by Tom Clancy
“It would seem that we underestimated the quality of their remaining air forces,” General Arima replied with a shrug. “It is not the end. We still have options.”
“Oh?” Not everyone was giving up, then?
“They will not wish to invade these islands. Their ability to perform a proper invasion is severely compromised by their lack of amphibious-assault ships, and even if they managed to put people on the island—to fight amidst so many of their own citizens? No.” Arima shook his head. “They will not risk it. They will seek a negotiated peace. There is still a chance—if not for complete success, then for a negotiated peace that leaves our forces largely intact.”
Yamata accepted that for what it was, looking out the windows at the island that he wanted to be his. The elections, he thought, could still be won. It was the political will of the Americans that needed attacking, and he still had the ability to do that.
It didn’t take long to turn the 747 around, but the surprise to Captain Sato was that the aircraft was half full for the flight back to Narita. Thirty minutes after lift-off, a stewardess reported to him by phone that of the eleven people she’d asked, all but two had said that they had pressing business that required their presence at home. What pressing business might that be? he wondered, with his country’s international trade for the most part reduced to ships traveling between Japan and China.
“This is not turning out well,” his copilot observed an hour out. “Look down there.”
It was easy to spot ships from thirty thousand feet, and of late they’d taken to carrying binoculars to identify surface ships. Sato lifted his pair and spotted the distinctive shapes of Aegis destroyers still heading north. On a whim he reached down to flip his radio to a different guard frequency.
“JAL 747 calling Mutsu, over.”
“Who is this?” a voice instantly replied. “Clear this frequency at once!”
“This is Captain Torajiro Sato. Call your fleet commander! ” he ordered with his own command voice. It took a minute.
“Brother, you shouldn’t be doing this,” Yusuo chided. Radio silence was as much a formality as a real military necessity. He knew that the Americans had reconnaissance satellites, and besides, his group’s SPY radars were all up and radiating. If American snooper aircraft were about, they’d know where his squadron was. It was something he would have considered with confidence a week before, but not now.
“I merely wanted to express our confidence in you and your men. Use us for a practice target,” he added.
In Mutsu’s CIC, the missile techs were already doing exactly that, but it wouldn’t do to say so, the Admiral knew. “Good to hear your voice again. Now you must excuse me. I have work to do here.”
“Understood, Yusuo. Out.” Sato took his finger off the radio switch. “See,” he said over the intercom. “They’re doing their job and we have to do ours.”
The copilot wasn’t so sure, but Sato was the captain of the 747, and he kept his peace, concentrating on navigational tasks. Like most Japanese he’d been raised to think of war as something to be avoided as assiduously as plague. The overnight development of a conflict with America, well, it had felt good for a day or so to teach the arrogant gaijin a lesson, but that was fantasy talking, and this was increasingly real. Then the double-barreled notification that his country had fielded nuclear arms—that was madness enough—only immediately to be followed by the American claim that the weapons had been destroyed. This was an American aircraft, after all, a Boeing 747-400PIP, five years old but state-of-the-art in every respect, reliable and steady. There was little America had to learn about the building of aircraft, and if this one was as good as he knew it to be, then how much more formidable still were their military aircraft? The aircraft his country’s Air Force flew were copies of American designs—except for the AEW 767s he’d heard so much about, first about how invincible they were, and more recently about how there were only a few left. This madness had to stop. Didn’t everyone see that? Some must, he thought, else why was his airliner half full of people who didn’t want to be on Saipan despite their earlier enthusiasm?
But his captain did not see that at all, did he? the copilot asked himself. Torajiro Sato was sitting there, fixed as stone in the left seat, as though all were normal when plainly it was not.
All he had to do was look down in the afternoon sunlight to see those destroyers—doing what? They were guarding their country’s coast against the possibility of attack. Was that normal?
“Conn, Sonar.”
“Conn, aye.” Claggett had the conn for the afternoon watch. He wanted the crew to see him at work, and more than that, wanted to keep the feel for conning his boat.
“Possible multiple contacts to the south,” the sonar chief reported. “Bearing one-seven-one. Look like surface ships at high speed, sir, getting pounding and a very high blade rate.”
That was about right, the CO thought, heading for the sonar room again. He was about to order a track to be plotted, but when he turned to do so, he saw two quartermasters already setting it up, and the ray-path analyzer printing its first cut on the range. His crew was fully drilled in now, and things just happened automatically, but better. They were thinking as well as acting.
“Best guess, they’re a ways off, but look at all this,” the chief said. It was clearly a real contact. Data was appearing on four different frequency lines. Then the chief held up his phones. “Sounds like a whole bunch of screws turning—a lot of racing and cavitation, has to be multiple ships, traveling in column.”
“And our other friend?” Claggett asked.
“The sub? He’s gone quiet again, probably just tooling along on batteries at five or less.” That contact was a good twenty miles off, just beyond the usual detection range.
“Sir, initial range cut on the new contacts is a hundred-plus-thousand yards, CZ contact,” another tech reported.
“Bearing is constant. Not a wiggle. They heading straight for us or close to it. They pounding hard. What are surface conditions like, sir?”
