"How far away are they?"
"Guessing from their last recorded position… I'd say fifty miles. A couple of hours, if they can give their playmates the slip."
"So that Mike shouldn't be a problem," Travers said. "They'll be long gone by the time it gets there."
"That's the general idea," Perrigrino said. "And while the Russians are off chasing the 'Burgh boat halfway back to Yokasuka, we'll have our chance to get the hell out of
Dodge."
Travers picked up one of the other charts and studied it, a general large-scale navigational chart of the entire Sea of Okhotsk.
A Soviet sea….
Not that the United States recognized the unspoken but vigorously defended claim. Almost completely enclosed by the Siberian mainland, the Kamchatka Peninsula, Sakhalin Island, and the pearl-string necklace of the Kurils, the only bit of land touching the sea not belonging to the Russians was a two-hundred-mile stretch of Hokkaido, Japan's northernmost island.
There were only two ways in or out of the Sea of Okhotsk. One was through La Perouse Strait, between the southern tip of Sakhalin and Hokkaido, near the port of Wakkanai, and that fed into the shallow and land-encompassed Sea of Japan. The other was through the Kurils, that chain of some thirty small, volcanic islands forming an imperfect wall be-
tween the Sea of Okhotsk and the open waters of the Pacific. They comprised yet another of the geographical curses laid against Mother Russia, a choke point through which Soviet warships had to pass if they wished to transit to the open sea.
As for the Sea of Okhotsk, the Soviets had been battling for years to have it accepted as an internal sea, belonging to them and from which all foreign vessels might be excluded. The United States, as ever determined to enforce freedom of the seas, insisted that the Sea of Okhotsk should be considered international waters, and free to all.
The international situation was further complicated by Japan's claim to the four southernmost islands of the chain. In 1875, Japan had traded the southern half of Sakhalin to the Russians in exchange for the Kurils. In September of 1945, however, at the very end of World War II, Soviet army and naval elements had landed on the Japanese islands. Japan had been trying to effect their return ever since, and still referred to the captive islands as "the Northern Territories."
Lieutenant Commander Roger "Skip" Jones joined Travers beside the chart table. "So, Commander," the XO said. "You think Silent Dolphins is worth it?"
"I guess that depends on what you think is important," Travers replied. "I hate to think of the boys on the Pittsburgh being deliberately put in danger."
The XO shrugged. "That's the Navy's mission. To go in harm's way, and all that." He grinned, the expression emphasizing his boyish looks. He couldn't have been more than thirty. "Besides, as far as we're concerned, these are international waters, right? We kicked Kadhafi's ass in the Gulf of Sidra, we'll do the same to Gorbachev here!"
"The two situations aren't the same," Travers said quietly. "Kadhafi isn't sitting on a few thousand megatons, ready to launch at a moment's notice!"
"Aw, c'mon! You don't think the Russkis would hit the red button over something like this, do you?"
It was Travers's turn to shrug. "All I know is that we don't know what they would do. That is the real reason we're here,
after all!"
"The man has a point," Captain Perrigrino said, coming up from behind. "Washington doesn't give squat whether Liberian-registered freighters can freely transit the Okhotsk. But they'd love to get a look at the bastards sinking one!"
"The Pittsburgh is hardly a freighter, Captain. Moscow could see her presence as a threat."
"But not one worth more than a few rattled sabers, son. Chase and his boys'll come out of this okay. You'll see."
"I hope you're right, sir."
"We do know how to play this game," Jones added.
A game. Was that all it was to the men at the cutting edge? Travers glanced at the other officers and enlisted men, quietly, even stolidly at their duty stations around the circumference of the Parche's command center. Some looked nervous, some bored. Most simply wore masks of professionalism, watching their consoles and boards with studied focus and concentration. How many of them were even aware of what was going on in this, Operation Silent Dolphins. How many knew the stakes?
What, Travers wondered, did they think of this "game?"
The cover story of enforcing international rights to free passage on the high seas had been invoked more than once before. A year earlier, in 1986, the United States Navy had enforced its interpretation of maritime geography by sailing into the Gulf of Sidra in the Mediterranean, of which Libya claimed sovereign ownership. The incident had resulted in missiles fired, some Libyan MiGs downed, and a couple of Libyan missile boats sunk. It had also almost certainly led to a Libyan-backed terrorist bombing of a disco in Germany frequented by American soldiers … which in turn had led to the U.S. air strikes against Libya in April of 1986.
The U.S. had never tried enforcing a similar interpretation over the Sea of Okhotsk; as Travers had pointed out, the Soviet Union was not Libya, and, in any case, the waters off the Siberian east coast were not as heavily traveled by international shipping as the waters of the central Med. The entire Sea of Okhotsk, all 610,000 square miles of it, iced over from October to May, was virtually empty save for military traffic, a handful of Russian fishing boats, and the occasional missile test.
Still, the U.S. Navy had a keen interest in access to the Sea of Okhotsk, legal or not. Operation Silent Dolphins was a case in point.
American activities in and around the Sea of Okhotsk went back three decades at least. One of the greatest espionage coups of the Cold War, a covert op known as Ivy Bells, had been carried out by elements of the American submarine force. Over the course of nine years, from 1972 through 1980, American submarines with special towed-array instrument platforms had sought out undersea telephone cables stretching across the Okhotsk seabed to the Kamchatka Peninsula, connecting the major Soviet naval bases at Vladivostok, Sovetskaya, and Magadan with the major Pacific port on Kamchatka, Petropavlovsk. Time after time, divers from the Halibut, the Parche, and other Special Ops boats, had attached electronic taps on the cables, allowing American intelligence bureaus to monitor everything from fleet movements to romantic phone calls to distant loved ones; telephone traffic across the Okhotsk had not been scrambled or encrypted because, it was thought, the submarine cables were completely secure. American submarines had serviced the taps at least once a month for years, picking up the long-duration tapes when they were full and replacing them.
Only in the last few years had the Soviets discovered this open back door to their Far Eastern operations and slammed it shut… and that thanks not to their Pacific Fleet and coastal defense forces, but to an American, Ronald Pelton, an employee at the National Security Agency who'd sold out his country for the munificent sum of roughly $15,000. The KGB was not known for its generous pay scales.
So the glory days of Ivy Bells were over, but American operations in the region continued, almost as though a tradition had been established, one that could not be abandoned without a certain loss of face and prestige.
The theory behind Operation Silent Dolphins was deceptively simple. Two Sturgeon class submarines, including the Parche, had crept stealthily past the Kurils and into the Soviets' backyard, parking themselves outside the port city of Magadan and within the shallow waters of the Sakhalinskiy Zaliv, on the northern approaches to the port of Nikolayevsk. Another Sturgeon, the Batfish, was outside of Petropavlovsk, on the Kamchatka Pacific coast, and a fourth was in the Sea of Japan in the Zaliv Petra Velikogo, south of the great port of Vladivostok and within easy listening range of the nearby secondary ports at Nakhodka and Vostochnyy. All four Sturgeons were experienced at sneak-and-peek inshore ops, and were equipped with high-tech ESM gear for monitoring Soviet radio and radar transmissions. Following their operational orders to the letter, they took up their assigned positions and waited. At a prearranged moment— 0330 hours that morning — all had risen to periscope depth and extended the slender radio masts studded with ECM listening gear.