Nimitz Class am-1

by Patrick Robinson

  “I can’t answer that. But you have reminded me of a strange conversation we once had at the Mena House. I can’t remember any of the exact words, but I do remember him saying something like, ‘My masters probably would not approve of my being here so publicly with an English admiral’s daughter. They might think it a bit indiscreet.’

  “I asked him why, and he just went rather thoughtful, and very steely. He said something like, ‘But my masters can be replaced anytime. I, on the other hand, cannot be replaced.’

  “It was not the arrogance that surprised me. Ben always had a touch of arrogance, even bravado, just under the surface. I’m a bit ashamed to say how attractive I found it at the time. But it was the use of the word ‘masters’ that should have given me just a touch of suspicion. I’ve just never heard any Naval officer use those words before, not in that context. I’ve always remembered Ben saying it.”

  “Funny that, Laura. I’ve never heard a U.S. Naval officer use it either. I continue to wonder precisely who Ben really was.”

  “You really do think he was not what he said he was?”

  “I do. Not least because your father thinks there are less than half a dozen men on earth who could have blown up our aircraft carrier. And he thinks Ben might have been one of them. And an Arab is a much better bet than an Israeli.”

  “Just after I was married Ben phoned and asked me to meet him but I couldn’t. He said Cairo that time as well.”

  “Strange. I wonder where the hell he is now.”

  “Can’t help much with that one. It’s been several months since I last heard. I might not hear again. And I never had an address.”

  “Would you agree to let me know if you ever did hear from him?”

  “Yes. Yes, I would. I am the daughter of a senior Navy officer, and I do understand about this, and how serious it is. I will contact you if I hear.”

  Laura stood up wearily and passed a hand through her hair. “Would you like to listen to some music?” she asked. Crossing the room, she flicked on the CD player and placed a disc on the sliding tray. The massed violins of the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra playing the rhapsodic overture to one of Giuseppe Verdi’s most memorable operas filled the room.

  “Rigoletto,” said Bill.

  They sat in silence for a long while, listening to the divine, heart-rending arias being sung by Ileana Cotrubas as Gilda, and Placido Domingo as the Duke of Mantua.

  When the soprano sang “Caro nome” Laura was surprised to hear the American Naval officer mutter, “It’s almost unbearably beautiful, don’t you think?”

  She turned the sound down a shade, and asked him, “You really like opera, don’t you?”

  “I do at times like this,” he said somberly. “My mother’s brother was on the Board of the Metropolitan Opera in New York. He used to throw her a few tickets now and then. She took me a few times when I was at Annapolis, paid for me to fly up from Washington, let me hear the great maestros at work.

  “I never got much further than the easier ones, like Bohème, Figaro, Rigoletto, Madame Butterfly…Carmen, Aida, and The Pearl Fishers…but I’ve always loved the music — it’s like havin’ someone cast a spell on you. I’d rather go to an opera than a rodeo. That’s the truth.”

  He glanced at his watch. “Hey, it’s midnight, and I haven’t slept in a bed since I left Kansas on Sunday morning. I have to meet your dad real early. I’d better turn in, before I collapse on the rug.”

  “All right. I’ll just clear these glasses and fix the fire screen. Good night, Bill. I hope I’ve helped.”

  “Yes, ma’am. I appreciate it.” He debated the propriety of giving her a quick kiss on the cheek, but decided against it. Mrs. Laura Anderson considered the omission a lot more peevishly than she ought to have done.

  Bill climbed the stairs and slept like a rock. He knew his second day at Inveraray was not strictly necessary but he wanted to tour this submariner’s mecca with Admiral MacLean. And he wanted to ask him a few more questions about Israel and its Navy. He justified his time with the certain knowledge that this British admiral was without doubt the most learned submariner he had ever met. He was also the man who had personally taught Commander Ben Adnam, whatever grave implications that might now have.

  152357JUL02. 11N, 53E.

  Course 192. Speed 7. Periscope depth.

  1,070 miles southwest of the datum;

  170 miles due east of Cap Guardafui, Somalia.

