by James Philip
Tom Moorer and Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird, frequently discussed the ‘down side’ of the helter-skelter ‘re-floating and modernisation’ of the surface fleet. Until last summer the plan had been to achieve a five-hundred-ship surface fleet and seventy-five-boat nuclear undersea fleet by August 1970. The United States would henceforth project its global reach by sea and by air, the Army was solely for continental security not ‘major overseas adventures’. However, that had been before the scandals and ‘ructions’ of last year: and the resulting firestorm of media angst and the sudden slump in the President’s poll ratings after the revelations about Operation Chaos and the assassination of James Jesus Angleton, which had thrown the Central Intelligence Agency into horribly public turmoil. Since then senior figures had departed the White House, some like Henry Kissinger into internal exile at Harvard, others to face a variety of criminal investigations, with several men exiting not concealing their disgust.
And then there had been Ambassador Brenckmann’s emergence into the limelight, a man regarded as an insider openly condemning the President for his duplicity…
Much of the furore had seemed to have blown over last fall; the lull before the storm as the race for the White House began in earnest ahead of the coming election in November.
Ambassador Brenckmann – whose resignation and announcement that he planned to run for President had briefly caused such a stir - seemed to have disappeared into the quagmire of Democratic political infighting as the candidates manoeuvred for position ahead of the first primary in New Hampshire. Thus far, the President had ‘stuck it out’, deflecting some of the domestic condemnation by bringing back what everybody hoped really was peace in our time from Russia, and notwithstanding his domestic approval ratings had slipped to around forty percent and the GOP was going to have a rough ride in a lot of states in the November mid-terms, there was a grudging consensus that the Administration might just about, have ridden out the worst of the storm.
For now, at least.
Every Presidential incumbent in history wanted to look strong in an election year. The word had gone out to Tom Moorer’s predecessor as CNO to ‘turn on all the taps’ and ‘to get our ships back to sea’ and by God, the Navy was on the job!
In fairness, that was not to say that the President was completely unaware that there was a big difference between keels in the water and ships capable of fighting their weight, particularly in this modern era when the increasingly complex equipment on those vessels required correspondingly skilled and motivated personnel to get the best out of them.
‘We don’t have enough people with the right competencies to man all our ships, sir,’ Moorer had reported to the Commander-in-Chief, ahead of his confirmation hearing in the Senate. But it was election year and there was nothing quite like giant aircraft carriers, mighty battleships and fast, sleek grey cruisers and destroyers bristling with gun barrels and missile rails to communicate ‘power’ to onlookers, whom, in this case, constituted the entire American polity.
Which did nothing to allay Tom Moorer’s unease.
It was his understanding that while the Enterprise was pretty much ‘on line’ many of the other ships in Task Force 136 were not. For example, the USS New Jersey was operating with her aft main battery turret deactivated and half her 5-inch dual-purpose secondaries mothballed. The Mackenzie was fifty men short of her normal peacetime complement, operating with her anti-submarine warfare capability so badly degraded that today, the Task Force Commander, Rear Admiral Elmo Russell ‘Bud’ Zumwalt, had relegated her to ‘search and rescue’ duties during the President’s visit.
Not even the knowledge that there were small pools of expertise and experience at the training establishments at Pearl Harbour, the fleet’s first port of call, and at Subic Bay and Sasebo, where two of the planned three Far East carrier divisions would eventually be based, allayed the CNO’s concerns. All the training and logistical infrastructures required for a much larger Navy – than the October 1962 fleet – were still on stream for early 1971. It took time to train men, and these days, women. Heck, the ‘manpower’ problem was so acute that there were people in the Pentagon openly talking about allowing women to serve on board ship!
Tom Moorer, for one, had no intention of letting that happen on his watch. Nevertheless, it deeply perturbed him that he was – whatever the President said about ‘deterrence’ and just making ‘a show of force’ – sending so many unprepared and patently non-combat-worthy ships into what potentially, was harm’s way in Far Eastern waters.
