Ohio Class

15

"The Supreme Leader," the bearded cleric told him, "has agreed to launch Operation Bold Fire. How long will it take to implement?"

Admiral Baba-Janzadeh had expected the question and was ready with an answer. "Twenty-four hours, Mullah Zeydvand. We will need that much time to transmit written orders to all of the field commanders. I suggest that we name five o'clock tomorrow morning as H-hour."

"So long?"

The admiral nodded. "The American CIA can intercept all radio communications through their satellites, and we cannot overlook the possibility that they have managed to tap our land lines as well. The only way to ensure surprise is to deliver orders by courier."

Baba-Janzadeh had never heard of a retired Marine named Van Riper, or of his fictitious sinking of the entire U.S. Fifth Fleet in an exercise six years before. Rather, Van Riper had anticipated the admiral's planning, step by methodical step. Surprise was essential to Bold Fire, and the enemy's ability to eavesdrop was, in Baba-Janzadeh's experience, nothing short of magical.

It only made sense to be carefully conservative, and to avoid the enemy's strengths.

One hurdle, at least, had been passed. The admiral's call to Iran's Supreme Leader three hours ago had produced the desired result. The Ayatollah Khameini could have reacted in anger at the presumption of his Defense minister calling with the request that Operation Bold Fire be launched immediately. Instead, after a few questions— the first few angry, the last few concerned — Khameini had agreed that the escape of the enemy submarine necessitated drastic and immediate action.

Originally, Bold Fire was to have been launched by the interception of the American submarine inside of Iranian waters. Subsequent Iranian actions could then be presented to an understanding world as purely self-defense.

But the escape of the enemy vessel — from under the very noses of the Iranian submarine armada — necessitated a change of strategy. To relocate the Ohio, the entire military southern command would have to be fully mobilized, and that, in turn, would put the American Fifth Fleet on its highest alert.

Instead, Tehran would launch Operation Bold Fire immediately, using the enemy's incursion as an excuse. The Ohio would be tracked down and destroyed as part of the larger operation.

A telephone rang, and a moment later a junior officer handed it to him. "Admiral? It's Admiral Vehedi."

He took the handset. "Baba-Janzadeh," he said. He listened. The man on the other end was excited, almost hysterically so.

"Gently, old friend," he said after a moment. "You're sure of your facts?" He listened a moment more. "Very well. New orders will be coming within the next few hours." He handed the phone back to the officer, and turned to Zeydvand. "A new development, Mullah," he said. "An important one. One of our submarines has been sunk."

"No! Where?"

"A few miles south of Qeshm. Inside our territorial waters."

"The Americans have sunk one of our warships?"

"As it happens, no. An hour ago the submarine Noor was sunk by one of our antisubmarine helicopters. An accident."

"No… "

"A fortunate accident, however."

"How is that?"

"We may know differently, but so far as the world is concerned, an American submarine has entered Iranian waters and torpedoed one of our vessels. We could not have planned such a stroke of luck!"

In fact, during the planning for Bold Fire, the possibility of sacrificing an Iranian warship had been discussed. The possibility of the truth getting out, however, had been deemed too great. It had been decided instead to attempt to trap the American submarine in a clear violation of Iranian sovereignty.

Operation Bold Fire — the invasion of Oman and the United Arab Emirates and the destruction of the

American Fifth Fleet — could be launched now without fear of negative political consequences.

The Americans would be seen as the clear aggressors, the Iranians as the holy defenders of Islam and the

Gulf.

And no matter what the outcome of the battle itself, victory, political victory, would be assured.

"Up scope."

Stewart took his time studying the horizon. It was fast growing light, and there was no need for the low-light optics. North, twelve miles away, was the western tip of Qeshm Island, though only the hilltops showed above the horizon. One mountain, to the northeast, stood well above all of the others — Kuh-e Bukhow, its almost perfectly dome-shaped summit glowing gold in the light of a sunrise that had not yet reached sea level.

South, only four miles distant, was another of the small and circular islands that dotted this stretch of the straits. Two and a half miles across at its widest, it carried the ungainly name of Tonb-e Bozorg on the charts. Its highest elevation was only about seventy feet above sea level, but it was large enough to possess an airstrip and a few straggling villages. The waters nearby were clear, however. Not even any local dhows. And this region offered reasonably deep water for the next part of the operation.

The key word was reasonably. In fact, the entire west end of Qeshm Island was surrounded by extremely shallow water. Satellite photographs showed the shallows as a horseshoe of pale aqua encircling the narrow island's western tip… coral reefs and shoals barely covered by seawater a meter or less in depth.

