by Joe Buff
“I still think our side’s team does it better. We’ve had years, decades more practice than the Germans.”
Bell almost sputtered in exasperation. Jeffrey pretended not to notice. “The decision affects my entire strike group. It’s not one you on Challenger can view in isolation.”
“Yes, Commodore. Of course.”
“Very well,” Jeffrey said. “We have a schedule to keep. We penetrate the strait through the Russian side.”
“What about their antisubmarine patrols and bottom sensors?”
“On that I defer to you, Captain. I’ve told you where we need to go. You tell your crew how to get us there.”
Chapter 4
Jeffrey took a short nap and a shower and immediately felt refreshed. He grabbed a quick lunch in the wardroom at 1105, joined informally by some of Bell’s officers. Among them was Lieutenant Bud Torelli, the weapons officer—Weps for short. Torelli was from Memphis, and his Southern accent showed it. He had a neatly groomed mustache, brown like his curly hair. His build ran to the fleshy side, with some overhang over his belt, but this was true of many submariners and it didn’t slow him down any. Torelli finished eating.
“I’m paying a quick visit to the men in the torpedo room.” His shoulders set squarely, he left the wardroom to go below. Jeffrey knew that Torelli and his people might soon be frantic with effort to keep themselves and the rest of the crew alive.
They’re a hardened, steely-nerved bunch now that they’ve got their sense of purpose back. Intercepting incoming fire, and putting weapons on target, required exhausting teamwork as intricately choreographed, and as thoroughly rehearsed, as any ballet. Every torpedo or cruise missile weighed thousands of pounds, much of that volatile engine fuels, high explosives—and fissionable cores of uranium or plutonium. Crush injuries and toxic spills were a constant hazard. A fire or explosion could spell disaster. Operating each tube correctly was a tricky task in itself. Bad flooding through one would doom the ship.
Damage control in Torelli’s department was taken tremendously seriously. Sessions, as XO, had assigned the Seabee passengers, when at battle stations, to be an extra damage-control party stationed outside the torpedo room; their talents at improvising machinery repairs during combat might give a decisive extra margin for survival if worse came to worst. One of Challenger’s chiefs from Engineering was with them as the man in charge, since the Seabees weren’t qualified in submarines.
Lieutenant Willey, the engineer, stopped by while Jeffrey finished gulping his coffee. “Greetings, mein Commodore.”
“Ahoy there, Enj,” Jeffrey razzed him back—a ship’s engineer often got the nickname Enj. Willey was respectful, but he did have an offbeat, sometimes edgy sense of humor. Tall and lanky, his face always seemed pinched and his posture slightly stooping, as if carrying a heavy load. Right now he had stubbly five-o’clock shadow and extra-bad coffee breath, and looked like he’d been awake for twenty-four hours straight, at least. His eyes were sunken and bloodshot, but sharply focused.
Jeffrey sympathized: he’d been an engineer on his own department head tour. The hours were especially grueling; the responsibilities never let up. Overseeing the safe and reliable running of a sub’s nuclear reactor, and all the rest of the propulsion plant and other mechanical systems, took commitment and heart as well as tons of book smarts and common sense.
Willey wolfed down a slice of sausage casserole, and hurried aft. Jeffrey left the wardroom, stepping into the passageway. The enlisted mess, on the opposite side of the galley, was doing brisk business. Captain Bell had passed the word that he’d be going to battle stations soon. This could be the crew’s last chance for a hot meal for a while.
The mess management specialists, normally very attentive to their customers and renowned for their cheerful service, seemed unusually eager for everyone to finish eating and leave. They needed to clean up, then specially sanitize these spaces: in emergencies, the ship’s wardroom doubled as an operating theater, and the enlisted mess was the triage area.
A corkscrew twisted in Jeffrey’s stomach momentarily, and he knew it wasn’t the food. He was remembering times on previous missions when there’d been human blood on the floor here in puddles, and bodies or parts of bodies stored in a sealed-off section of the ship’s freezer.
