Kosov gave his companion an ironic smile. "Misha, Misha, sometimes you can be most engagingly naive. I should have killed the son of a b.i.t.c.h, but this was not possible. Josef suffers from poor health, though he is not aware of it. The time is not yet right," Kosov said, as though discussing a vacation. "KGB is split into several factions at the moment. Josef controls one. I control another. Mine is larger, but not decisively so. He has the ear of the General Secretary and the Defense Minister. I am a sick old man-they have told me this. Except for the war I would have been replaced already."
"But he lied to the Politburo!" Sergetov nearly shouted.
"Not at all. You think Josef is foolish? He handed over an official KGB intelligence estimate drawn up under my chairmans.h.i.+p, by my department heads."
Why is he telling me all this? He fears losing his post, and he wants support with other Politburo members. Is that all?
"You"re telling me that this is all a mistake."
"Exactly," Kosov answered. "Bad luck and poor judgment in our oil industry-not your fault, of course. Add some fear in the hearts of our Party hierarchy, some ambition in one of my subordinates, the Defense Minister"s sense of importance, and outright stupidity on the part of the West; and here we are today."
"So, what do you think we should do?" Sergetov asked warily.
"Nothing. I ask that you keep in mind, however, that the next week will probably decide the outcome of our war. Ah!" he exclaimed. "Look, my car has been repaired. You may pull over here, Vitaly. Thank you for the ride, Misha. Good day." Kosov retrieved his jamming device and stepped out of the car.
Mikhail Eduardovich Sergetov watched the KGB limousine pull away and disappear around the corner. He had played many power games in his life. Sergetov"s climb up the Party ladder had been more than an exercise in efficiency. Men had stood in his way, and needed brus.h.i.+ng aside. Promising careers had been broken so that he could sit in this Zil automobile and aspire to real power in his country. But never had the game been this dangerous. He didn"t know the rules, was not sure what Kosov was really up to. Was his story even true? Might he be trying to cover his own flanks for errors he had made and blame it all on Josef Larionov? Sergetov could not recall ever meeting the First Deputy Chairman.
"Straight to the office, Vitaly," Sergetov ordered. He was too deep in thought to worry about his driver"s other activities.
NORTHWOOD, ENGLAND.
Toland scanned the satellite photographs with great interest. The KH-11 satellite had pa.s.sed over Kirovsk four hours after the missile attack and the signals sent by real-time link to the NATO command center. There were three frames for each of the Backfire bases. The intelligence officer took out a pad and started his tally, commanding himself to be conservative. The only aircraft he counted as destroyed were those with large pieces broken or burned off.
"We figured a total force of about eighty-five aircraft. Looks to me like twenty-one totally destroyed, and another thirty or so damaged. The base facilities took a real beating. The only other thing I"d like to know is how hard their personnel were hit. If we killed a lot of crews, too-the Backfires are out of business for at least a week. They still have the Badgers, but those birds have shorter legs, they"re a lot easier to kill. Admiral, it"s a new ball game."
Admiral Sir Charles Beattie smiled. His intelligence chief had said almost exactly the same thing.
LANGLEY AIR FORCE BASE, VIRGINIA.
The F-15 interceptor streaked over the runway at a height of one hundred feet. As she pa.s.sed the tower, Major Nakamura threw her fighter into a slow roll, then turned around for a more sedate landing. She was an Ace! Three Badger bombers and two satellites ! The first female Ace in the history of the U.S. Air Force. The first s.p.a.ce Ace.
She rolled to a stop at the ready shelter, jumped off the ladder, and ran to the reception committee. The deputy commander of Tactical Air Command was red-faced with anger.
"Major, if you ever pull something like that again I"ll bust your a.s.s back to doolie!"
"Yes, sir. Sorry, sir." She grinned. Nothing was going to spoil today. "Won"t ever happen again, sir. You only make Ace once, sir."
"Intelligence says Ivan has one more RORSAT ready to use. Probably they"ll think it over some before launching," the General said, calming down somewhat.
"Have they put any more birds together?" Buns asked.
"They"re working on two, and we might have them by the end of the week. If we get them, your next target will be their realtime photo reconnaissance satellite. Until then the RORSATs have highest priority." The General smiled briefly. "Don"t forget to paint that fifth star on the bird, Major."
NORFOLK, VIRGINIA.
They would have sailed anyway. The destruction of the Soviet RORSAT merely made it safer. First came the destroyers and frigates, fanning out, looking for submarines under an umbrella of patrol aircraft. Then the cruisers and carriers. Last of all came the s.h.i.+ps from Little Creek, Tarawa, Guam, Na.s.sau, Inchon, and twenty more. Over sixty s.h.i.+ps in all, they formed into three groups and steamed northeast at twenty knots. It would be a six-day trip.
