H.M.S. Unseen (1999)

by Patrick Robonson

  “One of those missiles wouldn’t breach it?”

  “No. But the first payload should smash the outside concrete layer, driving cracks maybe 40 feet into the wall. Then the second one bangs into the same exact spot, and makes those cracks wider, maybe 80 feet into the wall. Then the third one smashes in, and probably drives the cracks right through. The wall might go right then. But it’ll go with the impact of the fourth one. The last two would just be for good measure, in case one of them failed. As you well know, a cruise missile of this size could knock down the White House, blow up a destroyer. That dam wall would not have a prayer against four of them, never mind six.”

  “How about the propulsion of the missile under the water?”

  “That’s not a problem. We can do it using the weapon’s residual speed. Fast through the air, then into the water for the last couple of hundred yards. They turn into a kind of torpedo.”

  “Commander Adnam, are you sure of the extent of the damage if we hit Darband and Samarra?”

  “Very sure. If you remember, there was a fierce battle during the Iraq-Iran War at a place called Halabjah, which is a Kurdish town in the southeast of their area, right up there in the mountains, a couple of miles east of Darband. The Iraqis fought like tigers for that town, after the Iranians had captured it in the winter of 1988. And they succeeded, drove the Iranian tanks back. But there were allegations that Iraq had used chemical weapons in retaking this little place up near the borders of the two countries.

  “There was, however, more to it than that. Iraqi Intelligence had heard the Iranians were planning to blow the big dam at Darband, and Iraq could not allow that. And no price was too high to pay in order to stop them. Even the fury of the whole world over chemical weapons. That dam, and its massive hydroelectric plant, and the one at Samarra, very nearly represent life and death to the very fragile economy of Iraq.

  “If they were both blown at the same time, it would wreak havoc. Imagine the situation after the Samarra dam had gone, massive flooding right down to Baghdad, and then another vast volume of water cascading out of the Darband mountains…to meet the mainstream of the Tigris just below the center of the city.”

  “Doesn’t sound great,” agreed Admiral Morgan. “How long do you estimate it would keep Iraq out of action?”

  “I’d say ten years. At least that’s what they thought might happen when the Iranians threatened Darband back in 1988.”

  “How far will the missiles have to travel to the dams, Bill?”

  “Well, that’s the problem…the eternal problem for weapons officers. Bigger the target, bigger the warhead. Otherwise, you end up kicking away at an iceberg with a toothpick. And unless you want to end up with a missile the size of the Washington Monument, you always have to sacrifice range…what I’m really saying is you can send a minor warhead 1,500 miles, but the same missile will carry a big warhead only, say, 500 miles. The size of the missile is finite. You either carry fuel or explosive. Every time you increase one, you have to cut back on the other. We’ll have to make significant adjustments in design.”

  “Billy, you’re not saying we can’t do it, are you?”

  “No, Arnie, ’course not. But I am just cautioning everyone we do have to trade a lot of range for a lot of extra bang. When I last looked at this sort of trade-off, range was the limiting factor for the payload. Not the other way around.

  “Back in ’91, we were taking a very serious look at those Iraqi dams, and for a while we thought we could knock ’em down with modified Tomahawk missiles. We were looking at two launch-area options: one at the eastern end of the Med, one at the northern end of the Gulf.

  “We knew we would need a ton of missiles per dam, which meant we had to fire half of ’em from the Med. But that option required the missiles to fly at least 600 miles. And that gave us a real problem. We just couldn’t get a big enough warhead to travel that far. Couldn’t hold enough fuel if we were carrying that much explosive. Not without a complete redesign of the entire airframe and power plant…really a brand-new missile, because the 600-mile range was a given. The best we ever did was get it down to 30 missiles per dam. Right about then we stopped thinking about it.”

  Bill Baldridge stood up, paced the room, and drank some coffee. “I do seem to remember that Hughes went right ahead with the project. They completed operational trials, but no one ever told me how they came out. By the time they were ready, the goddamned war was over. But I did once hear they made a few. Shouldn’t be difficult to find out what happened to ’em.”

