Boomer, page 10
Steel considered everything he had learned over the years—tactics and strategy, all the special schooling, strategy and tactics, everything learned by intuition, tactics and strategy—and he came to the conclusion that there was very little he could apply to his current situation, for he had no idea what to expect. Only intuition could come to his aid on this mission. Some referred to it as imagination, others as luck. He maintained that it was intuition and hoped his own remained as expeditious as it had been in the trainers.
And was the selection of Manchester for this mission just luck?
“I believe it’s a matter of being in the right place at the right time, Captain.” The SEAL, Lieutenant Commander Burch, had been very matter of fact. Being dropped in the middle of the Pacific apparently hadn’t fazed him any more than being asked to run down to the store for a six-pack. After a few hours’ sleep he seemed to be as good as new. “They did seem to have a great deal of confidence in you, but I think it was mostly because Manchester was closest.”
“Who briefed you on this mission?” Steel inquired curiously.
“Admiral Bennett did most of the talking.”
Steel had known Mark Bennett since they’d been together on Stonewall Jackson in Charleston—a solid officer still capable of using his imagination.
“Admiral Larsen mostly listened.…”
Nice to know the Chief of Naval Operations knew who Ben Steel was.
“… and Admiral Arrow and Admiral Newman had a couple of things to say.…”
Ah, yes, the boss of all Pacific submariners—and “the man who would be Rickover,” as they all jokingly referred to Robbie Newman behind his back.
“… but essentially the orders were Admiral Bennett’s.”
Burch, Steel remembered with amusement, had sat back with a bored expression on his face and asked, “What could I do to help out here, sir? I really can’t go back where I came from, and I’m not the type to stand still.” The unique challenges of this mission didn’t seem to affect him. SEALs seemed unconcerned with their environment.
Steel remembered that those had been the first words to amuse him that day—I really can’t go back where I came from—and knew why he instinctively liked the SEALs. “Okay, Commander, I don’t know if we’ll have enough time to qualify you for a set of dolphins, but you can do a couple of things. I really was serious when I mentioned over the IMC that the men could talk with you if there was something bothering them about this whole mess. Your first job is to circulate around the boat. Spend time with the enlisted men. Have a cup of coffee with them. Get down to chiefs’ quarters. Talk with my officers, especially some of the younger ones, and tell them exactly who was present when you received our orders and what they expect of us. That makes you the morale officer,” Steel concluded.
“Then,” he continued with a grin, knowing there was so little time, “since you’re a SEAL and a man of action, I want you to get hold of my weapons officer and learn everything you can about those torpedoes we shoot and how we go about it. Don’t take more than a few hours.” Steel laughed. “After that, we ought to be at battle stations, maybe even using some of those torpedoes.”
“I guess you’re right, Captain. There’s not a hell of a lot of time. So it’s a morale officer you’ve won for now.…”
That had been five hours ago. Steel knew from talking to the XO since then that Burch had done a good job as morale officer because a lot of the men did talk to him. And the weapons officer mentioned in passing that the SEAL had already learned enough to shoot a torpedo if they were forced to go to local control during a firing sequence.
Ben Steel glanced at his watch and realized that his musings had taken less than half an hour, but every minute was critical. He had yet to determine a fixed approach pattern, or an attack plan, or whatever it might be called when you were sailing a submarine into harm’s way and you had no idea what that harm might be. He settled once again on intuition as his most reliable guideline. If he found Florida first, he might be able to communicate their mutual problem. On the other hand, he was just as likely to come upon the enemy—if, in fact, there was an enemy submarine —and then it came down to whose ability—
There was a rap of knuckles on the bulkhead outside his stateroom. When it all comes down to the short and curlies, Steel thought as he settled back into reality, you have to depend on your intuition more than anything else. “What can I do for you?” he called to the individual outside.
“Four hours to the limits of Florida’s sector, sir.” The navigator stuck his head through the curtain hanging across the door.
“Thanks. Tell the XO I’ll be out in a few moments and we can all play games with the chart—figure out how we’ll roll the dice,” he added more loudly as the navigator headed back toward the control room.
Steel closed his eyes and imagined he was back at Pearl. It was an exercise—more a mind game, if he allowed his imagination to run—that relaxed his mind whenever sleep wasn’t in the cards. He pictured a trip up to Makaha with his family to watch the surfing championships.
There was Connie handing the picnic lunch to the two girls, who were already in the back of their station wagon. It was a hot, sunny, late-January day, and they would take out past Makakilo City, then head north on the coast highway. The Steel family always started early on those hot days so they could stop for a swim at some of the beaches they hadn’t enjoyed in the past, or browse in out-of-the-way shops that always appealed to Connie and two teenage girls.
He never went in the stores. It was more fun to lounge outside and watch the people, especially the girls in bikinis when they were near a beach. Sometimes he would stop at a fruit stand. Steel had a passion for fresh fruit, and that was always an important part of his trip. If his three females could wander the stores, then the only male in the family was allowed to indulge himself when the opportunity arose.
