Nimitz Class (1997)

by Patrick Robinson

  Lieutenant Commander Jerry Curran was standing right next to him, and at 0604, the chief spoke again. “I have a rise in the level,” he said. “It’s hard to explain unless it’s the weather.”

  At 0614 an electric charge shot through the submarine…“Captain—sonar…I have faint engine lines coming up on the array. Relative 92. Alter to 135 to resolve ambiguity, please. They fit the sample, sir.”

  “Sonar—Captain…I’ll be right there.”

  Lieutenant Commander Curran crossed the room to the “water-fall” screen on which it was now clear that there were definite engine lines. The computer had already compared them with the Kilo engine sample built into the system. “They fit, sir, no doubt.”

  Boomer Dunning stepped into the room. “Nothing else on this watch?” he said.

  “Nossir, nothing except that zoo up on the bank.”

  “What’s the range?”

  “Not close, sir. Could even be first convergence. The bearing hasn’t moved. I assume she’s coming dead toward.”

  Commander Dunning stepped back outside and talked to Baldridge. “What would your admiral do right here, Bill?”

  “He said to keep moving back off-track to the north, trying to get the bank in behind us, for more noise cover, just in case the Kilo goes completely quiet on us.”

  “Right now he’s snorkeling, on course west, making a lot of noise, for that boat. But we’ll head north as you suggest.”

  Forty minutes passed with agonizing slowness. Bill heard the next call from the sonar room.

  “Solution looks good, sir. He’s still way out to the east, still coming our way. Still snorkeling, not cavitating. So he’s less than nine knots.”

  “One and two tubes ready, sir…we’re about three thousand yards to one side of the Kilo’s predicted track.”

  “Okay,” said Boomer Dunning quietly, as if even the sound of his voice would betray their presence. “I’m going to hold it right here, dead slow…then let him go by, and fire from his stern arcs, so he has zero chance of picking up the firing transient.”

  “Yessir.”

  “Meantime I want to get the best picture I can of his masts at CPA. ‘Posident,’ they said. ‘Posident’ they shall have.”

  Fifteen minutes went by, and now the Kilo was seven miles closer than he was at first contact, two miles to the south of Columbia.

  “Up periscope…Here, Bill, you’re the official observer. You’ve got to tell the CNO it was a real live Kilo. Take a look.”

  Bill Baldridge peered through the lenses, across the gray waters, at the tiny masts coming and going with the long swell…“Yup. Tallies close enough with the book. It’s hard to be sure, but that’s no trawler.”

  “Down periscope. Firing in five minutes. Sonar, make sure you get full recordings.”

  “Sonar, aye.”

  Three minutes later…“Captain—sonar…target dynamicstop, sir. He’s stopped snorkeling. I’m getting transients on the bearing in broad band, but the lines have all gone. He’ll be all quiet in one minute.”

  “Shit.”

  The sounds and signs from the Kilo died away. One minute passed, and Boomer Dunning made his decision, to fire at range three thousand yards on predictions from the last-known bearing, sending the Mk 48 torpedo off quietly at thirty knots, staying passive until sixty seconds from impact. Then Columbia’s Torpedo Guidance Officer would go to active sonar for dead accurate direction, and simultaneously accelerate the missile on its way, leaving its hapless target without hope, or even time for retribution.

  “Stand by one…”

  “Last bearing check…”

  “Shoot!”

  In the sonar room they heard the dull metallic thud of the big wire-guided torpedo launch out of the tube. Columbia shuddered faintly.

  “Weapon under guidance, sir…”

  “Arm the weapon.”

  “Weapon armed, sir.”

  One minute passed…“Weapon two thousand yards from target.”

  “Sonar—Switch to active. Single ping.”

  “Aye, sir,” called the sonar officer as he hit the button which would send the powerful telltale beam straight down the predicted bearing of the Kilo, and then echo back to give them a last-minute check on the fire control solution.

  260713SEP02. 54.40S, 60.00W.

  Course 255. Speed 5. East of Burdwood Bank.

  Depth 16 meters.

  “Captain—sonar…one active transmission…loud…bearing Green 135…United States SSN for sure. Real close.”

  “Stand by Tube Number Two. Set targets bearing Green 135. Range three thousand meters. Depth one hundred meters. Shoot as soon as you’re ready.”

  “Hard right. Steer zero-three-five. Shut off for counterattack. Full ahead…ten down…two hundred meters.”

  “Two Tube fired, Captain.”

  “Captain—sonar…torpedo active transmission…possibly in contact. Right ahead…Interval nine hundred meters…”

  Turned straight toward his enemy, charging forward at maximum speed, in the reckless, but classic, Russian torpedo evasion maneuver, Captain Georgy Kokoshin snapped out his last command…“Decoys…Thirty down…”

  The American torpedo slammed into the top of his bow, detonated with savage force, blasting a huge hole in the pressure hull. The water thundered in for’ard, flattening the bulkheads.

