Torpedo! (The Silent War Book 3) Page 2

  The office suite occupied by Vice Admiral Brannon was luxuriously furnished in keeping with his rank and his position as ComSubLant. The General Services Administration saw to it there were comfortable sofas, chairs, coffee tables, and a massive walnut desk with a high backed swivel chair for the Admiral. Within arm’s reach of the swivel chair there was a taboret with a carafe of ice water and glasses. The walls were decorated with a large picture of the President of the United States and framed color photos of the submarines, the submarine squadrons, the heavy cruiser, and the battleship Mike Brannon had commanded during his long naval career. A corps of yeomen worked in the three outer offices of the suite under the supervision of a dour Chief Yeoman who wore seven gold hash marks on the left sleeve of his uniform jacket denoting twenty-eight years of honorable service.

  Admiral Brannon paused at the Chief Yeoman’s desk in the outer office. “Good morning, Chief. Any word on the Sharkfin come in overnight?”

  “Negative, sir. Admiral Olsen is waiting for you in your office. Coffee will be ready in a minute, Admiral.”

  “Thank you. You’d better get a sweet roll for Admiral Olsen. He’s always hungry and nothing he eats puts an ounce on him.” Brannon went into his office as Rear Admiral John Olsen turned away from the office window.

  “Good to see you, John. The Chief said there was nothing on Sharkfin. That right?”

  “No word, Mike. As of zero eight hundred today, in a few minutes, she’ll be sixty-eight hours overdue with her position report. Aircraft search out of Spain and the Azores is negative. We’re calling her on all bands every five minutes, alternating from Rota and Washington. No answer.”

  “She could have a breakdown in her communications gear,” Brannon said. There was a light tap on the door and a yeoman came in with a tray holding a carafe of coffee, cups, a can of condensed milk, sugar, and a huge sweet roll. He put the tray down on a coffee table and closed the door quietly behind him as he left the room. Brannon carefully measured half a teaspoon of sugar into his coffee and then poured in evaporated milk until the liquid was a creamy yellow. Olsen bit into the sweet roll and chewed rapidly.

  “She’s got too much redundancy in communications for a breakdown to be the cause of not reporting,” Olsen said. “The only thing I can think of is a major breakdown in her nuclear power plant and that she might be somewhere on the bottom, trying to make repairs.”

  “That won’t wash,” Brannon said. “Water’s too deep for her to be on the bottom. Way too deep.”

  The two men, shipmates during World War II when Mike Brannon had commanded the U.S.S. Eelfish and John Olsen had been his Executive Officer during six harrowing submarine war patrols, looked at each other, each sensing the other’s concern.

  “Let’s go down to the Black Room,” Brannon said. He turned and stretched, reaching for the console of buttons on his desk top.

  “You don’t have to call them,” Olsen said. “I did that a little while ago. I asked Captain Steel to meet us there.”

  Brannon frowned. “You think that was necessary at this point?”

  “He’s an important man in the Navy, and still very powerful, Mike. He may not be able to contribute very much at this stage but if he isn’t kept informed he’ll raise so much hell that life won’t be worth living.”

  “I suppose you’re right,” Brannon said. He drained his coffee cup and stood up, his mind on the abrasive Captain Herman Steel. “I just don’t much like that man, John.”

  “Who does?” Olsen said as he unfolded his long, lean length from a sofa. “He doesn’t even have a wife or kids to like him. He’s just a mean, nasty, son of a bitch but he’s our son of a bitch and God help us.”

  The Black Room in Operations was well named. Three of the four walls were made of thick glass. There were no lights in the room except for one red light on a desk in the center of the room and a glowing ruby tip on the end of a microphone that sprouted out of the desk top on a long flexible stalk.

  “You took your time getting here.” The rasping voice of Captain Herman Steel was loud in the quiet dimness of the room. “I’ve got better things to do than to stand around and wait for people who can’t begin their day’s work until they’ve poisoned their systems with coffee. Caffeine is a drug. It dulls the brain. I see evidence of that every day when I have to deal with coffee-swilling, seagoing types.”

