by Joe Buff
“I thought—”
“Yes, I’m the most senior of the SERT members you have aboard.”
“But . . . ?”
“When we rendezvous, I merge with a much larger group.”
“How much larger?” Commodore Fuller asked.
“Seventy-five more.” Nyurba knew they were hot-racking—sharing bunks—since Carter only had space for fifty riders beyond her regular crew. Seventy-five was a mob.
“Seventy-five more Seabees together? What are you guys up to? That’s like, what, eight full SERT teams on one mission?”
“We’re not all Seabees, Commodore. The complement is a joint one. We have people from special ops groups throughout the U.S. armed forces. SEALs, Marine Recon, Army Green Berets and Delta, Air Force Special Operations Squadrons, and some other air force experts. We were chosen because of our individual skills and our physical fitness. But most of all because of our cultural backgrounds and language fluencies.”
“Meaning?”
“The majority of us are combat veterans from the Global War on Terror, who because of our birth and upbringing can pass for native-born Russians or Siberians, or Russian Federation nationalities that serve in their army these days. For instance, I speak Russian and a couple of main Siberian languages, which haven’t entirely died out in the Old Country. My family’s mostly Evenk, intermarried with Yukaghir.” Nyurba saw this drew a blank with Jeffrey. “I spent several tours in Iraq, and have two Bronze Stars and a Purple Heart to show for it, doing SERT engineering recon assignments attached to Marine Corps brigades.”
“Okay. I’m suitably impressed.”
“My entire current unit, the eighty of us, have been training together, as one commando entity, since the Berlin-Boer War started, as a contingency against a potential scenario. The President has decided to put that contingency, that scenario, into action.”
“Meaning?”
“I’m not supposed to say yet, sir. We need to get through the Bering Strait, then go to Carter by minisub. As you would know better than me, the Bering Strait is not an easy passage. We can’t afford any sort of problem, where this ship or her crew might fall into not-so-gentle Russian hands, while the latter pretend to be helping us poor distressed mariners. Everything they’d learn would be fed to the Germans. In this context, that could prove more disastrous than . . .”
Nyurba stopped himself, leaving an awkward silence made worse by the venom he realized had dripped from his last few sentences; his hatred of the Russians and Germans alike was rather personal. It was something he knew could not be fathomed by those whose ancestors hadn’t suffered the eastward expansion of Cossack traders and trappers long ago, the oppression under the czars, Stalin’s purges and forced migrations—and then the mass shipment westward of Siberian troops to repel the Hitlerite invaders, as cannon fodder marching on Berlin to be mown down in droves, to keep that same Stalin in power. Stalin’s successors had been no better, with Moscow despoiling the pristine Siberian environment in the name of industrial progress and Soviet-Russian national defense; the poisoned ecology killed people slowly and painfully. Nyurba knew all about that last part. He was an expert in nuclear decontamination.
Commodore Fuller put an end to the silence. “Last I heard, Carter was under repair in New London after heavy damage and casualties from a failed raid against Axis-occupied Norway.”
Nyurba’s hackles went up again immediately. “That raid did not fail due to even a single mistake made on site. The intelligence that led to the raid, and the operational security required to support it, are what failed.” Operational security meant overall secrecy to maintain surprise.
Jeffrey was taken aback at Nyurba’s vehemence. Clearly he was someone with a quick temper, someone to not make angry, especially not off duty in a bar.
“Commander Charles Harley remains in command of Carter,” Nyurba stated, “for everything that that should tell you. He won the Navy Cross for bringing his ship and the surviving SEALs back in one piece!”
Jeffrey felt a pang of grief. He had a strong hunch that two SEALs he’d grown fond of, who’d been with him on earlier raids staged from Challenger, had died on Carter’s mission to Norway. Because compartmentalization was so strict, none of his efforts to discover the fate of those comrades had yielded one clue.