  “Okay, Georgy. We’re closer to the shipping lanes than I’d like, but let’s get up to the surface, and get the main shaft locked ASAP. And tell him to fix that hull gland permanently. Right here. While we’re dead-stopped. It’s been a worry on and off for a week.”

  160124JUL02.

  “Watch Officer to captain, Watch Officer to captain…that racket on the ESM mast thirty minutes ago…I’d say she’s a big merchantman from the southwest. Fifteen miles, three-five-zero, twenty knots. Danger level in five minutes.

  “Captain to Watch Officer, how far will he miss us?”

  “Bearing steady for forty minutes.”

  “Christ!The shaft’s locked. Ben! Ben! We could get run right over and we can’t maneuver!”

  “Steady, Georgy, you’re going to make a ‘stopped dive.’”

  “Jesus Christ! I never done one before.”

  “Well, I’ve done dozens of them. We have no options. We must dive. I do not want to be seen by anyone. And I certainly do not want to be in a collision. I did think this could happen. That’s why I wanted you to catch a ‘stopped trim’ before we surfaced.

  “Now, do precisely as I say… open main vents and kingstons. Watch the angles…We’re stern down ten right now, but that’s okay. It’s always a bit uneven…What are we? Thirty meters?”

  “Christ! Ben, we sliding backward to the bottom!”

  “Shut up, Georgy old boy, will you? Keep those vents open, it’s just air bubbles. We’ve got tons of compressed air. Pull yourself together, for god’s sake. I know the angle’s bad…what are we? Sixty meters? Okay.”

  “The stern is down forty degrees, Ben. Crew will panic if any more.”

  “Well, tell them not to panic, will you? Shut five main vents…blow five main ballast…okay, stop blowing. Georgy, we’re heavy aft. Get ten men up to for’ard. Tell ’em to climb uphill.

  “Okay, Georgy…the angle’s coming off…open five main vents…That’s good…better…shut five main vents…where are we? Eighty meters?

  “Let’s catch trim on the layer at one hundred meters…open five main vents…shut five main vents…that’s good.”

  “One hundred meters, sir.”

  160154JUL02.

  “There you are, Georgy. We’re just floating here quietly, a hundred meters below. She’ll come over the top in the next ten minutes, none the wiser. And when she’s gone, we’ll just float very quietly back to the surface in the dark and finish our repair. No problem. Oh, Georgy, sorry about the angles, it’s always a bit like that on a ‘stopped dive.’”

  “You give me humiliation. If I ever get out of here I kill your fucking Teacher, Ben. But thank you.”

  The following morning, Bill Baldridge and the admiral left while the great house on the loch was still asleep, speeding through the forest and turning south before the main road down the side of Loch Lomond. They took a shorter route which hugged the winding eastern shores, running on down to Faslane from the opposite direction.

  “Do you think it would be easy for anyone to penetrate the Israeli Armed Forces, and work on the inside for many years?” Bill asked.

  “I gave it some thought overnight, and curiously, Bill, I do. It is a country of such interracial change. When Israel first came into being, there were so many strangers arriving in the vast exodus from underprivileged European countries, I am surprised they ever sorted anything out. But somehow they created a nationality, from Jews who had journeyed from Russia, Poland, Germany, from all over East and West Europe, even from the USA. What followed was that tho
usands of newly settled Jewish people could pass at any time for Muscovites, Londoners, New Yorkers, Berliners.

  “The entry into Israel from Arab countries was no less — they came from Egypt, Libya, Syria, Algeria, the Yemen, and of course Iraq, and Iran. No one has ever known for sure about the absolute loyalty to Israel of these families — indeed some of them have since left. But Israel has always found it dead easy to recruit very successful spies to operate in almost any Middle Eastern or European country, because they had so many original foreign nationals to select from.

  “It follows that the reverse would also be true…that in the great human influx into Israel between 1948 and, say, 1968, there were also people who had other interests, for other governments, which might find it extremely convenient having people already ‘inserted’ into the Armed Forces of a new nation, which may one day become an enemy.

  “Or do you find that altogether too far-fetched?”

