Freeman’s sister-in-law, Marjorie Duchene, stood in silence by the general as he looked helplessly down in the intensive care unit of Monterey’s Peninsula Hospital, watching the comatose figure of his wife, the array of blinking monitors, IV drips, and translucent green color of the oxygen mask transforming Doreen’s appearance utterly. Here the general felt as useless as a conscript on his first day at boot camp — powerless to do anything but stand and take it. All he could do, as the chief resident informed him, was wait. For Freeman it might as well have been a prison sentence. The very idea of waiting, of being confronted by a problem he could not attack, do battle with, was anathema. He knew what he should be doing. He and Doreen had talked it over often enough, intending to empower each other to “pull the plug” if either of them was ever struck down by some such incontinent, paralyzed condition. But ironically the man who had been so thorough in his professional life — on more than one occasion astounding logistical officers with his attention to minor details of supply and combat support — was now faced by the fact that neither of them had actually got round to doing it — to making a “living will.”
Back at the house the silence of the rooms was all the more oppressive because of the thunderous crashing of high tide and surf which, Freeman noted in his diary, were he an enemy commander offshore, would be disastrous for any amphibious operation. Pacing the rooms, flicking on the TV, seeing protesters against any impending war with Siberia, Freeman muttered an obscenity and switched it off. He was like a caged lion, spitting out his contempt for those whose selfishness was so profound that they would not fight for the very freedom that allowed them to protest. There was only one place for conscientious objectors — front-line stretcher bearers. That put their high principle to the test.
But it wasn’t all anger with the protesters that was adding to his concern, or — dare he say it? — ”anxiety” about Doreen, but rather guilt, a civilized luxury he rarely allowed himself. It was not the usual guilt of a military life — that he hadn’t spent enough time with her; that now he had the time to give her, to make up for the long separations, she was probably not even aware that he was around. Rather it was the guilt he felt for being angry at her for being in a coma. It was bad enough he’d been put out to pasture but now, just as war threatened to reopen with the Siberian breakaway from Moscow, Washington would keep him out of it because of her. He knew it was selfish, but he knew that to command men in battle was what he had been born for, and he knew Doreen would be the first to understand. It was why he loved her. Yes, it was his duty as a husband to be with her, but if he couldn’t do anything for her, what was the point of him staying around to—
“Thank God you’re back home,” said Marjorie in her bubbly God’s-in-his-heaven-all’s-right-with-me-world voice. “I’m sure Dory knows you’re here, Douglas. It must be a comfort to her deep down. You know what they say about some stroke victims, that just knowing a loved one is nearby—”
“Yes, yes,” said Freeman irritably.
“I’m sorry, Douglas,” Marjorie said, mistaking his irritability for anxiety about Dory. “Why don’t you go out to the pool, and I’ll make some coffee and bring it out? Maybe you’d like to just sit awhile?”
Freeman gave in; it was the only damn thing you could do with relatives. Sit by the pool till she got so tired of her own goodness or the cold front locking in Monterey that she’d hightail it back to sunny Phoenix. She was one of those people who said God had planned it all. He believed the same thing in his own way, but whenever she said it she made it sound so pious and self-satisfied — leaving no room for the possibility of human intervention — that she sounded positively evangelical.
By the pool, Freeman fell silent, Marjorie patting him understandingly on the arm as she placed the coffee cups atop the bubbled plastic table. Again she’d completely mistaken his mood, his staring down at the pool an attempt to turn her off for a while, but she was as unrelenting as a Soviet artillery barrage, her vigor something he would have admired in any soldier. In her case it seemed nothing more than the energy of a certified airhead.
She was a good woman, doing the right thing, but by God he wished she’d go back to Phoenix. At heart her optimism was born of the same kind of deep-seated confidence that Freeman held in the face of life’s vicissitudes, but something about her unquestioning conviction that “all is for the best” only moved him to seek the opposite view, if only for argument’s sake, a perversity alien to his usual nature.
“My,” she said, pouring the coffee in an irritating up-and-down motion that he saw no point to. “I was reading the other day about those Brentwood boys. Three heroes — all in one family. My, and the article said one of them was with you in Korea and the Dortmund-Bellfeld pocket.”
“Bielefeld,” grumped Douglas. “He wasn’t with the there. He’d been dropped outside the pocket by mistake — smack into the Russian lines.”
“You must be very proud of him,” she continued, oblivious to the correction. “Medal of Honor winner and all.”
“Proud of all my boys who—” He was about to say “are” instead of “were in my command.” He pulled the coffee toward him. “Young David Brentwood. He’s a good man. Wounded in Russia but back on his feet in no time.”
For a moment that indicated to him that he’d been away from the front too long, Freeman almost found himself in violation of security — about to tell her that members of the Allied outfit in which Brentwood served, Britain’s Special Air Service, were blood brothers with America’s Delta Force.
“And the two other brothers,” continued Marjorie. “The one on that Roosevelt boat.”
