Eyeball to Eyeball (Final Failure)

by Douglas Niles

  On the general’s desk, below the vast arc of televised displays, were two telephones, a gold one that linked SAC directly to the JCS in the Pentagon and, if necessary, to the President in the White House; and a red telephone that connected him to a huge network of subordinate commanders at SAC bases around the world. Now General Power picked up the red telephone, which immediately broadcast a signal to those subordinate commanders, ordering them to be ready to take a message from their CIC. Power watched the illuminated map, bright with white lights to mark every SAC asset around the world. As the commanders in those distant bases answered their phones, the white lights for each thus-connected base blinked out.

  Finally, the map was dark, the network activated. Power knew that his message would travel around the world on powerful radio waves. Yet, when his coding officer asked if he wanted to encrypt his message, he curtly shook his head “no.” This warning would be broadcast in the clear, understandable to anyonewith a scanner and working radio—including countless KGB and Soviet Military Intelligence outposts.

  The SAC commander had his eye on Moscow as he spoke into the phone. “This is General Power,” he began. “I want you all to know that we have taken Strategic Air Command to a level of alert unprecedented in our glorious history. We now stand at DEFCON 2. I cannot understate the seriousness of the situation facing you. It is important to realize that our entire Strategic Attack Force could be ordered to war at a moment’s notice. I repeat, we could go to war at a moment’s notice.”

  He set down the phone and leaned back with a smug, satisfied smile. He had no doubt that the message had been received, by exactly the people he wanted to hear it, loud and clear.

  1130 hours (Wednesday midday)

  USS DDG 507 Conning

  Quarantine Line, 500 miles NE of Cuba

  Seaman Duncan stood on the fantail of the fast destroyer. Her battery of guided missiles, twin rockets perched on a swiveling launcher, loomed over him. He tried to squint, to see into the distance toward the east and north, half-believing he could make out the gray shape of a Soviet merchant ship. In truth, it was his imagination.

  But he knew they were out there, and not just because Chief Weber had told him so. In fact, the captain himself had come over the loudspeaker several times in the last day, explaining that Conning was part of a destroyer screen waiting to intercept communist ships carrying unauthorized weapons to Cuba. Duncan felt the unusual weight of the Thompson submachine gun on his back as a reminder. Per Weber’s order, he had slept with the gun at his side and had been carrying it since he got up that morning. The gun, on a leather strap, was heavy, but it was a good weight. It felt kind of odd to stir a pot of oatmeal with the gun strapped to his back, but it was a “good odd.”

  He felt the deck lurch slightly underfoot and braced his hands on the railing as Conning started a sharp turn away from her previous course. The sun, nearly overhead, didn’t give much clue as to their bearing, but he saw from the wake that the fast ship had turned some ninety degrees toward the north. He could feel the thrum of her powerful engines in the deck under his feet, and sense that the guided-missile destroyer was accelerating to flank speed.

  Chief Petty Officer Weber approached, and Duncan called out to him, pointing eastward. “Hey, Chief—I though the Russians were coming from over there. What gives?”

  “What, are you a navigator now?” the chief asked.

  Weber had a canvas sack in his hands, and he pulled a belt out of it as he came up to Duncan. “New plan, Georgie. We’re off to hunt a Russian sub. And you get to help!” He held out one of the belts, and the seaman noticed a half dozen heavy objects, about the size of a can of fruit, hanging from the strap.

  “What are these?” he wondered, taking the proffered belt.

  “Those are practice depth charges, like hand grenades. When you get an order, you drop one of them over the side. If you’re lucky, you’ll hit a Russian sub and force it up to the surface. You got that?”

  “Well, sure, Chief, I think so.” Duncan looked at the “cans” and remembered basic training, where he’d learned how to throw a hand grenade. “I guess I pull this pin here, huh?”

  “Yep. Pull it, and drop it over the side, and wait for the ‘boom.’”

  “Aye aye, Chief. Am I supposed to bag a submarine all by myself?” he couldn’t help asking.

  “Don’t be a smart aleck. No, we’ve got some help.” The chief pointed to the north, and Duncan was surprised to see a large ship, now clearly visible a mile or two away. The flat deck, broken only by the tower of a single island, marked it as an aircraft carrier, though it wasn’t as big as the huge fleet carrier, Enterprise, that Conning had passed on the way out to the quarantine line.

  “That’s Randolph,” the chief explained. “Back in WW2 she was as good a carrier as there was. Now, she’s a hangar for helicopters and search planes—dedicated to ASW work. So it’s her job to find the subs, and our job to bring them to the surface.”

  “All right.” Duncan tried not to keep the skepticism out of his voice, though the plan sounded crazy to him.

  “Good. Now, take that Tommy Gun back to the weapons locker. Chief Denning will check it in; you won’t need it for this job. Then get back here and wait for orders.”