  Ben Adnam nodded, already a comfortable member of the team. “It’s about 600 miles from the Mediterranean to the more easterly dam, Admiral,” he said. “But I have a problem with that routing, simply because it cuts down so drastically on our ability to optimize the actual route. We just don’t have enough gas for a lot of ducking and diving. The bird will have to fly on a steady course almost all the way, quite possibly through heavy Iraqi radar and antiaircraft defense. That has major implications for the survivability of the weapon in transit. And it has implications all of its own—if we want to get 6 home, and we are calculating a possible loss of 2, we need to fire 9. Basically that’s why I hate to launch from the Med.”

  The admiral looked up and nodded, a kind of rueful half smile on his face. He just said, “Uh-huh.” But to himself he was thinking, Jesus Christ, is this guy something, or what? He’s only just fucking gotten here, and he’s talking like a lifelong U.S. weapons officer.

  “How many of these missiles do you think we got, Bill?”

  “Dunno. Hughes may have bagged ’em, for all I know. I’ll check it out right away. Even if we pull it off, we’ll still need two launch vehicles.”

  “That better not be a problem either,” growled Arnold Morgan. “Because if it is, someone’s in deep shit.”

  Bill Baldridge continued. “Look, we might get this thing done at short notice. But I have to check out, for a start, the status of those missiles. Then how many ships we have modified to launch these birds…and where they are…who’s nearest our launch areas. I ought to get through with that today…the main routing stuff gets done by the targeting-computer team…and before their machine spits out all our options, we need to feed in every scrap of information…the topography…every hill and valley…every intelligence report detailing Iraqi defensive positions along the way…right up-to-date, which it always is. But I shall want to talk to Ben. He might have some input.

  “The computer guys will understand right away that our 600-mile maximum flight path is the critical factor. They’ll come up with options for us. Then we can start to make a few hard decisions, about the launch area and the vehicles that will fire the missiles.”

  “Okay, Bill. Sounds like you two are on top of this. But remember, this thing is not simply a high-tech problem. We have to give real consideration to the political side as well. We have to find a way to make some serious evasions in-flight; otherwise, these bastards may leave a trail that goes straight back to the Pentagon. We gotta try the best we can to keep ’em right off the Iraqi radar…we gotta try every twist and turn to stop anyone from finding out where they came from.”

  “And we don’t want to make it too obvious where they’re headed to, either,” said Ben. “I suppose if you do happen to see a line of these things whipping through the skies at six hundred knots, you don’t have a lot of time to do much about it. Better not to take any chances though.”

  “Right,” said Morgan. “That’s the thinking. Anyway, I’m outta here, so I’m leaving it to you two. Get the computer whizzes to do their thing, and let’s take a look at the routing options ASAP. Also let’s get ahold of a real good hard-copy map, so we can take a careful look and choose the right options. Second-guessing a computer is a dangerous business, but we have to get this dead right. You get any trouble with the goddamned eggheads and their fucking software…you know the kind of thing…resentment at a couple of outsiders like you and Ben…just use my name, and use it hard.” />
  “You sure it might not be better for you to pave the way yourself, Admiral…one quick phone call before you go.”

  “You’re right,” he snapped, picked up a phone, and they heard him in action. Ben Adnam smiled a smile of pure admiration. Bill grinned wistfully, memories drifting back of stressful nights in Fort Meade with the Big Man.

  “Right. Admiral Morgan, that’s me. Yup, that’s it…Iraq…all the way north from Basra to the Turkish border…right…take in Syria out to the west…right…that’s it…same thing for the Gulf. And lemme have a chart of the Gulf itself…right…from the Strait of Oman right up to the northern end. Right. WHEN DO I WANT ’EM? NOW… CAR? Forget all about that. Get ’em down here in a chopper. What? FIVE MINUTES AGO. And tell the pilot to keep it running when he gets here, and to pick up Lieutenant Commander Baldridge and his colleague and run ’em down to SUBLANT in Norfolk.”