“Submarine,” Freeman corrected her.
“But that poor other brother — Ray — the one whose face was all burned on that other boat.”
“Guided missile frigate,” said Freeman, carelessly dropping in two sugar cubes as if they were dumb bombs.
“The miracles those surgeons did on him. My oh my. If ever I saw the hand of God at work, Douglas, that was it.” A zephyr passed over the pool, wrinkling it, and he watched it like an omen before the surface was placid again. “And they have this special mask now — looks like one of those hockey goalies — to help the healing and…”
Freeman restrained himself, tempted to ask her where God’s hand had been for the men who’d drowned in the attack on the USS Blaine — the first American warship to be hit in the war. But he didn’t bother. He believed God’s plan was a lot more complicated than that, that freedom meant the freedom to… But what the hell, he thought. Airheads like Marjorie also served Him — her task, no doubt, to talk the devil to death.
“Isn’t it nice out here?” she said, taking a deep breath of the cool, salty air. “I always find the pool so calming. Don’t you?”
Freeman grunted. Where Marjorie saw a translucent pool of ultramarine beneath the clearing sky — saw nature in harmony, insects happily skimming across the water’s mirrored surface, Freeman saw an unending battle, one insect pursuing another— a fight to the finish. Which made him think again of amphibious operations. They were undoubtedly the riskiest of all military undertakings. There Murphy’s Law was king.
No matter how much planning, how many rehearsals, disaster always lurked in the ever-changing sea. If the Siberian threat turned to war, the shortest distance was across the Bering Strait, which now would be a mass of ice floes. The moment he thought of ice he recalled two things simultaneously. The first was the English lord who, in the lounge of the Titanic as it struck the iceberg, had exclaimed imperturbably, “I sent for ice but this is ridiculous!” The second thing was the curious feet, filed away in his brain along with a thousand other apparently trivial yet vital pieces of logistical information, that at latitude sixty-five degrees, thirty minutes north the ice cakes forming in the dead of winter would be more dispersed, more loosely packed than in the warmer spring months when local currents and wind changed to shift ice northward — that is, packing it tighter together in spring than in the winter. It was precisely the opposite to what one would imagine, and this would make it much tougher for icebreakers or any other ship to negotiate. Also during the winter, unlike the spring and the fall, skies tended to be clearer, often with brilliant sunshine, bad news for close-support air cover when it would be possible for observers on Ratmanov, the Soviet name for Big Diomede, to see clear across the strait.
Anyway, you sure as hell couldn’t launch a sea invasion of Siberia or Diomede if you had to contend with pack ice. There was something else about the ice that he could not recall — was it that there was no ice south of the Pribilof Islands? But hell, that was over 650 miles south of Ratmanov. No, it was something else, but it wouldn’t come to him. Perhaps it was the note he’d made in his card index file — computer discs could be wiped clean by a big bomb’s electromagnetic pulse — that unless a ship wanted to risk being locked in the ice, or forced to move so slowly it would be like a dinosaur as a target, it would have to stand off the southern, protective side of the Pribilofs to launch any cruise missiles at Ratmanov. No, that meant it was some other detail about the ice buzzing around in his head, but it wouldn’t settle amid the constant patter of Marjorie’s antiaircraft fire. He wondered if the Pentagon’s contingency planners knew as much about the area as he did. He doubted it — not immodestly but from long experience. The trouble with the Pentagon was that there were too many desk jockeys — not enough people who had actually walked around and seen the places where they might have to fight a battle one day. Douglas Freeman had.
On his own money and time, he’d used every vacation and other time to visit every major battlefield in Europe before the war and had jotted down his observations on his three-by-five cards — operational plans for what he called potential “flash points.” One such plan had been for the Kuwait-Iraqi border, another for the Dortmund-Bielefeld pocket. Freeman had also been to Alaska. He had trekked to see the lonely, windswept monument to Will Rogers eleven miles southwest of Barrow on the godforsaken tundra of Alaska’s North Slope and had seen more than thirty bald eagles at once, on the banks of the Chilkat River, their white throat fur above the black body and white tails giving them a nobility among the winter-stripped cottonwoods that he would never forget. He had also been to Cape Prince of Wales, where high up in the stunningly clear air at the westernmost tip of Alaska’s Seward Peninsula he had gazed out over the white strait, the cobalt blue line of Siberia on the horizon, and had seen the two specks that were the Diomede Islands. Perhaps it was there he had learned whatever it was about the ice that now he couldn’t recall. He would have to go down to his basement, go through the rotary card file. “Excuse me,” he told Marjorie. “Think I’ll take a nap.” He forced a smile. “Still not over my jet lag.”
“Yes. You poor thing, Douglas. Thank the Lord I’m not affected.”
“What — pardon?” asked Freeman as he stood up and pushed the chair back by the edge of the pool.
“Jet lag,” said Marjorie serenely. “Thank the Lord I don’t get it. I’m not affected.”
