Like his crew, Ivan Stasky, captain of the Russian cruiser Admiral Yumashev, had never paid much attention to politics — to the fact that the honeymoon between Moscow and Washington, and Gorbachev’s Nobel Prize for peace, were long past, that the American government had been as naive about what would happen after Gorbachev as it had been about Deng’s “Open Door” policy in China — until the door slammed shut, Tiananmen Square awash in blood.
The Yumashev and her crew were nothing more and nothing less than instruments of Soviet national policy. One of the Soviets’ ten seventy-six-hundred-ton Kresta H-class cruisers, under the command of Capt. Ivan Stasky, her sole job was to hunt and kill American submarines that were escorting the critical NATO resupply convoys from Halifax and other North American East Coast ports to beleaguered Europe.
Three months into the war and four hundred miles south of the GIN (Greenland-Iceland-Norway) Gap, the ice shelf enveloping her in dense autumn fog, the Yumashev had been devoting all her talents to stalking the Roosevelt, for this sub, an “up-gunned” Sea Wolf class II, which was reported to have departed Holy Loch on Scotland’s west coast twenty-four hours before, was much more than a protector of NATO convoys. As one of the Americans’ 360-foot-long, 17,000-ton dual-role Hunter/Killer/ICBM subs, the Roosevelt was capable of acting not only as a fast hunter/killer of other subs, but as a defensive retaliatory launch platform for the six eight-warhead-apiece Trident II missiles stowed aft of its twenty-five-foot sail.
Happily for Ivan Stasky and his crew aboard the Yumashev, a Soviet rocket attack two days earlier had destroyed the Loch’s degaussing, or magnetic signature erasure, station. This meant that Yumashev’s computer, able to identify the sub through its “noise signature” as being that of the Roosevelt, could, by drawing on its memory bank of enemy captain profiles, also tell the cruiser’s captain that his counterpart aboard the U.S. sub was either a Robert Brentwood, age forty-three, a graduate of Annapolis, or a Harold Brenner, forty-four, also from Annapolis, the prestigious naval academy. The fact that there were two captains involved was due to the American nuclear submarines being so self-sufficient in food, reactor fuel, and in producing so much fresh water a day that they had to pump out the excess, that the sub needed two crews, gold and blue. Because of such self-sufficiency, it was the men, not the sub, who needed to be rested after a totally submerged forty-five- to seventy-day war patrol.
This time, however, several hours after the Roosevelt had left Scotland’s Holy Loch, the Yumashev’s communication center was to find out who was skippering the Roosevelt on this cruise by listening to the flippant chitchat of a Glasgow rock station. One of its disc jockeys, a longtime Soviet operative, informed the Yumashev, by working an LFL — letter for letter — code into his nonstop patter, that it was the blue crew which had been seen reporting to Holy Loch. And so it was that Ivan Stasky knew Capt. Robert Brentwood was his opponent.
The Yumashev’s first mate, reading the printout’s description of Brentwood — six feet, brown eyes, brown hair — made a joke about the blue eyes, how the American captain would soon be singing the blues. Stasky took no notice. For many Russian commanders, the computer profiles of their American counterparts — the information about them assiduously gathered in the Gorbachev era, when Americans and Russians had actually invited one another to attend maneuvers-could sometimes help a Soviet captain formulate tactics. Stasky, however, a tough, stocky Azeri from Kirovabad in Azerbaijan, believed the profiles were, in the main, a waste of rubles. “Akademiki”—”high-tech boys,” he would say, watching the computer spewing out the information about the adversaries he’d never seen. “Playing games in Moscow,” he’d charge, considering the money could have been better spent giving aid to his native, non-Russian, republic of Azerbaijan. Had it not been for the war, Stasky believed, the never-ending and increasing dissent of minority groups in the USSR such as the Armenians and the Azerbaijanis would have posed a far greater danger to Moscow than the Americans.
On occasion, however, he had to admit, albeit grudgingly, the psychological profiles of enemy captains did pay off — the most important information being whether the American captain, like an ice hockey coach, was offensively or defensively minded. This was especially helpful given the dual-role capacity of the up-gunned Sea Wolf.
In addition to its speed — over forty knots — and its silence, Stasky knew that the Sea Wolf had an unmatched ability to “mow the lawn”—that is, its wide side-scan sonar was able to simultaneously and in great detail search both sides of the deep oceanic canyons that plummeted either side of the seven-thousand-foot-high mid-Atlantic ridge.
