Ohio Class

12

Roger Caswell had never known such pain.

Four long days had dragged by since he'd gotten that familygram, and each day he'd settled a bit deeper into depression. It was the helplessness more than anything else that hurt. Ohio's early sailing date had been beyond his control, and now Nina had arbitrarily decided to call off their marriage without giving him a chance to discuss things, to talk, to negotiate in any way. If her parents had argued her into changing her mind, he hadn't been given the chance to answer.

He really didn't understand her refusal to listen to anything he had to say. Don't call me. Don't want my mind changed. What did that mean… that she was afraid that if they talked again, he would convince her to give him another chance? That if her parents had convinced her he was wrong for her, he might be able to make her change her mind again?

That was crazy. Caswell was a rational sort, the kind of man who thought things through carefully and wanted to know the whole story. If he was wrong, if he'd made a mistake, he wanted to know so he could correct it. To deliberately refuse to listen to someone else because to do so might lead you to change your mind… that was just fucking nuts.

Somehow, somehow, he had to get through to her….

"Cassie!"

"Huh?"

Dobbs had placed a hand on his shoulder and was shaking him. Caswell realized, belatedly, that the other sonar tech had been trying to get his attention for several seconds.

"Watch your screen, man!" Dobbs said, pointing. "You got a contact!"

"Uh, yeah. Thanks." A thread of white light had just begun slanting across the cascade of green up at the top. It was a weak contact, a distant one, but loud enough to emerge from the background static.

Damn. He hadn't been paying proper attention. For two weeks Ohio had been racing through the ocean depths at such a high speed that broadband sonar was all but useless. During the last three watch periods, though, the skipper had slowed them to twelve knots— slow enough that the rush of water past the hydrophones didn't drown out nearly everything else.

"Control, Sonar," he said. He glanced at his log, then made a notation. "New contact, bearing three-three-zero. Designate Sierra Two-five-one."

"Sonar, Con. New contact, Sierra Two-five-one. What's your guess?"

He closed his eyes and listened for a moment. He could hear the contact over the headphones now, a very, very faint churning of the water.

Dobbs, who was manning the narrowband towed array, tapped in some commands on his console, trying to tune in on the contact. The narrowband rig let him submit a little more data. "Sir, I make it twin screws. Probable civilian target. It's very faint. I think we're getting a CZ contact here."

"Very well."

Sommersby had been out of the control room for several moments. He returned now, the trademark mug of coffee in his hand, and picked up a set of headphones for a listen. "Sounds like a supertanker," he said. He glanced at Caswell's waterfall. "We're close enough to the Gulf of Oman proper here… ninety miles, close enough, which would put them within the third CZ. Sounds like she's coming out of the Gulf of Oman."

CZs, or convergence zones, were a useful phenomenon in the science of sonar detection. Under certain conditions, sound from a distant target reflected off the surface toward the depths, then was bent back toward the surface by the extreme pressure of the deep ocean, or by a thermocline, a sound-reflecting layer of deep, cold water. Convergence zones were the points where a listening submarine could detect sounds focused from far beyond their normal range of hearing; CZs occurred at roughly thirty-mile intervals, which was how Sommersby had deduced that Sierra Two-five-one was emerging from the Gulf of Oman, ninety miles ahead.

Ohio's passage of the Indian Ocean had been uneventful, with few contacts. Now that they were nearing the Gulf, however, they could expect commercial traffic to pick up.

They could also expect to begin picking up Iranian patrols. The word had been passed to Ohio via satellite radio traffic some time ago that the American SSN operating in the area — the Pittsburgh—had been tracking the new Iranian diesel boats in and around the Straits of Hormuz. There'd been intense speculation among the crew ever since they'd left the Straits of Juan de Fuca about that attack on the Ohio. If the Iranians knew about Ohio and her mission, or even if they'd simply guessed, they could expect to encounter the enemy's outlying pickets any time now. Ohio had just crossed the Tropic of Cancer; a hundred miles to the north was the border between Pakistan and Iran. A hundred fifty miles to the southeast lay Ra's al Hadd, the westernmost point of Oman.

The Gulf of Oman, while it had no hard-lined demarcation, could be said to begin in another ninety or one hundred miles. Here, an arm of the Arabian Sea stretched for 250 miles northwest to the Straits of Hormuz. At the southeastern end, the Gulf of Oman was two hundred miles wide. At the northwest, it narrowed sharply and twisted north into the straits, which at their narrowest were only about twenty-five miles wide.

