Countdown

CHAPTER 8

Sometimes the boredom seemed to mount like the pressure on the outer hull, building pound upon crushing pound until it seemed that mere flesh and blood, like the strongest steel, must finally crumple and collapse. Of course, the boredom had ended five hours ago, when the Galveston first began penetrating the Russian coastal submarine defenses.

Commander Richard Montgomery was captain of the American Los Angeles-class submarine Galveston, SSN 770. He was new to the boat, having taken her over just two months earlier. Though still officially attached to Carrier Battle Group 14, during the past few weeks Galveston had been on patrol here, north of the Kola Peninsula, monitoring the Russian giant and its slow, bloody suicide.

Nearly ten hours earlier, the sub had come to periscope depth, extending the slender tip of a radio mast long enough to pick up a set of coded messages relayed by satellite from the Aegis cruiser Shiloh, even now approaching North Cape in company with the Jefferson and five other warships. The transmission had included a verification of his operating orders: work as close into the Kola Inlet as possible and watch for the departure of Russian boomers, their big, nuclear missile boats.

"Bridge, Sonar."

Montgomery picked up a microphone. "Bridge, aye. Go ahead."

"Sir, sonar surface contact, Sierra Two, bearing one-seven-five. Twin screws, making slow revs. Sounds like a skimmer coming out of the slot."

"Skimmer" was a submariner's slang for any surface vessel. "Sonar, this is the captain. Can you make him?"

"Not yet, sir. We're running it through the library now. But my educated guess would be a sub-hunter. A Riga, or possibly a Mirka II."

"Stay on him, Ekhart. Engineering! Come to dead slow."

"Engineering, aye, sir. Come to dead slow, aye, sir."

"Diving Officer. What's the depth under our keel?"

"Depth to keel eight-zero feet and shoaling, sir."

"Steady on the helm. Take us down to four hundred twenty feet, nice and gentle."

"Steady on the helm, aye, aye, sir. Planesman, give me five degrees down bubble. Make our depth four-two-zero feet."

"Five degrees down bubble, depth four-two-zero, aye, sir."

The nuclear sub's crew, thirteen officers and 120 enlisted men, functioned with an effortless precision that was almost machine-like, through a litany of orders and orders repeated. Admiral Hyman Rickover, the father of the American nuclear navy, had laid down each detail of the procedure of multiple echoes of each order almost forty years before, a guarantee against that one mistake that could kill the boat and everyone on her.

Four hundred twenty feet would put Galveston within a scant few feet of the bottom. With her single screw scarcely turning and riding at a precisely balanced neutral buoyancy, she was relying on her forward momentum to carry her down, leveling off when her keel was just skimming the cold black mud a few miles off the Kola Inlet.

Montgomery felt the slight cant to the steel deck beneath his feet, then felt the submarine leveling off.

"Depth four-two-zero," the enlisted man at the diving planes forward announced.

"Very well. Captain, depth now four-two-zero. We have ten feet beneath the keel."

They spoke in hushed voices, scarcely louder than whispers, observing silent routine. All personnel not at battle stations were in their bunks, partly to avoid unnecessary noise, partly to help maintain trim fore and aft, which could be affected by men moving about the boat. Men on watch wore rubber shoes, and unnecessary machinery ― the ice maker in the galley and the soda machine in the mess among others ― had all been shut down.

"Very well, Diving Officer," Montgomery said. "Maintain depth and trim."

"Maintain depth and trim, aye, sir."

Four hundred twenty feet seemed like a lot of water, but in fact that depth was only sixty feet deeper than the Galveston was long. She was capable of diving to twelve hundred feet or more, and working this far inshore always posed extraordinary difficulties for a submarine. The chances for discovery were increased a hundred fold, and if they were discovered, there was no place to run or hide. Somewhere astern, perhaps ten miles off, was a new addition to the carrier battle group, another improved Los Angeles attack sub, the Morgantown. Together, the two nuclear subs had been steadily working their way toward the Murman coast, moving with extreme stealth through one of the deadliest arrays of antisubmarine defenses on the planet.

