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.
Woodall’s SUDO — submarine distribution officer— was matching noise signatures recorded by the Norwegian PB-3s and the SOSUS hydrophone networks that had not been affected by the electromagnetic pulse that had blacked out NATO’s computers along Europe’s central front. The SUDO tapped the computer’s keys with the unhurried competence born in the nexus of long training, self-confidence, and expertise in state-of-the-art submarine disposition programs. There they were on the monitor: the hitherto white sub signals indicating “vessel country unknown” changed immediately to red, subdivided into “DHs”—diesel hostiles — and “NHs”—nuclear hostiles.
Forty miles ahead of the convoy, the blue wrinkle of sea beneath him glinting with sunlight, one of the Prowlers picked up six blips. Instantly alerted, two ASW Sea King helos peeled out from the fan, racing ahead of the convoy, rotors catching the sun, toward the six blips. Four seconds later Admiral Woodall received coded burst messages from SACLANT, confirmed by Buda, the underground listening bunker in Norway, and by CINCEASTLANT, Commander in Chief Eastern Atlantic, Northwood, England, that the first group of the Russian subs was approaching the GIUK Gap. The six blips on the Prowler’s radar, however, were not coming from the west but from the south, forty miles ahead of the convoy. Admiral Woodall instructed his SUDO to “Code Top Secret to C in C East Atlantic. Where are Soviet minesweepers?”
An integral part of the whole NATO forward fleet flexible response policy at sea was to cause a major “traffic jam” at the GIUK Gaps, literally cutting the Russians off at the pass, buying time for the NATO convoys and forcing the Russians to send in time-consuming minesweepers. Woodall reminded his OOD that when in 1984 one mine layer dropped its load in the Red Sea, it had taken over seventeen minesweepers, eight large helicopters, plus dozens of support vessels from six countries more than three weeks to clear the area. NATO had laid the equivalent of twenty mine layer loads in the GIUK Gaps. Of course, Woodall pointed out, “the Bolshies might send in remote-control metallic barges, four abreast, to detonate the magnetic mines,” but that was easier said than done, and even so, it would still leave hundreds of sound-activated mines already coded to home in and detonate on the noise signature of each Russian ship that would have to pass through the narrow channels. Woodall was anxious to hear just how many minesweepers had been sighted.
As the two Sea King helicopters approached the six blips well ahead of the convoy, they recognized them, with great relief, as Norwegian purse seiners, their high poop decks and nets that are pulled in into the cone-shaped purse quite visible from five hundred feet for a distance of three miles, the Norwegian flags flying stiffly in the breeze as the Sea Kings now descended to make sure, in the words of the Sea King leader, that there was “no bloody hanky-panky.” The fishermen, however, looked positively relieved to see the Sea Kings, their voices on the radio band clearly conveying their alarm at not knowing where they could go. In one sense it seemed a ridiculous question to the crew of the Sea King, the blue expanse of the Atlantic all around, but the fishermen told the pilots that on their way back from weeks at sea since hostilities had begun, they simply did not know which coastal region was safe. The natural answer, of course, would have been to head for Iceland, but despite the NATO Alliance, the Sea King pilots were aware that there’d been some nasty “cod” wars within NATO over fishing rights around Iceland and Greenland, and the fishermen reported that they’d rather head back to Norway if it was possible or attach themselves to the convoy for safe passage. The lead Sea King pilot said he’d have to verify with the convoy commander but told them that meantime they should move over to the eastern flank of the convoy — a polite way of telling the fishermen that the convoy would not alter course for the time being and that Admiral Woodall would not take kindly to any trawlers getting in his way.
“Please,” explained one of the trawlers, “we have yet to bring in our net.”
“All right,” reported the Sea King leader, the helo rising, the fishermen looking fat, their yellow wet gear ballooning in the rotors’ wash. “But you’d better hurry it up.”
Upon returning to the convoy, the pilot was ordered to land his craft on the helicopter carrier ship nearest Admiral Woodall’s destroyer.
Stunned, the pilot was severely reprimanded for breaking radio silence without express authorization from Woodall. The point that messages had been sent to C in C East Atlantic by the admiral himself did not absolve the pilot. The messages sent to C in C East Atlantic were “burst” coded — a matter of milliseconds and of import to the convoy’s safety — while the chatter with the Norwegian trawlers had been long enough for the enemy via satellites and/or listening posts from Murmansk to the North Cape to get a vector fix.
It didn’t do any good for the pilot to explain that, given the low transmission power he’d used, it would have been all but impossible to pick up the exchange with the Norwegians.
“Hell,” complained the pilot to his comrades, “if they don’t know where we are now, their satellites aren’t worth a tinker’s damn.” He looked at his copilot, asking bitterly, “How the hell else should I have communicated with them? By bloody semaphore, for Christ’s sake?”
“Should have lowered down one of our crew,” said the copilot gamely.
The Sea King pilot snorted, went to his cabin furious — at Woodall but mostly at himself.
