Ghost Force

220-kiloton nuclear warhead, if required.

She carried forty torpedoes, the twenty-five-foot-long TEST-7IME fired from tubes fifty-three centimeters wide. This is a Russian ship-killer that travels through the water at forty knots, up to thirteen miles, packing a 220- kilogram warhead — nearly five hundred pounds of pure dynamite. Two of these would probably level the principal buildings of the Smithsonian Institution.

Viper had slipped her moorings in the Russian submarine base of Ara Guba shortly after midnight. Aside from the shore crew, just one lone Russian Navy Admiral stood on the north jetty to see them off. And a substantial figure it was, that of the giant greatcoated figure of Admiral Vitaly Rankov, who had been personally briefing the Captain and his senior officers for two days.

Free of her lines, Viper ran north up the long bay, which by some geophysical freak was not frozen solid, and headed up the channel into the icy depths of the Bering Sea. She dived in twenty-five fathoms, turning west toward the North Atlantic, on a voyage during which her crew would not see daylight for possibly three months.

The opening few hundred miles would see her running down the endless narrow coast of Norway, which sweeps 1,100 miles, from the southern city of Stavanger, straight past the western frontiers of Finland, Lapland, and Sweden to the Kola Peninsula, way up on the Russian border. It's six hundred miles down to the Arctic Circle, and five hundred more south to Stavanger.

Generally speaking, Viper could move pretty briskly during the first part of the journey, but would need to slow down measurably as she approached the narrowest point of the North Atlantic, the eight-hundred-mile wide electrically trembling waters of the GIUK Gap.

This is the most sensitive submarine country in the world, the stark line that runs from Greenland, bisecting the island of Iceland, dead straight to the northern coast of Scotland. The waters between Iceland and Greenland, the Denmark Strait, are often used by submarines, despite the danger of ice floes, the trawl nets of local fishermen, and generally shocking weather.

But it's the stretch between Iceland and Scotland that matters. These are the waters through which every Russian submarine from the Northern Fleet must pass if they wish to join the rest of the world. These are the waters still patrolled assiduously by submarines from the United States Navy and the Royal Navy.

During the Cold War, the U.S./UK patrols were even more intense than they are today. It would not be stretching a point to claim, as the U.S. Navy does, that no Soviet submarine traversed those waters, running either south or north, between the 1960s and the 1980s, without being detected.

In addition there is installed all through the GIUK the U.S. Navy's ultrasecret Sound Surveillance System, a fixed undersea acoustic network of passive hydrophone arrays, sensitive listening equipment connected to operational shore sites, which collect, analyze, display, and report acoustic data, relayed back from the strings of hydrophones laid in the deep sound channels.

These systems are laid in all of the key areas of the Pacific and North Atlantic, crisscrossed over the seabed, forming a giant underworld grid. Nowhere, repeat nowhere, is the system more vibrantly sensitive than in the waters of the GIUK Gap. They say if a whale farts, fifty American hearts skip a beat as the undersea sound waves ripple the SOSUS wires.

It would be prudent, of course, to say this was a slight exaggeration. Except that it's not. Little imagination is required to picture the total, steely eyed reaction in the U.S. Navy listening stations when the steady engine lines of a possibly hostile submarine are detected.

The commanding officer of Viper K-157, Captain Gregor Vanislav, one of Russia's most senior submariners, knew that once he ran south across the Arctic Circle he would be treading on eggshells. Like all Russian COs, he was highly nervous of being picked up electronically by the Americans.

He also knew no one would ever know precisely what had happened if his ship were sunk. Because the chances of a submarine being found in water two miles deep, somewhere in an area of several thousand square miles, was remote. It usually takes a couple of days for any command HQ even to realize one of their underwater ships has vanished, by which time it could be anywhere. Also, no one ever wants to admit the loss of a big nuclear ship, and certainly no one wishes to admit they destroyed it. Submarine losses are thus apt to remain very, very secret.

Captain Vanislav would run underwater some fifty miles off the Norwegian coast, past the fabled Lofoten Isles, a windswept, hundred-mile-long cluster of islands that jut out from the mainland, forcing submarines out into the 4,000-feet-deep Voring Plateau.

All through these waters, which were not particularly sensitive and were the regular exercise grounds for Russian ships, Viper would make almost five hundred miles a day. They would make a course change off the port of Namsos, swinging more westerly out into the Norwegian Sea, before running down to the Iceland — Faeroe Rise and the unseen line that marks the waters of the GIUK Gap.

Making only seven knots, they reached this relatively shallow water, only 850 feet deep, on the morning of March 22. And now they really were moving on tiptoes above the electronic lines on the ocean floor, as lethal as cobras, just waiting to detect any significant underwater movement, before raising all hell in the American listening station.

Captain Vanislav ordered their speed cut to five knots, and oh so slowly the most deadly attack submarine in the Russian Navy eased her way forward, her great turbines just a tad above idling speed as she slipped south into the Atlantic, with just three commands from Admiral Rankov in the mind of her commanding officer:

1. Do not under any circumstances be detected anywhere along the route to the Falkland Islands.

2. Locate the Royal Navy Task Force and hold your position until hostilities begin.

3. Sink the Ark Royal.

1130 (LOCAL), TUESDAY, MARCH 22

NATIONAL SECURITY AGENCY

MARYLAND

Lt. Commander Ramshawe was staring at the front covers of the major U.S. news magazines. Without exception they carried large photographs of the Royal Navy Task Force sailing for the South Atlantic. Most of them had shots from helicopters showing the decks of the aircraft carrier and the big assault ships, lined with the GR9s and helicopters.

The British military's ultimatum, that they would be unable to hang around in bad weather beating up the ships if not permitted to fight, had not been made public. However, the U.S. ambassador to London was in receipt of that knowledge and had informed President Bedford of the situation.

The Pentagon had been alerted, as had the NSA and the CIA. Jimmy Ramshawe was among those who knew that when the Royal Navy Fleet cleared the English Channel, it was going to war with the Republic of Argentina.

He poured himself a fresh cup of coffee and continued to look at the U.S. coverage of the crisis. 'Jeez,' he muttered. 'These bastards are actually going to fight for those islands all over again.'

And he realized that this time there was a lot more involved than was immediately apparent. For a start, the U.S. President was under enormous pressure from ExxonMobil to do something about the Falkland Islands oil fields, for which they had paid an arm and a leg to the British government for drilling rights, and for the massive investment in drilling-rig equipment, miles of pipeline, enormous pumps and transportation.

ExxonMobil had $2 billion tied up in that operation, and all of their guys had been frog-marched, at gunpoint, off the island by Argentinian troops. The oil giant wanted action. In fact, the oil giant wanted President Bedford to get down there with a U.S. Carrier Battle Group and 'roust these bastards back to where they came from…doesn't seem right to let the Brits go it alone.'

But President Bedford did not want to take his country into another war, especially with Argentina, which had always extended the hand of friendship to the USA. The problem was that when Uncle Sam picked up his musket, any ensuing war had to be won, and the High Command in the Pentagon knew how thoroughly the Argentinians were prepared for this conflict.

The political ramifications of American boys fighting and dying in that godforsaken group of rocks, which anyway belonged to someone else, filled the President with horror, never mind the oil. And the Pentagon chiefs themselves were not mad about such an adventure either.