They were now far inside the twelve-mile limit claimed by Russia as her territorial waters. The Kola Inlet was opening up directly ahead, and the small island called Ostrov Kildin was less than seven miles to starboard.

Their position was complicated by the fact that they were moving south down one of the busiest shipping channels of the former Soviet Union, the sole shipping lane to the busy ports of Murmansk, Severomorsk, and Polyamyy.

Attack subs were arguably the single most useful tool in the U.S. Navy's inventory… though aviators or skimmer crews would never have admitted the fact. When something went wrong with diplomacy anywhere in the world, sending a carrier battle group was a great way to send a message, a very loud message, to the offending party: "Behave or we'll flatten you." Time after time, as regional conflicts and brushfire wars had broken out across the face of the globe, the planners in Washington had repeated that time-honored phrase, "Where are the carriers?"

But far more often it was necessary to take a more diplomatic tack ― or a more covert one ― and an aircraft carrier with ninety planes sitting off the coast in question was not exactly a comfortable statement in the language of diplomacy. If a CBG penetrated this far into foreign territorial waters, it was an act of war.

But a submarine, on the other hand… that was different. A Los Angeles attack sub could slip silently into enemy waters, listening to radio traffic, counting ships and radar sources and aircraft, then slip away without anyone knowing it'd been there. Throughout the Cold War, American attack subs had repeatedly penetrated such closely guarded Soviet fortresses as the Shelikhova Gulf, the Tatarskiy Strait, the White Sea, and the Gulf of Finland. The nature and specifics of those penetrations were all still highly classified.

"Control room, Sonar."

"Control room. What is it, Ekhart?"

"I've got an ID on Sierra Two. Riga-class frigate. Still at one-seven-five. Estimate he's making turns for one-five knots."

A Riga-class frigate, a sub-hunter for sure. She'd be a hair under three hundred feet long, with a displacement of about twelve hundred tons. Either a Herkules or a Pegas high-frequency sonar mounted in the hull. ASW weapons including RBU-2500 rocket launchers, depth charges, and 533mm torpedoes.

Ping!

Every man in Galveston's control room froze, eyes turning toward the overhead.

"Control room, Sonar. Sierra Two has gone active on sonar."

There were two types of sonar, passive and active. With passive sonar, a ship or submarine simply listened for noise produced by the target ― the sound of its screws, the machinery in its engine room, the pumps circulating water through its nuclear reactor, the clang of a carelessly dropped tool. Active sonar, on the other hand, transmitted a pulse of sound, then listened for the echo from a solid target. Far more accurate than passive listening ― through pinging, a sonar operator could get an accurate measurement of the range to the target ― active sonar had the single disadvantage that it gave the transmitting vessel away. Submarines nearly always preferred to use passive sonar only.

Destroyers and other ASW surface ships, however, rarely cared whether their quarry heard them or not. This one was almost certainly sweeping the Kola channel, searching for intruders precisely like the Galveston.

Ping!

They were getting closer. Montgomery could hear the gentle chug-chug-chug of the ship's screws now, gradually growing louder.

Ping!

Just because Galveston's crew could hear the active sonar of the approaching surface ship, it didn't necessarily mean they'd been spotted.

Sonar was more complicated than simply making a noise and waiting for the echo; discontinuities in the temperature and salinity of the water could refract sound waves in odd ways, and a submarine as close to the bottom as Galveston was now could be lost in the background clutter. Shipping channels such as this were usually littered with wrecks or with debris dumped from surface ships, and near naval bases they were sown with undersea hydrophones, remotely activated mines, and various types of detection equipment. Even if the Russian sonar operators heard an echo, they might easily misinterpret it.

Getting any information at all out of a sonar return was an arcane and mysterious art.

Ping!

The throb of the ship's propellers sounded almost directly overhead. Had they spotted the American submarine, now lying directly beneath their keel?