  “Admiral, I don’t find that far-fetched at all. Makes sense to me.”

  “So while I do think Commander Ben Adnam was probably an Israeli, I also recognize the possibility that he may not have been, especially as he went to school in England — a strong, eighteen-year-old, well-educated boy from a good English school, with apparently Israeli parents…very easy to place in almost any walk of life in the Holy Land. I’m not saying he was an Iranian, or an Iraqi…but it’s not by any means impossible.”

  “No…” said Bill slowly. “I guess the most I can do at this moment is to keep my mind open. To be aware of the man who could have done it, and to be aware that he may not have been Israeli, and that he could have been working for someone else.”

  “That’s it. I believe modern theorists would describe that as lateral thinking. I normally call it logical research and a bit of common sense.”

  By this time Bill could see across the water to the point of land where the Argyll Forest peters out between the two great fiords of Loch Goil and Loch Long. They swung away from the water and over the top of the hill, plunging straight down into the little town of Garelochhead. “Faslane dead ahead,” said the admiral, and again Bill Baldridge found himself looking at the cold, black waters of the Scottish loch.

  The formality of the armed guards was no less than chillingly normal, even for the entry of the greatest submariner the Royal Navy had ever known. Passes were scrutinized, and they were handed over to a lieutenant commander with a submarine badge on his left shoulder.

  He showed them where to park the Range Rover, and asked Admiral MacLean whether he and his guest were ready to board. “Yes, please,” replied Sir Iain, and then to Bill, “I thought I’d show you a few of the places where I taught your man to drive one of these things. By good fortune there’s a Perisher boat going out this morning, actually for about a month, but they’ll fly us off, down near the Isle of Arran. Back by about four o’clock.”

  They walked down to the quayside where a three-hundred-foot-long, five-thousand-ton hunter-killer submarine, HMS Thermopylae, awaited. Stored deep within this menacing instrument of underwater warfare was a battery of brand-new Tomahawk land-attack missiles with a lethal range of 2,500 miles. The balance of her weapon load, stored adjacent to the bow tubes, was made up of Marconi Spearfish wire-guided torpedoes, each of which could travel seventeen miles through the water at almost fifty knots before blasting the backbone of an enemy warship in half.

  The old boy had taught Ben that part pretty well, no doubt about that. As Bill had explained to the President, a nuclear-tipped torpedo does not have to smash into the hull of its target, but it still has to run fast, straight, and accurate. Peaceful modern oceans do not provide much opportunity for hands-on practice sessions.

  To Bill’s surprise, they piped him aboard with traditional Navy ceremony, but not the admiral. Salutes were crisply exchanged, and the captain led the way down through the hatch into the claustrophobic, Formica-paneled companionways, to the wardroom where the six Perishers were waiting to start their first day at sea. It was strange how the name “Perisher” had stuck, even though the old “Periscope Course” was now the Commanding Officers Qualifying Course. Folklore has decreed that trainee submarine commanders will be, forever, “Perishers.”

  Commander Rob Garside, the 2002 Teacher, wished the admiral “good morning, sir,” extending a proper courtesy to the man who had taught him thirteen years previously.

  “Hello, Rob — I’d like you to meet an American officer who is going to be our guest today, Lieutenant Commander Bill Baldridge from Kansas via the Pentagon, I believe. Commander Rob Garside.”

  “A privilege to have you both aboard,” smiled the Teacher, and, looking at Bill, said, “You will find I am not quite such an ogre as your host was back in the eighties.”

  “He’s just being modest. Rob’s one of my very best Perishers.”

  Admiral MacLean smiled, patted his old pupil on the shoulder, and said, “What about some coffee while they’re getting this steamer to sea?”

  “No time, really, sir. Not if you want to be on the bridge going down the Gareloch.”

  “Right. Come on, Bill. I’ll show you the way.”

  “Permission for the admiral and his guest on the bridge, sir?”

  “Yes, please.”

  “Okay, Bill, up we go.”