Jeffrey walked forward into the control room, pushing these macabre recollections from his mind. He sat and activated his console, arranging windows on the two large screens, one above the other, to show the data he would need: a copy of the navigation plot and the tactical plot. A copy of the ship’s gravimeter display, which used sophisticated sensors and computer algorithms to measure the three-dimensional gravity fields around the ship, and from that derive a picture of the local sea floor and coastline topography. The gravimeter was nice because it was passive, not needing to make emissions that could give away Challenger’s presence. It could see through solid rock, because gravity reached through solid rock. It also was immune to loud noise, unlike the sonar systems, though the gravimeter couldn’t detect moving objects.
Jeffrey next called up a copy of the main sonar waterfall displays. Lighter solid streaks marked man-made contacts; aircraft could be detected if they came close enough, from their engine sounds passing down through the water. Intermittent bright spots, or a series of dots, indicated whale calls: humpbacks and grays were especially common, feeding on the plankton blooms that nourished these waters at this time of year.
Last, he added to his crowded screens the pictures from the ship’s hull-mounted photonic sensors, set in passive image-intensification mode. The ocean outside Challenger was murky, due to the rich biologics and their organic waste, and because of erosion silt from heavy runoff as snow and ice melted on the watersheds of the continents looming to both sides.
He was satisfied for now. These readouts gave him the best possible overall situational awareness as the ship approached the Russian channel through the Bering Strait.
Bell strode into the control room, nodding to his commodore as he passed. “Officer of the Deck, I have the deck and the conn.”
“Captain has the deck and the conn, aye-aye.” All the watchstanders acknowledged, too.
“Chief of the Watch,” Bell ordered, “on the sound-powered phones, rig for ultraquiet and go to silent battle stations.” The shipwide public-address system, the 1MC, was much too noisy.
In moments, people began dashing into Control, relieving those at some positions. The chief of the boat came in, a salty bulldog of a master chief, Latino, from Jersey City, in his early forties the oldest man aboard. Everyone called him “COB”—like the word “cob,” not an acronym—as if that was his only name. He took over as battle stations chief of the watch, at the two-man ship control station at the front end of the space. The helmsman on watch next to him didn’t move; Lieutenant (j.g.) Radesh Patel, from Engineering, was the newly designated battle stations helmsman. A former Western Conference football linebacker and physics major, even seated he was a head taller than COB. Normally jovial, and a wicked chess player, Patel had gone from damage control assistant to a very different sort of responsibility—one that would be like doing football, chess, and physics all at once.
Bell took the left seat of the two-man desk-high command console at the center of Control. Sessions assumed the right seat. Metallic snicks sounded throughout the space, men buckling their seat belts, which reminded Jeffrey to do the same.
He set up one more small window on his lower screen, so he could instant-message with Meltzer through the LAN. This way they could converse, commodore and executive assistant, without distracting Bell and Sessions as they fought the ship.
Lieutenant Torelli hurried in and stood in the aisle overseeing his first team at the four target tracking and weapons consoles that lined Control’s starboard bulkhead. A nondescript lieutenant (j.g.), the new sonar officer—Alan Finch, from Peoria, Illinois—stood in the opposite aisle. The forwardmost of his seven consoles, lining the port bulkhead, was t
aken by the most seasoned sonar supervisor, Senior Chief Brendan O’Hanlon.
Meltzer entered and stood at the navigation plotting table with the assistant navigator and several of their people.
The phone talker, wearing his heavy sound-powered intercom rig, listened on his big headphones. He answered on the bulky mike that made its own electricity from the vibrations as he spoke, then looked up. “Captain, Phone Talker. All compartments report manned and ready.”
“Very well, Phone Talker,” Bell said. “Chief of the Watch, rig ship for red.”
COB acknowledged. The lighting switched from bright white to a subdued ruby glow. It gave the control room an intimate feel, and helped remind people in some other spaces to maintain ultraquiet. Men blinked to help their eyes adjust to the dimness. Several small pocket flashlights were brought out, to frequently check pipes and fittings for flaws that might otherwise go unobserved. All hunched more closely over their consoles. Their voices became more restrained.
“Chief of the Watch, secure ventilation fans.”
“Secure ventilation fans, aye.” COB worked switches. The air circulation vents ceased their hushing sound; the gentle cool breezes stopped. The change was portentous, eerie. Challenger, like a living thing, was hunkering down for maximum stealth.
