Seas of Crisis Read online

  “Bull Horn from the Grisha-V again. Udaloy has gone active with hull-mounted Horse Jaw.” The Udaloy’s sonar was more powerful than the Grisha-V’s, but the Udaloy was further away.

  Jeffrey watched the tactical plot and listened to the sonar speakers. The helicopters began to circle, sometimes coming very close to Challenger.

  The Grisha-V announced its arrival on scene with a louder blast from its Bull Horn system. The tactical plot showed her slowing, reducing her self-noise to get clearer sonar returns.

  “Sit tight, people,” Bell said. “We can’t sneak further into the strait or they’ll track us for sure, by a Doppler shift in whatever fragmented echoes they’re hearing. Just sit tight.” An object in motion toward or away from an active sonar caused the returning ping to be higher or lower in frequency, enough to register on the active sonar’s signal processors—a dead giveaway of a genuine target.

  Everyone waited for the Russians to make their next move.

  People were jolted by three loud bangs in quick succession.

  “Signal grenades,” Bell said before Sonar could.

  Three grenades dropped one after another was the international signal meaning, “Unidentified submarine in my territorial waters, surface and indicate your intentions.”

  “Sit tight,” Bell repeated. Three more grenades went off, much closer. “Commodore, any directives?”

  Jeffrey stood and eased gingerly past the sonar officer, Finch, over to Bell. “Whatever we do, don’t surface,” he whispered. A junior enlisted man let out a yelp as three more grenades went off, closer still. “We don’t know for sure that they know that we’re here.”

  “You do like to gamble, Commodore.”

  “Get inside their minds. They don’t have a solid sonar return off our hull, with our out-of-phase suppression. They might think what they’re getting are garbled bounces off the backs of the spires. Whatever sensor data zeroed them in on this location could just be dismissed as a false alarm, or a whale.”

  “Maybe.” Bell was starting to sound sarcastic.

  Jeffrey brought his face a few inches from Bell’s. “They can’t be positive of an MAD contact because of these spires.”

  “Only if they do have steel in them.”

  “Yes, there is that.”

  “The bomber might have gotten a lock on us, twice, by LASH.”

  “I think the water’s too opaque.”

  “And I think we should sneak away on auxiliary maneuvering thrusters. The longer we stay here, the better their chance to be certain they have a non-Russian sub in their sights.”

  “We can’t move away from the spires. You said so yourself.”

  “Not away, Commodore. Along.”

  “You mean follow the fence east or west?”

  “Yes.”

  “No. If we move at all, their readings at this spot on sonar and MAD and even LASH will alter. They’ll grow more suspicious, instead of doubting they’ve got a real contact.”

  Three more grenades went off: The Udaloy had arrived. In a few seconds, everyone in Control heard three more loud bangs.

  “Commodore, how long before those become depth charges?”

  “I don’t think they’d actually depth-charge us or launch a torpedo. They certainly might, but I don’t think they will.”

  “Getting inside their heads is a much too iffy thing for me. Commodore, I cannot unduly endanger my ship. The people up there could be tired, or drunk, or just plain trigger-happy. Who knows what foul-ups are possible in Russian command and control?”

  “That’s what I’m counting on them thinking, too. That a submarine actually here would surface, and blame everything on navigation error, then just sail away. Submerge again once back in U.S. waters. . . . The fact that nothing surfaces helps them convince themselves that nothing’s here.”

  “What if they think we’re here, and won’t surface because we have a covert mission?”

  “There’s covert and then there’s suicidal, Captain. They won’t expect even a ballsy U.S. spy sub skipper, on neutral Russian turf in time of war, to be genuinely suicidal.”

  “Concur, Commodore, except . . . except I’m not sure which action would seem to them more suicidal in a major covert op. Us surfacing and for certain ruining our stealth, or not surfacing to maybe bluff them into going away? They’d figure that if our secrecy were paramount we’d go for the bluff. And they’d be right. So maybe they’ll think we are here.”

  “If we do surface,” Jeffrey said, “we compromise our mission and by doing so we compromise Carter. So we know we need to stay down. But the Russians presumably can’t know that our mission is in fact directed against them somehow, not the Germans.”

