Seawolf End Game

by Cliff Happy

  He went around the room once more, making eye contact with each of his officers, pausing on each of them. Kristen’s turn came, and she saw the dreadful seriousness in his eyes. This was no game. It was real. He expected them to be going into harm’s way.

  “Any questions?” he finally asked.

  Ryan Walcott offered a question, “Sir, what about shifting personnel—”

  He was cut off before he finished by the Chief Engineer. “Forget it, Ops,” Ski told Walcott as he pointed an accusing finger at the Operations Officer. “You can’t have her.”

  Kristen hadn’t expected this again, and she sat quietly, trying to disappear into the chair as the two men argued over her.

  “Dammit, Ski,” Ryan argued calmly, “half the officers on this boat are in engineering, and with two new submarines floating around out there somewhere, neither of which have a signature anyone can recognize, I need the best set of ears on this boat in sonar.” He then pointed abruptly at Kristen. “And that’s her!”

  “I have half the officers in engineering because I need half the officers in engineering,” Ski countered. Kristen hadn’t expected to ever have Ski arguing to have her anywhere near him. But she knew this argument was well above her pay grade, so she stayed out of it. “Besides,” Ski concluded, “since when can’t Chief Miller handle sonar?”

  Ryan glanced at Kristen, still pointing at her. “Dammit, Ski, Miller’s the one requesting her!”

  “No,” Ski responded uncompromisingly.

  “All right,” Graves cut them both off, ending the argument and sparing Brodie from having to listen to any more, “that’s enough from both of you. The enemy’s out there,” he reminded them pointing through the bulkhead at the sea beyond, “not in here.”

  “Lieutenant?” Brodie asked as he looked back down the table at her. “We can’t split you in half. What do you say in the matter?”

  Kristen met his gaze. Unflinching. Confident. She knew he would support her, whichever one she chose. As an officer, her place was not in the sonar room with a pair of headphones on, she should be supervising a division in engineering, which was what she was being paid for. But if she was the best pair of ears on the boat, then even though it would be taking a position beneath her rank, she wouldn’t argue. “Whatever’s best for the boat, Captain.”

  Ryan interjected in his usual calm, reasoned tone, “Captain, if I may…” he motioned toward Kristen as he spoke, “Chief Miller told me she is picking shit up in the water no one else is,” he said bluntly. “The Chief isn’t certain if it’s that her ears are better than everyone else’s, or if his men have been too well indoctrinated to trust the equipment to do most of the work for them, or if she can just focus better than anyone else. But whatever it is, she’s got it and I think, considering the situation we find ourselves in, we have to make whatever personnel shifts will best enhance the combat effectiveness of this boat. And if it means I have to start scrubbing shitters, or strapping a pair of headphones on a lieutenant, then I think we have to do it.”

  “And who is gonna take over her responsibilities in Engineering?” Ski asked abruptly.

  Ryan held his hands open as if to offer any help he might give. “I’ll pull a couple of hours in there each rotation if it’s what you need.” He then added as he motioned around at the other officers gathered at the table. “I bet we all will if that’s what it takes to get the job done.”

  Brodie nodded thoughtfully, apparently appreciating Ryan’s and Kristen’s comments. He glanced at his XO as he stood. They said nothing; not so much as a whisper passed between them, but apparently whatever communication was necessary between them was accomplished by this silent exchange. As soon as Brodie exited the wardroom, Graves settled the matter for him. “Lieutenant, you’re back in sonar,” he said simply, accepting no discussion. He glanced at Ski, throwing him a bone. “I’ll see what I can do about getting you some help back there, Ski. The rest of you might have to kick in an extra hour or two in engineering to cover for Kristen while she’s working in the shack.”

