Ohio Class

7

"So fuck her, man," Sonar Technician Chief Sommersby said with a broad shrug. "No one needs that kind of hassle."

"Actually, Chief," ST1 Dobbs said, leering, "Cassie's problem is he can't fuck her! He ain't getting none now, right, Cas?"

"And there's all that money to consider, too," the COB said from the open door leading to the bridge. "Didn't you say her folks were loaded?"

"I don't care about the damned money, COB!" Caswell said. "It's Nina I want. And now I've lost her!"

He was seated at his station in front of one of Ohio's four sonar displays, Dobbs to his left, Sommersby to his right. In front of him was his waterfall, a display, so called, because vertical green lines of light cascaded slowly down the screen, each one a readout for a particular direction. The screen was divided into horizontal thirds, with the older information at the bottom. At the moment, his display was configured to show broadband contacts from Ohio's spherical bow sonar array.

Intermittent white lines were sonar contacts. There were now five of them at various bearings… already designated as Sierras One through Five, then redesignated as Mikes, because they'd been identified by radar — Romeo — and by visual observation from the fair-water — Victor. Vertical white lines indicated that the target was stationary with respect to the Ohio; moving targets drifted at a slant across the display. Four of the five Mikes were slanting in various directions at various angles as Ohio, cruising now at eight knots, passed them, or they passed her. Mike One was a Coast Guard cutter on harbor security patrol, escorting the Ohio through the straits, and so she was represented by a perfectly vertical line, dead abeam to starboard.

"You shouldn't let it get ya, kid," Dobbs said. "No dame is worth it, see?"

"What'd she say, anyway?" Master Chief O'Day asked, taking a sip from the big coffee mug that was a near-permanent fixture in his right hand. "Did she dump you?"

"Not exactly. But her parents sure were unhappy about the wedding and everything. They were telling her to reconsider marrying me… and she told me we would have to—"

Another white contact line appeared, this one forward and to port.

"Shit. Chief? New contact, bearing two-zero-three. Designate as Sierra Six."

"I've got it too, Chief," Dobbs said. "Sounds like a pleasure boat… maybe a cabin cruiser. Single screw, high-speed."

"Right," Chief Sommersby said. He picked up a handset. "Bridge, Sonar. New target, designated Sierra Six, bearing two-zero-three. Probable civilian pleasure craft." He listened for a moment to the reply, then said, "Aye aye, sir."

He hung up the handset. "Skipper says he's got it— looks like a weekend party boat. Redesignate the target as Mike Six."

Caswell typed the new characters into the display from his keyboard. "Mike Six it is."

"So finish the story," Dobbs said. "What did your girl say she was going to have to do?"

"Not see me for a while. At least until things blew over."

"Well, that's reasonable enough," O'Day said.

"Sure," Sommersby added. "Ain't like you're going to be around to see her for the next couple of months or so, right?"

"Right." But he felt miserable as he agreed. To his mind, it had seemed as though Nina was seriously considering her parents' demand — that she drop him and never see him again. As with her family's money, he didn't care so much about them or what they thought, but he very much cared about Nina.

God, he hated the Navy right now. That crack about the Navy issuing a wife with your sea bag. It was an ancient line, but it emerged from a nasty truth. Life in the service took you away from your loved ones, often for months at a time.

It wasn't fair.

But he'd also chosen this life. He'd volunteered, first for the Navy, and then for the submarine service. And now he was stuck with the consequences of those choices.

Captain Stewart leaned against the fair-water, taking another long look through his binoculars at the new contact ahead and to starboard. It looked like a typical pleasure boat… nothing out of the ordinary. She'd popped out from behind Ediz Hook a moment ago, just west of Port Angeles, swung hard to starboard, and was now roughly paralleling Ohio's course.

Ohio was cruising slowly on the surface, on a heading of WNW, making for the middle of the channel. The sky was typical for Washington… overcast, but there was a hint of blue sky beyond the clouds and open sea to the west. South lay the state of Washington, beneath the dramatic loom of Mount Olympus; north, across the line into Canada, was the port of Victoria and the eastern tip of Vancouver Island. The straits were twelve miles across at this point — a ninety-minute ferry ride — and Ohio was currently three to four miles from the U.S. coastline.

Traffic was surprisingly light today for this busy, international waterway. The Island-class Coast Guard cutter Edisto was cruising two hundred yards to port. An oil tanker… a Japanese maru … two other pleasure boats…

Still, Stewart was wary of pleasure craft while entering or leaving port. He remembered an incident while he was exec on the Pittsburgh, when a boatload of Greenpeace protestors had made a run on them while they were navigating through the waters of San Francisco Bay. And Garrett had regaled him once with some pretty wild stories… including the time a bright red cigarette boat had tried to make a high-speed run close across the bow of the brand new SSN Virginia, just outside of New London.