When they arrived at Makaha, the girls would go off by themselves since they intended to stroll the beach in their bikinis like all the others their age and they were sure their stern father wouldn’t approve. What they failed to understand was that their father only disapproved of their trolling for boys like that. Ben Steel’s favorite pastime at Makaha was no different than his daughters’, except that he was doing the looking. If ever he happened to see his girls out of the corner of his eye, he always pretended to be looking the other way. Connie would hold onto his arm as they meandered across the hot sand repeating every so often what a dirty old man she married.
Makaha was a wonderful way to spend a day. International surfers were the reason everyone gathered there, and it was all good-natured fun. The police made sure that the beer drinkers stayed under control, and the girls consistently went home with new phone numbers. It was always a superb day.
Steel opened his eyes and stared at the neutral-green bulkhead of the confining stateroom that surrounded him. It had been a lovely daydream for a few moments—he looked at his watch and noticed that this particular trip to Makaha had taken less than ten minutes. But now he was relaxed. There were times he often wondered if he really slept. Was it possible to order up a dream like that? Could it be so vivid if he were asleep?
Ben Steel stood up and stretched, then went over to the metal sink and splashed some cool water in his face. The figure that stared back from the mirror needed a fresh shirt, Why not indulge yourself, Steel? You may never need another.
Chapter Five
A cold wind, spawned in the bleak, frigid Laptev Sea, swept over the western Siberian mountain ranges, crossed the Kamchatka peninsula, then whipped down the Bering Sea across the Aleutians into the open ocean. There was nothing in the northern Pacific to stall its mounting fury. Wave heights increased dramatically. Ousting winds flattened the peaks of waves and blew the foam from the whitecaps horizontally until vision was five hundred yards at best. The ceiling was less than a thousand feet.
SSV-516 plowed through the heaving ocean on a course thirty degrees off the oncoming wind. Any number of ships longer and heavier could handle such a day with reasonable comfort, but hardly any could churn through such seas with the relative ease of SSV-516. She was a scientific research vessel, which was a charitable appellation for an intelligence collector. Her broad beam coupled with a full-load displacement of five thousand tons countered the tumbling seas effectively.
Her commanding officer, Captain Markov, remained in the pilothouse almost constantly in such weather. He had little concern for hull damage but worried constantly over the tremendous value of her electronic equipment. Just one slip by an inattentive watch stander and a series of heavy rolls would result in damage that could be both costly to repair and hazardous to her mission. Most of her sophisticated equipment was unavailable anywhere on the east coast of the USSR, and replacement parts would have to be flown in from the research centers west of the Urals. SSV-516’s captain had been selected over a host of talented naval officers for his seamanship, common sense, and caution in such weather; he would not have been selected to command a man-of-war.
The ship was plodding along at seven knots, her bow occasionally plowing deep into the sea. Even in the pilothouse one could feel the shudder run throughout the ship when she struggled to shake the tons of green water spilling from her broad bow to either side of her main deckhouse.
Her nose was buried in dark water when the phone next to the captain’s chair buzzed. “Yes.”
“Captain, this is Lieutenant Peshkov. The American aircraft are at two hundred kilometers, still closing on a direct line.”
“Have you learned if there are any of their aircraft carriers within range?”
“Negative. Definitely not carrier aircraft. We picked them up shortly after departure from their Air Force base in the Aleutians. I’d wager my next paycheck they’re recon aircraft. What little electronics they’re employing fit that ID.”
“How are they armed?” SSV-516 shook violently as her bow lifted out of the swell, flinging green water to either side.
“They aren’t. Purely intelligence gathering, the type that should normally stay about where they are now … just listen. That’s what I was anticipating even though they’re still closing the gap. It could be a standard intelligence mission … or they could be out here for a specific reason, maybe wondering if we have anything to do with those submarines of theirs.” Word seemed to be spreading on SSV-516.
“Let me know if they close to a hundred kilometers.” He cut off his radar officer and pushed the buzzer for his warrant-missile specialist. “I want your men on standby. A possible target is closing from the east.”
Captain Markov felt much better after replacing the phone in its cradle. This world of electronics was a comfortable one, a world in which the human eye was no longer necessary. But somehow he had been intimidated, almost frightened, by the cloak of invisibility that the clouds and blowing spray surrounded him with. His missiles became a comforting shield—even though their range was no more than ten kilometers. He suppressed the knowledge that any self-respecting pilot would already be aware of SSV-516’s defensive weaknesses and would find it easy to remain just beyond their reach.
It was an especially quiet watch in Florida’s control room. The watch section was exhausted from Buck Nelson’s intensive exercises, and the diving officer found it necessary to shift men at their positions more often than usual to keep them alert. It was also a boring watch, few contacts, smooth seas above. The OOD had little interest in maneuvering games. Their course was generally steady, speed and depth rarely changed, and sonar’s only contacts were distant sounds that would have no effect on the submarine.