It was a question of who heard whom first, neither Americans nor Russians wanting to use “active radar,” preferring instead to run “passive,” listening for the other sub, instead of sending out echo-creating pulses which could give away your own position. And Stasky knew that even if a Sea Wolf hadn’t found out exactly where you were, any one of its twenty-eight-mile-range Mk-48 homing torpedoes set loose could run a search pattern around you and then home in.
Even if a surface vessel like the Yumashev could cut engines enough to reduce its noise signature to a faint murmur in the sound channel, as it had done on silent station listening for the Roosevelt, it was not safe. For while this might deny any approaching torpedo an exact fix on the surface vessel, a torpedo exploding anywhere nearby would implode the hulls of most ships, except perhaps the double-titanium alloy of the Soviet Alfa boats. And if the Americans’ torpedoes didn’t get you, they could use any of five forward tubes to launch one of the cruise missiles they carried. These were able to hit either surface ships, submarines, or land targets fifteen hundred miles away with a CEP, or circular error of probability, of only plus or minus three hundred feet! In addition, any one of its forty-eight independently targeted reentry nuclear warheads was capable of melting Moscow into oblivion, the sub’s total firepower over three thousand times greater than the Hiroshima A-bomb.
Even so, Yumashev’s captain knew that for all the Sea Wolf’s awesome power, making it the primary target of the Russian navy, the American sub was only as good as its captain and crew. Besides, Yumashev had already sunk two Allied submarines, one a British Oberon-class diesel-electric, the other a Trafalgar — a seventy-five-hundred-ton British nuclear-powered ballistic missile sub. When Stasky had used his helicopter-borne “dunking” sonar mike to pick up the movement of the enemy submarines, then launched his ASROCS — airborne antisubmarine rockets — he had been struck once again by the paradox of the hunt. Whereas the obsessive silence of the subs was their greatest weapon, it was a singular one, for the moment they fired, their silence was gone, the advantage immediately shifted to the surface ship and its deadly array of ASW weapons. Sometimes the sub didn’t have to fire at all in order for your sonar to detect it. If you had your helicopter out, and its dunking sonar picked up the enemy sub’s noise signature, you simply dumped a homing depth charge or two to finish it off.
“What I want to know, Ilya,” the Yumashev’s captain asked his first officer, “is whether or not the Roosevelt is heading out for convoy escort duty — or is it hunting like we are?”
“It left Holy Loch alone, Captain.”
“Yes, but with forty to forty-five knots submerged, it could now be on the flank of a convoy. That would put it in a defensive mode, and that changes our mode of attack.”
“We haven’t received any information from Glasgow on a convoy forming,” answered the lieutenant.
“I’m not talking about a convoy leaving Scotland,” said Stasky, “with nothing but empty holds. I mean a convoy approaching the U.K. even as we speak — loaded to the gills for NATO resupply. The American sub could be coming out to take over escort duty at the halfway mark.”
“But the British navy have responsibility for this side of the Atlantic, Captain.”
“Yes,” said Stasky, “but the British have only eight…” he remembered the Trafalgar he’d sunk “… seven nuclear submarines, Comrade. They can’t do it alone. They need American help.”
Stasky requested a printout of Roosevelt’s total complement — officers and crew. KGB’s First Directorate had assigned agents in Britain and the United States to follow family members of some of the U.S. submarine crews. Whenever one of the family went to a post office, the KGB agent, usually a woman, waited patiently behind the person in line. Chatty and friendly, the agent would “accidentally” bump the family member, apologizing profusely, quickly retrieve the dropped mail, and in the process deftly affix a quick-stick microdot chip transmitter to the targeted envelope. The transmitter could then hopefully be traced through “fleet mail.” The failure rate was high, as most of the time the microdot chip would become mangled by the post office or its shape otherwise ruptured along the way. But occasionally the concerted effort paid off. The key to the KGB’s success was their ability to keep track of the highly sophisticated “Japanese” microdot tracer sets via KRYSAT, the intelligence satellite named after Vladimir Kryuchkov, who had been personally appointed and ordered by Gorbachev in 1988 to launch the biggest KGB espionage operation since World War II to secure as many military and industrial secrets from the West as possible.