The Greenpeace activists could be particularly annoying. They meant well — saving the whales and the environment and all of that — but trying to come close astern a U.S. Navy nuclear submarine was just plain freaking stupid. What did they think… that the skipper was going to suddenly have a change of heart and put back into port?

Ohio, though, might be a particularly tempting target for the antinuke protestors. She was nuclear-powered, and — at least before her conversion — she'd packed the sizable payload of four megatons, total, in her twenty-four missile tubes. The fact that Ohio was now armed solely with conventional warheads meant nothing; the protestors couldn't be expected to know that Ohio was now an SSGN. Besides, they could equally well just be protesting the various skirmishes being fought around the planet in the name of the War on Terror, or the government's buildup toward war with Iran.

In any case, the lookouts had been cautioned to pay particular attention to civilian pleasure boats during Ohio's transit of the Straits of San Juan de Fuca.

"My God, it stinks!" his exec, Lieutenant Commander Wayne Shea, said. "Even over here."

"It can be pretty bad sometimes," Stewart agreed.

"I don't really care for the Canadians using the straits as their toilet, y'know?"

Stewart lowered his binoculars and shifted his attention back forward. Ohio's bow wake rippled and flowed smoothly up over the forward deck. He could see some garbage in the water, though… an empty two-liter soda-pop bottle, and a nasty-looking clump of plastic netting, Styrofoam, and God-knew-what.

"Maybe," Stewart replied, "we should dock at Victoria and issue them a citation."

Canada and the United States tended to be pretty good neighbors… but the issue of environmental pollution was ongoing and stubborn. Canada could be downright snooty at times over U.S. environmental policies — such as the celebrated rejection of the Kyoto Treaty a few years back — and over such genuinely problematical issues as acid rain from the U.S. Northeast.

But Canada was far from blameless when it came to international environmental issues. One of the worst problems was the fact that Victoria and several other cities on Vancouver and in British Columbia continued to dump raw, untreated sewage or lightly treated sewage into the Straits of San Juan de Fuca. The joke was that Ottawa would still be planning feasibility studies on B.C. sewage treatment plants when the entire strait had been filled in with solids, and the stench had made the region uninhabitable as far south as Portland.

Boomer crews joked that the passage through the sewage-laden straits was necessary to grease up the submarine's hull, so she could slip more quietly through the ocean depths.

They also joked that the pollution had been started by the Russians back during the Cold War as an attempt to seal off the straits and isolate America's Pacific boomer fleet, trapped in the Hood Canal behind a solid wall of shit.

He glanced again at the pleasure boat to port. It was closer than he liked, three miles off now, and on a slightly converging course that was bringing it slowly nearer to the Ohio. The idiot might be trying to pass across their bow.

Weekend boaters. Drunk, probably, and here it wasn't even 1000 hours yet. He found the stupidity of people amazing sometimes.

All things considered, it would be good to reach the open ocean. Submariners didn't like being on the surface, especially in such tight quarters, with no room to maneuver. Back during the Cold War, boomer skippers had submerged as soon as possible after transiting the Hood Canal, knowing that Russian attack subs were lurking just beyond the mouth of the strait. They would wait there, submerged, listening for the whisper of a boomer coming into the Pacific in order to try to tail them.

Some of the wild sea stories of those days were pretty incredible. Ohio-class boats were very quiet, and their skippers well-trained in being cunning. One common trick was to come through submerged with several surface ships making as hellacious a racket as possible. That was almost guaranteed to confuse the Soviet sonar operators, and allow the boomer to slip into the quiet depths undetected.

Nowadays, of course, they still took precautions, just in case. But chances were, no one was out there waiting for them this time….

"Missile launch! Missile launch!"

The port lookout in his manhole-sized opening in the sail aft of the weather bridge was pointing past Stewart's shoulder, screaming the warning. Stewart looked… and saw the white-star pinpoint of a missile exhaust streaking across the water.

"Where, damn it?" Shea demanded.

"There," Stewart said, pointing. It looked like a small, shoulder-launched missile — probably a Stinger — fired from that pleasure boat that had just emerged from behind Ediz Hook. "Son of a bitch!"

Stewart's mind flashed ahead through several blocks of information. If it was a Stinger, it was an infrared homing missile… and most likely one of the older models, not one of the reprogrammable upgrades.

There was no time to submerge. A Stinger had a range of… what was it? About 4,800 meters for the older models — make it three miles. Speed Mach 2.2— say half a mile a second… or less than six seconds' total flight time.

Almost without thinking, he reached past Shea and grabbed the Very pistol mounted on a rack on the inside of the weather bridge, checked to see that it was loaded, and took aim… not directly at the missile, but slightly off to the right and well ahead of the swell of Ohio's bow wake, angled high, at about forty-five degrees.

