by Joe Buff
Jeffrey nodded, and smiled. Supercomputers were very expensive, but they didn’t take up much space. What they did need was a very clean environment, a lot of electricity, and facilities to take away the immense waste heat they created. But with a reactor and turbogenerators—to drive air-conditioning and refrigeration equipment, which fed ventilation ducts and chilled-water pipes that already ran all over the ship to keep the combat-system electronics cool—a nuclear sub was the ideal place to install the most advanced available supercomputer. Rapid warnings to the CIA or the Pentagon could be sent with tight-beam laser or radio buoys, talking to dedicated submarine communication satellites.
And by the link between his ships, Jeffrey was using two supercomputers at once—massive parallel processing. Four NSA experts, who’d come from Carter in the German mini at the end of the first rendezvous, were in Challenger’s electronic support measures room; four more NSA men were in Carter’s. They’d guide the automated interpretive work done via hardware and software.
“OK, sir,” the systems administrator said. “The uh, the channel maps are completed. The sifting through to locate the stuff we care about is starting.”
“How long should that take?”
“I’m guessing about two hours, sir.”
“I’ll be in my office. You can reach me there if you have any problems. Otherwise, call me when we’re ready to stir up the hornet’s nest.”
Chapter 17
Jeffrey was back in Challenger’s control room. The system administrator had called him a few minutes ago. Carter confirmed through the acoustic link that they were ready, too.
As prearranged during the mission briefing days before, Carter positioned two of her Seahorses in polynyas spaced widely apart, with their signals intercept and electronic support measures antennas raised out of the water. These were coated with a white radar-absorbing material, for camouflage and stealth. They would capture radio and radar transmissions across the entire frequency spectrum, and by direction-finding triangulate on each transmitter’s position. The computers would produce a map of any facility that emitted anything at all. This map would be extremely wide-ranging, because surface ducting from side lobes, of even spaceward-focused satellite relay ground stations, could be picked up and amplified billions of times from hundreds of miles away. Side lobes were unavoidable leakage from any radiating antenna, in directions other than where the antenna was aimed. Ducting was an effect where a layer of air at ground or ocean level trapped and held radio and radar waves, minimizing signal-strength loss over vast distances, and bending them along the curve of the earth. Surface ducting was especially effective in mist and fog—and just such weather prevailed in the seas near Challenger this time of year, because differences between air and water temperatures caused heavy moisture condensation.
The computers and analysts on Challenger and Carter were ready to capture transmissions through the air and through the cable tap. To gather intelligence vital for completing the strike group’s mission, it was now necessary to get both the Siberian coastal defense forces, and Russia’s Strategic Rocket Forces, very excited very suddenly.
Jeffrey knew exactly how he would do this.
“Captain Bell, load a Mark Three brilliant decoy in tube eight.” The new Mark III design was a programmable decoy that, unlike the Mark IIs, could operate down to Challenger’s crush depth. Thus it could mimic the ship in every respect. Mark IIs would implode at about three thousand feet—much too shallow.
Bell issued orders to Torelli.
Jeffrey leaned against the side of Bell’s console. “Call up the large-scale tactical plot and let’s look at the predicted track of K-Three-three-five.”
Jeffrey began to issue instructions. “I want you to have the Mark Three programmed to sound and act like Challenger. You can work out the details on course waypoints and timing with the Nav. But basically this is what I want it to do.”
Jeffrey pointed with his index finger as he spoke. “Have the decoy proceed at stealth speed off of the continental shelf and on an intercept course with K-Three-three-five’s projected position over the Polar Abyssal Plain. Run it at a depth of eight thousand feet, to avoid any risk of collision and give a clearer acoustic path. When within six thousand yards of where we think the Akula-Two will be, have the decoy accelerate to fifty knots and turn sharply north. One of the Akula’s passive arrays should pick up the contact. Here, have the decoy go quiet, veer west, and gently bury itself in the bottom. It’ll have outrun and outdived K-Three-three-five before she can even get off a shot. We’ll put the Akula’s captain in a tizzy that he detected USS Challenger dashing into the middle of their boomer bastion at a speed and depth that only this ship can make.”