“It is quite a sight,” Richard Nixon murmured, grinning as he surveyed the gathering of long, grey predators around the flagship. “Quite a sight!!
The Tannoy boomed.
“NOW HERE THIS! ALL DECK CREW STAND READY! FLY PAST STATIONS! FLY PAST STATIONS!”
The first section of four jets hammered down the port side of the leviathan and wheeled to the right, climbing.
The second roared in.
The aircraft looked odd, unfamiliar, stubby and not quite aerodynamic as they thundered down the Enterprise’s flank at an altitude of about one hundred and fifty feet holding classic finger-four formations.
“The Marines sure know how to put on a show!” This from a man in the President’s entourage.
“They sure do!” Richard Nixon agreed enthusiastically as the next section rattled past the windows of the flag bridge.
Marine Fighter Squadron 211 - VMF-211 – had still been flying turbo-prop A-1 Skyraiders at the time of the October War, and taken heavy casualties in the fighting in Korea in 1964. Initially, there had been plans to re-equip it with McDonell Douglas A-4 Skyhawks before materiel shortages and other operational demands led to the unit being mothballed. Then, somebody had had the bright idea of re-commissioning the squadron as the US Marines’ operational proving unit for the brand-new Kestrel vertical take-off and landing fighter, unexpectedly gifted to the US side by the rapprochement with the British. Several members of VMF-211 were still in England, ‘volunteers’ flying with the so-called Eagle Squadron, effectively operating with the RAF in peacekeeping and anti-insurgency missions over France; the rest of the squadron was presently airborne over the Enterprise Task Force, and in the next few minutes would be swooping in to land – vertically - on the great carrier to complete her somewhat polyglot Air Group.
Nothing so exemplified the positives gained from the renewed US-British alliance as the Kestrel. The Marine pilots of VMF-211 and the Lockheed Skunkworks test pilots, who had demonstrated the remarkable aircraft all over the United States at innumerable air shows and pageants had done more to solidify – some said, ‘prop up’ – the renewed ‘special relationship’, than any amount of Presidential rhetoric. A number of pilots had died or been seriously injured in training and demonstration aerobatics but that knowledge had simply captivated America still further. And now the Kestrel was about to go to sea with the US Navy.
Regardless of the political cracks in the US-British alliance, the aerospace side of the renewed partnership had already produced stunning results.
If the Kestrel was the first fruit from that potentially plentiful tree, it was by no means the least. In many ways, the amazing VTOL fighter-bomber was looking as if it might just be a taster for what was to come.
Last week at Edwards Air Force Base, the President, the British Air Minister, Sir Ian Gilmour, and Air Marshall Sir Daniel French, the new Chief of the British Air Staff, had posed for photographs beneath the wing of the Lockheed-British Aerospace Corporation B-201 Strike Eagle, the first pre-production model of the jointly developed TSR2 multi-role – interceptor, bomber, reconnaissance - supersonic aircraft.
In a few minutes, the Navy and press photographers beginning to crowd onto the flag bridge would be snapping pictures of the Commander-in-Chief patting the still warm flanks of VMF-211’s Kestrels on the Big E’s flight deck.
Tom Moorer threw a thoughtfully rueful look at Bud Zumwalt, who shrugged a veiled, somewhat saturnine smil
e back at the CNO.
Politics was politics and it was ever thus.
Presently, the two Navy men had other things on their minds; praying for the time they needed to work up the huge fleet coalescing on the other side of the Pacific into the truly formidable force that at present, it only looked on paper to their enemies.
The first pair of Kestrels approached, slowing to a hover fifty yards off the Enterprise’s port beam, before, at a signal, sliding to the right. The whistling thunder of their engines peaked as they lined up, then sank onto the deck, dipping low on their fragile-looking undercarriages as they touched down.
“Funny looking aircraft!” The President observed jocularly.
