Los Angeles Class

11

My God, it's him. It really is him….

Seaman O'Brien stood at attention in the second rank of Pittsburgh s crew, listening to the change-of-command ceremony on a warm and blustery Monday afternoon. The formation was drawn up on the pier, facing the Pittsburgh; the twin podiums set up on the sub's forward deck, and the ' Burgh's brow were festooned with red, white, and blue bunting, and a blue backdrop had been rigged behind the podiums to support the Navy Seal and to serve as a neutral background for the photographers.

To O'Brien's right was an audience area, consisting of rows of folding metal chairs hauled out from the base for the occasion. At his back was the Parche, with a fair number of her crew gathered on her deck and on her sail-top weather bridge to watch the festivities.

"In the long tradition of naval service," the admiral who seemed to be running the show was saying, "the ceremonies revolving around the passing of command from one ship captain to another have held a special and vitally important place…. "

The man had been introduced as Admiral Hartwell, the commanding officer of Submarine Squadron 5, but he didn't sound as though he were especially excited about being there. He was reading from a prepared speech. The two other officers up there behind the patriotically colored bunting set up around the torpedo-loading hatch sat on their chairs and tried to look relaxed, as Admiral Hartwell's voice droned on from speakers set up on the pier.

O'Brien was still in shock from meeting the man who was going to be his commanding officer, the boat's new skipper… and O'Brien's companion during the four-hour flight across country two weeks ago. He'd only seen Gordon that morning, when he'd come aboard for an inspection with Captain Chase. O'Brien had been in the torpedo room going over his qual requirements with Lieutenant Walberg and the COB when Gordon and Chase had stooped through the torpedo-room hatch.

"Attention on deck!" COB had called out.

"As you were," Chase had said. "Surprise inspection."

And it was a surprise. Generally, word of a snap inspection was passed by various covert means from department to department, giving at least a few moments' warning. O'Brien had already learned how that dodge worked from personal experience.

Gordon had smiled when he'd seen O'Brien.

"Seaman O'Brien, isn't it?" he'd said with a wink. "How are your quals coming along, sailor?"

"Uh… just getting started, sir."

"I'll want this man standing watches down here as soon as possible, Lieutenant," he'd told the others. "He's a smart man, and I want him up to speed as quickly as possible."

"Aye aye, sir," COB had said, looking a bit startled.

O'Brien couldn't take his eyes from the man, now. Commanders and ship captains were such godlike creatures from the perspective of an E-3 fresh out of C-School. And this guy had actually talked to him for the better part of four hours….

He must have known he was going to be O'Brien's CO, and he hadn't said a word, hadn't pulled rank, hadn't acted like anything except a friendly and interested naval officer sharing a few hours of boredom on a transcontinental flight.

What kind of submarine captain was he going to make?

Harwell's "few remarks" came to an end at last, and Captain Chase stood at one of the podiums to give his speech. Overhead, seabirds wheeled and screeched and called, as small whitecaps began kicking up on the waters of the straits separating Mare Island from Vallejo.

O'Brien remained stiffly at attention. His feet were starting to get numb, and he resorted to an old trick learned in boot camp… wiggling his toes hard within the embrace of his spit-shined dress shoes, and alternately tensing and relaxing the muscles of his calves, to keep them from cramping.

Commander Frank Gordon had talked to him. Incredible….

"I stand ready to be relieved, sir."

"I relieve you, sir."

"Very well. The boat is yours. Good luck with your new command."

Mike Chase extended a white-gloved hand, and Gordon accepted it. The small band on the pier struck up "Anchors Aweigh," as the handful of civilians in the folding chairs nearby applauded. Gordon and Chase stood at the podium on Pittsburgh's forward deck for a moment more as photographers snapped pictures. Admiral Hartwell stepped forward and shared a place in several shots, the three men grinning as they repeated handshakes and shoulder claps for the press. A stiff breeze blew across the Mare Island Strait, ruffling the surface of the water and eliciting a whoosh sound from the speakers as it whispered across the microphones, followed by a squeal of feedback.