The Gulf of Oman, then, offered a taste of what Ohio could expect on the far side of the Straits of Hormuz — shoaling water, rapidly narrowing to a tightly constricted bottleneck, with no room for maneuver and no room for mistakes.

If the Iranians were hoping to ambush the Ohio before she reached Iran, they would try it here, in the Gulf of Oman, or within the straits themselves.

And Caswell had let himself be distracted as they entered the danger zone. He was furious with himself, and determined to do better.

But all of the determination in the world wasn't enough to remove Nina, or the pain, from his thoughts.

Admiral Mehdi Baba-Janzadeh was called by some the father of the new Iranian navy. It was a role he cherished, and in which he took tremendous pride, though publicly he was careful to ascribe his success to the mercy and munificence of Allah. Within his inner circle of confidants, he liked to point out that Allah used human assets to achieve His goals, and clearly He was determined to turn the Persian Gulf into an Iranian lake.

Much of the recent growth of Iran's navy was due to his foresight and will. Long the weakest of Iran's military services, the navy had been all but destroyed during the long war with Iraq. Baba-Janzadeh had been appointed commander-in-chief of the Iranian navy just after that war's conclusion, and despite meddling by army and air force elements squabbling for scarce resources, he'd begun a major buildup that had continued for the past nine years.

He'd continued the buildup of long-range missile defenses — including the deployment of Chinese-built Silkworm HY-2 surface-to-surface missiles on Larak Island in the early 1990s. In 1992 he'd helped broker a deal with the People's Republic of China for Iran to purchase a fleet of seventy-ton Chinese patrol boats armed with Styx antiship missiles.

In 1993, at his urging, Iran had purchased the first two of an eventual six Russian Kilo submarines, along with eight minisubmarines from North Korea. Later, they'd purchased fifteen North Korean semisubmersible gunboats designed for commando operations. Following maneuvers in 2001, the Iranian merchant fleet was consolidated with the naval arm to improve overall fleet efficiency. Other additions and improvements swiftly followed, as Iran sought to replace the obsolescent foreign vessels of its regular navy with new and advanced designs produced in Iran. New destroyers, frigates, high-speed patrol boats, and finally the three Ghadir-class submarines. The goal — largely realized — had been to make Iran's navy self-sufficient and independent of foreign sources.

Five years later, in part as a reward for his efforts, Baba-Janzadeh was promoted to full admiral and appointed Minister of Defense, in charge of all of Iran's military forces. While his increased scope of responsibilities required that he relinquish much of the planning and execution of naval strategies to subordinates, he'd been able to have a hand in the selection of those subordinates. Rear Admiral Hamid Vehedi, the current commander of Iran's navy, had been a classmate of his at the naval academy and was a trusted friend. When Iran's supreme leader, the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, had approached him to begin work on Operation Bold Fire, Vehedi had taken on much of the actual preparation.

Admiral Baba-Janzadeh stood in the Defense Ministry's basement communications center, a computer printout in his hand. The message had been sent by Vehedi, and it was one he'd been waiting for.

American submarine detected in Arabian Sea, the message read in part.

They were coming.

Things should start moving very swiftly now.

They'd found a tanker at last.

"Sonar contact now bearing three-five-five, Captain," the sonar officer said. "It is almost certainly a tanker emerging from the straits."

The weapons officer completed the TMA — the Target Motion Analyses — and turned to the captain. "Target speed six knots, range nine hundred meters, sir."

Captain Majid Damavandi stepped onto the control room dais. "Up periscope."

The periscope slid silently up out of the well, and Damavandi snapped down the handles and pressed his face against the eyepiece as it rose. He could see the green fog of brightly lit water, then the sudden burst of bright blue sky and sea as the head of the periscope broke through the surface. He did a careful three-sixty first, scanning for possible nearby threats that might have been missed by the sonar, before bringing the crosshair reticules onto the target.

Even a kilometer away, the target was huge. Its long, low hull with the far-aft white-painted superstructure was unmistakable, as was the flag hanging at the taff-rail.

"Liberian registry," Damavandi said. "Texan Star."

"Two hundred seventy-five thousand tons," Commander Reza Tavakkoli, the sub's executive officer reported, reading from the warbook. "Three hundred four meters loa. Despite the registration, it is American owned and operated."

"She will do," Damavandi said. "Maneuvering! Come left to zero-one-zero and increase speed to twelve knots. Engineer!"

"Yes, sir!"