  Two minutes later the hunter-killer was under way. From the top of the fin, the views of the loch and surrounding landscape were so striking that Baldridge hardly spoke for several minutes. Running south before the backdrop of the great mountain, with mists still hugging the shoreline on both sides, and the long heathery hillsides of Glen Fruin up to the left, made it very easy to forget the true purpose of this mission.

  It was a typical July morning; no rays of sun had yet lit up the eastern slopes of The Cobbler, as HMS Thermopylae slipped silently down the middle of the loch at around eight knots toward the Rhu Narrows. The sky was overcast. It looked like rain.

  “Is it deep enough to run down here at periscope depth?” asked Bill.

  “Yes, it is,” replied the admiral. “But we don’t do it these days, and certainly not in a nuclear boat. It’s considered an unnecessary risk…I mean, if something went wrong, no one would thank us for dumping a nuclear reactor on the floor of a Scottish loch in which it would remain active for probably a hundred years.”

  “No. I guess not. Has anything ever gone wrong in this loch?”

  “Not for a long time. Not seriously since World War I when someone managed to leave a funnel-hatch open by mistake in one of the old K-Class submarines. The water filled the boiler room and she plunged to the bottom of the loch, drowned thirty-two men. They are all buried up in Faslane cemetery.”

  “That’s one of the big troubles with these damn things…one mistake and you may never get a second chance,” said Bill quietly. “I guess that’s why we all think that a submarine CO is superior to any other.”

  “What d’ya mean, think?” said Commander Garside. “We know it.”

  Everyone laughed at the boss’s joke. But the seriousness of this mission had put all of them on edge. They were going out for a month, into great waters, west of the British Isles. They would take this submarine into the depths of the Atlantic, working as much as one thousand feet down, in water which was two miles deep, out beyond the Rockall Rise, five hundred miles offshore, well off the continental shelf.

  This is the area known in the trade as the GIUK Gap, the deep-water patrolling ground of the most powerful nuclear submarines in the Western world. It is the “choke point” formed by the coastlines of Greenland, Iceland, and the U.K., through which all Russian submarines must pass from their principal northern bases on the Murman Coast, which forms the southern shore of the Barents Sea. This was the old Soviet submarine way to the transatlantic trade routes, should it come to war.

  In those days there was no way they could navigate through the GIUK Gap without the Americans or the Brits knowing precisely who they were, how many there were, and the direction in which
they were headed. From that point on, no Soviet submarine was ever alone for long.

  It was the strategic importance of these deep waters which made the submarine bases in the Scottish lochs so important, and so efficient. It was easy to bottle up the Russians in the Black Sea, because the Turks were in charge of the only way out, through the Bosporus. And, beyond there, the Strait of Gibraltar offered another “choke point.”

  The difficult area was the GIUK Gap, and to that potential theater of submarine warfare both the Pentagon and the Royal Navy historically sent their best men and their best equipment.

  Admiral MacLean chatted to Bill about the forthcoming program the Perishers must face as Thermopylae threaded through Rhu Narrows and on south past the Tail of the Bank. For fifteen miles they ran on the surface, and then, three miles south of the Cumbraes, the captain took the submarine to periscope depth.

  The admiral kept Bill apprised of the activities, as they continued southwesterly toward the southern coast of the Isle of Arran, which stands in the eastern lee of the Mull of Kintyre.

  Once past Arran, they surfaced again, and the admiral again took Bill to the bridge for a perfect ride across the unusually sunlit fifteen-mile channel to Campbeltown, where a Navy helicopter would pick them up and fly them back to Faslane.

  All the way to Kintyre, Bill found himself wondering about the Perishers down below, working away at their notes and diagrams, listening to the sonars, consulting with the surface picture compiler, talking to the AWO, conferring with the weapons officer, discussing the systems which governed the missiles and torpedoes.

  It had been in this very area where Commander Ben Adnam had learned the specialized techniques of modern submarine warfare. But there was no longer one shred of doubt in Bill’s mind — for any potential terrorist, this was the place to learn the tricks of the trade. He guessed, too, that if he nailed Adnam, the Royal Navy would never again train a Middle Eastern submariner.