It seemed a strange way to begin a secret mission, with a change of command in the full glare of publicity, but then to break with ceremony and tradition would have been to invite comment… and suspicion.

The formal ceremonies were over. There would be a reception and dance that evening in the big recreation hall, but the deed itself was done.

Frank Gordon was now in command of a Los Angeles class nuclear attack submarine.

The ship's complement was drawn up in ranks ashore, to the right of the seated crowd, standing quietly at attention. The actual change-of-command ceremony was brief and simple, but vitally important in the routine of Navy life. Since the days of wooden hulls and canvas aloft, ceremonies like this one had served as a visible ritual whereby the absolute authority of command was transferred from one man to another, ensuring that every man aboard was fully aware of the authenticity of the new captain's orders and the legality of his command. While a naval captain no longer held the absolute command of life and death over his crew, he was still, within carefully proscribed limits, the law aboard ship.

And the men had to trust him absolutely, since it was his decisions that determined the success or failure of their mission, and, quite possibly, whether they lived or died.

Gordon was just glad the dog-and-pony-show part was over with. Two years of giving Special Ops briefings in the Pentagon had long ago gotten him over any fear he might have had about public speaking, but it was still a chore he disliked. Politicking was how he thought of it. Trying to buy people, to manipulate them with pretty words.

But his brief speech was over. He'd spoken of the verities, of duty and honor, of sacrifice and trust. His men needed to trust him implicitly, but that trust was two-way. He would need to trust them as completely, as deeply, if this new command of his was to be a success.

"Well done, boys," Hartwell said, as they stepped away from the podium. Ashore, the band had reached the triumphant conclusion of its closing piece. The crowd was standing now, breaking into small knots. It wasn't a large group — twenty-five, maybe thirty people. The Pittsburgh's crew only comprised 120 men, and not that many of them had family living here at Mare Island or within a reasonable drive.

The boat's COB was dismissing the formation. Most of the men began filing back aboard up the gaily decorated brow. A few remained with the visitors, mostly women and children, wives and kids, with a few older couples, proud parents.

Gordon tried picking a few faces out of the crowd. He'd spent the past several evenings going over personnel records, memorizing names, rates, and positions, and now he was trying to attach faces to the descriptions. In the coming months, it was going to be vital that he know each man — not only by name and face, but by what could be expected of him.

He saw the new kid, O'Brien, and smiled to himself. It looked like the nub was just getting over the shock of realizing just who it was with whom he'd shared that flight out from Washington.

He already knew a surprising number of the men aboard… but then, the Navy was a tight little community, and the Silent Service was smaller and tighter still. Lots of men found themselves serving together with old shipmates, given time enough. BM1 Archie Douglas, for instance, was one of Pittsburgh's old hands. According to his dossier, his first cruise had been that memorable op aboard the old Bluefin in the Persian Gulf in 1980. Gordon remembered him well. The kid had dived in after an injured SEAL while the boat had been on the surface under attack, and won a Silver Star for the act.

Gordon had been XO on the Bluefin during that op, under none other than Commander Mike Chase. Geeze,he thought, it's like old home week.

That one over there, the third class in the arms of a startlingly pretty young woman with long hair, was ST3 Dave Kellerman, one of his sonar techs. Nearby was SM/2 Rodriguez, with his wife and two-year-old daughter. Entries in his record suggested he was one of the best sonar men in the service. Rodriguez was due for rotation ashore pretty soon, and Pittsburgh would be losing him. It would be a good idea, Gordon thought, to have Rodriguez and Kellerman work particularly closely together, if the watch schedules could be swung that way, to make sure Kellerman was up to Rodriguez's standard. He made a mental note to talk to Latham about that.

Pittsburgh's Executive Officer was another potential worry, something that was going to require his attention. Latham, too, was nearing the end of his tour as Pittsburgh's XO. According to his records, he was up for consideration for a command of his own. In fact, the Promotion Board should have made him a full commander, sent him to Command Orientation, and given him his own boat.

