Arctic Fire c-9

by Keith Douglass

  As he climbed into the front seat of the van and looked across at the young female petty officer driver, a memory flashed into his mind. Brilliant sun, the gentle pounding of Mexican waves against a clean, white sandy beach. And Tomboy, nestled under his arm, pressing gentle curves into the hard, lean lines of his own body. He smiled, wondering what she would think if she could see him now, decked out like an Eskimo.

  “Welcome to Adak, sir,” the driver said. “I understand this is your first trip here?”

  “Sure is.” He glanced at the front of her uniform, wondering what her name was, but her stenciled nameplate was covered up by the bulky cold-weather gear. “And you are?”

  “Petty Officer Monk,” she said, the hard edges of a New England accent clipping her words off. “I’ll be your driver while you’re here, Admiral,” she added, candidly assessing him.

  “I don’t imagine we’ll need to go a lot of places,” Tombstone said. “After all, the base isn’t that big, is it?”

  “No, Admiral, but you’ll want a driver even to get between most of the buildings. This cold,” she said, shaking her head, “I thought I’d be used to it, but this takes even me by surprise.”

  “Maine?” Tombstone asked, hazarding a guess.

  Her face brightened. “You’ve been there?”

  “Several times. Did a lot of skiing up at Sugarloaf years ago.”

  She nodded vigorously. “Only about forty miles from my hometown,” she said happily. “Gets cold up there, but nothing compared to Adak.”

  Something about the young sailor reminded Tombstone of Tomboy. It wasn’t just the physical similarity, he was sure, although Petty Officer Monk was about the same size as his lover. No, it was something in the set of the eyes, the bright gleam of mischief that not even naval courtesy and custom could entirely dim.

  “Oh, by the way, Admiral,” Petty Officer Monk said suddenly, breaking into his reverie. “A few members of the press arrived yesterday on the last C-130 for the decommissioning ceremony. There’re only three reporters, though,” she added hastily, seeing the expression of dismay cross his face. “Just one from a major network.”

  As the last passenger climbed into the van, Petty Officer Monk started to pull away from the aircraft. She’d left the engine running while sitting there.

  “And just who might that be?” Tombstone asked, already feeling a curious, pleasant fluttering in his stomach. If it were …”

  “Miss Pamela Drake,” Monk said cheerfully. “She’s staying at the Bachelor Officers’ Quarters — BOQ — but most of us have gotten a look at her. She’s from ACN.”

  Pamela Drake. Why wasn’t he surprised? Tombstone shook his head. During the last ten years, Pamela had managed to turn up on every major press pool covering United States Navy operations, particularly those that involved a certain Matthew Magruder. At first he’ thought it was coincidence, but on his last cruise, Pamela had finally admitted that she never passed up an opportunity to cover anything involving Tombstone. When they’d finally broken their engagement, he thought those days would be over.

  Evidently not. A new thought struck him, and he grimaced. Now just what would Tomboy have to say if she found out that Pamela Drake was on the same isolated island as her lover? He shook his head, quite sure that it wouldn’t be pleasant.

  1710 Local

  Tomcat 201

  “Okay, we got it,” the voice said over Tactical. “Solid visual on the COI — contact of interest.”

  “About time you guys showed up,” Bird Dog grumbled. “This is a fighter, not a babysitter.”

  “We do our best, but our max speed is four hundred and forty knots,” the other pilot retorted. “You might be able to get here faster, but you can’t do a damned thing about her while she’s submerged. We can,” he concluded smugly.

  Bird Dog stared out the windscreen at the squat, blunt-nosed S-3 Viking ASW aircraft. She was less than half the size of the Tomcat, he figured, but her long fuel endurance and highly efficient engines enabled her to remain on station far longer than the Tomcat could have dreamed of without tanking. Two Harpoon antiship missiles hung slung on either side of her fuselage, with two torpedoes on each wing occupying the outer weapons stations. Evidently, the carrier took this business seriously, sending out the S-3s fully armed.

