by Jeff Edwards
Army General Horace Gilmore, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, cleared his throat. He was a mild-looking man, with a rounded face and black-rimmed glasses that would have been at home on the nose of a librarian. The rack of ribbons on the left breast of his uniform jacket hadn’t come from shelving books, though. He leaned his head forward and stared over the tops of his glasses with eyes that were nearly predatory in their intensity. “And then what, Admiral Casey?”
The admiral sat down and pulled his seat up next to the table. “I believe that’s what we’re here to discuss, General.”
Secretary of Defense Rebecca Kilpatrick leaned back in her chair. “I get the feeling that you already have a plan of action.”
“I do, Madam Secretary. I think we should hunt those bastards down and sink every one of them.”
Secretary Kilpatrick smiled. “It has the virtue of being simple. And a simple plan is often the best plan.” She looked around the table. “But I think we need to consider this situation carefully before we start shooting at people. Things may not be as cut-and-dried as we think.”
“With all due respect, Madam Secretary,” the admiral said, “it looks pretty simple from my side of the table. One of our allies has been attacked. If we don’t cover their backs, how can we expect them to cover ours?”
“I don’t dispute the fact that one of our allies has been attacked,” Secretary Kilpatrick said. “The question is which of our allies?”
“That’s pretty obvious,” the admiral said.
SecDef’s eyebrows went up. “Are you certain? Right now, we can’t even be sure who fired the first shot. What if we investigate and discover that one of the British ships launched first, and the Germans only returned fire in self-defense?”
“I suppose it’s possible,” Admiral Casey said. “But I don’t think it’s very likely.”
“You’ve been in combat before,” the secretary of defense said. “And so have I.” As a retired Army colonel, she was one of only three people in the room who had earned the right to wear the coveted Combat Infantry Badge.
“We both know how the game is played,” she said. “Some yahoo crowds your airspace, so you lock on them with fire control radar. They return the favor and paint you with their fire control radar. Before you know it, you’re both pumping enough electromagnetic energy into the air to microwave a hotdog. Alarms are going off; adrenaline levels are sky high; people are shouting. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, somebody eventually gets tired of the game and backs down. Everybody gets to go home claiming victory. But about one percent of the time, somebody gets spooked and does something stupid. Sometimes it’s one of our guys, and sometimes it’s one of their guys.”
“The Brits are claiming that the Germans shot first.”
“Of course they are,” the secretary of defense said. “In their shoes, I’d probably say the same thing, whether I’d shot first or not.”
General Gilmore nodded. “I agree. We have to table the matter of the shooting, at least until we know who initiated the attack. That still leaves us with four German submarines hauling ass through the Med. What do we do about them?”
“We can’t afford to attack them out of hand,” Undersecretary of State Mitchell said.
“We’re not going to,” the president said. “I want the Abraham Lincoln strike group to intercept them and turn them around.”
Admiral Casey tilted his head to the side. “That tactic didn’t seem to work too well for the British, sir.”
The president brought his palms together and interlaced his fingers. “A fully escorted aircraft carrier should fare slightly better than two aging British warships. I would hope so, anyway.”
General Gilmore nodded. “No doubt you are right, Mr. President. But Admiral Casey does have a point. While there’s no conclusive evidence yet, my instincts tell me that the Germans probably pulled the trigger first. What if they start shooting at us?”
“They won’t,” the president said. “Somebody just got an itchy finger. It’s not going to happen again.” He looked at the Chief of Naval Operations. “Bob, it’s your job to make sure that it doesn’t happen again. We don’t want to provoke the Germans; we just want to turn them around.”
“Understood, sir,” the CNO said. “We’ll play it low-key. But what happens if the Germans open up on us anyway?”
“Jesus Christ, Bob!” the president snapped. “Get over it, and get over it now. You’ve got your orders. We’re not going to get in a shooting war with the god-damned Republic of Germany. That is simply not an option. It’s … it’s unthinkable.”
