Ghost Force

Atlantic.

Admiral Holbrook decided to visit the Dauntless and the Daring in the morning, and then fly back to the Iron Duke and the Richmond in the afternoon. And to each of those four groups of highly apprehensive sailors he delivered the same somewhat brutal message:

'Gentlemen, there's no point beating about the bush. We are going to war, and it is likely that some of us may not be returning. I expect to lose ships, and people. And I am obliged to remind you that for several years now you have been paid by the Royal Navy to prepare for events such as this.

'I realize this is all something of a shock, but I am afraid you are all now required to front up, and earn it, perhaps the hard way. You may not have realized it before, but this is what you joined the Navy for.

'To fight one day a battle on behalf of your country. Royal Navy seamen have long had a phrase for it— you shouldn't have joined if you can't take a joke.

'With regard to our enemy, the Args have two twenty-six-year-old diesel electric submarines, both somewhat tired and slow. We ought to detect them far away, and deal with them accordingly. They also have an even older, even slower submarine that one of their commanders ran aground in the River Plate at the end of last year. I do not regard the Argentinians as a major subsurface threat.'

This raised a tentative laugh, but Admiral Holbrook's words had already had a sobering effect. 'Their surface fleet is more of a problem,' he said, but added, more encouragingly, 'although I expect our SSNs to have dealt with it before we get there.

'I refer to their four German-built destroyers, all of them equipped with Aerospatiale MM 40 Exocet surface- to-surface missiles, which is not good news.

'They have another couple of elderly destroyers, one of them a British-built Type-42 with Exocets. The other one, Santisima Trinidad, is probably out of commission.

'They have nine frigates, mostly carrying an Exocet missile system. Two of them only ten years old. We must be on our guard at all times, absolutely on top of our game. And if we stay at our best we'll defeat them.'

Admiral Holbrook saw no point in dwelling upon the awful discrepancy in the air war, Argentina with perhaps two hundred fighter-bombers, God knows how many Super-Etendards, all land-based, against the Royal Navy's twenty-one GR9s with no radar, unable to find each other in bad visibility, never mind the enemy. All of them bobbing about in the South Atlantic with no second deck, should the Ark Royal be damaged.

And each day the Admiral flew to address a different ship's company, and to confer with his Captains. And they continued to make passage south, mostly in good weather, covering hundreds of miles every twenty-four hours.

The aircrews continued to work up their attack force, with takeoffs and landings being conducted all day and into the evening. They were rarely interrupted, except, on several occasions, by Russian Long-Range Maritime Patrol Craft, known locally as Bears. Every time they visited, they just flew along the horizon watching the British ships, and every time they came, the Task Force Commander hoped to hell they were not talking to the Argentinians.

However, they never came south of the Spanish coast, and eventually the Bears vanished altogether. Nonetheless, the deep frown on Admiral Holbrook's brow never eased as he and Captain Reader discussed the appalling task that lay ahead of them, both men understanding this could be the last battle a Royal Navy Fleet would ever fight.

231440MAR11 50.47N 15.00W

NORTH ATLANTIC

SPEED 7, DEPTH 500, COURSE 195

Captain Vanislav had thus far conducted his long voyage with exemplary caution. He had run Viper K-157 swiftly for two days down the Norwegian coast, then cut his speed dramatically as he angled more westerly out into the Norwegian Sea, and delicately over the SOSUS wires of the United States Navy.

They'd crept down through the GIUK Gap, making only seven knots as they moved over the Iceland — Faeroe Rise in only 850 feet of water, straight along the ten-degree westerly line of longitude. They had pressed on over the Iceland Basin, where the Atlantic suddenly shelves down to a depth of nearly two miles.

And then they had run on five hundred miles southwest, now down the fifteen-degree line of longitude until they approached the Porcupine Abyssal Plain 120 miles west of the Irish trough. And right here they ran into one of those deep-ocean phenomena, a school of whales out in front, showing up on the sonar like an oncoming Battle Group.

In fact, no one was concerned, since such events are fairly commonplace in the deep waters of the North Atlantic. And the whales swerved away. Almost simultaneously, however, something else, much more serious took place. One of Viper's 'indicator buoys' broke loose and made the most frightful racket on the hull for two minutes until its mooring wire broke.

They were directly over a deepwater SOSUS wire, and two operators in the secret U.S. Navy listening station on the craggy coast of County Kerry in southwest Ireland detected them instantly. Huddled over their screens deep in the cliff side of the Iveragh Peninsula, south of Dingle Bay, the Americans picked up the signal from a distance of more than two hundred miles.

Almost immediately, with the loose buoy transmitting on the international submarine distress frequency, Viper's comms room sent in a short-burst 1.5-second transmission to a satellite just to let home base know right away they had not in fact sunk.

The Americans heard all three bursts of noise.

Sounds like a submarine in trouble, sir. It's plainly Russian. Nothing else correlates. I'm checking, it's a Russian nuclear — probability area small.

Degree of certainty on that?

Eighty percent, sir. Still checking. She runs at the northern line of a ten-mile-by-ten-mile square. But right now the contact's disappeared.

Keep watching…

Everyone knew, of course, the Russians were perfectly entitled to be running a Navy submarine down the middle of the Atlantic south of the GIUK Gap. Just as the Americans or the British were.

But this particular submarine had not been detected for several hundred miles as it crossed that unseen line in the North Atlantic. Which suggested it did not want to be detected. Had it been making an aboveboard voyage at probably twenty knots, the Americans would have picked it up a dozen times.

But it had been moving very slowly, and remained undetected except for the very minor two-minute uproar when the buoy broke loose, and it all suddenly popped up on the U.S. Navy screens in Ireland.

Then, as suddenly as it appeared, it vanished. Which again suggested it had no intention of being located. Indeed, it suggested, strongly, that its commanding officer was operating clandestinely, on a mission that was plainly classified.

Of course everyone in the U.S. listening station knew there were several possibilities. The Russian ship could easily have been on a training run, or testing new equipment on a long-distance voyage. Maybe the U.S. operators had picked her up at the end of the training run, and located her as she made her turn. But if so, why was she not making proper speed north, when everyone could locate her?

The U.S. Navy Lt. Commander did not like it. Any of it. And he put an immediate signal on the satellite to Fort Meade:

231610MAR11 Southwest Ireland facility picked up a two-minute transient contact on a quiet submarine. Data suggests Russian heading south. Abrupt stop. Nothing on friendly networks correlates. Fifty-square-mile maximum area. Still checking longitude 15, 200 miles off west coast Ireland.

The Navy's Atlantic desk in the National Surveillance Office drafted a request to Moscow to clarify the matter. But no reply was forthcoming. And none of the Americans, of course, understood the depth of the fury within Admiral Vitaly Rankov, who paced his office in the Kremlin and spent fifteen minutes roundly cursing the errant carelessness of Viper's crew.