South of the shoals, however, and close to little Tonb-e Bozorg, the bottom dropped off sharply. The major Gulf shipping lanes entered the Straits of Hormuz from the Gulf proper just a few miles more to the south, and there the channel reached its greatest depth — sixty meters.

Here, the steeply sloping bottom passed the forty meter line — just over 130 feet deep. Ohio had been creeping along this undersea ridge, literally feeling her way using her depth finder sonar — highly directional transponders sending out extremely weak pulses of sound that would not be picked up by an enemy unless they were literally right on her tail.

And that, of course, was still a possibility, but Stewart was pretty sure they'd eluded the fleet of Iranian subs that had been following them the night before. After waiting out the search in their hide southeast of Bandar Abbas, they'd spent the rest of the night slipping west ten miles south of the coast of Qeshm Island.

And that had brought them… here.

"Down scope." He turned to face the three SEALs standing by the plot tables. He pointed to a spot the quartermaster had just marked on the chart — their current location, designated Waypoint Alpha. "We're on station, gentlemen," he told them. "You'll have to take it the rest of the way yourselves."

Commander Drake nodded. "We're squared away and ready to book, Captain." He looked at his watch. "We'll lay low and begin loading the ASDS in six more hours. She'll be ready to detach one hour after that… say… 1200 hours."

"High noon. And you're certain daylight won't be a problem?"

"Negative, sir." The SEAL gave him a wintry grin. "Unlike your vessel, Captain, the ASDS doesn't have much of a footprint."

"They've got sixty nautical miles to cover, Captain," Lieutenant Wolfe explained. "At eight knots, that's seven and a half hours. They'll be hitting the beach at just about an hour before dark. That last bit of daylight will give them some recon time, and let them pick where they'll be coming ashore."

Stewart nodded. This was the SEALs' show, and they knew what they were doing. Ohio had gotten them to their drop-off point. Now the ASDS would take them the rest of the way in.

Actually, the minisub would only be carrying sixteen SEALs, under the command of Drake's exec, Mayhew. Drake would remain on board Ohio with the remaining fifty SEALs, ready to take them in as a reserve, or for what was euphemistically referred to as "special action," if needed. Lieutenant Wolfe would also remain aboard. He'd already been ashore on that barren coastline; he was along now strictly as an advisor.

The question, though, was whether any advice, experience, or preparation would be enough to get the SEALs through what was coming.

Or, for that matter, the Ohio herself.

Caswell lay in the narrow confines of his rack, trying to sleep, yearning for sleep, and unable to find it. He was so tired… exhausted physically, but more, exhausted emotionally, wrung out, drained, and limp.

Some part of his mind kept telling him that it was mid-morning, not the middle of the night. With his curtain drawn, the inside of his rack area was dark, but enough of a glow spilled through from the fluorescents outside; and men, as always, kept moving back and forth, getting up for their watch, going or coming from the head, getting dressed, quietly talking or bantering….

He wanted to scream at them all to shut the fuck up and let him sleep.

But he knew that even in perfect silence and darkness, sleep would still elude him.

He'd made it through the last several watches, but ever since Ohio had entered the Gulf of Oman, played her cat-and-mouse games with Iranian submarines in the Straits of Hormuz, and was now quietly entering the Persian Gulf itself, he'd been stretched to the very limit of emotional endurance, and, he thought, well beyond. He'd almost gotten the entire crew killed by missing those Iranian subs on sonar. He'd been following his training since, but, like the old joke about the rabbit from that battery commercial, the crises simply kept coming and coming and coming.

He felt stretched so thin. Nina. He missed her so much. Why hadn't she stood by him? Why had she sided with… them?

Hospitalman Chief Tangretti clambered up the steel ladder within the long, narrow, and vertical cylinder, squeezed up through the double hatch above, and emerged inside a dark spherical chamber. It had four hatches — the one in the deck he'd just climbed through, another overhead, leading up onto the upper deck, and two more, one going forward, one aft. Squatting, he called down to Hutchinson, who was peering up along the ladder at him, his square face framed by the hatchway.

"Okay, Hutch. Pass 'em up."

"Here y'go, Doc."

A bundle squeezed its way up through the deck hatch — a backpack and gear satchel. Pulling it the rest of the way, he turned and pushed it through the afterhatch, into the cargo deck of the ASDS, where TM1 Avery was waiting to receive it.

"Weapon coming up. Safe is on," Hutchinson called.

"Got it."

An M-4 rifle with collapsible stock and M-2 Aim-point laser targeting scope came up through the hatch. He took it, checked the safety, and passed it through to Avery.

More gear came up and he passed it on, before finally joining Avery on the cargo deck. Hutchinson replaced him in the lockout chamber and began accepting his gear from Lambardini.

