Counter Poised (16 page)
Authors: John Spikenard
The call came in to the Subron 16 headquarters at 2245 hours. Petty Officer Jones initially took the call and then called for the OOD after the caller demanded to talk to “whoever’s in charge over there.”
“Subron 16 Officer of the Day, Lieutenant Ware speaking.”
“This here’s Billy Kastle. I just got run over by one of your gawldang submarines in the Kings Bay Channel!”
“I’m sorry, sir, that’s not possible. We don’t do any arrivals or departures at night. All of our ship’s movements are during daylight hours.”
“Oh yeah, tell that to my friggin’ capsized
boat bass
.”
“Uh…do you mean bass boat?”
“Yeah, that’s what I mean…. what you just said.”
“Sir, have you been drinking tonight? I’ll have you know, it can be a federal crime to call in here and tie up official communication lines for no reason. If you capsized your fishing boat, you should call your dealer or a marina to come help you, not the U.S. Navy. If you call here again, we’ll report you to the district attorney. I hope I have made myself understood. Have a good evening.”
Lieutenant Ware hung up the phone. He stood thoughtfully looking at the phone in its cradle for about ten seconds, then turned to Petty Officer Jones and said, “Get the marine duty officer on the line. I want marine patrols to do a thorough recon of the lower base and report the locations and conditions of all submarines.”
Machinist Mate First Class Gordon Brown and his wife, Carolyn, left the
Louisiana
ship’s party at the Kings Bay Chief Petty Officers’ Club around 2250 hours. Sailors always like a good party, but when you only have three more days before an extended deployment, family time takes precedence. Married members of the crew were headed home with their wives to check on the kids in bed, send the babysitters home, and enjoy their own private time before the coming separation. As they drove out of the parking lot, Petty Officer Brown remembered that he had forgotten to retrieve a tape recorder he kept in his locker on the
Louisiana
.
“Oh, honey, I meant to bring home the tape recorder so you and the kids could record some messages for me to listen to while on patrol. It’s still in my locker on the boat. Let’s run by there. It will only take a minute for me to get it.”
They drove to the checkpoint separating the upper base, with family housing and various administration buildings, and the lower base, where the submarines were docked and maintained.
Pulling up to the checkpoint, a no-nonsense marine approached the driver’s window. “May I see some identification, sir?”
“Uh, sure.” Petty Officer Brown dug his ID out of his wallet and handed it to the marine. The marine checked the ID with his flashlight and then pointed the flashlight into Brown’s face to verify his identity.
“Thank you. And you, ma’am?”
Carolyn reached across the car and handed the marine her dependent’s ID card while Brown explained that she was his wife.
“Sorry. Only military and authorized personnel beyond this point. However, we have a waiting area next to the guard shack. Your wife can wait in there until you return.” Carolyn sighed at this little inconvenience of military life, got out of the car, and went into the waiting room and sat down.”
While Carolyn waited, Petty Officer Brown drove to the almost deserted parking lot next to refit wharf number 2 where the
Louisiana
was docked. Petty Officer Brown got out of the car and walked toward the two-man guard shack next to the chainlink fence, which ran across the entrance to the wharf. As he approached, he sensed something was wrong. There were always two Marine Corps guards at the shack, one inside and one outside with his weapon at the ready. Tonight, it looked like ten or fifteen combat-ready marines crowded around the tiny shack, getting a briefing from their squad leader.
Must be some sort of exercise, he decided. Gordon came up behind the two closest marines and asked, “Hey guys, what’s going on?”
The two startled marines whirled around, with one of them hitting him high and the other hitting him low. Gordon went down face first with a thud on the hard parking lot surface with 350 pounds of “marine” on top of him!
That’s when the remaining marines leveled their weapons at him, and the squad leader shouted, “Put your hands behind your head!
Now!
”
Gordon knew better than to argue with armed marines and did as he was told. “Hey, what the hell’s going on here?” he asked. His voice was muffled because his face was securely planted in the asphalt, and a marine’s knee was in his back as he was being handcuffed.
