Again, sonar raked Dreadnought.
“Bandit One is turning right… Coming around onto our stern…”
Simon Collingwood frowned.
Why was the second American boat trying to match Dreadnought’s potential collision course with its sister? He’d come across one or two gung ho sorts training in Connecticut prior to joining the boat a year before her projected completion at Barrow-in-Furness. However, what Bandit One was doing wasn’t gung ho; it was positively dangerous.
“Scorpion is maintaining revs and heading!”
Okay, I’ve got one Skipjack class hunter-killer on a possible collision course on my bow, and another steaming up my prop wash.
This is going to be interesting!
More shrill pings deflected off Dreadnought pressure casing.
And then as the other boat fell in directly astern the pings became mushy, confused in the boat’s wake or missing completely; or returning off a target beyond Dreadnought…
“Bandit One is painting Scorpion for us,” Max Forton chuckled, meeting his Captain’s eye as he looked up from the plot.
Simon Collinwood acknowledged this with a nod.
“All stop! Repeat, all stop!”
Max Forton raised an eyebrow.
“Scorpion and her chum know where we are. We’ll let them think they’ve won this round.” More active pinging scourged the boat.
Minutes passed slowly.
“Scorpion is on our port bow. Very close…”
In this game of underwater blind man’s bluff played with three to four thousand ton chess pieces nothing was more dangerous than one of the players not following standard operating procedures and ignoring the customary courtesies between former friends. If the three participants had been trying to kill each other things would have been so much simpler; as it was Dreadnought’s running silent and manoeuvring erratically was a nightmare for her jailors whose nerves would be rubbed red-raw by now.
The Captain of HMS Dreadnought could hear and feel the USS Scorpion’s churning multi-bladed single screw and the soft thrumming of her turbines. The other boat was less than a hundred yards away, perhaps; and a little deeper. He couldn’t help holding his breath as the sound faded astern. Both US submarines knew exactly where he was but they couldn’t manoeuvre freely because they’d just got in each other’s way.
“Maximum revs please,” he demanded, fighting not to smile too widely. “Come to two-seven-zero degrees. Make our depth three-zero-zero feet.”
Simon Collingwood felt better now he’d seized back the initiative. The United States Navy could either race Dreadnought out into the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, search for the Hermes Battle Group or fall back on the USS Enterprise and her consorts patrolling the Western Approaches south of Ireland. If they followed Dreadnought into the west; that was well and good, he’d play hide and seek again in a few hours at a time and under conditions of his choosing. If the two Skipjack boats went south he’d put himself between them and the Hermes’s northern screen. If they turned back to secure the undersea flank of the fleet around the USS Enterprise, the giant new super carrier that was the pride of the US Navy, he’d follow them.
HMS Dreadnought surged forward.
Chapter 29
If General Curtis LeMay had been smoking one of the fat cigars he’d been famous for pugnaciously jamming between his jaws in dozens of wartime photographs, he’d have involuntarily chewed it to bits. As the Sikorsky SH-3 Sea King transporting him from Andrews Air Force Base on the short hop to the White House rose off the tarmac he got his first good look at the pillars of smoke rising from the city on both sides of the Potomac. The main targets had been government buildings, the embassies of friendly countries, and the British Embassy. Part of the Navy Department block on Constitution Avenue had been demolished — or collapsed spontaneously, nobody knew for sure — after two massive truck bombs detonated in front of it. The Main State Building, the huge State Department complex close to the river had been targeted with petrol tankers and a clutch of truck bombs, and as at the Pentagon there were stories of gangs of heavily armed men in military fatigues gunning down survivors and marauding through the wrecked building after the initial assault. There was a pitched battle in progress in and around the Pentagon, Marines and National Guardsmen having been thrown into the ongoing fire fight as they arrived through the night. LeMay’s own aircraft had been delayed nearly an hour in a holding pattern over Andrews Air Force Base as C-130 Hercules transports delivered two battalions of the elite 101st Airborne Division to bolster the defence of the capital.
“Tell me again what’s going on at the White House?” The Chief of Staff of the United States Air Force demanded, yelling above the roar of the rotors.
“A bunch of crazies with Bazookas tried to slug it out with the Marines holding the perimeter, sir. There were a couple of hits on the West Wing, some bullet damage but the Marine Corps pretty much wiped out the insurgents.”
Curtis LeMay’s expression grew very sour.
Whereas the defenders of the White House had shrugged off every ragged assault to date, the two platoons of lightly armed Marines and the squad of Washington PD officers guarding the grounds of the Pentagon had been wiped out in minutes. The building’s internal security force had been driven deep into the complex before reinforcements from elsewhere started to arrive. By then well-organised ‘insurgents’ equipped with automatic weapons and wire-guided anti-tank munitions had already established defensive positions within the building commanding unrestricted fields of fire over the main approaches. It wasn’t until Virginia National Guard tanks and armoured personnel carriers arrived that a path up to and into the great construction had been secured — with the loss of seventy men and a five armoured vehicles — and the ‘insurgents’ outer gun line breached. FUBAR didn’t begin to describe the catastrophe. Scores of government buildings, embassies and office and suburban housing blocks were burning. Gangs of insurgents had roamed the streets all night stalking, murdering and terrorising innocent unarmed civilians. Scores of firemen and policemen had been gunned down going about their duty; and the atrocity was still going on.
Nobody was talking about casualty numbers; it was too early for that and vicious spasms of new fighting kept breaking out across the city. No sooner was one hot spot damped down than another flared up somewhere else. The latest outbreaks of violence seemed wholly unconnected with the sieges and stand-offs which had developed as the first troops and armour had been fed into the battle. Out in the suburbs there were disturbing reports of the homes being attacked and the families of government officials and diplomats being executed. One account told of a family of a senior Treasury Department official being forced to kneel down in the street outside their burning home before being riddled with automatic gunfire. Panic was spreading like a deadly contagion. In the middle of the fire fights shops and marts were being looted, vehicles stolen and with every passing hour the situation grew murkier. Not least because the telephone system was down across three-quarters of the city. A dystopian apocalyptic nightmare was playing out in the streets of the capital of the most powerful nation in the history of the World.
The Sea King’s loadmaster leaned over Curtis LeMay’s shoulder.
“The White House is still taking sporadic incoming small arms fire, sir,” he reported. “The pilot says we’ll be approaching low and the landing is going to be fast and dirty. He says the sooner everybody’s safely on the ground the better he’ll feel, sir!”