USNS PREVAIL.
Even at three knots she didn"t ride well. The s.h.i.+p was just over two hundred feet long, and she responded to every wave like a horse to a fence. She had a mixed crew, not really Navy, not really civilian. The civilians ran the s.h.i.+p. The naval personnel ran the electronics gear. The really amazing thing, everyone agreed, was that they were still alive.
Prevail was an adaptation of a blue-water fis.h.i.+ng boat. Instead of a trawl, she pulled a sonar array at the end of a six-thousand-foot cable filled with sonar sensors. The signals received were preprocessed by on-board computers, then sent via satellite to Norfolk at a rate of thirty-two thousand bits of data per second. The s.h.i.+p was driven by quiet electric motors, and her hull had been installed with the Prairie/Masker system to eliminate even her tiny amount of machinery noise. Her topsides were made of fibergla.s.s to reduce her radar signature. In a very real sense she was one of the first Stealth s.h.i.+ps, and despite the fact that she carried no weapon other than a rifle for dealing with sharks, she was also the most dangerous antisubmarine platform ever made. Prevail and three sister s.h.i.+ps were cruising the North Atlantic on the great circle route between Newfoundland and Ireland, listening for the telltale noise of a submarine in transit. Two already had kills painted up on their bridges since each had an Orion patrol aircraft in constant attendance, and Soviet submarines had twice had the misfortune to approach one of them. But their job was not to kill submarines. It was to warn others of them, far away.
In the mids.h.i.+ps operations center of Prevail, a team of oceanographic technicians watched a bank of TV-type display tubes, while others worked up tracks of anything that might be close enough to be a direct threat.
A petty officer ran his finger down a fuzzy line on the display. "That must be the convoy from New York."
"Yeah," said the technician next to him. "And there"re the folks who want to meet them."
USS REUBEN JAMES.
"At least we"re not going to be lonely," O"Malley observed.
"You always have such a positive att.i.tude?" Frank Ernst inquired.
"Our Russian friends must have excellent intelligence. I mean, your Air Force chaps did kill their satellite." Captain Perrin set his coffee down on the table. The five officers conferred in Morris"s stateroom. Perrin had flown over by helicopter from Battleaxe.
"Yeah, so they know our composition," Morris said. "And they"ll want to cut this bunch down to size."
The message from Norfolk stated in clipped navalese that at least six Soviet submarines were believed to be heading for the convoy. Four would be on the north. That was their area of responsibility.
"We should be getting some data off the tail any time now," Morris said. "Jerry, you up to three days of continuous ops?"
O"Malley laughed. "If I say no, will it matter?"
"I think we should remain close together," Perrin said. "Five miles" separation at most. The real trick will be timing our sprints. The convoy wants to make as straight a run as possible, right?"
"Yeah." Morris nodded. "Hard to blame the Commodore for that. Zigzagging all those s.h.i.+ps could create almost as much confusion as a real attack."
"Hey, the good news is no more Backfires for a while," O"Malley pointed out. "We"re back to a one-dimension threat."
The s.h.i.+p"s motion changed as power was reduced. The frigate was ending a twenty-eight-knot sprint and would now drift for several minutes at five knots to allow her pa.s.sive sonar to function.
USS CHICAGO.
"Sonar contact, bearing three-four-six."
Seven hundred miles to the icepack, McCafferty thought as he went forward. At five knots.
They were in deep water. It was a gamble, but a good one, to run away from the coast at fifteen knots despite the noise Providence made. It had taken four hours to reach the hundred-fathom curve, a period of constant tension as he had worried about the Russian reaction to their missile attack. The Russians had sent antisubmarine patrol aircraft first of all, the ubiquitous Bears dropping son.o.buoys, but they"d been able to avoid them. Providence still had most of her sonar systems in operation, and though she could not defend herself, she could at least hear the danger coming.
Throughout the four-hour run the wounded submarine had sounded like a wagonload of pipes, and McCafferty didn"t want to think about how she had handled, with her fairwater planes hanging like laundry in a breeze. But that was behind them. Now they were in seven hundred feet of water. With their towed-array sonars deployed, they"d have an extra measure of warning for approaching danger. Boston and Chicago cruised three miles on either side of their wounded sister. Seven hundred miles at five knots, McCafferty thought. Almost six days . . .
"Okay, what do we have here, Chief?"
