by Tom Clancy
“Christopher Cook?” Murray asked.
“That’s right.”
It was a very nice house, the Deputy Assistant Director thought as he pulled out his identification folder. “FBI. We’d like to talk to you about your conversations with Seiji Nagumo. Could you get a coat?”
The sun had a few more hours to go when the Lancers taxied out. Angered by the loss of one of their number not so long before, the crews deemed themselves to be in the wrong place, doing the wrong thing, but nobody had troubled himself to ask their opinion, and their job was written down. Their bomb bays taken up with fuel tanks, one by one the bombers raced down the runway and lifted off, turning and climbing to their assembly altitude of twenty thousand feet for the cruise northeast.
It was another goddamned demonstration, Dubro thought, and he wondered how the hell somebody like Robby Jackson could have thought it up, but he, too, had orders, and each of his carriers turned into the wind, fifty miles apart to launch forty aircraft each, and though these were all armed, they were not to take action unless provoked.
46
Detachment
“We’re almost empty,” the copilot said in a neutral voice, checking the manifest as part of the preflight ritual.
“What is the matter with these people?” Captain Sato growled, looking over the flight plan and checking the weather. That was a short task. It would be cool and clear all the way down, with a huge high-pressure area taking charge of the Western Pacific. Except for some high winds in the vicinity of the Home Islands, it would make for a glassy-smooth ride all the way to Saipan, for the thirty-four passengers on the flight. Thirty-four! he raged. In an aircraft built for over three hundred!
“Captain, we will be leaving those islands soon. You know that.” It was clear enough, wasn’t it? The people, the average men and women on the street, were no longer so much confused as frightened—or maybe even that wasn’t the proper word. He hadn’t seen anything like it. They felt—betrayed? The first newspaper editorials had come out to question the course their country had taken, and though the questions asked were mild, the import of them was not. It had all been an illusion. His country had not been prepared for war in a psychological sense any more than a physical one, and the people were suddenly realizing what was actually going on. The whispered reports of the murder—what else could one call it?—of some prominent zaibatsu had left the government in a turmoil. Prime Minister Goto was doing little, not even giving speeches, not even making appearances, lest he have to face questions for which he had no answers. But the faith of his captain, the copilot saw, had not yet been shaken.
“No, we will not! How can you say that? Those islands are ours.”
“Time will tell,” the copilot observed, returning to his work and letting it go at that. He did have his job to do, re-checking fuel and winds and other technical data necessary for the successful flight of a commercial airliner, all the things the passengers never saw, assuming that the flight crew just showed up and turned it on as though it were a taxicab.
“Enjoy your sleep?”
“You bet, Captain. I dreamed of a hot day and a hot woman.” Richter stood up, and his movements belied his supposed comfort. I really am too old for this shit, the chief warrant officer thought. It was just fate and luck—if you could call it that—that had put him on the mission. No one else had as much time on the Comanche as he and his fellow warrants did, and somebody had decided that they had the brains to do it, without some goddamned colonel around to screw things up. And now he could boogie on out of here. He looked up to see a clear sky. Well, could be better. For getting in and getting out, better to have clouds.
“Tanks are topped off.”
“Some coffee would be nice,” he thought aloud.
“Here you go, Mr. Richter.” It was Vega, the first sergeant. “Nice iced coffee, like they serve in the best Florida hotels.”
“Oh, thanks loads, man.” Richter took the metal cup with a chuckle. “Anything new on the way out?”
This was not good, Claggett thought. The Aegis line had broken up, and now he had one of the goddamned things ten miles away. Worse still, there had been a helicopter in the air not long before, according to his ESM mast, which he’d briefly risked despite the presence of the world’s best surveillance radar. But three Army helicopters were depending on him to be here, and that was that. Nobody had ever told him that harm’s way was a safe place. Not for him. Not for them, either.
“And our other friend?” he asked his sonar chief. The substantive reply was a shake of the head. The words merely confirmed it.
“Off the scope again.”
There were thirty knots of surface wind, which was whipping up the waves somewhat and interfering with sonar performance. Even holding the destroyer was becoming difficult now that it was slowed to a patrol speed of no more than fifteen knots. The submarine off to the north was gone again. Maybe really gone, but it was dangerous to bank on that. Claggett checked his watch. He’d have to decide what to do in less than an hour.
They would be going in blind, but that was an awkward necessity. Ordinarily they’d gather information with snooper aircraft, but the real effort here was to achieve surprise, and they couldn’t compromise that. The carrier task force had avoided commercial air lanes, hidden under clouds, and generally worked very hard to make itself scarce for several days. Jackson felt confident that his presence was a secret, but maintaining it meant depending on spotty submarine reports of electronic activity on the islands, and all these did was to confirm that the enemy had several E-2C aircraft operating, plus a monster air-defense radar. It would be an encounter battle aloft. Well, they’d been training for that over the past two weeks.
“Okay, last check,” Oreza heard over the phone. “Kobler is exclusively military aircraft?”
“That is correct, sir. Since the first couple of days, we haven’t seen any commercial birds on that runway.” He really wanted to ask what the questions were all about, but knew it was a waste of time. Well, maybe an oblique question: “You want us to stay awake tonight?”