CHAPTER 15
TORPEDO: THE HISTORY AND EVOLUTION OF A KILLING MACHINE
(Excerpted from an unpublished manuscript [pages 91–95] and reprinted by permission of the author, Retired Master Chief Sonar Technician David M. Hardy, USN)
Following the American Revolution, naval tacticians in many countries began to see the torpedo’s promise as a weapon. The torpedo still lacked a viable delivery system, but its destructive potential was nothing short of astounding.
Over the course of the next several decades, two basic design philosophies emerged. Floating torpedoes (by far the most common) were designed to drift on, or slightly below, the surface of the water until they came into contact with the hull of an enemy ship. Today, these so-called floating torpedoes would be classified as mines, but in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the word torpedo was understood to include nearly any form of waterborne explosive device. During the American Civil War, when Union Admiral David Farragut shouted his famous line, “Damn the torpedoes! Full speed ahead!” he was referring to mines.
Spar torpedoes were second in popularity and effectiveness to floating torpedoes. A spar torpedo consisted of an explosive charge mounted on a wooden pole (or spar) and lashed to the bow of a small boat. Rigged to project several yards out in front of the bow, the spar torpedo was designed to be rammed directly against the hull of the target vessel. The resulting explosion, only a few yards from the attacking boat, would almost certainly result in damage to the torpedo boat or its crew. Understandably, spar torpedoes were unpopular weapons, and they saw very little application in combat before they fell out of use altogether.
Destructive capacity notwithstanding, the lack of a reliable delivery system severely limited the effectiveness of both spar and floating torpedo designs. It would take a major technological breakthrough to change that.
The breakthrough finally came in 1866, when a British-born naval engineer named Robert Whitehead built the first self-propelled torpedo. Whitehead called his invention the automotive torpedo (or sometimes, the locomotive torpedo), but critics and supporters alike insisted on calling it the Whitehead torpedo. By any title, the self-propelled torpedo represented more than a technological breakthrough; it was a quantum leap in naval weaponry.
In appearance, Whitehead’s torpedo was a cigar-shaped steel cylinder with severely tapered ends. Mounted at the rear (or afterbody) of the weapon was a propeller, which was coupled by a drive shaft to a pneumatic motor inside the cylinder. Also mounted on the afterbody were a pair of horizontal fins and a pair of vertical fins, to guide the torpedo through the water in a straight line. The pneumatic motor was powered by compressed air from a tank built into the middle section of the weapon. The nose of the weapon was dedicated to an explosive charge, the warhead. Whitehead used explosive gun cotton in most of his early warhead designs, but eventually he switched to dynamite, which was more stable and packed significantly more destructive power.
The ironclad warships of Whitehead’s day were defenseless against torpedo attacks. Designed to repel explosive shells from naval cannons, ironclads were heavily armored all the way down to the waterline. Since cannon shells could not effectively penetrate below the water, naval architects the world over agreed that it was not necessary to armor the underwater portion of a warship’s hull. (In fact, an armored hull was considered undesirable; the increased weight would make a ship ride
lower in the water, reducing its speed and its fuel efficiency.) As a consequence, in the closing decades of the nineteenth century, every warship in the world was vulnerable to torpedo attack.
Nineteenth-century Sailors found the very idea of the torpedo both insulting and terrifying. They began to refer to Whitehead’s invention as the Devil’s Device. Many prominent naval officers condemned the machine as a barbarous method of warfare. After all, war at sea was a gentleman’s game, and a device that slipped in under a ship’s armor wasn’t a very far cry from a punch below the belt. It could hardly be considered the weapon of an honorable man.
Luckily (for its detractors), Whitehead’s torpedo had a lot of problems. Early models had difficulty maintaining their depth in the water. A torpedo that rose too high in the water would impact on a ship’s armor, which might well absorb the explosion without serious damage. A torpedo that ran too deep would pass under the target ship’s hull and miss it completely. To make matters worse, since Whitehead’s first models did not have steering mechanisms, they were easily pushed off course by tides or ocean currents, frequently causing them to miss their targets.