Finally, they pulled him to his feet, and the squad leader asked him, “Who are you, and where are our missing guards?”
“I’m Petty Officer First Class Gordon Brown, and I don’t know anything about your missing guards.”
“What are you doing here?”
“I’m a crewmember of the
Louisiana,
and we’re moored here. I was just returning to the boat to get a personal belonging. Captain Adams or anybody else on board can vouch for me.”
The squad leader growled, “Well now, Mister, that might be pretty hard to do, don’t you think?”
“What do you mean?” Gordon was extremely perplexed over this turn of events. It should have been a routine matter to retrieve his tape recorder, and the guard at the outer checkpoint hadn’t said anything about a security problem on the lower base.
“Take a look, Petty Officer,” as the squad leader pointed down the wharf.
Gordon looked down the wharf in the direction of the marine’s gesture. “What the—?” he gasped. As he looked down the wharf to where he should have seen the stern of the
Louisiana
, moored starboard side to the wharf, there was nothing but blackness. It was gone! “Oh no!” he shouted. “I missed my deployment!”
The marines sneered. The squad leader scoured at him and said, “No, you moron.
The Louisiana has been hijacked!
”
The Kings Bay Naval Submarine Base went into immediate lockdown. Base Commander Captain James Worley gave the order: Assume terrorists have somehow managed to hijack the
Louisiana
. A contingent of four hundred marines guarded the base at all times, and all were put into service to search for missing crewmembers and the two marine guards from the wharf who may have been injured or killed in the hijacking. The Naval Communication Station issued emergency calls to ships in the area to alert them of the events.
The entire scene could only be described as organized chaos. The marines were particularly frantic in their search for their two missing comrades.
“No marine is ever left behind in combat!” yelled the marine commander to his lieutenants. “This was an unbreakable rule, and if our marines from the wharf are in trouble, we’re going to find them!”
“Yes, sir! We’re searching all the buildings and alleyways in the vicinity of the wharf. Nothing’s been found yet,” answered one of the lieutenants.
“Well keep looking! And I want patrols to inspect the entire perimeter security fence—all of it—from one end of this base to the other. If bad guys got onto this base, they surely didn’t do it through one of our armed gates. Find out where they did!”
“Yes, sir!” they answered in unison.
Just then, the commander’s phone rang. He picked it up and listened intently. “Yes, sir. I understand. We’ll get right on it, sir!” He hung up the phone and quickly assessed the group of lieutenants standing before him. “Lieutenant Gill!”
“Yes, sir!”
“That was the base commander pointing out that the exit channel is lengthy and difficult to navigate. It should take the Louisiana at least two hours to reach open ocean, if they’re able to do it at all. Form a squad of marines and get down to the northern tip of Amelia Island on the double. With any luck, you should be able to intercept the
Louisiana
before she enters the Atlantic. Load up with whatever armament you need to stop her!”
“Yes, sir!” Lieutenant Gill responded as he ran out the door shouting orders to the assembled marines outside.
The marines grabbed a variety of weapons from their armory as they hurriedly jumped into Humvees and rushed to Amelia Island. This was about a forty-minute drive at high speed, but there was no closer point along the channel that was accessible by road. They arrived at Fort Clinch State Park, at the northern tip of the island, at 2345 hours and stormed the beach in reverse. Marines were used to coming ashore in amphibious landings, but now they were running
toward
the water! The squad had a mixture of anti-tank weapons, M-16 assault rifles, grenade launchers, an M249 light machine gun referred to as a SAW (Squad Automatic Weapon), and one M224 60mm lightweight mortar with twenty mortar rounds.
Lieutenant Gill visually searched the pitch-black waters of the channel with a pair of telescopic night-vision goggles. There was no sign of the
Louisiana
abeam their position or up river. Continuing his search down river, past the island, and out to sea, he spotted a dark object, which was possibly a submarine sail approximately a mile and a half to two miles into the Atlantic.
