Rockets' Red Glare

by Greg Dinallo

  “Hell, I’d have been tickled to pull things together with Giancarlo for you. Can I help out with anything else?”

  “Affirmative. Evaluate capability of newly appointed chief Churchco Equestrian to assume role.”

  “Sorry. I can’t recommend that, Jake. The boy’s got the smarts, but he’s going to have his hands full trading horses over there. This is his first crack out of the box. I’d hate to see him screw it up.”

  “Agreed.”

  “I’ve got some offshore problems snapping at my heels,” Churcher said, glancing anxiously to the Van Gogh. “I’m going to have to drop off.”

  “Seven-fifteen tee-off, opening day, Eagle Rock?”

  “I’ll be there.”

  Churcher hung up. He slipped the fraudulent painting into the portfolio, and zipped it closed with an angry motion. There was an element of danger in what he was about to do. It gave him pause. Not for his own safety, but that of someone for whom he cared deeply. He scooped up the phone again, called Moscow, and alerted her. Then he crossed to a door in the wall of arched windows and exited to an expanse of roof where a helicopter waited.

  The high-speed amphibious craft was painted Churchco’s corporate black and silver. It was a customized version of the CC-65 Viper, the two-seat attack helicopter Churchco Aero-Space manufactured for the military. The weapons and munitions bays had been gutted, and fitted with auxiliary fuel tanks that greatly extended its range.

  Churcher set the portfolio on the vacant copilot’s seat, donned safety harness and headphones, and threw a number of switches on the console.

  The turbine whined to life, the slack rotors quickly becoming a whirling blur.

  Churcher gently pulled back on the joystick.

  The chopper lifted off in the familiar forward tilt, revealing the concentric rings of a huge Churchco logotype painted on the roof as a landing target.

  In seconds, Churcher was gliding above the Republic Bank Center, and on over One Shell Plaza, Penzoil Place, and the other curtain-walled shafts that stabbed into the morning sun.

  Churcher clicked on the radio.

  “This is Churchco N653WD to Hobby Field. Request clearance to heading three five zero.”

  “Cleared to three five zero. Fifteen hundred.”

  “Fifteen hundred,” Churcher echoed.

  “Roger,” the controller said, then shifting to familiar tone, “This here’s Jordy Banks. That you, Mr. Churcher?”

  “Sure is. How’re you doing, son?”

  “Just fine, sir,” he drawled. “Churchco’s already up three and a half.”

  Churcher had been so preoccupied that morning he hadn’t checked the stock activity as he always did.

  “Three and five-eighths,” he bluffed. “And don’t sound so surprised.”

  Churcher clicked off, punched the throttle, and headed southeast toward the Gulf of Mexico. In twenty minutes he’d covered the distance to a cluster of oil drilling platforms. Each sported the concentric Cs of the Churchco logotype.

  Below, on Churchco 47, bare-chested men in hard hats wrestled with the drilling pipe.

  The whomp of spinning rotors signaled the helicopter’s approach. It came at an angle toward a landing pad that cantilevered over the sea.

  Churcher hovered momentarily, as if he was going to land, then punched the throttle, lifting off again.

  The men below shouted and waved as Churcher headed out toward open sea. One of the youngsters turned to the leather-skinned crew chief next to him. “What’s that all about?” he shouted.

  “That was the boss,” the chief hooted. He whipped chain around pipe and pulled hard. “Just his way of letting us know he’s out there. Buzzes us all the time.”

  The new fellow looked after the helicopter, now a distant gull on the horizon. “Son of a bitch—” he said admiringly, punching the air with a gloved fist.

  Churcher knew his employees. And he knew they got a kick out of the chairman of the board piloting his own helicopter. And, so did he.

