The Mountains of the Moon: The Gulf War of 1964 - Part 2 (Timeline 10/27/62 Book 8)

by James Philip

  Although Walter was a submariner by trade, other than a forty-day training tour on the USS Scorpion he had spent all his sea time on a single Polaris missile boat, the USS Theodore Roosevelt (SSBN-600). SSBNs went to great lengths keeping away from all shipping, especially warships, and operated most of the time in remote and very deep waters far from customary shipping lanes. SSBNs did not routinely exercise with surface ships, or with other submarines. Consequently, his experience of anti-ship operations, of stalking and or, collecting intelligence on friendly or hostile vessels was limited to shore-based training and familiarization courses and technical sessions. Another critical area in which his expertise was constrained was the breadth of his knowledge regarding the performance and sound characteristics of the latest class of SSNs – the Thresher class – now beginning to join the fleet.

  He had mistakenly assumed that the USS Kitty Hawk and her escorts would not have put to sea without having first been supplied with the basic sonar profiles of the Thresher class boats, and at least a rudimentary description of the class’s underwater performance parameters.

  Walter had first got a feel for how ‘secret’ the Threshers were at the time Carrier Division Seven was informed that the Permit would be its ‘guard SSN’ for part of the fleet’s time in theatre. It had rapidly become apparent that Walter had known more about the Permit than his chief or anybody else on the Kitty Hawk, simply on account of his having been based at Alameda at the time the Permit was commissioned at the end of May 1962.

  The USS Permit had actually been built only fifteen miles away from Alameda at the northern end of San Francisco bay at the Mare Island Naval Shipyard. Lieutenant Commander Robert Blount, Permit’s first commanding officer had attended a function at Submarine Squadron 15’s base at Alameda around that time. Walter had spoken to him briefly about torpedo maintenance histories, although he could not recollect how they had come to converse on that particularly thorny subject. Among the submariner community in the Bay it was known that Permit’s completion had been delayed to allow for modifications connected to the new SUBROC system; for which Permit was to be the designated ‘trial boat’.

  Like other boats built on the West Coast, Permit would have sailed to Bremerton and worked up in the waters around Puget Sound, before returning to Mare Island to fix all the mainly small, minor things that always broke when a new boat ran its first extended sea trials. After that a boat would go down to the San Diego for an operational shakedown, deep dives and evolutions with surface ships and other nuclear boats during an intensive three to four week period. The trialling of the SUBROC system and the live firing of several weapons had been scheduled for late 1962 and early 1963; but Walter had no idea whether that had gone ahead as planned or where Permit had been deployed in the nineteen months since the October War. More problematic was the fact that the Thresher class boats were so new that nobody knew what they sounded like underwater; and the ships of Carrier Division Seven had taken thirty-three long hours to figure it out.

  Before the October War the growing Soviet submarine threat had preoccupied the US Navy much more than the prospect of a global nuclear war. Consequently, anti-submarine warfare had recently been assigned an operational prioritisation not deemed appropriate since 1945. Around the time of the October War it had been known that the Red Navy was building the first of perhaps as many as forty nuclear powered submarines at shipyards in the Arctic, the Baltic and the Far East, in a desperate attempt to catch up with the massive technological lead the USN had established since the launch of the USS Nautilus in 1954. However, it was thought unlikely that more than three or four of the new Soviet ‘E’ or ‘Echo’ class nuclear boats had been completed prior to the war, and tacitly assumed that none of the completed boats would have been operational at that time.

