“Sounds obvious, doesn’t it?”
“Of course it’s bloody obvious.”
“Which is why we aren’t doing that.”
“Paully, what is going on here?”
“Sir, President Warner is what’s going on. She wants the Oparea secured today, meaning tonight our time, and she wants the blockade back in force.”
“That means we have to clear out the Oparea of— how many Destiny IIs?”
“Between eighteen and twenty-two. Depending on force readiness.”
“Say twenty-two. That’s, hell, eight of ours to twenty-two of theirs.”
“Nine, counting the Barracuda, the Seawolf class ship.”
“Tough odds but maybe we can live with them.”
“Warner says we have to live with them.”
“So, Paully, tomorrow is Christmas Eve. We’ve got till close of business Christmas Eve to get the curtain back up around Japan.”
“Right. With all of nine fast-attack subs.”
“We’ll just have to do that—but with eight of them.”
“Why only eight?”
“Paully, you and I are about to make the USS Barracuda our new flagship. If I’m the Pacforcecom, I can do this any way I please. Right?”
“You are going to piss off one Capt. David Kane.”
“Kane saved my career once,” Pacino said. “The least I can do is thank him in person.”
“He’s not one to enjoy having his submarine commandeered by staff types.”
“I know how he feels, but that’s the way it’s going to be. By the way, get out a message to Sean Murphy and CB McDonne back at USUBCOM. Tell Murphy to get the Panama Canal cleared and do what he can to get the Joint Staff to secure that area.”
“Anything else?”
“Yeah, get this damned bandage off me. You said I had one good eye, right? Get me an eyepatch for the bad one.”
“Oh, this is going to be great. Admiral. You’ll look like a pirate when you get to the Barracuda. Should I get you a parrot too?”
“I already have one, Paully. Want a cracker?”
“Oh, very funny. Sir.”
arctic ocean, under THE polar icecap USS Piranha
“How long to the start of the Bering Strait Trench?”
It was nice when Scotty Court had the conn. He could be both officer of the deck and the navigator. Phillips felt that the more pressure the navigator was under, the better. The control room still blurped and wailed with the eerie sounds of the SHARKTOOTH under-ice anticollision sonar. Phillips stared at the console, wondering if the Japanese had the capability to go under the icecap.
Probably not, he decided. Why would they, considering their scope of operations.
“Captain, looks like another six hours.”
“At that point we’ll have enough depth below and clearance above to make, what do you think, Nav, twenty-five knots?”
“Well, Skipper, speaking as the ship’s navigator, I’m not comfortable with anything over twenty knots. Too much risk of collision with an ice raft or a ridge like the one you blasted through.
But speaking as the officer of the deck and the ship’s operations officer, I don’t see any reason why we should go any slower than thirty knots. We’ll have an eight-hour transit at thirty knots to the marginal ice zone. Once we have some open water overhead, I don’t see any reason for speed restriction at all. We’ve got an Oparea to get to, and we need to get there now.”
“You know. Court, if you ever want to be a skipper of one of these things, you’re going to have to learn to make the big decisions. If you want to run with the big dogs, you gotta bark like one. And bite, too. So can the equivocal bullshit and give me a straight answer.”
“Thirty knots, Captain. When we’re in the marginal ice zone, gun it.”
“Absolutely, Mr. Court.” Phillips clapped the navigator on the shoulder. “I don’t care what they say about you, Scotty, you’re okay.”
“Thanks, sir. I think.”
“I’m going to hit the rack, Mr. Court. Think you can get us through this maze all by yourself?”
“I’ll try, sir.”
“I’m just a phone call away, Nav.” Phillips opened the door in the aft bulkhead of control and stepped into his stateroom. He sank into the high-backed leather swivel chair and stared at his Writepad. He turned it on and reread the message about the sinking of the battle groups. He went to his locker and pulled out an old-fashioned paper chart of Japan, and taped it to his conference table. He stood over it for a long time, firing up a fresh cigar. After a while he got a pencil and marked in the boundary of the exclusion zone, the Japan Oparea. He stood over it, continuing to stare down at it. What would he do if he were the fleet commander? There must be some two dozen 688 ships he could coordinate and deploy into the Oparea. Coordination was the key. He would hit the Japanese with everything he had, all at once. It would be the only way to survive, especially since the Destiny IIs had the tactical and acoustical advantage. The tactical advantage was theirs because they knew where the intruder subs would be coming from and when. The acoustic advantage belonged to them because they were three to seven decibels quieter than the Improved Los Angeles-class ships. The quietest sub heard the intruder first and could set up to put a torpedo in the water before the intruder knew what was happening. So how could the American force beat that? Maybe by entering in superior numbers, two US boats for every Japanese boat, so that if a Destiny fired at one submarine, the noise of the torpedo launch would alert the other American ship. Hell of a way to win a war, Phillips thought. Maybe the Destiny ships would need to reload torpedoes and would go back into port, and the US force could catch them coming out. Still, the chances looked slim. The only hope was the stealth of the Seawolfclass subs and the power of the Vortex missiles. But there were two dozen Destiny submarines and only nine Vortex missiles.