  Aircraft had always captivated him. At age twelve, to the consternation of his parents, he skipped farm chores to catch rides in a rickety crop duster. The old bi-wing’s pilot was a former World War I flier who filled the teenager’s mind with tales of bravery and derring-do. And each time they soared above the endless acres of blight-ravaged crops, Churcher fantasized that they would land in another world far from the dust-bowl poverty in which he lived. And each time the plane touched down on the drought-hardened field behind his family’s tiny farm house, he cursed the bitter reality and vowed that no matter what it took, he would one day have unlimited wealth—and he soon realized that the symbol could become the means. Obsessed with learning to fly, but not having the money for formal instruction, he talked the crop duster into giving him lessons in exchange for gasoline—siphoned from the family’s farm vehicles. He soloed at sixteen and, a year later, won a scholarship to Houston’s Rice University, where he majored in engineering and designed his first airframes. As an OSS operative during World War II, he flew gliders to night landings behind enemy lines and discovered that he thrived on the risks; and now, he was not only a pilot but also a manufacturer of aircraft, including assemblies of the Space Shuttle, and Apollo moon rocket before that; and a lifetime of risk-taking had paid off.

  The helicopter left the last drilling rig behind.

  Churcher engaged the computerized navigation system, locking the chopper onto a preprogrammed heading—the precise intersection of latitude and longitude which he had passed on during his call to the Soviet Embassy in Washington the night before.

  The data transfer had been accomplished by concealing the numerical coordinates in Churchco contract numbers. Churcher’s extensive business dealings in the Soviet Union generated many bona fide calls during which contracts were discussed. And for years, both sides had used this method to arrange meetings and specify locations without raising the suspicion of national security eavesdroppers.

  The chopper was below any radar now, skimming the surface of the Gulf. Anyone monitoring it would have assumed Churcher had landed on the drilling platform; and of course, the roughnecks assumed its destination another of the Churchco platforms sprinkled over the thousands of square miles of ocean. Churcher counted on that whenever he made this run.

  * * * * * *

  The previous afternoon in Moscow, a TU-144 supersonic jetliner—a civilian version of the Soviet mach 2.3, 9,600-mile-range Blackjack bomber—left Ogarkhov Air Force Base. Six hours later, at 3:35 A.M. EST, it touched down at Castro International in Havana, and taxied to a secured area away from the terminal.

  Soviet Minister of Culture Aleksei Deschin and Vladimir Uzykin, his KGB bodyguard, were the only passengers. They hurried down a mobile boarding ramp to a Russian-made limousine parked on the tarmac.

  The chauffeur-driven Chaika took the two men to the Soviet Naval Base at Cienfuegos on Cuba’s southern shore. They boarded a Soviet Foxtrot class submarine, and went directly to the officer’s mess, where Gorodin and Beyalev were waiting.

  At precisely 5 A.M., as scheduled, while the four men breakfasted, the Foxtrot slipped from its berth into the main ship channel.

  The captain ordered his executive officer to set a southwest course into the Caribbean.

  Almost immediately, two hundred and fifty miles out in space, a United States intelligence gathering satellite detected the sub’s movement. The KH-11 Ferret was the cutting edge of surveillance technology. Circling the planet in Polar orbit, the Ferret took advantage of the earth’s rotation, and scrutinized the surface twice every twenty-four hours, performing heretofore unimaginable feats of surveillance; its sensitive electronic interceptors monitored up to a hundred telephone conversations simultaneously; its high-resolution camera read the numbers on the license plates of moving vehicles; and its lightning-fast central processor recorded and/or transmited the ferreted data to ground stations—the top-secret, mission-control-like rooms where technicians and analysts sat at consoles monito
ring space-, land-, and sea-based surveillance devices.

  The photographic data on the Soviet submarine was instantly transmitted to Anti-Submarine Warfare Headquarters at the Naval Air Station in Pensacola, Florida. ASW intelligence personnel evaluated the information, identified the ship as an enemy vessel, and initiated an alert.

  * * * * * *

  Chapter Seven

  The digital clock in Pensacola’s ASW Duty Room read 05:23 hours.

  Navy First Lieutenant Jon Lowell was the airborne tactical coordination officer on duty. The tall sandy-haired Californian was leaning over the pool table about to put away a game of eight ball when the alert sounded. The other members of the crew scrambled immediately. Lowell coolly stroked the winning shot before hurrying after them.

