Red Storm Rising Part 32

"Let's be careful with that, Lieutenant," Smith whispered.

The ten men in the truck dismounted and spread into the gra.s.s off the road, perhaps fifty yards away. Edwards couldn't tell if they carried weapons or not. Each man stopped, and almost in unison they unb.u.t.toned their flies to urinate. Edwards gawked and nearly laughed. Finished, they moved back to the truck, which started up and proceeded west on the fork to the main road, motoring off with the sound on a poorly m.u.f.fled diesel engine. The Marines reformed as the truck's taillights dipped under the horizon.

"Too bad." Rodgers smiled in the semidarkness. "I coulda blow'd one guy's p.e.c.k.e.r right off!"

"You done good, people," Smith said. "Ready to move out, Lieutenant?"

"Yeah." Shamed by his performance, the lieutenant let Smith lead them off. They crossed the gravel road and a hundred yards later were in yet another lava field, climbing over rocks into the wasteland. Their wet fatigue pants clung to their legs, drying slowly in the cool westerly breeze.

USS PHARRIS.

"Our friend the November doesn't have an anechoic coating," ASW said quietly, pointing to the display. "I think that's him, running to catch up with the convoy."

"We have this trace plotted at about forty-six thousand yards," the tactical action officer said.

"Get the helo up," Morris ordered.

Five minutes later, Pharris's helicopter was running southwest at full speed, and Bluebird-Seven, another P-3C Orion, was closing on the datum point from the east. Both aircraft flew low, hoping to surprise the submarine that had killed one of their flock and gravely damaged another. The Russian had probably made a mistake by increasing his speed. Maybe he had orders to trail the convoy and radio data for other submarines to use. Maybe he wanted to catch up to make another attack. Whatever the reason, his reactor pumps were running and making noise that his hull could not contain. His periscope was up, and that gave the aircraft a chance to spot him with their look-down radars. The helo was closer, and its pilot was communicating with the tactical coordinator of the Orion. This could be a textbook attack if things worked out right.

"Okay, Bluebird, we are now three miles from datum center. Say your position."

"We're two miles behind you, Papa-One-Six. Illuminate!"

The systems operator flipped the cover off the radar switch and moved it from Standby to Active. Instantly, energy began to radiate from the radar transmitter slung under the helicopter's nose.

"Contact, we have a radar contact bearing one-six-five, range eleven hundred yards!"

"Stream the MAD gear!" The pilot advanced his throttles to race toward the contact.

"We got him, too," the Tacco called swiftly. The petty officer beside him armed a torpedo, setting its initial search depth for a hundred feet.

The helicopter's anticollision lights came on, the red lights flas.h.i.+ng in the darkness. No sense in hiding their approach now. The sub must have detected their radar signals and would now be attempting a crash dive. But that took more time than he had.

"Madman, madman, smoke away!" the systems operator screamed.

The smoke was invisible in the darkness, but the short green flame was an unmissable beacon in the darkness. The helo banked left, clearing the way for the Orion now only five hundred yards behind him.

The P-3C's powerful searchlights came on, spotting the telltale wake left by the now-invisible periscope. The MAD contact had been right on, the pilot saw at once. The Orion's bomb doors swung open and the torpedo dropped toward the black waters along with a son.o.buoy.

"Positive sonar contact, evaluate as submarine!" a sonar-board operator said over the intercom. The tone lines displayed on his screen were exactly what a November at high speed looked like, and the torpedo chasing her was already on continuous pinging. "Torpedo is closing the target rapidly . . . Looks good, Tacco, closing . . . closing-impact!" The torpedo's sound tracing merged with that of the submarine, and a brilliant splotch appeared in the waterfall display. The Orion's operator switched the son.o.buoy from active to pa.s.sive, recording the recurring rumbles of the torpedo warhead explosion. The submarine's screw sounds stopped, and again he heard the sound of blowing air that quickly stopped as the submarine began her last dive.

"That's a kill, that's a kill!" exulted the Tacco.

"Confirm the kill," Morris said over the radio. "Nice job, Bluebird. That was a real quick-draw!"

"Roger, copy, Pharris. Thank you, sir! Beautiful job with the helo and the detection, guy. You just got another a.s.sist. h.e.l.l, we might just orbit you for a while, Captain, looks like you got all the action. Out."

