NimitzClass Read online

  “No. He told me it was empty too.”

  “Anyway, you have plan for straits?”

  “I have no requirements whatsoever, except we do not get caught. You’ve driven through here many times I’m sure.”

  “Yes, but long time back—and Americans have better surveillance now. They got suspicion last time. Maybe satellite photo. Now how you make another miracle, Ben? How we go through in secret?”

  “Basically, Georgy, old man, we have only one choice. Very slowly, very quietly, and hope to God no one really sees us.”

  “No problem with that. I agree. You expect message from boss?”

  “Not yet. Not until the final phase. Possibly not till the fuel turns up. Possibly not at all.”

  “Okay. I make crew accept story. But this is long journey.”

  “They’ll be well rewarded in the end. From here on, we must take extra care again. We’ll stay in silent drive at five knots for forty-eight hours. Ultra quiet, please, Georgy.”

  061200MAY02. Fort Meade, Maryland.

  Vice Admiral Arnold Morgan, Director of the National Security Agency, a short, hard-eyed Texan with grimly trimmed white hair, sat alone behind his desk. He was normally on three telephones, growling orders which would be relayed by satellite to his agencies throughout the world. The admiral’s reputation was that of a voracious and dangerous spider at the center of a vast electronic web of Navy intelligence resources. Most of the time he just watched. But when Admiral Morgan spoke, men jumped, on four continents and the oceans surrounding them.

  Right now the admiral was curious. Open wide on his desk was the weighty current edition ofJane’s Fighting Ships , the British bible of the world’s warships. He had not expected it to provide an answer, nor did it. Neither did three other highly classified Naval reference books which were also piled around his desk.

  Late on the previous evening he had received a satellite message. It had not been urgent, or alarming, or even particularly informative. It was, nonetheless, distinctly unsatisfactory, and something about it irritated Arnold Morgan. The story was simple: “Gibraltar facility picked up very short transient contact on very quiet vessel at 050438MAY02. Insufficient hard copy data for firm classification—aural, compressed cavitation, one shaft, five blades, probably non-nuclear. No information on friendly transits relate.”

  Admiral Morgan understood that someone with very sharp ears on the other side of the Atlantic had heard a noise in the water, for a matter of twenty to thirty seconds, which sounded a lot like a non-nuclear-powered submarine. It was propelling on a single shaft with a five-bladed screw. It was probably well off-shore, almost certainly below the surface, and had made the noise either by speeding up somewhat carelessly, or putting her screw too shallow for the revolutions set. Perhaps she had momentarily lost trim, pondered the admiral, himself an ex-submariner, ex–nuclear commander.

  In the good old days it was possible to discern a Soviet-built boat because of their insistence on six-bladed props when Western nations went for odd numbers of blades, three, five, or seven. If Admiral Morgan closed his eyes tightly, and cast his thoughts back twenty-three years to his own days in the sonar room of a Boomer, deep in his mind he could hear again the distinctive “swish—swish—swish—swish—swish—swish”of the blades on a distant old Soviet Navy submarine.

  They used to be hard to miss but it was much more difficult nowadays to identify any submarine. Even modern, quiet fishing trawlers can make this kind of noise if they speed up suddenly and inadvertently hassle the haddock. But Admiral Morgan had no interest in fishermen. The only furtive, five-bladed fucker he would worry about was a submarine. And he could sort that out pretty quickly.

  Admiral Morgan was a living, snarling encyclopedia when it came to checking out foreign warships. He wanted to know what kind of contact it was, who the hell was driving it, and where the hell was it going. The merest possibility of a submarine had that effect on him.

  It took about five minutes on the computer for the admiral to figure out that it could not have been an American or British boat. A bit longer to find out that it could not have been French or Spanish either.

  Israel had one submarine of Russian origin in service that he knew of, but there was a record of it entering the Atlantic four weeks ago. So it was not them. The goddamned Iranians had three they bought from Russia, but they had all been accounted for in the Gulf recently—thoroughly enough for him to know that none of them were that far from home.

