Hunter Killer

North Carolina came to periscope depth. And this time they could see the ship, a VLCC, a black-hulled tanker of at least 250,000 tons, riding low in the water, making around seventeen knots.

From here they could see her bright scarlet upperworks through the periscope, but they would have to close in much nearer to read the name high on her port bow.

The Captain ordered her deep again, and the North Carolina accelerated underwater on a direct course to the tanker’s line of approach. They came in at over twenty knots for another nine minutes, and the Captain ordered them again to PD. And now they could really see her, less than a mile away, and every bit of 300,000 tons. But the name, in white lettering just below the massive sweep of her bow, was still not sufficiently clear to be read.

They slid back under the surface and ran forward for another half mile before returning to PD. They were actually just astern of midships, which made it slightly more difficult to read the letters.

But the name was unmistakable. This was the Voltaire, right on time, barreling through the calm water off the coast of Oman, laden with Abu Dhabi’s finest crude and bound for the port of Marseille.

Captain Stimpson ordered the North Carolina deep again, and he ordered a speed increase and a course change…make your depth one hundred, speed twenty-two, come left to course zero-seven-zero.

The North Carolina, now running easterly for the first time, was moving much faster than the tanker, on a course that would take her slightly north of the oil ship. On this diverging course she would be fifteen miles away inside forty-five minutes, but she would still be directly off the port beam of the Voltaire.

Final missile check.

Captain. Missile Director. Both weapons programmed…course one-eight-zero to target.

At precisely 1425, Capt. Bat Stimpson, with his ship now two hundred feet below the surface, ordered the missiles away. And one by one the sub-Harpoons ripped out of the underwater launchers, pre-programmed and unstoppable — at least by an oil tanker.

They swerved upward toward the surface and burst clear of the water, cleaving their way into the clear skies, still swerving until they settled down on the course fed into the computer brain of each weapon.

These were not sea-skimmers, but they flew low over the water, coming in toward the Voltaire at over 1,300 mph. Flight time for their fifteen-mile journey: forty-one seconds.

No one saw anything. The ocean was deserted in this part of the Gulf, and the crew of the tanker was paying scant attention to anything out on the port side. Those who were on watch were gazing steadily ahead when the big heat-seekers smashed into the hull seventy feet apart, twenty feet above the waterline.

The missiles exploded with sensational impact, sending two fire-balls clean through the mighty ship. Each one of them blew the bulkheads separating the oil tanks. The heat was so incinerating, it immediately set fire to the gasses above the actual fuel, which exploded violently, blasting upward two massive holes in the deck.

The deck pipelines were blown to smithereens, and in a split second the crude oil itself, unable to resist the terrifying heat of the missiles’ warheads, burst into flames, the fire racing across the surface of the oil. It was a vicious, roaring fire.

Within twenty seconds the great tanker was doomed. She began to list to her port side, and the fires were so intense the entire upperworks was becoming too hot for human survival. The French captain ordered the ship’s company to abandon, and lifeboats were lowered on the starboard side and over the stern.

Miraculously, no one had been killed, because there was no one for’ard at the time. The crew was either on watch, sleeping, or eating in the towering aft section. The nearest missile hit one hundred yards for’ard of this. But the fire would not be quelled for three and a half days, and would melt the midships section of the deck and upper hull.

One minute after she had unleashed the missiles, the North Carolina turned away from the datum and ran southeast at twelve knots, leaving behind a puzzle that would confuse the world’s tanker industry for several days. But in France, military leaders were highly suspicious of an involvement by the U.S.A.

Indeed General Jobert, C-in-C of France’s Special Forces, on that same Sunday evening, convened a meeting with his friend Adm. Marc Romanet, the Navy’s Flag Officer Submarines. The General came in by helicopter to the dockyards in Brest, and they talked through dinner.

There was just one question: would the United States have dared to sink a French tanker?

Admiral Romanet was absolutely certain the all-powerful U.S. Navy could most certainly have done it. “I could have done it,” he said, “in a halfway decent attack submarine.”

“Leaving no trace and no clues?” asked the General.

“Not a problem,” replied Admiral Romanet. “Mind you, with all the trouble for the U.S. at the United Nations I think it extremely unlikely they would have done something like this. I mean…that censure motion was very serious last Thursday. But I expect you noticed the American representatives at the UN refused to attend any of the three Security Council meetings, or indeed to recognize formally any censure by anyone.”

“I did notice that, of course,” replied the General. “They are quiet, but defiant. It would still be very extravagant just to go out and blow apart a three-hundred-thousand-ton tanker in the Strait of Hormuz, in complete contempt of world opinion.”

“Yes. It would,” said Admiral Romanet slowly. “But my fellow former submariner, Admiral Morgan, is in the White House at the President’s side. And he is a very dangerous man to any enemy of the United States. And, whether we like it or not, at this moment, he perceives us to be in that category.”

MONDAY, APRIL 12, 0530

THE RED SEA, SOUTH END

Capt. David Schnider, commanding officer of the U.S. Navy’s second brand-new Virginia-class SSN, the Hawaii, was waiting 200 feet below the surface, thirty-six miles north of the Bab el Mandeb. His ship was making a quiet racetrack pattern, moving at only five knots in a surprisingly deep stretch of water, almost 700 feet, twenty-five miles off the remote desert seaport of Al Mukha, on the Yemeni coast.

This is where the Red Sea split into two buoyed channels, both of them with in and out lanes, one heading along the Yemeni coast, the other swerving toward the Eritrean side. Captain Schnider did not know which lane his quarry would choose, which was why he was lurking quietly in deep water, positioned to hit in either direction. But his hit would be on a very special ship and there could be no mistakes.

Captain Schnider, who was born within sound of the old Brooklyn Navy Yards in New York, was one of the most able SSN commanding officers in the U.S. Navy. At forty-four, he had already commanded the Los Angeles — class attack submarine U.S.S. Toledo, and there was a degree of envy among his contemporaries when SUBLANT had appointed him to U.S.S. Hawaii.

David Schnider was a short, swarthy man with a crushing grip on facts and situations. He would have made one hell of a lawyer, but his father had served as a Chief Petty Officer in a destroyer, and his grandfather, a gunnery Chief, had died in the blazing hulk of the battleship California at Pearl Harbor.

The Navy was in his blood. Despite a certain rough edge to his method of command, and indeed his somewhat black humor, his men loved serving under him, and there were those who thought he might rise to the highest pinnacles of the U.S. Navy.

Captain Schnider knew what he was looking for here at the south end of the Red Sea — an 80,000-ton red- hulled gas carrier, distinguished by four massive bronze-colored holding domes, which rose sixty feet above the deck, with a long gantry crossing the length of the ship, nine hundred feet, above all four domes, and then descending to the foredeck.

David Schnider agreed with SUBLANT. She was damned hard to miss, so long as you were positioned in more or less the right place. His plan was to let her run by and then slam his missiles into the hull below two of the holding domes. The water here was plenty deep enough for a safe and efficient escape, but Captain Schnider had decided he did not wish to turn around, and then run back past a burning ship that, so far as he could see, was not much short of an atomic bomb.

He had the details of these LPG carriers right in front of him. The TRANSEURO ship he awaited, the Moselle, carried 135,000 cubic meters, that’s 3,645,000 cubic feet of liquefied natural gas,