  “Got it, Chief. They find ’em, we bring ’em up,” he clarified as Weber walked away. Under his breath he muttered the final detail, the one he still couldn’t really believe:

  “With a hand grenade.”

  2130 hours (Wednesday night)

  Virginia Highway Patrol Weigh Station

  Leesburg, Virginia

  The CB radio in Captain Jake Miller’s closed jeep crackled. The device was set to the 6th Battalion’s channel, but he couldn’t be sure it wasn’t some civilian. After all, they were just thirty miles or so west of Washington D.C. There were a lot of people living around here. Nevertheless, he reached for the microphone and pressed the “speak” button.

  “Miller, here,” he said.

  “Uh, Captain. This is Sergeant Snelling, in truck one. You’d better get back here—we have a problem. We’re in the weigh station.”

  “Hold tight, I’ll be right there—I’m only five minutes away,” the captain replied. “Miller out.”

  He turned to his driver. “Turn around—back to the weigh station.”

  A few minutes later the jeep pulled in to find a convoy of trucks, the entire battalion, lined up in front of the truck scale. The lead truck was on the scale, and a highway patrolman had been standing below the driver’s door. When Miller got out, the trooper turned to face him.

  “Captain,” he declared, clearly unimpressed by Miller’s silver bars of rank. “This truck is too heavy. I can’t let it through. And those other trucks behind, if they’re the same as this one, they won’t pass either.”

  “Dammit, Trooper—we’re on orders from the Department of Defense. We have to take those trucks from Maryland to Key West Florida, and we have to have them there yesterday!”

  “I’m sorry, Sir. You’ll just have to find some way to do it that doesn’t involve driving on the roads of the Commonwealth of Virginia.”

  “You’ve heard about the crisis with Cuba?” Miller said sarcastically. “These are antiaircraft missiles intended for the airbase at Key West! If that base is attacked by communist aircraft, these missiles will be needed to shoot them down!”

  “Good luck with that mission, sir. But I haven’t received any notice to make an exception. You’ll have to turn back.”

  “I don’t believe this shit!” the captain fumed, nearly exploding.

  “Sir, you will keep a respectful tongue in your mouth, or I’ll have to arrest you.”

  “By God, I think you mean it!” Miller declared, drawing a deep breath. He looked at the well-lighted office beyond the scale. “Do you have a phone I can use?”

  The trooper pointed to the ditch next to the road. “There’s a pay phone down there.”

  Miller clapped his hands to his helmet. He
wasn’t even sure who he could call, what he could do. In fact, there was only one thing to do.

  The 6th Hawk Battalion, 65th Artillery Regiment—the modern antiaircraft missiles intended to defend Key West Naval Air Station against enemy air attack—on the move from its base at Fort Meade, turned around and the whole convoy headed north, back into Maryland.

  25 October 1962

  0340 hours (Thursday early morning)

  Submarine B-59, on the surface

  Approximately 650 miles NE of Cuba

  Foxtrot B-59 had cruised on the surface for almost four hours, which was a nice break for the men, since each crew member had gotten two full half-hour stints on the deck, breathing fresh air under the open, starlit sky. But Captain Savitsky, in the watchpost on top of the sail, was growing increasingly displeased. For about the tenth time, he reached for the speaking tube and called down to the command center.

  “Has there been any broadcast from Moscow? Any communication with information or orders?”

  “I’m sorry, Comrade Captain,” the radioman replied. “There has been nothing directed at us, not since we surfaced before midnight.”

  “Damn,” he muttered, straightening up. The sky was moonless, but the stars were bright enough that the whole ocean seemed to glow with a silver phosphorescence. He knew, in an abstract way, that it was beautiful. But he couldn’t think of anything except how alone they were, how far from the rodina, and how many questions he had about what was going on in the world outside of this submarine.

  The hatch opened, and Commander Arkhipov climbed up the ladder to join the captain and the two lookouts. There was room enough, barely, for the four men and the hatch leading downward.

  “Look at it as good news,” Arkhipov suggested cheerfully. “If anything had gone wrong, they’d have to send us a message. As it is, things must be proceeding exactly according to plan.”

  “But we don’t even know what the plan is!” the captain snapped, then shook his head. “I’m sorry, Vasily Andreivich. You’re right. We’ve made it this far without—”

  As if he’d cursed their luck with his own words, an alarm klaxon suddenly brayed a warning. The men on the fore and after decks sprinted for the hatches leading down into the hull, as did the two watchmen on top of the sail. Savitsky snatched up the end of the speaking tube. “What is it? What’s going on?”

  “An American ship, Captain,” the radar operator came back. “About twenty kilometers away, and closing on us fast. By the speed and size of the radar image, I suspect it’s a destroyer. And she has us painted on her own radar.”

  “Damn!” spat the captain. He gestured to Arkhipov, wordlessly sending his exec down the hatch after the two lookouts. A glance fore and aft confirmed that the last of his crew had dropped out of sight, vanishing into the dubious safety if the submarine’s hull.