  This had been part of Walter Brenckmann’s pre-tour briefing before he flew out to Japan to join the Kitty Hawk. Given that the Soviets might have had as many as twenty nuclear boats ‘in the water’ or on building slips, he regarded the headline assessment that ‘the Red Navy has no nuclear boats’ as a little complacent but had had to concede that there was no hard intelligence to indicate that since October 1962 the Soviets had any kind of ‘deployable nuclear boat capability’. If the Red Navy had had such a capability surely it would have been employed in the Mediterranean against the British? Or in the Pacific against the build up of shipping for Operation Manna, or against the Seventh Fleet as its aircraft and ships scoured the Sea of Okhotsk for targets in the aftermath of the war? All the damage assessments he had had access to conclusively proved that whatever capacity the Soviets had once had to build nuclear boats was now wrecked; but that did not mean that perhaps one, or two boats had not survived the war. The example of HMS Dreadnought, ninety percent completed in a graving dock in England on the day of the October War ought to have been the perfect antidote to Navy Department inertia; look what that one – prototype – boat had achieved in its first two war cruises!

  In analysing how Permit had crept up on and manoeuvred around, within and under Carrier Division Seven undetected and therefore with impunity for so many hours; Walter had begun to wonder if the Red Navy was really quite as ‘beaten’ as everybody wanted to believe. The Black Sea Fleet had supposedly been destroyed in October 1962 yet it had very nearly outflanked the Royal Navy at Malta, and Soviet diesel-electric submarines had been encountered off Cyprus and north of Alexandria, this latter succeeding in launching a nuclear-tipped torpedo at the British fleet carrier HMS Victorious. Was it really so hard to imagine circumstances in which at least one of the new Soviet Echo class boats under construction at the huge Leninskiy Komsomol Shipyard at Komsomolsk-on-Amur in the Russian Far East, might have survived the war in the way HMS Dreadnought survived that attempted Soviet missile strike on its base?

  For the moment it remained just a nagging doubt, something of a side issue and he had not allowed it to distract him in his analysis of what Carrier Group Seven, and he personally, had got wrong in those hours before the Permit was identified and successfully tracked in the vicinity of the fleet.

  Most of the thirty-three hours that the USS Permit had made monkeys of Carrier Division Seven’s shipboard sonar men, and the crewmen in the air in the Kitty Hawk’s Grumman S-2 Tracker anti-submarine aircraft, had been in the middle of a force eight gale in deep water one hundred to two hundred miles off the Indian coast, in regions where tidal and prevailing thermocline conditions were poorly documented.

  The stormy weather and the unfamiliar – classified - sonar profile of the Permit had almost certainly contributed to the SSN’s ability to remain undetected during those hours. However, Walter Brenckmann had come to the conclusion that what had really kept the Permit from being detected and tracked from the minute she came on station, was that she had got lucky. Everything now indicated that the summer storm, a precursor of the Indian monsoon season and local tidal surges had combined to create a particularly favourable thermocline in the water column of the ocean at a depth of between two and three hundred feet.

  A thermocline is a relatively thin – thin in the context of the depth of the ocean at a given geographical location – layer within the water column in which for reasons of salinity, surface disturbance, variations in tidal flows or in ocean current circulation, temperature changes less predictably than it typically would as depth increases. In other words, sea conditions in the period under review appeared to have given rise to a layer of warmer or colder water beneath which the USS Permit was in effect, able to hide from the passive sonar systems onboard the ships of Carrier Division Seven; and when she was eventually detected, she remained elusive for several hours from the late 1940s to early 1950s-vintage active sonar arrays which still equipped most of the ships in the fleet.

  “Thermocline?” Captain Epes had queried. He had never been a submariner and he was reluctant to take at face value what he was being told. Had he not previously been so impressed by everything he had seen and heard about the flagship�
��s Acting Anti-Submarine Warfare Officer in the short time he had been onboard the Kitty Hawk, he might have scoffed. However, the young man was self-evidently organised, methodical, and completely on top of his department, and had presented his case dispassionately and with almost lawyerly precision.

  “Yes, sir. While one can always make the argument that the sonar men on our ships can perform to a higher standard of competence, I think the thermocline theory is the one that makes the most sense. That, allied to the likelihood that the Permit with its tear drop hull design is presumably significantly more streamlined, more ‘slippery’ in the water and therefore quieter than previous classes of SSN. Thermocline or not we would have detected Permit within hours of her arrival on station had we had a prior recording of her sound profile.”

