Threat vector

by Michael Dimercurio

  There was no reply. Another attempt at downlink, met once again with silence. A third unsuccessful attempt, and the missile dived for the sea.

  Four hundred meters below, Captain Second Rank Pavel Grachev ripped off his headset and threw it to the deck.

  The bridge cockpit, atop the sail of the USS Devilfish, was breezy in the wind of their fifteen-knot passage, and the sun, high overhead, was warming the air to the eighties. Salt spray climbed up the sail from the bow wave below as the bulbous nose of the submarine burrowed into the water. Inside the small cockpit of the leaned-back Russian-style teardrop shaped sail stood Bryan Dietz and Toasty O'Neal, and behind them, sitting up on the high coaming of the cockpit, was Captain Petri, wearing

  working khakis with a light khaki jacket, Ray-Bans covering her eyes, her binoculars around her neck. Petri felt a freedom she hadn't experienced in years. The vibrations of the ship beneath her climbed her spine and warmed her spirit, even if this was a wartime mission, or perhaps because it was.

  The bridge communication box and the three officers' headsets squawked with Kiethan Judison's Houston accent: "Mark the turn to course zero eight five!"

  "Helm, Bridge, right full rudder, steady course zero eight five," Toasty O'Neal called on his boom microphone as Dietz watched him.

  Devilfish made the turn into the start of Thimble Shoals Channel. The buoys on either side made it look like a runway as the ship steamed down the seaway.

  "What happened this time?"

  "Captain, we've got the same answers as last time," Svyatoslov reported.

  "Here's what we're going to do. Navigator, shut down the Antay pod, button it up, and pull it back down to the rudder and make sure it latches."

  "But Captain—"

  "Shut up, Mr. First. Navigator, execute!"

  "Yessir, Antay pod shutdown sequence start, and the EHF antenna indicates rig-in. Antay door is shut, unit is rigged for full submergence. Cable reel is hot and rolling, Antay pod has departed the surface and coming down. Two minutes to stowed and

  latched position. Do you want me to call out cable length, sir?"

  "Belay your reports, Nav," Grachev said, his eyes on his auxiliary readouts.

  Eventually the pod came down to the top of the rudder and was captured, the system latching the pod to the rudder post.

  "Antay pod stowed and latched, Captain."

  "Very good," Grachev said. "Navigator, deploy the Antay pod to the surface."

  "What are you doing?" Novskoyy asked.

  "When in doubt, line up the systems again from scratch and push the button. If it doesn't work, we're into Plan B, which means we go into the bay shooting."

  "That's a suicide mission at this point," Novskoyy mumbled quietly.

  "Bingo, Al," Grachev said, equally quietly. "Your flair for the obvious rises to the surface once again." Then he practically screamed, "Navigator, your report, dammit!"

  Fifteen minutes later, the Antay pod was again floating on the surface, the top hatch open, the ELF antenna protruding into the sun-drenched sea air.

  "Captain," the navigator said. "Antay pod's on the surface, antenna door is open. Pod camera shows EHF antenna rigged out, EHF downlink and uplink continuity sat."

  "Very good. Do an EHF transmit/receive test."

  "Executing. We're getting reception of the transmitted signal, but that doesn't prove much, sir."

  "Mr. First, you ready to ride a third time?"

  "Yes, Captain."

  "Good. Cross your fingers and launch Azov unit three, tube three, when you're ready. Command enable entered."

  "Yes, sir, and Second Captain has the countdown at ten seconds. Five seconds, fingers crossed, sir, and two, one, firel"

  Azov unit three was blown out of the ship, rising in the cloud of steam. As twice before, the inner canister hurtled skyward and blew apart, and the folded winged missile started its rocket engine and climbed vertically for a fraction of a second as it arced over to its shallow climb angle. The downlink transmission to the Antay pod hit the ELF antenna, and this time the antenna returned the signal with a radio check uplink. The central processor of the unit was satisfied, and it continued the rocket-powered climb at a shallow angle.

  "We got it! Unit three is airborne, all-nominal signal received! We have downlink, Captain!" the navigator reported.

