War Plan Red

by Peter Sasgen

  “Captain, possible contact dead ahead!”

  Bayer rolled on a shoulder and said, “Mr. Dass.”

  “Aye, sir, I have it. Range?” Dass queried CIC.

  “Under eight thousand meters.”

  “Any matches?”

  “Propagation is poor. Trace only.”

  “Signals!” Bayer snapped.

  “Aye, sir?” said the yeoman.

  “Raise Narvik by voice. Advise we have a contact. Bearing, et cetera. Query same.”

  “Aye, aye, sir.”

  Bayer planted his binoculars on the heaving purple sea roaring white around the Trondheim’s cutwater and through her hawse pipes and ground tackle. He knew there was nothing to see, but in his gut felt certain that a submarine was out there, trying to escape into deep water.

  The frigate pounded hard, her decks chopping up, down, up. Bayer, braced against the windscreen, swung his glasses to starboard and saw the Narvik take white water over her bow. In the east the sky had failed to brighten—in fact, had gotten darker. “Damn the weather,” Bayer muttered. Something to be concerned about when towing a seven-ton sonar transducer at the end of a four-inch-diameter cable fifty meters below the surface. The armored cable, forty-eight pairs of signal conductors running its length, was not indestructible, and Bayer had had one part a year ago while hogging in on a contact that turned out to be a biological. He weighed reducing speed but decided not to.

  Bayer slammed the bridge speaker’s Talk button with the heel of his gloved hand. “Mr. Garborg, this is the captain.”

  “Aye, Captain?”

  “I don’t appreciate your silence, Mr. Garborg. I want constant ranges and bearings.”

  “Aye, sir. At the moment we’re getting only scatter, no positives.”

  “In panoramic?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Once again, thought Bayer, geography, salinity, time of year, sea state were favoring the enemy.

  “What’s your cadence?”

  “One thousand to thirty thousand meters, sir.”

  “Well, stay at it, Mr. Garborg.”

  “Aye, aye, sir.”

  Bayer snapped the speaker off and turned to his executive officer. “Mr. Dass.”

  “Sir?”

  “Send Mr. Mayan below to Sonar. I want them to feel his hot breath on their necks.”

  “Aye, aye, sir.” Dass, carefully gauging each step across the heaving deck, headed for the CIC, where Weapons Officer Mayan and his technicians were busy monitoring the Trondheim’s fire control gear.

  “Captain, Narvik sends,” announced the signals yeoman. He wore a mike and headset trailing a long cord plugged into a remote repeater.

  “Well?” Bayer said. “I’m not deaf. Give me the short version.”

  “From Narvik: ‘Contact negative across three sectors. Await your advisory.’ ”

  Bayer blew through his teeth. “Send them…send them, ‘Contact impaired. Maintain current pattern.’ ”

  Bayer wanted to bully Garborg again but thought better of it. He stalked onto the port wing and looked aft. He saw a huge winch and sheave arrangement mounted on the fantail, from which the thick black VDS cable paid out from a supply spool midships and over the sheave, where it disappeared into the Trondheim’s boiling wake, which had spread to the horizon like a bridal veil. He looked south toward the plunging Narvik and saw a similar scene of gear, cables, and flying spume.

  Bayer spun on his heel. “Sonar!” he bellowed into the speaker. “This is the captain. What the hell’s going on down there? Do we have a contact?”

  “Negative, sir.” It was Mayan’s voice. “Zero trace on all inputs.”

  “Not even biologicals?”

  “Nothing, sir.”

  “I don’t believe it.”

  “I beg your pardon, sir?”

  Bayer looked north as he collected his thoughts. He didn’t doubt that he was hunting a Russian submarine but had underestimated her skipper’s determination to avoid detection, a challenge Bayer couldn’t overlook. My mistake, he thought. It won’t happen again.

  “Kapitan, the Norwegians are turning south.”

  Litvanov nodded.

  “Have they lost contact with us?” Zakayev said.

  “They never had contact,” Litvanov said.

  Zakayev watched Starpom Veroshilov mark the double track of the Norwegian frigates on the chart, a long, sweeping U-turn that would put them on a southerly track.