  Chapter Eleven

  Imagery Intelligence Section, National Reconnaissance Office, Chantilly, Virginia

  Tristan Ellis had been with the IMINT section of the NRO for just under a year, having joined the NRO after leaving the military where he’d been an intelligence officer in the Air Force’s Satellite Imagery analysis department. During his time in the military and now as a civilian “spook,” he’d learned just what satellite surveillance could and couldn’t do, and he was a firm believer that the imagery the American fleet of surveillance satellites collected provided the greatest wealth of intelligence on what his nation’s potential enemies might be up to.

  Ever since the crisis in Korea had started, Tristan and the entire staff at the NRO had burned the midnight oil trying to provide the kind of significant information the theater commander needed to properly respond to the growing threat. But, in the last two weeks, the focus had slowly moved from the Korean Peninsula and back toward the rest of the globe. The DPRK was still a threat, but recent negotiations led by the Russian Federation had helped alleviate the crisis somewhat. Now the American government was concerned that they had overlooked something.

  Tristan was seated at an analysis bench, complete with microscope and imagery equipment as he studied the latest download from a KH-11 Ikon surveillance pass over the Persian Gulf. It hadn’t escaped the NRO’s notice that the Russians had transferred a significant quantity of military equipment to the Islamic Republic, but this in and of itself wasn’t necessarily significant since the Russians had been selling off vast stockpiles of equipment for years. Most of it was outdated and had ended up in countries like Iraq, Syria, the DPRK and other potential enemies.

  Satellite imagery analysis was, from Tristan’s perspective, mostly about bean counting. Images might show a train loaded with armored personnel carriers going from point A to point B, and his job was to simply identify and count the types of vehicles and let others determine the reason for the move. Of course, he could often detect certain patterns for himself and had noticed a growing amount of heavy equipment in and around the Iranian port of Bandar-e-Abbas.

  Troops, tanks, APC’s, trucks and other military equipment were steadily pouring into the city, and part of his job was to count it. After days of this, he’d become quite familiar with the—as of yet—unexplained buildup of Iranian forces in and around the city. But, once again, as he’d done for the last two weeks, he carefully examined the latest imagery looking for anything new or unexpected.

  He was looking over several images of the harbor where cargo ships of all shapes and sizes were docked or anchored and was about to advance yet another frame when his practiced eye noticed something that looked… uncomfortably interesting. He magnified the image of a train car positioned alongside a small coastal freighter. He noted the armed men in military fatigues around the train and on the ship, but ignored them as he looked at the unusual shape positioned on a train car. The cargo on the other flat cars was concealed under large tarpaulins to prevent aerial observation, but the car’s tarp had been removed prior to the cargo being loaded onto the ship.

  He adjusted the magnification and played with the resolution a bit to clear up the image. As he did, and the image became clearer, he felt a sickening feeling low in his abdomen. He raised his head from the eye pieces, and thought for a few seconds, trying to determine what else the unusual shape might possibly be. But nothing came to mind. He turned to his computer and brought up his imagery database where millions of pictures of every conceivable piece of military and civilian hardware was carefully catalogued. In less than three minutes, he found what he believed was a match for the image.

  “Holy shit.”

  “What is it, Tristan?” Aaron Connelly, a fellow analyst, seated at the adjacent workstation asked curiously.

  Tristan motioned toward his station. “You tell me.” Tristan surrendered his seat and Aaron slipped into it before looking through the ey
epieces. He took a few seconds to adjust the image to suit him and then, after a good thirty seconds, looked up. From the look on his face, he had come to the same conclusion. “That’s too big to be a torpedo shipping crate.”

  “The shipping crate is forty feet if it’s an inch,” Tristan agreed.

  “That’s too big for an anti-ship missile,” Aaron added thoughtfully. He glanced back down and then again looked at Tristan. “It’s not a cruise missile.”

  Tristan tapped his computer screen. “It’s a Bulova shipping container.”

  Tristan saw the look of shock on Aaron’s face as he again studied the image. The Bulova series of ballistic missiles were the most advanced submarine-launched missiles in the Russian arsenal. “Even the Russians wouldn’t sell those.”