northwest pacific USS Mount Whitney Adm. Michael Pacino lingered in the door of sick bay, saying goodbye to the doctor, then spending a few moments more with Lt. Eileen Constance, the nurse who had attended to him during the ten days he had spent recovering from the Reagan sinking. Finally he checked his watch, blinking as he realized it was hard to see anything with his left eye obscured by the patch. The Mount Whitney doctor had given him the black eyepatch until the eye healed. “I’ve got to go,” Pacino said. Eileen asked if he would come by before he got on the helicopter for the personnel transfer to the Barracuda. “We’ll see,” he said. Pacino struggled down the passageways, the eyepatch making navigation difficult, finally arriving at his temporary stateroom that he and Paully White were assigned. He opened the door, saw Paully, whose jaw dropped just before he erupted into laughter. “It’s not funny. The bad eye hurts,” Pacino said. “Sorry, boss, but I just couldn’t help it.
You need a spyglass and a hook for a hand, a tricornered cap, and you’re ready.”
“What I’m ready for is to get out of here.” Pacino went to the locker and took out the wet suit, took off his uniform and struggled into the wet suit. Paully White cursed getting into his. By the time Pacino was suited up he was sweating and seasick. The suit was tight and constricting and hot. As long as it had taken to get into it, it would probably take longer to get out of it once he was aboard the Barracuda.
Pacino glanced at his watch again. It wasn’t quite time yet—the Barracuda and the Mount Whitney needed to close the range between them or else the chopper wouldn’t have enough fuel. Pacino sat at the temporary stateroom’s conference table and unrolled his large chart-sized electronic display, which was a Writepad blown up to ten times the regular size. The chart display was selected to a large area view of the Japan Oparea. Pacino had made half a dozen marks on it, showing the present positions of his eight Los Angeles-class submarines.
Going through each position was a line segment indicating his idea of where he wanted that ship to go. Pacino glanced at the chart from a few feet away, frowned and erased the arrows through the ship’s present positions. “Troub
le?” Paully asked. “It’s not making sense,” Pacino said. The heat of the wet suit, the strain of putting it on in the stuffy stateroom while the ship rolled in the swells, the stress of being ordered to win a war that might not be winnable were all building into a world-class migraine headache. “Look, Paully, trying to attack the MSDF sub force with eight subs is a mistake. And geography is killing us too.
The backside, the Sea of Japan, is too remote, yet that’s where the Russian resupply ships would be. Warner wants results in one day—”
“Typical.”
“—so I’d have to put something together for the Pacific side. That would leave the Sea of Japan with no US submarines. Which means that the Russians could run out the so-called blockade and Warner gets mud on her face.”
“I say don’t worry about the Sea of Japan,” Paully said, stabbing his finger on the chart. “The Russians aren’t going to resupply from the east or the west—not after the Cheyenne put that supertanker on the bottom.”
“Go on.”
“Well, we’d be in big trouble if we hadn’t shot at one of the Russian ships, but we did. We sank the first guy dumb enough to run the blockade. We blew him to the bottom.
They lost ten men, the whole crew.”
“They shouldn’t have had to die. The Cheyenne crew would have had to live with that the rest of their lives—”
“Hey, they’re dead, too.” Pacino shook his head. The blockade had become a war and it was out of control. And he was the man responsible to the president to control it. By comparison, it had been so easy and so simple to just command a submarine, with all the relevant information at his fingertips. Now there were so many unknowns for the enemy as well as his own forces that his tactical decisions were going to come down to a series of guesses. He tried to remind himself that so much of his past success was based on hunches and guesswork, and that that was why he was here today. If his past intuitions in combat had been flawed he would be dead at the bottom of the Arctic Ocean or the Go Hai Bay or the Labrador Sea. Trust yourself, he commanded himself.
