Charles D. Taylor
Silent Hunter
Charter Books by Charles D. Taylor
CHOKE POINT
FIRST SALVO
SHOW OF FORCE
SILENT HUNTER
THE SUNSET PATRIOTS
Acknowledgments
The undersea world of our nuclear navy is a strange and fascinating place — and also one that wisely keeps to itself. I learned much about the Arctic environment from my friend, Steve Young, and his Center for Northern Studies, from Dr. Charles D. Hollister of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, and from Barry Lopez’ Arctic Dreams (Scribners, 1986). While Imperator sprang from my own imagination, I have studied designs of such mammoth submarines produced by the American Society of Naval Engineers, The Society of Naval Architects and Marine Engineers, and the Electric Boat Division of General Dynamics.
Tom Shields was kind enough to assist me with initial introductions in New London. Others who then offered help were Vice Admiral N.R. Thunman (who initially brought Admiral McKee’s statement about George Washington to my attention), Rear Admiral Virgil Hill, Lt. Commander Cherie Beatty, Lt. Tony Kendrick, Senior Chief Robert J. Zollars of the Submarine Force Library and Museum, and especially Lt. Commander J. M. Crochet. Mike Crochet spent untold hours of his own time helping an old “surface type” understand the world of the nuclear navy. The countless little details that should make readers feel they are really sailing under the ice are thanks to Mike’s patience with me; the mistakes are distinctly my own. Those who have earned the right to wear the dolphins should understand that everything about their world does not belong in these pages; any breaches of trust or security are the end result of my own imagination.
It is important to remember those friends who helped in so many ways — Candy Bergquist, my favorite retired typist, Dan Mundy and Ted Magnuson, who criticize so well, Bill McDonald, still our captain, Dominick Abel, my agent, and Mel Parker, whose advice is wise.
The world’s first atomic submarine, “underway on nuclear power” on January 17, 1955, was a fantastic deterrent, for she never fired a torpedo in anger. She now lies proudly alongside her own special pier by the Submarine Force Museum in Groton, Connecticut. Report aboard for your tour of USS Nautilus (SSN-571); then take a few hours to visit the Museum, a valuable part of our American heritage.
Dedication
Once again, I want to dedicate one to
my wife, Georgie — her love is sustaining
and she encourages me to achieve.
Epigraph
…It is clear that the new expansionist ambitions of the imperialists on the oceans, directed against the countries of socialism, can be countered by our seapower which is capable of exerting a sobering influence on them.
…the growth of importance of submarine forces makes necessary the intensive development of submarine-hunting forces…
George Washington, our first Polaris submarine… retired without fanfare after silently and effectively performing her mission of deterrence for more than twenty years. She never fired an armed missile. In the business of deterrence, that is the absolute definition of success.
Prologue
A GRAY CHEVY eased to a dusty stop at a scenic turnoff on the coastal highway in Washington State. The man who got out and stretched as he rolled up his shirt sleeves might have been a salesman taking a midday break. The automobile was registered in the same name that appeared on his driver’s license — Charles Pearson. He was of medium height, clean shaven, indistinguishable in a crowd, apparently an average working man stopping by the roadside for a breather during a busy day.
It was a rare sunny day for late winter. Ocean waves boomed with a never-ending rumble on the rocks below. A small sandy beach interrupted the unevenness of a rocky coastline. There, seals wiggled ashore to sun and frolic, their playful barking rising as the man’s eyes methodically completed their second complete circuit of his surroundings. Satisfied, he reached in the driver’s window and extracted a set of high-powered binoculars. They’d been adjusted to his eyes that morning in his hotel room. He again looked about cautiously before scanning the hills behind him. No one there, nothing unusual he could detect. As a matter of fact, there had never been any reports of lookouts anywhere in the vicinity. Yet his comrades continued to disappear.
Arkady Kovschenko — for that was his given name in his hometown of Tula, a city south of Moscow — swept the binoculars from the landscape behind him to the high pasture on the spit of land two miles down the coast. It sat on a bluff sloping sharply down to the water’s edge. He had memorized the available charts for this section of coastline, and that entire spit of land seemed to have appeared out of nowhere in the last few years.
This was a remote strip on the Washington coast, barren enough that it had not been mapped by Soviet satellites for years. The spit’s appearance had been noted a few years back by a minor operative who found it unusual, When he suffered a heart attack soon after, apparently no one in the KGB’s cartographic division had considered the report significant. A little more than a year ago, another agent had provided sketchy reports on a strange consortium of military officers and defense contractors (mostly involved with submarines) that would meet on a monthly basis in Washington, D.C. They would also mysteriously disappear every few months after flying into the Seattle area. Strangely enough, covert checks at their normal offices would always indicate they were either temporarily unavailable to the caller or somewhere other than reported by the agent in the Northwest. When he died in an automobile accident, his carefully prepared reports seemed to have died with him. There was no correlation from the other sources that would have made his reports more important than first judged.
If the number of Soviet agents dying in the American Northwest hadn’t finally attracted some attention in Moscow, the bureaucrats who administered these agents might have buried what would later prove to be one of the most vital intelligence coups in the United States.
That was why Charles Pearson/Arkady Kovschenko was peering intently through his binoculars at the pastoral scene before him. The powerful lenses brought the pasture and the spit to him as though they were next to the car. It appeared so natural that without his earlier training he would never have noticed the oddities he now identified. The coastline in that vicinity was punctuated by sharp grades running up from the waterline, broken only by the narrow’ flood plain of rivers and creeks flowing from the inland peaks. This spit sloped more gradually, taking on an unnatural appearance as he concentrated. The rocks seemed to have been placed there by man rather than nature. Then he noticed the grass in the pastures. Though there actually were cattle grazing there, the shading of the grass they consumed was slightly different, thicker and more textured than that nearby. It was almost as if it had been planted there to ensure that the cows remained.