  The admiral banged down the phone, as usual, without missing a beat. “Okay, I guess you got about an hour before he arrives. Meanwhile, work on the details—and then make SUBLANT’s Black Ops cell your headquarters. We’ll probably want one of their boats anyway. The thing is we want this done with a high degree of secrecy, but we need to be fast and efficient. The cell has all the facilities. Get to it…I’ll be at SUBLANT at 1600.” And with that, Arnold Morgan was gone, like a Texas tornado, sweeping all before him, frightening the life out of everyone who stood in his way.

  The day passed in a whirlwind of helicopter flights, harassed computer technicians, phone calls, checks and rechecks, satellite communications to the CVBG in the Gulf of Iran, clearances, and the development of a cold-blooded plan to attack the two great dams that keep Iraq alive as a world economic power.

  At 1600, both Bill Baldridge and the Iraqi Naval officer were unsurprised when the door to the Black Ops cell burst open and Admiral Arnold Morgan marched in.

  “Just tell me we’re on,” he barked. “No bullshit. No major snags.”

  “We’re on,” said Bill. “No bullshit.”

  “Beautiful.”

  “The best news first,” said Bill. “We have a good choice of launch platforms. We can fire from surface ships or submarines, and we can position adequate assets in the northern Gulf or the Med, or both, without any trouble. We got two cruisers in the Med, both available at short notice. And we got two SSNs plus another cruiser out in the Indian Ocean with the Battle Group. The whole lot of ’em can fire these weapons.

  “The main drawback in firing from the Med is we have to fly the weapons out there. We’d probably have to use a Fleet Auxiliary stores ship, but that would mean a long surface transit as well, and it might be pretty difficult to hide the sonsabitches.

  “If you ask me, it would be a whole lot better to use the platforms in the Indian Ocean. That way we can fly the weapons direct into Diego Garcia and load ’em right there in private. Then it’s 2,700 miles up to the northern end of the Gulf of Iran, leaving us a missile flight of only 400 miles to the most easterly of the dams, flying direct.

  “That option would allow us plenty of indirect routing, but we’d have to conceal the launch platforms.

  “That means submarines. And because of the number of weapons, that means both of them.”

  “Just as well they can both fire the birds, right?” grunted Morgan. “And what about the goddamned birds? Have we got any? Hughes got ’em stowed away somewhere?”

  “They sure have. I could hardly believe our luck. They’d gone right through to 24 production models, on the shelf, ready to go. They’re not gonna be cheap. Probably double normal cost, because Hughes wanna get their money back. And you can bet your goddamned life they’ll charge us plenty to make a rush modification. But they can do it and have them ready to ship out in ten days flat.”

  “Well get on the horn and do it…NOW!”

  “I already have, Admiral. In your name. You got plenty of cash?”

  Ben Adnam shook his head, ruefully, at the apparent ease with which the Americans could deploy really major weapons of war, like big guided-missile nuclear submarines, and he pondered briefly all the troubles he had encountered just trying to acquire a diesel-electric submarine for his missions. Aloud he said, “I can’t see much of a problem getting the submarines into the Gulf and up to the launch area around latitude 29 North. But it’s not as deep as we would like up there, especially if we have to evade any opposition. And the high seawater temperature does place limits on maximum reactor power and high speeds.

  “On the other hand the Iraqi Navy does not possess any real threat to an American SSN…except in the unlikely event they had a patrol craft lurking right in the launch area. I suppose our COs could either blow it away, or wait a few hours till it left.

  “Even after we’ve fired off the missiles, even if the Iraqis were somehow able to trace the flight paths back to our launch area, they still couldn’t do a damn thing about it. They simply do not own a weapons system capable of catching a U.S. SSN. Fortunately, they do not have any allies in the area either. I imagine the Iranians could make things quite awkward for us down in the Strait of Hormuz with their new Kilo. But I can’t see them helping the Iraqis, of all people, can you?”

