Los Angeles Class

1

Commander James Edward Travers pressed the headset against his ear, listening to the warble of coded transmissions plucked from the cold, wet air somewhere above the spaghetti of pipes and wiring bundles that decorated the Spook Hut's overhead. An adjustment on one of the verniers … there!

Red lights flickered across the array on the receiver mounted on the bulkhead in front of him, an extremely sophisticated and expensive broad-bandwidth scanner that one sailor had irreverently referred to as his "big-ass CB." Citizens band it certainly was not; each flash of a red LED pinpointed a different transmission on a Soviet military frequency. He made another slight adjustment on the console, as the big tape heads on the cabinet at his back rolled.

"Neechivah ni slishna!" a voice said with explosive clarity and strength. "Gavaritee medlina, Yedenitsa P'yat-dvah-adeen!"

"Shtob! Shtob!" a second voice came back, distant but shrill, almost hysterical. "Zdess' P'yat-dvah-adeen! Amerikanskyy podvahdnya lahtka … "

The burst of Russian, sent in the clear, was startling. The Soviets were usually meticulous in their use of coded and scrambled transmissions. Travers listened with intent fascination, translating the exchange as the tapes rolled.

"Unit Five-two-one, this is Headquarters," the near voice said, interrupting. "You are in violation of regulations. Cease transmission at once."

"Fuck the regulations!" the shrill voice replied. "The American submarine is getting away! He is maneuvering now for the Proliv Yekateriny. We need antisubmarine air to cut him off!"

Travers smiled. Whoever Unit Five-two-one was, he had a thing or two to learn about tact. Or, possibly, he was well connected enough that he didn't need to worry about tact… or the penalties for transgressing the regulations regarding unsecured radio transmissions.

Still, it was exactly this type of unguarded moment that ELINT specialists lived for, a brief and narrow window into the forest of scrambled signals and fiendishly convoluted encryptions.

"Additional forces are on the way, Unit Five-two-one. Cease transmission on this channel. Switch to scrambled mode at one-five-nine-nine."

"Bastards! I know reinforcements are coming. Deploy them to the Proliv Yekateriny if you want to slam the gate on this pig!"

The hairs at the back of Travers's neck prickled with excitement. He'd definitely picked up a part of the search net cast for Parche's fellow provocateur in this exercise, the LA-class boat Pittsburgh, some thousand miles almost due south of the Parche's current lurking point. He made a note on a piece of paper on the console before him and continued listening.

But this window, at least, had just closed. He heard no more outbursts of unguarded plain Russian. The warbles and chirps of coded, burst transmissions, however, continued to fill the air above.

He turned in his swivel chair to the Radioman First Class crowded into the cramped confines of the Spook Hut at his side. "Keep on 'em, Joe," he said. "I've gotta get this to the skipper."

"Aye, aye, sir," RM/1 Joseph McNally replied. He, too, wore a radio headset as he monitored the Soviet transmissions. "Maybe bring me some coffee, huh?"

"You got it." He shook his head as he squeezed out of the Spook Hut… which was in fact the Sturgeon class boat's torpedo room, redecorated for the occasion as an intelligence ESM listening suite. As with the Navy's submarine service, the SEALs, and a handful of other elite groups that prized professionalism above the formal hierarchies of rank and privilege, Naval Intelligence operatives — at least in the field — tended to accept casual fraternization between officers and enlisted men more than was possible within the regular naval service. You would never find a full commander fetching coffee for an enlisted man in the real Navy.

Ducking out of the cozy confines of the Spook Hut, he made his way aft along the main corridor, trotted up a companionway ladder, then entered the larger but still claustrophobic enclosure of the Parche's bridge and combat center, red-lit, now, to preserve the night sight of men whose duty schedules took scant notice of whether it was light or dark in the world above. Commander Richard Perrigrino, Parche's captain, stood at one of the two gleaming, silver tree trunks in the compartment's center, the housing for one of the boat's periscopes. With eye pressed against the rubber-cushioned ocular, his arm draped over one of the turning arms, he looked every inch the rugged U-boat skipper he sometimes pretended to be. Skip Jones, the boat's Exec, stood beside him.

"Whatcha got, Commander?" Jones asked, looking up from the clipboard and pen he held in his hands. "What brings you out of your cave and into the red light of day?"