It was going to be a close fit, and the ASDS had to be loaded step by step, both with men and with their equipment, in a precise order. The routine had been practiced many times before, until it was all but automatic for them, but they still proceeded with meticulous attention to each step.

The idea was to make it work the first time, with no false starts, no retries, no delays.

At last they all were on board — fifteen SEALs and all of their gear for an anticipated two nights and one day ashore — food, water, ammo, targeting gear, communications equipment, all of the materiel, high-tech and low-tech both, necessary for the modern covert op deployment.

It took the better part of an hour to load it all. The only way on board was through the lockout chamber. With Ohio's refitting as an SSGN rigged for covert operations, her first two ICBM tubes had been transformed into lockouts for divers, or, as they were configured now, as access ways to either Dry Deck Shelters or the ASDS minisub mounted on the submarine's aft deck.

The Advanced SEAL Delivery System — ASDS — was a blunt torpedo sixty-five feet long, divided into three sections. Aft was the cargo deck, with Tangretti and his fourteen teammates, designated Delta One and Two. Forward was the spherical lockout chamber, an airlock, actually, that currently was sealed with the special DDS-adaptor on the hatchway, which had once been the outer hatch on one of Ohio's ballistic missile tubes. Forward of that was the cockpit, just big enough for two men — the SEAL detachment commander and the ASDS commander.

Lieutenant Mayhew was the last SEAL to come aboard, just ahead of Lieutenant Commander Jason Taggart, the minisub's skipper. He stuck his head in through the cargo deck hatch. "Everything secure?"

"Everything secure, sir," Tangretti told him. "We're squared away and set to roll."

"Yeah!" MN2 Hobarth called out. "Let's do it, man!"

"Let's go kill us some Eye-ranian tangos, Wheel!" That was RM1 Gresham's booming voice.

"Fuckin' A, Wheel!" BM1 Olivetti added, and several other SEALs chorused their agreement.

"Outstanding," Mayhew said, grinning. "Chief, looks like you have your hands full."

"If they give me any trouble, sir, I'll have 'em running laps."

That raised some laughs. With fifteen men and all of their gear crammed into a tube not quite big enough to stand up in, the SEALs were wedged in side by side so tightly they could barely move. The thought of breathing in these sardine-can confines for the next seven-plus hours was daunting, to say nothing of calisthenics.

"Good man."

Mayhew turned and vanished, moving into the cockpit forward. Taggart came on board a few minutes later; by ancient nautical custom, the commander of a vessel was always the last on board a small boat or launch, and the first off. The ASDS, serving purely as transport from the Ohio to the beach, qualified.

The deck hatch in the lockout chamber clanged shut, and the SEALs could hear other thumps and clangs from below as Ohio's crew sealed their side of the hatches.

"Delta Sierra Delta ready to detach," sounded over the intercom. Delta Sierra Delta was the designation for the ASDS. A moment later a final thump echoed through the cargo deck, the SEALs felt the cylinder roll slightly to port, then stabilize.

They were under way.

Tangretti looked at his watch. It was five past noon. The journey — about sixty nautical miles — was expected to take between seven and a half and eight hours. The ASDS could make better than eight knots; how much better was classified. However, they wouldn't be able to run the little vessel full throttle continuously. The silver-zinc battery array that drove the minisub's sixty-seven-horsepower electric motor needed to be nursed carefully on this long a haul. According to the manuals, the ASDS had a total range of over 125 miles — again, how much more was secret — but the run, sixty miles in and sixty out, was pushing the vessel's envelope pretty ruthlessly.

Still, the wonder was that the ASDS was operational at all. A long and at times vicious battle had followed the project from its very inception.

Until the 1990s, SEAL delivery vehicles, like the workhorse Mk. XIII Mod 1 SDV, were all wet submarines, meaning the SEALs were fully suited up and exposed to the ocean for the entire run. The Mk. XIII was twenty-two feet long and rated to carry six SEALs — two operators and four passengers. It had a maximum speed of six knots and a range of about seventy nautical miles… but that was a polite and usually overlooked fiction. Seventy miles at six knots meant almost twelve hours in a wet suit, unable to move, and in water that ranged from chilly to frigid.

SEAL training — the BUD/S course at Coronado — emphasized building the would-be SEAL's endurance to the point where he could tolerate severe discomfort and hypothermia. But twelve hours in freezing water without being able to move or stretch, followed by swimming ashore to carry out an operation that might involve long marches, hours of motionless surveillance, or the supreme rigors of combat? Forget it. Even SEALs had their limits.

For decades the SEAL community had tried to get a dry delivery vehicle, one that would allow them to ride all the way to their drop-off point underwater, but warm and in relative comfort. It was an important distinction. Even in a wet suit and even in relatively warm water, hypothermia sets in fast, and few things are as debilitating.