  A quick cheer rose up in the control compartment. Grachev growled, "Mr. First, you have a camera view?"

  "Yes, Captain. I'm flying back here."

  In the sensor cubicle, strapped into the leather couch, SvyatosloV had ordered the couch to rotate until he was hanging suspended in it, facing the deck. Had he taken off his virtual-reality goggles, he would have seen the eggshell-shaped black felt contour of the cubicle under the seat, along with the seat-mounting pedestal, not twenty centimeters from his face. That was a rather uninteresting sight, but with the VR goggles, Mykhailo Svyatoslov was

  flying as if he were riding the missile. The sea flashed below him in a rush of speed. The horizon extended with every meter of height the rocket gained. At the moment there was not much to see but ocean, but at the horizon on the left he began to see the first hint of a shoreline.

  As the rocket thrust withered, the missile began to free-fall. Then the small jet engine aboard lit off, the wind of the missile's passage windmilling the compressor vanes and pressurizing the central combustion chamber annulus with high-temperature air that flowed aft through the windmilling turbine out the exhaust port. The rocket motor farther aft shut down, and sixteen explosive bolts detonated and jettisoned the rocket booster. The unit tumbled away, eventually making a small white splash on the surface of the sea far below.

  Fuel was then injected into the combustion chamber and several spark plugs energized, igniting the fuel-air mixture and sending the temperatures and pressures in the combustion chamber soaring. The high-energy mix was ducted aft to the turbine, no longer freewheeling but zipping into high speed on its oiled journal bearings, driving the compressor at the nose end by a central shaft. As the turbine wound up, the shaft spun faster, spinning the compressor faster, sending combustion chamber pressures higher, until after another full second the jet engine was self-sustaining, and the thrust from the hot exhaust gases passed out the aft nozzle where the rocket booster had been.

  The wings, up till now folded under the vehicle's belly, rotated outward. They looked fragile, like a

  glider's, but were constructed of a carbon-fiber composite full of radar-absorbing material. It took several seconds for the unit to stabilize its flight path with the wings deployed, but soon it was again flying arrow-straight, still climbing at a shallow ten-degree angle.

  The Azov unmanned aerial vehicle continued climbing to the northeast on jet engine power, until it reached an altitude of seven thousand meters. High above the sea, it was able to look at the coastline of the United States far below. The unit turned to the west and began flying toward the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay and Hampton Roads.

  High above the earth, Mykhailo Svyatoslov looked down on the beauty of the morning sun drenching the beaches of northern North Carolina and southern Virginia, the pointing finger of the Delaware-Maryland-Virginia peninsula jutting downward on the horizon, dim in the haze of distance, and he could clearly see the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel extending across the mouth of the Chesapeake, the long line of it interrupted at the two tunnels where it dived under the surface to allow deep channels for deep-draft merchant ships and large naval vessels.

  "Captain, still no contacts," Dietz reported. "Five

  miles from the Bay Bridge-Tunnel, ma'am." "Off'sa'deck, bring her to all stop." "Aye-aye, ma'am. Helm, Bridge, all stop. Sonar,

  Bridge, stopping."

  "Bridge, Helm aye," the bridge communication

  box squawked.

  "Bridge, Sonar aye," Cook said into their headsets.

  The ship's bow wave calmed as 7,700 tons of nuclear submarine came to a halt in the middle of Thimble Shoals Channel.

&nb
sp; "What's up, Skipper?" Dietz asked, looking at Petri with an odd look on his face.

  She couldn't exactly say she had an odd feeling, so she put her binoculars up and scanned the horizon on all sides. "Tell sonar to conduct a multifre-quency search, broadband, narrowband, acoustic daylight. Give them ten minutes."

  "Aye, Captain," Dietz said, speaking into his boom mike.

  Petri jumped down from the ledge of the top of the sail and joined the two officers in the cockpit. She picked up the WritePad chart computer, the display the size of a poster, able to display the chart of the bay even in bright sunlight. She scanned the chart, stabbing her finger at a point ten miles away, then paged through the software to display a window superimposed over the chart, the tactical signals for the surface task force. She picked up the UHF tactical Nestor satellite secure voice radio handset, an old-fashioned telephone handset done in red plastic, a transmit button set in the middle of the grip. She called to the control room in her boom mike, "Radio, Captain, is Nestor aligned?"