"Something the captain might be interested in," Travers replied.

"Hang on just a sec, Commander," Perrigrino said. "Got a hot one here. Smile for the birdie…. "He touched a button on the side of the periscope housing, snapping a rapid-fire series of high-resolution photographs through the scope's lens. "Mark, Sierra Six-one, bearing three-three-four. Log it."

"Sierra Six-one, bearing three-three-four, aye, Captain," Jones said, noting the information on his clipboard.

Captain Perrigrino pulled back from the scope and grinned at Travers. "Hey! You want to see something damned cool?"

"Certainly, Captain." It wasn't every day that anyone other than the tight little coterie of senior submarine officers got to have a peek through the boat's periscope. He walked across the combat center to the periscope housing, leaned forward, and pressed his eyes up to the objective eyepiece.

The low-light image-intensifier system was on, flooding his eyes with a green-yellow glow. It took him a moment to begin to pick out shapes and meaning from the jumble he was seeing.

The water, for the most part, was a black swell low in the field of view. Against an equally black sky, mountains reared in shades of deep green and streaks of black, while closer blazed the whites and yellows of city lights, sparkling on the water.

Nearer still, he saw movement….

It took Travers long seconds to understand what it was… a long, low hull barely above the swell, supporting a rectangular sail above, all painted in yellow-green. Human shapes, tiny with distance, could be discerned in the vessel's weather bridge, high atop and forward on the conning tower. A submarine, definitely… but it didn't look like any Russian boat he'd ever seen. That long, low, and right-angled sail looked like the silhouette of an Oscar or a Papa, both cruise-missile subs… but the sliver of tail fin he could see above water was all wrong… as was the shape of the part of the hull he could see. He glanced at the range and bearing figures visible on the scope display. At a guess, the sub he was watching was three to four hundred feet in length… way too small for a monster Oscar, which measured a good 501 feet and some inches, and displaced 13,600 tons when submerged.

Besides, the Soviets only had one Papa class boat, a prototype test bed built at Gor'kiy in the late sixties to test cruise-missile concepts and later transferred to the Northern Fleet.

"What the hell is it?" he asked the captain. "If it's their one Papa, they're a hell of a long way off course."

"Ehhhh," Perrigrino said, making a sound like a game-show buzzer. "Wrong answer."

"Fair guess, though, Skipper," Jones said. "They look a bit alike."

"Fair but still a clean miss," Perrigrino said. He enjoyed needling the Naval Intelligence operative and liked to rub in the fact that there was an enormous gulf between books and think tanks and the inescapable realities of real-world experience. "So… would the gentleman from Maryland care to try for Double Jeopardy, where the cash prizes get really serious?"

Travers took another look. Those sleek lines on the hull… It had to be an attack boat, a hunter-killer, rather than a fat-pig SSGN or a Russian boomer. The most advanced H-K boats in the Soviet naval arsenal were the Alfa, which looked like a sleek cigar with a teardrop-shaped sail, low, mean, fast, and deadly; and the brand-new Akula, which looked like a big Alfa with a streamlined pod fixed atop the tail to house a towed array sonar.

"An attack boat," he said quietly. "But not one I know." He pulled back and looked Perrigrino in the eye. "Has to be a Mike."

Perrigrino's eyes widened, his bushy eyebrows climbing high. "Nice guess, Commander," he said, with just the slightest emphasis on the second word.

"But… that's not possible. They only have one Mike, and she was launched from Severodvinsk three years ago. She's still with the Northern Fleet."

"Well, either their lone Mike got a transfer," Perrigrino said, "or they have a second one." He picked up a microphone. "Sonar, Conn."

"Sonar, aye," a voice replied over the bridge speaker.

"You got a make on Sierra Six-one yet?"

"It's a Mike," the sonar watch replied. "But not the one in our library, the one recorded off Murmansk a couple of years ago. We're designating this one Mike Two."

"A new boat," Jones said. "This'll perk up the boys back at the Squirrel Cage."

Travers watched the Mike as it cruised slowly out of the Tauyskaya Guba, scattering the reflections of the lights of the port city of Magadan. It was moving quickly — he estimated fifteen knots or better — and a small flotilla of harbor craft and patrol boats escorting it clear of the port approaches were struggling to keep up. The figures on the weather bridge, he noticed, were gone, and in another moment, the lean, rounded hull began to slip beneath the rippling, light-smeared water.