Throughout the control room, every eye not focused on a specific readout or instrumentation was fastened on the compartment's overhead, as though trying to pierce the double hull and the darkness and the water, to see the looming presence of the Russian ship as it came closer… closer…

… and then the sound of the Riga's engines was dwindling… fading into the distance somewhere astern.

And it was gone.

Slowly, Montgomery let out a sigh of pent-up breath. Though the temperature throughout the boat was always maintained at a comfortable seventy degrees, Montgomery realized his khaki uniform shirt was sopping wet beneath his arms and down his spine. His left hand was gripping a handhold on the attack periscope mounting so tightly his hand had cramped.

"Just routine," he said, letting go of the handhold and massaging his fingers. "Cakewalk." Several of the men in the control room chuckled nervously. "Engineering Officer, Captain. Make turns for five knots."

"Make turns for five knots, aye, sir."

Galveston continued her creep toward the south, penetrating still deeper into the Kola Inlet.

Lieutenant j.g. Kathleen "Cat" Garrity sat in the rear seat of the F-14 Tomcat, which was parked on the starboard side of Jefferson's flight deck.

The long pins, each tagged with a red flag, that safed her ejection seat mechanism had already been pulled. In front of her, the Viper Squadron Co, Commander Willis F. Grant, better known aboard Jefferson by his call sign "Coyote," was going through the last of his pre-flight.

"Canopy coming down," Coyote told her over the Tomcat's intercom system, or ICS. The transparent plastic bubble descended slowly over her head, locking in place with a reassuring thump. "Starting engines."

Cat's heart was pounding beneath the tightness of her seat harness and G-suit, and she could hear the rasp of her own breathing, thick behind the rubber embrace of her oxygen mask, hissing in her ears. The Tomcat's twin F110-GE-400 engines spooled to life, their whine penetrating the cockpit like rolling, high-pitched thunder. She concentrated on finishing up her own pre-flight: WCS to STBY; wait for the Weapons Control System light to come on, then flip the liquid cooling switch from OFF to AWG-9. "AWG-Nine light's Out," she said. That was as it should be.

"Rog," Coyote replied.

Next she flipped the Nav Mode switch left of the radar display from OFF to NAV, set IFF to STBY, and turned the radio knobs to BOTH and ON. On the console just above her left knee was a keypad. Carefully, reading from the penciled notations on a pad strapped to her thigh, she keyed in Jefferson's current longitude and latitude for the Tomcat's on-board computer: 22'05'15' East, 71'00'35' North ― which translated as about eighty miles off the northern coast of Norway. Finally she began checking circuit breakers, by eye for those on her side consoles, and by reaching up behind her head and feeling for the set behind the seat. None had popped. Good. "Breakers all go."

A loud thump from outside the aircraft startled her. The blue-shirted deck crewmen were beginning to break the Tomcat down, removing the chains and chocks that secured the thirty-ton aircraft to its place on the flight deck.

A plane director in a Mickey Mouse helmet and a stained, yellow jersey moved past the starboard wing, hands raised, signaling like a cop at a busy intersection. Every man in the deck crew wore a color-coded jersey that identified his section: yellow for plane directors, blue for aircraft handlers, green for maintenance personnel and for the hook-and-cat men, brown for plane captains, purple for fuel handlers, red for firefighters and ordnance men, white for safety monitors, black-and-white checks for inspectors and troubleshooters.

"Here we go," Coyote said. "Gold Eagle Two-oh-one, rolling."

Guided by the Yellow Shirt, the Tomcat rolled smoothly across the flight deck, nosing up behind the vertical wall of a jet-blast deflector raised from the deck. Forward of the JBD, another Tomcat had just screamed off the bow and into the sky, and steam was swirling past the deck like low-flying clouds.

The JBD dropped into its recess in the deck, and Coyote guided the Tomcat forward, aligning it with precision along the rail-straight slash of the starboard bow catapult.