“You wouldn’t be,” said Freeman under his breath.
“Pardon?”
“You’re unaffected,” said the general.
“Yes. To tell you the truth, Douglas, I think it’s all in your head. If God had intended—”
Freeman wasn’t listening, his attention drawn momentarily to the wind-ruffled pool, and knew instantly what it was about the winter ice floes in the strait. Not only were they looser than summer ice, but they were wind sculptured to heights of twenty-five feet above the frozen surface of the sea. He remembered them now — the purest white, glistening like mirrors in the sunny, clear air and then, as night came, turning to extraordinary hues of blue, a forest of jumbled sharp ice that would spell the death knell of any marine or army hovercraft invasion against Ratmanov, the ice too jagged to permit the necessary air cushion for the troop-carrying hovercrafts. They’d be torn to pieces.
Immediately he rang General Grey at the Pentagon, using his personal scrambler code to get a secure line.
“May I ask who’s calling please?” said the secretary.
“General Douglas Freeman.”
“Hold on please, General.” Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons” assaulted him at full volume before the receptionist’s voice came back on the line.
“Ah, Douglas,” came General Grey’s voice. “How’s your wife?”
“The same, thank you. Look, Jimmy, with this Siberian thing looming I thought you could do with some advice from an old soldier out here.” Freeman was waiting for a positive response but got none. He told Grey about the ice.
“Thanks, Douglas. Appreciate your interest. Really do. But to tell you the truth, we think this Novosibirsk thing is pretty much a bluff — to squeeze concessions out of us after the Moscow surrender. It’ll blow over.”
“What if it blows over Ratmanov?” asked Freeman.
“What?”
“Ratmanov. Big Diomede?”
“Oh — well, Douglas. CIA agrees with us that if we stand our ground, Novosibirsk’ll back off. Besides, air force figures it can handle Big Diomede if it comes to that. And the navy, of course. But look — it’s great to hear from you. You keep in touch, you hear? And Douglas — give my regards to your wife.”
“Yes, sir.”
Freeman put down the phone and cussed. He might be the commanding officer of Fort Ord, but he was effectively unemployed, out to pasture. The “No Help Wanted” sign up in Washington.
“Yoohoo! Douglas? Are you awake?”
“No,” said Freeman, as he walked over and spun the globe, arresting the spin, turning it to him like the end of a football so he could see the Arctic Circle. Goddamn Diomedes were so small they weren’t even marked. Like him, they were off the map. Get a goddamn grip on yourself, he muttered. Goddamn pity is for goddamn sissies. You a sniveller, Freeman? No. Then stop your goddamn whining.
“Yoohoo? Douglas?”
The general inhaled deeply, slowly, teeth gritted. Damn woman knew he was in his basement den. Why in hell did she have to—
“Yes? What is it?”
“It’s visiting time. The hospital. You coming along?”
“Yes,” said Freeman morosely. Then his conscience berated him, not only with what should have been concern for Doreen but because he’d caught himself at the shoreline of another sulk, the one thing he couldn’t stand in anyone, least of all himself. “Yes,” he said clearly, straightening up, grabbing his cap, “I’m coming.” Surely the man who had handled the raid on Pyongyang and broken out of the Dortmund-Bielefeld pocket and pierced the famed Minsk-Moscow defenses could handle the barrage of inanities and clichés launched by his mobile sister-in-law.
“You see, Douglas?” she said as they walked out to the general’s car.
“See what?” he asked as pleasantly as he could.
“How things work out for the best? I mean you coming home just when Dory needed you the most.”
“Goddamn it, Marjorie — she’s comatose!” said Douglas. “I can’t do a thing to help her.”
“But you’re nearby. And just think — if you’d still been on active duty you might have got caught up in all this terrible Siberian business.”
“Yes,” said Douglas. “I probably would have, Marjorie.”
“There, you see?” said Marjorie, slipping her arm through his and patting him. “It was meant to be.”
Off Canada’s west coast Captain Valery’s Saratov, one of the Soviet Union’s Pacific Fleet subs, out of radio contact with its home base of Vladivostok, was on silent running, listening on passive, rather than active, sonar. An active pulse, having to originate from the sub, would be too dangerous to use as the Saratov penetrated deeper into Allied ASW “microphoned” waters north of Vancouver Island. Sound from the ships it had been tracking for the last forty-eight hours was faint, yet discernible, the sound travelling at four times the speed it would in air, racing through the saline molecules of the sound layers.
Whether the contact was now fading because the ships his sub was shadowing had moved closer in to the coastline during the storm, further away from the Saratov, or whether they had in fact reduced speed, giving off less signature noise, Captain Valery couldn’t tell, but with his sub at the end of its OSP— operational safety perimeter — he’d soon have to decide. “Take her up,” he instructed the first officer. “Thirty meters.”
“Up to thirty meters,” confirmed the officer and planesman. “Rising… angle ten… steady at thirty meters, sir.”
“Up search scope.”