  “So you are recommending that I advise Rear Admiral Bringle that we’re worrying about nothing?”

  “No, sir. Now that Permit is in company with Carrier Division Seven she will be our ‘ears’ beneath any similar thermocline. Additionally, when sea conditions inhibit the efficiency of the sonar arrays on the smaller escorting vessels in company with the flagship, I recommend active sonar emissions should be employed more aggressively, particularly in deep water.” Walter hesitated. “At the risk of being involuntarily impertinent, sir,” he went on, “our current operational stance greatly contributed to the problems we encountered locating the Permit, and will continue to hinder our anti-submarine defence. We are operating at a reduced, essentially peacetime level of combat readiness, whereas all other naval forces in this theatre are continually operating at a level of readiness only one stage removed from action stations, sir.”

  Captain Epes ran a hand through his cropped hair.

  He had been sitting behind his desk in his day cabin as Walter Brenckmann delivered his report.

  “There is something else, sir,” Walter added.

  Captain Epes waited.

  “While I am confident that the thermocline theory covers most of the obvious bases, but,” Walter tried very hard not to shrug, “when I started studying the Permit’s sound profile I was unable to match it with two other profiles we recorded, possibly at relatively long range during the hours she went undetected. The distortion of a given sound profile can be a consequence of a thermocline effect but it is by no means the only explanation.”

  “You’ve lost me, Mr Brenckmann.”

  Walter swallowed hard.

  “I think we actually detected as many as four possible submarine contacts during the thirty-three hour period under review, sir.” He explained respectfully. “But I can’t be absolutely certain that all four contacts were the Permit.”

  “Is that in your report?”

  “Yes, sir. But only as a technical footnote.”

  “Very good,” Captain Epes nodded. He ruminated for several seconds. “Were we to operate at a higher state of alert for any length of time we might risk sending the wrong message to other parties in the region. We are here as peacekeepers, Mr Brenckmann,” he sighed. “One might wish for things to be otherwise. Nevertheless, we live to serve. Your comment is well made and I note it accordingly. Thank you for your work. Write it up and submit it to my secretary. I will pass it on to the Fleet Commander. That will be all.”

  It was not until Walter Brenckmann returned to his quarters that he started to worry.

  I told the Captain that I believed there were other unidentified submarines in contact with Carrier Division Seven before we identified the Permit?

  I am sure I just said that...

  Chapter 18

  Thursday 11th June 1964

  Merton College, Oxford, England

  Lieutenant Colonel Francis St John Waters had been in something of a daze – much as if he had just been coshed over the head in a hand-to-hand training melee in those days when his battered frame was still up to it – most of the evening. Or rather, from the moment SHE had walked into the room.

  The Margaret Thatcher that he had encountered at Brize Norton on his return to England, and the Prime Minister he had listened to on the radio the day after those useless nonentities in Parliament had attempted to boot her out of office, had been different, a little humourless and grimly stoic, and much, much older. The woman sitting across Airey and Diana Neave’s dinner table from him had shrugged off her weariness, caught her second wind and was passionately determined by the rightness of her cause.

  And she had seemed to the jaundiced old SAS man to be the most utterly beautiful woman in Christendom.

  The papers got it wrong when they talked about her being a ‘blond bombshell’; her perfectly coiffured hair, just touching her shoulders was fair, lightly auburn in a certain light. Her complexion was clear, her eyes steely blue and mesmeric and she broadcast a uniquely marvellous defiance.

  Frank Waters was putty in the woman’s hands.

  That had never happened before.

  “Your wife and son survived the war, Colonel Waters?”

  “Er, yes...”

  Airey Neave had previously laid down the law as soup – some kind of vegetable broth which might have included carrots and a couple of potatoes – was served by an elderly woman who was apparently, the Neave’s housekeeper, and Marigold the Neave’s eighteen year old daughter.

  ‘We’ll have no talk of politics, Margaret,’ he had cautioned the Prime Minister as everybody sat down around the table. ‘We’ve all earned an evening without politics!’