  While the Tomcat could carry a wide range of antiair missiles and bombs, there was damned little it had against a submarine. Rockeyes, ground-attack missiles that carried a payload of bomblets, could be effective against a submarine on the surface, but the Tomcat had no anti-surface or torpedo capability whatsoever. Indeed, on this flight, which was intended to be a simple quick look-see at the Greenpeace ship, Tomcat 201 carried only a minimal weapons load-out, more for training than for any other purpose. Sidewinders graced the outer weapons stations, with two Sparrows occupying the ones closer to the fuselage. They’d elected to forego the longer-range Phoenix missiles, whose massive weight significantly reduced the Tomcat’s onstation time.

  “Okay, we’re out of here. You guys take this bitch out if she even so much as moves like she’s going to take out my stereo,” Bird Dog said.

  “Don’t worry about it,” the S-3 pilot said dryly. “You might have noticed that you and I live in the same apartment building.”

  CHAPTER 3

  Monday, 26 December

  0200 Local

  Kilo 31

  Colonel Rogov returned to the submarine after the initial camp setup, leaving the Spetsnaz commandos huddled inside their sleeping bags inside the creaking, groaning cave carved out of the cliff. The small raft had barely made the trip back to the submarine safely, taking two waves completely over it and being turned into a miniature version of its mother ship several times.

  He watched the men move around the submarine’s control center, noting with disdain the black circles under their eyes and the fatigue in their every movement. Europeans, all of them. The strong Slavic stock of their ancestors bred out of them and diluted by the effete blood of inbred royalty. None of them would have lasted long under his command. And none of them could have endured the conditions ashore in the ice cavern.

  Not that the submarine’s crew would have seen it that way. They saw themselves, he knew, as vastly superior to the Western Europeans that inhabit France, Germany, and England. He snorted. If they only knew. Approximately half of the crew was Russian, the last remnants of a grand race that had done its best to extinguish everything noble and superior in its bloodlines in the coups that destroyed the czars’ line. The remaining crew members were primarily Ukrainian, with a few mongrel Georgians, Azerbiijanis and Armenians thrown in. All in the latter group were at least half Polish, some even with strong German stock mixed in with the historic blood that had first flourished in the fertile steppes of the Ukraine and in the high, craggy mountain regions of Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Armenia. Had they but seen what they would become, he doubted that any one of them would have chosen to consort with the invading hordes that swept east from Europe from century to century. Instead, they would have preferred to fight to the last man and woman, chosen defeat over the hybridization and bastardization of their blood.

  Not so with his ancestors. The Cossacks, driven out of their homeland surrounding the Black Sea and on the Crimean Peninsula, had remained a closed, insular nation without a country, warlike and incapable of being defeated. The best the Russians could manage was to drive them out into the vast desolation of its most eastern areas, consigning them to Mongolia, Siberia, and the rugged alien terrain of the eastern Soviet Union. Yet even centuries of forced relocation had failed to extinguish their strong tribal instincts, their sense of who and what they were. Primary among those attributes was their identity as Cossacks.

  He watched the men again, noting the pale faces, the languid, almost feminine movements as they carefully monitored the complex array of sensors, weapons, and electronics installed on the small submarine. Such a powerful submarine, even for its small size. The Kilo combined ham-handed Rus
sian design with frighteningly advanced electronics and computers obtained from Japan, Korea, and yes, even the United States. A powerful ship, one that deserved better than the masters she now had. That would change.

  He felt the submarine captain watching him uneasily. He turned and faced the man full on, letting him see the disdain flicker at the edges of his normally impassive expression. This man most of all would have to go. His hesitation when one of his crew members had been swept into the icy sea was just further evidence of his unfitness for command. While he might possess the requisite technical and tactical knowledge required of a commander, he lacked the single most important ingredient — the iron will so necessary for transforming a collection of equipment and machinery and men into a potent, irresistible fighting force.