From her vantage point high up off the steel deck, Cat had a glorious view of the sea and sky around her. It was minutes before dawn, which came at 0640 hours at this latitude and this time of year. The sky was completely clear save for a rim of purple clouds along the horizon. Aft and to port the sky was still a deep, midnight blue; ahead and to starboard, toward the east, it had already lightened to a dazzling blend of cerulean and gold, and the tops of the clouds were catching the first orange touch of the hidden sun. A dazzlingly bright star ― actually the planet Venus ― gleamed like a beacon low in the southeast. In every direction, the sea was a deep, deep blue-green shadowed to near-invisibility by the last remnants of night.

With a thunderous, shuddering roar, the engines of Tomcat 206 on the catapult to her left rose to a shrieking crescendo, the aircraft trembling against that twin-mouthed fury. The launch officer performed his ballet of movement, swinging his arm up to point off the carrier's bow, then dropping to touch the deck. At the signal, the catapult officer in his enclosed cockpit on the deck off to one side pressed his button. Tomcat 206, Lieutenant Bruce "Mustang" Davis at the stick, whooshed down the catapult and off the bow, its engines glowing like twin orange eyes in the twilight. Steam fumed from the catapult track as deck crewmen dashed from their standby positions, preparing to receive the next Tomcat in line.

Other crewmen, meanwhile, were making the final preparations on 201.

Red-shirted ordies yanked the safing wires from the F-14's armament stores: four AIM-54C Phoenix missiles, two AIM-9M Sidewinders, and two of the new AMRAAM radar-guided missiles that were only now slowly coming into service as a replacement for the old, less-than-satisfactory Sparrow. One of them held a handful of wires up so that Coyote and Cat could verify that all of the weapons were now ready to fire. A Purple Shirt, a "Grape" in the lexicon of carrier deck crews, held up a signboard with the numerals 65000. That was the weight in pounds of the Tomcat, its stores, and its fuel. A cross-check with Coyote was necessary to verify the figure, so that the launch crews could set their catapult to fire with the proper strength. Green-shirted hook-and-cat men crawled beneath the aircraft, attaching the catapult shuttle and making certain all was ready for launch.

"Father, Son, Holy Ghost, Amen" sounded over her headset, a murmured litany. Coyote was running through the old naval aviator's ritual, "wiping" the Tomcat's rudder and ailerons by moving his stick forward and back, left and right, then moving the rudder pedals with his feet.

"Harness set?" Coyote asked her.

"Ready to go," she said. Could he hear her heart hammering through the ICS? Her mouth was dry, her palms inside her flight gloves were wet. She heard the Air Boss speaking to Coyote over the radio, giving him clearance. A light shining from the island and visible over her right shoulder showed green. They were ready for launch. Leaning her helmet as far back into her headrest as it would go, she braced herself, fighting the tension building in her gut. Suddenly, it was as though perspective had changed for her. The length of track from the Tomcat to the bow, just visible past the console and the back of Coyote's seat in front of her, seemed now impossibly short, a few feet at most. The deck officer was making revving motions with his wands, and she felt the F-14's engines coming to full power, a volcanic blast of power shrieking scant feet behind the small of her back. The Tomcat trembled now at the head of the catapult, like a great, gray eagle poised for flight.

How Many times had she been hurled from the bow of an aircraft carrier?

She'd long ago lost count… but the excitement and the fear and the adrenaline rush were always the same for her.

Coyote saluted the deck officer, indicating he was ready. The deck officer swung his arm up in that graceful point, dropped, touched the deck…

WHAM!

The Tomcat accelerated from zero to 170 mph in two seconds, thundering off Jefferson's bow in a dizzying rush of raw power. Had something gone wrong, had the catapult failed to provide the necessary thrust, they would have plunged off the carrier's bow toward the sea… with a scant second or two to grab their ejection rings and blast themselves clear.

"Wheeooo!" Coyote shrilled from the forward seat. "Good shot!"