"Prepare for snorkeling."

"Yes, sir!"

He felt, more than heard, the hum of the vessel's electric motor as Ghadir increased speed. Most of a submarine's time was spent remaining very, very quiet, and that meant remaining motionless, or idling along at a couple of knots, just enough to maintain steerage way.

There were times, however, when you simply had to make noise. Ghadir, like the Kilo-class submarines Iran had purchased from Russia, was not nuclear-powered. She was diesel-electric, which meant that she ran on the surface with noisy, air-breathing diesel engines, but underwater with quiet electric motors. Unfortunately, a sub running off her batteries could only do so for a limited time — in this case about eighteen hours.

Of course, on the surface and running the diesels— which also recharged the batteries — a sub was vulnerable, easily picked off by the enemy's ASW forces. The Germans had solved that problem for their U-boats by inventing the snorkel — essentially a tube sticking up above the surface from a submerged sub that lets it run the diesels while remaining underwater.

The down side of this was the fact that both diesel engines and the act of snorkeling itself are noisy, making a throbbing, pounding, hissing-wake racket easily picked up by the enemy's sonar systems.

The nine boats of Iran's submarine fleet all had been deployed to the narrow waters of the Gulf of Oman, just outside of the Straits of Hormuz. Their orders were to wait, remaining undetected, for the inevitable arrival of one or more American submarines. Savama, Iranian Intelligence, had already given the warning: The Americans' new guided-missile submarine Ohio had departed from the U.S. west coast three weeks before, almost certainly en route to the Gulf. When she arrived, the net of Iranian hunter-killers would close on her, trailing her closely and silently into Iranian territorial waters. And when that happened, Iran would have the excuse she needed to present to a watching world— the trigger that would launch Operation Bold Fire.

The problem was remaining undetected until Ohio arrived. Savama had also reported that at least one American SSN — the Pittsburgh—was in the Gulf already, and that others might be en route. Nuclear-powered, those submarines were unimaginably silent and deadly. How could Iran's fleet of diesel-electric boats remain submerged when — even if they didn't run their electric motors at all — they would still drain their batteries within a couple of days?

The answer had come from a Russian naval advisor working with Rear Admiral Vehedi at Bandar Abbas. Mask the noise you make beneath the louder noise of something else… in this case the Texan Star. Supertankers were loud.

Damavandi could hear the monster now, a deep-throated pounding transmitted like multiple hammer blows through Ghadir's hull. The supertanker was now crossing Ghadir's bows almost directly due north. Ghadir had adjusted her course and speed to slip into the tanker's wake. There was a zone perhaps a hundred meters long aft of the tanker's two monstrous screws where the snorkel could be raised and the diesels switched on, and the listening Americans would never hear it.

He continued to guide the maneuver from his station at the periscope. The tanker was so close now he had to angle the scope up to see the highest parts of the superstructure. "Maneuvering! Come right fifteen degrees!"

"Coming right fifteen degrees, by the will of Allah!"

Damavandi grimaced at the helmsman's appeal to

God but said nothing. Ghadir's mullah, Hamid Khodaei, was standing close by, wearing an unreadable expression. It wouldn't do to alert Khodaei to his… heresy.

Well, not heresy so much as practicality, and an alternate point of view. He considered himself to be a good Muslim, but did not share the belief of most of his officers that theirs was a divinely appointed mission, and under the protection of Allah. Claiming that it was God's will and not the captain's, that was bad enough. Using the name of Allah to bless an act of war seemed little short of blasphemous to Damavandi.

Of course, if the mullahs back in Tehran knew his views on the subject, he would find himself relieved of command in short order. If he was lucky, he might retain a desk job in Bandar-e Anzelli, on the coast of the Caspian Sea. If he were not, it might well require the protection of Allah the Merciful just to keep him alive.

Besides, if religion kept the men focused on their duties, kept them sharp and willing to face hardship, overcrowding, and discomfort for the cause, then Damavandi was all in favor of it.

Allah, he thought, would understand.

Through the periscope, the Texan Star appeared to be turning away from the Ghadir; in fact, the sub was now swinging directly into line with the tanker's stern, about eighty meters back. From this fish-eye vantage point, the sheer bulk of the supertanker was more abundantly clear than ever. The Texan Star was 304 meters long at the waterline; Ghadir measured just seventy-six meters bow to stern, exactly a quarter of the supertanker's length.

In tonnage, however, the Texan Star's displacement was nearly nine times that of the slender Ghadir-class boat. To Damavandi, it felt as though he were a minnow attempting to slip in behind a whale.