The question was whether Latham harbored any grudges or bad feelings thinking that Pittsburgh should have been his. Fred Latham was another of Bluefin's officers, and had served with Gordon before. Like Gordon, he was a bit behind the point on his service career curve where he should have been, had he not missed a promotion opportunity a few years back. There were only so many sub-driver billets to go around in the Navy, with many more qualified officers standing in line to take them. Miss the selection board process a time or two, and the next available billet would go to a younger man coming up the rank ladder behind you.

How did Latham feel about that? Gordon needed to know, needed to get to know the man well. The boat's XO was responsible for everything inside the submarine's pressure hull, including, specifically, the crew and all of the crew's individual and personal problems. If he did his job and did it well, Gordon would have a happy, efficient, and well-run boat. If he did not, this coming cruise could turn into sheer hell.

"Good job, boys," Admiral Hartwell said. "Well, they didn't throw anything at us," was Gordon's reply.

"So, shall we see to the final handover details below?" Chase asked.

"Of course."

"I have to get back to headquarters," Hartwell said, "but I'll see you both at the reception tonight. Deal?"

"Deal, Admiral."

"Congratulations again, Gordon. It was a long time in coming."

"Thank you, sir."

They escorted the admiral aft to the brow, where he was joined by some of his staff. "SUBRON 5, departing," a voice called from the loudhailers, accompanying the clang of the ship's bell and the squeal of a boatswain's pipe.

With the admiral safely ashore, Gordon followed Chase down the forward escape trunk ladder into the boat. As they made their way forward through the control room, now his control room, Gordon wondered what Chase was thinking, what he was feeling.

Through the control room and forward to the captain's cabin.

"I think we're done with all the busywork," Chase said, opening the door and ushering Gordon through. He gestured toward the wall safe. "Your orders were delivered by courier this morning. They're in there."

"Thank you."

"Anything else I can tell you? Any other questions you might have?"

"You can tell me about Okhotsk."

Chase sighed and dropped into a chair, leaving the chair behind the compartment's small desk free. Gordon walked around behind the desk and sat down. It wasn't as though this were a new thing for him. He'd commanded a submarine before, the Bluefin.

Did the sense of newness, of sheer wonder never go away?

"Probably not a lot that you can't get from the standard oceanographic charts. It's big, it's deep, it's cold. Ice-covered October through May, usually. Something like six hundred ten thousand square miles. Except for a little fishing traffic along the coasts, it's mostly a restricted preserve for the Soviet Fleet. They've got sonar arrays stretched on the seabed between each of the Kuril Islands and across La Perouse Strait, all the way from Sakhalin to the northern tip of Hokkaido. They have a PLARB bastion there, so it's real tightly controlled and patrolled." PLARB was the acronym for Podvodnaya Lodka Atomnaya Raketnaya, the Soviet equivalent of American boomers, ballistic missile submarines. Soviet naval strategy called for keeping their naval ICBM assets in safely contained and heavily protected areas, or "bastions," secure from prowling American hunter-killers.

"Did you run into any sign of their bastion forces in Silent Dolphins?"

"Hell, we ran into their whole Siberian fleet! But we weren't there long enough to pick up any of their attack subs, if that's what you mean." Bastion areas, according to what was known of their strategic doctrine, would be patrolled by attack boats — Alfas, Sierra IIs, Victor IIIs, Akulas.

"Yeah. I'm not that worried about their surface ASW assets. You need a sub to catch a sub."

It was an old saying among submariners, trite, but no less true for that. In World War II, most sub hunting had been done by surface vessels — destroyers and destroyer escorts— and by aircraft. In the fifties and sixties, however, that had changed. Hunter-killer submarines — as opposed to the ponderous guided-missile boats, the SSBNs like modern-day Soviet Typhoons or American Ohios — were designed primarily to find enemy submarines and, in wartime, sink them… especially the enemy's ballistic-missile subs that hung as such terrible threats above home cities and populations. If war came, some HK assets would be deployed against the enemy's merchant shipping and surface naval forces, no doubt… but their first and by far most important target would be his submarines.