He fired, and the Very pistol thumped in his hand. The flare streaked through the morning sky, a bright point of light dragging its white contrail behind.

Everything depended on how late-model the Stinger missile was. The more recent designs had a focal plane array imaging IR sensor, which let them more effectively lock onto low-signature targets, and could be programmed to ignore many common countermeasures… including flares.

If that missile had been launched by al-Qaeda operatives — just a wild guess, of course — then chances were their toy was one of the old, early-model Stingers, one of the ones provided to the various Mujahideen guerrillas fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan during the 1980s by the American CIA.

The flare burst well ahead of the Ohio, and began drifting toward the water on its parachute. The oncoming missile, weaving its zigzag course toward the sub just above the surface of the water, seemed to hesitate… then swung hard to the right, climbing to track the flare, not the submarine. The Ohio made a far larger target, of course… but the flare was much, much hotter, a far more inviting target to the infrared sensor mounted in the missile's nose.

Stewart, Shea, and the two enlisted lookouts watched the Stinger climb sharply, miss the descending flare, and arc high up over the center of the waterway. The engine burned out while it was still climbing, and the missile, now invisible, plunged harmlessly into the middle of the strait. Stewart thought he saw the splash in the dark water a mile or more off to port.

"Bridge, Comm!" a voice said over the speaker. "Sir, the Coasties say we're under attack, and want to give chase!"

"Tell 'em to go get the bastards," Stewart replied. A moment later the Edisto lunged ahead, throttling up to an all-ahead 28 knots. Stewart could see Edisto's CO on the bridge. He tossed the man a salute, and thought he saw a salute in reply.

The cabin cruiser had already put his helm over and was running for shore. He wouldn't have much luck there; the coastline west of Port Angeles was flat and straight, offering no hiding places. Maybe the guy was going to try running his boat ashore so the crew could leap out and escape across the beach on foot.

They probably wouldn't get far. The skipper of the cutter was probably on the horn to everyone from local law enforcement agencies to the U.S. Marine Corps right now, letting them know what was going down.

A military attack on a U.S. nuclear sub — inside American waters, no less — was very serious business.

At the same time, Stewart thought, the attack was abysmally stupid. He was pretty sure it was a Stinger that the bad guys had popped at the Ohio. A Stinger mounted a four-kilogram warhead of high explosives, nowhere near enough to sink or even cripple a target as big as the Ohio. Her hull was three-inch steel; an explosion that size might have breached her sail, where the steel was thinner, but the operative word was might. Or a lucky shot could have hit the sail and killed or injured her captain and exec… but luck rarely came gift-wrapped in such a large package.

And the sub was cold … barely warmer than the chilly waters around her. Definitely a low-signature target.

Still… it was conceivable that if the missile had hit them, the sub might have been damaged. Maybe all the attackers had been hoping for was to hurt the Ohio enough to make her put about and head back for port.

Was that enough, though, to warrant sacrificing a boat and crew?

The attackers, whoever they were, were not sophisticated and they weren't well-trained. They'd fired the Stinger from pretty much the maximum possible range— three miles or so. They would have been better off arranging to surprise the Ohio at a narrow chokepoint — like the exit from the Hood Canal — and pop several missiles from close range.

The Edisto passed across Ohio's bow, sounding a blast from its horn. Stewart touched the intercom button. "Maneuvering, Bridge!" he called. "Come right ten degrees, and increase speed to fifteen knots."

"Bridge, Maneuvering. Come right ten degrees, aye. Increase speed to one-five knots, aye aye!"

"Diving Officer, this is the captain. What's our bottom look like?"

"Twelve fathoms beneath the keel, Skipper. Dropping… thirteen fathoms now."

"Let me know when we have twenty fathoms under us, Lieutenant. I want to go where the sun don't shine!"

"Aye aye, Captain."

Shea was looking at Stewart with just a touch of awe. "That was mighty fast thinking, Skipper," he said, nodding at the empty Very pistol still gripped in Stewart's right hand.

He looked down at the pistol, surprised. He'd forgotten he was still holding the thing. He leaned over and clipped it back in its mount, snapping down the cover and locking it.

"Aircraft use flares to decoy IR-homing missiles," he said with a shrug. "Why not a submarine?"

"You saved us…. "

"At worst, I saved us a return trip to NIMF," he said. "That thing wouldn't have delivered more than a pinprick."

But it would have aborted the mission.

That raised several ugly thoughts in Stewart's mind. Had the attack been simply carried out against a target of opportunity? By terrorists waiting in a boat along the Washington coast for the first likely U.S. Navy target to present itself? Maybe even by domestic terrorists… Greenpeace activists gone bad, or something of the sort?

Or had the attack been a part of a deliberate military attack? One carried out by a foreign enemy?

Iran was known to have Savam agents in the United States. There was supposed to be a fairly well-organized al-Qaeda intelligence ring as well. The FBI issued regular reports on their known or suspected activities.