The control room slowly began to grow stuffy, from the heat and tense breathing of two dozen men and the warmth of electronics—Challenger’s acoustic and thermal insulation kept the chill of the water outside well away from her innards. The crew was used to this, but no one liked it. If it went on for too long, personnel performance would be degraded, and eventually some important part of the combat systems might fail. Jeffrey knew that this was just one of many unpleasant trade-offs an SSN’s captain faced. Peering forward, he could see people shifting in their seats, flexing their shoulder blades, moving their heads back and forth, to loosen cramping muscles. The excitement of new mission orders had worn off. It wasn’t a game anymore.
“Helm,” Bell ordered in a low but firm voice, “slow to ahead one third and make turns for five knots.”
The helmsman, Patel, acknowledged, then gingerly touched icons on one of his screen menus. His arm movement was jerky, and Jeffrey thought he could see his hand shaking. In a moment, Patel reported in a near-whisper, “Maneuvering answers, ahead one-third, turns for five knots, sir.” Jeffrey heard the strain in his voice. Meltzer would have been handling the stress much better, but he’d been promoted to navigator.
“Very well, Helm. Left five degrees rudder, make your course three-four-zero.”
Again Patel acknowledged Bell, twisting his joystick.
Feeling strangely detached, almost as if he’d been plunged back in time to the height of the Cold War, Jeffrey saw the own-ship heading’s readout on his console change as Challenger swung gently left. Who am I kidding? We’re in a second Cold War with Russia right now that could quickly turn hot.
He envied the men who had assigned stations they could fixate on. With nothing concrete at the moment to keep him preoccupied, he found his mind beginning to dart from one item to the next. His gravimeter display, set in forward-looking mode, showed rugged Little Diomede and Big Diomede Islands a short distance ahead, slowly drifting rightward on the 3-D picture as Challenger continued her turn. He could see the ocean floor, the parts of the islands that rose steeply from the bottom, plus a notional transparent plain that marked the ocean’s surface, and the terrain of the islands exposed in the air. The sea floor was almost perfectly flat, at a depth of only one-hundred-sixty feet.
On the left edge of the image, a mountainous knob three miles wide rose suddenly from the ocean floor to altitudes of over six thousand feet above sea level: the beginning of mainland Russia. On the right edge, on both the gravimeter and the navigation chart, Cape Prince of Wales and the Prince of Wales Shoal were visible. This jutting part of the Alaskan mainland was tipped by a mountain, too, though only half as tall as the Russian ones.
Jeffrey eyed the tactical plot. All merchant shipping had been left behind, and none was detected in front. Every one of the handful of contacts held on the display, surface or airborne, was denoted by an icon that meant it was military, and Russian. If something submerged was lurking in ambush, a submarine or an unannounced minefield, Challenger’s sensors and technicians hadn’t spotted it yet. Not that they weren’t trying. A few of the sonarmen and fire-control specialists were already wiping sweat off their foreheads.
Rules of engagement for neutrals were words on paper, Jeffrey reminded himself. Russia didn’t have a stellar record putting them into practice in the field. In 1983, when local commanders ordered Korean Airlines Flight 007, from JFK to Seoul, be shot down by a fighter—without properly verifying the 747’s identity first—the Kremlin was humiliated before an angry world. Hundreds of innocent civilians were killed. The blunder helped bring down the Soviet Union. Though that was almost thirty years ago, the newest Russian Federation regime was autocratic, and talked very tough about self-defense, with rising investments in hardware to back up the talk. It was unclear if local forces would open fire on an unidentified undersea contact.
Jeffrey was second-guessing his own decision, too late. The navigation plot showed Challenger miles beyond the treaty line already.
Bell ordered several more course changes to get the ship into position to transit the Bering Strait. Jeffrey’s displays showed Challenger nearing the mouth of the Russian-side channel. The constricted part, the strait itself, was only three miles long from start to finish before widening out again, so depending on Bell’s tactics they could be through it very quickly. He’d chosen to aim for a path about two-thirds of the way from Big Diomede to the protruding knob at the tip of Siberia. Closer to the mainland, the water should be cloudier from soil erosion and thaw runoff. The Russian side was also more nutrient-rich—more productive biologically—and phytoplankton could turn the surface yellow-brown or milky white; even droppings from numerous sea birds helped obscure submerged visibility.