To that end, SSNs on both sides of the Iron Curtain continued to train and, when possible, to spar with one another. A common game in the larger game of Cold War maneuver was to find the enemy's boats wherever they might be patrolling, sneak in close and unheard, and pick up what intelligence you could from passive sonar, signals intercepts, and the like. Hell, frequently, when the other guy heard you, a real battle developed, complete with maneuvers … and terminated not by the sudden launch of torpedoes, but by a loud active sonar ping that, in effect, called out "Tag! You're It!"

Mike Chase continued talking, describing what he'd seen of Soviet ASW assets in the Sea of Okhotsk three weeks before. "It's all in my after-mission report. I'm sure they'll distill it down and include the skinny in their briefing for you."

Gordon snorted. "Yeah, maybe. But sometimes the cult of secrecy gets so thick around here, they won't tell you the name of your own boat or what color she's supposed to be painted."

"I know what you mean. But I'll see if I can get you a copy, just in case."

"Fantastic! I'd appreciate that."

"Anything else?"

"Any major discipline problems I should know about?" Chase shook his head. "They're all great kids. The best. Absolute professionals, every one of 'em. COB went back and had a quiet talk with the owner of that bar ashore, by the way. The fight last week? We're paying him for damages out of the boat's fund, and he's dropping his charges."

"That's good. I'd hate to leave that unresolved."

"Still a shame. That bar was an old submariner's haunt for a lot of years. Sounds like the SPs are going to have to put it off-limits, now that that gang has taken it over."

"Won't be the first time."

"Roger that."

"And the men involved?"

"I'm deferring to you. Your problem. But I recommend you take it easy on them. They weren't to blame."

"Understood. I'll have to review the Shore Patrol reports, of course, but I don't see any point in being the bad guy, here."

"Anything else?"

"Can't think of anything, Mike. I know you're giving me a good boat."

"The best, Frank. Absolutely." He extended a hand.

"Good luck."

"Thanks a lot. You have your new orders yet?"

"Oh, yeah. I'll be conning a desk for a while down in San Diego. After that, I expect they'll be talking to me about senior service college, and maybe a major shore command. But hell. After driving a boat like the 'Burgh … "

Gordon looked up at the bulkhead, then the overhead. His, now. "I know what you mean."

Lieutenant (j.g.) Kenneth Randall swam with long, easy strokes of his flippers. Even though it was only a little past noon, the water was murky enough to make visibility a bitch. He had an underwater lantern attached by a lanyard to his left wrist, but the silt in the water served only to make the beam dazzlingly opaque. He relied instead on his eyes, peering through the high-tech mask that covered his entire face. He could just make out the bottom a foot or two ahead.

The water was frigid, though he honestly didn't feel the cold that much. His wet suit insulated him well with a layer of water warmed by his own body between the rubber and foam layers of the suit. Even in July, the water temperature in this region never got much above forty-five degrees or so. Without protection, a swimmer would die of hypothermia in minutes.

He checked his wrist compass to make sure he was still following the correct bearing. In this kind of silty gloom, it was possible to swim aimlessly in circles and think you were going in a straight line, just like a man lost in an Arctic whiteout. Yeah. The reported sighting ought to be just ahead.

"Trout One, this is Trout Two. Do you copy, over?" Nelson's voice was a bit garbled over the earpiece buried in the depths of Randall's dive hood, but recognizable.

"Trout Two, this is One." The full-face mask let him speak into the small radio microphone by his lips. He just had to be careful not to put too much pressure into the mask by talking, and risk breaking the pressure seal from the inside. He held the corner of the mask tight against his face as he spoke. "Go ahead."

"I think I found the objective. Track's pointed straight at the beach."

"Copy, Two. I should be there in a few moments. Hold your position."

"Copy, One. Holding."

Navy divers had been experimenting with various types of underwater radios for decades, with varying amounts of success. The trouble was that water was almost impenetrable to radio, so even modern units like this still-experimental one were only good for pretty close range — distances out to a few tens of meters or so. There was the promise of a whole new family of underwater communications gear piggybacked onto blue-green laser beams, which treated the ocean like a pane of transparent window glass.