For that matter, Stewart had read a report lately about Stinger missiles in the hands of terrorist groups.

At the end of the Soviet-Afghan War, the CIA had tried to buy back the Stinger missiles they'd given to the Mujahideen; the effort had been a complete failure, and hundreds of the shoulder-launched missiles had passed into terrorist hands.

MANPADS — Man-Portable Air Defense Systems— were a major worry for commercial airline companies the world over. One classified Department of Defense report suggested that MANPADS of various types, including Stingers, had been the leading cause of loss of life in commercial aviation over the past several decades, with over thirty aircraft downed worldwide. There'd been no known Stinger attacks recently; it was believed that the batteries necessary to fire the things had all gone dead by now.

But that wasn't the whole story. A CIA report indicated that no fewer than sixteen Stingers had been delivered by Mujahideen guerrillas to Iran, and Iran had successfully duplicated the design.

Had the Ohio just been attacked by Iranian commandos while still in U.S. waters?

And, again… had the missile been launched at a target of opportunity? Or did Iranian military intelligence know about Ohio's mission, and had the attack been an attempt to stop that mission before it was even properly under way?

A very unpleasant thought indeed….

"What the hell's going on, man?" Dobbs wanted to know.

Caswell couldn't give him an answer. The white line on his waterfall marking Mike One — the Coastie escorting Ohio out to sea — had suddenly taken a sharp dogleg to the left and cut almost straight across the screen horizontally, as the cutter crossed Ohio's bows. "Hey, COB!" someone called from the bridge. "Sparks says we're under fire!"

"How the hell does he know?" Abruptly, O'Day turned and left the sonar room, taking his coffee with him.

"Aw, nobody ever tells us shit," Dobbs said.

"So much for being the eyes and the ears of the sub," Caswell said with grim humor. Back in sonar school, that litany had been recited almost daily; so vital was the work of the sonar department that the ST supervisor could, at any time, request a course change from the Officer of the Deck, so the sonar techs could get a better angle on a contact. "Look at that! Mike Six is really lighting out."

"And Mike One is chasing him," Chief Sommersby noted. "Maybe Greenpeace is putting in an appearance."

A sharp sound cracked in Caswell's headphones, followed by a grinding, scraping noise. "Ow! What was that?"

"Mike Six just ran aground." Sommersby had heard the same broadband noise over his headset. The white line indicating Mike-six stopped growing, indicating that the boat's screw had stopped, but now there were rapid-fire popping sounds. "That," Sommersby said, "is gunfire. Someone is in damn bad trouble over there."

Captain Stewart studied the scene through his binoculars. The Edisto had just swung parallel to the coast and several hundred yards out, unwilling to follow the cabin cruiser onto the beach. A small storm of white geysers suddenly erupted from the water around the cabin cruiser, which was now visibly heeled over to port close to the rocky beach. Several seconds later he heard the insistent rattle of chain-gun fire; Edisto was firing a long burst from her 25mm Bushmaster cannon.

Seconds later another player entered the scene — a police helicopter, swooping in low above the shoreline, then coming to an ominous hover. Smoke was rising from the cabin cruiser now.

"Bridge, this is the diving officer," a voice called over the intercom. "Depth-below-keel is twenty fathoms."

"Very well. Prepare to dive."

"Prepare to dive, aye aye."

Stewart looked around. "Clear the bridge!"

The two lookouts ducked down their holes, the pressure doors slamming tight above them. "Our last look at daylight for a while, Skipper," Shea said. "After you, sir?"

Stewart took a last look at the shore, then nodded and climbed down into the sail well. Above him, Shea secured the cockpit, pulling in the Plexiglas windshield and securing it, then dogging tight the pressure hatch.

Stewart scrambled down the long ladder and emerged in the control room, just abaft the periscopes. Lieutenant Myers, who was Officer of the Deck this watch, looked up from the chart table. "Captain on deck!"

"As you were," he said. "Diving Officer! Take us down, periscope depth."

"Take us down, periscope depth, aye aye, sir!"

The water was shallow yet. At periscope depth they'd damned near be scraping barnacles — if there'd been any barnacles to scrape on Ohio's newly scraped, cleaned, and painted keel. But Stewart wanted to get her down into her real element… the silent darkness below the surface. That pleasure boat up there might have been the only attacker, but it was also possible the attacker had been the first of several, possibly set up in layers. That way, just when the Ohio's crew thought they were in the clear, just when her escort had been pulled out of position, another ambush would be sprung. A Stinger missile might not have made much of an impression on Ohio's tough skin, but what if there was someone up there with a military surplus Exocet?

Good sub drivers didn't take that kind of chance.

"Flood main ballast," the D.O. ordered. "Five degrees down plane."

The deck tilted beneath Stewart's feet, and the Ohio slid gently into the depths.