The centrally located heavyweight hydraulic twin-tyre landing gear, and the robust single nose wheel assembly, contrasted with the skeletal, balancing small-wheeled struts that dropped from wing-mounted hinges to stop the aircraft toppling over. The single mighty Pegasus jet was housed centrally behind the nose and cockpit section, venting its thrust to the atmosphere via four vectored pipes, which were pointed aft in normal flight and re-vectored downwards for take-off, landing, and during air-to-air combat evolutions.
An often repeated rumour recounting the occasion when a particularly daredevil Marine test pilot had evaded an inadvertently launched Sidewinder heat-seeking missile, by vectoring his aircraft’s thrust abruptly to his machine’s starboard beam – resulting in a bone-crunching high-speed, high G-force lurch to the left – was already part and parcel of VMF-211’s fighting folklore. Given the aircraft’s stubby wings and supposedly sub-sonic (Mach 0.9 maximum speed in level flight) performance, there had been a fear that as a dog-fighting interceptor the strange-looking new addition to the Marine Corps’ and soon, the US Air Force’s order of battle, might be ‘lightweight’ and possibly better employed in a largely ground support, strike role; but the ‘Sidewinder Incident’ had changed all that! A fighter that could dance sidelong out of the way of the most advanced air-to-air missile in squadron service anywhere in the world, was clearly anything but ‘lightweight’.
The Enterprise’s CAG – Combat Air Group Commander – was busily extolling the virtues of the Kestrel to the President. The Task Group Commander, Bud Zumwalt, who had only come back to sea on 1st January, after a stint as Director of Naval Planning at the Pentagon, where he had worked closely with the Secretary of Defense and somewhat to the former CNO’s irritation, become a frequent visitor to the White House and Camp David, was standing respectfully at Tom Moorer’s shoulder, waiting to be addressed before offering an opinion.
Tom Moorer had a lot of time for Bud Zumwalt, the man was on the way up, fast-tracked and how he handled Task Force 136 in the coming months would determine if, or when he would continue to climb the greasy pole. Presently, he was one of several candidates for promotion to Vice Chief of Naval Operations as early as this time next year, and given his age and good relations with Administration members, at some stage a prospective future CNO.
The US Army had already gone down the road of raising Bill Westmoreland – a man often referred to, perhaps unfairly, as a corporate executive in uniform – to Chief of Staff.
The Air Force was still having that ‘discussion’, principally about ‘missing a generation’ to find the right man for the modern age, and General John P. McConnell, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, the man who had ably stepped into Curtis LeMay’s flying boots in late 1965 had had his appointment extended to mid-1969, while the infighting continued at the Pentagon.
Tom Moorer was not living on borrowed time yet, he had after all, only been in post a couple of months. Nonetheless, these days it paid to always remember, that if the lessons of recent years had taught them anything, if one was not quick, one was dead.
Listening to the President chatting with the Enterprise’s CAG, the CNO was very, very aware that the Administration’s ‘re-balancing’ of US foreign policy – essentially, moving towards armed neutrality with the Soviets while adopting an aggressive policy of forward deployment in respect of the Communist Chinese to ‘hold the line’ in Asia – came with inherent risks.
Mostly, to his Navy.
Chapter 6
Wednesday 6th March, 1968
Ukrainka-Seryshevo Air Base, Siberia
Andrei Kirov found twenty-eight-year-old Lieutenant Olga Yurievna Petrovna working alone in the cold, cavernous hall of Special Weapons Store Number Two that evening.
Unlike the other three munitions stores at the base, Number Two was neither buried, nor protected by several metres of reinforced concrete and soil. Rather, it was a medium-sized hangar – albeit solidly constructed – in the trees. The woods hardly offered any real camouflage because the Second War labour gangs responsible for hugely expanding Seryshevo over twenty years ago, had chopped down most of the surrounding forest, leaving only a few clumps of trees. In one of which, Special Weapons Store Number Two now languished, its last two ‘weapons’, although once fully assembled both fifteen metres in length, seeming lost within it.