Valery flipped the beak of his cap about, his eyes glued to the column, and draped his arms on the scored grips, moving around with the scope as if he were one with it. Now hopefully he would see the actual shape of the ships his sub had been tracking so far only by noise. What he saw through the infrared-penetrated darkness puzzled him. In the grayish white circle of wave action, obscured now and then in the night’s dark curtain of spray, the Canadian coastline, rather than being visible as a low blur before the mountains, appeared to be missing. Only the sharp geometry of the snow-capped coastal range beyond was visible, as if the range rose straight out of the sea. He turned the scope another five degrees but still no trace of the coast. It was as if the diameter of the periscope’s gray infrared circle had been painted black. Then he realized what he was looking at, why turning the five degrees hadn’t made any difference: two great slabs, the two ships, had overlapped, obliterating the coastline. “Gospodi!”— “My God!” he called. “Ya ikh vizhu! Pryamo peredo mnoy!”— “I have them dead ahead. Bearing?”
“Zero eight two,” came the reply.
“Down scope!” ordered Valery. “Attack scope up.”
“Down search scope. Up attack,” confirmed the first officer. Above the wheeze of the scope’s column the tone signal of action stations gonged urgently, though softly, in Control, the pulsating red of the battle station’s alarm bleeding pink into the red of Control.
“Two of them,” the captain informed the control crew as the attack scope slid into position. “Both tankers. Enormous brutes.”
Eyes welded to the attack scope, Valery quickly picked the ships up again on the same bearing. The attack scope, its field of view not as wide as that of the search scope but higher, allowed the sub to go deeper for a shoot. The scope’s hair-crossed circle was completely blocked by the massive walls that were the tankers’ sides, the bridge and crew housing astern of one tanker etched silver in moonlight as the clouds broke and two small blobs — tugs — could be seen bobbing up and down in the swells.
“Prevoskkodno”— “It couldn’t be better,” said Valery. Not only had he made the right decision by venturing in closer to the coastline — now he was no more than three miles from them— but at this angle of attack he would in effect not be firing at two separate hulls but at one long cliff of steel, over seven hundred meters — almost half a mile long. For safety’s sake, the second tanker was sailing not directly behind the first where it could not hope to stop should anything happen to the tanker in front, but starboard aft of it in staggered convoy position. And the two tugs were all but obscured by the rising seas now. Even if they were armed with ASW depth bombs and sub-surface torpedoes Valery knew that they would be so busy with damage control if one or both tankers were hit that they would give him little cause for concern. In any event he ordered forward tubes two and four loaded with submarine simulator decoys of the kind that had been perfected after the cruiser Yumashev had been the victim of an American MOSS — a mobile submarine simulator — the cruiser dummied into positioning itself to be sunk by the U.S. nuclear sub Roosevelt in the early months of the war.
Now it was Valery’s chance for revenge. But he would try to save the decoys for later use if possible. Hopefully he’d have complete surprise and wouldn’t have to use them at all. He heard the officer of the deck confirming forward tubes one, three, five, and six were loaded with “live fish.”
“Bearing?”
“Zero eight three.”
“Mark!” Valery ordered. “Range?”
“Thirty-four hundred meters, sir.”
Valery could feel a movement — energy transmitted by under-the-surface wave oscillation, a slight down pitch. “Hold her steady!” he said without unlocking his eyes from the scope. “Forward tubes one, three, five, and six. Set the up angle.”
“Forward tubes one, three, five, and six — set up angle.”
The confirmation came from torpedo control. “Up angle set.”
The first officer was watching the relay screen showing the computerized, keyed-in angles that allowed for everything from the enemy’s speed, variable friction caused by differing salinity, and water temperatures, to surface turbulence. Next he checked that the “decoy fish”—the simulators — were in forward tubes two and four.
“Bearing?”
“Zero eight four.”
“Range?”
“Thirty-five hundred meters.”
“Bearing?”
“Steady. Zero eight four.”
“Shoot!” ordered Valery.
“Set,” came the firing officer’s reply.
“Fire one!”
“Fire one,” confirmed the firing officer.
“Fire three,” said Valery. A slight tremor passed through the sub as one was away and running.
“Fire three,” came the confirmation.
“Fire five… fire six.. down scope.”
“Down scope, sir.”
“Hold position.”
The first officer was reading out the count from 120 seconds as the four twenty-one-foot-long torpedoes sped, without visible wakes, toward their target.
“Two apiece,” announced the officer of the deck. Valery said nothing, his eyes on the computer clock. He knew he should hit both of them if all the computations were right, but with such a storm raging on the surface off the heavily timbered and logged coast there were bound to be deadheads, or floating logs, in the water. It would take only one torpedo to hit a piece of waterlogged timber and the remaining three torpedoes could all be blown off track. “Molis”— “Pray,” said Valery. “Sonar?”
“Sir?”
“Everything alright?”
“Humming, sir. Beautiful.”
“Pipe it to the PA but low on the volume.”
