Arctic Front

“What?”

“Ratmanov. Big Diomede?”

“Oh — well, Douglas. CIA agrees with us that if we stand our ground, Novosibirsk’ll back off. Besides, air force figures it can handle Big Diomede if it comes to that. And the navy, of course. But look — it’s great to hear from you. You keep in touch, you hear? And Douglas — give my regards to your wife.”

“Yes, sir.”

Freeman put down the phone and cussed. He might be the commanding officer of Fort Ord, but he was effectively unemployed, out to pasture. The “No Help Wanted” sign up in Washington.

“Yoohoo! Douglas? Are you awake?”

“No,” said Freeman, as he walked over and spun the globe, arresting the spin, turning it to him like the end of a football so he could see the Arctic Circle. Goddamn Diomedes were so small they weren’t even marked. Like him, they were off the map. Get a goddamn grip on yourself, he muttered. Goddamn pity is for goddamn sissies. You a sniveller, Freeman? No. Then stop your goddamn whining.

“Yoohoo? Douglas?”

The general inhaled deeply, slowly, teeth gritted. Damn woman knew he was in his basement den. Why in hell did she have to—

“Yes? What is it?”

“It’s visiting time. The hospital. You coming along?”

“Yes,” said Freeman morosely. Then his conscience berated him, not only with what should have been concern for Doreen but because he’d caught himself at the shoreline of another sulk, the one thing he couldn’t stand in anyone, least of all himself. “Yes,” he said clearly, straightening up, grabbing his cap, “I’m coming.” Surely the man who had handled the raid on Pyongyang and broken out of the Dortmund-Bielefeld pocket and pierced the famed Minsk-Moscow defenses could handle the barrage of inanities and cliches launched by his mobile sister-in- law.

“You see, Douglas?” she said as they walked out to the general’s car.

“See what?” he asked as pleasantly as he could.

“How things work out for the best? I mean you coming home just when Dory needed you the most.”

“Goddamn it, Marjorie — she’s comatose!” said Douglas. “I can’t do a thing to help her.”

“But you’re nearby. And just think — if you’d still been on active duty you might have got caught up in all this terrible Siberian business.”

“Yes,” said Douglas. “I probably would have, Marjorie.”

“There, you see?” said Marjorie, slipping her arm through his and patting him. “It was meant to be.”

* * *

Off Canada’s west coast Captain Valery’s Saratov, one of the Soviet Union’s Pacific Fleet subs, out of radio contact with its home base of Vladivostok, was on silent running, listening on passive, rather than active, sonar. An active pulse, having to originate from the sub, would be too dangerous to use as the Saratov penetrated deeper into Allied ASW “microphoned” waters north of Vancouver Island. Sound from the ships it had been tracking for the last forty-eight hours was faint, yet discernible, the sound travelling at four times the speed it would in air, racing through the saline molecules of the sound layers.

Whether the contact was now fading because the ships his sub was shadowing had moved closer in to the coastline during the storm, further away from the Saratov, or whether they had in fact reduced speed, giving off less signature noise, Captain Valery couldn’t tell, but with his sub at the end of its OSP— operational safety perimeter — he’d soon have to decide. “Take her up,” he instructed the first officer. “Thirty meters.”

“Up to thirty meters,” confirmed the officer and planesman. “Rising… angle ten… steady at thirty meters, sir.”

“Up search scope.”

Valery flipped the beak of his cap about, his eyes glued to the column, and draped his arms on the scored grips, moving around with the scope as if he were one with it. Now hopefully he would see the actual shape of the ships his sub had been tracking so far only by noise. What he saw through the infrared-penetrated darkness puzzled him. In the grayish white circle of wave action, obscured now and then in the night’s dark curtain of spray, the Canadian coastline, rather than being visible as a low blur before the mountains, appeared to be missing. Only the sharp geometry of the snow-capped coastal range beyond was visible, as if the range rose straight out of the sea. He turned the scope another five degrees but still no trace of the coast. It was as if the diameter of the periscope’s gray infrared circle had been painted black. Then he realized what he was looking at, why turning the five degrees hadn’t made any difference: two great slabs, the two ships, had overlapped, obliterating the coastline. “Gospodi!”— “My God!” he called. “Ya ikh vizhu! Pryamo peredo mnoy!”— “I have them dead ahead. Bearing?”

“Zero eight two,” came the reply.

“Down scope!” ordered Valery. “Attack scope up.”

“Down search scope. Up attack,” confirmed the first officer. Above the wheeze of the scope’s column the tone signal of action stations gonged urgently, though softly, in Control, the pulsating red of the battle station’s alarm bleeding pink into the red of Control.

“Two of them,” the captain informed the control crew as the attack scope slid into position. “Both tankers. Enormous brutes.”

Eyes welded to the attack scope, Valery quickly picked the ships up again on the same bearing. The attack scope, its field of view not as wide as that of the search scope but higher, allowed the sub to go deeper for a shoot. The scope’s hair-crossed circle was completely blocked by the massive walls that were the tankers’ sides, the bridge and crew housing astern of one tanker etched silver in moonlight as the clouds broke and two small blobs — tugs — could be seen bobbing up and down in the swells.

“Prevoskkodno”— “It couldn’t be better,” said Valery. Not only had he made the right decision by venturing in closer to the coastline — now he was no more than three miles from them— but at this angle of attack he would in effect not be firing at two separate hulls but at one long cliff of steel, over seven hundred meters — almost half a mile long. For safety’s sake, the second tanker was sailing not directly behind the first where it could not hope to stop should anything happen to the tanker in front, but starboard aft of it in staggered convoy position. And the two tugs were all but obscured by the rising seas now. Even if they were armed with ASW depth bombs and sub-surface torpedoes Valery knew that they would be so busy with damage control if one or both tankers were hit that they would give him little cause for concern. In any event he ordered forward tubes two and four loaded with submarine simulator decoys of the kind that had been perfected after the cruiser Yumashev had been the victim of an American MOSS — a mobile submarine simulator — the cruiser dummied into positioning itself to be sunk by the U.S. nuclear sub Roosevelt in the early months of the war.

Now it was Valery’s chance for revenge. But he would try to save the decoys for later use if possible. Hopefully he’d have complete surprise and wouldn’t have to use them at all. He heard the officer of the deck confirming forward tubes one, three, five, and six were loaded with “live fish.”

“Bearing?”

“Zero eight three.”

“Mark!” Valery ordered. “Range?”

“Thirty-four hundred meters, sir.”

Valery could feel a movement — energy transmitted by under-the-surface wave oscillation, a slight down pitch. “Hold her steady!” he said without unlocking his eyes from the scope. “Forward tubes one, three, five, and six. Set the up angle.”

“Forward tubes one, three, five, and six — set up angle.”

The confirmation came from torpedo control. “Up angle set.”

The first officer was watching the relay screen showing the computerized, keyed-in angles that allowed for everything from the enemy’s speed, variable friction caused by differing salinity, and water temperatures, to surface turbulence. Next he checked that the “decoy fish”—the simulators — were in forward tubes two and four.

“Bearing?”

“Zero eight four.”