  The present situation illustrated that point perfectly. The Kilo submarine lingered ten miles away from the island, barely making steerageway through the silent ocean. Hours ago, the sharp pops and groans of the ice floe had subsided as the sun sank back down below the horizon. Now, the ocean was a silent, dark cloak of invisibility.

  Had Rogov been the skipper, the submarine would have been snorkeling, topping off the last bit of charge on its batteries in preparation for any immediate tactical need to stay submerged for hours. True, the bank of batteries was currently charged to ninety percent, but one never knew when that additional ten percent of capacity would spell the difference between life and death for a submarine and its crew.

  This skipper, however, after a brief communications foray to the surface to monitor the group ashore’s progress, had decided that the weather was too bad, the seas too rough, to inflict the nausea-inducing pitch and roll of a submarine near the surface on its crew. He fled the surface and returned to the depths, where the motion of the storm above them was imperceptible. The crew had all looked relieved at that decision.

  Pah! The men ashore would hardly have it so easy. Even safe inside the ice cavern, the scream and howl of the winds alone would have been daunting. The winds had built steadily throughout the night until sixty-knot gales, at times growing to hurricane force, now scoured the desolate island.

  “Captain,” a young lieutenant said suddenly. His quiet voice echoed in the tomb-like control center. “The other submariner I think — yes, it’s her.”

  The skipper stepped away from his normal post in the center of the small room, and stationed himself behind the sonar operator. “Where?”

  The younger man pointed at the waterfall display. “It’s barely distinguishable from the background noise yet, Skipper, but this appears to be a line from her main propulsion equipment.” He pointed to a series of dots that looked to Rogov’s untrained eyes to be merely part of the noise.

  Rogov allowed a trace of satisfaction to tug at the corner of his mouth. So far, all was going according to plan, although neither the Russians on this boat nor their larger counterpart knew it. The Oscar-class nuclear cruise missile submarine was one of the most potent ship-killers in the Russian inventory today. Equipped with SS-N-19 Shipwreck missiles, it had a tactical launch range of over three hundred nautical miles. It could obtain targeting data from any other platform, including the Tupelov Bear aircraft or the Ilyushin May-76 reconnaissance plane. When properly aligned, it could also download targeting data from Russian surveillance satellites, relieving it of the necessity of obtaining enemy positioning data from its own organic sensors.

  The Oscar’s deployment had been suspended in the first few years following the breakup of the Soviet Union, but had resumed in 1995. It roamed with impunity the vast reaches of the Pacific Ocean, occasionally making forays into the smaller Atlantic. Her torpedoes, twenty-eight feet long and over five feet in diameter, could crack the keel of an aircraft carrier with one well-placed shot.

  As it would soon, if necessary. He smiled, wondering what his Cossack ancestors would have thought of him, riding this massive underwater seahorse into battle again. A far cry from the days when his ancestors had swept out of the mountains and across the plains, decimating Ukrainian and Russian troops with their bloody sabers. While today’s Cossack might depend on invisible electrons and satellite data instead of a finely honed blade, the principles remained the same — attack, attack, attack.

  The Americans would remember that soon.

  0800 Local

  VF-95 Ready Room, USS Jefferson CVN-74

  The Ready Room was one of the larger single compartments on the aircraft carrier, and served as both a duty post and a central point of coordination for the VF-95 squadron. Ten rows of high-backed chairs took up the forward starboard portion of the room, arrayed in front of a chalkboard and overhead projector. The port side was a general congregating area, and its bulkheads were ringed with hard plastic couches and the all-important squadron popcorn machine. A battered gray table protruded from one bulkhead. Bird Dog, Gator, and their squadron commanding officer were gathered around it.

  Bird Dog glared down at the chart spread out before him. A series of standard Navy symbols was penciled in on it, connected with a faint line representing the track of the contact. The Greenpeace ship had been meandering around the area south of Aflu for two weeks now, and there was still no discernible pattern to her movement.

  “I still don’t see what the hell is so damned important about flying out to take a look at that ship,” Bird Dog grumbled. “Why not send an S-3B out instead? That way she can look for that Oscar at the same time.”