Bell broke into a grin. “You’ll light up every radar from here to Anadyr, and every switchboard from here to Polyarny.”
“And, I hope, once the Akula’s laser-buoy report hits the Kremlin via Russian Navy headquarters in Moscow, we also trigger a higher alert by their ground-based Strategic Rocket Forces.”
“How does that last part help us, sir?” Sessions asked. “It sounds destabilizing.”
“They’ll un-destabilize, for a while, when they see they lost contact with Challenger and nothing bad occurred to their boomers. Before then, we listen to them freak out over the fiber-optic cable. If we’re lucky, some important things will come through in plain text, or an encryption clerk will make a mistake and we’ll read a useful message in code we can break. This will hopefully aid Kurzin’s people to do their job. When I surface as Challenger’s captain in a different place, they’ll figure I used a decoy to evade one of their fast-attacks while on my way to blockade the Eight-six-eight-U. God willing, they won’t realize I’m playing a game on a much, much higher level.”
Bell’s people programmed and launched the Mark III decoy.
In ninety minutes, things did begin to happen. First, a higher-level naval antisubmarine alert was sounded. All sorts of radars and radios, on ships, on planes, at bases, and on satellites, that weren’t already radiating gave themselves and their technical specifications away. An invaluable charting of threats and spoofing strategies and gaps in Russian defensive coverage resulted. Several previously unidentified coastal supersonic antiship cruise missile installations were also plotted; these might have turned out to be fatal traps, given the way Harley intended to bring Carter close inshore.
Messages at the local Russian Navy level were caught and translated from the fiber-optic cable tap. The organization chart of units, tactical boundaries, and lines of authority—previously almost opaque to Allied intelligence—revealed itself in crisp detail. The coding-decoding abilities in this military district were swamped by the clarion call from K-Three-three-five, and some people talked in the clear.
Amazingly, Jeffrey was able to hear Rear Admiral Elmar Meredov telling the leader of a regiment of maritime patrol bombers to get everything that could fly airborne. Meredov sounded confident, not cocky, fierce and direct, and on excellent personal terms with his subordinate. Then came an even bigger, unpleasant surprise.
“Remember my cardinal rule of sub hunting. Aircrews must assume that the first antisubmarine contact they make will not be the last. If one contact is actually held, you need to allocate forces between harassing that American sub and searching for another.”
“Understood, sir,” the regimental commander said.
“Don’t forget to have them look in the least likely places, Aleksei, including our continental shelf and especially the noisy water near the islands.”
This was useful to know for future reference, but Jeffrey grew extremely concerned. Meredov was, and would be, a formidable adversary, one who left nothing to chance and who knew that as far back as the Cold War, U.S. spy subs did sometimes work in pairs in Russian waters. If Carter is exposed . . .
Jeffrey intended to listen to the recording over and over, sifting and absorbing every syllable and nuance.
It took longer to see how the Russian
strategic rocket forces reacted. Jeffrey, and everyone else in his strike group who understood what was happening, hated every minute ticking by. O’Hanlon kept reporting sniffs of snowmobiles and helos, fading in and out of his passive sonar detection range. So far as Torelli could figure, they were quartering the area between and around their pair of small islands. It also seemed as if they were examining the route of the undersea cable, wherever polynyas or flat-enough ice made the route practical to reach. If the two Seahorses still assigned to signals-intercept duty heard on their own passive sonars that someone was coming too close, they’d have to dip down beneath the ice and the task group would lose their vital electronic surveillance at the worst possible time.
Jeffrey gritted his teeth as a maritime reconnaissance aircraft roared overhead nearby, its slow speed of two hundred knots showing that it was on active patrol. It sounded different from previous ones, more of a throbbing whine than a growl. O’Hanlon said the engines were turbofans, making it a militarized version of the Tupolev-204, Russia’s newest, most numerous model of antisubmarine plane.
