“Sonar… how longs he been moving now?”
“Twenty-one minutes… Now, sir.”
“Thank you.” He wanted a little more water above them and he still had plenty beneath their keel at this point.
“Five down, seventy feet… ease the bubble if you will, Cox’n.”
As the boat steadied at the new depth, the captain checked the chronometer.
“Engines, all stop, absolute silence everyone, let’s not break the boredom of an otherwise monotonous day for him.”
The captain looked hard at the chart with the outline of the estimated western edge of the minefield guarding the approaches to the Kola Inlet. The current was going to move the 2,400-ton submarine uncomfortable close to it in the next thirty minutes, but so long as it stayed at its present rate and the Kilo moved on again as usual they should have a safe margin of 700m.
A minute later, sonar signalled that the Kilo’s barely perceptible electric motor had ceased and his eyes drifted to the clock.
Exactly thirty minutes later the captain’s heart rate eased slightly when sonar reported the Kilo was again making way, but it only lasted a moment.
“Captain, sonar… … .aspect change on the Kilo sir, she’s turning… ..she’s coming around to port… .now bearing zero zero seven degrees, course one eight zero, depth one hundred feet, speed five knots!”
The captain felt several sets of eyes on him now, the Russian was coming toward them and even if it wasn’t because they had been detected, it meant they could drift onto a mine in the next hour. He looked again at the chart, even if the Admiralty had erred on the side of caution when marking the fields bounds, another hour could put them well beyond the line on the chart. He viewed it logically, if they got underway, they were screwed, if they fired on the Kilo, they were screwed, but if they didn’t hit a mine then they would make it. It all depended on how much accuracy had been applied in the marking of their chart.
“We wait,” he announced simply.
The digital plot showed the Kilo closing on the Upholder class submarine over the next thirty minutes, but as the hands showed exactly half an hour from the time the Kilo had started her motors the sonar department did not signal that she was drifting and listening once more, the plot showed her still coming on. After another eighteen minutes the Kilo was abeam of the British submarine, with only two hundred and forty-nine yards separating them, but she kept moving at a steady five knots for a minute longer.
“Captain, aspect change on the Kilo… … .turning to starboard, speed constant at five knots.”
“Good… group up, slow ahead main motor and bring us around, slowly, to two seven zero degrees, if you please.” He wanted to get away from this damned minefield.
The First Lieutenant sidled up next to the Captain, and then turned his body so that no one in the control room could observe him speaking.
“I almost started to get worried there sir,” he said quietly.
“When he didn’t stop on schedule, I almost laughed aloud with relief!”
“Really number one?” the captain replied.
“Because that was the point where I nearly lost control of the old sphincter muscles.”
The First Lieutenant gave him a puzzled look, unsure as to whether his skipper was making a joke.
The captain saw the expression and decided to educate the man “The reason he didn’t stop Jeremy, is because he knew the edge of the minefield here is too bloody close to piss about with!”
He stabbed a finger at their current position on the chart, inside the marked area.
They had another thirty miles to go, into the Motovskiy Zaliv Inlet where their live cargo, a four man SBS team, would swim ashore from the submerged submarine. In 1995 the UK’s government of the day had decided that the cost of defending the country was still too expensive and sold off hardware at a fraction of its value as well as putting thousands of patriotic young men and women on the dole queues. The sales did not cover even ten percent of the equipment’s initial cost and the extra thousands of unemployed were a further drain on the nation’s social security benefit system, because the government declined to spend money retraining the ex-service personnel for civilian occupations. Four out of five almost brand new Upholder class submarines had been sold to Canada but the fifth, Ulysses, had been saved, retained should the need arise for covert insertion operations.
Once that was accomplished then they themselves would creep back out into relatively open water and make for Norwegian waters, to collect another team of swimmers. Temeraire would remain to monitor traffic entering and exiting the Kola Inlet. The SBS team and the nuclear attack submarine had similar roles, the marines were there to monitor troop movements for any sign of an invasion of the Scandinavian countries, and plot a bit of mischief of course. The Temeraire herself had land attack, Tomahawk cruise missiles and Spearfish torpedoes with which to cause mayhem if so ordered.
Once the Kilo’s departing course was established, the Ulysses altered course to two two four degrees and resumed her insertion of the SBS team.
The Royal Marines in the team faced an hours swim followed by a night climb of a hundred-foot cliff face in order to avoid the passive intruder detection systems on the rocky beaches.
Admiral Dalton had addressed the officers and crew of the USS John F Kennedy, three hours’ ago, at the same time, the Captains of all the ships in the combat group read out the message from the Admiral to their crews. They had enough weapons remaining for one strike, and even if successful they would probably succumb to the enemy retaliatory attacks that would swiftly follow.
It wasn’t a ‘damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead’ or an ‘England expects’ type of speech, it was quite matter of fact and down to earth.
With no defensive armament other than her Phalanx close-in defence system, HMS Prince of Wales was to the north of the big carrier, where she was controlling ASW operations for the group.
As before, the group was at full EMCON so as to give no warning of their position or intention, and the ships were either at battle stations or action stations, depending upon which side of the Atlantic they hailed from.
Rain came down upon the ships in sheeting gusts that frequently came in curving horizontally down from the heavens. Aboard the Type 23 frigate, HMS Malta, on outer picket duty to the west, the seas were breaking over her bows and the water that crashed against the forecastle was deep green. It was early in the year for the typhoon season to have started, and young naval ratings that took the stormy Atlantic in their stride, discovered just how nasty nature could really be when she was in the mood.
The edge of the storm was lashing the coast of the Kamchatka Peninsula and small port of Ust’-Kamchatsk, where the PLAN and Russian carrier combat groups had gone in order to carry out repairs. The port was sat on low ground, slightly higher than the marshy ground that surrounded it. The water was too shallow and the port too small to accept anything bigger than a frigate, but the bay offered calmer waters and the protection of land based defences whilst the ships were patched up. To the west of the bay the ground rose in a long ridge called Gora Shish and beyond that the heights of a smallish mountain named Klyuchevskaya Sopka. These features masked the SW to NE running valley that ran downhill from the hills just behind Petropavlovsk-Kamchatskiy, to the bogs and marshes that surrounded the port of Ust’-Kamchatsk. Captain Hong was aboard the Mao supervising repairs, the repairs that could as easily have been carried out whilst they were underway, in his opinion. Admiral Li was ashore for the night, having turned the Mayor and his family out of their home, rather than stay aboard where the repairs disturbed his sleep.