“Yes, sir.”
Now everyone throughout the sub, as if equipped with stethoscopes, could hear the fast, heavy heartbeats of the tankers and the steady hiss of the four torpedoes running for them.
“Get the book,” said Valery. The officer of the deck passed over the enemy ship silhouette recognition binder. The moment they blew — if they blew — it was Valery’s intention to surface for quick visual confirmation of type. Naval intelligence at Vladivostok would want to know. For a moment the surge of adrenaline in him stopped as he remembered the reason for HQ’s insistence on getting all possible information including sea conditions during attack. The scuttlebutt going the rounds of Vladivostok was that apparently some Jews from the Jewish Autonomous Oblast, or region, around the Sino/Soviet border along the Amur River had been sabotaging munitions. Valery hoped it had only been air force and army munitions that had been tampered with and that when they found the saboteurs they hanged them — slowly. Shooting was too quick for saboteurs.
“Nine seconds to go,” answered the first officer softly. Valery nodded, still leafing through the book, trying to identify the class of tankers he was attacking from the brief glimpse he’d had through the scope. He tried to suppress his excitement, but it was difficult. It was so easy — a dream of an attack. One thing he knew already — they were not VLCCs — very large crude carriers but ULCCs — ultra large crude carriers. “Ha,” he exclaimed to the first officer. “Give it to the Americans — they always do things big, eh?” Even if only one was hit there’d be a hell of a spill; and if the crude’s flash point was raised high enough and it started to burn, there would be no way the enemy crews could put it out. He could use the light to take his time on the second should any of the first four torpedoes miss.
On the first tanker, MV Sitka, captained by Jesus Llamos, assistant radio operator Sandra Thompson was taking her break. A shy, slim redhead, the subject of half the crew’s on- and off-duty fantasies — despite the fact that she was married and in the early stages of pregnancy — she stood on the quiet, semidarkened bridge of the enormous tanker watching the amber island of light that was the Marconi anticollision radar. She found the phosphorescent dance of its hypnotic sweep comforting. Nothing was showing west of them. Eastward the coastline ran crooked, the radar trace a knotted, amber-colored snake flanked by the salt-and-pepper dots of offshore islands.
Glancing up from the radar for a moment, out through the darkness of the Sitka’s bridge, Sandra could see the moonlight bathing the sea’s turbulence in a deceptively soft light, the great, sliding, gray metallic swells momentarily robbed of their violence. Something hit her, like a strong, hot wind. As she reached for the radar’s console for support there was a flash from forward midships, an enormous crash, the ship shaking violently like a car at speed with a blowout, then a tremendous whoomp as the shock wave rebounded. In an ethereal moment of calm she saw Captain Llamos running toward the steering console, but his image shivered, and he looked as if he were moving in slow motion, hands outstretched for the auto-to-manual levers.
Then the ship listed to port. For a second Sandra thought the tanker had collided with one of the big tugs. The next moment the bridge shifted violently to port, and she was thrown hard in the darkness onto the cleated matting, glass shattering, its invisible hail all about her, alarm klaxons blaring, several lights on the wing tank monitor console blinking furiously, indicating at least five of the forward starboard wing tanks were ruptured, spilling their liquid cargo into the sea. Her face and hands soaking wet, she tried to get up, but the port list had increased to fifteen degrees, and she felt herself sliding down the incline. Suddenly lights came on.
“Put that damn switch off!” It was Llamos’s voice shouting at the starboard lookout, Llamos hunched, hanging onto the steering console in the middle of the bridge.
“We’re hit, aren’t we?” the lookout yelled defiantly.
“You don’t have to make it easier for them,” Llamos shouted. “Keep the damn light off.” Sandra could see him dimly against the shattered bridge glass as he flicked on the intercom to the radio room, ordering the operator to send an SOS. There was no reply. He gave the order again. Still no reply.”Thompson?” he called out. “Sandra?”
“Yes, sir, I’m here.”
“Go do it.”
“Yes, sir.” Pushing herself off the wet latticed decking she grabbed a flashlight from the port lookout’s rack, making her way downhill to the radio room. Within seconds she was drenched, the sprinkler system going full bore. In the gossamer spray, cut cleanly by the beam of her flashlight, she saw blood streaming down her arms, only now realizing that her face had been lacerated by glass shards from the bridge. There was another flash of light; momentarily night became day. The second tanker was hit, one of her tanks immediately catching fire, an overwhelming explosion of crimson flame curling in the blackest smoke she’d ever seen, the flames now spiralling and joining. In the corner of the radio room she saw the operator trying to get up, holding his head. Instinctively moving to help, she checked herself and instead issued the SOS. As she went into the third repeat, giving the tanker’s approximate position from the last fix, the computer readout dead, there was another sound like an enormous door creaking. The radio room began to move as if disembodied from the ship proper, and she knew that the Sitka was breaking, its spine snapped by either torpedoes or acoustic mines.