"They're submerging," he said.

Perrigrino tapped his shoulder, cutting in. Travers stepped back as the Parche's captain took another look… and another round of photographs. "Going… going… and gone," Perrigrino said.

"Are they going after the Pittsburgh, you think?" Travers asked.

"Down scope," Perrigrino said. He stepped back, looked at Travers, and shrugged. "Only if our boys are real slow. Even at forty knots, that's a full day's cruise."

"I just overheard something broadcast in the clear. One of our Russian friends on the site was calling for more help, saying the American sub was making a break for the… " He stopped and glanced at the note in his hand. "The Proliv Yekateriny."

"Katherine's Straits, huh? Let's have a look."

He led the way to the chart table behind the periscope walk. Several charts lay open, and he thumbed through half a dozen before finding the one he wanted. "There," Perrigrino said. "Between Iturup to the north and Kunashir to the south. Both contested. The Soviets grabbed 'em from Japan in 1945 and never gave 'em back. Good, deep-water channel between them."

"How far away are they?"

"Guessing from their last recorded position… I'd say fifty miles. A couple of hours, if they can give their playmates the slip."

"So that Mike shouldn't be a problem," Travers said. "They'll be long gone by the time it gets there."

"That's the general idea," Perrigrino said. "And while the Russians are off chasing the 'Burgh boat halfway back to Yokasuka, we'll have our chance to get the hell out of

Dodge."

Travers picked up one of the other charts and studied it, a general large-scale navigational chart of the entire Sea of Okhotsk.

A Soviet sea….

Not that the United States recognized the unspoken but vigorously defended claim. Almost completely enclosed by the Siberian mainland, the Kamchatka Peninsula, Sakhalin Island, and the pearl-string necklace of the Kurils, the only bit of land touching the sea not belonging to the Russians was a two-hundred-mile stretch of Hokkaido, Japan's northernmost island.

There were only two ways in or out of the Sea of Okhotsk. One was through La Perouse Strait, between the southern tip of Sakhalin and Hokkaido, near the port of Wakkanai, and that fed into the shallow and land-encompassed Sea of Japan. The other was through the Kurils, that chain of some thirty small, volcanic islands forming an imperfect wall be-

tween the Sea of Okhotsk and the open waters of the Pacific. They comprised yet another of the geographical curses laid against Mother Russia, a choke point through which Soviet warships had to pass if they wished to transit to the open sea.

As for the Sea of Okhotsk, the Soviets had been battling for years to have it accepted as an internal sea, belonging to them and from which all foreign vessels might be excluded. The United States, as ever determined to enforce freedom of the seas, insisted that the Sea of Okhotsk should be considered international waters, and free to all.

The international situation was further complicated by Japan's claim to the four southernmost islands of the chain. In 1875, Japan had traded the southern half of Sakhalin to the Russians in exchange for the Kurils. In September of 1945, however, at the very end of World War II, Soviet army and naval elements had landed on the Japanese islands. Japan had been trying to effect their return ever since, and still referred to the captive islands as "the Northern Territories."

Lieutenant Commander Roger "Skip" Jones joined Travers beside the chart table. "So, Commander," the XO said. "You think Silent Dolphins is worth it?"

"I guess that depends on what you think is important," Travers replied. "I hate to think of the boys on the Pittsburgh being deliberately put in danger."

The XO shrugged. "That's the Navy's mission. To go in harm's way, and all that." He grinned, the expression emphasizing his boyish looks. He couldn't have been more than thirty. "Besides, as far as we're concerned, these are international waters, right? We kicked Kadhafi's ass in the Gulf of Sidra, we'll do the same to Gorbachev here!"

"The two situations aren't the same," Travers said quietly. "Kadhafi isn't sitting on a few thousand megatons, ready to launch at a moment's notice!"

"Aw, c'mon! You don't think the Russkis would hit the red button over something like this, do you?"

It was Travers's turn to shrug. "All I know is that we don't know what they would do. That is the real reason we're here,

after all!"

"The man has a point," Captain Perrigrino said, coming up from behind. "Washington doesn't give squat whether Liberian-registered freighters can freely transit the Okhotsk. But they'd love to get a look at the bastards sinking one!"