  “We’re between a rock and a hard place, cornered against these spires. For all we know they’ll send divers down to take a look-see in person.” Crewmen cringed as they listened to this mounting debate between captain and commodore.

  “We just have to chance it. I’ve never heard of that being in their standard antisubmarine doctrine, using divers in shallow water. And Russians aren’t noted for personal initiative.”

  “Sirs,” Sessions said, “we have our own safety divers, and some of the Seabees might be dive-qualified. We could send men out to kill any Russian divers who do show up.”

  “The Russians would be missed,” Jeffrey said tersely.

  “They could chalk it up to a diving accident, sir.”

  “They’d send more divers to investigate. . . . No, we buy this diver-to-diver combat, it just prolongs the inevitable. We do nothing, stay quiet, wait for them to get bored and go away.”

  Challenger was pounded by an eruption with such bruising punch it was felt more than heard, the sharp vibrations painfully shaking Jeffrey’s bones inside his body.

  “Depth charge!” a sonarman shouted. “Within five hundred yards!” Men who’d been knocked off their feet recovered, checked themselves for injuries, then held onto something solid. They glanced apprehensively upward, thinking of what could come next.

  “They’ll work the area systematically now,” Bell warned, “until we’re all dead.”

  “Do nothing. That’s a direct order.”

  “Sir, based on what reasoning? Intuition? A hunch?”

  Jeffrey held his tongue. The silence that lingered was heavy with feelings of rage and betrayal from Bell, who’d wanted all along to run the strait on the U.S. side. The men, sensing this conflict, by now were confused and scared. The implied accusation from Bell was unmistakable: their new commodore was too clever for everyone’s good.

  There was another dreadful eruption. The control room darkened as red fluorescent bulbs shook loose in their sockets; consoles jiggled against their shock-absorbing mounts. Jeffrey’s teeth were jarred so badly they hurt; his feet ached.

  “Depth charge! Within three hundred yards!”

  Bell glared at Jeffrey. “It isn’t too late to surface!”

  “It’s too early! You don’t have a single flooding report!”

  “I—”

  “Aspect change on the Grisha-V,” came from Chief O’Hanlon. “Grisha-V is . . . turning away! . . . Udaloy turning away!”

  “Sir,” Sessions said, “helicopters have ceased orbiting, are on intercept course with the Udaloy.”

  “See, Captain,” Jeffrey chided gently. “They decided there was nothing here. They left.” Happy crewmen traded high fives, or shot thumbs-up to their buddies. COB reached and gave Patel an approving jab in the shoulder.

  “Why the depth charges, then?” Bell demanded. “It could still be a trick.”

  “One depth charge from each ship, it wasn’t a trick. It was two bored Russian surface-ship skippers, using a good excuse to liven up their day with some fireworks on the Kremlin’s dime.”

  Chapter 6

  Once the patrolling Russian forces departed, Challenger wormed her way north through the strait and entered the Chukchi Sea, where for hundreds of miles the bottom was less than two hundred feet deep.
With Meltzer’s assistance, Bell chose a course slightly west of north. This led toward a canyon in the continental shelf, giving a little more depth to play with. The canyon would pass safely east of craggy Wrangel Island—more properly, Ostrov Vrangelya, since it was Russian territory.

  Tension of a different sort started to increase in the control room, and throughout the ship. If Challenger encountered the edge of the ice cap while the water was still very shallow, broken slabs projecting down by many feet, called bummocks, could block her path frustratingly. There was also real danger that she could hit a massive bummock head-on, doing damage where the ice above precluded any emergency blow to the surface. Crippled or sinking, with no way up or out, Challenger might be stranded, or lost with all hands. Advance intel showed this probably wouldn’t happen, because global warming from natural and man-made factors, combined with normal random year-to-year fluctuations, had pushed the start of the solid pack ice in the Chukchi Sea more northward than usual. The ship had sonars specifically designed to warn of inadequate clearance between the bottom and the irregular ice. But using these systems meant radiating, which, as before, compromised stealth, so Jeffrey had forbidden it. This time, Bell didn’t argue with him.