  “This Norwegian skipper is going to retrace his steps. By the time he gets turned around, we’ll be gone.”

  Zakayev felt the tension ebb. The girl’s color had returned.

  Litvanov, all smiles, opened the SC1 mike. “Secure fire control, secure torpedo stations.”

  The men in the CCP relaxed. They exchanged satisfied looks and gave a thumbs-up.

  Litvanov opened the mike again, “Mischa…where are you?”

  The SC1 hummed, then the voice of the messman said, “In the galley, Kapitan.”

  “Mischa, break out bread and vodka for everyone.”

  “At once, Kapitan!”

  Litvanov looked at Zakayev and the girl. They knew what he was thinking: that this would likely be one of their last celebrations.

  “It’s over,” Alex said.

  “What is?” Abakov said. He entered the wardroom and took a seat at the table with Alex and Scott. He looked tired and had red-rimmed eyes. The submerged K-480 was twenty nautical miles due north of Gamvik, Norway, and moving south.

  “We’ve been recalled by Northern Fleet,” Scott said. He handed Abakov a message flimsy. It had arrived via Molniya-3 satellite less than ten minutes before and had been copied to Norfolk. “They want a confirmation of receipt and an ETA at Olenya Bay.”

  Abakov read the message. “It doesn’t say they’ve found the K-363. I don’t understand.”

  “My guess is that they don’t want us looking over their shoulder anymore,” Scott said.

  “In other words, now that they’re not worried about nuclear missiles and torpedoes, they want to hunt down the K-363 on their own and take all the credit.” Abakov rubbed his eyes. “Just as well. I’m not cut out for this kind of work. I want to feel the earth under my feet again. Plus, the air has gotten bad.”

  The K-480’s atmosphere was heavy and thick. Scott had been quick to notice a buildup of carbon dioxide. “There’s a problem with the carbon dioxide scrubber,” he said.

  “Where’s Botkin?” Alex said.

  “Working on the scrubber.”

  “I think that’s a good idea,” she said. “So we don’t suffocate, I mean. And that’s not all he should work on. The food is lousy. And so are the cold saltwater showers, and the cockroaches, and the garbage piled up in the galley.”

  Abakov said nothing, just took it all in.

  “I warned you this wouldn’t be a pleasure cruise. The starpom is helping Botkin, but we don’t have a spare thermocouple or filters. The DUK garbage ejector outer door is jammed. Someone put a forty-pound sack of rotting potatoes in the chute and it got stuck. I can’t do anything about the cockroaches, but one of the engine snipes has set traps. As for the saltwater showers, the freshwater holding tanks are contaminated.” He watched Alex tuck strands of limp blond hair under her Russian Navy cap and studied the downy line of her jaw. “Anything else?”

  “Thanks, you’ve made me feel so much better.”

  “Just a warning: It may get worse.”

  “What do you mean? We’ve just been recalled to civilization, haven’t we?”

  “That’s what I wanted to talk about with the two of you.”

  Alex, her eyes as red-rimmed as Abakov’s, said, “I think I see what’s coming.”

  “Something doesn’t add up,” Scott said. He turned to Abakov. “Yuri, earlier you said Zakayev is unpredictable.”

  “He is.”

  “That he always does the unexpected. That he’s dedicated and committed to a cause.”

  “True.”

 
“Stealing a submarine is a bold act of terrorism, wouldn’t you agree?”

  “Yes. Especially when you consider the planning that went into it.”

  “What are you getting at,” Alex said.

  “Stealing the K-363 only makes sense if, as we all thought, Zakayev and Litvanov had a cruise missile aboard to launch at Moscow or St. Petersburg or some other place. But they don’t, so what’s the point?

  Litvanov knows that sooner or later he’ll be hunted down and sunk. What will they have proven?

  Nothing. Zakayev dies and his cause dies with him. It doesn’t add up.”

  “My head is throbbing from the bad air,” said Alex, “and you’re making it worse, Jake, by trying to make me understand how Zakayev thinks. I can’t. No one can.”

  Abakov said, “But Jake is right: Zakayev would die for his cause, but only if by doing so he accomplished his goal.”

  “And what is his goal?” Alex said. “Does anyone know. Does he know?”