“Up to you, Master Chief. Now, can I talk to your guests?”
“John? Phone,” Portagee announced, then was struck nearly dumb by the normality of what he’d just said.
“Clark,” Kelly said, taking it. “Yes, sir ... Yes, sir. Will do. Anything else? Okay, out.” He hit the kill button. “Whose idea was this friggin’ umbrella?”
“Mine,” Burroughs said, looking up from the card table. “It works, doesn’t it?”
“Sure as hell,” John said, returning to the table and tossing a quarter in the pot. “Call.”
“Three ladies,” the engineer announced.
“Lucky son of a gun, too,” Clark said, tossing his in.
“Lucky hell! These sunzabitches ruined the best fishing trip I ever had.”
“John, you want I should make some coffee for tonight?”
“He makes the best damned coffee, too.” Burroughs collected the pot. He was six dollars ahead.
“Portagee, it has been a while. Sure, go ahead. It’s called black-gang coffee, Pete. Old seaman’s tradition,” Clark explained, also enjoying the pleasant inactivity.
“John?” Ding asked.
“Later, my boy.” He picked up the deck and started shuffling adeptly. It would wait.
“Sure you have enough fuel?” Checa asked. The supplies that had been dropped in included auxiliary tanks and wings, but Richter shook his head.
“No prob. Only two hours to the refueling point.”
“Where’s that?” The signal over the satcomm had said nothing more than PROCEED TO PRIMARY, whatever that meant.
“About two hours away,” the warrant officer said. “Security, Captain, security.”
“You realize we’ve made a little history here.”
“Just so I live to tell somebody about it.” Richter zipped up his flight suit, tucked in his scarf, and climbed aboard. “Clear!”
The Rangers sto
od by one last time. They knew the extinguishers were worthless, but somebody had insisted on packing them along. One by one the choppers lifted off, their green bodies soon disappearing into the darkness. With that, the Rangers started dumping the remaining equipment into holes dug during the day. That required an hour, and all that remained was their walk to Hirose. Checa lifted his cellular phone and dialed the number he’d memorized.
“Hello?” a voice said in English.
“See you in the morning, I hope?” The question was in Spanish.
“I’ll be there, Senor.”
“Montoya, lead off,” the Captain ordered. They’d keep to the treeline as far as they could. The Rangers clasped weapons so far unused, hoping to keep it that way.
“I recommend two weapons,” Lieutenant Shaw said. “Spread the bearings about ten degrees, converge them in from under the layer, and nail him fore and aft.”
“I like it.” Claggett walked over to the plot for a final examination of the tactical situation. “Set it up.”
“So what gives?” one of the Army sergeants asked at the entrance to the attack center. The trouble with these damned submarines was that you couldn’t just hang around and watch stuff.
“Before we can refuel those helos of yours, we have to make that ’can go away,” a petty officer explained as lightly as he could.
“Is it hard?”
“I guess we’d prefer he was someplace else. It puts us on the surface with—well, somebody’s gonna know there’s somebody around.”
“Worried?”
“Nah,” the sailor lied. Then both men heard the Captain speak.
“Mr. Shaw, let’s go to battle stations torpedo. Firing-point procedures.”
The Tomcats went off first, one every thirty seconds or so until a full squadron of twelve was aloft. Next went four EA- 6B jammers, led by Commander Roberta Peach. Her flight of four broke up into elements of two, one to accompany each of the two probing Tomcat squadrons.
Captain Bud Sanchez had the lead division of four, unwilling to entrust the attack of his air group to anyone else. They were five hundred miles out, heading southwest. In many ways the attack was a repeat of another action in the early days of 1991, but with a few nasty additions occasioned by the few airfields available to the enemy and weeks of careful analysis of operational patterns. The Japanese were very regular in their patrols. It was a natural consequence of the orderliness of military life and for that reason a dangerous trap to fall into. He gave one look back at the formation’s sparkling wakes and then focused his mind on the mission.
“Set on one and three.”
“Match generated bearings and shoot,” Claggett said calmly.
The weapons technician turned his handle all to the left, then back to the right, repeating the exercise for the second tube.
“One and three away, sir.”
“One and three running normal,” sonar reported an instant later.
“Very well,” Claggett acknowledged. He had been aboard a submarine and heard those words before, and that shot had missed, to which fact he owed his life. This was tougher. They didn’t have as good a feel for the location of the destroyer as they would have liked, but neither did he have much choice in the matter. The two ADCAPs would run slow under the layer for the first six miles before shifting to their highest speed setting, which was seventy-one knots. With luck the target wouldn’t have much chance to figure where the fish had come from. “Reload one and three with ADCAPs.”
Timing, as always, was crucial. Jackson left the flag bridge after the fighters got off, and headed below to the combat information center, the better to coordinate an operation already figured out down to the minute. The next part was for his two Spruance destroyers, now thirty miles south of the carrier group. That made him nervous. The Spruances were his best ASW ships, and though SubPac reported that the enemy sub screen was withdrawing west, hopefully into a trap, he worried about the one SSK that might be left behind to cripple Pacific Fleet’s last carrier deck. So many things to worry about, he thought, looking at the sweep hand on the bulkhead-mounted clock.