  He knew the Indonesians had some old and defunct Russian boats, which were unlikely to have cleared the breakwater in safety. Even the Algerians had a couple of Kilos, brand new in 1995, but both were back in refit, he knew, in St. Petersburg. The Poles had one in the Baltic, the Rumanians one in the Black Sea, both out of action and both recently observed. The Libyan’s Kilo fared no better than its six “Foxtrot” predecessors, two of which sank alongside—it had not been to sea for a year. The Chinese had quite a few, more modern designs. But none of these people had any known business in the strait.

  He had already played a long shot and placed a call to his opposite number in the Russian Navy in Moscow. It was all very cheerful these days, and without hesitation, the Russians told him they had not sent any of their diesel boats through the strait for eighteen months.

  In fact the only Russian diesel unaccounted for was lost in an accident in the Black Sea about three weeks ago, and was right now resting in seven hundred meters of water with everyone in it dead. They were still searching, but had found her special indicator buoys drifting, and a small amount of debris.

  All of which baffled Admiral Morgan. He kept repeating to himself the same scenario. If one of the U.S. Navy’s sonar wizards said he had heard a quiet propeller, then the admiral believed there had to be a suspicion in that operator’s mind.

  Only a few people can evenhear these subtle, distant sound waves, and even fewer can recognize them. And if his man in Gibraltar said he had heard one shaft and five blades, then that was what he had heard. But this guy had not only bothered to report it, he had also included a veiled personal suspicion that it was “probably non-nuclear.”

  “I think our man suspects it was underwater,” Morgan thought. “The contact was transient. And the trouble with all transients is their similarity to code-breaking…if you have just a small sample you don’t really know much. Just enough to want to know a bit more. Like what precisely was the type of boat, and who was driving the bastard?

  “But our new friends in Moscow are saying no—and why should they lie? Not only are we at peace, we could not give a rat’s ass if they drove a diesel up and down the Atlantic all year, calling at all stations. If they pitched up in Norfolk, Virginia, hell we’d probably give ’em a cup of coffee.”

  When he had first seen the message, he did not understand. And he still didn’t. The facts seemed mutually exclusive—a mental outcome guaranteed to infuriate him.

  At fifty-seven, Arnold Morgan was a driven man, a ruthless demander of matching, orderly facts. Admiral Morgan did not accept Chaos Theory. This character trait had cost him two marriages, and strained his relationships with his children. The Navy regarded him as the best intelligence chief they’d ever had. If there was one single criticism of him, it was simply that he was inclined to become over involved in what some people considered petty details.

  “I do not accept incompatible facts,” he said firmly to the still-empty room. “That, gentlemen, is a matter of principle.” And with that, he consigned the signal and all of the results of his many questions about the phantom contact to his highly efficient electronic filing system. His only comfort lay in the knowledge that if indeed it was a submarine, it would turn up somewhere, sometime, and the problem would be resolved.

  Until then, he decided to put it down as a kind of fishy snafu. And the admiral detested all snafus. Especially underwater snafus, because those were, unfailingly, both expensive and embarrassing.

  “So perhaps it was,” he announ
ced to the empty room, “just a fishing trawler. Perhaps our man was just a tiny bit overzealous. Hmmmm.”

  Then, visibly brightening, “Unless some bastard’s lying.”

  2

  271300MAY02. 6S, 73E.

  Course 340. Speed 12.

  SURROUNDED BY HIS MOST SENIOR STAFF, REAR ADMIRALZack Carson, one of the few high-ranking, seagoing officers in the United States Navy, was methodically grappling with a zillion details involving the waging of war on a scale never before witnessed on this particular planet.

  He was seated in a king-sized leather chair in the Flag Operations Room on the third floor of the island, thirty feet above the five-acre flight deck of his flagship, the USSThomas Jefferson .

  They had moved generally WNW during the past two weeks in the Indian Ocean, and the huge aircraft carrier was now proceeding close-north of the remote tropical atoll of Diego Garcia. To the NNE, 850 miles away, stood the headland of Cape Comorin, the southernmost point of the Indian subcontinent. If, however, theThomas Jefferson followed the polestar due north she would steam for 1,600 miles before entering her patrol zone in the Arabian Sea. Deep blue waters, shark-infested, some 450 miles due west of the teeming seaport of Bombay.