  Bill Baldridge shook his head. “Not a chance,” he said. “But, of the launch areas, the Gulf of Iran wins it hands down…just on the basis of the spare 200 miles range it gives us for a deceptive approach and defense avoidance. Arnold, I could only recommend the Med if you have overriding political reasons.”

  “Well, I can think of one overriding political reason why we should consider only the Gulf,” replied the admiral, grinning. “If we let ’em go from the Med, just a little farther to the north, it would look as if they were coming in from Syria. Or, taking a slightly more roundabout route, from Israel, which would have the effect of causing a full-scale war in the Middle East, which no one needs. Let’s just bag the Med and everything to do with it.”

  “The same thing would apply to routing the missiles in anywhere from the west,” said Commander Adnam. “But I do have one thought. Surely even the Iraqis know that no one except the U.S.A. can fire this kind of a missile accurately?”

  “We’re not sure of that anymore,” said the ex–weapons officer from Kansas. “The Brits have something similar. And the French and the Russians. Probably the Indians and possibly the Iranians. But the Iraqis are gonna look no further than the Americans, so we wanna leave them with a few nice little choices. Then we can sit back and try to let them prove it was us. Which will be just about impossible.”

  “If we’re very careful,” said Adnam, smiling. “Oh, by the way, Admiral, we did find out that the water levels in the dams are unusually high all over Iraq. It’s been an unusually hard and wet winter. A lot of flooding.”

  Admiral Morgan stood up. “Right,” he said, with an air of finality. “That’s it. I want you to set up to use the south and southeastern approach routes. Send the missiles in along the western foothills from the Iraq-Iran border. East around the Baghdad city defenses is also good sense. If anyone should say anything to us, we’ll just ask politely if they are absolutely sure the Iranians weren’t somehow involved. I don’t think there’s any doubt in any of our minds, the southeast route, the one the computers put up, gives us all the advantages. You’d better get back to the programmers and have ’em produce a few more alternatives, to give us a bit more variation. Otherwise, we’ll have a dozen missiles all flying down a straight line like a fucking clay-pigeon shoot.

  “And make sure the goddamned eggheads understand we’re using two launch platforms, firing at the same time, each SSN taking a separate dam, in case one of ’em doesn’t get to the launch area right on time. We don’t want one platform almost taking out two dams but not quite. Much better to hit one, and hit it good, and then let the other SSN bang away at a new target hundreds of miles away an hour later. The computer guys will have to work at it, because we want the individual routings deconflicted. The missiles have to arrive at the respective dams at
thirty-second intervals. Both lead missiles hitting at roughly the same time. We’re looking for precision.”

  “Aye, sir. You want me to work on these clearances right away?”

  “No, Bill. We have to go right to the top on this one. Just get it set up to move into gear, real quick, as soon as I’ve seen the President. Keep it moving, guys. This one’s gonna fly.”

  The admiral picked up his briefcase and decided to take just the big chart with him, the one on which Bill Baldridge had sketched out the projected route of the Tomahawk cruise missiles. Then he got on the secure line to Admiral Mulligan, warned him of the broad requirements he was about to make of the U.S. Navy, and told him to meet him in the outer office of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs in forty-five minutes. The Navy helicopter was already running, as the President’s national security advisor marched resolutely forward, preparing to teach the government of Iraq a very severe lesson.

  Inside the Pentagon, Admirals Morgan, Mulligan, and Dunsmore studied the general plan. The launch platforms would be two SSNs, both 7,000-ton boats of the Los Angeles-Class, Cheyenne and Columbia. By 1800 they were ordered into the U.S. Naval Base at Diego Garcia. The loading of 14 modified Tomahawks, prepared and flown direct from San Diego, would take place on Thursday, May 25.