  Captain Kokoshin looked up at the five-foot high, three-inch-thick steel door which protected him, just in time to see it catapulted toward him, exploding inward before eighty-six tons of solid water pressure. He died in his Navy uniform on active duty. But not on behalf of Mother Russia, the nation he had served for all but the last five months of his working life.

  Back in Columbia, they had already picked up the incoming Russian torpedo, which, in a lightning, last-ditch reaction, the Kilo’s weapons team had got away.

  “Captain—sonar…Possible discharge transient on bearing.”

  Boomer Dunning was calm. “Captain, aye…Ahead flank. Right full rudder…thirty down…nine hundred feet…Decoys one and two.”

  “Torpedo—torpedo—torpedo…bearing two-six-zero…sweep mode…moving left. Fast…still in sweep mode.”

  “Rudder amidships,” snapped the captain.

  “Still moving left…but fainter, sir. She’s missed.”

  “Yes, she has,” replied Commander Dunning. And he turned to Bill Baldridge and added, in the rich, salty, language of their calling, “Beats the shit out of me how he got one away at all.”

  And now he ordered his ship to surface and was quite surprised that the swell in the ocean had died down very quickly. Off to the west about a mile away, they could see a smooth area on the surface of the water. All alone now in this bleak and desolate South Atlantic seascape, Columbia turned toward it and drove along the surface, through the calm and now flat gray waters, to identify, formally, the remains of their “kill.”

  There was not much to see, really. A lot of oil, a few small bits of wooden wreckage, and unsecured items which looked like Navy jackets and other items of clothing that had been blasted out upon the torpedo’s impact. The rest, the heavy steel structure, weapons, engines, and the ship’s company, rested now on the floor of the ocean, two and half miles below.

  Commander Dunning, Bill Baldridge, and Lieutenant Wingate stood up on the bridge and stared down at the minute remnants of the Kilo.

  Down on the casing, a half-dozen crew members were taking a closer look, just a final check for bodies. Russian bodies, they supposed. But there were none.

  No one said anything for a few minutes, possibly out of an unconscious mark of respect for the unknown dead. But suddenly a young sailor shouted out: “Hey, what’s that right down there? Right there, where I’m pointing.”

  But no one else could see anything. And the sailor looked up to the bridge, embarrassed at his outburst, in front of the captain. “Sorry, sir,” he said. “But I could a sworn I saw a coupla hundred dollar bills floating right there, in the oil.”


  Only Lieutenant Commander Baldridge smiled.

  Epilogue

  1100 Thursday, October 10. The Pentagon. Office of the Secretary of Defense.

  Third Floor, E Ring.

  ROBERT MACPHERSON PRESIDED OVER THIS PARTICULAR debriefing meeting personally. Seated around him in the conference room were the Secretary of State, Harcourt Travis, the CJCS, General Josh Paul, the CNO, Admiral Scott Dunsmore, the Intelligence Director, Vice Admiral Arnold Morgan, and the man who had tracked the Russian Kilo from day one until it was finally destroyed, Lieutenant Commander Bill Baldridge. Major Ted Lynch of the CIA was invited to sit in, having compiled a dossier on the Iraqis’ financial involvement in the Jefferson disaster. At 1115, the President of the United States was expected to join them, but not to preside.

  They were assembled to discuss the formal report of the secret demise of the Russian Kilo. Here in this room behind closed, guarded doors, the men who occupied America’s three great Offices of State would finally confer with the most senior officers in the Pentagon, to make a decision not to admit anything. The Iranians had said nothing whatsoever about their written-off submarines, the Russians had already agreed to say nothing about the Kilo, and theIsraelis intended to say nothing about Commander Benjamin Adnam. Nor indeed about their probably murdered field officer in Cairo.

  Governments like to put things to bed. The United States of America was about to turn out the light on the death of the Thomas Jefferson. Assuming the President was not hell-bent on flattening Baghdad for all the world to see.

  Robert MacPherson suggested that the President was in no such frame of mind; not with the Kilo, and its crew, and Benjamin Adnam all resting at the bottom of the South Atlantic.

  Everyone at the table had read the accounts of the hunt and “kill,” most of which had been written by Lieutenant Commander Baldridge, and refined by Admiral Arnold Morgan. The financial document from Major Lynch had provided critical pieces of the jigsaw, and a private addition to the report, furnished to Admiral Morgan from General David Gavron, had more or less confirmed that Commander Adnam was an Iraqi agent who had been in place in Israel since he was eighteen.

  The Mossad had run a set of computerized voice-matching tests on the conversation they had taped from the lakeside home of Barzan al-Tikriti. At first they had learned only that the two parties both came from the same hometown, which was plainly Tikrit, a small town located further north up the Tigris from Baghdad.

  But the Mossad technicians now identified the other party. It was, without question, Benjamin Adnam, also of Tikrit, like Saddam Hussein and most of the Iraqi Government. The Mossad nailed Adnam five days after his death, comparing the Geneva conversation with an instructional tape Ben had helped to make for trainee Israeli submarine officers.

  The loose ends were tying together smoothly when the President arrived. He greeted everyone warmly, using first names as he always did, and confirming that he had, of course, read all of the reports very thoroughly, and that there seemed little further they could advance, save to declare war on Iraq, which on reflection was not a great idea.

