Sometimes Spence’s zeal just plain wore the cook down, but he tried not to dampen the kid’s enthusiasm. He’d seen too many go the other way. Maybe the kid had a point about the wines as nowadays they were trying all new bottling techniques anyway. In any case, the cook knew the boy had the “gift” of all great chefs. Organization. Being the cook of HMS Peregrine, one of Britain’s star hi-tech destroyers, the chief petty officer had seen hundreds come and go through his charge, and he’d known many of them who could cook meals that you’d never forget. But he hadn’t met many who could do that and who also possessed the ability to pace themselves, never to have one dish rushing in the wake of another, or too far apart, but just to appear naturally, and always, but always, at the right temperature. That’s where art came in.
“Now, when you’ve finished with those spuds, Johnson,” said the cook, “I want you to put this vitamin C on them before you start the next lot.”
“Stops them going brown,” said William. “The vitamin C.”
“I fucking know that,” said Johnson. He sprinkled the vitamin C around and tied the heavy plastic bag with double twist. “Good as dead!” he said. “Subs. That’s what we need. This surface shit is a crock—”
“We’ve got subs,” said Spence before the chef could tell Johnson to shut up.
“Nine,” said Johnson. “Jesus Christ, the Russians have hundreds.”
“So have the Americans,” answered William.
“Right!” joined in the cook.
“You know—” said Johnson, his hand grabbing the cold stove rail as Peregrine climbed up out of a trough.
“Know what?” asked William Spence, feeling a little seasick in the closed-off and overheated air that was being recycled through the galley.
“Moscow’s only got to move all their crap down the road. Yanks have to move their shit across the whole friggin’ Atlantic.”
“You should be in comedy, Johnson,” said the cook nonchalantly. “You’ve missed your vocation, laddie. We ought to send you round to the hospitals, we ought. They could do with a cheery bastard like you.”
“Haven’t you heard of rollover?” asked Spence challengingly.
“Oh ‘cor. Spare me, will you? Rollover.”
“Yes,” said William Spence. “We roll over them. Just push through.”
Johnson finished peeling the potato, stared at it for a moment, and let it crash to the bottom of the bucket. “Rollover Beethoven. You sound like one of those fucking admirals. They do the rolling, we do the over.”
“What would you do then?”
“I’d leave it up to the Yanks and the Russians. Their war, not ours.”
“But we’re part of NATO,” said Spence.
“Listen, mate — in this world it’s everyone for himself. NATO, TATO, who gives a shit?” He was using the peeler as a pointer. “You don’t look after Number One, sweetheart, nobody will.”
“Perhaps you should have gone to jail instead,” said Spence— the first time the cook had heard Spence angry.
“Now, that,” rejoined Johnson, “is the first bright idea you’ve had, Sunshine.”
“Then why didn’t you?”
“Because, ducky—” Johnson savagely extracted a rotten spot from the potato “—I didn’t know some silly bastard’d start shoving — did I?” He moved the bucket of potatoes over toward the sink. “Well, now I know and I’m telling you, mate — any friggin’ thing hits this ship and I’m first off — Beaufort raft and all.”
The cook heard the buzz on the bridge-to-mess intercom, and as he picked it up, wondered whether he should put Johnson on report. “Right, yes, sir. Right away, sir.” He clipped the phone back on its cradle. “Sandwiches and coffee to the bridge. Corned beef and lettuce for the old man. No pickles.” He paused before giving Spence the plastic tray, checking that all the indents for cups, plates, and so forth were spotlessly clean. “Sub pack ahead of us.”
“How far?” asked Spence, trying not to sound frightened.
“A ways off yet,” said the cook, “but it’ll be a long night ahead of us, boys.”
“What did I bloody tell you?” said Johnson. “I thought our mob were supposed to knock ‘em off up near fuckin’ Greenland with all the super-duper mines we planted down there. Christ— now we’re in for it.”
During the trawlers’ mine attack on R-1 and R-1’s defense, ocean noise was such that it shook the fine instrumentation of sonar buoys and towed arrays for thousands of miles. By sheer chance it provided a noise cover that seemed heaven-sent by the Soviet sub pack approaching the GIUK choke points in two groups. The first group was heading for the Greenland-Iceland Gap, close in to the extended ice sheet, using it as added protection against which ASROC and other antisubmarine warfare missiles could not penetrate other than by blowing themselves up. The second group of seventy subs, using the static and a heavy sea for cover, was going for the Faeroe-Iceland Gap. NATO’s mines in both the narrow Greenland-Iceland Gap and the Iceland-Faeroe Gap had been beaten by the Soviet subs, who, with the help of the Walker spy ring secrets, had found out how to best “baffle”—or alter — their noise signatures-similar to altering sounds from a car.
But once through the ice-free Iceland-Faeroe Gap, the submarines were detected through “thermal patching,” the Soviets’ COMONES — computer-controlled emission systems — not being nearly as sophisticated as the Americans’. Here the Russians’ luck ran out and there was a terrible slaughter.
“Prigotovitsya vsplyt!”—”Prepare for surfacing!” was one of the oft-repeated phrases that morning of the NATO attack on the Russian Northern Fleet.
Protected by F-IIIAs — Ravens — from Upper Haywood and the Norwegian bases, NATO’s Nimrods came out of Scotland’s Kinross Air Station, with searchwater radar and aerial-release depth bombs. The American Lockheed search-and-attack Vikings, with infrared sensors, magnetic anomaly detectors, and homing torpedoes, closed with thirty F-15 Sea Eagles out of Keflavik. The attack spread out from the shallow 190-mile-wide gap to Wyville Thomas Ridge two hundred miles south, where the water depth increased to two thousand meters. It was the “high,” as one of the Viking pilots put it, of all their years in NATO, as one Soviet captain after another ordered, “Prepare to surface.” Nineteen subs, eleven nuclear and four diesel-electrics, were outright kills, and four forced to the surface, white smoke pouring out of them high into the pristine air, their crews having no alternative but to ditch into the ice-cold Arctic waters. Some managed to get rafts inflated in time to drag themselves, half-frozen, aboard, but it was the first time since World War II that the Russian navy, at least its submarine branch, had come under such attack and proved so wanting. The American Vikings’ under-wing ECM — electronic countermeasures— worked superbly well, not only in jamming the Russians’ “snoop tray” radars but also in feeding the submarine force and its Russian battle group false over-the-horizon echoes. This caused two of the Soviet ASW helo carriers to fire Cruise missiles at empty air, and one of the Tango-class subs to send back an advisory “burst” message that was picked up by two of the Vikings. Thus identified, the submarine never stood a chance as a Mark 46 torpedo streaked through the water at twenty-five meters a second, its explosion rupturing two of the Tango’s forward watertight compartments, torpedo room, and crew’s mess, the sub driving nose-first to the bottom, its implosion registered by a Sea King helo from HMAS Invincible.