"The Pittsburgh is hardly a freighter, Captain. Moscow could see her presence as a threat."

"But not one worth more than a few rattled sabers, son. Chase and his boys'll come out of this okay. You'll see."

"I hope you're right, sir."

"We do know how to play this game," Jones added.

A game. Was that all it was to the men at the cutting edge? Travers glanced at the other officers and enlisted men, quietly, even stolidly at their duty stations around the circumference of the Parche's command center. Some looked nervous, some bored. Most simply wore masks of professionalism, watching their consoles and boards with studied focus and concentration. How many of them were even aware of what was going on in this, Operation Silent Dolphins. How many knew the stakes?

What, Travers wondered, did they think of this "game?"

The cover story of enforcing international rights to free passage on the high seas had been invoked more than once before. A year earlier, in 1986, the United States Navy had enforced its interpretation of maritime geography by sailing into the Gulf of Sidra in the Mediterranean, of which Libya claimed sovereign ownership. The incident had resulted in missiles fired, some Libyan MiGs downed, and a couple of Libyan missile boats sunk. It had also almost certainly led to a Libyan-backed terrorist bombing of a disco in Germany frequented by American soldiers … which in turn had led to the U.S. air strikes against Libya in April of 1986.

The U.S. had never tried enforcing a similar interpretation over the Sea of Okhotsk; as Travers had pointed out, the Soviet Union was not Libya, and, in any case, the waters off the Siberian east coast were not as heavily traveled by international shipping as the waters of the central Med. The entire Sea of Okhotsk, all 610,000 square miles of it, iced over from October to May, was virtually empty save for military traffic, a handful of Russian fishing boats, and the occasional missile test.

Still, the U.S. Navy had a keen interest in access to the Sea of Okhotsk, legal or not. Operation Silent Dolphins was a case in point.

American activities in and around the Sea of Okhotsk went back three decades at least. One of the greatest espionage coups of the Cold War, a covert op known as Ivy Bells, had been carried out by elements of the American submarine force. Over the course of nine years, from 1972 through 1980, American submarines with special towed-array instrument platforms had sought out undersea telephone cables stretching across the Okhotsk seabed to the Kamchatka Peninsula, connecting the major Soviet naval bases at Vladivostok, Sovetskaya, and Magadan with the major Pacific port on Kamchatka, Petropavlovsk. Time after time, divers from the Halibut, the Parche, and other Special Ops boats, had attached electronic taps on the cables, allowing American intelligence bureaus to monitor everything from fleet movements to romantic phone calls to distant loved ones; telephone traffic across the Okhotsk had not been scrambled or encrypted because, it was thought, the submarine cables were completely secure. American submarines had serviced the taps at least once a month for years, picking up the long-duration tapes when they were full and replacing them.

Only in the last few years had the Soviets discovered this open back door to their Far Eastern operations and slammed it shut… and that thanks not to their Pacific Fleet and coastal defense forces, but to an American, Ronald Pelton, an employee at the National Security Agency who'd sold out his country for the munificent sum of roughly $15,000. The KGB was not known for its generous pay scales.

So the glory days of Ivy Bells were over, but American operations in the region continued, almost as though a tradition had been established, one that could not be abandoned without a certain loss of face and prestige.

The theory behind Operation Silent Dolphins was deceptively simple. Two Sturgeon class submarines, including the Parche, had crept stealthily past the Kurils and into the Soviets' backyard, parking themselves outside the port city of Magadan and within the shallow waters of the Sakhalinskiy Zaliv, on the northern approaches to the port of Nikolayevsk. Another Sturgeon, the Batfish, was outside of Petropavlovsk, on the Kamchatka Pacific coast, and a fourth was in the Sea of Japan in the Zaliv Petra Velikogo, south of the great port of Vladivostok and within easy listening range of the nearby secondary ports at Nakhodka and Vostochnyy. All four Sturgeons were experienced at sneak-and-peek inshore ops, and were equipped with high-tech ESM gear for monitoring Soviet radio and radar transmissions. Following their operational orders to the letter, they took up their assigned positions and waited. At a prearranged moment— 0330 hours that morning — all had risen to periscope depth and extended the slender radio masts studded with ECM listening gear.