Besides magnetic anomaly detection, with a mental jolt Jeffrey saw a whole other reason to worry: His two ships had been in one place long enough that the warmed seawater exiting their steam condensor cooling pipes might be noticeable on infrared scanners aimed at polynyas downcurrent from the cable tapping site—where Challenger and Carter had no choice but to loiter, motionless, hooked up to the fiber-optic lines.
His heart missed a beat at an even worse thought.
An airborne gravimetric gradiometer, at close enough range, would see our reactor compartments, dead to rights.
Such airborne gravimeters did exist, used by civilian geologists. Jeffrey hoped that the Tupolev’s speed, its engine vibrations, and air turbulence near the sea would impair the resolution if the aircraft actually carried one. Again Jeffrey felt like a fly stuck to flypaper. He was annoyed at himself for not realizing these dangers sooner, but there was nothing he could do to avoid them anyway.
The Tu-204 went away and nothing unpleasant happened.
But after ten hours of waiting on excruciating tenterhooks, it became obvious that the Strategic Rocket Forces never would react to Jeffrey’s scheme with the Mark III decoy. The generals in charge, apparently, didn’t see what an American fast-attack by the North Pole near some missile subs had to do with their ICBM silos far inland. They were too smart—or too paranoid—to generate extra signals traffic, only to have it intercepted somehow, somewhere, by spies. Jeffrey, disappointed beyond words, couldn’t argue with their logic. In retrospect, this aspect of the intel grab was a long shot from the start.
Via the fiber-optic link between Challenger and Carter, he and Bell held a conference call with Harley and Kurzin. The decision they made was the only one they could make. Patch, release, and rebury the cable, smooth over any signs that the bottom had been disturbed, then press on with the mission. Maybe if Carter continued her radio surveillance while on the move with her Seahorses, something might still turn up. Kurzin stated darkly that there were other ways, once near the silo field, to gain the information he needed to help get inside.
Jeffrey already knew that Nyurba didn’t like good-byes, and Kurzin certainly wasn’t the type. He wrapped up simply. “Good luck. See you someday in a better place.”
The two ships parted, Challenger going west and Carter east. Challenger needed to keep up the cover that she was after the 868U at the furthest end of Russia. Carter had to put Kurzin’s squadron ashore in close coordination with Jeffrey’s schedule, or the double-teaming plan against the Russians would come unglued.
Chapter 18
As soon as he’d transferred to Carter again at the start of the second rendezvous, Dashiyn Nyurba had given a high priority to exercise. The rule of thumb for commandos in transit submerged on a submarine was to work out hard six hours a day. On Challenger this had been difficult, because her provisions for physical fitness were rudimentary. Carter’s Multi-Mission Platform, in contrast, included a superbly equipped PT room with two dozen of the latest workout machines—like a top-of-the-line health club without any windows, with rather Spartan decor, and with extra vibration damping and noise suppression engineered in. She also has an expanded sickbay, with two experienced combat trauma surgeons aboard, to treat incoming wounded from my squadron.
Nyurba could tell that he and his four SERT Seabees had lost conditioning during their unexpected, extended rehearsals with Commodore Fuller, when Kurzin had needed to send them back to Challenger at the end of the first rendezvous. By dint of effort and copious sweat, with Nyurba egging the others on, in the few days still available they built back toward the peak of strength and endurance they’d need in Siberia.
Tougher training now could mean less bleeding later.
As Nyurba climbed up the sail-trunk ladder and stood on the open grating at the top, the first things that struck him were the fresh, tangy salt air, the feel of the bracing wind on his face, and the immensity of the twilit sky above, a deep electric aquamarine. He drew in delicious lungfuls. He blinked to help his eye muscles focus, for the first time in weeks, at actual infinity instead of optical illusions within a virtual-reality helmet. He experienced, by the sudden lack of it, how claustrophobically confined he’d been inside Challenger and Carter and the minisub. Then, despite the extreme-weather clothing that he wore against the Arctic chill, he felt starkly naked as he stood in the tiny cockpit on Carter’s sail.
