Red Metal

CHAPTER 46

United States Navy commander Diana DelVecchio peered at the monitors in front of her with a rare look of surprise, given her experience.

She called out, “XO, come take a look at this.”

Lieutenant Commander Tad Jenkins, the ship’s executive officer, pivoted away from the navigator’s depth and right-of-way charts on the plotting board. He turned to the periscope displays on the conning tower and worked the zoom controls in and out as he did so.

“That’s a fleet, Captain,” he said, looking at the large cluster of unmarked dark shapes in the rainy gray gloom of the Gulf of Aden.

On an older boat, with an older-style periscope, submariners called the funny back-and-forth movement the officers made while looking through the periscope “dancing with the one-eyed lady.” The John Warner had a new state-of-the-art digital periscope system, technically called a UMM, or universal modular mast, which provided constant video feeds, was visible to everyone on the multiple screens, and had enhancements far beyond its fragile glass-and-mirrors predecessor.

Jenkins flicked a switch engaging the enhanced night vision, then tried thermal to see if they could pick up any heat from the ships. Commander DelVecchio always wanted the scope low in the water to avoid detection, so Jenkins had to pause between waves as they crashed over the specially coated digital lenses.

“That’s a fleet with a purpose,” he added, squinting through the scope. “Civilian ships in there, but that’s a military convoy. I see escorts, and they are arrayed in a battle plan.”

He turned the UMM to the right, looking thoroughly over the convoy, pausing briefly on each distant gray ship. Then he zoomed all the way out and turned the scope slowly left, trying to better appreciate the full size and composition of the fleet.

“XO, send it in,” DelVecchio ordered.

“Down scope,” said Jenkins, retracting the photonic mast. “Radio, get an SSIXS transmission ready. I want to send Fleet Headquarters images and audio. Wait for Sonar to send you waveforms. We should have gotten enough video panoramic, both night and IR.”

“Aye, sir,” replied the officer of the deck.

The XO turned to the OOD. “The scope is yours if you need it, but maintain the captain’s preferred interrupted search and get pictures and laser ranges in the meantime. Get that transmission ready, then one last-up mast for a sat burst.”

The USS John Warner was a Virginia-class submarine with Block-III upgrades. This meant her passive sonar included some of the latest tech, like the new large-aperture bow (LAB) sonar array and an enhanced active array of “chin-” and “sail-mounted” high-frequency sonar to hunt the enemy.

And hunting the enemy in the most guileful fashion, using all the boat’s technological advances, was what Commander Diana DelVecchio did best.

Her larger-than-life approach to leadership was such that she seemed a lot taller than her actual four-foot-eleven height.

She had been born as a first-generation Italian American, and sometimes a slight Italian accent was audible, but only when she was angry or felt like her back was against the wall during fleet meetings. She also flared up when her crew or their performance was questioned, and this caused her accent to reveal itself.

The crew loved her and treated her with a deep but almost friendly respect, which she allowed. She knew every single crew member’s full name, as well as the names of their wives and kids. Most of the crew worked hard for ways to get a word of praise from her, such was their respect for her naval professional skills, care for the crew, and fair treatment of them in a pinch.

In minutes they would extend the UMM again, this time to zap their new intelligence up to the sky and all the way back to Fifth Fleet headquarters. The intelligence experts at Fifth Fleet would then go to work and dissect each ship in the convoy with known and recorded sonar data and images. If things went according to plan, they’d share the data with the rest of the fleet and also transmit some analysis to the John Warner.

DelVecchio stared at the bulkhead a few seconds, thinking, then turned around and walked off toward the operations center. There she watched the video of the convoy and tried, with the help of audio and her sonarmen’s practiced ears, to discern who was who in this odd assortment of ships.

Colonel Borbikov paced the tiny bridge of the Iranian frigate Sabalan, watching the downpour outside. This time of year was called the “short rains” by local fishermen for the brief but frequent squalls here in the Gulf of Aden. The season was tapering off, but tonight the intermittent spots of light rain reduced visibility. It did have the benefit of cooling things considerably from the daily highs of ninety degrees Fahrenheit, a fact not lost on the troops in the sweltering heat belowdecks.

Borbikov peered through the glass as the bridge porthole wipers wicked away the rain. Two more infantrymen had wandered up on deck to refresh themselves in the squall. They climbed out of a hatch in the bow and faced skyward, relishing the fresh air and gentle rain.

Even though Borbikov had threatened their superiors with court-martial, a few soldiers still appeared on deck about every half hour to escape the heat and stench common to troopships belowdecks. His own Spetsnaz soldiers generally maintained good discipline, but these were General Lazar’s troops aboard Sabalan, and the regular army guys always tested his boundaries. It didn’t help that Lazar himself and most of his other senior officers were aboard other vessels in the convoy, leaving Borbikov as the most senior Russian officer aboard Sabalan.

He had taken to using the bridge’s bullhorn to scare Russian infantrymen back down to their cramped quarters.

The Iranian frigates and cargo vessels loaned to the Russians came with several obligations. One was a requirement that no Russians be visible outside the skin of their ships until they made landfall. Another was that Iran would benefit from the last phase of the overall Russian campaign with a percentage of the income generated at the REM mine. It was a gain that might take several years to realize, but Iran was nothing if not patient when it came to profit.

It had been clear to Borbikov from the beginning that the Americans would understand Russia’s true objective by this point in Red Metal. There was no way 5,000 Russian soldiers and their armor could be loaded into ships on the Iranian coast and then put to sea without it being noticed, and it wouldn’t take too much deductive reasoning to then determine that the aim of the military movement was the disputed rare-earth-metal mine in southern Kenya.

But Borbikov had another feint to pull. He determined that all the other obligations of the U.S. military at present would slow their detection, analysis, and reaction times, and then when they did determine Russia was after the mine, they would reasonably assume the ships would be landing in Mombasa, less than fifty kilometers from Mrima Hill. Transit time from Chabahar Port in Iran to Mombasa Port meant the West would have two full days to execute a naval or aerial military response before the Russians landed and off-loaded.

Of course, the United States and NATO would want to engage Russians at sea. The destruction of AFRICOM in Germany meant America would have a difficult time organizing and mounting an in extremis attack in Africa, but American bombs and missiles fired at the Iranian ships could end the Russian invasion of Kenya before it even began. Once on land, the Russians would have all their ground-to-air assets up and running, not in storage several decks below the surface.

But the West would not have two days to mount a defense. Borbikov’s plan instead sent his flotilla out of the Arabian Sea and up the Gulf of Aden, where they would go ashore at Djibouti City. This would necessitate Lazar making an arduous 1,300-kilometer armor movement through Djibouti, Ethiopia, and Kenya, but it would also mean shaving by half their vulnerable crossing over water.

Sure, Borbikov allowed, if there were U.S. ships or subs in the Gulf of Aden, the Iranian and Russian escort ships and submarines lurking below the surface would have to deal with them, but this was a far better match than the premeditated and coordinated ambush they would receive if they tried sailing all the way to Mombasa.

Colonel Borbikov lifted the bullhorn, barged out onto the bridge wing, and stood in the afternoon rain. “Get your fat, lazy fucking asses back down that hatch, soldiers!”