“I–I was fixing my boot — something— “
The NKA lieutenant slapped him across the face. “You are lying. Take off your boots.”
Tae did so. The lieutenant handed them to the guard, but he was still watching Tae. “You will follow me.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
It was a bright, clear day, a cobalt-blue sea and sky — not a day for war.
Twenty-four hundred miles northeast of Newfoundland in the thirty-four million square miles of Atlantic Ocean, the first British convoy of World War III was under way. Dispatched by SACEUR — Supreme Allied Commander Europe — the convoy, consisting of twenty fifteen-thousand-ton container-type ships escorted by twenty-five NATO warships, primarily British, was negotiating its way past an iceberg floe, for though it was early autumn, the ice sheets still extended from Greenland.
No difficult task for each merchant ship, it was a major headache for SACLANT, the Supreme Allied Commander Atlantic, Admiral Horton in Norfolk, Virginia, as the convoy, designated R-1—Resupply One — was just the first of dozens that would have to be made in the first four-week period. After that, the NATO reserves, particularly of fuel, would be dangerously low, and the Russian monolith, with no such problems of cross-sea reinforcements, would clearly win.
The deadly Cold War game of ASW, antisubmarine warfare, of hide-and-seek between the Soviet sub fleet of four hundred and NATO’s 270, had been waged with deadly seriousness ever since 1947, NATO’s aim having been to demonstrate to the Russians that the cost of a Soviet sub offensive would be disastrous for the Soviet Union.
But all that was before the sudden surge in Soviet submarine technology in the late eighties, due largely to the American Walker spy ring, who, with other highly sensitive material it had gained access to, had sold the Soviets top information, including the location sites of NATO’s SOSUS — sound surveillance system — an underwater network of microphones, or hydrophones, which picked up the movements of Soviet submarines throughout the world.
The Russians also knew that, quite apart from trying to sink a whole convoy, they would win the war if their navy could sink allied shipping at a faster rate than lost ships could be replaced. This was especially true for tankers carrying fuel, which, unlike the Russians, Western Europe had to import. Even the British, who didn’t import their oil from the Middle East any longer but from the North Sea, were dependent on the transport of that oil by tankers vulnerable to the Russian subs. It was a simple enough equation, but a devastating one for NATO’s forward defense in Western Europe. Admiral Horton explained it by quoting Patton: “My men can eat their boots, but my tanks gotta have gas!” And if Europe went, so would America.
The sub packs from Russia’s Northern Fleet came out of Murmansk and down from the Kara Sea—153 of them, the Americans’ K-12 satellite picking up their thermal discharge patterns. It was an underwater armada of HUK, Hunter/Killer, submarines, the satellite photos suggesting their course was set for the GIUK, Greenland-Iceland-U.K. Gap, in effect two gaps, one group of subs heading for the Denmark Strait, the other for the Iceland-Faeroe Rise, through which they must pass if they hoped to intercept the convoy. The “sound prints” picked up by. NATO’s SOSUS hydrophones on the ocean bottom of the GIUK Gap, together with magnetometer readings taken by low-flying Norwegian PB-3 ASW planes via their long-trailing wire antennas, confirmed the satellite projection of the subs’ course.
The noise of each sub, as peculiar to itself as the noise of each automobile, gave off different sound signatures or “fingerprints.” Fed into the computers of NATO’s naval commands, matchups were made with the known noise signatures of all Russian subs ever recorded by NATO. Within an hour Norfolk, Virginia, and Convoy R-1 knew via satellite burst message that of the 153 subs from Russia’s Northern Fleet heading for the convoy, 43 were modern snorkel-breathing diesel-electric HUKs, 100 were nuclear, and the remainder, 10 old diesel-electrics, used for training purposes. The dispatch of the old diesel-electrics by Arctic TVD military theater naval headquarters at Severomorsk was viewed by Norfolk as an effort to throw everything at the convoy — not simply to maul it but annihilate it, to demonstrate to NATO that the cost to them of reinforcing Europe wasn’t worth the candle.
Norwegian air patrols were taken over by American air trackers out of Iceland, where the U.S. Navy escorts would take over from the Royal Navy to see the convoy safely to Halifax on Canada’s east coast, the largest northernmost port of North America best able to handle the huge shuttle and storage of materials and ordnance for NATO resupply. Most of the cargo, now being assembled on the Halifax docks, was in containers, one modern container ship carrying as much cargo as twenty-seven World War II merchantmen. This meant that Convoy R-1 would, if it arrived safely in Halifax, equal the cargo-carrying capacity of twenty World War II convoys.
A lieutenant commander at Norfolk, Virginia, asked, why the “Brits?”
“NATO,” he was corrected sharply by Admiral Horton. “We’re in this together, Commander. And it’s not the play-offs. It’s the World Series. Right here. Right now,” he said, tapping the last-reported position of the convoy.
“Sorry, sir, but why’s NATO sending over twenty cargo ships? Wouldn’t it make more sense to simply load or expropriate container ships here in the U.S. and Canada — load ‘em up and move out?”
“We’re doing both,” replied the admiral, waving the lieutenant commander’s suggestion aside. “We’ve no time to lose either end. And remember — extraordinary security procedures are in effect. We find a leak from this side of the Atlantic and I’ll deep-six the son of a bitch.” He was edgy; the Russians knew the GIUK Gaps were the choke points, transiting lanes, deep in places but relatively narrow, that had to be negotiated before the Soviet Northern Fleet could hope to break out into the deeper vastness of the North Atlantic.
Twenty-three hundred miles north of Newfoundland’s Cape Bauld, Convoy R-1 was proceeding southwest, the square of twenty empty cargo vessels, five a side, a mile between each ship, surrounded by a larger square-shaped U of twenty-five ASW Sea King helicopters. In front of this double square there was a fan-shaped deployment of Gruman EA-6B electronic-countermeasures Prowlers. Each plane, its telltale proboscis sticking out in front of the cockpit for midair refueling, was so jam-packed with detection and jamming electronics, it was simply too heavy to be armed; the main business of its crew of four — pilot, copilot, and two electronic warfare officers — was to be constantly on the lookout for visual as well as “dipstick” sonar evidence of submarines.
Between the advance screen of Grumans, ASW helicopters, and patrol aircraft and the protective outer square of frigates and destroyers that surrounded the core square of twenty container ships, there was a wide arrowhead formation of ten British Trafalgar-class nuclear-powered attack submarines. Behind these were four older Oberon-class diesel electric subs and a lone Dutch glass-reinforced, plastic-hulled minesweeper of the HMS Wilson design, with its corrugated hull of fiberglass on plastic formers looking distinctly ungainly as its twenty-seven hundred tons plowed through the medium chop, and it became the butt of many jokes. The minesweeper had been sent along by SACEUR simply to be “on call,” though the NATO commander of the convoy, British Admiral Woodall, suspected that as the ship had been designed for coastal defenses, it had really been dumped on the convoy as a tryout, for it wasn’t the Russian Northern Fleet that would now be fretting about mines. In the GIUK Gap, NATO had lain both magnetic and “signature primed” mines, sometimes only a hundred meters apart.