He felt the submarine captain watching him uneasily. He turned and faced the man full on, letting him see the disdain flicker at the edges of his normally impassive expression. This man most of all would have to go. His hesitation when one of his crew members had been swept into the icy sea was just further evidence of his unfitness for command. While he might possess the requisite technical and tactical knowledge required of a commander, he lacked the single most important ingredient — the iron will so necessary for transforming a collection of equipment and machinery and men into a potent, irresistible fighting force.
The present situation illustrated that point perfectly. The Kilo submarine lingered ten miles away from the island, barely making steerageway through the silent ocean. Hours ago, the sharp pops and groans of the ice floe had subsided as the sun sank back down below the horizon. Now, the ocean was a silent, dark cloak of invisibility.
Had Rogov been the skipper, the submarine would have been snorkeling, topping off the last bit of charge on its batteries in preparation for any immediate tactical need to stay submerged for hours. True, the bank of batteries was currently charged to ninety percent, but one never knew when that additional ten percent of capacity would spell the difference between life and death for a submarine and its crew.
This skipper, however, after a brief communications foray to the surface to monitor the group ashore’s progress, had decided that the weather was too bad, the seas too rough, to inflict the nausea-inducing pitch and roll of a submarine near the surface on its crew. He fled the surface and returned to the depths, where the motion of the storm above them was imperceptible. The crew had all looked relieved at that decision.
Pah! The men ashore would hardly have it so easy. Even safe inside the ice cavern, the scream and howl of the winds alone would have been daunting. The winds had built steadily throughout the night until sixty-knot gales, at times growing to hurricane force, now scoured the desolate island.
“Captain,” a young lieutenant said suddenly. His quiet voice echoed in the tomb-like control center. “The other submariner I think — yes, it’s her.”
The skipper stepped away from his normal post in the center of the small room, and stationed himself behind the sonar operator. “Where?”
The younger man pointed at the waterfall display. “It’s barely distinguishable from the background noise yet, Skipper, but this appears to be a line from her main propulsion equipment.” He pointed to a series of dots that looked to Rogov’s untrained eyes to be merely part of the noise.
Rogov allowed a trace of satisfaction to tug at the corner of his mouth. So far, all was going according to plan, although neither the Russians on this boat nor their larger counterpart knew it. The Oscar-class nuclear cruise missile submarine was one of the most potent ship-killers in the Russian inventory today. Equipped with SS-N-19 Shipwreck missiles, it had a tactical launch range of over three hundred nautical miles. It could obtain targeting data from any other platform, including the Tupelov Bear aircraft or the Ilyushin May-76 reconnaissance plane. When properly aligned, it could also download targeting data from Russian surveillance satellites, relieving it of the necessity of obtaining enemy positioning data from its own organic sensors.
The Oscar’s deployment had been suspended in the first few years following the breakup of the Soviet Union, but had resumed in 1995. It roamed with impunity the vast reaches of the Pacific Ocean, occasionally making forays into the smaller Atlantic. Her torpedoes, twenty-eight feet long and over five feet in diameter, could crack the keel of an aircraft carrier with one well-placed shot.
As it would soon, if necessary. He smiled, wondering what his Cossack ancestors would have thought of him, riding this massive underwater seahorse into battle again. A far cry from the days when his ancestors had swept out of the mountains and across the plains, decimating Ukrainian and Russian troops with their bloody sabers. While today’s Cossack might depend on invisible electrons and satellite data instead of a finely honed blade, the principles remained the same — attack, attack, attack.
The Americans would remember that soon.
The Ready Room was one of the larger single compartments on the aircraft carrier, and served as both a duty post and a central point of coordination for the VF-95 squadron. Ten rows of high-backed chairs took up the forward starboard portion of the room, arrayed in front of a chalkboard and overhead projector. The port side was a general congregating area, and its bulkheads were ringed with hard plastic couches and the all-important squadron popcorn machine. A battered gray table protruded from one bulkhead. Bird Dog, Gator, and their squadron commanding officer were gathered around it.
Bird Dog glared down at the chart spread out before him. A series of standard Navy symbols was penciled in on it, connected with a faint line representing the track of the contact. The Greenpeace ship had been meandering around the area south of Aflu for two weeks now, and there was still no discernible pattern to her movement.
“I still don’t see what the hell is so damned important about flying out to take a look at that ship,” Bird Dog grumbled. “Why not send an S-3B out instead? That way she can look for that Oscar at the same time.”
Commander Frank Richey fixed him with a pointed glare. “Lieutenants aren’t asked to decide what’s important, mister,” he snapped. “If the United States wants to make sure her citizens can count beluga whales in the North Pacific in peace and quiet, then we’re gonna make sure that happens. You got it?”
Bird Dog heard Gator, seated next to him, sigh and move away imperceptibly. Bird Dog nodded, acknowledging the rebuke with bare courtesy. When he was the commanding officer of a squadron — if that day ever came, which was looking more and more unlikely these days — he would remember what it was like to be a frustrated junior pilot, blooded on one cruise but still not considered an important enough member of the team to be fully briefed on the mission.
Fully briefed. He snorted. The skipper thought it was enough that he understood his flight profile, knew what his weapons load-out was, and was able to make the F-14 Tomcat dance around the sky like a ballerina. But no one ever bothered to talk about the bigger issues — why the United States was here in the first place, and just what the hell babysitting a group of peaceniks and long-hairs on a Greenpeace boat had to do with national security.
Although, he had to admit, the powers that be had proved right about the Spratly Islands. There, their routine surveillance of the rocky outpost in the South China Sea had been the first step in building stronger ties with the small nations that rimmed that body of water.
Still, would it have cost the skipper anything to give him a better explanation? He sighed. Maybe he’d wander down to the spook spaces later today, see if any of the Professional paranoids that lived in the Carrier Intelligence Center, or CVIC were willing to discuss the mission with him. Somehow, he had the feeling that if he just knew more, he might be a whole hell of a lot more interested in the mission than he was at this point. If it hadn’t involved flying, it would have been a complete waste.
“So, I take it you’ve got the big picture now?” his skipper said, distracting him from his thoughts.