  Admiral Carson was due on station in those tense, somewhat unpredictable seas eight days from now. His massive presence there, at the very gateway to the Gulf of Iran, served as a warning to all who might challenge the right of the world’s tankers to ply their trade along the sprawling crude oil terminals which stretch from the Strait of Hormuz to Iraq. His presence would also, unavoidably, deepen the already simmering hatred toward the United States by much of the Islamic nation. But that goes with the territory of a Battle Group Commander. And the six-foot-four-inch Kansan Zack Carson, at the age of fifty-six, had long since accepted that not everyone flew a flag of pure joy when his giant ship hove into sight along the horizons of the Middle East.

  At his command were cruise missiles, guided weapons of all types to attack targets above, on, and under the water, a small all-purpose Air Force, whole batteries of artillery, to send in thousands of shells per hour. And stored deep in the bowels of this great ship, and in his two nuclear submarines, other missiles—missiles of such colossal destructive force, not even Zack Carson was comfortable contemplating the consequences of deploying them. The admiral, and his masters in the Pentagon, could, if instructed, damn nearly destroy much of the world. In very short order.

  That was not an actual part of his plan, but a U.S. Battle Group must, at all times, be right at the peak of the warfare efficiency curve, which heads steeply upward according to the value of the hardware. The view of the Chiefs of Staff, not to mention the hard-nosed Southwestern Republican currently occupying the White House, was, broadly, “at that price it better work, and it better work real good, right on time, no bullshit.”

  Thus, at this particular moment, in deep conversation with his fellow Kansan, Captain Jack Baldridge, Admiral Carson was making doubly sure that the previous month’s intense battle training programs had transformed this ship, and all of the six thousand men who sailed in her, into the best it was possible to be. From the cooks to the navigators, from the sonar men to the guys in the print room, from the firefighters to the fighter pilots, the radar wizards to the missile loaders—the Battle Group commander could afford no weak link in his chain of command, no suspect system, no indecisive officer, zero inefficiency. This was the very frontier of warfare, the bottom line of the U.S. offense and defensive charter. The admiral, reverting easily to the more relaxed vernacular of the prairies, often reminded his closest staff officers in the following way, “A long time before the buck comes to a stop in the Oval Office, someone’s gonna shove it right up my rear end.”

  For weeks on end, the admiral had driven the entire Battle Group to the heights of their abilities. Twice a day he sent out communications detailing exercises which ultimately involved all sixteen thousand of the men serving in the dozen ships in the group.

  There was endless training for the Aegis missile cruisers—training which ensured they really could knock out any incoming missiles, even traveling at twice the speed of sound.

  The submarine commanders, ranging far out in front of the Battle Group, were made firmly aware of the admiral’s special interest in their work. He believed not only in the offensive capability of these search-and-strike underwater killers—but in their critical role as the group’s frontline anti-submarine weapon; the destroyer of their own counterparts. After several weeks out here, practicing and patrolling endlessly in the deep waters of the Indian Ocean, the phrase “deadly accurate” really did apply to all of their systems, but especially the lethal wire-guided torpedoes, equally effective against ship or submarine.

  Zack Carson, a surface ship man and, in his youth, a former aviator, had often wished he had been a submariner. He was just never sure he could have passed the searching examination process these sailor-scientists require before taking command of a U.S. Navy SSN…the degree in marine engineering, the electronics, the mechanics, the hydrology, the deep navigational skills, and the nuclear engineering courses. These days the underwater commanders represented the elite of all Western navies, and Zack Carson was kind of uncertain that he possessed quite the academic grasp the submarine service required of its captains.