  The answer came back from "Mr. Clean" himself, Senior Chief Morgan Henry: "Nestor's up and freqs are aligned."

  "Very well, Radio."

  She pulled off her headset and put the red tele-

  phone to her ear and spoke. "November uniform, this is tango sierra, over."

  The speaker of the handset crashed into loud static. Petri adjusted the volume knob on the red panel under the forward lip of the sail. The static changed into a bleating tone as the computer's encryption of the incoming voice activated, the signals delayed by the encryption and decryption.

  "Tango sierra, this is November uniform flag, read you five by, over."

  She had just heard from the commander of the Navy surface task force holding off all merchant traffic at Norfolk. The commander of the task force, a Navy commander freshly frocked from lieutenant commander five hours earlier in the aftermath of the decapitation of the Navy's senior ranks, reported to Petri, who not only commanded the submarine Devilish but the surface action group, at least until the ship transited into the Va-Capes OpArea.

  "November uniform, this is tango sierra. Immediate execute, break, go to Seven Eleven and pick up a case of Twinkies, break, over."

  There was no levity on the circuit in the task group commander's reply. "Roger, understand execute Seven Eleven trip for a case of Twinkies, break, November uniform out."

  Petri had just ordered the task group commander to shepherd the merchant traffic farther out to a point labeled T for Twinkie, where they would be safe from the unit she was about to launch down the channel.

  "Off sa'deck, in five minutes load a Mark 5 Shark-eye into tube one."

  "Sharkeye tube one, aye, Captain."

  She'd decided to hold the ship here and fire the unit down the channel, where it would drop an acoustic daylight sensor to the bay bottom exactly where she wanted it, extending the range of the sensors.

  Dietz made the orders, then looked at Petri. "Wouldn't it be more effective to drop a Mark 12 Yo-Yo pod from a Pegasus, ma'am?"

  "Yes, OOD, but I'm saving the Yo-Yos for deeper water. For what I want, a Mark 5 will do.

  They waited, the hull stationary in the channel center, while sonar searched the bay and the torpedo chief loaded tube one with a Mark 5.

  Twenty thousand feet above Petri's head, a tiny aircraft flew over. It was an eighth the size of a Cessna single-engine plane, with a radar signature smaller than the return from a seagull. As the unit looked down on the ship there in the channel, the signal from it downlinked in a narrow EHF be; to a receiver far distant, where it was received on the antenna of a floating pod and sent down a fiberoptic cable four hundred meters to the nuclear submarine Vepr, where a dozen officers scanned the crisp photographs of the sub lying in the channel, a perfect and juicy target.

  "Feed it in from Second Captain's downlinked location of the SSNX submarine, designate as target one."

  "Aye, Captain."

  "Program units one through four for slow-speed, shallow-depth run on the Second Captain navigational waypoints." Grachev's aux two display showed the chart of their position at the lower right and the opening of the Chesapeake Bay, with Thimble Shoals Channel at the upper left. The depth of the water was indicated by color contour, and the SSNX's position was fed in from the Azov orbiting undetected seven thousand meters above the target.

  "All units programmed, sir. Request command enable plasma warheads."

  "Command enabling units one through four," Grachev said, glancing at Novskoyy and typing into his console the captain's passwords to unlock the plasma detonators for all weapons.

  "Enable keys onboard units one through four, Captain."

  "Very good." Grachev removed his headset and rubbed his eyes, turning to Novskoyy. "You happy now, Al? We'll drive the Boras in and blow the SSNX to iron filings on the bottom of the bay, then withdraw farther east."

  "Fine, but your orders are to keep anything from coming off the U.S. East Coast. That surface task force has capabilities that worry me. And they might detect the torpedoes on their transit."

  "As long as you're worrying, why not worry about dropping dead in your boots from a heart

  attack?" The consultant was hopeless, Grachev decided, strapping his headset back on.