Of the fourteen submarines in the advance fan screen, four of the nuclear-powered Trafalgars had now sprinted ahead at thirty knots, submerged to a point thirty miles ahead of the convoy. Reducing speed to ten, then five knots, thus eliminating their own noise, they deployed their hydrophone arrays extruded astern like a long tube worm. In neutral buoyancy the subs sat and listened, their computers automatically subtracting any noise they emitted against incoming noise received by the passive radar. Active radar would not be used, as while this would bounce off any other sub and give its precise position to the listening Trafalgars, the Trafalgars themselves would also have been identified as a noise source. In passive mode, however, no noise was sent out by the Trafalgars, their operators listening intently to the noisiest place on earth. The sea’s high density of life gave off a cacophony of sound, everything from the snapping noise of swarms of shrimp to the muted hornlike calls of seals and whales and other mammals. In addition, there was the din of currents in concert, currents in opposition, turbulence of small and enormous mud slides, jets of superheated mineral-rich water steaming out of thousands of vents after traveling through the hot volcanic aquifers far beneath the seafloor interface. One of the loudest noises was that of the plankton which rose with the coming of night and fell with the coming of dawn, their sizzle confounding the sonar operators ever since World War II, when the noise was first heard in the sonar war against the Nazi Wolfpacks. The plankton layer still interfered at times with even the strongest and most sophisticated electronic filters as the billions of microscopic creatures created a massive blanket of sound, distorting all other. In the same way, different density layers that never mixed created, through temperature differentials, warm oases teeming with life in depths once thought uninhabitable.
All this meant that to detect any particular noise, sound moving much more quickly in water from liquid molecule to molecule than in the air, was as much an art as a science for a trained operator. To detect another submarine was as much art as science. One had to develop the feel for the sounds, the ability to eliminate all similar sounds, to sort out one propeller’s cavitation from another, listening carefully on the narrow-band receivers for the SFP — sharp frequency peaks — and on the two-hundred- to two-thousand-hertz band for the “singing” sound of a propeller shaft’s vibrations, these varying within the same ship in proportion to rate of speed, blade shape, and hull curvature — all affecting the overall noise signature. In addition to all these concerns of the sonar operators, the NATO navies were not really sure of the full extent of the damage done by the American Walker spy ring or by Toshiba’s sale of the Toshiba-Konigsberg quiet-propeller-making machine to the Soviet Union. In any event, to find their way through all of this, the sonar operators, of course, needed excellent hearing. It was something that Capt. Robert Brentwood, skipper of the USS Roosevelt, now back on its Norfolk-to-Scotland patrol, made a point of double-checking whenever a new sonar operator was assigned to the sub.
It was usual for skippers to acquaint themselves as quickly as possible with each new man aboard. But as well as finding out something about their home town, family, hobbies, and such, Robert Brentwood always made a point of asking sonar operators what kind of music they liked, pointing out that there were all kinds of tapes aboard the subs for off-hours earphone listening. Robert Brentwood was an honest man; “straight to the face,” his officers described him, or “no horseshit,” as the crew put it. But he did not want to prejudice the operator’s answer by making it seem like a very serious question, and so he did practice, on these occasions only, a willful deception on his men. If a sonar operator said he liked rock and roll, he would smile accommodatingly and, as if he were an aficionado himself, inquire, “Hard rock?” If the operator said, “Yes, sir,” he would never be first choice on sonar in any crisis situation. No aspect of submarine warfare had escaped Brentwood’s attention, and he knew that, though in all other respects a person’s hearing might test normal in boot camp and training school, sustained hard rock — especially as experienced through headphones— inevitably damaged hearing and as a result, unknown to the operator, “high-tone differentiation” would be lost. The failure of a sonar operator to hear such a tone, as sometimes emitted by the high electric whine or “cue tones” of homing torpedoes and SUBROCs, surface-to-sub missiles, could cause the death of 161 men.
At a thousand feet, the Roosevelt sat listening, her tow array hydrophones weighted for three thousand feet, an optimum sound channel depth according to computer readout of Gulf Stream salinity, temperature, and current strength. In ideal conditions, sound could travel through this layer for over four thousand miles. Roosevelt was also quietly leaking cold water from its ASREC, antisatellite recognition emission control, the cold water neutralizing the radiant heat from the sub’s machinery, which would otherwise produce a “hot” spot on the sea surface recognized by satellites’ infrared cameras. The problem for the Roosevelt now was for its operators to separate the noise of the convoy, which, according to Brentwood’s calculations, it should pass near the halfway mark between Newfoundland and Scotland.
The sonar operator informed Brentwood that he could hear no “hostiles.”
“Very well,” said Brentwood. “Phones in.”
“Phones in,” confirmed the OOD, Peter Zeldman, and Brentwood could hear the faint, soft sound of the big spool hauling in the two-inch-diameter oil-filled hose, a long, pale yellow snake containing the series of tiny wristwatch-size black microphones.
