Even as the convoy was turning, there were two more thunderous explosions, mushroom plumes of oil and boiling water rising high into the sky, then collapsing in on themselves. Three more merchantmen were going down, and when Woodall saw one of them had been at least a mile to his port side, the other a mile or so starboard, he assumed for a moment that at least two Russians had joined the attack.
There was another explosion and the calm voice of a British captain aboard a Sheffield-class destroyer reporting to Woodall that he was “taking water abaft” the starboard beam. The trawlers’ mines, set for individual merchantmen’s signatures, now became obsolete, but there was still a question of whether “magnetic/pressure” mines reacting to water displacement and magnetic fields passing over them had been set for the heavier merchantmen, thus allowing the lighter escorts, including the Dutch minesweeper, to pass over before being triggered as, unlike most of the escorts, the merchantmen did not have “self-degaussing” or “magnetic wiping” systems that could give them anti-magnetic protection against such mines.
Woodall gave orders for the escorts to form a single line as the best hope of getting out of the minefield and to fire at will at the trawlers.
“Beg pardon, sir,” said the captain of the command cruiser. “One of them’s on fire. I wouldn’t imagine—”
“Sink them, Mr. Rees!”
“Very good, sir.”
The Sheffield destroyer, holed abaft and sinking quickly, listing dangerously over, her pumps working overtime, led the attack, with her 115-milimeter forward gun pumping away at the first big ocean-going trawler, flecks of paint and rigging spitting up into the air above her. The fish boat turned tail, its stern now to the destroyer; the high-piled netting seemed to shrivel up and fall away. There was an orange wink. Two other trawlers were doing the same.
“Skimmer midships!” shouted the destroyer’s starboard lookout. A split second later the destroyer’s radar, which activated the close-in Phalanx system, began firing. The destroyer’s radar mast collapsed on the bridge as the Sea Dart roared off from its weather deck mount. But the list of the Sheffield was so acute that only the 115-milimeter gun could depress far enough to do any damage, the Gatling gun effectively raking only the trawler’s wheelhouse. The trawler suddenly bucked, its stem lifted clean out of the water by the force of a British destroyer’s Exocet — but not before the trawler and two of its sister craft had fired four fifty-five-hundred-pound Styx surface-to-surface missiles. Two of them missed, or rather were exploded by in-close Gatlings. The other two hit. The entire superstructure and bridge of the next ship in the line, a sleek Leander-class frigate, were engulfed in fire, her radar and radio masts collapsing into the hot maze of twisted steel like a long-legged insect, the crescent-shaped radar antenna aglow as it struck the water, and temperatures generated so high that the port side lifeboat was incinerated amid the reek of cordite, gasoline, and burning bodies, other men spilling into the sea, many of them afire. And methodically, above the sound of the screaming men, the steady pump-pump-pump of cannon fire pulverizing the remaining trawlers.
Several of the officers aboard the long line of British, Dutch, and German escorts had difficulty stopping their gunners even after it was obvious that the trawlers were well and truly done for. Among some men it had been an unwritten contract in a war that they knew would be waged with the speed and force of missiles. There would be no time for such old-fashioned notions as rescue. Better a bullet than to be left drowning in oil.
By now it was dusk, and as the convoy re-formed in squares, the Dutch minesweeper leading, Woodall ordered all ships to turn south again in a wide arc, avoiding the area where the trawlers had sown their deadly harvest. But only he, among the entire complement of the cruiser and all the other ships, knew that R-1 had been an experiment — with the empty container ships as decoys. As another admiral before him, Mountbatten, had sent the Canadian Corps to invade a beach in Normandy to test the theory for D-Day, to see if it could be done, Woodall was now seeing if “rollover” was feasible. And as Mountbatten had hoped to draw out the Luftwaffe during the Dieppe raid, now R-1 was to draw out the Russians for the killing. The Dieppe raid had been a terrible failure — more than two-thirds killed, the rest taken prisoner — but from it came the invaluable lessons of D-Day.
The men like Horton in charge of “rollover” had to know as quickly as possible whether the square base, fan-shaped screen convoy was workable in real combat. But the awful thing for Woodall was that now that it had been tried in actual battle conditions, the first time in modern missile warfare, he knew he could not give SACLANT or anyone else a definitive answer, other than to say that the Soviets had very effectively attacked the convoy by deception, using mines to devastating effect. Without question, it was a terrible loss for the convoy, eight of the container ships sunk, two escorts, a total of over four hundred men dead. But the Russian subs, the more telling test for the long-run strategy, had not appeared at all. So far.
Again Woodall wondered what was happening at the GIUK Gap, where NATO had laid its noise-signature-primed mines.
ACCHAN in Northwood, U.K., had replied that as yet no explosions had been picked up by the GUIK SOSUS network or by any towed sonar arrays.
The only good piece of news Woodall received was that Greenland’s ice sheet was farther out than usual for September, making the Greenland-Iceland Gap even narrower, so that if the Soviet subs were going to break out, it would most likely be through the Iceland-Faeroe gap as they rounded Norway’s north cape.
“That would narrow the field,” the cruiser’s captain commented to Woodall.
“Possibly,” answered the admiral, “unless they used the ice sheet as cover.”
“Then they’d have to bust through, sir. Make a hell of a din. Could hear it in Piccadilly.”
“No,” said Woodall, “they could use the sheet as cover until they’re well south of the main channel, then break out on their left flank at speed — into open water.”
“There’s still our mines,” said the cruiser’s captain.
“Then why haven’t our listening posts in Iceland heard them popping off?” pressed Woodall.
“Yes, unless—” The captain could see that the admiral had already thought of it, too — the possibility of it — the trawlers being the tip-off. “Bloody hell, sir. Special forces?”
“Yes,” replied Woodall. “Bastards might have wiped out the listening posts. Either that or been digging up the damned SOSUS lines.”
“Dragging them up would be tricky,” commented the captain. “Take an age, too.”
“I agree,” said Woodall, worriedly, his eyes roaming the leaden horizon as night began its descent. “I’d say we’re not hearing anything because the—”