  Last to leave, last to arrive, never pressured, Lowell had a patient, methodical nature that made him well suited to ASW. His resting pulse of forty-eight came from running the equivalent of a 10-K each morning in under thirty minutes. He’d grown up in a rambling Santa Barbara beach house, and inherited his exceptional hand-eye coordination from his mother—a talented graphic artist—and honed it in the video arcade on State Street, where, as a teenager, he spent after-school hours destroying alien starships that flew across his video screen.

  Within minutes of the alert, Lowell and his crew had collected mission data, and were sprinting across the tarmac to their Lockheed Viking S-3A. The two-engine plane—pilot and copilot side by side on the flight deck, TACCO and sensor operator in aft cabin—was designed to locate and track submarines, and equipped with armaments to destroy them. Primarily carrier based, the Viking’s small crew, and maneuverability enabled it to respond quickly to ASW alerts from land bases as well.

  The Viking’s pilot, Navy Lt. Commander Keith Arnsbarger, was a tall red-faced Georgian. The first thing he put on each morning was the mirror-lensed sunglasses he claimed to be wearing at birth. He had done two carrier-based tours in Nam piloting reconnaissance aircraft, and assignment to ASW was a natural.

  Arnsbarger had gone straight from Annapolis to war, and had been living in the fast lane ever since. The endless chain of one-night stands and hangovers ended the day he started dating Cissy Tate, the widow of a fellow pilot whose F-14 vanished during a training mission over the Gulf. Arnsbarger had been living with Cissy and her eleven-year-old son for three years now. Lately, he’d been thinking of the boy more and more as his own, and though he hadn’t told anyone yet, for the first time in his life he was considering marriage.

  He was imagining what Cissy’s reaction to the idea might be, imagining her gentle face coming to life when he got a priority ASW clearance from Pensacola Tower and started the Viking down the north/south runway. Twenty seconds later, the silver and sky-blue bird rose from the tarmac and, wheels still retracting, headed due south over the Gulf of Mexico.

  * * * * * *

  When the Soviet submarine left Cienfuegos harbor, she remained on the surface and headed for open sea. The sounds of her screws pushing water were picked up by SOSUS.

  The Sound Surveillance System was a global network of hydrophones anchored to the ocean floor. These submerged listening posts ringed Soviet Naval bases and shipping channels throughout the world. The Caribbean net that covered Central American and Cuban ports detected the sounds of the Foxtrot’s cavitation.

  This noise—the whine of a spinning propeller creating a vortex, a whirling mass of water with a vacuum at its center—was transmitted by cable to ASW Headquarters in Pensacola.

  Within minutes, these sounds were recorded, computer analyzed, and matched against a library of previously recorded acoustic signatures of the Soviet fleet. The submarine’s “ac-sig” identified the target vessel as a Soviet Foxtrot.

  This data—along with location coordinates, also determined from the hydrophone contact—was immediately transmitted to the Viking in flight.

  In the compartment aft of the cockpit, Lieutenant Lowell sat at the plane’s electronics-packed surveillance console. The unit is folded vertically about the TACCO’s center of vision, presenting him with three equidistant data planes: flashing banks of SOSUS status indicators above, combination radarscope and graphic tracking monitor with attendant controls in the center, computer and communications apparatus below.

  Lowell entered the newly transmitted positional coordinates for the submarine.

  The computerized tracking system reconciled the data from the satellite and hydrophone contacts, and recalculated the Fly To Point, the estimated position of the Soviet submarine, which had been previously determined from the satellite data only. Lowell had just initiated a process of refinement that would continue automatically.

  The blip of the Soviet Foxtrot started pinging across the radarscope.

  Lowell’s pulse quickened; his eyes narrowed; he straightened in the chair.

  “Target up,” he announced while encoding again.

  Three rows of numbers flashed across the screen.

  “Range—three point six five miles. Heading—six zero five five. Speed—twenty-five knots,” Lowell reported in crisp cadence.

  The first light was just bending over the horizon as Arnsbarger repeated the data and dipped a wing, adjusting the Viking’s course to the new FTP. The Soviet submarine was still on the surface when Arnsbarger leaned forward in the cockpit and spotted it. A plume of water arched behind the conning tower as it sliced upright through the sea.