  The gravimeter, though excellent for pinpoint navigation under the ice, by orienteering against finely detailed charts of the Arctic Ocean floor, unfortunately couldn’t distinguish between sea water and the ice cap. Their densities were too similar; this was why ninety percent of an iceberg floated beneath the surface.

  Jeffrey knew he was taking a serious risk, proceeding toward the hard roof of treacherous ice with all active sonars secured. But the data he’d been given, and the urgency of his mission, told his gut that the risk was worth it, even necessary.

  Satisfied that Meltzer and Finch and their men were working in good order under Bell’s leadership, Jeffrey went to his office to reread his orders. He also wanted to practice his Russian in private, using language tapes in the ship’s huge e-book library, accessible through the LAN. He wasn’t at it long when someone knocked.

  “Come on in.”

  It was Bell. He shut the door behind him.

  “Good afternoon, Commodore,” Bell said gravely.

  “Why the sudden formality, Captain?”

  “I wanted to apologize.”

  “For what?”

  “I was out of line, in the control room back there.”

  “How so?” Jeffrey knew, but wanted to hear Bell say it. He knew Bell needed to get it off his chest.

  “I argued with you about tactics, in front of the rest of the crew. I feel . . . well . . . it undermined discipline and might have verged on insubordination.” Bell exhaled deeply.

  Jeffrey sat back. “Yeah, I admit it’s different, with you being captain of Challenger. We had our knockdown, drag-outs often enough in the heat of battle, when it was us sitting at the command console, side by side. The dynamics have changed, that’s for sure. . . . But it’s still your job, in part, to advise me, backstop me—and don’t forget filling in for me if I keel over from a stroke. You’re my flagship captain, for God’s sake.”

  “Still, I don’t feel right about how I handled it.”

  Jeffrey flashed Bell a friendly grin. “I didn’t exactly win any prizes myself.”

  Bell smiled for the first time in hours.

  “Look,” Jeffrey told him, “you and I, and this whole crew for that matter, have been through a hell of a lot in this war. We were a team in every engagement we fought. The winningest team in the whole submarine fleet. I don’t want to lose that.”

  “Readjustments are necessary, sir. We can’t deny the blunt fact.”

  “Yup. Can’t deny it. Especially once we hook up with Carter. Then Commander Harley joins the equation. I don’t know much about him, personally.”

  “I met him once or twice. I’d have to say that you and he are opposites.”

  “Opposites can be good, if they complement each other. If they fill gaps in the other guy’s outlook.”

  “All true.” Bell’s tone hinted at more.

  “What?”

  “I’m not so sure he’s quite the type of opposite you mean.”

  “I’ll handle all that in due course.” Jeffrey tapped one of his silver eagle collar tabs, to emphasize that he outranked Harley. “Commander Nyurba seems quite loyal to him.”

  “Yes, Commodore. I didn’t mean to be prejudicial. It’s not my business, really. My impression of Harley was passing, brief, months ago, when he’d just been under huge stress.”

  “Not to worry.”

  But Bell still seemed pensive, hesitant.

  “Finished with the preliminaries, then?”

  “Am I that transparent, sir?”

  “To me, after five combat missions together in barely six months, yes.”

  “Okay.” Bell took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “I keep asking myself what I would’ve done when we were pinned down by those Russians, if you hadn’t been there, hadn’t been aboard.”

  “Without me to teach and challenge you, without me to do the final deciding?”

  Bell nodded.

  “Well, you got the big question out. So, answer it. What do you think you’d’ve done, if everything had rested on your head alone? And forget about Carter, leave that part aside.”

  “I’d have done whatever I thought you would have done in my place, sir. I mean followed your example, imagining you were the captain.”

  “Not a bad policy at all, I must say. But you have to find your own tactical style, whatever that might be, since you and I are also different people.”

  “Granted.”

  “So what specific answer comes up? What actions would you have taken? Issued what orders?”

  “I know one thing. There’s no way I’d have let a bunch of stinking Russkies force me to the surface until the very last extreme.”