Hypothermia. SEAL recruits are deliberately exposed to it during BUD/S, especially during the sadistic rite of passage involving sleeplessness, torture, and exhaustion known fondly as Hell Week. Tangretti could still remember his last hours of Hell Week, sitting in a water-filled clay pit with a dozen other anonymous tadpoles, coated with black and slimy mud, teeth chattering, body shivering so violently he thought he was going to rattle himself to death. He would have stood up and rung the bell, signaling his decision to drop out of the program, except that he'd been too tired to move. To have even considered engaging in a firefight after that would have been sheer fantasy.

He'd also completed numerous training operations with the Mk. XIII, as well as two other SEAL wet SDVs, the Mk. VIII and the Mk. IX. In all of them, the range limitation had not been battery life, but the endurance of the SEALs on board.

The Navy Special Warfare community had fought long and hard for dry submarines, a seemingly reasonable request that repeatedly had been refused. The reason, irrational as it might have seemed, was simply that the line Navy insisted that dry submarines belonged to the submarine service, not to NAVSPECWAR. For the SEALs to get their own submarines would be an intolerable trespass of the line Navy's turf.

At long last, though, Navy Special Warfare had gotten their dry submarine, the ASDS. But the victory had come with a price. Until then, SEAL vehicles had been operated by SDV platoons attached to the SEAL Teams, with SEALs as their drivers. The Navy Department would permit the ASDS project to go forward only if the minisub were commanded, not by a SEAL, but by a line Navy officer.

It was an uncomfortable compromise. SEAL training emphasized complete reliance on your fellow SEALs. You knew you could rely on your teammates, because each and every one of them, including the officers—especially the officers — had been through the same training you had, including Hell Week. Once they exited the ASDS, Delta One and Two would be under the command of Lieutenant Mayhew, a SEAL. Until then, however, they were under the command of Lieutenant Commander Taggart, a submariner, and an unknown quantity.

It wasn't that they didn't trust Taggart, exactly. They simply… didn't, well, trust him. Not like another SEAL.

Tangretti leaned back on his bench, elbows propped on knapsacks to either side. Seven and a half hours. Back when he was stationed in Coronado, when he had liberty he sometimes drove up the coast to visit a friend in San Francisco — four hundred and some miles. The way he drove, that was about seven and a half or eight hours.

He would try to enjoy the ride, or at least endure it.

"Jesus, Skipper! Lookit this!"

"Is that any way to deliver a message, sailor?"

Lieutenant Commander Chisolm said, his voice stern and sharp-edged.

The sailor, a twenty-year-old radioman second class, stopped in his tracks, ashen-faced. "Uh, sorry, sir."

"That's okay, sailor," Creighton said. "What do you got?"

"This just came through, sir!" He handed a translated message flimsy to Creighton.

"Christ on a crutch," Creighton said slowly, almost reverently, when he finished reading the flimsy. He glanced at the sailor. "Comm has acknowledged this?"

"Yes, sir!"

"Very well. Go back to your station."

"Aye aye, sir!"

Trust the Pittsburgh's internal communications grapevine. Every man aboard would know about this within thirty minutes.

Pittsburgh, at the moment, was at a depth of 150 feet, in the main shipping channel just north of tiny Abu Musa Island. Abu Musa was a point of contention in this region, seized, along with two other flyspecks, the Greater and Lesser Tunbs, back in 1971 by Iran and from the United Arab Emirates. Even before the Shah had been deposed and the clerics seized power, Iran had coveted control of the straits between the Gulf and the open ocean. Seizing those islands had been a vital step toward gaining control. All three had had Iranian military forces posted on them ever since their takeover. Abu Musa, in particular, was rumored to have a Chinese-made Silkworm battery, one capable of taking out tanker traffic in the main shipping channel. Pittsburgh had been trying to get close enough for a look-see when the message arrived.

Iran's complete control, however, would be accomplished only by two things — the seizure of the Musand'am peninsula, on the south side of the straits, from Oman and the UAE… and the neutralization of the U.S. Fifth Fleet.

Until now, neither possibility had seemed likely. But if Iran's Supreme Leader had just announced the closing of the straits, that might very well change.

"Defense Posture Bravo." That was one of a number of alternate battle plans laid up against the possibility of open hostilities in the Gulf. Creighton would go break the orders out of his safe shortly, but he already knew what they entailed, in general.

Remain undetected.

Wait and watch.

Return fire if fired upon, but take care not to initiate hostile action.

Return fire if friendly vessels are fired upon but, again, do not initiate hostile action.

"Mr. Chisolm, sound general quarters," he said.

The Ayatollah's pronouncement didn't mean all-out war — not yet — but it was the next thing to it.