“There they go…we missed them! They must have passed here no more than ten minutes ago. The M-16s, antitank weapons, and grenade launchers are useless at this range. Get that mortar set up for max range, bearing…zero-eight-five degrees.”
Three Marines jumped to it and began setting up the M224 lightweight mortar.
“Corporal Gutierrez!”
“Yes, sir!”
“You got night-vision goggles?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Then get over here with that SAW and see if you can hit that sub with some harassing fire. They’re just about at max range for the SAW, but maybe we can make them turn and stay within mortar range for a little longer.”
Corporal Gutierrez opened fire with the SAW. The SAW was a handheld combat machine gun with a maximum effective range of about a mile. However, the bullets would actually fly about two and a quarter miles, but at that range, there was only a slight chance of actually hitting what you were aiming at. Still, with a cyclic rate of fire of 725 rounds per minute, it was sure to get the attention of anyone on the bridge of the
Louisiana
!
After passing the last spit of land on Amelia Island, the
Louisiana
maintained a course of due east and increased speed to all ahead full. The channel was dredged in a straight line for another twenty miles out to sea. The channel was deep enough for the
Louisiana
to run safely on the surface, but if they left the channel, she would run aground. The Atlantic waters would not be deep enough to submerge for almost two more hours.
The first two and a half miles of the Atlantic channel were protected on the north side by a stone jetty extending eastward from the southern tip of Cumberland Island and on the south side by a stone jetty extending eastward from the northern tip of Amelia Island.
“Captain, I can see the ends of the jetties!” reported Seaman Hayes, peering ahead into the pitch-blackness of the Atlantic with his night-vision goggles.
Captain Adams breathed a sigh of relief. “Very well!”
The two lookouts remained alert for any other ships or small boats in the area, but none were in sight.
Captain Adams decided it was time for a little celebration and pulled a cigar from the breast pocket of his uniform. He informed the two lookouts, “The smoking lamp is lit on the bridge!”
Removing a cigarette lighter from another pocket, Captain Adams ducked down below the top edge of the bridge to escape the wind and light his cigar. “White light…. Watch your eyes,” he announced to the lookouts so they would avert their eyes from the white flash of the lighter flame. One flash of a white light at night could cause their eyes to readjust to daylight conditions, and it would then take twenty minutes to fully regain their night vision.
Just then, Captain Adams heard a series of rapid
pssssts
overhead, and Seaman Hayes suddenly cried out in pain and crumpled to the deck of the bridge clutching his right arm. Blood flowed between his fingers and onto the deck.
“Olson, get down!” the captain shouted. “Those are bullets!”
Seaman Olson ducked below the top edge of the bridge and crouched next to the captain. Seeing the blood running from Hayes’s arm, Olson tore a strip of material off the bottom of his T-shirt and tied it around Hayes’s wounded arm as a makeshift tourniquet.
“Dang, Captain. If you had been standing up, that bullet might have hit
you
instead of Hayes’s arm!”
They could hear bullets splatting in the water around them. Then several of them impacted on the side of the
Louisiana
’s steel sail with a series of loud
donks
that could be heard throughout the submarine.
The call came from below, “What’s going on up there, Captain?”
“We’re being fired upon! All ahead FLANK!” And then after further thought, “XO, you have the conn. Use your GPS to keep us in the middle of the channel.”
“Aye-aye, sir. I have the conn!”
“Send somebody up here with a line. Seaman Hayes has been wounded in the arm, and we need to get him down the ladder and to sick bay.”
“Aye-aye, sir. Petty Officer MacKenzie is on the way up.”
Captain Adams was still wearing his night-vision goggles. He faced forward and poked his head up high enough to see over the top edge of the bridge. “Still clear ahead. We have to make sure there are no surface contacts in our path. Sonar is useless when we’re running at flank on the surface.”