One of the Russian sub’s torpedoes hadn’t exploded. Valery entered it in the Saratov’s log as a possible dud, though he noted that given the sea’s condition it might have gone off course because of a sudden thermocline. In any case, all Valery was concerned with now was that he had sunk two tankers — the first, though not on fire, was doomed, its funnel and aft crew sections, each half a quarter-mile long, drifting apart and in toward the wild coastline of British Columbia. Meanwhile the inferno on the second tanker was spreading over the sea in huge, fiery fingers, riding up and down the swells in the fast current. Because of the lack of surf between the protective offshore islands, the fiery spill, fed by its enormous tar balls and mousse blankets of crude, was already washing up on the pristine shoreline. Fanned by the gale-force winds, the huge flames were licking the dense shoreline forests, setting the timber here in the dry cold several hundred feet below the coastal range’s snow line afire in what would be the biggest single blaze and ecological disaster since the oil spills and fires of the Iraqi war.
In the search scope Valery could easily identify the stricken tankers illuminated by the flames as ultrA-1arge carriers of the Globtik Tokyo class, both in excess of three hundred thousand dead weight tons. “Even better than I had hoped,” he informed the officer of the deck. “But I don’t understand why the first tanker isn’t burning.”
“The fires were probably doused by the flooding,” commented the OOD.
“Even so,” rejoined Valery, “the tanker’s own engine oil should—”
Suddenly Valery snapped the grips hard against the scope’s stainless steel column. “Down scope. Dive to five hundred.”
“Down scope… dive to five hundred!” repeated the OOD. The diving officer stood directly behind the two planesmen, hands gripping their two bucket seats, knuckles white as he watched the gauge of the sub. If they dove at too steep an angle, the sub’s stern would come clear out of the water before they were fully submerged.
“Podgotovit’ k vypusku torpedo — simyulatorpodvodnoy lodki. Zadnyaya truba. “—”Prepare to fire submarine simulator torpedo. Stern tube.”
As the torpedo officer confirmed the order, Valery explained the rush to the OOD. “A helicopter’s coming off the second tanker. Most likely for crew rescue but could be ASW.”
For a second Valery chastised himself for not having fired the submarine simulator before the attack, but it was an enormously expensive piece of equipment. Besides shooting out millions of rubles with each fish, its noise, while a decoy for any ASW aircraft or ship in the area, would have been picked up by the SOSUS, the underwater microphone arrays of the sound surveillance system, giving the sub’s general “area position” away. With the depth needle approaching five hundred meters, Valery decided he’d made the right decision, saving the simulator till now. True, he’d glimpsed the helicopter on the tanker’s deck for only a split second, but he was sure its rotors had been spinning, ready for takeoff, possibly with ASW munitions.
“Level at five hundred, sir.”
“Fire decoy!”
“Decoy fired, sir.”
“Silent running,” ordered Valery.
“Silent running, sir.”
From now on if any crew member made a mistake — dropped anything on the metal deck that might be picked up in the sound channel — it would cost the man three months’ pay plus a “zebra”—a black-striped demotion entry on his blue service sheet.
But Valery himself had made a serious error. The Bell 212 twin-turboshaft chopper rising aft off the second tanker’s stern housing pad was interested only in trying to rescue two crew members whose salt-activated vest lights were orange pinpoints in the raging cauldron about the stricken tankers. The spray-roiling beam that was the chopper’s searchlight turned rust-red above the blankets of burning oil. In the beam’s circle that was moving up and down the chaotic sea like an undulating sheet of blood, the two crewmen lay limp in the helo’s harness, having suffocated in the oil after having been concussed by the explosions of the torpedoes. Likewise, scores of seabirds were already smothered in the bunker “C” crude.
Sandra Thompson, Llamos, and the starboard lookout struggled on the slippery incline of the stern deck of the first tanker. The ship’s two halves continued drifting apart as the three survivors tossed over a white, drum-size Beaufort canister, its tether flying free of the ship like some long snake. The canister hit the water, instantly shedding its fiberglass shell and blossoming into a tent raft of vivid Day-Glo magenta highlighted by the fire on the second tanker aboard which small, toylike figures could be seen vainly manning a crisscross of hoses.
“Inflate your vest,” Llamos shouted to the starboard lookout. “Hold your breath as long as you can and—” Llamos’s voice was whipped away by the gale-force winds as he pointed toward the treacle-moated raft now about thirty feet away from the badly listing stern section. The lookout jumped.
Sandra pulled the C02 string on her life vest, heard the sudden hiss of air, felt the Mae West swelling above her bosom as she tightened the waist straps and bent down to inflate the vest of the injured radio man whom she and Llamos had dragged precariously from the bridge. Llamos had taken a turn about the operator’s waist with a painter from one of the lifeboats to prevent the injured man from sliding down the deck that was now dangerously slick with the oil which had been blown skyward in towering black spumes before falling back on the tankers, drenching the four and fuelling the fires with a driving black rain. The radio man was so quiet, Sandra thought he was dead, but putting her finger on his carotid artery she thought she felt a faint pulse.