“Thirty minutes to the wall,” the duty quartermaster announced in a bored monotone. He’d been replotting their position and reporting the time every five minutes to no one in particular—anyone who might listen—simply to keep himself alert. The internal navigational system’s positions were determined by the computer and accurate within feet. A typewriter in the control room printed out their longitude and latitude every six minutes. But he had chosen to plot their location by hand, just as quartermasters had done before the Omega system became more accurate than the individual who operated it. The old methods were those he’d learned first, and now they were a welcome crutch to stay awake.
Captain Nelson’s standing orders didn’t require notice of a base course change, only reason not to have done so, but no one in the darkened control room minded if the quartermaster had decided to keep them informed. Each instance after the time to maneuver was called out, one by one the others ambled over to the chart table to study their new location—a couple of additional miles covered on an imaginary line superimposed over a chart of a single sector in the Pacific Ocean. The background was entirely blue, no indication of anything they might identify with. Only the neat, black numbers indicating ocean depths revealed any type of relief, and that was the bottom, miles below.
The quartermaster’s line of advance and each position marked with a tiny X on the invisible sheet of plastic covering the chart were straight and efficient. His efforts were normal. All quartermasters tested themselves against the computers. The computers were always correct. The exact position of an SSBN was absolutely critical from one moment to the next since they might be ordered to fire a missile at any time. An incorrect position fed into that missile would mean a complete miss after traveling up to six thousand miles—and for all they knew, the single mistake could mean the end of their country. It was sensible to indulge the quartermasters, not to mention the technicians who maintained the navigational equipment.
So every five minutes the time to course change continued to be summarily announced, and in time visually noted by each member of the watch able to pass by the chart table. At precisely five minutes beforehand the OOD, without realizing why he did it, called the captain in his cabin to inform him of the maneuver.
Buck Nelson was stretched out in his narrow bunk, his pillow carefully folded in half under his head. His original intention had been commendable—to read until he was called to the control room. The light still burned over his head. Some of the handful of papers he’d been reading had slipped off his chest onto the deck when he fell asleep. For a moment the harsh buzzing of the phone became an integral part of a fitful, already forgotten dream, before it gradually dragged him from the oblivion of an exhausted sleep.
Nelson mumbled into the mouthpiece, “Captain here.” The remaining sheets of paper slid off his chest as he rose on one elbow out of habit. “Very well,” he responded, “come to your new course on schedule,” without wondering why he was called.
He hung up the phone and allowed his head to slump back on the pillow for a moment. Waking like that reminded him of the few times he’d been drunk. Buck Nelson accepted the reality of command—never sleeping more than two hours at a time at sea. It was a fact of life. But he would never come to terms with the disconcerting effect of that buzzing phone jarring him awake. That was another fact of life that had no doubt raised his blood pressure every time it jolted him like that. It was something you put up with. A standard course-change report could just as easily be an emergency call—a torpedo in the water! Silly to think about. Yes. But that buzzer sure as hell got your attention, no matter what the reason.
There wasn’t the slightest reason to get out of his bunk for a course change. The OOD had completed the same maneuver a thousand times, and this one would be no different. The point Nelson was making to himself at the same time he felt for his pulse was that commanding officers who reacted to every single evolution aboard their vessels probably weren’t going to continue in that position for long.
Yes, his pulse rate was faster than it should have been. It couldn’t have been that “all ships” message that implied in as few words as possible that an increased alert had been set—no reason why. Relax. That’s it… relax. He’d seen those messages too often. Like all captains, he was certain they were sent by shore-based officers who had nothing better to do. The one he’d worry about would be the launch message. The soul of the engineer took over, relaying the messages to the body, explaining that tension was a state of mind. Only type-A personalities, highly nervous individuals, allowed the tension to rise like that. That was why they weren’t fit to command a boomer. But Buck Nelson is.
If the pressures that were integral to commanding a war machine as lethal as Florida got to any of the C.O.s for more than a couple of patrols, it would turn up in their physicals. It didn’t matter whether it was found out by one of the meticulous physicians responsible for the health of the men who commanded the boomers, or one of the shrinks who would ask something stupid just before delivering an incisive, demanding question out of left field that dug into your very soul. They had their ways—they learned pretty quick if that tremendous responsibility was getting to the man.
He took a deep breath, exhaled slowly. Then another. And another. That’s it. Nelson, relax. You have earned this fantastic ship and you don’t want to screw things up with something as dumb as tension … nerves.
This was the ultimate job in the Navy, as far as he was concerned. He was willing to argue that with anyone who claimed it was carriers. When you were promoted out of a boomer, there were big things ahead … as far as status was concerned. Your first star was most likely on the horizon. That was making it. But that star was nothing like command at sea; nothing was quite like command of a Trident ballistic-missile submarine, command of the most powerful weapon yet devised by man.
If an SSBN functioned as it was designed, it would never launch a missile in anger. It would deter. It would simply run around a box in a designated sector and its awesome capabilities would deter the other guy from challenging the effect of more D-5 ballistic missiles than would ever be necessary to wipe mankind from the face of the earth.