The supertanker was crawling along at a bare six knots — one did not race a vessel of that much sheer bulk and mass through straits as twisting, shallow, and narrow as these — but the wake still throbbed and thundered around them. Ghadir shuddered as she plowed through turbulent water, secure, now, in the knowledge that any nearby Americans would not be able to hear her.

"Raise snorkel!" Damavandi ordered. He had to shout to be heard above the thunder.

"Snorkel raised!"

Damavandi walked the scope around one-eighty to check the snorkel, which had emerged from the aft part of the sail and protruded now a meter above the water. Everything appeared correct. The head valve was open, marked by a slender rod extending above the snorkel head. An engineering auxiliary, meanwhile, was draining the tube into Ghadir's bilges.

A moment later Engineering reported the snorkel drained, and the head valve closed. Damavandi ordered the outboard induction valve opened. When this was done, he gave the final order. "Commence snorkeling!"

The control room lights dimmed suddenly, then came back up. Damavandi heard the clatter of Ghadir's diesel engines starting up aft.

"Diesel engines engaged, Captain! Electric motors off-line and charging!"

The operation was hazardous. The snorkel only extended about three meters above the sail, which meant the submarine had to travel at a shallower depth than was usual for periscope operations. Shallower meant she was more badly buffeted by the supertanker's wake, and that, in turn, meant Ghadir's crew needed to stay very sharp, to avoid accidentally surfacing.

Even if they didn't pop to the surface, there was a chance the supertanker's crew would spot her periscope and snorkel. That was unlikely, of course. Both tubes were slender and camouflage-painted, a hundred yards astern, and the wake they drew would be lost in the far greater seething of white water boiling from the tanker's churning twin screws.

These were risks worth taking, however. By trailing the Texan Star for the next six hours or so, which would take them well out into the Gulf of Oman, Ghadir could safely recharge her batteries, preparing her for another eighteen to forty-eight hours of submerged silent running. Her sister boats were performing the same operation, but in rotation, so that at any given time at least five of the Iranian subs were silent and listening.

There remained one serious concern — and that was the Pittsburgh and any of her sister Los Angeles-class subs that might be in the region. Weeks ago Ghadir and her two sisters had been repeatedly towed out of Bandar Abbas and back. The hope was to make any watching American sub captains believe the Ghadir boats were not yet operational, and that the display would actually bring the American subs into the open. The Americans had to be curious about the new submarines, and about their capabilities. Apparently, that had not happened. There'd been absolutely no sign that the Americans had penetrated the considerable ASW defenses surrounding Bandar-e Abbas.

In fact, though, Damavandi was personally convinced the Americans had been out there, watching and listening to every move.

The fear was that the American SSNs might still be out there, watching. Unlikely — since the Americans probably didn't have one SSN to track each of the nine Iranian submarines separately.

But when it came to American submarine technology, Damavandi was unwilling to make any rash pronouncements about what the enemy could and could not do.

Soon, though, it wouldn't matter. When the American Ohio arrived, there would be too many Kilo- and Ghadir-class submarines closing on her for the American SNNs to handle. If the Americans fired first, so much the better. That would be the rallying call to Iran and to the entire Islamic world to commence the jihad that would drive the U.S. Navy out of the Gulf once and for all. If they didn't, the Ohio would be driven until she did fire first, or until she entered Iranian waters.

And when that happened, the Ohio would die, and Operation Bold Fire would begin.

Jihad…

"So what do you make of it?" Captain Creighton asked the young man across the plot table from him.

"Damnedest thing I've ever seen," Lieutenant Commander Harold Chisolm replied, rubbing his bald scalp. He was Pittsburgh's executive officer, but submarine tactics — at which he'd excelled at New London — were his specialty. "It could be an exercise, tracking tankers coming in and out of the Gulf."

"But you don't think so."

"No, sir, I don't. Kilos — and I assume the new Iranian-built boats as well — pack Type 53 torpedoes: 533mm, range fifteen to twenty kilometers, with active/ passive sonar and wake-homing variants. There is absolutely no reason to get that close to a tanker you're about to kill."

"So what are they doing?"

"Two possibilities, sir. They're deliberately sending us a message—'We have submarines out here and we're tracking your supertankers'—or… "

"Or?"

"Or they're using the tankers for cover while they snorkel."

Creighton nodded. "That was my thought as well."