“Go!” Llamos yelled out to her. “Jimmy and I’ll look after him. You need to reach the raft. Transmit our—” He didn’t finish, his voice drowned in a gush of superheated steam, a boiler beneath them exploding, splitting the ship’s port after section, the stern heaving, the stack spewing boiling water swept forward for hundreds of yards in the gale force winds. The stern was now split and sliding back into the sea, rolling, revealing the flanges of its enormous prop blades. Llamos and the other three were toppling out of control down the cliff of the deck. A lifeboat wrenched from its davits swung upward like a trapeze, smashing itself to splinters. The hissing roar of the stern was so loud it could be heard above the gale by the few crewmen still battling the second tanker’s fires. Unable to save Sandra or the others, the two-man helo crew watched helplessly as the rear half of the MV Sitka disappeared. Then they turned their attention to the tiny frantic figures on the stern of the second tanker.
The chopper’s pilot had ordered his assistant to jettison the bodies of the two dead men they’d hauled up, lessening the chopper’s weight so the helo might try to pick up as many survivors as possible from the twenty-five-man crew on the second tanker and any others who, inconceivable as it appeared, might be alive on the forward section of the first tanker. Though still afloat, it was certain to go under within minutes.
The pilot shouted his instructions regarding excess weight into the throat mike, and his assistant, after having grabbed the auto-flash Canon and taking head shots of the two dead men for later identification, pushed the bodies out. The chopper banked in the darkness toward the stern of the second tanker, its fire now so fierce, there was no hope of the ship’s hoses extinguishing it. The hot air currents streaming up from the blazing ship were so powerful that the pilot knew there was no chance of getting anywhere close to the deck.
Cautiously he brought the chopper toward the stern, his visibility now reduced to zero because of the continuing oil smudge on his windscreen combining with the buildup of salt crust, a combination the wipers couldn’t handle. His assistant saw a crimson streak several hundred yards away to the east— a flare — and in its flickering light the Day-Glo of a Beaufort “Teepee.” Yelling at the pilot and gesturing eastward, the assistant guided them to the point seventy feet away. The chopper hovered above the raft and lowered the harness, swiveling in the C clip. But then seeing the raft was overcrowded with survivors from both tankers and that this could easily lead to a capsize should the chopper be suddenly caught in an updraft, the pilot shouted into the mike, “We’re only a few miles from shore. Best leave ‘em for Air Sea Rescue in the morning. Stand a better chance, I reckon.”
“I dunno,” yelled the assistant. “Could go belly-up anyway in the swells.” During the second of hesitation the Bell 212, which could not fly on one engine unless traveling in excess of one hundred miles per hour, gave a shudder. An engine coughed, then the other cut out, its air filter jammed solid with soot from the oil fire. The chopper plunged, its rotors chopping into the loaded raft. Then, catching a swell, the blades cartwheeled the chopper several hundred feet, splashing into the mousse of bunker “C,” parts of the main rotor whistling through the gale. Everyone aboard the tent raft was drowned, in effect suffocated by the oil, including Sandra Thompson and the two-month-old child she was carrying.
General Grey had thought nothing of Freeman’s call about the peculiar condition of winter ice in the Bering Strait. Surely the Pentagon planners would know this. Grey called downstairs to make sure. They didn’t know. This shocked Grey, but even so it wasn’t Freeman’s familiarity with the minutiae that now impressed him but rather the simple yet profound realization that for Freeman to think of such a detail in the midst of his wife’s catastrophic injury meant that the soldier in Freeman was not only alive and well, but there was only the soldier — that Freeman was straining at the leash. With his genius for logistical detail as well as strategic thought he was unquestionably the man for the job. America had never fought a sustained Arctic war, but now, with the Mideast oil wells afire and the Siberians having answered President Mayne with the sinking of the two American tankers, which by itself constituted an immediate threat to the U.S. oil supply from the Alaskan North Slope, the U.S. had no option. It was war.
Grey lifted his Pentagon scrambler phone, got the Joint Chiefs’ approval, including that of the CNO, Admiral Horton; then he rang the White House and suggested that General Douglas Freeman be appointed commander in chief, Operation Arctic Front, the moment he landed at Elmendorf Air Force Base Alaska. The president approved.
The call came through to Freeman in Monterey as Marjorie was watching a news flash cutting into “The Tonight Show” with Jay Leno announcing that America was at war.
“My glory—” began Marjorie, in a state of shock, one hand clasped before her mouth as the other worked the remote to bring in CBN. “You hear that, Douglas?” she called out. “Russian submarines have attacked two of our ships. We’re at war again.”
Freeman had put the phone down and was already doing up his necktie in an old-fashioned Windsor knot, so old that it was now said to be back in style. He had already called Fort Ord to make transport arrangements and issued a series of orders marshalling elements of the marines’ rapid deployment force.