  “There she blows, bucko,” he called out. He increased airspeed, put the Viking into a shallow dive, and started closing.

  Below, atop the Foxtrot’s conning tower, her captain pulled the stem of an English briar from his mouth and leaned into his binoculars, observing the Viking’s approach. “Clear the bridge! Dive! Dive!” he shouted, his voice blaring from loudspeakers in every compartment in the submarine.

  The Klaxons wailed their call to action.

  The crew scrambled to battle stations in response.

  The captain and executive officer came down the ladder from the bridge into the control room, joining Gorodin, Beyalev, Deschin, and Uzykin, who had assembled in response to the alarm.

  “What is it?” Deschin asked. “Something wrong?”

  The captain shook his head. “Right on schedule as a matter of fact,” he replied without taking the pipe from his mouth. He slipped out of his parka, and dropped it onto a hook welded to the bulkhead. “We’re just playing the game,” he went on as he passed them. “We play it every time we make this run.” He smiled, took up his position at the chart table, and addressed the diving officer. “Negative trim. Take her to two hundred feet,” he ordered. “All ahead full.”

  “The game?” Deschin inquired impatiently, turning to the men around him.

  “The Americans expect us to dive and run,” Gorodin replied. “So”—he paused, inhaling deeply on one of the little wrinkled cigars he favored.

  “So we dive and run,” Beyalev interjected, taking advantage of Gorodin’s hesitation. “We don’t want to break the pattern we’ve established and arouse their curiosity beyond the normal.”

  “What would make them curious about this, this—” Deschin paused, gesturing to the interior of the sub as he searched for an appropriately derogatory word “—this rust bucket of obsolete technology?” he continued, finding it. Though a reliable workhorse, the diesel-powered Foxtrot class was designed in the fifties and was far from the cutting edge of Soviet naval power.

  “Nothing,” Gorodin answered simply, smiling to indicate that that was the point.

  “Precisely,” Beyalev snapped, launching into one of his self-aggrandizing tirades. “Once identified as such—and not a Viktor Class III whose superior speed, range, and armaments intimidate them—they will lose interest as they always do. Then”—he made a sharp turn in the air with his hand accompanied by a whistling noise—“back to base for the Viking.”

  Deschin let an amused smile indicate no more explanation was required.

  Beyalev nodded and reddened sl
ightly, sensing he may have overdone it.

  Uzykin, the KGB man, had said nothing throughout. He stole a glance at Beyalev, clearly pleased with his enthusiasm if not his penchant for verbosity.

  On the surface, the sea rolled over the decks and conning tower of the Foxtrot as it submerged.

  The Viking, jet engines whining, made a low strafing run. Doors in the underside of the fuselage yawned open, dropping sonobuoys into the Caribbean a thousand feet below. Hydrophones within the canister-shaped units began transmitting data that pinpointed the submarine’s course beneath the sea up to the Viking.

  The tracking-monitor in Lowell’s console came alive with a series of green lines: each represented data from one of the sonobouys; each moved in a staccato rhythm across the screen; all intersected to reveal the position and course of the Foxtrot below.

  Lowell tracked the sub for approximately half an hour. He ascertained its course was away from the United States mainland, verified its acoustic signature as that of a Soviet Foxtrot, and transmitted this data to ASW Forces Command.

  As the Russians anticipated, once satisfied the vessel was an over-the-hill Foxtrot, and not a missile-carrying Viktor Class III, ASW Command called off the alert, ordering the Viking back to base.

  Arnsbarger put the two-engine jet into a looping right turn.

  Lowell sat staring pensively at his console. After a few moments, he leaned into the cockpit.

  “Where do you think they go?” he asked.

  Arnsbarger shrugged. “Search me,” he replied. “Probably Castro’s weekly nose candy junket to Bogota.”

  Lowell laughed. “No kidding. This is what? The fourth, fifth time that we’ve tracked ’em. Same sub. Same course. Like every three, four months, right?”

  Arnsbarger nodded, swung onto a heading for Pensacola, and pushed the throttles home.

  The plane vibrated, then just hummed.

  Lowell was deep in thought.

  “I think I know,” he said.

  “Know what?” Arnsbarger asked.