“Waves eight to ten feet, Chief.” A hundred thousand yards plus. More than fifty nautical miles, Claggett thought. Those ships were driving hard. Right to him, but he wasn’t supposed to shoot. Damn. He took the required three steps back into control. “Right ten-degrees rudder, come to new course two-seven-zero.”
Tennessee came about to a westerly heading, the better to give her sonar operators a range for the approaching destroyers. His last piece of operational intelligence had predicted this, and the timing of the information was as accurate as it was unwelcome.
In a more dramatic setting, in front of cameras, the atmosphere might have been different, but although the setting was dramatic in a distant sense, right now it was merely cold and miserable. Though these men were the most elite of troops, it was far easier to rouse yourself for combat against a person than against unremitting environmental discomfort. The Rangers, in their mainly white camouflage overclothing, moved about as little as possible, and the lack of physical activity merely made them more vulnerable to the cold and to boredom, the soldier’s deadliest enemy. And yet that was good, Captain Checa thought. For a single squad of soldiers four thousand miles from the nearest U.S. Army base—and that base was Fort Wainwright in Alaska—it was a hell of a lot safer to be bored than to be excited by the stimulus of a combat action without any hope of support. Or something like that. Checa faced the problem common to officers: subject to the same discomfort and misery as his men, he was not allowed to bitch. There was no other officer to bitch to in any case, and to do so in front of the men was bad for morale, even though the men probably would have understood.
“Be nice to get back to Fort Stewart, sir,” First Sergeant Vega observed. “Spread on that sunblock and catch some rays on the beach.”
“And miss all this beautiful snow and sleet, Oso?” At least the sky was clear now.
“Roge-o, Captain. But 1 got my fill o’ this shit when I was a kid in Chicago.”
He paused, looking and listening around again. The noise-disciphne of the other Rangers was excellent, and you had to look very closely indeed to see where the lookouts were standing.
“Ready for the walk out tonight?”
“Just so’s our friend is waiting on the far side of that hill.”
“I’m sure he will be,” Checa lied.
“Yes, sir. I am, too.” If one could do it, why not two? Vega thought. “Did all this stuff work?”
The killers in their midst were sleeping in their bags, in holes lined with pine branches and covered with more branches for additional warmth. In addition to guarding the pilots, the Rangers had to keep them healthy, like watching over infants, an odd mission for elite troops, but troops of that sort generally drew the oddest.
“So they say.” Checa looked at his watch. “We shake them loose in another two hours.”
Vega nodded, hoping that his legs weren’t too stiff for the trek south.
The patrol pattern had been set in the mission briefing. The four boomers had thirty-mile sectors, and each sector was divided into three ten-mile segments. Each boat could patrol in the center slot, leaving the north and south slots empty for everything but weapons. The patrol patterns were left to the judgment of individual skippers, but they worked out the same way. Pennsylvania was on a northerly course, trolling along at a mere five knots, just as she’d done for her now-ended deterrence patrols carrying Trident missiles. She was making so little noise that a whale might have come close to a collision, if it were the right time for whales in this part of the Pacific, which it wasn’t. Behind her, at the end of a lengthy cable, was her towed-array sonar, and the two-hour north-south cycle allowed it to trail straight out in a line, with about ten minutes or so required for the turns at the end of the cycles to get it straight again for maximum performance.
Pennsylvania was at six hundred feet, the ideal sonar depth given today’s water conditions. It was just sunset up on the roof when the first trace appeared on her sonar screens. It started as a series of dots, yellow on the video screen, trickling down slowly with time, and shifting a little to the south in bearing, but not much. Probably, the lead sonarman thought, the target had been running on battery for the past few hours, else he would have caught the louder signals of the diesels used to charge them, but there the contact was, on the expected 60hz line. He reported the contact data to the fire-control tracking party.
Wasn’t this something, the sonarman thought. He’d spent his entire career in missile boats, so often tracking contacts which his submarine would maneuver to avoid, even though the boomer fleet prided itself on having the best torpedomen in the fleet. Pennsylvania carried only fifteen weapons aboard—there was a shortage of the newest version of the ADCAP torpedo, and it had been decided not to bother carrying anything less capable under the circumstances. It also had three other torpedolike units, called LEMOSSs, for Long-Endurance Mobile Submarine Simulator. The skipper, another lifelong boomer sailor, had briefed the crew on his intended method of attack, and everyone aboard approved. The mission, in fact, was just about ideal. The Japanese had to move through their line. Their operational pattern was such that for them to pass undetected through the Line of Battle, as the skipper had taken to calling it, was most unlikely.
“Now hear this,” the Captain said over the 1-MC announcing system—every speaker had been turned down, so that the announcement came as a whisper that the men strained to hear. “We have a probable submerged contact in our kill zone. I am going to conduct the attack just as we briefed it. Battle stations,” he concluded in the voice of a man ordering breakfast at HoJo’s.
There came sounds so faint that only one experienced sonarman could hear them, and that mostly because he was just forward of the attack center. The watch had changed there so that only the most experienced men—and one woman, now—would occupy the weapons consoles. Those people too junior for a place on the sub’s varsity assembled throughout the boat in damage-control parties. Voices announced to the attack-center talker that each space was fully manned and ready, and then the ship grew as silent as a graveyard on Halloween.