Olga Petrovna was lying on a low, wheeled dolly reaching up into the convoluted web of narrow, gleaming high-pressure piping and multi-coloured wiring beneath the mid-section of the partially dismantled Raduga Kh-20 nuclear-capable long-range air-launched supersonic cruise missile nearest the wooden shack that housed the store’s administrative office.
The two guards at the main entrance to the bunker had checked Kirov’s ID card perfunctorily, probably only because of his green KGB uniform; and inside, out of the worst of the cold of the early spring evening, apart from a couple of technicians, dressed like Olga in dirty grey Red Air Force issue boiler suits, who glanced at him and then went back to their work, there was nobody around.
“They told me you’d pulled extra duty tonight?” The KGB man said, squatting down on his haunches under the port, stubby wing of the missile.
From a distance it was easy to see the genesis of the flying bomb: its fuselage was not unlike a slimmer version of a MiG-17 or MiG-19 fighter’s, and the wings, notwithstanding they were swept back more violently, were not dissimilar to those of the latest fast jets.
The woman did not turn to look at him.
Her face was screwed up in concentration, her short, boyish blond hair was specked with grime, and possibly, also with specks of propellant or lubricating oil. The Kh-20 burned ordinary aviation fuel and the atmosphere in the store always carried the taint of kerosene.
She mouthed something inaudible.
“Fuck it!” She muttered a moment later and pushed herself clear of the fuselage. Ignoring the KGB man, she moved to the opposite side of the missile.
Andrei Kirov knew it had been a bad idea to come looking for Olga. In the three weeks since he had met her and the ten days since they had had sex – for the one and thus far, only time – he would have had to have been a complete imbecile not to figure out that she had two modes, and only two modes. Full-on duty mode, and party mode. Mostly, she was in duty mode, only occasionally letting, metaphorically, her hair down; and she did not like ‘personal issues’ intruding on her work!
“What can I do for you, Comrade Commissar?” She sniffed, rising to her feet with a peeved, distracted expression on her pale lips, viewing Kirov with inscrutable cornflower blue eyes.
Like the KGB man, Olga Petrovna’s parents came from the former Leningrad Oblast, although going back a couple of generations they were of Finnish stock. However, while she had inherited Scandinavian, possibly Viking blood, as evidenced by her blond hair and blue eyes; his head was darkly cropped and his eyes were green-grey, his build heavier, definitely Slavic, or at least that was what people assumed. Olga, on the other hand was willowy, and in a proper dress, she would be the bell of any ball even though, she seemed perfectly happy playing the tom boy.
“I am not a commissar,” Kirov objected mildly. “As you well know I am a humble political officer in an age where the rank is rapidly falling out of fashion…”
“You still send your reports back to
your bosses in Vladivostok,” the woman retorted, almost but not quite without the contempt she had previously flaunted in his face.
“As, presumably, you do to your superior officer.”
“That’s different. Everybody reports on everybody in the Red Air Force. Well, they used to; I’ve no idea if they still do. There aren’t so many of us, these days.”
Olga Petrovna was wiping her hands on a filthy cloth.
“You have grease on your nose,” Kirov observed helpfully.
She wiped it away with the back of her right sleeve.
The KGB man looked away, eying the Kh-20 with what he hoped was a mixture of pride and genuine curiosity. Practically every inspection panel was open, or lying on the floor of the bunker; and components lay in groups, and sad clusters. Once, there had been nine of the supersonic flying bombs stored in the bunker; the two which remained had been unserviceable at the time the others had been dismantled and loaded onto trucks for the journey to the nearby railhead.
“Surely, sooner or later 37th Air Army will take these two,” he gestured around him, “back into central storage? Why spend so much time trying to put them back together again?”
“So,” the woman snorted, “while the High Command makes up its mind what it wants to do with them, we’re supposed to let them rot? We’re supposed to sit on our arses doing nothing? You guys in the KGB might think that’s a good idea but I joined the fucking Air Force! Until somebody tells me otherwise, I plan to go on defending my country!”
“Ouch!” The man grunted, feigning a pained look.
Olga Petrovna half-smiled.