“Sir!” Seaman Olson shouted. “That’s my job. If someone has to take the risk of putting himself in the line of fire, it should be me, sir, not you.” With that, Seaman Olson removed Seaman Hayes’s night-vision goggles and donned them himself.
“Thank you, Seaman Olson, but I think this is a risk we can share.” The captain’s legs began to ache from squatting below the edge of the bridge, and so he sat down on the deck in a position of relative safety. “Well, it would have been nice to make it all the way to blue water without being discovered, but I guess it was too much to ask. All we can do now is run like hell and hope they don’t get any attack aircraft on us before we can submerge. Then we need time to evade before they get the P-3s out here.”
Just then, there was a huge explosion a few hundred feet forward of their position, off the starboard side of the
Louisiana
.
“What the heck was
that
, sir?”
“Well, they have obviously gotten a bigger gun!”
“How are we going to evade that?”
“There’s nothing we can do except continue to run as fast as we can. The channel is too narrow here to make any evasive maneuvers. And it will be at least another hour and a half before we have the depth needed to submerge.”
Then another huge explosion. This one was several hundred feet off the port side, just slightly forward of the bridge.
“Captain, that one was on the other side!”
“Yes, it’s Fire Control 101—bracket the target in range and azimuth, and then walk it in with subsequent rounds for a kill. Luckily for us, it’s
manual
Fire Control 101. If they had an automatic, computerized fire control system on whatever they’re shooting at us, we’d be dead already!”
A third blast came close aboard off the starboard side.
“That was
close
, Captain!”
“Yes it was, but close doesn’t count. Those are small shells actually—maybe a mortar. They can’t hurt us unless they get a direct hit. And that’s unlikely because we’re close to their maximum range; it’s dark; and we’re moving at twenty-five knots. If they hit us, it would be a magic BB.”
A fourth blast came close aboard off the port side, just aft of the missile compartment.
“A magic BB?”
“Yeah, attack pilots talk about dodging anti-aircraft fire and surface-to-air missiles during a bombing run, but they recognize there is always the chance some farmer with a BB gun will shoot it into the air, and the BB will have just the right trajectory to cause it to hit the aircraft in just the right spot that it causes catastrophic failure of the engine or some other vital system. It’s a very
slight
chance, but mathematically, the chance is always there.”
“So these guys
could
hit us? Right?”
“Yes, they certainly could…and it would ruin our whole day!”
“Who do you think it is, sir?”
“I don’t know, but they have to be firing from the shore. I don’t hear any aircraft, and there are no surface contacts on the scope.”
A fifth blast hit right in the center of the
Louisiana
’s wake, just 20 feet or so aft of the screw.
“All right! Yes!” yelled the captain.
“Sir? That one was closer than any of them. Why are you cheering?”
“Don’t you see, Olson? Every blast has been farther and farther aft. That one was completely behind us.”
“Ah, so we’ve outrun them!”
“Exactly. We are officially out of range!”
A few more of the marine mortars fell harmlessly into the sea aft of the
Louisiana
as she made her way toward deep water.
Back at the base commander’s office at Kings Bay, Captain Worley grabbed the phone from his yeoman and screamed at the duty officer at NAS Jacksonville. “I need P-3s airborne
NOW!
As we speak, we have a renegade submarine making an escape at Saint Marys Entrance! I need P-3s and attack aircraft to converge on that position and destroy the
Louisiana!
”
Captain Worley listened for a few seconds and then incredulously yelled, “What?!? What do you mean it’s peacetime, and no forces are on alert?…You have to call the flight crews in from home?…Aircraft have to be serviced and readied for flight? You mean they’re not already?…And you have to get your base commander’s approval to draw live ordnance from the armory?…There’s nobody at the armory…you’ll have to call them in too?…Yes, by all means call the commander and wake his ass up!”
By the time armed P-3 patrol planes flew over the area, it was 0400 hours—several hours after the
Louisiana
submerged and slipped into the wide and deep Atlantic Ocean.