Randall had trouble believing that even that technomarvel would work well in conditions as crappy as these.

There it was. It had to be.

Careful not to touch the bottom — one careless flick of a flipper would stir vast clouds of silt into the water which would not settle out for hours — he moved closer, then hovered. Reaching for the underwater camera slung from his waist, he raised the plastic housing, aimed, and clicked the shutter. Film advance was automatic. He took three more shots, just to be safe.

The subject of his photographic study was two sets of linear marks on the seabed just below … a pair of long rows of marching indentations in the soft muck running side by side about ten feet apart. As Trout Two had suggested, they were aimed straight at the beach.

He could see the shadow of his dive buddy above the tracks to his right, in the direction of shore. Carefully, he turned and followed, reaching GM1 Tom Nelson's position a moment later.

"They look fresh," Nelson said, his voice breaking up a bit over the radio circuit.

"Hard to tell. This goo would look fresh no matter what."

"Yeah, but currents and stuff would erode the markings. These are razor-sharp."

"Okay, Tonto. You're the ace tracker, then. Let's do some tracking."

"Right you are, kemosabe, sir."

They turned toward the shore and began gently kicking along side by side. The water here was nearly thirty feet deep, but shoaling rapidly. Overhead, the murk gradually grew lighter, until a silvery, flashing swirl of daylight began penetrating the silt. Ahead, light and dark churned and chopped, and the two SEALs could feel the insistent tug of the surf.

"Okay," Randall said, moving upright and holding his position with gentle motions of his arms. "We go in hot… just in case."

"Copy."

They dropped their lanterns and unclipped their weapons, H&K submachine guns specially designed for work in salt water. They removed muzzle plugs and breech covers, then started swimming in.

Randall's head broke the water as his knees hit the bottom. Shoving his mask up high on his head, he took a careful look around before letting the next inrushing wave pick him up and body-surf him forward another ten feet.

The beach was sere and lifeless, as lifeless as the gray mountains shouldering behind the dunes into a gray and leaden sky. Aptly named Split Top, one of the handful of genuine mountains on Adak was just visible on the horizon through the rain-laden haze to the east.

There wasn't a lot to Adak. A tiny island, one of the larger of the Andreanof Islands in the middle of the Aleutian chain, the place occupied a point almost precisely midway between East and West—2,062 miles from Seattle and 2,070 miles from Tokyo, as a hand-painted directional sign set up on the base pointed out. There were no native trees, no native civilian population. All that Adak boasted was a naval station, the site of NSGAA, the Naval Security Group Activity Adak. About two thousand naval personnel were stationed there, along with approximately a thousand dependents.

Randall lay in the surf, studying the beach. It was all rock and gray, volcanic ash. There was a lot of ash cover on the island, for Great Sitkin Volcano was located just thirty-six miles to the northeast, while Kanaga was to the west, just across Adak Strait. The gray muck and silt on the seabed surrounding the ocean was the accumulation of thousands of years' worth of volcanic fallout.

But that muck had captured the underwater tracks that had first captured a hiker's attention. Two days before, a young sailor stationed at the air station had been hiking along the western shore of the island above Adak Strait, not far from Cape Yakak, when he'd come upon strange tracks along the beach. The incoming tide had destroyed those tracks within the next couple of hours, making it impossible to pinpoint exactly where they'd emerged from the sea… or where they'd returned. Since the special SOG-SEAL unit had just flown into Adak to await transfer to a nuclear sub and their next op, the captain commanding the Adak station had asked if Randall and his people would take a look.

The beach was deserted, and Randall moved up out of the surf, still keeping a careful eye out for any unwelcome presence on the beach. Though the tracks sighted by the sailor had been created two days ago — the tide gave them a good indication of exactly when — it was possible the intruders had come back more recently… possible, in fact, that the intruders were still there.

"Ground looks pretty churned up above the high-tide line," Nelson pointed out.