Morris walked to the corner and poured himself a cup of coffee. So, they had just helped to kill a pair of Soviet submarines.

The TAO was less enthusiastic. "We got a noisy old Foxtrot and a November who did something dumb. You suppose he had orders to trail and report, and that's why we got him?"

"Maybe," Morris nodded. "If Ivan's making his skippers do things like that-well, they like central control, but that can change if they find out it's costing them boats. We learned that lesson ourselves once."

USS CHICAGO.

McCafferty had his own contact. They had been tracking it for over an hour now, the sonar operators struggling to discern random noise from discrete signal on their visual displays. Their data was pa.s.sed to the fire-control tracking party, four men hovering over the chart table in the after corner of the attack center.

Already the crew was whispering, McCafferty knew. First the yard fire before they were commissioned. Then being pulled out of the Barents Sea at the wrong time. Then being attacked by a friendly aircraft . . . was Chicago an unlucky boat? they wondered. The chiefs and officers would work to dispel that thought, but the chiefs and officers held it, too, since all sailors believed in luck, an inst.i.tutional faith among submariners. If you're not lucky, we can't use you, a famous submarine admiral once said. McCafferty had heard that story often enough. He had so far been devoid of luck.

The captain moved back to the chart table. "What's happening?"

"Not much in the way of a bearing change. He has to be way out there, skipper, like the third convergence zone. Maybe eighty miles. He can't be closing us. We would have lost the signal as he pa.s.sed out of the zone." The executive officer was showing the strain of the past week's operations, too. "Captain, if I had to guess, I'd say we're tracking a nuclear sub. Probably a noisy one. Acoustical conditions are pretty good, so we have three CZs to play with. And I'd bet he is doing the same thing we are, patrolling a set position. h.e.l.l, he could be running back and forth on a racetrack pattern, same as us. That would account for the minimal bearing changes."

The captain frowned. This was the only real contact he'd had since the war started. He was close to the northern border of his patrol area, and the target was probably just on the other side of it. Going after it meant leaving the bulk of his a.s.signed sector unprotected . . .

"Let's go after him," McCafferty ordered. "Left ten degrees rudder, come left to new course three-five-one. All ahead two thirds."

Chicago rapidly turned to a northerly heading, accelerating to fifteen knots, her maximum "silent" speed. At fifteen knots the submarine radiated only a small amount of noise. The risk of counterdetection was slight, since even at this speed her sonars could detect a target five to ten miles off. Her four tubes were loaded with a pair of Mk-48 torpedoes and two Harpoon antis.h.i.+p missiles. If the target was a submarine or a surface s.h.i.+p, Chicago could handle it.

GRAFARHOLT, ICELAND.

"You're early, Beagle," Doghouse replied.

Edwards was sitting between two rocks and leaning back against a third, the antenna resting on his knee. He hoped it was pointing in a safe direction. The Russians, he figured, were strung mostly along the coast from Keflavik to Reykjavik, well to the west of the direction to the satellite. But there were houses and factories below him, and if they had a listening post down there . . .

"We had to get here before it got too light," the lieutenant explained. They had run the last kilometer with the rising sun behind them. Edwards took some small comfort in the fact that the Marines were puffing harder than he was.

"How secure are you?"

"There is some movement on the road below us, but that's a good ways off, maybe a mile."

"Okay, you see the electrical switching station southwest of you?"

Edwards got out his binoculars with one hand to check. The map called the place Artun. It held the main electrical transformers for the power grid on this part of the island. The high-voltage lines came in from the east, and the feeder cables radiated out from this point.

"Yeah, I see it."

"How are things going, Beagle?"

Edwards almost said they were going great, but stopped himself. "Lousy. Things are going lousy."

"Roger that, Beagle. You keep an eye on that power station. Anything around it?"

"Stand by." Edwards set down the antenna and gave the place a closer look. Aha! "Okay, I got one armored vehicle, just visible around the corner on the west side. Three-no, four armed men are in the open. Nothing else that I can see."