For several days Pittsburgh had been moving in and out of the Straits of Hormuz, tracking different Iranian submarines. Weeks ago the Iranians had seemed intent on parading the new Ghadir-class boats for all to see, but within the past few days they'd begun making themselves hard to find.

But that had not meant Pittsburgh could not find them. She had to get close, and Ridgeway, the sonar chief, declared it was like listening to a hole in the water. But they had picked them up, either waiting quietly on the bottom or creeping along at a barely noticeable three knots.

They'd been tracking one lurking submarine twenty minutes ago, when sonar reported their contact moving, then merging with another contact, a noisy commercial target. By moving in close and using narrowband sonar, they'd been able to pick up key tonals from the target sub, all but masked by the tanker's prop wash.

The Iranian sub was moving at periscope depth just astern of a supertanker.

Three times previously over the past two days, Pittsburgh had picked up what sounded like snorkeling diesel-electric boats, but always masked by the racket made by a large commercial surface vessel entering or leaving the straits. This, however, was the first time they'd actually caught the target in the act.

"It's a strange way to deliver a message," Chisolm admitted, "since they're still playing it quiet and cagey. If I had to guess, I'd say they're setting a trap."

"Using the tankers to cover their battery recharge runs. Yeah. Lets 'em stay quiet and undetected until… "

"Until what, sir?"

"That's the question, isn't it? They may just be practicing, to see if they can hide their whole submarine force for a week at a time. Or they may be planning on springing the trap."

"Yes, sir. But what's the target?"

Creighton shrugged. "Could be us, if a war starts. Tensions have been going up like hemlines on a Paris fashion-show ramp. You heard Mad-in-a-jar's latest."

"Mad-in-a-jar" was the slang name Pittsburgh's crew had adopted for Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Fifth Fleet HQ had rebroadcast the translation of his speech of two days before over Armed Forces Radio. In it, Ahmadinejad had predictably followed the hard-nosed line of the Council of Twelve and the Supreme Leader — Iran would become a nuclear power, no matter what the American president said; Iran would resist the efforts of "foreign colonial powers," meaning the United States, to establish a permanent presence in the Gulf; and Iran would take steps to defend its borders, both against foreign powers and against any and all illegal incursions by hostile neighbors.

That last was an ominous statement. The first two declarations had been the standard party line out of Tehran for decades, but defending against incursions by neighbors was something new. The foreign powers part was easy to understand — a not-so-veiled reference to the sinking of the American patrol boat off the Iranian coast a few weeks ago. "Neighbors," however, could mean a number of things, none of them good. Iran still had border disputes with Iraq left over from the 1980-88 war, and no love for the current democratic and U.S.-supported government in Baghdad. In the east, Iran continued to engage in cross-border skirmishing with Afghan bandits, drug runners, and military forces, and resented Afghanistan's damming of the Helmand River… again territorial disputes with an American-supported regime.

And Iran still had a long list of ongoing territorial disputes with other nations in the Gulf — especially with the United Arab Emirates and with Oman, just across the narrow Straits of Hormuz. In 1992, Iran had seized three islands claimed by the UAE, including the strategically placed Abu Musa. Iran now claimed that both the UAE and Oman were nothing but American puppets, and that they gave the Americans control of what should be a joint Arab and Iranian resource— access to the Persian Gulf.

It was possible that Tehran was looking for an excuse to cross the Gulf and seize the eastern tip of Oman, the Musand'am peninsula, on the opposite side of the Straits of Hormuz.

Ahmadinejad had promised that Iran would lead the Islamic world to victory over the hated imperialists, the minions of Satan, and that the time of victory was near.

The speech had done nothing to quiet tensions that already had been running high. War already seemed all but inevitable.

"You think maybe the Iranians are looking for an excuse to attack us?" the XO asked.

"Hell, I know they're looking for an excuse. The question is when we're going to give them one. I know this much: If those subs are out there running ovals up and down the Gulf of Oman, it can't be for very long. That means either it's an exercise, just for practice, or… "

Chisolm nodded. "Or they expect things to turn hot within the next couple of days, at the latest."

Creighton glanced at the control room clock on the forward bulkhead. Pittsburgh wasn't scheduled to come up to periscope depth and broadcast a status report for another three and a half hours yet.

"I think this warrants a priority flash, Harry."

"I concur, Skipper."

"Maneuvering! Come to periscope depth!"

"Maneuvering, come to periscope depth, aye aye!" Gently, the deck tilted as Pittsburgh began rising from the depths.