This would make it harder to detect Challenger via optical sensors: dipping blue-green lasers called LIDAR, or airborne cameras linked to supercomputer software—called LASH—able to notice anomalous color gradations and shapes deep underwater.
Out of curiosity, and to audit the proper preparedness of Challenger’s brand-new command team, Jeffrey called up a copy of the main weapons status page. He saw that Bell had four tubes loaded with high-explosive Mark 48 Improved ADCAP torpedoes, the standard heavyweight fish of the U.S. submarine fleet. The other four tubes held Mark II brilliant decoys, which could be programmed to imitate Challenger, or another sub, by giving off an acoustic signature meant to be noticed by the enemy.
He typed a message to Bell: “Why no off-board probes to scout ahead?” Remote-controlled probes could be deployed through the torpedo tubes, too. Similar in size and shape to an ADCAP, they were fitted with a mix of active and passive sonars, passive photonic imagers, and active laser line-scan cameras.
Bell answered right away, typing, “Path here known clear of shipwrecks.” A pause. “You’re welcome to stand by my console.”
Jeffrey got up and eased forward through the compartment’s cramped left aisle. He stopped next to Bell’s console, with his back touching the sonar supervisor’s chair. Bell turned from his horizontal screens and looked up at Jeffrey. He responded to the query more, his voice lowered to be barely audible. Bell spoke softly mainly to not break his crew’s concentration on their console displays, since a threat could appear out of nowhere at any time. But some of it was purely mental: at ultraquiet people walked and talked and even thought on pins and needles.
“Because probes might be detected, Commodore, and Russian subs wouldn’t use them in their own safe corridor. It would show right away we’re not friendlies. Besides, in these conditions our own probe sensors in passive-only won’t give us much we can’t get better on Challenger herself.”
Sessions joined in from the seat next to Bell, his soft features
softened further in the dim red lighting. “The Captain and I discussed it, Commodore.” While Jeffrey had been in the wardroom, apparently. “Since we can’t afford to radiate, we can’t use the acoustic link to control any probes. If we use a fiber-optic tether instead, and it breaks, we can’t recover the probe and then we’ve left a clue we were here. . . . Plus, to send a probe on ahead of us slowly and quietly, by far enough to make a difference in tactically useful data, would take too long when we want to minimize our dwell time by the strait.”
“What about antisubmarine mines, if this path you picked isn’t in their safe corridor of the day? The whole channel’s fifteen miles wide. What if we’re too far right or left of where Russian subs know they should go?”
“No notices to mariners, sir,” Sessions reminded Jeffrey politely. “No minefield.”
The reminder was unnecessary—Jeffrey had been quizzing him. By international law, all naval minefields had to be publicly announced, with all mines moored or otherwise held stationary. Modern mines could be programmed to ignore surface shipping, and to go off only when a submerged submarine went by. They could also be armed and later switched off via remote control, altering safe pathways through a solid field of mines.
Jeffrey nodded sourly. “If there’s one good thing we can say about Moscow, they’re sticklers for the outward letter of international law. . . . Axis subs using the strait?”
“Intel says our forces have them too well bottled up on the other side of the world, sir.”
These were good answers. “Okay.” Jeffrey eyed the tactical plot vertical display on the forward bulkhead. Something genuinely puzzled him. “Why do you think the U.S. doesn’t have any surface ships or aircraft patrolling the American channel?”
He felt the sonar supervisor sliding sideways in his seat. Jeffrey glanced at O’Hanlon, a self-assured expert who liked to go clean-shaven, and almost bald with a razor cut, accentuating the way his small ears stuck far out from the side of his head. Senior Chief O’Hanlon, in his mid-thirties, was a battle-hardened sailor, and Jeffrey could see the very top of a chest tattoo above the collar of his undershirt, worn beneath his jumpsuit. He had a pair of sonar headphones draped around his neck, so he could don them in a jiffy if he wanted to. A small lip mike was positioned to one side of his very square jaw.