Straits of Power

He was positively delighted. Whatever he’d done, good or bad, his supporters in upper Navy echelons — and the White House too? — outweighed and overruled his detractors. He wasn’t being banished after all. Jeffrey read further into his orders, more slowly now to absorb every detail. Crucial portions of the mission required that two submarines be involved, but there was much more to it than Challenger and Carter together having more total firepower, while covering each other’s back. This piqued Jeffrey’s curiosity; no explanation was given of what it meant. Even more cryptically, Jeffrey was told to brush up on the Russian he’d studied in college, and to practice his poker face; the SERT guys would help him on both counts, starting right away. His eyebrows rose, involuntarily, as he took this in.

After the rendezvous and a joint briefing to be held aboard Carter, he would lead his two-ship strike group westward, into the East Siberian Sea — Russian home waters. His assignment was to do something that would force Russia once and for all to stop supporting the Axis against America while Moscow outwardly kept claiming legal neutrality. Specifics were inside that inner envelope, to be opened only once the rendezvous was made.

Jeffrey’s entire demeanor changed. This was exactly the sort of important and dangerous undertaking he really enjoyed; revealing the whole plan only in stages, for security, was something he’d gotten used to. He couldn’t wait to tell Bell the great news about their twinned promotions. Jeffrey was fond of Navy traditions and pomp; he’d been so, almost obsessively, since discovering naval history in a local St. Louis library as a child. He was impatient to hold the formal change of command ceremony, in the enlisted mess — the biggest meeting space on his ship. No. Correct that. On Captain Bell’s ship.

One thing puzzled, disturbed Jeffrey. For this mission, he came under the control of Commander, Strategic Command, a U.S. Air Force four-star general. That general oversaw the readiness and possible use of America’s thermonuclear weapons — hydrogen bombs. Challenger carried no H-bombs, and never had. Her nuclear torpedoes bore very low yields, a single kiloton maximum. H-bombs had destructive power a thousand times as large, and vastly greater deadly radioactive fallout that drifted globally.

The Axis, shrewdly, owned no hydrogen bombs and made sure the whole world knew it. This kept America from escalating past tactical atomic fission devices set off only at sea— not that anyone sane in the U.S. would want to further escalate this war.

Jeffrey began to suffer a dreadful unease. Why am I suddenly reporting to Commander, Strategic Command?

Glossary

Acoustic intercept: A passive (listening only) sonar specifically designed to give warning when the submarine is “pinged” by an enemy active sonar. The latest version is the WLY-1.

Active out-of-phase emissions: A way to weaken the echo that an enemy sonar receives from a submarine’s hull, by actively emitting sound waves of the same frequency as the ping but exactly out of phase. The out-of-phase sound waves mix with and cancel those of the echoing ping.

ADCAP: Mark 48 Advanced Capability torpedo. A heavyweight, wire-guided, long-range torpedo used by American nuclear submarines. The Improved ADCAP has an even longer range, and an enhanced (and extremely capable) target-homing sonar and software logic package.

AIP: Air Independent Propulsion. Refers to modern diesel submarines that have an additional power source besides the standard diesel engines and electric storage batteries. The AIP system allows quiet and long-endurance submerged cruising, without the need to snorkel for air, because oxygen and fuel are carried aboard the vessel in special tanks. For example, the German class 212 design uses fuel cells for air- independent propulsion.

Ambient sonar: A form of active sonar that uses, instead of a submarine’s pinging, the ambient noise of the surrounding ocean to catch reflections off a target. Noise sources can include surface wave- action sounds, the propulsion plants of other vessels (such as passing neutral merchant shipping), or biologics (sea life). Ambient sonar gives the advantage of actively pinging but without betraying a submarine’s own presence. Advanced signal-processing algorithms and powerful onboard computers are needed to exploit ambient sonar effectively.

Auxiliary maneuvering units: Small propulsors at the bow and stern of a nuclear submarine, used to greatly enhance the vessel’s maneuverability. First ordered for the USS Jimmy Carter, the third and last of the Seawolf-class SSNs (nuclear fast-attack submarines) to be constructed.

Ceramic composite: A multilayered composite foam matrix made from ceramic and metallic ingredients. One formulation, called alumina casing, an extremely strong submarine hull material significantly less dense than steel, was declassified by the U.S. Navy after the Cold War.

Corvette: A type of oceangoing warship smaller than a frigate (see below).

Deep scattering layer: A diffuse layer of biologics (marine life) present in many parts of the world’s oceans, which causes scattering and absorption of sound. This can have tactical significance for undersea warfare forces by obscuring passive sonar contacts and causing false active sonar target returns. The layer’s local depth, thickness, and scattering strength are known to vary by many factors, including one’s location on the globe, the sound frequency being observed, the season of the year, and the hour of the day. The deep scattering layer is typically several hundred feet thick, and lies somewhere between one thousand and two thousand feet of depth during daylight, migrating shallower at night.

Double agent: A spy who works for both sides in a conflict. Often one side believes the spy works exclusively for them, when in fact the spy’s loyalty is to the enemy, or only to him- or herself. Double agents in your employ can thus provide valuable information about the other side’s intelligence operations. But they might instead (or simultaneously) represent a serious threat to your security by providing good information about you to the other side, or by intentionally misleading your side with false but plausible information.

Ekranoplan: Originally, the name of a very large Soviet military “wing in ground effect” aircraft. More generally, ekranoplans, also known as wiggies, are a hybrid sea-skimmer airplane. They fly just above the sea surface or level ground while obtaining significant extra aerodynamic lift by riding on a cushion of air trapped between the ground and the underside of the wings. Their speed can reach several hundred knots, and their huge cargo capacity can exceed five hundred tons. Smaller civilian wiggies are built in the U.S. for use as water taxis. Military versions can serve as powerful amphibious landing craft because of their excellent mobility and payload, and their ability to fly through marshes or up onto beaches.

ELF: Extremely low frequency. A form of radio that is capable of penetrating seawater; used to communicate (one way only) from a huge shore transmitter installation to submerged submarines. A disadvantage of ELF is that its data rate is extremely slow, only a few bits per minute.

EMCON: Emissions control. Radio silence, except it also applies to radar, sonar, laser, or other emissions that could give away a vessel’s presence.

Frequency agile: A means of avoiding enemy interception and jamming, by very rapidly varying the frequency used by a transmitter and receiver. May apply to radio, or to underwater acoustic communications (see Gertrude, below).

Frigate: A type of oceangoing warship smaller than a destroyer.

Gertrude: Underwater telephone. Original systems simply transmitted the voice directly, with the aid of transducers (active sonar emitters, i.e., underwater loudspeakers), and were notorious for their short range and poor intelligibility. Modern undersea acoustic-communication systems translate the message into digital high-frequency active sonar pulses, which can be frequency agile for security (see above). Data rates well over one thousand bits per second, over ranges up to thirty nautical miles, can be achieved routinely.

Hole-in-ocean sonar: A form of passive (listening only) sonar that detects a target by how it blocks ambient ocean sounds from farther off. In effect, hole-in-ocean sonar uses an enemy submarine’s own quieting against it.

Instant ranging: A capability of the new wide-aperture-array sonar systems (see below). Because each wide-aperture array is mounted rigidly along one side of the submarine’s hull, sophisticated signal