  “I wouldn’t have thought so,” Tristan agreed. “But if not, what the hell is a trainload of them doing in Bandar-e-Abbas?”

  Within an hour, it was the same question everyone in Washington was asking one another.

  Chapter Twelve

  USS Seawolf, The Indian Ocean

  Kristen hadn’t gotten three straight hours of sleep since the Seawolf left Japan. The high-speed run to the Singapore Straits and then into the Indian Ocean had taken almost a full week. From there they’d continued on, racing through the depths toward the patrol area off the Maldives to the south of India.

  The combination of mounting stress and unrelenting battle drills piled on to the normal grueling work routine was pushing the entire crew to the breaking point. But for Kristen, there was something else. She couldn’t shake the sensation of being a pawn on a global chessboard, and she didn’t like the feeling. Nothing in any of the intelligence briefings had given her reason to suspect a motive for why the Koreans and possibly the Russians might be willing to risk war with the United States. There was nothing to indicate just what the Russians were planning, and this puzzle, this riddle with no readily available solution, was causing her to spend hours racking her brain in search of the answer.

  She was normally obsessive and at times single minded when in pursuit of a goal. These traits had served her well in the past, but were now plaguing her sleepless hours as she tried to apply sheer reason to the enigma and find the solution. But no revelation was forthcoming. Making it worse was the growing fear that the answer was discernible if she hadn’t overlooked some apparently trivial, yet revealing, snippet of information in the hours of intelligence briefings they’d all received almost daily as they made their run from Sasebo. She couldn’t quite put her finger on it, but she had the most uncomfortable feeling—growing stronger each day—that she was overlooking something.

  There’d been no word about the missing Russian submarines. Just what the Russians might be planning—if anything—was still a mystery, but Brodie and Graves were driving the officers and crew with the compassion of taskmasters. Every six-hour watch saw at least one battle drill or damage control exercise, which meant no one on board got much uninterrupted sleep, and Kristen was growing concerned that her captain might be going too far as more and more of the crew began to show the stress they were feeling. Haggard faces greeted her in the narrow passageways. On the mess decks, normally innocent snipes at one another were now causing brawls between sailors—a sure sign of mounting stress.

  Following a two-hour damage control exercise that had interrupted her sleep period, Kristen resisted the urge to go directly to her quarters and instead went for a quick shower. The XO had just finished, and they exchanged brief, perfunctory greetings as they passed one another in the captain’s cabin. Kristen entered the small bathroom and a few moments later slipped into the shower, plunging her head under the water in an attempt to relieve the tension headache she’d had for days.

  She finally shut off the water, pulled the shower curtain back, and began toweling off, unable to shake the unsettling feeling of forgetfulness. The incomprehensible yet palatable sensation that the answer was on the tip of her tongue had plagued her for days, yet she felt no closer to the answer. “Come on,” she whispered as she toweled herself off, “think!”

  But no answer presented itself. Instead, the sound of the handle on the bathroom door startled her as she dried her back. She turned in horror, realizing too late that, in her lassitude, she’d failed to lock the door. The door opened and Brodie stepped in. He’d barely made it over the threshold when he saw her.

  Kristen was partially covered from his view by the towel across her back reaching down to the top of her thigh. She instinctively pulled the towel tightly about her in a mixture of surprise and dismay. She saw him, briefly frozen in shock, standing inside the threshold of the head. For an agonizingly long moment, they stared at one another, each surprised and embarrassed. A million thoughts ran through her head as she considered what she might possibly say, but her usual quick mind had turned to mush, and all she could do was gasp.

  The split second of realization passed. He turned his head away, averting his eyes automatically to save each of them any further embarrassment. “Good heavens,” he gasped softly as he retreated hastily and closed the door behind him.