“Contact is firming up nicely,” the sonarman said over his phones. “Bearing is changing westerly, bearing to target now zero-seven-five. Getting a faint blade-rate on the contact, estimate contact speed is ten knots.”
That made it a definite submarine, not that there was much doubt. The diesel sub had her own towed-array sonar and was doing a sprint-and-drift of her own, alternately going at her top speed, then slowing to detect anything that she might miss with the increased flow noise.
“Tubes one, three, and four are ADCAPs,” a weapons technician announced. “Tube two is a LEMOSS.”
“Spin ‘em all up,” the Captain said. Most COs liked to say warm ’em up, but otherwise this one was by-the-book.
“Current range estimate is twenty-two thousand yards,” the tracking party chief announced.
The sonarman saw something new on his screen, then adjusted his headphones.
“Transient, transient, sounds like hull-popping on Sierra-Ten. Contact is changing depth.”
“Going up, 1 bet,” the Captain said a few feet away. That’s about right, the sonarman thought with a nod of his own. “Let’s get the MOSS in the water. Set its course at zero-zero-zero. Keep it quiet for the first ten thousand yards, then up to normal radiating levels.”
“Aye, sir.” The tech dialed in the proper settings on her programming board, and then the weapons officer checked the instructions and pronounced them correct.
“Ready on two.”
“Contact Sierra-Ten is fading somewhat, sir. Probably above the layer now.”
“Definite direct-path to Sierra-Ten,” the ray-path technician said next. “Definitely not a CZ contact, sir.”
“Ready on tube two,” the weapons tech reported again.
“Fire two,” the CO ordered at once. “Reload another MOSS,” he said next.
Pennsylvania shuddered ever so slightly as the LEMOSS was ejected into the sea. The sonar picked it up at once as it angled left, then reversed course, heading north at a mere ten knots. Based on an old Mark 48 torpedo body, the LEMOSS was essentially a huge tank of the OTTO fuel American “fish” used, plus a small propulsion system and a large sound-transducer that gave out the noise of an engine plant. The noise was the same frequencies as those of a nuclear power plant, but quite a bit louder than those on an Ohio-class. It never seemed to matter to people that the thing was too loud. Attack submarines almost always went for it, even American ones who should have known better. The new model with the new name could move along for over fifteen hours, and it was a shame it had been developed only a few months before the boomers had been fully and finally disarmed.
Now came the time for patience. The Japanese submarine actually slowed a little more, doubtless doing its own final sonar sweep before they lit off the diesels for their speedy passage west. The sonarman tracked the LEMOSS north. The signal was just about to fade out completely before the sound systems turned on, five miles away. Two miles after that, it jumped over the thermocline layer of cold and warm water and the game began in earnest.
“Conn, Sonar, Sierra-Ten just changed speed, change in the blade-rate, slowing down, sir.”
“He has good sonar,” the Captain said, just behind the sonarman. Pennsylvania had risen somewhat, floating her sonar tail over the layer for a better look at the contact while the body of the submarine stayed below. He turned and spoke more loudly. “Weapons?”
“One, three, and four are ready for launch, solutions on all of them.”
“Set four for a stalking profile, initial course zero-two-zero.”
“Done. Set as ordered, sir. Tube four ready in all respects.”
“Match bearings and shoot,” the Captain ordered from the door of the sonar room, adding, “Reload another ADCAP.”
Pennsylvania shuddered again as the newest version of the venerable Mark 48 torpedo entered the sea, turning n
ortheast and controlled by an insulated wire that streamed out from its tailfin.
This was like an exercise, the sonarman thought, but easier.
“Additional contacts?” the skipper asked, behind him again.
“Not a thing, sir.” The enlisted man waved at his scopes. Only random noise showed, and an additional scope was running diagnostic checks every ten minutes to show that the systems were all functioning properly. It was quite a payoff: after nearly forty years of missile-boat operations, and close to fifty of nuclear-sub ops, the first American sub kill since World War II would come from a boomer supposedly on her way to the scrapyard.
Traveling far more rapidly, the ADCAP torpedo popped over the layer somewhat aft of the contact. It immediately started radiating from its own ultrasonic sonar and fed the picture back along the wire to Pennsylvania.
“Hard contact, range three thousand and close to the surface. Lookin’ good,” sonar said. The same diagnosis came from the weapons petty officer with her identical readout.
“Eat shit and die,” the male member of the team whispered, watching the two contact lines close on the display. Sierra Ten went instantly to full speed, diving at first below the layer, but his batteries were probably a little low, and he didn’t make more than fifteen knots, while the ADCAP was doing over sixty. The one-sided chase lasted a total of three and a half minutes and ended with a bright splotch on the screen and a noise in the headphones that stung his ears. The rest was epilogue, concluding with a ripping screech of steel being crushed by water pressure.
“That’s a kill, sir. I copy a definite kill.” Two minutes later, a distant low-frequency to the north suggested that West Virginia had achieved the same goal.