  Commander Frank Richey fixed him with a pointed glare. “Lieutenants aren’t asked to decide what’s important, mister,” he snapped. “If the United States wants to make sure her citizens can count beluga whales in the North Pacific in peace and quiet, then we’re gonna make sure that happens. You got it?”

  Bird Dog heard Gator, seated next to him, sigh and move away imperceptibly. Bird Dog nodded, acknowledging the rebuke with bare courtesy. When he was the commanding officer of a squadron — if that day ever came, which was looking more and more unlikely these days — he would remember what it was like to be a frustrated junior pilot, blooded on one cruise but still not considered an important enough member of the team to be fully briefed on the mission.

  Fully briefed. He snorted. The skipper thought it was enough that he understood his flight profile, knew what his weapons load-out was, and was able to make the F-14 Tomcat dance around the sky like a ballerina. But no one ever bothered to talk about the bigger issues — why the United States was here in the first place, and just what the hell babysitting a group of peaceniks and long-hairs on a Greenpeace boat had to do with national security.

  Although, he had to admit, the powers that be had proved right about the Spratly Islands. There, their routine surveillance of the rocky outpost in the South China Sea had been the first step in building stronger ties with the small nations that rimmed that body of water.

  Still, would it have cost the skipper anything to give him a better explanation? He sighed. Maybe he’d wander down to the spook spaces later today, see if any of the Professional paranoids that lived in the Carrier Intelligence Center, or CVIC were willing to discuss the mission with him. Somehow, he had the feeling that if he just knew more, he might be a whole hell of a lot more interested in the mission than he was at this point. If it hadn’t involved flying, it would have been a complete waste.

  “So, I take it you’ve got the big picture now?” his skipper said, distracting him from his thoughts.

  “Yes, sir, Skipper,” Bird Dog replied. “We’ll fly a routine surveillance mission over this area,” he said, tracing out a large square on the chart in front of him. “I’m to report the location of the Greenpeace ship, drop down to one thousand feet for a quick pass over her for rigging, then we’re to take a quick look at all the islands. Make sure none of them have moved.” Bird Dog winced as he heard the sarcasm in his voice. Damn it, when was he going to learn to keep his mouth under control?

  “There’s islands bear close watching sometimes, Gator said softly. “Remember?”
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br />   “Hell, yes,” Bird Dog said in the same tones. “But that was Asia. The Aleutian Islands are part of Alaska — American property! Do you really think that they’re going to be blowing up like the Spratly rocks were?”

  Gator shook his head sadly. “That’s what they pay us for, shipmate — to make sure that they don’t.”

  1200 Local

  SS Seriony

  Tim Holden, first mate on board the third and largest ship in the Greenpeace inventory, kept his hands firmly wrapped around the overhead stabilizer bar. The steel rod ran from port to starboard near the ceiling of the bridge on board the ship. In rough seas like today’s, crew members virtually hung from it, suspended like bats in order to keep their balance.

  The former fishing boat had a deep draft, its keel extending some thirty feet below the thrashing waves around it. Even with that, though, the ship bobbed and twisted in the waves, her powerful diesel engines straining to keep her bow pointed into the long line of heavy swells that extended out to the horizon. Holden watched the helmsman make minor adjustments to their course. The man had good sense, far more than most of his counterparts, and could be trusted to take immediate action without Holden giving rudder orders for every small course change. It relieved the strain of standing watch in heavy seas. Although just why he was out here in the first place was something of a mystery. He knew what the Greenpeace people said. He’d paid attention during all the briefs, had been impressed by their starry-eyed innocence and fanatic dedication to their cause, but it still didn’t make much sense to him. Spending months watching for the occasional appearance of a pod of whales and trying to develop a complete census of the creatures didn’t strike him as doing much for world peace and endangered species. It’d be a hell of a lot more effective if the Navy put a couple of torpedoes up the ass of Russian fishing vessels that harvested them. Well, at least the wages made up for part of the misery of bobbing around like a cork in this storm.