Two thousand miles northeast of Roosevelt, the sonar operator aboard the Trafalgar suddenly threw his headphones down, hands clutching his head in pain. The six Norwegian-flagged trawlers were on the port beam of the convoy when a mine exploded beneath a merchantman, the rapid expansion of carbon dioxide and methane gases combining with vaporized water to buckle a starboard plate of the MV Clyde, creating a jagged four-meteR-1ong hole below the ship’s waterline. Next to go was the MV Bahrain, the explosion directly beneath her bow. As the cold waters of the Atlantic rushed in over red-hot steel and stiffener beams, they produced plumes of high, hissing steam mistaken by some among the twenty-five escort ships for smoke of the kind expected after a skimmer or air-to-ship missile had hit. It was an assumption that sent the escorts’ crews to their antiaircraft missile consoles.
However, Admiral Woodall, who, as a very young midshipman, saw action in the Falklands War, immediately noticed that neither of the two merchantmen that were hit and sinking had seemed buffeted sharply to one side in the telltale manner of a missile, whose blast wave punched its target with such high speed that it usually crumpled much of the upper deck or superstructure.
One of the British frigate’s tracking radar operators picked up a blip coming in abaft, on the starboard beam. In a millisecond the signal flashed from the tracker’s office to command center in the ship’s middle, then through the computer to the swing six-rocket Sea Wolf launcher on the weather deck forward of the bridge. One of the console’s hinged jaw flaps opened, and out streaked one of the Sea Wolf’s antimissile missiles, which in 1.2 seconds blew a Sea King helicopter out of the air. The helo’s fiery debris further cluttered the radar screens of the NATO escorts, whose firing of chaff, or aluminum foil, deception rockets caused further disaster as some foil, due to moisture absorption in one of the rockets, stuck together in a ball, its size causing overanxious radar operators to report, “Incoming missile.”
In seconds the confusion of antimissile missiles and radar jumble, including a spray of high-speed depleted uranium coming from the Dutch minesweeper’s in-close weapons system, added to the chaos. Two heat-homing Sea King rockets wiped out a destroyer’s launcher, stripping the ship’s missile consoles’ fuses in the process so that soon more missiles on the automatic feed stack below began exploding. From the Sea Kings miles ahead on forward screen high above the white-flecked blue of the sea, it looked like a daytime fireworks display gone wrong. But no one was laughing as men from the two merchantmen were calling for help, desperately trying to swim out of the wash of oil and flotsam bubbling up from their sunken ships. Nearby, a Dutch destroyer’s broadband filters and circuits were reported so severely damaged by “friendly fire” that a HERO warning-hazard of electromagnetic radiation to ordnance — was flashed through the ship for technicians to take appropriate action before unprotected circuits could prematurely detonate all depth charges aboard.
One of the trawlers was three miles to port, already burning fiercely from a Sea King air-to-ship missile. As its crew and the men from the merchantmen struggled for their lives in the burning slick, the merchant sailors screaming and waving for help, Admiral Woodall, aboard HMS Newcastle, his helo/VSTOL— vertical takeoff and landing aircraft — cruiser, issued orders for the entire convoy to turn about and to withdraw, as near as conditions would allow, along the same course as that on which they had entered the minefield. Strict orders were given that no ship was to stop to pick up survivors, for if Russian subs were in the area, the covering noise generated by the convoy to mask each ship’s exact position would be imperiled by any ship slacking off from the convoy. And if enough ships stopped, they would be picked off one by one. All Sea King helos and the advance Grumans on screen were ordered to return and form a closer-in protective perimeter about the convoy as soon as possible.
On the bridge of HMS Newcastle, the officers and men didn’t have time to realize the full extent of the calamity that had befallen not only their convoy but the entire NATO convoy strategy, for now that radio silence had of necessity been broken, the air was filled with coded message bursts from R-1 to SACLANT in Norfolk, Virginia, and ACCHAN — Allied Commander in Chief Channel — forces in Northwood, U.K., only further confounding the post-World War II years of argument between proconvoy and anticonvoy tacticians. Those against convoys were now pointing at R-1 as stark evidence against convoy strategy and for IMS — independent merchant shipping — strategy, with smaller high-tech, high-speed boats assigned escort duty. This, they argued, would reduce risk both in terms of cost and men, and more important, would free subs and surface vessels from escort duty, giving them the freedom to spread out in search-and-destroy missions rather than being inhibited by an overconcentrated and slower convoy.
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—”
“Lines have been closed,” put in the captain, as eager as Woodall for an explanation.
Woodall was pacing back and forth across the cruiser’s bridge, oblivious to the winking lights of the steering console and the phosphorescent sweep of the radar’s arm. “I’d say the posts are still operational but are being run by the SPETS. They’ve deactivated the mines from shore-control relay. We’re being fed silence.” He stopped walking, looking across at the cruiser’s captain. “Everything’s seeming normal to us — even a little static on the line.”
“How about the call-in code checks they’d have to answer?”
“Broken the code, old boy. Or more likely they’ve been sold the bloody things. Some pretty East German secretary in Bonn, no doubt — slipping her boss a bit more than rollover.”
“I don’t like that much,” said the captain.
“Neither do I. Those subs could be breaking out right now.”
They were both quite wrong. No listening stations had been overrun — NATO had given top priority to defending them — nor was the sub fleet that had come out of the Kara Sea and around the Kola Peninsula in the process of breaking out. They had already done so. Hours before.