But that was months ago. And from what he did hear through the grapevine, Captain Harley had reason enough for his own bereavement, from the losses he suffered on that mission, ambushed by waiting German forces through no fault of his own. It said something that, even given the shipyard working round the clock with the highest priority, it took many precious months to make Carter ready for action again. Harley’s Navy Cross was second only to the Medal of Honor as a naval combat decoration.
Jeffrey barely knew Harley, and wondered what leading him into renewed battle might be like. Would he flinch, after the prior setback, as some did? Would Harley overcompensate and become too reckless? Jeffrey caught himself staring into his coffee mug. He took another sip before addressing Nyurba.
“Why aren’t you on Carter now?”
“My team had to go for extra training stateside. The rest of the squadron was training too, on an island in northern Canada, pretending to be a science research expedition.”
“An ice station?”
“Except on land, not a drifting floe. They were brought south, scattered, then made their way to New London in small groups to not draw attention from Axis spies working in the U.S. It was more secure to fly us five in the SERT cadre to Pearl. It also allowed me to meet you sooner, to perform indoctrination.”
“Who’s in command of your special ops company?” Jeffrey’s orders said the commandos reported to him as strike group boss, but further details rested in that still-sealed inner pouch.
“An Air Force lieutenant colonel, Sergey Kurzin. You’ll meet him when we rendezvous with Carter. And although we’re called a special operations squadron, we are in fact organized for this mission like an infantry company.”
Jeffrey couldn’t hide his surprise. “Why Air Force?”
Nyurba frowned. “I probably said too much. . . . But I do need to emphasize something, to you and your key officers, before another hour goes by. You must have this thoroughly clear before we even begin to approach the strait, because it will affect all decisions you make from here on.”
Jeffrey wondered how much Nyurba knew and wasn’t allowed to let on yet. He was a senior officer, with the same rank that Jeffrey had held until this evening. At Nyurba’s level, he could have been leading a conventional Seabee brigade, over two thousand men. Whatever he was really up to had to be extremely unconventional. “Go ahead, Commander.”
“For purposes of this mission, for this mission to succeed, it is imperative that Carter remain undetected.”
Jeffrey tried to not sound condescending. “I admire your loyalty to Captain Harley’s crew and Colonel Kurzin’s people, but that’s true of every submarine on every mission, Commander.”
“Commodore, you don’t understand. Perhaps the wording in the orders you’ve read seemed too routine. My own orders are clear cut. I’m to convey to you in no uncertain terms that this is not in the least routine. Carter’s invisibility throughout is paramount. Her having ever been where she will be must remain unsuspected from now until after our mission goals are achieved, and for decades beyond. Decades. If necessary to preserve Carter’s total stealth, should it come to that, Challenger and all aboard, from this moment forth, are expendable.”
Chapter 3
Thirty-six hours later, at 0900 local time, Jeffrey held a planning huddle with Bell, Sessions, and David Meltzer around the digital navigation table toward the rear of Challenger’s control room. The Bering Strait choke point was coming up fast, and critical decisions were needed on routing and tactics.
Lieutenant Meltzer, as brand-new ship’s navigator and part-time commodore’s executive assistant, was handling himself with commendable professionalism. A Naval Academy
graduate like Bell, Meltzer spoke with a Bronx accent that got thicker under combat stress. He always walked, in the ship or ashore, with a strut on the cocky side, chest puffed out, as if daring the Navy—or life in general—to keep giving him more difficult things to do. Jeffrey, who’d grown up in St. Louis and done Navy ROTC at Purdue, liked this attitude; Meltzer was popular and admired among the junior officers as well, and respected without reservations by the chiefs and other enlisted people. More visibly ambitious than Sessions, and more socially poised and outgoing, he took being made a department head in stride.
To Jeffrey’s practiced eyes, there was no sign of jealousy among the men who’d remain for a while yet as lieutenants, junior grade. If anything, the feeling shipwide was one of a group bond renewed, and strongly validated, by their shared Presidential Unit Citation. Jeffrey could sense this in the busy control room, packed with two dozen people sitting at consoles or standing in the aisles, each doing some specialized task, or helping or teaching or learning.