"Came in slowly, sir, so it"s probably direct path. We have a slow bearing-change rate. My first guess would be a diesel boat on batteries, and close." The sonar chief showed no emotion.
The captain leaned back into the attack center. "Come right to zero-two-five."
The helmsman applied five degrees of right rudder, gently bringing the submarine to a northeasterly course. At five knots Chicago was "a hole in the ocean" that made almost no noise at all, but her contact was almost as quiet. McCafferty watched the line on the screen change shape ever so slightly over a period of several minutes.
"Okay, we have a bearing change to the contact. Bearing is now three-four-one."
"Joe?" McCafferty asked his executive officer.
"I make the range eight thousand yards, plus or minus. He"s on a reciprocal heading, speed about four knots."
Too close, the captain thought. He probably doesn"t hear us yet, though.
"Let"s get him."
The Mark-48 torpedo fired at its slowest speed setting, turned forty degrees to the left on leaving the tube, then settled down to head for the contact, its guidance wires trailing back to the submarine. The sonarmen directed the fish toward its target while Chicago moved slowly away from the launch point. Suddenly the sonar chief"s head jerked up.
"He"s heard it! He just kicked his engines. I got a blade count-it"s a Foxtrot-cla.s.s, doing turns for fifteen. Transient, transient, he just flooded tubes."
The torpedo accelerated and switched on its homing sonar. The Foxtrot knew it had been found, and her captain reacted automatically, increasing speed and ordering a radical turn to starboard, then firing a homing torpedo back down the line of bearing at its attacker. Finally he dove deep, hoping to shake off the closing fish.
The hard turn left a knuckle in the water, an area of turbulence which confused the Mark-48 briefly, but then the torpedo charged right through it, and on coming back to undisturbed water, found its target again. The green-painted weapon dove after the Foxtrot and caught it at a depth of four hundred feet.
"Bearing is changing rapidly on the inbound," the sonar chief said. "It"s going to pa.s.s well aft of us-hit, we got a hit on the target." The sound echoed through the steel hull like distant thunder. McCafferty plugged in a set of phones in time to hear the Foxtrot"s frantic attempt to blow to the surface, and the screech of metal as the internal bulkheads gave way. He did not hear the captain"s last act. It was to deploy the rescue buoy located on the aft corner of the sail. The buoy floated to the surface and began transmitting a continuous message. All the men aboard the Foxtrot were already dead, but the rescue buoy told their fleet headquarters where they had died-and several submarines and surface s.h.i.+ps immediately set off to that point.
USS REUBEN JAMES.
O"Malley pulled up on the collective control and climbed to five hundred feet. From this height he could see the northern edge of the convoy off to the southwest. Several helicopters were in the air-a good idea of someone"s. Many of the merchant s.h.i.+ps were carrying Army helicopters as deck cargo, and most of them were flyable. Their crews were taking them up to patrol the convoy perimeter, looking for periscopes. The one thing any submariner would admit to being afraid of was a helicopter. This procedure was called "black-sky" ASW. Throughout the convoy, soldiers were being told to watch the ocean and report anything they saw, which made for many false sighting reports, but it gave the men something to do, and sooner or later they might just spot a real periscope. The Seahawk moved twenty miles east before circling. They were looking for a possible submarine detected on the frigate"s pa.s.sive sonar array during the last drift.
"Okay, w.i.l.l.y, drop a LOFAR-now-now-now!"
The petty officer punched a b.u.t.ton to eject a son.o.buoy out the side panel. The helicopter continued forward, dropping four additional buoys at intervals of two miles to create a ten-mile barrier, then O"Malley held his aircraft in a wide circle, watching the sea himself as the petty officer examined the sonar display on his screen.
"Commander, what"s this I hear about the skipper? You know, the night before we sailed."
"I felt like getting drunk, and he was kind enough not to make me drink alone. Didn"t you ever get drunk before?"
"No, sir. I don"t drink."
"What"s this Navy coming to! You take her for a minute." O"Malley took his hand off the stick and adjusted his helmet. It was a new one and he hadn"t quite gotten used to it yet. "You got anything, w.i.l.l.y?"
"Not sure yet, sir. Give me another minute or two." "Fair enough." The pilot contemplated his instruments briefly, then resumed his outside scanning. "I ever tell you about this thirty-five-footer in the Bermuda-to-Newport race? Storm beat h.e.l.l out of it. Anyway, it had an all-girl crew and when the boat swamped they lost all their-"
"Skipper, I got a weak signal on number four."
"Grateful as h.e.l.l for being rescued, too." O"Malley took the stick and brought the helicopter around to the northwest. "You don"t do any of that either, Mr. Ralston?"