  “Meaning what, in practical terms?”

  “I’d have sat there, motionless, and gutted it out as long as possible. I’d have let their own doubts work against them, and waited for them to give up and leave. . . . Just like you did.”

  “And if they’d opened fire in earnest?”

  “I can think of a few ways to freak them out nonlethally, and use our potent repertoire to defeat any inbound torpedoes. Then I’d hightail it back to U.S. waters, doing flank speed way shallow on purpose, to let them eat my dust, with my propulsor wake boiling behind as a dare for them to cross to my side of the treaty line.”

  “Freak out just how?”

  “Launch a decoy or two programmed to sound like ADCAPs. Lob a few Polyphems, unarmed, to fall short of the May but give her aircrew the general idea.”

  “Four-oh, Captain.” A perfect grade. “If I’d still been captain myself, and the depth charges had really come too close, or Sonar called a torpedo in the water, that’s exactly what I would’ve done. Used our mobility to clear out of there, fast. Let them know from our tonals whom they were dealing with, and invited them to take on our eight wide-bodied torpedo tubes where our ROEs let us shoot back.”

  “Thanks, Commodore. For everything.”

  Jeffrey glanced at his wristwatch. “Well, I don’t know about you, but with all that excitement back there, I worked up an appetite. Let’s hit the wardroom together, shall we? Tuck in with gusto, side by side, leisurely like. No better way to show your officers, in very certain terms, that you and I are still on the same page.”

  Eventually the water got much deeper, past the continental shelf, over the Chukchi Abyssal Plain. On Bell’s orders, Challenger began maintaining a depth of nine hundred feet, and resumed a silent speed of twenty knots.

  Along the way, submerged through the Chukchi Sea, Challenger began to pass more and more chunky icebergs, and flatter floes, bobbing and tumbling noisily on the ocean surface above. Then she crossed beneath the edge of the 2012 summertime Arctic ice cap. The boundary zone was extremely noisy, with wind and wind-driven wave action making broken ice chunks gr
ind against one another and the outer margin of the solid cap. What marine mammals were heard now, on sonar, changed from whales—who rarely went under the ice cap since they needed to surface often to breathe—to amphibious creatures: seals and walruses, who ate the many Arctic fish. The seal and walrus adults and pups would enter and leave the water through open areas called polynyas or leads, which existed even in winter, but became more common and larger in summer. Teeming flocks of sea birds also lived off fish they caught in these polynyas.

  Jeffrey reminded himself that polar bears walked around on the ice and snow up there. They hunted the seals and walruses. Inuit walked around, or paddled kayaks, or drove dog sleds or rode on snowmobiles, too. They also hunted walruses and seals, and sometimes had confrontations with the polar bears—which were edible, but just barely.

  Challenger turned east, entering the Beaufort Sea north of Alaska, and began to steam across the Canada Abyssal Plain, in water nine to twelve thousand feet deep. Three and a half days after transiting the Bering Strait, well up under the ice cap, Challenger neared her rendezvous with USS Jimmy Carter.

  Commander Dashiyn Nyurba was impressed by the food on Challenger. Whether breakfast, lunch, dinner, or midrats, the ingredients were the highest quality, the cooking the most skilled and imaginative, that he’d ever experienced in his fifteen years as a naval officer. And he’d traveled far and wide, ashore and on many surface ships, before being tapped for the Air Force Special Operations Squadron joint-service outfit that he was second in command of now.

  The dinner dishes had been cleared a while ago. Nyurba’s people were in the wardroom with Commodore Fuller, playing their last poker game before they transferred to Carter. While the card-playing helped to kill time—the Seabees had a lot to spare as they rode along on Challenger—the rounds weren’t friendly. Everyone, including the commodore, spoke only in Russian. Since gambling was forbidden by Navy regs, the stakes were toothpicks and ego, especially the latter, which made the play extremely competitive. Nyurba thought that the commodore was getting noticeably better at both his poker face and his language fluency. His accent was atrocious, but that part didn’t matter. Unlike the special ops team, Fuller wasn’t supposed to disguise his nationality. No, his duty would be to emphasize it.