The tactical plot was updated for the umpteenth time. The surface wind came from the south, at force four—about fifteen knots—strong enough to cause whitecaps. The same wind created enough noise that Challenger’s advanced passive sonars could use ambient ocean sounds, instead of telltale active pinging, to detect any silent collision threat—even an errant mine—in time to avoid it, if people stayed on their toes. With prevailing currents coming from southeast, across a fetch of open water whose temperature in early summer was well above freezing, the risk of encountering an iceberg soon was minimal; the Bering Sea only froze during winter. Jeffrey knew this would change, menacingly, once they got above the Arctic Circle—near the summertime reach of the polar ice cap, and closer to massive coastal glaciers from which the biggest icebergs calved.
Jeffrey had an unobstructed line of sight to the big displays on the bulkheads at the front of the control room, because Challenger possessed no old-fashioned periscopes. Instead, data from photonics masts, which retracted into the sail—conning tower—when not in use, would electronically feed imagery to full-color, high-definition plasma screens that many crewmen could observe simultaneously.
“The photonics mast control console,” Jeffrey said to Bell.
“Commodore?”
“I don’t think you’ll be needing it anytime soon. I’d like to take it over, while I’m in Control, as a place to sit and command my strike group.”
The console was on the aft bulkhead of Control, its screens dark now, the seat unoccupied. The console was also near the doors to the radio room and the electronic support measures room. The radio room contained the ship’s top-secret encryption equipment. The electronic support measures room contained the equally classified signals-intercept eavesdropping gear. Both doors had security warnings posted on the outside, and were protected by combination locks.
Jeffrey pointed toward the doors. “They’ll be handy in case I need either one, and I can reconfigure the console to show me the data I’ll want, and I’ll also be out of your way but still in easy speaking distance.”
“Certainly, Commodore.”
That console also happened to be the one closest to Jeffrey’s stateroom that he shared with Sessions and used as an office. He could move back and forth quickly and unobtrusively. On a submarine there’s no formality like someone shouting Commodore in Control or Captain off the Bridge or crap like that.
“New passive sonar contact on the starboard wide-aperture array,” the sonar supervisor of the watch, a senior chief, called out. “Bearing zero-six-five, range twenty thousand yards.” East-northeast, ten nautical miles. The northern Bering Sea’s bottom was shallow and silty. Sound emanations bounced repeatedly between the surface and the sea floor, and signal strength was lost with every bounce, so detection ranges were short. “Surface contact, designate Sierra Eight-Four.”
“Contact identification?” the officer of the deck asked.
“Three-bladed shaft, dead-slow blade rate. Auxiliary machinery broadband, with intermittent transients. . . . Assess as American fishing trawler.” A factory ship. Salmon, pollack, and herring were plentiful here, unblemished by radioactivity because the war to date had spared the Pacific.
“Very well, Sonar.” The OOD for this six-hour watch, a junior officer from Engineering, also had the conn, in charge of the course, speed, and depth of the ship.
“Conn,” the leader of the contact tracking party called out, “Sierra Eight-Four appears to be making bare steerageway, conjecture to hold position against the half-knot current. Our projected closest point of approach crosses within five miles of possible deployed trawling net.” Too close for comfort.
Bell glanced forward in concern.
New lines and icon symbols appeared on the tactical plot.
“Very well,” the officer of the deck responded. “Helm, left five degrees rudder, make your course zero-four-zero.”
“Left five degrees rudder, aye,” the helmsman acknowledged. “Make my course zero-four-zero, aye.” He worked his joystick, then made more reports to the OOD at the conn.
On the tactical plot, Challenger’s projected track shifted to the left, further away from the trawler. Bell appeared satisfied.
