TWENTY-TWO
Well to the west and south of the fighters now plunging toward the coast, Commander “Rabies” Grill surveyed the ocean below him. Funny how after enough time spent staring down at water, you can pretty much figure out where you were even without your navigation gear. This nasty, dark body of water below him, for instance. It could never be mistaken for the clear dark blue surface of the Pacific, which seemed so deep and inaccessible. It was, Rabies thought, the most indifferent to human presence of all the bodies of water.
The Atlantic, now, that was a different matter. Crossing time to Europe was around a week to ten days, depending on how fast the admiral wanted to get there. Just off the coast of the U.S., there were the silty brown coastal waters, then the sudden, clear green path of the Gulf Stream as it made its way north, arced east near Greenland and Iceland, then headed back south along the coast off England and Wales, carrying with it rich nutrients from the East Coast through the Arctic realms. The boundary between the Gulf Stream and the Atlantic Ocean was usually fairly clear, occasionally muddied by a few eddies that spun off from the Gulf Stream. Sometimes Rabies could even believe that he felt the line of mountains that ran down through the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, the Mid-Atlantic Ridge that almost divided the ocean into two bodies of water. Even with their jagged points well below the surface, they were a major factor in acoustic transmission and submarine detection.
And then there was the Med, ah, the Med. It wasn’t that Rabies liked the water that much — it was what it represented. Warm, sun-drenched islands, Italian food, Greek food, every imaginable cuisine brought to the coast of this ancient sea by the inhabitants of Europe and elsewhere.
While it might be a gourmand’s dream, as the busiest bit of water in the world the Mediterranean was a submariner’s nightmare. It was loud, noisy, and shallow. The water was dark green and brown, occasionally blue in the deeper parts, and in some places you could almost see the bottom. There were other problems with finding submarines in that area as well. The mouth of the Mediterranean was one of the strangest environments for acoustics in the world. Cold water flowed into the Mediterranean along the bottom, while warm water flowed out along the top, creating such turbulence near the mouth that any detections were virtually impossible. The salinity, too, differed widely between the two, as the salt water pouring out of the Med mixed with the salt water from the sea. The oceans were largely homogeneous when it came to salinity, but the Med was the one place that wasn’t, along with the Dead Sea, which was so dense and salty that it was virtually impossible to avoid floating. Not that that mattered to Rabies — there were no submarines in the Dead Sea.
Yet, when he thought about it, the Red Sea had to rank right up as his least favorite ASW environment. It was deeper than the Med, but the bottom was littered with wrecks and uncharted obstructions, all of which interfered with MAD and sonobuoy detections. The United States had made considerable strides in charting all the obstructions, but there was still a long way to go. Every country in this part of the world seemed to put up oil pipelines overnight, and the new ones were hardly ever annotated on the charts, even though the quartermasters did their best to keep up.
And then there were the drilling rigs. The ones far offshore — and even the ones near the shore — radiated broadband noise that shot through the entire spectrum, blanking out many useful frequencies. Normally, you could filter some background noise out, but there were so much of it here that you risked losing too much signal along with the interference.
Oh, well. Tough for him, but even worse for the submariners who tried to work in these waters and the Persian Gulf. For decades, it had been conventional wisdom that no submarine could operate in the Persian Gulf. During Desert Storm and Desert Shield, the United States Navy had proved everyone wrong. While the submariners despised working in shallow waters, they reported their exploits with such smugness that most of the other warfare communities wanted to smack them.
The latest intelligence reports speculated that the Iranians might have just received a shipment of minisubmarines from North Korea via China. The small ten-man-crewed boats were ideally suited to operating in these constrained waters. They were powered by a battery charged by a closed-circuit diesel engine, and unless they were charging those batteries or on the surface, they were virtually undetectable. They could cover long ranges with their late-generation battery technology, moving slowly but inexorably toward their targets.
There were two major shortcomings with mini-submarines. First, the accommodations made for the human crew who sailed in them were abysmal. Second, the mini-sub had limited storage capacity for weapons. From what he knew of the Iranian sailors, he doubted that the government placed very much emphasis on the first problem. In fact, he wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that berthing space had been sacrificed for torpedo storage.
Still, there were worse things, weren’t there? After all, most of their missions lasted no longer than a few days, and while conditions might be unpleasant, the crew could at least survive without decent beds. And really, if you got right down to it, the life expectancy of the crew after firing a missile was short enough that bunk beds weren’t what you might call a necessity of life. He patted his control stick fondly, thinking about the torpedoes and antiship missiles slung under his wings. At least, if he had anything to say about it, their life span would be short. It was like what they said in the Russian Navy — the Soviet Navy back then — with radiation sickness rampant among submariners due to inadequate shielding on the early-generation reactors. It was a standing joke that there was no family tradition of submarine service like there was the United States Navy. Soviet sailors who spent much time at all on board nuclear subs were often sterile.
“Anything?” he asked over the ICS, although he already knew the answer. If there’d been the slightest hint of a contact, his TACCO and enlisted technicians would have him dancing to their tune by now. Although he was the pilot in command, the TACCO in the back, a few years his senior, was mission commander. Unless a decision involved safety of flight or safety of crew, the TACCO’s word was law.
Rabies didn’t like it much, but on balance it made little difference. After all, if he wanted to head back to ship, there wasn’t much anybody was going to do to stop him.
“Nothing yet,” the bored voice of the TACCO replied. “Let’s give this pattern another fifteen minutes, then move it to the south a bit. They may be near the entrance, lurking around that new pipeline down there.”
“Roger,” Rabies said cheerfully. He glanced at his copilot, a young woman on her first cruise. “It’s always like this, you know. Like watching grass grow.”
“Could be worse. We could be assigned surface surveillance,” she answered.
Rabies shuddered. “Bite your tongue.” There were few things that the Viking pilot liked less than flying down near to the surface and buzzing commercial ships looking for identifying characteristics and recording the rigging. For one thing, whoever painted the ships usually had lousy handwriting. And for another, it wasn’t that unusual to find that some nations made frequent military use of their commercial fleets. All too often, there was some raghead hiding behind a couple of containers with a Stinger propped up on his shoulder ready to take out the first American he saw.
No, hunting submarines was what they were for. But the youngsters had to do their time on surface surveillance and taking tracking — he had put his time in when he was a junior pilot.
“Rabies, head south,” the TACCO said, his voice a notch higher than it had been before. “You got the mark.” A new symbol appeared on Rabies’s display, indicating a fly-to point from the TACCO.
“You got something?” he asked.
“Maybe. Faint indications of a diesel engine — it fits for the one they may have on board, according to the intelligence summary. But it’s real intermittent and long-range — we won’t know until we get closer. It’s worth looking at, though.”
That final assessment, Rabies knew, came from the enlisted technicians. Although the TACCO was in tactical command and Rabies might be the pilot in charge, all the people on board knew who really held the keys to their success. It was the first-class petty officer seated next to the TACCO, the one with the finely trained eyes and ears who could sniff out the sound patterns made by machinery from among noise, signals from noise, submarines from surface ships, and friend from enemy.
AW-1 Greenberg, the antisubmarine warfare specialist flying this mission with them, was exceptionally good, even among the elite community of aviation subhunters. He had recently completed a tour with the intelligence staff in San Diego, and was completely familiar with all the intelligence that was too highly classified to ever make it to the fleet. That was probably why the XO had him on this mission, hoping they could pull something out of their ass