"Yeah. Let's check it out."

"Whatcha think. Crawler Subski?"

"I'd bet money on it. We don't have anything like this."

There'd been stories for years, now, ever since the early eighties, of sightings of track marks exactly like these on sandy beaches along the Alaskan coast. Similar sightings had been made on the beaches of Finland and Sweden as well. Though no official statement had ever been released by the Navy, it was almost certain that the Russians possessed some sort of unusual submarine or amphibious crawler, one that traveled underwater, but did so by crawling along the sea floor on tracks like a sealed and pressurized tractor or tank. No one had ever actually seen one of the beasts, but there was little doubt about its existence.

And it had to be the Russians. Siberia, after all, was only about seven hundred miles northwest of Adak.

Most likely, though, the vehicles, which some in the SEAL community had dubbed Crawler Subski, were brought in as passengers on a Russian cargo or special operations submarine. The mother boat would drop the intruder off a few miles offshore, and wait to pick it up upon its return.

But… return for what? That was the biggest question Naval Intelligence still faced in regard to the mysterious beach visitors. It wasn't as though Adak was a high-priority target….

Adak had been born as a result of the Japanese occupation of two Aleutian Islands — Attu and Kiska — some hundreds of miles to the west during 1942. With the advent of the Cold War, any base positioned strategically relative to the Soviet Empire had been of value. If the Cold War ever turned hot, Adak might serve as an advance airbase for operations against Kamchatka or northeastern Siberia.

But what could the Soviet tracked intruders have possibly been looking for?

"Hey! Lieutenant Randall! Something here."

Randall moved farther up the beach, passing the high-tide line and joining Nelson where the sand and ash grew soft, just before the inland dunes.

"Whatcha got?"

"Looks like they came in and had a fucking picnic!" A black plastic trash bag lay half-buried in the ash. Spilling from the open mouth were napkins, dirty paper plates, some paper cups, and assorted ripe garbage, including fish bones. A couple of empty bottles — vodka bottles— lay nearby.

"This is too weird for school," Randall said. "They pack up their crawler aboard a special ops submarine in Petro, say, and come all the way up here, deploy their vehicle, come ashore on American territory… to have a picnic? It makes no sense!"

"They might have been eavesdropping on Adak Naval Station," Nelson suggested. "Might even have climbed Split Top over there for a straight line of sight to the base communications center."

"Still doesn't explain them leaving their lunch here on the beach. Unless… "

"Unless what?"

"Well, there've been rumors, scuttlebutt about American submarines sneaking into Russian coastal waters, right?"

"Sure."

"Suppose they left this here deliberately?"

"Why?"

"To say, 'Hey! We can play these games, too!'"

"Seems pretty far-fetched."

"Yeah? You come up with a better answer."

"Dunno. They might've done it on a lark. Or as a bet or a dare. Maybe they never figured we'd spot their tracks and come looking."

"If they didn't want to be found, they would have taken their garbage with them," Randall said evenly. "That's the way it's done."

"Well, it's the way we do it. Maybe they're just pissing on the fire hydrant."

"Doing what?"

"You know. Marking territory, like dogs."

"Interesting image. Well, we'll let the Intelligence boys sort through this."

"Are we going to take it back?"

"Negative. We'll mark it with a beacon, and let the higher powers come and play in the garbage." Kneeling, he pulled a transponder from a waterproof pouch and planted it in the sand next to the spilled trash. "My guess is that they'll turn this whole beach into an archeological site, and go over it with penknives and toothbrushes, looking for clues… cigarette butts, bottle caps, girlie magazines, that sort of thing."

Nelson looked out at the gray sea to the south. "Yeah. And some Russian sub driver'll be out there watching through his periscope, laughing himself sick." He pitched his voice in a broad, mock-Russian accent. "Gullible Amerikanski!"

"Well, we won't be here," Randall said. "We'll be in

Siberia, saying 'gullible Russki' to them! C'mon. Let's go."

Together, the two SEALs trudged back down the beach toward the water.