On several occasions KRYSAT was able to keep an ELLOK, or electronic lock, on one of the microdot transmitters, allowing it to be traced all the way to a fleet area. Once in the area proper, the weak transmitter signal, on the same frequency as a thousand other pieces of electronic equipment in the area, was drowned in a sea of much stronger frequencies, so that the exact position of the American sub that the targeted crew member was on was not known. But the general area of the battle group, to which sub armament resupply vessels were attached, narrowed the search area considerably. This made up for the fact, which Stasky and every other Soviet captain was aware of, that the Russian Tupolev reconnaissance aircraft, NATO designation “Bear,” with its thirty-six-foot-wide rotodome, though good enough for general maritime patrols up to seven thousand miles away, was not much help in hunting for enemy subs. The Bear’s four Kuznetsov turboprop engines were capable of only 540 miles per hour, its armament in the otherwise impressive remotely controlled dorsal and ventral twin twenty-three-millimeter gun barbettes no match against the dazzling virtuosity of the American F-15s.
Unfortunately for Stasky, while the general fleet area of the Roosevelt, like that of the two subs he’d already sunk, had sometimes been known to him, courtesy of the First Directorate’s dogged electronic surveillance, the American sub had always acted as a lone wolf. He would have to find her by himself.
To this end Stasky gave orders for the Yumashev’s “Hormone” helicopter to be launched, and reemphasized the need for full battle readiness to the 108 men manning the 54 torpedo/depth charge tubes that festooned the cruiser’s sleek flanks. As the cruiser increased speed, both men and launchers were splattered by spray as the elegant curve of the long, gray ship’s bow bucked and sliced its way through mounting seas. Next, after checking the SATNAV, satellite navigation, printout — something he could not always rely on during severe solar flare activity — the Russian captain ordered his chief engineer to be ready at a moment’s notice to “ekhat’ polnym khodom”—” pull out all the stops.” Bringing the sub chaser to its maximum speed of fifty-nine knots would give Stasky an advantage of fifteen knots over the American.
Binoculars slung about his neck, Stasky moved out to the windward side of the flying bridge, the sudden rush of cold sea air at once invigorating and numbing. He looked down at the foredeck of his long, gray ship as it knifed through a heavy swell and knew he was ready, confident of his command, his crew, and the ship’s impressive armament. At the same time, he was too old a captain not to realize that in addition to speed and ASW weaponry — which the technical experts ashore referred to rather grandly as the “determining elements”—what you needed was udacha— “a bit of luck.”
As the cruiser raced eastward, hoping to close the gap between herself and her American quarry, Stasky found himself trying to imagine what the enemy captain, Brentwood, and his crew were like. Was there anything in the profile printouts that he could pick up on, turn to his advantage? Despite all the mumbo-jumbo and psycho-babble of some of the printouts, which had gotten worse during the “liberalism” of Gorbachev’s time, Stasky had to admit that sometimes a submarine had been found out and sunk because of a small inattention to detail by just one member of its crew. He recalled the Soviets’ loss of a state-of-the-art Alfa-class HUK sub because a disgruntled crewman on garbage disposal detail had failed to make sure the compacted bale of trash had been properly weighted and bound. Loose foil from the frozen food wrappers bobbing up to the surface, though invisible to the naked eye, especially in fog, had nevertheless been picked up by a U.S. satellite’s infrared eye.
Going back inside the bridge, Stasky ordered the officer of the deck to give him a printout of all the Roosevelt crew member “summaries” on file. Glasgow had reported, for example, that Robert Brentwood was engaged — to a schoolteacher in Surrey. But this information, garnered from the London Times announcements column, didn’t strike the Russian captain as in any way significant. That is, until his first officer pointed out, half-jokingly, that at least Brentwood’s insurance rates would fall. When Stasky asked what he meant, the officer explained that on one of the prewar programma voennogo obmena— “military exchange programs”—he’d been on in America, he had discovered that in the United States and other capitalist countries, when a man is married or has children, his insurance rates fall because the insurance companies’ statistics showed that with increased responsibility for a wife and/or children, a man tended to be much more cautious, to drive more carefully, bol’she oboronitez ‘no—”more defensively.”
Stasky nodded thoughtfully, looking down at Brentwood’s printout again. More defensive! It was the samy kray—”the edge”—that might make all the difference, especially if the Roosevelt was heading out for convoy patrol. Such escort duty was an added incentive for a sub captain not to fire the first shot, not to do anything that might betray his position. To play defensively rather than offensively. Oh, certainly it might account for only a fraction of a second, but in a fraction of a second — another man’s hesitation — Stasky knew he could fire everything he had.