And at the same time, a fifth American submarine, the Los Angeles class boat Pittsburgh, had surfaced ten miles off the east coast of Sakhalin, opposite the port of Yuzhno Sakhalinsk.

The Soviet reaction had been predictable, and instantaneous. The Pittsburgh was well outside the three-mile limit declared by the United States, but well inside the twelve-mile limit claimed by Moscow… not to mention being a good two hundred miles within a body of water claimed in its entirety by the Soviet Union.

Pinpointed almost at once by half a dozen radar transmitters, from Novikovo in southern Sakhalin to an Ilyushin-38 May operating out of Petropavlovsk, the Pittsburgh had instigated a leisurely turn back out to sea, then submerged once more with an almost royal arrogance.

With four electronic surveillance submarines listening, a full alert had been sounded throughout the Soviet Far East, from Vladivostok in the south to tiny, remote Anadyr, far to the north on the Bering Sea. ASW aircraft had lifted into the dark, partly overcast skies. Ships had gotten under way. SAM batteries had been manned. Radar had swept skies and sea alike.

And the four spy subs had recorded every movement, every radio call, every radar bandwidth from their watery blinds in the icy black waters off the Soviet homeland.

It was an old game, a game as old as the Cold War itself, a matching of wits and nerve, of technology and crew training in secret and out-of-the-way arenas around the world. It was also a war, and a deadly one. The battles, the heroes, the stakes were never published, never revealed to the civilian community… but the casualty lists were real. If the Russians managed to corner the Pittsburgh, they would find a way to bring her to the surface. By their way of thinking, they were defending their sovereign territorial waters; they were as skittish about U.S. subs lurking in the Sea of Okhotsk as their American counterparts would be about Russian boats cruising up the Chesapeake to eavesdrop on electronic chitchat coming out of the Pentagon or Fort Meade.

"How much more time are you going to need?" Perrigrino asked, breaking Travers's reverie.

Travers looked at his watch. Operational orders called for listening to Soviet signals and recording them for at least three hours … but dawn in these waters was at 0451 hours … several minutes ago, now. He knew Perrigrino was less than enthusiastic about trying to slip away from the approaches to a heavily traveled military port under the light of day. These waters were shallow, this close inshore, and a submerged submarine could be picked out sometimes by its shadow, from the air.

"We either move out now, so we can be in deep water by the time it's fully light," he said, "or we stay put until after dark. Your call, Captain. We have a lot of good stuff already… including the sighting of that Mike."

"Yeah, but another twelve hours would give us a lot more, right?"

"Certainly." Travers nodded. Perrigrino had the rep of an aggressive sub skipper, one who wasn't afraid to get in close and tight when it counted.

Perrigrino pulled up another chart and studied it for a moment. This one was a close-up look at the Bay of Tauyskaya and the approaches to Magadan. An island, Ostrov Zav'yalova, marked the southern boundary to the bay.

The captain pointed, indicating the waters just north of the slender island. "We've got us a great hide here," he said. "There's enough junk in these waters to cover us even if they start active pinging. I think we're best off staying put. If anything, it'll give us a longer run in darkness to make it out of this hole, down Kamchatka's west coast and out through the Kuril'skiy Straits. XO?"

"I concur, Captain."

"Okay," Travers said. "We'll keep our ears on."

He was still troubled, however, as he made his way down the ladder, turned left, and headed forward toward the torpedo room. While U.S. subs had performed a variety of espionage operations in the Sea of Okhotsk, everything from cable tapping to monitoring the splashdowns of Soviet missile tests, this was the first time they'd tried deliberately provoking a Soviet military response. The idea, Travers had heard, had come in the wake of the Soviet downing of a civilian airliner, the ill-fated Korean Air Lines Flight 007, in 1983. U.S. and Japanese intelligence assets, including an American ELINT aircraft over the Pacific, had picked up a wealth of data on Soviet military responses as the Boeing 747, with 269 people on board, had been pursued by a MiG and shot down by close-range missile fire.

Those civilians had been among the casualties of this sometimes not-so-cold war. Soviet actions that night had fully demonstrated their willingness to defend their territory with lethal force.

How, he wondered, would they react to the unprovoked intrusion by an American attack submarine?

Joe McNally grumbled about the fact that he'd forgotten the coffee.