  He had made his name as a battle line strategist, an expert in aviation, missiles, and gunnery, a tactician on the grand scale, a commanding officer who painted in broad, sure strokes, but never strayed too far from the minutiae of his trade. Everyone liked Admiral Carson, because he still sounded like some kind of a gunslinger from the High Plains of Kansas—as indeed a couple of his direct ancestors had been—and he displayed a deliberate, laid-back nonchalance under pressure that was plainly deceptive, but nonetheless an enviable quality in any ship’s operational center.

  All of which was pretty impressive from a Midwestern farm boy who had grown up in the little town of Tribune, in the middle of the endless wheat prairies of Greeley County, hard by the western state border where Kansas joins Colorado. These lands summon up the true meaning of the word “nowhere.” Flat, sprawling Greeley County contains only two small towns in its entire 620 square miles. Both of them are set along the little local highway, Route 156, which starts 180 miles to the east near the great bend of the Arkansas River.

  These are the remotest American lands, with populations of about one hundredth the average for rural U.S.A. Miles and miles and miles of wheat and grassland, flat, windswept, and, in an uncluttered way, made glorious by the sheer absence of spectacle. Out here, under the big sky, untouched by modern intrusion, names like Elija, Zachariah, Jethro, Willard, Jeremiah, and Ethan were commonplace. Zachariah Carson was the tall, lean son of Jethro Carson, who farmed thousands of acres of the prairie, as his immediate forefathers had also done.

  Perhaps it was a young lifetime spent watching the wind sweep across the endless acres of gently waving wheat which gave Zack Carson his early longing for the ocean. But for as long as he could remember, he had an uncomplicated yearning to join the United States Navy. There were two other brothers in the family to carry on farming the wheat, but it almost broke old Jethro Carson’s heart when his oldest boy packed his bags at the age of eighteen and set off across the country from the most landlocked state in America for the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis, Maryland. His entry into the historic Navy school represented the biggest teaching triumph in the entire history of Tribune High.

  With his gangling walk, crooked grin, and down-home way of expressing himself, Zack Carson proceeded to stun successive Navy examination boards with his grasp of the most intricate details of warfare at sea. He gave up Navy aviation after ditching a faulty jet fighter over the side of a carrier, when he was just twenty-six, and he commanded a frigate before his thirty-sixth birthday. He had charge of a guided missile destroyer at thirty-nine, and by the time he was forty-eight, Zack was captain of the giant carrierDwight D. Eisenhower —named after another Kansas b
oy. This was most unusual for an aviator turned “black shoe”—but Zack was pretty unusual, too, and recognized as such.

  They promoted him to rear admiral within four years and in the year 2000 awarded him the honor of the newest U.S. aircraft carrier, theThomas Jefferson , for his flagship. Within a few months he requested as his Battle Group Operations Officer another Kansas farm boy, Captain Jack Baldridge, whose hometown of Burdett was about 120 miles from Tribune, straight along Route 156. Like Jack he was married with two daughters, and both families now lived in San Diego, California, where theThomas Jefferson was based.

  Baldridge was a barrel-chested disciplinarian who reacted swiftly and decisively to any possible threat or danger to his ships. Admiral Carson was more inclined to give a few “Uh-huhs.” Under pressure, Admiral Carson was cautious, thoughtful, cynical, and superstitious. He was also absolutely decisive.

  They made a truly formidable team. When either of them spoke, the Combat Information Center jumped. Because when Captain Baldridge issued an order, that was an order from the admiral himself. And in a big-deck carrier that was an order that was seldom questioned.

  Right now the two of them were discussing the possibility of yet another heavy night-flying program, as part of the major upcoming war game against the U.S. Battle Group they would soon be replacing in the Arabian Sea. The battle lines were now being drawn, and as ever these apparent practice sessions were taken with immense seriousness by all concerned. Because this was their opportunity to hone their battle skills in a theater of almost real war.

  These exercises are both career breakers and makers. They are blisteringly expensive, and represent the only way the U.S. Navy has to simulate battle conditions, and to assess various key players and how they will react to the heightened speed and danger of the exercise. In the forthcoming combat zone, theThomas Jefferson would attack the resident, and now outgoing, Battle Group centered on her fellow Nimitz-Class 100,000-tonner, the USSGeorge Washington .