  Given the state of the country and the impending disaster in the Middle East, Frank Waters was not convinced that the political classes in general had ‘earned’ anything other than a good kick up the posterior. But he had let his old friend’s diktat go unchallenged. He was an old enough dog to know that in politics, like war, things went wrong most of the time and that there was not a lot one could do about it except keep one’s chin up.

  “I must confess that my wife and I have become somewhat estranged, Prime Minister,” he had confided.

  “The war has a lot to answer for,” the woman sympathised.

  “I was away over a year before the war,” Frank Waters said, hardly recognising his own voice. “Things were on the slide even then. My fault entirely,” he went on, thinking I never say things like that. “Shirley thought I was dead,” he lied, “she’s made a new life for herself and young Harry. It is just one of those things. It would be unkind for me to seek to turn their lives upside down again after all this time.”

  Good God, I actually meant what I just said!

  The woman’s vaguely topaz gaze had softened and its sole object was the face of the man whose proven courage, moral fortitude and self-sacrifice had suddenly touched an unsuspected chord deep within her soul.

  “Yes,” she murmured, “the thing is to always make the best of things.”

  “Quite, Prime Minister,” the suddenly tongue-tied SAS man muttered. He felt an unaccustomed heat rising in his face as he contemplated the awful truth of his rampant fascination for the thirty-eight year old widow, in whose hands the fate of the nation rested. It was as if the hunter had just turned prey; the man who had been a predatory womaniser his whole adult life was helpless, literally not knowing what to do next. Except try very hard not to grin like a Baboon!

  “Nick tells me that you are a very reluctant hero, Colonel Waters?” The Prime Minister demanded, turning to Nicholas Ridley, the UAUK’s propagandist in chief.

  The hero protested half-heartedly: “One tries to keep a low profile in my line of work...”

  “Colonel Waters wishes to get back into the thick of things at the earliest opportunity, Prime Minister,” Ridley parried.

  The soldier decided to keep his powder dry.

  “What is it with you men?” Margaret Thatcher inquired, genuinely peeved. “I recollect we had the same problem with Sir Peter; Admiral Sir Julian Christopher’s son. All he wanted to do was get back to sea as soon as possible. As if he had not already been through enough already. I don’t know what we’d have done with him
if dear Iain,” she paused, a tear forming in her eye for a moment as she thought about her lost friend and ally, “if dear Iain Macleod hadn’t come up with the idea of sending him to the United States, where,” she sniffed, choked momentarily, recovered, “he was absolutely invaluable at the recent Cape Cod Summit with President Kennedy.”

  “Sir Peter went sailing with the President in the middle of the summit,” Airey Neave chuckled. “They got on so famously that the Christophers have been invited to visit the Yanks’ ‘Space Flight Centre’ down in Alabama. Lord Franks, our man in Philadelphia, says Sir Peter and Lady Marija are worth their weight in gold. Perhaps,” he speculated mischievously, “a similar diplomatic career awaits you, Frank?”

  The SAS man visibly blanched at the suggestion.

  It was Margaret Thatcher who rescued him from the hostile cul-de-sac into which he had retreated.

  “No. No. No. We can’t have you gallivanting off willy-nilly, Colonel Waters,” she decided.

  Frank Waters’s heart sank; the lady had spoken and that was that.

  “We need your wealth of experience at home,” the Prime Minister continued. “For example, you are one of the few men in England who has actually met Marshal Babadzhanian and at least one of his senior commanders face to face.”

  “I met Puchkov,” the man admitted guardedly. “He’s in charge of 10th Guards Tank Division. He’s a real hard case. I can’t claim to have passed the time of day with him. The fellow’s not a pretty sight; he got bust up a tad getting out of burning T-34 at Kursk back in forty-three. Lightly scorched, too,” he added matter of factly. “Vladimir Andreyevich Puchkov. Not quite Rommel re-incarnated but you’d put him in the same league as some of the other chaps we were up against in the Western Desert in the good old days.”