These interactions had been going on nonstop for hours. Jeffrey leaned his elbows on the edge of the horizontal navigation plotting table, and tried to tune them out. He followed along as Meltzer summarized Challenger’s progress since crossing the Aleutian Islands volcanic chain, entering the southern Bering Sea through one of the deep-water inter-island gaps. The ship’s previous track was shown on the navigation display. This verbal summary was needed for clarity, to best establish a context for the next decisions they faced. It was a long-standing Silent Service tradition that every briefing was also, in part, an oral exam. Errors could be avoided, weaknesses identified and fixed, and continuing education maximized if seniors tested juniors—and themselves strove, before a keen audience, to meet the highest standards.
Meltzer continued his first major briefing review. “After the change of command, we altered base course to zero-one-zero and came up to five hundred feet as we reached the Siberio-Alaskan rise. That let us avoid St. Matthew Island and then St. Lawrence Island, U.S.-owned in mid-Bering Sea, and we also bypassed the very shallow water stretching east of them to the Alaska mainland.” Meltzer gestured at the chart with his hands. “It did, however, bring us near to the treaty convention line defining American versus Russian waters.” That abstract line on nautical charts, during the Cold War, helped prevent U.S. and Soviet warships from coming too close together unintentionally, thus avoiding an accident or misunderstanding that could escalate. “We’ve gone progressively shallower, and reduced speed, as water depth decreased to its present one-hundred-eighty feet. We altered base course to zero-four-five when we rounded the western tip of St. Lawrence Island.” Northeast. “This put us moving parallel to the treaty line, fifteen, that is one-five, nautical miles on the U.S. side. . . . Excuse me, please, sirs.”
Meltzer conferred with the Assistant Navigator, a senior chief, and pointed out that their most recent course diversion was slowly bringing them closer to the treaty line. The assistant navigator calculated when, and by how much, to turn back east, safely past Sierra Eight-Four, and before intersecting that line. The senior chief relayed this data to the officer of the deck, who acknowledged.
“Well, then,” Meltzer resumed. “Since, as you can see, the treaty line splits the Bering Strait down the middle, the zero-four-five heading also put us on course for the strait. At our present speed of eight knots, and from our present position, here, we’ll need to commit to one side of the strait or the other within two hours. That’s the next major choice. Do we take the channel on the U.S. side of Little Diomede Island, or the other channel on the Russian side of Big Diomede?” The two islands sat right next to each other in the middle of the strait. “If we take as our minimum acceptable water depth one-five-zero feet, for a covert passage at reasonable speed, then the n
avigable part of either channel is one-five nautical miles wide.”
“The American side seems the much safer bet,” Bell stated.
“I concur, sir,” Sessions said.
“Okay,” Jeffrey responded. “It seems the safer, so it’s what the Russians would expect.”
“You mean,” Bell asked, “go through on their side because they’ll think that channel’s more secure? I don’t know, Commodore. Is that even allowed by our rules of engagement?”
“My ROEs give me extensive discretion,” Jeffrey said. “And the Russians are neutral, supposedly.”
“We’re not neutral, sir. We’re a belligerent. And their neutrality is, as you say, only supposed. Plus, they’re totally paranoid. They could easily open fire on an unidentified submerged contact, us, without any warning.”
Jeffrey gave Bell a wry smile. “I’m paranoid, too. I’m paranoid of American traitors and moles. I have good reason to think there’s one on the loose in Washington, with high access. If we pass through east of Little Diomede, our own assets might more likely pick us up. We get injected into the U.S. command-and-control net. If that net is compromised, our position and course get reported right to the Axis.”
“Like another Walker spy ring or something?” Meltzer asked.
“Exactly. And our detection systems are more advanced than the Russians’, so if we get picked up at all it’d more likely happen on the U.S. side.”
Bell shook his head. “We don’t know what gadgets Russia has that we don’t even know about, Commodore. We do know their anti-stealth radar is better than ours. We do know the Germans are giving them various things, fancy things.”
“Antisubmarine warfare is about much more than gadgetry, Captain. By ‘systems’ I include the people. It’s a team sport, as you’re aware, and I believe our side’s team does it better.”
“Sir, the Bering Strait is one of the most strategic choke points in the world! For all we know the hydrophone listening posts in the Russian channel are manned by Germans!”