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 after 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