  Novskoyy ignored the comment. "And you need to devote a tube to deploying the remaining Shchuka sensor. We need to have acoustic daylight capability in case we're approached by someone with the same capability."

  "Fat chance, Al. The only warship with that capability is about to go down." Grachev spoke into his boom mike. "Attention to orders. We'll be shooting four Bora plasma torpedoes into the Chesapeake to target the SSNX, target one. Once she goes down, we'll haul in the Antay, self-destruct the Azov, and withdraw to open ocean. Firing interval one minute, to keep each torpedo from getting confused by the wake in front of it. All stations, report status."

  Thirty seconds later, all four Bora torpedoes were ready for launch. Grachev nodded to himself.

  "Weapons Officer, tube one launch when ready."

  "Aye, Captain, Second Captain has the countdown. Ten seconds, sir."

  Bora unit one lay snugly in the seawater-flooded monel torpedo tube amidships. The electrical system was alive with energy from the onboard fuel cell, and the onboard computer—a somewhat less advanced version of the Vepr's Second Captain— was fully awake and waiting calmly for the launch order. The trajectory to the target was programmed in. The sailing directions called for the torpedo to climb at a thirty-degree angle as soon as the pro-pulsor was at full revolutions, to a depth of twenty

  meters, then slow down to transit speed, a mere eighty clicks, and drive north to a point due east of the Norfolk traffic separation scheme, then turn west and proceed toward the target. By then the sub was sure to have come out of the bay, where future intelligence would allow the torpedo to deploy on target.

  The onboard processor received the countdown, which was ticking past three seconds to one, the signal for the torpedo to start its engine. The pressurized peroxide fuel tank loaded a solenoid valve that opened to the combustion chamber. The chamber's spark ignited the self-oxidizing fuel to several thousand degrees. The violently expanding gases were ducted to the turbine and from there to the water exhaust valve and into the tube. As the countdown clicked down to zero, the turbine had spun up to just short of a hundred rotations per minute; at the same time the unit felt the pressure building up from the water in the aft part of the tube. As the pressure soared, a ball valve rotated aft, loading the water in the tube with water at one hundred atmospheres greater pressure than the water outside the muzzle door. The force of the pressure accelerated the five-ton torpedo out the tube and into the water. The control cable spooled out of the propulsor shroud, the thin wire connecting the torpedo to the tube in case the ship's Second Captain wanted to update the torpedo on the new location of the target. The structure of the tube zipped by the forward camera sensors.

  The turbine spun past its idling speed o
f twelve hundred RPM and throttled up as the solenoid V-

  ball valve opened farther. The turbine inlet temperature and pressure increased. The turbine spun its output shaft linked to the counterrotating pro-pulsor vanes. The thrust built up, accelerating the torpedo past ten clicks to twenty, thirty, forty. The weapon sped up during the climbout of the deep on the way to its transit depth of twenty meters. Then the unit leveled off, its speed stabilizing at eighty clicks as it headed north.

  The unit drove on like that for some time, only the waves rolling past overhead, the water too deep to detect the bottom below, with nothing on either side, alone in the sea with the exception of the thrumming of its propulsor vanes and the rush of water on its flanks.

  "Unit one away, Captain," Lynski reported. "Very good. Get on the interval, Weps." "Yes, sir, we're ready for tube two." Over the next three minutes tubes two, three, and four were fired. Their Bora II torpedoes were hurtling out into the sea, their wires linking them to the Vepr below while the units zoomed northward, the wire reels in the torpedo tubes spinning as kilometer after kilometer of wire paid out of each.

  "Time to turn, Weps?"

  "At a speed of eighty clicks, we have ninety minutes to wait, Captain. The units will then turn west and sail toward the mouth of the Chesapeake."

  "I suppose that's the problem with sitting so far away. Watchstanders, we have a wait in front of

  us, so everyone settle down, but remain at max alert status."

  Grachev took off his headset and pushed his sweaty hair off his forehead. He stood and looked at Novskoyy, who was staring at him.

  "What?"