  “Good morning, Captain.” Mike Brannon’s voice gave no evidence that he was aware of the rudeness of Captain Steel’s remarks. “I thank you for coming down here on such short notice. I know you have a busy schedule.” As his eyes adjusted to the room’s gloom Brannon saw that Captain Steel was watching Brannon closely.

  Commander John Fencer, the officer in charge of the Black Room, moved out of the gloom to the desk. The red light illuminated his square, compact form and made deep shadows under his eyebrows. As he turned to face the three men the red light cast an eerie sheen on his close-cropped blond hair. He touched a finger to a button on the desk top.

  “Standing by, sir.” The voice came from a speaker built into the desk.

  “Please display the western half of the Mediterranean, the Strait of Gibraltar and the eastern half of the Atlantic,” Fencer said crisply. He turned with the others to face a glass wall that began to glow faintly and then lit up with a detailed nautical chart of the requested areas.

  “Please chart the course of the U.S.S. Sharkfin up to and through the Strait and beyond and lay down her designated course after her last position report.” A black line appeared in the Mediterranean and moved through the Strait of Gibraltar and out into the Atlantic, veering slightly to the north as the line moved out to the edge of the chart.

  “Thank you,” Fencer said. “Now indicate the points where Sharkfin made her known position reports.”

  A black X showed on the chart in the Mediterranean and another black X appeared on the chart on the course line to the west of the Strait. Fencer looked at a paper he held in his hand, tilting it to catch the dim light.

  “Assume speed to be twenty knots made good over the ground. Indicate where on the course line Sharkfin would have made her next position report.” A black O showed on the course line. The desk speaker rattled.

  “Sharkfin’s last position report was made just before she crossed the outboard edge of the SOSUS network, sir.”

  “What other information do you have from SOSUS, Commander?” Brannon turned to Captain Steel. “SOSUS is our network of ocean bottom sensors, Captain.”

  “I’m aware of that,” Steel snapped. Brannon shrugged and turned to watch as a red line appeared on the chart just south of the Strait of Gibraltar. The red line moved northward and then joined the black course line of the Sharkfin. The red line followed along the black line and then stopped. It reappeared, moving on a reverse course and veering to the southeast, away from the black line. The red line continued in that direction until it neared the west coast of Morocco, where it formed an elliptical loop.

  “The red line is the track of a submarine, not one of ours,” Fencer said. “The break in the red line is where the other submarine passed out of the SOSUS area. It then returned and proceeded to the area where it has been on patrol. That area is shown as the elliptical loop on the chart, Admiral.”

  “Do you have an ID on that other submarine?” Brannon asked.

  “Yes, sir. We have a positive footprint confirmed by visual observations off Algeria, in the Med. She’s a late model Soviet nuclear attack submarine. I must point out, Admiral, that Soviet submarines often follow our submarines and surface ships. Our submarines follow their ships. It’s a rather common practice, sir.”

  “But they don’t usually follow one of our ships that far, isn’t that so?”

  “Yes, sir,” Fencher answered.

  “Thank you, Commander. Please give my thanks to your staff.” Brannon turned to Captain Steel. “I’d like to see you in my office, sir, if you have time?”

  “I don’t have time,” Steel snapped. “A cong
ressional committee takes precedence over a vice admiral, I believe. I have to testify this morning. I can give you forty-five minutes this afternoon. At fourteen hundred. In my office.” He turned and left the Black Room, his steel-shod heels ringing on the tiled floor.

  Brannon’s Chief Yeoman brought fresh coffee into his office. He put a list of telephone calls to be answered on the desk and left.

  “Care to drug your system with a little poison?” Olsen asked as he poured the coffee. “The arrogance of that man! You’d think he flew three stars and that you were a snot-nosed ensign! I don’t know why you don’t lower the boom of rank on that man, Mike, I really don’t.”

  “Don’t let it bother you, John,” Brannon answered. He stirred his coffee slowly. “I don’t let it bother me and I’ve been exposed to him for three years. You’ve only had that pleasure for the last six months.

