WW III

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.