Whitehead applied his engineering skills to the first problem: depth control. It took him two years to solve it, but by 1868, he had the solution: a device that he referred to as the secret. Many European countries were becoming interested in the automotive torpedo, and Whitehead was intensely aware that he had a growing list of competitors. To throw them off the scent, Whitehead hinted strongly that his secret depth control device was highly complex and would be difficult or impossible to duplicate. In fact—despite its dramatic title—the secret was little more than a piston, a cylinder, and a spring attached to the horizontal fins by a mechanical linkage. Seawater flowed into the cylinder by means of a small vent just behind the warhead. As the water pressure increased with depth, the seawater in the chamber would exert force on the piston, compressing it against the spring. The motion of the piston would in turn move the mechanical linkage, which would change the angle of the horizontal fins, making the torpedo climb or dive. When the force exerted on the piston by the seawater became equal to the opposing force of the spring, the fins would return to a level position, causing the torpedo to level off. By adjusting the tension on the spring, Whitehead was able to pre-select the depth to which a torpedo would dive. To make depth changes even smoother, Whitehead attached a pendulum to the linkage to dampen minor oscillations as the piston shifted positions.
The basic design of Whitehead’s secret depth control device was so successful that it remained in use—with very few changes—for nearly a hundred years.
With the depth control issue finally solved, Whitehead turned his attention to the problem of steering. Unlike the depth control issue, which had yielded to Whitehead’s engineering expertise in only two years, the steering problem seemed to defy solution. Whitehead (and his competitors) spent the next several decades trying to solve it.
In the meantime, the unsolved steering problem did not prevent the torpedo from gaining popularity. Over the social and moral objections of many naval officers, nearly every navy in Europe began buying or building automotive torpedoes. Small, steam-powered torpedo boats began appearing in increasing numbers, and many larger warships were back-fitted to carry torpedoes. The situation escalated into an arms race, and conventional wisdom held that any navy that did not arm itself with torpedoes was likely to fall prey to one that had embraced torpedo warfare.
On January 25, 1878, the automotive torpedo found its first real use in combat. Russia, under the rule of Tsar Alexander II, had been at war with Turkey since April of the previous year. On the night of January twenty-fifth, two Russian torpedo boats, Tchesma and Sinope, conducted attacks on the armed Turkish steamer Intibah. Both shots were direct hits, and the resulting explosions devastated the Turkish ship. The wreckage of the Intibah slipped beneath the waves in less than two minutes.
In many ways, the attack was less impressive than Whitehead might have hoped for. The Intibah—although armed—was not an ironclad, so the torpedo’s effectiveness still had not been demonstrated against a fully armored warship. (In fact, the Tchesma and Sinope had conducted earlier attacks on the Turkish ironclad Mahmoudieh, but both of their torpedoes had missed the target.) Still, details notwithstanding, history had been made: automotive torpedoes had struck and destroyed an armed vessel under conditions of actual combat. The torpedo was no longer a curiosity, or even a theoretical weapon. It was an engine of war. The race to acquire and perfect torpedo technology rose to a level approaching frenzy.
The torpedo, in various designs, saw use in several sea battles over the next few decades, with wildly varying degrees of success. The mixed results were the product of two factors: one positive and one negative. On the positive side, the destructive energy that a torpedo could deliver was astounding; it was not at all unusual for a single torpedo hit to cripple or sink a fully armored warship. On the negative side, the lack of a self-correcting steering mechanism made it difficult to actually hit a target with any real degree of reliability.
In the early 1890s, Whitehead became convinced that the torpedo steering problem could be solved by installing a gyroscope. (Invented in 1852 by French physicist Jean Bernard Leon Foucault, the gyroscope was known to have interesting properties but was generally thought to have no practical application.) Whitehead embarked on a series of experiments using a Russian-made gyro called a Petrovich. Despite its promise, the Russian gyro was too crudely made to suit Whitehead’s purpose. In 1895, Whitehead turned his attention to a precision-built gyroscope designed by an Austrian naval engineer named Ludwig Obry. Unlike the Russian model, Obry’s gyroscope could achieve and maintain a high enough rotation speed (about 2,400 rpm) to give a torpedo both duration and accuracy.