“My glory!” Marjorie repeated, slumped down in the recliner. “That’s terrible.”
“Yes,” Freeman agreed. “Sure as hell is.” It may have been the light of the TV flickering, but for a moment Marjorie could have sworn Douglas was smiling.
“Still, Marjorie,” he added, “must have been meant to be.” She suspected in a vague sort of way that it might be a jibe at her, but it was clear he also believed it.
“I hope it’ll be quick,” said Marjorie, “like Iraq.”
Freeman’s smile was devoid of condescension — one of those a parent gives when obliged to break a truth of life gently to his offspring, the truth that in life you couldn’t hope for nonstop, easy victories. He took nothing away from the men who had fought in Desert Storm, in which he himself had led part of the Seventh Armored in the decisive outflanking movement north that caught the Republican Guard with their pants down. But the Iraqi war, for all its moments of undeniable American and Coalition bravery, had been, when all was said and done, a hundred-hour ground war. Even the dimmest private would see that Siberia was a far different situation, that any comparison to Desert Storm was naive to say the least.
He spoke quietly. “Marjorie — Iraq is desert. Some high country to the north, but in the main, a desert. Siberia has everything, by which I mean every natural land, water, and ice barrier on God’s earth. And taiga — pine, birch, and fir forests — far as the eye can see. Wermacht used to talk of ‘distance illness,’ the endlessness of Russia. And Marjorie—” He was looking in the mirror, straightening the khaki tie. “—the Krauts didn’t even get to Siberia. They were in the small part of Russia.” He buttoned up his coat, the rows of campaign ribbons and decorations attesting to the battles he had fought for America from Southeast Asia to Iraq to the Minsk-Moscow line, his reflection in the mirror at once eager for and awed by his responsibility. “There is,” he said, pulling on his cap, “another minor detail.”
“What?” Marjorie asked, though her attention was distracted by a CBN broadcaster. Somehow they’d got one of their cameras twenty-four miles across the strait from Alaska to Little Diomede Island and had it set up on the sloping but still steep western side of the small American outpost near the Eskimo village of Inalik. The CBN’s camera was filling the TV screen with the ice-covered basalt that was the bottom half of Big Diomede or, as CBN was calling it, “Ratmanov Island.”
Freeman shot a glance at the TV, and Marjorie had seldom seen such a look of outright contempt on his face as he watched the CBN announcer in a fur-lined Eskimo parka telling Americans how the U.S. Air Force were already assembling fighters and fighter bombers on the Alaskan Peninsula for what was “certain to be” an aerial bombardment of the 11.2-square-mile Ratmanov Island. The island was so heavily defended, the reporter continued, “that many military experts believe it to be the most heavily defended piece of real estate in the world whose troops, unlike the ill-supplied Republican Guard of the Iraqi war, are known to have months of supplies and ammunition deep within the granite fortress. Along with state-of-the-art air defenses that are bound to inflict heavy casualties upon the Americans if they try to take out the SAM sites on Ratmanov and which they must take out if they have any hope of…”
“It’s not Ratmanov Island,” shouted Freeman at the CBN announcer. “It’s Rat Island, and we’re going to exterminate the bastards! By the bushel!”
“Douglas!”
He flashed a winning smile. “Sorry, Marjorie.”
“Aren’t you going to tell the then?”
He looked at her, puzzled, as he unconsciously felt for what he called his “backup,” his vest-holstered Hi-Vel.22 automatic beneath his tunic. “Tell you what?”
“You said there was one other thing about Siberia that made it so different. Oh, dear — you aren’t going to tell the you expect it to be a long war, are you?”
“Yes,” answered Freeman, slipping in a rubber-banded clutch of three-by-five index cards—”Arctic Ops”—into his pocket. “Siberia,” he told her, “is twenty times the size of Iraq.” Actually it was more than twenty-three times as big, but he knew civilians preferred round numbers. Suddenly Marjorie realized he’d been dressing with more ceremony than usual for duty at Fort Ord. “You’re not going?” she charged.
“Ordered by the president, Marjorie,” he said. “No choice.” It was only the second lie he’d told since leaving Europe, the first during a news conference in Paris on his way home, in which he had apologized, under direct orders from General Grey, for having called his Russian counterparts a pack of “vodka-sucking sons of bitches.” It was quite wrong of him, he said later, to have said anything against vodka—”Hell, I have it on good authority that you can run tanks on it.”
“If I didn’t know better, Douglas,” said Marjorie, “I’d think you enjoyed it.”
On the way to Fort Ord he heard on the radio that CBN was reporting that U.S. air strikes against Ratmanov from Elmendorf Air Force Base near Anchorage and from the bases further west on Cape Prince of Wales were imminent.
“That’s right, you bastar—” He stopped short, old-fashioned about using rough language in front of women. “Wonder is,” he told the blond chauffeur, “they don’t tell the Siberians how many planes are involved.”
“They’re probably working on it, General.”