All parts of the submarine that he could see from outside, with the ship on the surface now, were coated bluish-white. This included the sail itself, plus her entire long rounded hull—and even the top of the rudder sticking out of the water, aft of where the teardrop-shaped hull tapered into the very cold sea. The radar-absorbent tinting, the first of its kind on a nuclear sub, had been applied when the ship was in dry dock; though the yard workers made jokes about it, the paint job didn’t seem funny to Nyurba at present. It was a matter of life and death.
What was missing was the minisub, no longer carried on Carter’s back. Since it couldn’t be deployed while Carter was surfaced—it weighed almost sixty tons, sitting high and dry—it had already been released and was waiting submerged with its two-man crew, away to port.
Above Nyurba, on the sail roof, two crewmen in white camouflage smocks—lookouts—peered through image-stabilized binoculars, their urgency and concern infectious. Carter’s photonics masts were both raised, though only by inches, their sensor heads spinning and bobbing as they scanned in every direction for threats on visual and infrared. The electronic support measures antennas atop both heads were steadily feeding data for analysis below; airborne surface-search radars were the ESM technicians’ main worry. The depth here was less than ninety feet, and too soon Carter wouldn’t be able to dive at all if she’d wanted to.
Nyurba didn’t bother with binocs; he didn’t need them. Flat ice floes, the occasional jutting berg, smashed-up bergy bits, and slush were all around. So were birds and seals—resting on the floes and bergs, or flying or slipping into and out of the water. Their noises were familiar; they’d been coming over the sonar speakers in Carter’s control room the whole time she worked her way southeast to the edge of the solid cap and onward into the marginal ice zone. Then she’d blown her main ballast tanks in spurts while the crew hoped the sounds, if detected by the Russians, would be mistaken for whales cavorting.
What was unfamiliar to Nyurba was this sensation of being so terribly exposed. Every minute counted. But this was the only way to get the German minisub into practical range of the mainland, almost a hundred miles further south through the increasingly less ice-choked and ever more shallow East Siberian Sea. From here the mini’s fuel load was just enough to make the trip there and back only once, even at slow speed, and this would never do for shuttling eighty commandos with all their equipment to the beach. The idea of towing the mini once released had been rejected early on: Carter wasn’t designed for it, improvised tow cables would f
oul her sternplanes or rudder, and any pitching in rough seas would whipsaw the minisub violently. It had been known for months that, as part of the overall mission concept, Carter would need to surface and serve as a special operations taxi until the distance to Russian soil became much shorter.
Captain Harley stood shoulder to shoulder with Nyurba, in the cockpit that was officially called the ship’s bridge. Carter was stopped, dead in the water. She rolled and pitched in the moderate swell, the same swell that made the chunks of ice in all directions bob rhythmically, almost hypnotically. A phone talker was next up through the sail trunk. He squeezed in beside Nyurba, but Harley already had an intercom headset on and was plugged into the bridge connection. He was frowning, his thin lips pursed, his blue eyes darting everywhere with a power of perception that impressed Nyurba. His own instincts from prior land combat screamed to crouch low, keeping his head down, but Harley stood extra erect, setting an example that all those with him were quickly inspired to follow. He took evident pride, even relish, in steering his ship and leading his crew into harm’s way on his country’s most vital strategic business.
“Control, Bridge,” Harley said, “tell Colonel Kurzin we are ready.”
Nyurba’s job was to help supervise from the bridge—the highest available vantage point—and to interface with Captain Harley on any sudden tactical emergencies.
Thick round hatches on the hull swung open against their massive, hydraulically damped hinges. Men began to climb out quickly, also garbed in white. At the same time, three other men clambered up the bridge trunk inside the sail, wordlessly squeezing past Nyurba and Harley. One carried a scoped sniper rifle, wrapped in white tape to break up its outline. The other two each lugged a shoulder-fired antiaircraft missile launcher, with outer parts dappled in white. Nyurba helped the threesome reach the roof of the sail, where they took up positions and clipped on safety harnesses—also white, instead of red-orange.