  “The Chief of Naval Operations gave me two major priorities when he assigned me to this job three years ago. One was to carry out the responsibilities of the office and God knows, that’s a heavy load. The other was to try, as subtly as I could, to restore the morale the submarine Navy has lost over the years and to increase the re-enlistment rate in nuclear submarines. The re-up rate had fallen to an all time low and cash bonuses for re-upping weren’t doing the job.

  “To carry out that second priority I had to begin countermanding a lot of the directives that Captain Steel had put out. The sort of directives that coddled the graduates of the nuclear power training schools he had set up. I had to do that in such a manner that Captain Steel didn’t get his ass in an uproar and go running to the Congress to demand my head on a platter alongside the head of the Chief of Naval Operations.

  “What did they teach us in War College? Know your enemy. Study your enemy. Understand him. I did that. I wound up not liking the man any more than I had but I did gain a lot of respect for him. He took an awful hazing at the Academy because of, well, call it ethnic bigotry. That same bigotry that Rickover had to deal with as a Jew. It gave the two men a common ground. That’s how they were able to work so closely together.

  “Rickover had only one weapon he could use against the bigotry — his brain. He used it. He took the reality of the atomic bomb and the concept of nuclear power from that bomb and he literally created the nuclear submarine Navy all by himself and Steel has done nearly as much bringing the Navy up to date.”

  “Don’t forget how he did that,” Olsen said dryly. “He sucked up a lot of powerful members of the Congress and when he had them in his hip pocket he sucked up to presidents, their White House staffs and to the press. He became a little tin god, untouchable.

  “Once the nuclear submarine Navy was underway he coddled, that’s your word and it’s a good one, he coddled the nuclear school graduates until damned good submariners who hadn’t qualified to go through his schools got so fed up they either didn’t re-enlist or if they had a lot of time to serve they tried their damndest to get off the nukes. I know of cases where some of them offered as much as a thousand bucks to get a swap. I had to live with that in my command in Pearl Harbor and it almost drove me crazy.”

  “I know,” Brannon said. “It’s taken me the better part of two years to get rid of the worst of the petty stuff. There’s still a hell of a lot to be done, a hell of a lot and it’s got to be done carefully and slowly.” He looked at Olsen, his dark blue eyes boring into the other man.

  “Why do you think I asked for you as my Number One when Roger retired? I want someone I can trust to carry on the work. Someone who can make this nuclear submarine Navy into the same sort of submarine Navy we had in World War II and after the war. An outfit that good men will try their damndest to get into and will never want to leave. Captain Steel has been passed over for admiral but I know that he’s got a scheme going that’s going to override the Navy’s rules and give him his big star. I’ve only got another year and a bit in this job and then they’ll pipe me over the side. They don’t let you stay past the age of sixty-two. Unless you’re Captain Steel, of course.”

  “He must hate you with a passion,” Olsen said slowly. “And he’ll hate me just as much. Fine shipmate you are, Mike, letting me in for this.”

  ‘I don’t think he hates anyone,” Mike Brannon said. “He’s too intelligent to waste emotion on hatred. I think he sees me as a problem he has to solve with his intellect.”

  “Oh, sure,” Olsen said. He refilled the coffee cups from the carafe. “I can name two or three admirals he got rid of. Damned good men who didn’t want to go, either. But he got nasty about them and they went.”

  “That was early, when he was starting to build his power base,” Brannon said. “He had to show his power so he could do the things that he wanted to do. He’s too good a politician now to try that sort of thing.” He pushed a button on his desk and his Chief Yeoman came in, a stenographic pad and pen in hand.

  “Would you call the director of the CIA and ask him to sit in with me in a meeting in Captain Steel’s office at fourteen hundred today? Tell him I apologize for the short notice but I consider the meeting important.”

  “Talk about politicians,” Olsen said, “Didn’t Steel try to torpedo Admiral Benson when the President proposed him as head of the CIA?”