  “Of course he knows,” Scott said. “And the fact that he has no nuclear missiles or torpedoes hasn’t changed a thing. He’s still dangerous and we still have to find him.”

  “The Russians will have to find him,” Alex said. “We’ve been recalled, remember?”

  “Not necessarily.”

  “What do you mean?” Abakov said.

  “Maybe the message from NorFleet got scrambled up and we didn’t receive it. Maybe we were having trouble with our radio and couldn’t receive it. Maybe anything. What I’m saying is, we have to find Zakayev and can’t rely on the Russians.”

  “Jake, you can’t disobey their orders,” Alex said.

  “Technically the recall order is for Botkin, not me. Besides, to quit now would be admitting defeat. It would be a surrender. Look, it’s risky, but we can’t give up when there is still potentially so much at stake.”

  He wanted to tell her something, something personal, to break the spell of gloom, but when her gaze fell on him, it seemed as if she were looking right through him.

  “You’re the Navy’s garbage man aren’t you?” Alex said sharply, refocusing.

  “What the hell does that mean?”

  “It means they send you out to clean up their mess and fix things: bring Frank Drummond home; find the K-363; kill her if you can but don’t fuck up. And by all means keep the mess out of sight. If you don’t, well, you’re expendable. Do I have it right?”

  For a long moment Scott said nothing. It wasn’t always like that, but then one day it was. “This is a cold blooded business. There’s no room for mistakes.”

  “And you’ve made a few.”

  “What do you want me to say?”

  “Tell us what happened in the Yellow Sea.”

  There was a long silence.

  Abakov rose and said, “I’ll be in my stateroom.”

  “Stick around, Yuri,” Scott said. “You might as well hear this.”

  The memory of that incident slammed into his consciousness with a grim fury. He started talking but didn’t look at his companions. “We had arrived in Sohan Bay in the north, to deliver a SEAL team into North Korea. My sub, the Chicago, had an Advanced SEAL Delivery System, a mini-sub that can transport ten men and their equipment. I couldn’t get inshore because of shoaling, but the SEAL team CO was okay with that. Seas were rough and I felt there was no way they’d make it unless I got them in close to the mouth of the river at Sinanju.”

  “What was the target?” Abakov said.

  “The nuclear complex at Yongbyon.”

  “Oh my God,” said Alex.

  “The NKs said they had enough plutonium to build twenty nukes and were making threats to use them or sell them to terrorists. The SRO couldn’t get reliable intelligence about what the NKs were up to, whether or not they really had any nukes or whether they were bluffing. The Russians and Swedes had installed some krypton 85 sniffers in their embassies for us that would confirm the reprocessing of uranium, but the results were inconclusive. Meanwhile, the SRO had developed a new miniature monitoring device with a satellite uplink but had no way to get it into the Yongbyon area. The devices look like a plant native to the region.”

  “You mean the kind of plant that grows in the ground? Like a weed?”

  “Yes. Only they’re made of a synthetic material and have miniature processors and transmitters, and a spike on the end that you push into the ground. The SEALs had the job of planting them.”

  “So, what happened?” Alex said.

  What happened? He’d probably never know how the North Koreans stumbled onto the mission. Luck more than anything else, he had told himself over and over until he believed it. Some parts were still a blur, but others he remembered like they had happened yesterday.

  The young SEAL lieutenant and his men had been eager to carry out their mission. Scott nosed into shallow water after launching an Unmanned Underwater Vehicle, a UUV, to probe for mines, which proved to be nonexistent. The SEALs’ mini-sub lifted off the Chicago’s deck at night and, using North Korean coastal traffic as cover, headed for the mouth of the river.

  “And that’s when the NKs showed up,” Scott said. Noisy as a dishwasher. That’s what he remembered thinking. A goddamned Soviet Romeo-class diesel submarine built by the North Koreans from Chinese plans. It had apparently chug-chugged its way up the coast from Namp’o, submerged.

  “We weren’t in danger of being detected, not by that old crock. But then a frigate and two patrol craft showed up and that’s when it got hot. The NKs must have had a port surveillance system to detect swimmers and swimmer delivery vehicles. When they started dropping anti-diver hand grenades, I knew the mission had been blown.”