  “All right, take her down—crash dive!” Savitsky, the last man outside the boat, ordered.

  Immediately he felt the lurch as seawater poured over the bow, roaring back to churn around the base of the sail, appearing to climb quickly as the sub angled sharply into the sea. Savitsky dropped through the hatch and quickly spun the lock shut behind him. He slid down the ladder into the command center, allowed a crewman to close off the secondary hatch block access to the sail.

  He realized that the diving officer was looking at him expectantly. With a ship, potentially an enemy ship, bearing down on them, he didn’t want to take a chance on running at snorkel depth—a keen radar man on the destroyer could potentially pick up the sub’s location just from the snorkel and the turbulence it raised on the surface.

  “Take her down to 100 meters,” he said, then picked up the tube that connected to the engine room. “Switch over to batteries. Rig for silent running.”

  Immediately a shroud of quiet seemed to blanket the submarine as the three powerful diesel engines shut down. The sub glided, almost like a giant fish, deeper beneah the surface.

  Arkhipov was eyeing him, nodding in approval. “We won’t stay down that deep all day,” the captain explained. “But I want to shake this pesky destroyer before we start up the engines again.”

  * * *

  Far to the rear, the diving fins contorted the submarine’s hull ever so slightly from the force of the sudden maneuver. That force was enough to twist and stretch the tiny crack that had appeared in the hull two days earlier. The crack extended several centimeters farther, and the dripping of water through the opening, almost unnoticeable before, became a steady trickle.

  Propeller shaft number three passed through the hull where the tiny crack had just expanded. For now, the flaw wasn’t enough to impeded the rotation of that steel rod, which spun steadily, cradled in its roller bearings. But, very slightly, enough play entered into the opening so that the shaft started to vibrate, just a bit.

  It was subtle, still—so subtle that no one in the submarine noticed that anything was wrong.

  1012 hours (Thursday morning)

  Presidium Chamber

  Kremlin, Moscow

  “Comrade Malinovsky, would you report on the readiness of our military forces?” Khrushchev asked from his position at the front of the room. He was pleased that he kept his voice steady, and he imagined that he now projected a sense of cool control.

  His manner was a far cry from the almost paralyzing dash of terror he’d felt the previous evening, when KGB and military intelligence sources had both reported that the United States Strategic Air Command had advanced its readiness to DEFCON 2. Upon hearing the news, the chairman had retired to his apartment to collect himself, a process that had required more than an hour. When he had emerged, he still felt rattled, and he sensed that these dour bureaucrats could sense his fear. He had ordered Malinovsky to advance the state of readiness of the Soviet armed forces, then claimed that he was tired and needed to go to bed.

  In fact, he hadn’t slept much at all, and in his darkest moments had more or less taken it for granted that he, and the Kremlin, and all of Moscow, were going to be incinerated by a thermonuclear explosion sometime during the night. As a consequence, when he woke up to find the sun shining, a beautiful autumn day commencing, and no ominous mushroom clouds rising from any point on the horizon, he had decided that, once again, the Americans were bluffing.

  “All branches of the Soviet Military have moved to standby alert,” Malinovsky intoned, reading from a briefing sheet. “Leaves have been canceled. Weapons have been prepared for use and tested, and our aircraft have been dispersed to advance bases. Our strategic bomber forces have been fueled, with bombs loaded aboard. The strategic rockets have yet to be fueled, but fueling stations are ready, and crews are standing by.”

  “Excellent,” the chairman said cheerfully, rubbing his hands together.

  It was a hollow cheer for all that. He, and Malinovsky, if not every man here, knew that the Soviet strategic bomber force was a minimal threat to the American mainland. Even from bases on the very far east of Siberia, the Kamchatka peninsula, the farthest those bombers could range against the USA would be the northwestern cities of Seattle and, possibly, San Francisco. And the Soviet Air Force lacked the in-air refueling capabilities of the Americans, so any bombers that made it as far as northern California would run out of fuel within a hundred miles or so of dropping their bombs.

  The Soviet chairman had reached another realization during the previous night’s long hours of terror. He had come to understand that he would have to pull the rockets out of Cuba. To continue like this was madness. It would be different, he had argued to himself, if the missiles had been made operational before they had been discovered. As it was, however, the SS5—the rockets with the range to reach most of the American homeland—would not be ready ever, because too many important components had not yet reached Cuba. And now, with the blockade, they could not make it to their intended ports of destination.

  Of course, he could conceivably unleash a devastating blow against the southeastern quarter or third of the ene
my nation, but that would leave far too much of American territory unaffected. Furthermore, it would enrage the Americans to the point where a devastating counterstrike would be inevitable. Khrushchev was an emotional man, but he entertained no illusions about his country’s ability to withstand a full-strength thermonuclear attack from the world’s only other superpower.