Whitehead attached the gyro to a two-way air valve, which directed measured quantities of compressed air to a steering engine whenever a torpedo began to deviate from its directed path through the water. The steering engine was connected in turn to the torpedo’s vertical fins, which Whitehead re-engineered into turnable rudders. It was an ingenious solution to a problem that had plagued the automotive torpedo ever since its birth in 1866. Gyroscopic steering increased the accuracy of the torpedo’s course to a mere half degree over a distance of seven thousand yards, or three and a half nautical miles.
Suddenly, the torpedo had striking range, accuracy, and the incredible destructive potential for which it had become famous. With the major engineering problems finally solved, it was nearly inevitable that the torpedo would begin to exert a significant influence on world events.
CHAPTER 16
SOUTHERN MEDITERRANEAN SEA
MONDAY; 14 MAY
1609 hours (4:09 PM)
TIME ZONE +2 ‘BRAVO’
Lieutenant Shari Scarlotti leaned her head against the side window and felt the bass drone of her plane’s engines resonate through her skull. Dark-haired and small-boned, her slight frame looked out of scale in the pilot’s seat, like a child swallowed up in her father’s easy chair. The relentless sound of the turbines never ceased and rarely wavered while the big four-engined aircraft was airborne.
Her air crew had nicknamed it the hypno-tone, and they frequently joked that it lulled them into a post-hypnotic state and then forced them to perform acts that they would never have even considered without its mesmeric (and undoubtedly evil) influence. Any trouble they got into when they were off-duty was invariably blamed on fourteen-hour missions spent listening to the hypno-tone.
Her Flight Engineer, Chief Benjamin Lanier, took the opposite side of the argument, asserting that the steady thrum of the huge Allison turboprops was the most beautiful music audible to the human ear. With a couple of beers in him, he’d even been known to claim that he couldn’t make love to his wife without a recording of turboprops droning in the background.
Shari wouldn’t go quite that far, but she liked the sound; she liked it a lot. The Lockheed Martin P-3C Orion was a big p
lane and over thirty years old. But as long as the 4,600 horsepower engines kept pumping out that deep monotonous tone, she knew that her aircraft had a guaranteed place in the sky.
Shari’s copilot, Lieutenant (junior grade) Andy Cole, squeezed past her right shoulder and slid into the right-hand seat. He held out a tall, spill-proof plastic cup. “Coffee, boss? Just the way you like it: fourteen sugars, nine creams, and then I waved the cup over the pot to give it that good coffee flavor.”
Shari reached for the cup and took a sip. It was just the way she liked it, hot and black. She swallowed. “Thanks, wise-ass.” She took another sip and swallowed again. “What’s the word from Nav?”
Andy set his own coffee cup in a car-type cup holder that he had Velcroed to his side of the cockpit and went about the business of belting himself into the copilot’s chair. “Our fearless Navigator assures me that we are right on track, and nine minutes ahead of profile. We should be on station in about fifteen minutes.” He lifted his coffee cup out of the holder.
Shari nodded. “Good. It’s just about time to start this party.”
Andy furrowed his eyebrows in mock concentration. “I think Nav had his fingers crossed,” he said. “So he could have been blowing smoke up my butt.”
Shari looked out her side window at the brilliant blue waters of the southern Med scrolling by fifteen thousand feet below. “If I’ve told you once, I’ve told you a hundred times,” she said. “If you don’t put your butt where Nav can get to it, he can’t blow smoke where you don’t want it.”
Andy grinned. “Roger that, boss.”
Shari rotated her neck to relieve a crick. “How are we looking for Electronic Support?”
“The ALR-66 is still out of commission,” Andy said. “Chief Lanier is back there breathing down the tech’s neck, trying to get it fixed. Apparently, we need a break-while-stepping relay, whatever the hell that is. It’s probably going to stay broke till we get back to the barn.”