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  Rage of Battle

  ( WW III - 2 )

  Ian Slater

  From beneath the North Atlantic to across the Korean peninsula, thousands of troops are massing and war is raging everywhere, deploying the most stunning armaments even seen on any battlefield or ocean.

  Ian Slater

  RAGE OF BATTLE

  There are no guarantees that a Stalinist will not succeed Gorbachev.

  — Andrei Sakharov

  CHAPTER ONE

  From the redded-out control room beneath the USS Roosevelt’s sail, Capt. Robert Brentwood reached the forward torpedo room in under ten seconds. Stepping into the compartment, he saw Evans, previously one of the quietest and best-behaved seamen aboard the sub, backed into a corner near the number one torpedo tube, slashing the air with a long, thin screwdriver, screaming, “Fucking snakes! Get ‘em away — get ‘em away!”

  The bosun and another crewman, an electrician first-class, were moving in on Evans, the bosun trying to shush him. “For Christ’s sake! They’ll hear you in Moscow!”

  “Where’s the hospital corpsman?” Robert Brentwood asked quietly.

  “In sick bay,” the bosun told him. “Down with the flu. What I reckon, Evans has probably—”

  Brentwood knew there was only one thing to do but felt queasy even as he gave the order. “Get a syringe here fast. Valium — twenty milligrams.”

  “Yes, sir,” the bosun answered, and was gone.

  The electrician was so alarmed by Evans’s fit and screaming that he didn’t notice the fine beads of sweat breaking out on Brentwood’s forehead as he’d given the order for the hypodermic. It was a secret fear, one shared only by Robert Brentwood’s two younger brothers and sister, Lana, a navy nurse. He hadn’t even told Rosemary Spence, his fiancée back in England. For the quietly competent graduate of Annapolis, top of his class and commander of the most awesome weapons launcher in history, a confession to Rosemary or to his crew that the very thought of a hypodermic made him weak at the knees would have been nothing less than an abject humiliation. Whenever he had to have a blood test, he’d always looked away, out the window, at a painting, a piece of fly dirt on the wall — anything to avoid the sight of the cold steel puncturing taut skin, sliding into the vein. But now, with the hospital corpsman out of it with the virulent influenza that had been rampant in the United Kingdom and which Brentwood believed might have temporarily unhinged Evans, it would be up to him as captain to remember his officer training in subcutaneous and intramuscular injections, to push the needle into the wild-eyed sailor who was still yelling, the long, thin screwdriver keeping Brentwood and the electrician at bay. The problem would be to talk Evans down, to get him calm or preoccupied enough to give him the shot.

  “What’s all the racket?” the corpsman asked the bosun groggily, his eyes all but closed in the grip of fever.

  “Evans!” explained the bosun. “Off his fucking head. Wake up the dead, let alone the Russians. Where’s the Valium?”

  “Diazepam,” the corpsman corrected him, full of self-importance despite his malaise. “How much did you say?”

  “Ah — twenty ccs.”

  “Who you want to kill?” drawled the corpsman, shuffling toward the locked drug cabinet. “Evans or the whole fucking crew?”

  “What?”

  “Twenty milligrams, you mean. Not ccs.”

  “Give me the fucking vial — and a syringe.”

  * * *

  When the bosun reentered the torpedo room, there was a strong chemical smell. Everything in the “rigged for red” glow seemed pink. Evans was on the deck — the foam from a carbon dioxide extinguisher Brentwood had used so they could get near him stained with blood from a bad gash on the left side of Evans’s head. The bosun almost slipped, the deck slicked with foam. “What the—” he began.

  “Quickly!” ordered Brentwood. “Give me the syringe.” He wished to God his sister, Lana, were here. Slippery from the foam, Evans’s arm kept eluding Brentwood’s grip. “Goddamn it!” It was the first time the bosun had heard the skipper use any kind of profanity since he’d taken command of the Roosevelt two years before. Brentwood lowered Evans’s arm and stepped over him to his right side.

  “Pull down his pants,” Brentwood ordered. Gritting his teeth, Brentwood plunged the hypodermic into the torpedo man’s buttocks and pushed the plunger in, surprised by the resistance, looking away, focusing on the stainless steel prop of one of the thirty-five-hundred-pound Mk-48 torpedoes until he felt the plunger wouldn’t depress any farther.

  “All right,” he said, his breathing short and hard as if he’d just sprinted a hundred yards. “Get him to sick bay. Restraining straps. One of you stay with him.”

  “What happens when he wakes up, sir?” asked the electrician. “He’s gonna start up again.”

  Brentwood handed the emptied hypodermic to the bosun. “Tell the corpsman — if he’s well enough — to keep Evans heavily sedated until further notice. If the corpsman’s not up to it — come and tell me.”

  “What you think’s wrong with him?” asked the electrician, looking apprehensively from Brentwood to the bosun.

  “Darned if I know,” said the bosun.

  “Bosun,” ordered Brentwood, “you’d better get a stretcher. Watch yourself on this deck. I’ll send someone down to dry it off.”

  * * *

  The hospital corpsman said he drought it must be the DTs— “Delirium tremens.”

  “Bullshit!” said the bosun. “He doesn’t even smell of booze. Anyway, we left Holy Loch over twenty hours ago—”

  “Worst time,” said the corpsman in a tone calculated to impress the electrician, who’d helped carry Evans on the stretcher. The corpsman tried to stifle a racking cough with one hand, giving the restraining straps for the stretcher to the bosun with the other. “Secret boozer maybe,” he continued. “So long as they get their daily dose, they’re okay. Miss one, and brother — they see snakes, elephants, you name it.”

  “The sub’s dry,” said the bosun impatiently.

  “Right,” said the corpsman, “and I’m Scarlett O’Hara. Engine room solvents, cough medicine—” The corpsman stopped. “Man, they’ll drink anything.”

  “Uh-huh,” said the bosun, recalling the corpsman’s smartass crack about twenty ccs instead of twenty milligrams. The bosun tapped the antiroll-secured drug cabinet above the corpsman’s head. “Better check your supplies, Doctor. I’ll bet tits for bits you’ve got some water in your alcohol jars. You being in sick bay yourself is probably what stopped him getting his daily shot of booze. If you’re right.”

  “Well,” responded the corpsman, weighing the possibility of having to explain any alcohol missing from the sick bay. “Maybe he has the flu.”

  “Right,” said the bosun, “and I’m Scarlett O’Hara.”

  “Scarlett,” said the electrician, “will you marry me?”

  “Piss off,” said the bosun, “and get back to the fucking torpedo room. After the racket Evans made, it’s a fucking wonder if their whole fucking Northern Fleet didn’t hear.”

  As well as being profane, the bosun was quite wrong. The Northern Fleet hadn’t heard them. But with the sound waves from Evans’s commotion racing out through the underwater world at four times the speed of sound in the air, a Russian cruiser, on silent station — her orders to find and kill the Roosevelt — had heard them, her sonar now locked on to the American sub.

  CHAPTER TWO

  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 af
ter 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 w
ent 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.