Precisely at 11:45:00 local time, destroyers Cushing and Ingersoll turned broadside to the wind and began launching their Tomahawk missiles, signaling this fact by a five-element satellite transmission. A total of forty cruise missiles angled up into the sky, shed their solid-fuel boosters, then angled down for the surface. After the six-minute launch exercise, the destroyers increased speed to rejoin the battle group, wondering what their Tomahawks would accomplish.
“I wonder which one it is?” Sato murmured. They’d passed two already, the Aegis destroyers visible only from their wakes now, the barely visible arrowhead at the front of the spreading V of white foam.
“Call them up again?”
“It will anger my brother, but it must be lonely down there.” Again Sato switched his radio setting, then depressed the switch on the wheel.
“JAL 747 Flight calling Mutsu.”
Admiral Sato wanted to grumble, but it was a friendly voice. He took the headset from the junior communications officer and closed his thumb on the switch. “Torajiro, if you were an enemy I would have you now.”
He checked the radar display—only commercial targets were on the two-meter-square tactical-display screen. The SPY-1D radar showed everything within a hundred-plus miles, and most things out to nearly three hundred. The ship’s SH-60J helicopter had just refueled for another an tisub sweep, and though he was still at sea in time of war, he could allow himself a joke with his brother, flying up there in the big aluminum tub, doubtless filled with his countrymen.
“Time, sir,” Shaw said, checking his electronic stopwatch. Commander Claggett nodded.
“Weps, bring them up and go active.”
The proper command went to the torpedoes, now nearly two miles apart on either side of the target. The ADCAP—“additional capability”—version of the Mark 48 had a huge solid-state sonar system built into its twenty-one-inch nose. The unit launched from tube one was slightly closer, and its advanced imaging system acquired the destroyer’s hull on the second sweep. Immediately, the torpedo turned right to home in, relaying its display to the launch point as it did so.
“Hydrophone effects, bearing two-three-zero! Enemy torpedo bearing two-three-zero!” a sonar officer shouted. “Its seeker is active!”
Sato’s head turned sharply toward the sonar room, and instantly a new item appeared on the tactical display. Damn, he thought, and Kurushio said the area was safe. The SSK was only a few miles off.
“Countermeasures!” Mutsu’s captain ordered at once. In seconds the destroyer streamed an American-designed Nixie decoy off her fantail. “Launch the helicopter at once!”
“Brother, I am somewhat busy now. Have a good flight. Good-bye for now.” The radio circuit went dead.
Captain Sato first wrote off the end of the conversation to the fact that his brother did have duties to perform, then before his eyes he saw the destroyer five miles below him turn sharply to the left, with more boiling foam at her stern to indicate a sudden increase in speed.
“Something’s wrong here,” he breathed over the intercom.
“We got him, sir. One or both,” the fire-controlman announced.
“Target is increasing speed and turning to starboard,” sonar reported. “Both units are in acquisition and closing. Target isn’t pinging anything yet.”
“Unit one range to target is now two thousand yards. Unit three is twenty-two hundred out. Both units are tracking nicely, sir.” The petty officer’s eyes were locked on the weapons display, ready to override a possible mistake made by the automated homing systems. The ADCAP was at this point not unlike a miniature submarine with its own very precise sonar picture, enabling the weapons tech to play vicarious kamikaze, in this case two at once, a skill that nicely complemented his skill on the boat’s Nintendo system. The really good news for Claggett was that he wasn’t trying a counterdetection, but rather trying to save his s
hip first. Well, that was a judgment call, wasn’t it?
“There’s another one forward of us, bearing one-four-zero!”
“They have us,” the Captain said, looking at the display and thinking that probably two submarines had shot at him. Still, he had to try, and ordered a crash turn to port. Top-heavy like her American Aegis cousins, Mutsu heeled violently to the right. As soon as the turn was made, the CO ordered full astern, hoping that the torpedo might miss forward.
It couldn’t be anything else. Sato was losing sight of the battle, and overrode the autopilot, turning his aircraft into a tight left bank, leaving it to his right-seater to hit the seat belt signs for the passengers. He could see it all in the clear light of a quarter moon. Mutsu had executed one radical turn and then twisted into another. There were flashing lights on her stern as the ship’s antisub helicopter started turning its rotor, struggling to get off and hunt whatever—yes, it had to be a submarine, Captain Sato thought, a sneaking, cowardly submarine attacking his brother’s proud and beautiful destroyer. He was surprised to see the ship slow—to stop almost dead with the astern thrust of her reversible propeller—and wondered why that maneuver had been attempted. Wasn’t it the same as for aircraft, whose rule was the simple axiom: Speed Is Life ...
“Major cavitation sounds, maybe a crash-stop, sir,” the sonar chief said. The weapons tech didn’t give Claggett a chance to react.
“Don’t matter. I have him cold on both, sir. Setting three for contact explosion, getting some magnetic interference from—they must use our Nixie, eh?”