  “What did you do?” Alex said.

  “I had strict orders to pull out if something went wrong and to not risk the ship under any circumstances.”

  “In other words, you had orders to abandon the SEALs.”

  “In an emergency they were expendable.”

  “And you disobeyed orders.”

  Scott nodded. “I couldn’t leave them behind.”

  “How did you get them back on board? It must have been a nightmare.”

  A nightmare that still haunted him. Scott had activated the laser communication-navigation system used to direct the SEALs in their mini-sub back to the Chicago for recovery. Then he fired two decoys simulating the noise signature of a Chinese Ming-class diesel attack submarine. The first decoy drew the two patrol craft away from the SEALs and on a wild-goose chase into the mouth of the river. The second decoy, aimed at the North Korean sub, caused so much confusion that the sub ran aground.

  The frigate was another matter.

  “The SEALs’ mini-sub was in our beacon cone, ready to relock on deck. But the damned NK frigate got lucky and picked us up on sonar.”

  Scott saw the Soho-class frigate turn on her heel, and with a bone in her teeth, charge the Chicago. He was in a race to get the SEALs aboard and haul out into deeper water before the frigate attacked. It was a race Scott knew he would lose unless he violated all the rules, including the rules of engagement governing the mission itself.

  “Snapshot, tube one! Target One!” Scott had commanded, and a moment later: “Fire!”

  He remembered the pressure pulse and slam of the air piston signaling ejection of the MK-48 torpedo.

  “What happened next?”

  “Nothing. The North Koreans never said a word. We expected a storm to break, maybe even a declaration of war. Silence. They must have believed that they had attacked a Chinese submarine that was snooping in their territorial waters.”

  “But what about the frigate?”

  “Sunk.”

  “You sunk it?”

  “Blew it to bits.”

  “And when you returned to Norfolk, you got thrown into a meat grinder.”

  “You could say that. The Navy said that I had disobeyed orders, violated the rules of engagement, hazarded my ship. They even threw in a few other things while they were at it.”


  “But you saved the lives of those SEALs. Didn’t that mean anything?”

  “It did to the SEALs but not to Admiral Ellsworth. He was ready to put me against the wall when Frank Drummond stepped in.”

  “And now you’re their garbage man,” Alex said.

  Paul Friedman, running late from his meeting at State, took a seat by the president’s desk in the Oval Office. The president looked at his national security advisor over the tops of half-glasses and said,

  “What’d the Russian ambassador say, Paul?”

  “In a word, nyet.”

  The president removed the glasses and tossed them on his desk. “You were right, Karl. The Russians are going to play tough on this one.”

  “Did Zamorin say anything else,” Radford asked Friedman, “or was he his usual inscrutable self?”

  “No, sir, he was quite animated,” Friedman said, speaking to the president. “Despite your entreaty that we be allowed to hunt down the K-363, the Russians have said no. They still reserve the right to do it themselves.”

  “Idiots,” Radford said.

  “And they absolutely refuse to rescind their recall order to the K-480,” Friedman said, adding, “and we won’t change their minds.”

  “Can those Norwegian intercepts and satellite images that you have be trusted, Karl?” the president asked.

  “Yes, sir. That’s why we should get something in the air over the Norwegian Sea. We’ve got P-3Cs we can deploy from Iceland and Spain. I’ve talked to Gordon, and he and Webster can have something on the way, today, if we say so. We ought to get an ASW group into the Skagerrak to plug that hole. Also, Ellsworth may be able to move a couple of his SSNs into the area around Norway and Sweden.”

  “If we did that, Karl, it would upset the Russians,” Friedman said.

  “Paul, we’re talking international waters,” Radford protested.

  Friedman, looking to the president, said, “Sir, if we bring a cordon down on that area, the Russians will explode.”

  “So, what are we supposed to do, Paul?” Radford said. “Just stand by and watch the Russians capture Zakayev and make him talk? Think what that would do to the summit if the Russians threw him in our faces. With all due respect, Mr. President, I still think that your decision not to cancel the summit is ill advised. Your safety is of paramount concern and until we can find and eliminate Zakayev, I’m damned uncomfortable with the situation we have.”