"Very good, Beagle. Now you keep watch on that place. Let us know if any SAMs show up. We also want data if you see any more fighters. Start keeping records of how many trucks and troops you see, where they're heading. Be sure to write things down. Got that?"

"Okay. We write it all down and report in."

"Good. You're doing all right, Beagle. Your orders are to observe and report," Doghouse reminded them. "Avoid contact. If you see enemy troops heading in your direction, bug out. Don't worry about calling in, just bug the h.e.l.l out and report when you can. Now get off the air for a while."

"Roger that. Out." Edwards repacked the radio. It was getting so that he could do it with his eyes closed.

"What gives, Lieutenant?" Smith asked.

The lieutenant grunted. "We sit tight and watch that electrical place off that way."

"You s'pose they want us to turn some lights off?"

"There's too many troops down there, Sarge," Edwards replied. He stretched and opened his canteen. Garcia was on guard atop the knoll to his right, and Rodgers was asleep. "What's for breakfast?"

"Well, if you got peanut b.u.t.ter and crackers, I'll trade you my peaches for it."

Edwards ripped open the C-Ration container and inspected the contents. "Deal."

22.

Ripostes

USS CHICAGO.

The submarine slowed to reacquire the target. She'd run deep at fifteen knots for over an hour, and now reduced speed and came up to five hundred feet, right in the middle of the deep sound channel. McCafferty ordered an easterly course, which allowed the towed-array sonar-his "tail"-to bear on the supposed target to the north. It took several minutes before the array was straight and aligned in the proper direction so that the sonar operators could begin their work in earnest. Slowly the data came up on their displays, and a senior petty officer plugged in a set of headphones, hoping for an aural detection. There was nothing to detect. For twenty minutes the screen showed only random noise patterns.

McCafferty examined the paper plot. Their erstwhile contact would now be exactly two convergence zones away and should have been easily detected, given known water conditions. But their screens showed nothing.

"We never did have a cla.s.sification." The executive officer shrugged. "He's gone."

"Take her up to antenna depth. Let's see what's cooking topside." McCafferty moved back to the periscope pedestal. He could not fail to note the instant tension in the compartment. The last time they'd done this, they'd nearly been sunk. The submarine leveled off at a depth of sixty feet. Sonar did another check and found nothing. The ESM mast went up, and the electronics technician reported only weak signals. The search periscope went up next. McCafferty made a very quick check of the horizon-nothing in the air, nothing on the surface.

"There's a storm to the north, line squall," he said. "Down scope."

The executive officer grumbled an inaudible curse. The noise from the storm would make the normally difficult task of finding a conventional sub motoring along on battery power nearly impossible. It was one thing for them to dart a short distance out of their patrol area with a good chance for a kill. It was another to leave for a whole day looking for something that they might never find. He looked at the captain, waiting for the decision to be made.

"Secure from general quarters," McCafferty said. "XO, take us back to station at ten knots. Keep her deep. I'm going to take a nap. Wake me in two hours."

The captain walked a few steps forward to his stateroom. The bunk was already folded down, unmade, from the portside bulkhead. Instrument repeaters would show him course and speed, and a TV set could show him whatever the periscope might be looking at, or a taped movie. McCafferty had been awake for about twenty hours now, and the added stress that comes from a combat environment made it feel like a week. He took off his shoes and lay down, but sleep would not come.

KEFLAVIK, ICELAND.

The colonel ran his hand along the bomber silhouette painted on the side of his fighter. His first combat victory, recorded on his gun cameras. Not since a handful of his comrades had fought in the skies of North Vietnam had a Soviet Air Force pilot won a real air-to-air victory, and this one had been over a nuclear-capable bomber that might otherwise have threatened the homeland.

There were now twenty-five MiG-29 fighters on Iceland, and four of them were aloft at all times to protect the bases as the ground troops tightened their control of the island.

The B-52 raid had hurt them. Their main search radar was slightly damaged, but another was being flown out today, a more modern, mobile unit whose position would be changed twice a day. He wished they had an airborne radar, but learned that losses over Germany had severely limited their availability. The news of the air war there was not good, though the two regiments of MiG-29s were doing well. The colonel checked his watch. In two hours he would be leading a squadron escorting a small force of Backfires that was searching for a convoy.

GRAFARHOLT, ICELAND.