  Brannon nodded. “That’s one of the very few times Mr. Steel ever ran up on a reef. Johnny Benson had a hell of a record as a pilot and as a carrier skipper and when he made admiral he showed his colors as an administrator.

  “I wasn’t playing politics asking him to sit in on the meeting. I’m worried about something else, John.” He rose and walked over to the window and stood looking down at the tree tops whipping in the wind.

  “We’ve never had a nuclear power plant failure in a submarine that I know of. We’ve got our hands full in Vietnam right now and what I’m damned afraid of, old friend, is that the Russians have decided to take advantage of our problems in Vietnam and restart the Cold War. Only this time the theatre isn’t Europe, it’s our area, the deep sea.”

  CHAPTER 3

  His long membership in the Politburo entitled Leonid Plotovsky to sit at the head of the table in the third-floor conference room in the KGB headquarters. The radiators hissed and rattled as the building engineers, alerted by Stefan Lubutkin that a senior member of the Politburo was in the building, sought to keep the third floor warm enough to prevent a complaint from the old Communist street fighter.

  To Plotovsky’s right sat two admirals of the Soviet Navy, their uniform jackets bedecked with metals. To his left, one chair removed from the end of the table, sat Submarine Commander Nikita Kovitz, his square face solemn, his deep-set eyes wary. His face showed the strain he had been under during the flight from Tripoli to Moscow. He had spent the long hours of the flight worrying about the meeting that was now about to begin.

  To Kovitz’s left sat Stefan Lubutkin, a pad of paper and a gold Cross pen on the table in front of him. Lubutkin kept his eyes lowered, looking at the pen, a gift from Igor Shevenko. Farther down the table Sophia Blovin, her prominent breasts encased in a tight sweater, sat next to Shevenko.

  Plotovsky cleared his throat and looked around. He saw the white enameled cuspidor that Shevenko had ordered Lubutkin to place beside his chair. He hawked noisily and spat into the cuspidor.

  “Begin,” he ordered.

  “As you know, honored Comrade,” Admiral Aleksandr Zurahv said, “we have been greatly concerned with the American capability to strike at almost every one of our cities with nuclear missiles fired from their submarines. We are vulnerable to that threat from every quadrant of the compass except the north.

  “We have devoted great energy to find a means to neutralize that threat. We have had some success. The development of our own nuclear ballistic missile submarines gives us a means to strike at American cities from the sea. Another success has been the building of a new class of nuclear attack submarines which are very fast and can go much deeper than previous submarines of that type.

  “We rea
lized that to make these new attack submarines a real threat to the American missile submarines we needed a new weapon, a torpedo, that would have great range and yet could be fired at a target close to our own submarines.” He paused and filled his great chest with air and let it out slowly.

  “I must at this point, Comrade Plotovsky, give you a little background that you might not have. The Americans have armed many of their torpedoes with nuclear warheads. We can do the same thing. When one does that the torpedo must be exploded at least six to eight miles away from the submarine that fired it or the submarine will be destroyed in the nuclear explosion. At such great distances one sacrifices accuracy.

  “We wanted a new type of torpedo that would seek out the enemy through the sounds the enemy ship makes. It should be armed with a non-nuclear warhead. Using a non-nuclear warhead means the torpedo can be fired at a target that is fairly close to the firing submarine, thus increasing accuracy to a high degree. We have developed such a torpedo with an entirely new type of sonar reading device that will not confuse the noise our submarine makes with the noise of the enemy submarine.” He paused as he saw Plotovsky’s forehead wrinkle.

  “Existing models of sound-seeking torpedoes have a weakness, Comrade. Often the torpedo, after being fired, would hear the noise its own submarine was making and would circle around and attack the ship that fired it. With our new torpedo we can program it ahead of time with the sound patterns of the ship that will be firing it and it will ignore those programmed noises and seek out the noise of an enemy ship, for example, an enemy submarine.”

  “Speak precisely,” Plotovsky said. He hawked and spat noisily into the cuspidor. Sophia Blovin shuddered slightly and Shevenko smiled to himself.