And then they were climbing, her seat tipping back as the nose came up… up… up… and the Tomcat rocketed into the dawn. Golden light exploded over the eastern horizon as they passed five thousand feet, a mile up and still climbing. The sky above was pure glory.

And this was why Kathy Garrity had become a naval flight officer, despite the protests of her parents, despite the grueling training and study she'd put herself through for the past four years.

"oh, God, this is beautiful!" she cried over the ICS, unable and unwilling to suppress the joy.

"Amen to that," Coyote replied. "Let's tuck 'em in and see what this crate'll really do."

The Tomcat's wings, extended straight out to achieve maximum lift for takeoff, were folding back now, turning the Tomcat into a sleek spearhead designed for speed.

Accelerating now, they kept climbing into blue-gold glory.

The E-7C Hawkeye had roared off Jefferson's number-two catapult hours earlier, taking up station in advance of the carrier group as it made its way northeast along the Norwegian coast. One of four E-2Cs in VAW-130, the Catseyes, the Hawkeye was a carrier-based AEW, or early warning aircraft, thought by many to be the most capable radar-warning and aircraft-control plane in service anywhere in the world. In an age of high-performance jets, it was driven by two Allison turboprops, which gave the plane fuel efficiency enough to manage a two-hundred-mile patrol radius with six hours of loiter time on station. By far its most distinctive feature was the saucer-shaped radome, twenty-four feet in diameter, circling at a leisurely six revolutions per minute on its mounting above the aircraft's fuselage. The saucer provided lift enough to offset its own weight, and housed the powerful APS-125 radar that allowed the E-2C to track targets out to a range of 240 nautical miles.

On board was a crew of five: two pilots, a combat information center officer, an air controller, and a radar operator. Though it was now past sunrise, the aft part of the aircraft was shielded from outside light, and the only illumination came from the green-glowing screens that were the Hawkeye's entire reason for being. On the radar operator's main console, the sweep line painted smears of liquid light, stage-lighting the man as he noted the appearance of unidentified blips just entering the E-2C's range.

The CIC officer and the air controller stood behind him, peering over his shoulders at the screen. "My Lord in heaven," the air controller said. "They must be standing on each other's shoulders."

"Let's flash it," the CIC officer said. He picked up a microphone, keyed it, and began speaking in rapid, urgent tones.

"Home Plate, Home Plate," he said, using Jefferson's call sign. "This is Echo-Tango Seven-six-one. We have multiple contacts, repeat, numerous multiple contacts, from one-zero-zero to one-five-zero, range two-four-zero nautical miles."

The radar operator was Radarman First Class Richard Lee. Twenty-four years old, he'd been in the Navy for seven years and he had never, in all his life, seen such an array of aircraft except, possibly, for simulations of a mass Russian attack.

The Hawkeye was flying well in advance of the Jefferson and had now reached its patrol station twenty miles off Norway's North Cape. From that vantage point, and at the aircraft's ceiling of just over thirty thousand feet, he could see well into Russia's Kola Peninsula, painted on his display in crisp lines of light. Nothing was happening around Polyamyy or Murmansk, but the sky must be thick with aircraft over the airfields at Titovka, Pechenga, Zapolyamyy, Nikel.

This couldn't be happening…

"Sir," he said, pointing. "They're crossing the line."

It was true. Aircraft from Nikel and Pechenga, already practically on Russia's narrow border with Norway, were moving across the demarcation line between the countries. More aircraft were arriving too, from further to the south and cast, from Kola airfields not yet within range of the E-2C's radar.

"Home Plate, Home Plate," the CIC officer said. How could the man keep his voice so steady? "Echo-Tango Seven-six-one. We have a fire. I repeat, we have a fire. Bogies are assuming intercept vectors, bearing on Home Plate."

A fire ― the current code phrase meaning a possible attack in progress.

As far as Lee could tell from his radar screen, every aircraft in Eurasia was on its way.

And their destination appeared to be the Jefferson.