  The President wanted to talk for a while about operational improvements which might be made for the future patrols of Carrier Battle Group, and he was particularly interested in the blow-by-blow account from Commander Boomer Dunning of the sinking of the Kilo. But he appeared preoccupied today, as if he wanted, finally, to lay the Jefferson to rest. For the moment he seemed content just to have the knowledge that the Iraqis had been behind the atrocity. Almost as if he was biding his time over any future retribution.

  “Well, gentlemen,” he said, “I would like to thank all of the investigative team for the great job you all did. I wish someone would express our gratitude also to the Scottish admiral. We owe him a great deal. I would very much like to meet him, if that could be arranged.

  “Meanwhile, we are naturally agreed on a policy of silence. And now, unless anyone has anything of paramount importance to impart, I guess that wraps it. For the moment.” He looked around the table, smiled at his team, and added, one final time, “Anything else?”

  “Sir,” Lieutenant Commander Baldridge said firmly, “we did not get Commander Adnam. He was not on the submarine. And he’s still alive. And I just hope he does not have it in his mind to try anything else.”

  All heads turned in unison. The President looked amazed, but recovered his composure very swiftly. “Bill!” he said in mock outrage. “Haven’t we been through a similar routine to this, once before?”

  “Yessir.”

  “Well, you were right then. I guess I’d better sit right here, and hear you out.”

  Admiral Dunsmore interrupted. “Commander, the President is very busy. Could you not have mentioned your new theory to me a few days ago?”

  “Not hardly, sir. I only just got it. Just dawned on me. I didn’t even tune in when I stood by and watched them wipe out the Kilo.”

  “What’s on your mind?” said the President. “I may be busy. But I’m not too busy for this.”

  “Okay, gentlemen,” said Bill. “If you turn to page fourteen of Captain Dunning’s report, you will see that we fired the wire-guided torpedo, and let it run at thirty knots for two thousand yards. Then, with about one thousand yards to go, we took a single ping and switched the weapon’s sonar to active, to give it a good look at its target, and then we increased its speed. The report from Columbia’s sonar room says it hit only thirty seconds later.

  “That means the Kilo’s defense was classic ‘Crazy Ivan.’”

  “Crazy what?” asked the President.

  “Crazy Ivan. Submariner’s jargon for the regular Soviet method of getting out of the way of a torpedo. Sonsabitches just turn around and run straight back down the bearing toward the incoming missile, going deeper at top speed all the time. They think this tactic throws the torpedo’s sonar into confusion, and will force it to miss. And so it does. Sometimes. But no Western-trained submarine commander would ever dream of doing anything like that.

  “Our own method is normally to accelerate forward in the same direction as the incoming missile. That means that if the torpedo is making forty knots, and we’re doing twenty, he’s only catching us at around twenty knots, and we have a head start. That gives us vital extra seconds to think of something, you know, decoys, evasion tactics. But we would not run straight at the damn thing, that’s for certain.”

  The table was silent. And Bill Baldridge took it upon himself to add, “Kilo 630 accomplished its place in the Navy’s Black Museum because it was handled by a master. It died because that master was no longer on board. Whoever was left in command was a Russian, Captain Georgy Kokoshin. Not Ben Adnam.”

  “You think Ben jumped overboard?” asked the President, wryly.

  “Nossir. He got off when they were fueled. I calculated it somewhere in the Indian Ocean, before they made the crossing of the South Atlantic. Matter of fact I’d say they were topped up again with gas in the Atlantic, off West Africa. Ben left ’em at one of those two stops. That’s why they were blown apart by the first torpedo fired at’em.”

  The President stood up. “Thank you, Bill. Very interesting. Arnold, you’ll listen out for Adnam’s footsteps, I’m sure. Don’t let’s drop our guard. But for the moment, I think I’ll just take some time to think about this.”

  October 30. Burdett, Kansas.

  Lieutenant Commander Bill Baldridge resigned from the United States Navy and returned to the family cattle ranch. Two days later there was a memorial service for his brother, Captain Jack Baldridge. It was conducted by a Navy chaplain down by the river, next to the new bronze and granite memorial. The CNO, Admiral Scott Dunsmore, and his wife Grace were among the three hundred people who attended.

  1130 November 12. Camp David.

  Admiral Sir Iain MacLean and the President of the United States walked slowly in the glorious autumn foliage of the Blue Ridge Mountains. The path they trod, set deep in the 125 acres of the Presidential retrea
t, ran through a copse of maple, hickory, and locust, the red and butter-gold leaves lit by the morning sun. The route was so winding you could hardly see the Secret Servicemen and the Navy guards following on behind.

  “Mr. President,” said the admiral, “you have invited me to a very beautiful place.”

  “If I could, I’d give it to you, Admiral,” replied the President, “after what you did for us. I’m just delighted you were able to come and spend a couple of days. I’ve invited Scott Dunsmore and his wife for dinner this evening so we can indulge in my favorite pastime, talking about Naval warfare.”