against a submarine. Rockeyes, ground-attack missiles that carried a payload of bomblets, could be effective against a submarine on the surface, but the Tomcat had no anti-surface or torpedo capability whatsoever. Indeed, on this flight, which was intended to be a simple quick look-see at the Greenpeace ship, Tomcat 201 carried only a minimal weapons load-out, more for training than for any other purpose. Sidewinders graced the outer weapons stations, with two Sparrows occupying the ones closer to the fuselage. They’d elected to forego the longer-range Phoenix missiles, whose massive weight significantly reduced the Tomcat’s onstation time.
“Okay, we’re out of here. You guys take this bitch out if she even so much as moves like she’s going to take out my stereo,” Bird Dog said.
“Don’t worry about it,” the S-3 pilot said dryly. “You might have noticed that you and I live in the same apartment building.”
CHAPTER 3
Colonel Rogov returned to the submarine after the initial camp setup, leaving the Spetsnaz commandos huddled inside their sleeping bags inside the creaking, groaning cave carved out of the cliff. The small raft had barely made the trip back to the submarine safely, taking two waves completely over it and being turned into a miniature version of its mother ship several times.
He watched the men move around the submarine’s control center, noting with disdain the black circles under their eyes and the fatigue in their every movement. Europeans, all of them. The strong Slavic stock of their ancestors bred out of them and diluted by the effete blood of inbred royalty. None of them would have lasted long under his command. And none of them could have endured the conditions ashore in the ice cavern.
Not that the submarine’s crew would have seen it that way. They saw themselves, he knew, as vastly superior to the Western Europeans that inhabit France, Germany, and England. He snorted. If they only knew. Approximately half of the crew was Russian, the last remnants of a grand race that had done its best to extinguish everything noble and superior in its bloodlines in the coups that destroyed the czars’ line. The remaining crew members were primarily Ukrainian, with a few mongrel Georgians, Azerbiijanis and Armenians thrown in. All in the latter group were at least half Polish, some even with strong German stock mixed in with the historic blood that had first flourished in the fertile steppes of the Ukraine and in the high, craggy mountain regions of Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Armenia. Had they but seen what they would become, he doubted that any one of them would have chosen to consort with the invading hordes that swept east from Europe from century to century. Instead, they would have preferred to fight to the last man and woman, chosen defeat over the hybridization and bastardization of their blood.
Not so with his ancestors. The Cossacks, driven out of their homeland surrounding the Black Sea and on the Crimean Peninsula, had remained a closed, insular nation without a country, warlike and incapable of being defeated. The best the Russians could manage was to drive them out into the vast desolation of its most eastern areas, consigning them to Mongolia, Siberia, and the rugged alien terrain of the eastern Soviet Union. Yet even centuries of forced relocation had failed to extinguish their strong tribal instincts, their sense of who and what they were. Primary among those attributes was their identity as Cossacks.
He watched the men again, noting the pale faces, the languid, almost feminine movements as they carefully monitored the complex array of sensors, weapons, and electronics installed on the small submarine. Such a powerful submarine, even for its small size. The Kilo combined ham-handed Russian design with frighteningly advanced electronics and computers obtained from Japan, Korea, and yes, even the United States. A powerful ship, one that deserved better than the masters she now had. That would change.
He felt the submarine captain watching him uneasily. He turned and faced the man full on, letting him see the disdain flicker at the edges of his normally impassive expression. This man most of all would have to go. His hesitation when one of his crew members had been swept into the icy sea was just further evidence of his unfitness for command. While he might possess the requisite technical and tactical knowledge required of a commander, he lacked the single most important ingredient — the iron will so necessary for transforming a collection of equipment and machinery and men into a potent, irresistible fighting force.
The present situation illustrated that point perfectly. The Kilo submarine lingered ten miles away from the island, barely making steerageway through the silent ocean. Hours ago, the sharp pops and groans of the ice floe had subsided as the sun sank back down below the horizon. Now, the ocean was a silent, dark cloak of invisibility.
Had Rogov been the skipper, the submarine would have been snorkeling, topping off the last bit of charge on its batteries in preparation for any immediate tactical need to stay submerged for hours. True, the bank of batteries was currently charged to ninety percent, but one never knew when that additional ten percent of capacity would spell the difference between life and death for a submarine and its crew.
This skipper, however, after a brief communications foray to the surface to monitor the group ashore’s progress, had decided that the weather was too bad, the seas too rough, to inflict the nausea-inducing pitch and roll of a submarine near the surface on its crew. He fled the surface and returned to the depths, where the motion of the storm above them was imperceptible. The crew had all looked relieved at that decision.
Pah! The men ashore would hardly have it so easy. Even safe inside the ice cavern, the scream and howl of the winds alone would have been daunting. The winds had built steadily throughout the night until sixty-knot gales, at times growing to hurricane force, now scoured the desolate island.
“Captain,” a young lieutenant said suddenly. His quiet voice echoed in the tomb-like control center. “The other submariner I think — yes, it’s her.”
The skipper stepped away from his normal post in the center of the small room, and stationed himself behind the sonar operator. “Where?”
The younger man pointed at the waterfall display. “It’s barely distinguishable from the background noise yet, Skipper, but this appears to be a line from her main propulsion equipment.” He pointed to a series of dots that looked to Rogov’s untrained eyes to be merely part of the noise.
Rogov allowed a trace of satisfaction to tug at the corner of his mouth. So far, all was going according to plan, although neither the Russians on this boat nor their larger counterpart knew it. The Oscar-class nuclear cruise missile submarine was one of the most potent ship-killers in the Russian inventory today. Equipped with SS-N-19 Shipwreck missiles, it had a tactical launch range of over three hundred nautical miles. It could obtain targeting data from any other platform, including the Tupelov Bear aircraft or the Ilyushin May-76 reconnaissance plane. When properly aligned, it could also download targeting data from Russian surveillance satellites, relieving it of the necessity of obtaining enemy positioning data from its own organic sensors.
The Oscar’s deployment had been suspended in the first few years following the breakup of the Soviet Union, but had resumed in 1995. It roamed with impunity the vast reaches of the Pacific Ocean, occasionally making forays into the smaller Atlantic. Her torpedoes, twenty-eight feet long and over five feet in diameter, could crack the keel of an aircraft carrier with one well-placed shot.
As it would soon, if necessary. He smiled, wondering what his Cossack ancestors would have thought of him, riding this massive underwater seahorse into battle again. A far cry from the days when his ancestors had swept out of the mountains and across the plains, decimating Ukrainian and Russian troops with their bloody sabers. While today’s Cossack might depend on invisible electrons and satellite data instead of a finely honed blade, the principles remained the same — attack, attack, attack.
The Americans would remember that soon.
The Ready Room was one of the larger single compartments on the aircraft carrier, and served as both a duty post and a central point of coordination for the VF-95 squadron. Ten rows of high-backed chairs took up the forward starboard portion of the room, arrayed in front of a chalkboard and overhead projector. The port side was a general congregating area, and its bulkheads were ringed with hard plastic couches and the all-important squadron