  Kristen stood, her expression of shock seemingly now a permanent fixture as she stared at the door she’d been through a couple of hundred times before and had never forgotten to lock. She closed her eyes, cursing her lack of attention to such a small and insignificant detail. “You idiot,” Kristen whispered and gently banged her head against the wall of the shower.

  He’d seen nothing more of her than he might have seen if she’d been wearing her one-piece swimsuit, but the unexpected intimacy of seeing him before her as she stood in the shower with a closely grasped towel between them had caused shivers to course through her body. She’d seen his reaction, the initial expression of extreme fatigue wiped away in an instant as if he’d been slapped across the face.

  She stepped softly from the shower stall onto the cotton floor mat providing her some traction on the otherwise slippery tile floor. With the towel still wrapped around her, she carefully, and as silently as possible, turned the locking latch. To her extreme dissatisfaction, it snapped shut with a click that sounded to her like a manhole cover dropping into place. She shook her head, wondering if she could possibly do anything more to embarrass herself and make the situation between the two of them any more awkward. “Idiot,” she whispered again.

  She hadn’t seen him more than in passing since that night on the sail as they entered the Sea of Japan nearly two weeks earlier. She didn’t know if he was avoiding her or if the grueling work schedule simply prevented any regular contact. She knew he was spending an inordinate amount of time in the control center running battle drills with the tracking parties. But one look at his drawn face was all she needed to know that the burdens of command were weighing especially heavy now. He hid it well outside the cabin, but once inside his inner sanctum, his defenses weakened and the weariness became evident.

  She stared at the door, still cursing herself for her stupidity. The idea that he was on the other side of the door and she had to see him as she exited his cabin was something she preferred not to consider. There was nothing she could say to lessen her embarrassment or alleviate the discomfort between them. But, with nothing more to be done, she finished drying off and dressed. Trying to sound as silent as a ghost, she wiped the water off of the shower walls and the fixtures to leave it as pristine as she always found it upon entering. As she went through this routine ritual, Kristen prayed for the power to teleport just this one time so she might forgo the possibility of running into him in his cabin. But she settled for finding the cabin empty.

  Once safely in her own cabin, she began brushing the tangles and knots out of her hair while looking at her reflection in the mirror. She continued to shake her head in disgust as she pulled the brush punishingly through her wet hair, sending water droplets flying through the air and onto the bulkhead and mirror in front of her. She ignored this as she continued to brush, frustrated at her stupidity over forgetting the door
lock.

  Since Sasebo, the long hours of work, the daily eighteen hour grind on board, and the incessant drills had combined to give her—mercifully—little time to ponder him, or anything that had happened between them. In fact, Kristen was convinced she had again gained control of her wayward emotions.

  But the incident in the shower had shattered that naïve certainty.

  She cursed her weakness and her undisciplined emotions. They were nothing to her but an impediment. She took several deep cleansing breaths, struggling to force the unwanted thoughts and images back in line. There were real-world problems to deal with. The Russians were up to something, and odds were they weren’t alone. She was certain she had the answer somewhere amidst the trillions of memories locked away in her head. She just had to find it.

  Chapter Thirteen

  K-955 Borei

  “New course,” Captain Ahadi ordered his helmsman softly, “two-seven-five.”

  “Yes, sir,” the helmsman responded automatically as he began to turn the submarine.

  The massive supertanker was hardly a challenging target, but it would have to do. Ahadi waited patiently as the Borei settled on her new course. His sonar operators, although still relatively inexperienced with the Borei’s advanced acoustical suite, were able to track the slow-moving, heavily-laden tanker with ease. It took them less than fifteen minutes to provide a second bearing.

  Ahadi turned his attention to his tracking party. They immediately used the second bearing to estimate a range to target. “Distance, two thousand meters, Captain,” his weapons officer reported dutifully.

  “Load tubes one and six with Shkval torpedo,” he ordered. Behind him, watching quietly, was his Russian counterpart, who was still technically in command, although Ahadi was assuming more and more duties as their cruise continued.