Paully was saying something. “Say again, Paully.”
“Okay, sir. We sank the supertanker Petersburg. Russia isn’t going to screw with another ship through the blockade—I’m amazed the Petersburg ran the blockade in the first place, because there’s no insurance for anyone running a blockade. Lloyd’s of London just laughs. You’re on your own.”
“I thought they would insure anything.”
“Oh, they will. The insurance premium for a billion dollar ship with, say, three hundred million dollars in crude would be, oh, about 1.3 billion. It doesn’t make any sense to insure it.
Like I said, you’re on your own. The Russians had to pay for the loss of the Petersburg. That’s a couple billion dollars in anyone’s currency.
You’ve spent your life welded into big sewer pipes, you don’t know squat about what makes the world go round. It’s money. Listen to me. A couple billion had to hurt and hurt bad. So the Russians, they’re not going to be anxious to lose another vessel. Yeah, the Japanese sank our battle group. But the battle group didn’t sink the Petersburg, our submarine did. And submarines are in visible. So no Russian merchant ship is gonna cross that line because for all they know we’ve got more submarines out there.”
“Paully, Russia’s money was an investment in a relationship with Japan. The Russians might try again now that the battle group is gone. They might try to escort in a convoy with Russian navy vessels, maybe even an Akula nuclear submarine.”
“No way, sir. The Russian fleet is too poor to use the fuel to go to sea. They can’t send a submarine out, there’s no food for the crews. Admiral, don’t you read the Newsfiles? The Russian navy hasn’t paid their officers for three months, and their sailors—the ones who are left—have been working for free for six months. The sub-trained ratings were tilling fields to try to get food to be able to go to sea, and the harvest this year was squat. This is not about charity to Japan, Admiral. This is about yen and rubles and pounds and dollars. The Russians are too poor. That’s the reason they were helping the Japanese in the first place. Now that you sank their tanker they’ve got a great excuse to do nothing. ‘Hey, we tried but they sank our ship, and the water’s full of subs, so we can’t risk any more.’ Now the Russians can sit this out and still get credit for trying to help.” Pacino’s headache was worse, and he had no idea where Paully’s tirade was going. White’s tone would be considered disrespectful by some officers; Pacino was grateful for it. He was blessed with an aide who would tell him the truth without the sugar coating. “So don’t worry about the Sea of Japan. Leave the Pasadena there as insurance. Put your subs on the southeast, the Tokyo side.”
Pacino sat back and rubbed his eyes. “Great. So we leave the west side alone. What about the Pacific side?”
“Sir, your vectors show the eight sub force spreading out.”
“Yes. They operate independently.”
“I think we should wolfpack them in on the north and south corners of the Oparea.
Two or three subs within ten miles of each other. One will serve as a tripwire for the other. If one gets attacked, the other can back him up from a different bearing. We know the Japanese can kill one of ours alone. Why not change the equation?” Pacino glared at White. “So you’re suggesting we rewrite the Approach and Attack manual, abandon forty years’ worth of nuclear submarine tactics, techniques that have been tested in the Bahamas test range in years of sub-versus-sub exercises, years of computer simulations against the Destiny class—abandon it all and go back to World War II U-boat tactics. Is that what you’re saying?”
White said nothing. “Well?”
“Yes sir. That’s my recommendation.” For the first time since Pacino came in with the eyepatch he smiled at Paully, then held out his hand. “Good. It’s a great idea. I’m going to call it Tactical Plan White. If it works I’ll make sure you get the credit for it.”
“And if it fails, you’ll get to take the heat.” Pacino looked up.
“If it fails it won’t matter.” He pushed the chart over to Paully. “Show me where you’d put the boats.”
“Nine boats, eight with Pasadena holding down the Sea of Japan. That’s four packs of two, call them A, B, C and D. A and B start here in the southwest Oparea. C and D begin farther north. A and B move north and C and D come south down the coastline, linking up outside Tokyo Bay. By that time the Oparea is secured.”
“There’s no D. Remember, we’re keeping Barracuda out of the wolfpacks. I want her center stage, right here. We’re going to be at periscope depth trying to run the show.”
“That almost works out, sir. We could put the Buffalo, Albany and Boston up in the north, and Atlanta, Jacksonville, Charleston and Birmingham down south.”
“The Yankees against the Rebs.”
“Easy to remember, anyway.” Pacino grabbed the Writepad and began a tactical employment message. Each ship was given a position and a time to be there. The subs were to link up with their wolfpack partner in the Pacific, then enter the Oparea. Pacino wrote that each ship was to report to him using SLOT buoys, the one-way radio buoys that could be launched from a signal ejector at depth and would then rise to the surface and transmit, allowing the subs to stay deep. “What do you think?” Pacino asked Paully. “Transmitting, even SLOT buoys, is dangerous. The Japanese will be onto us.”
“I’ll tell them to program coded SLOTS with prewritten messages. Then at midnight and noon they’ll put them up, and on the Barracuda we’ll know what’s going on.”
“Coded slots?”
“Code 1 means’no contact,’ code 2 means’pursuing contact,’ code 3 means ‘I’m under attack’ and code 4 means’we sank a Destiny.”
“Not much meat there, Admiral.”
“We can’t micromanage the skippers. We just need to know if they’re still alive.” Pacino modified the message, then attached the electronic file depicting his marked-up chart. “Too bad we lost the USUBCOM aut
henticators when the Reagan sank. Now our people will just have to trust it’s us sending the message.”
“No, sir.
We’ll have access to Barracuda’s authenticators. They’ll have everything we had on the Reagan.” Pacino nodded, sent the order. The Writepad transmitted the files to the megaserver in orbit, which relayed the data to the Navy’s western Pacific Comstar communications satellite and from there to the subs nearing the Oparea. “Time to go, Paully. You got everything?”
“I’m loaded. The chopper is waiting on the aft deck. You want to say goodbye to the ship’s captain? He asked me to tell ypu he sends his luck. Hugs and kisses, all that good shit.”
“No time.” Pacino pulled out his waterproof bag, which was a carbon fiber canister with a gasketed screw top. He rolled up and stowed the chart pad and the Writepad inside, along with the uniform he’d come with and some new ones. He still had his solid gold dolphin pin and his admiral’s stars from the uniform he’d been wearing when the battle group was attacked.
“Let’s go.” They walked down the crowded passageways of the Mount Whitney, their wet suits creaking and squeaking. The ship’s halls were busy with cables and junction boxes and pipes, but nowhere near as crowded as a nuclear submarine. The surface ships wasted space and volume everywhere, so much so that it was hard for Pacino to walk their passageways without thinking of the waste, but soon he would be aboard the Barracuda and it would all fall into place— But would it? He felt a dread come into him then, settling onto his spirit like a carrion bird on a carcass. Suddenly the war seemed to become sinister and alive, a beast too big for him, and for the first time in memory he felt unequal to the task. In the past he’d taken his abilities to the limit. On the Devilfish he had once been faced with sinking under the polar icecap with a dying nuclear submarine or trying to emergency blow through ice a hundred feet thick. He had had nothing to lose in aiming for the ice—either his crew would have died if he did nothing, or they had a chance, however slight, to live if he took a huge risk. It hadn’t been a choice. Now, his decisions would affect several thousand men with several thousand families, and maybe even the nation. If he prevailed, America would again be the big kid on the block. If he lost, the US would go the way of Napoleon’s France or Hitler’s Germany or Sihoud’s United Islamic Front of God. The pressure was too much, he could feel it crawling down his throat, a cold claw on his heart. Every decision would inevitably send men to their deaths. He tried to tell himself to stop such thoughts and calm down, but the battle coming up in the next hours would determine a judgment of his entire life. Before, at sea, in command, he had coped with the pressure by simply telling himself that he knew his crew had taken risks to come to sea with him and that they trusted him. And that if he lost, he lost his ship and his men and that was it. But there were other ships, other captains, other days for them to fight. Here now, in the Pacific outside of Japan, there was only himself and his fleet, two-thirds of it late, the other third already committed by an overly aggressive commander-in-chief who might relent when he confronted her—but who might not. And this battle was not just for his life, his crew’s, his ship, it was for a whole fleet of ships, his country’s future. If he blew this… Pacino knew he would be sailing into darkness, not only blind but dumb, not able to tell his ships his orders unless they came out of the depths to hear him— Paully’s voice interrupted, his words focused on the irrelevant, the nurse who had attended Pacino when he was injured, Paully, of course, unaware of Pacino’s thoughts. “Admiral, you really should take a few minutes with Nurse Eileen. She tended to you when you were out of it!”
Barracuda- Final Bearing Page 27