Ghost Force (22 page)

The U.S. military was willing to assist Great Britain, willing to run the base at Ascension Island in a way that would make life much, much easier for the Task Force in terms of supplies and fueling, even assistance with missiles. But President Bedford, like President Reagan before him, would not commit American troops, and he would not commit U.S. Navy ships, and he would not commit any U.S. fighter attack aircraft.

After two or three weeks of hard negotiating, he accepted that the Brits needed help, but it would need to be arm’s-length help, which did not entail one single death of an American serviceman.

In truth, President Bedford felt somewhat guilty about the whole operation, because ExxonMobil was ultimately the biggest player in the Falklands oil business and would thus be the biggest benefactor of any victory achieved by the forces of Great Britain.

And there was also the question of the massive natural gas strike on the island of South Georgia. President Bedford understood that the Task Force could only attend to that after recapturing the Falklands themselves. And he had a disturbing vision of the Union Flag once more fluttering above Port Stanley, with the battered remnants of the Royal Navy Fleet, with all of its burned and wounded sailors. Then turning southeast to South Georgia in order to save 10,000 British national penguins and to wrest 400 billion cubic feet of ExxonMobil’s natural gas holdings from the hands of Argentinian brigands.

It was not at all fair. He knew that. But then nothing was, and the prospect of a couple of hundred body bags arriving back in the United States was more than he could risk. Because in the end it would cost him his Presidency. And, good guy or no, Paul Bedford was a politician, and ensuring his own survival came as natural to him as breathing.

He would do damn near anything to help the Brits, except take his country to war, which would be tantamount to throwing himself on his sword.

Jimmy Ramshawe understood the high stakes. He had read, over and over, the carefully constructed assessments of the forthcoming war by Ambassador Ryan Holland. He knew the heavy strength of the Argentinian fighter aircraft, the Mirage jets, the Skyhawks, and the Super-Etendards stationed at the newly active Rio Grande base.

And he knew that when battle commenced, the Argentinians would launch everything at the Royal Navy Fleet. It would be an overwhelming aerial armada, and yes, the Brits would down several of them. But they would not down them all, and many bombers would get through and probably blast the British Task Force out of the game. Because the Brits had insufficient air power.

And no one understood the real issues here more thoroughly than Admiral Arnold Morgan. Recalled from his winter vacation on the Caribbean island of Antigua he had arrived back in the States, on board
Air Force One
, and flatly refused to see the President until he had read the assessments by Ryan Holland and the summaries from the Pentagon.

“There’s quite enough political assholes briefing you on subjects they do not understand,” he grated, “without me joining them. Gimme two days and we’ll talk.”

That had been Friday, February 18, and since then the President and the former National Security Adviser had been in constant communication. And as ever, Arnold Morgan had brought a clarity to the situation, which the President simply could not ignore.

“I understand you do not want to take the United States to war,” said the Admiral. “But that is only the simple part of your problem. The difficult issue is that the Brits are plainly going to get beat. There’s no ifs, ands, or buts, they cannot win.

“I know they pulled it off last time. But they had infinitely bigger resources then. Many more ships, fifty percent more fighter aircraft, all of them Harriers, which were vastly superior to these no-radar GR9s they’re fucking about with. And above all they had replacements. Sandy Woodward lost two of his major Type-42 destroyers, but they brought out more.

“They cannot do so this time. They’re too small a fleet, too thinly stretched, and they cannot defend themselves against iron bombs. Quite frankly I’m astounded the Royal Navy agreed to go. As for the Army, God knows what’s going to happen to them. If they manage to land on the Falklands, to form an enclave preparing to march on the Argentinian positions, and the weather’s bad, they’ll get blasted out of sight, because those GR9s can’t stop an incoming enemy air assault.

“In my view we’re looking at the most shocking military defeat for Great Britain since Dunkirk.”

President Bedford walked across the Oval Office. He said nothing, but his concern was obvious. “Can we ignore it, if that happens?”

“Christ, no,” replied Arnold. “Refuse to help our best friends in the international community? A nation that stood shoulder to shoulder with us, twice, in the Gulf? Our one completely trustworthy ally in Europe? Hell, no. We can’t just leave them to it. It would be construed as something close to treachery. No one would ever count on us again.

“And, of course, the lion’s share of the oil and gas fields in the Falklands and South Georgia is held by ExxonMobil. That’s about as American as it gets.

“Mr. President, I obviously appreciate your problems with taking this nation into a war. But it might be a whole lot easier to join the Brits right off the bat, in the hope we may frighten the shit out of the Args and they’ll withdraw from the islands in the face of American fury.”

“Something tells me, Arnold, they’re not budging from that pile of rocks,” replied the President. “And I don’t think the oil and the wealth under the land is the true issue. I think they’re all nuts, and feel they are fighting some kind of a pampas jihad, battling for the birthright of every Argentinian. They’ve been simmering over their defeat in the Malvinas for nearly thirty years.

“They have said, plainly, they would have fought for the islands even if the oil had never been there. In my view the oil and gas are merely the casus belli. Sooner or later the Argentinians would have attacked the pathetically weak British defenses in the Falklands. And then battled ’til the last drop of blood to hold on to their conquest. I agree with you. The Brits, and in a sense us as well, have our backs to the goddamned wall trying to fight these fucking fanatics.”

Admiral Morgan nodded, in a clearly somber mood. He leaned back in his chair and suggested another pot of hot coffee. The President pressed a bell, then leaned forward to hear what the Admiral was about to say.

When he finally spoke, it was more like a father to a son than an ex–submarine commander to a President. “Paul,” he said, “you and I have known each other for a while. We both served in the United States Navy. And I want to ask you one question…”

“Shoot,” said the President.

“What would you do if you were in command of the Argentinian military and wanted to win this forthcoming war in the fastest possible time?”

“I’d take out the Royal Navy carrier, the one with the entire air force embarked on board.”

“Correct. So would I. In fact I’d aim to hit the
Ark Royal
and about a half dozen other warships. I’d launch a hundred fighter-bombers and send half of ’em after the
Ark Royal
. That way I’d put her on the bottom of the Atlantic about four hours after the start of the war.”

“Well, I guess they knew that last time, but they either could not or would not do it.”

“Last time,” replied Arnold, “they had only five Exocet air-to-surface missiles. And Admiral Woodward kept the
Hermes
well out of range during the daylight hours. This time it’s all different. The Arg Air Force is much bigger, much more efficient.

“They probably have two hundred Exocet missiles, because they’ve been stockpiling for this very day. However, the Brits have improved their antimissile systems and they might actually stop most of the Exocets, but they won’t stop the bombs from the A4s. They cannot stop them.

“The Args will take their losses and in the end break through, and smash the carrier. And that, ladies and gentlemen, will be the end of the game.”

“Christ,” said President Bedford. “Then what?”

“Then what, indeed?” said the Admiral. “But in my view that’s where we’re likely to stand four weeks from now. So we better start thinking about it.”

“You staying for lunch?”

“Depends what you’re offering. Tuna sandwiches, forget it. Decent steak and salad, count me in. Tell you what, I’ll even go for a roast beef on rye, so long as you run to mayonnaise and mustard. But we better start thinking. This Falklands bullshit gets to be more of a goddamned problem by the day.”

“If my wife catches me eating roast beef sandwiches with mayonnaise she’ll have a heart attack,” grinned the President.

“Then I guess we’d better be good boys, and have two nice little grilled steaks with grass and fucking dandelions,” confirmed Arnold.

“But what we really need to do is think. Because the day’s not far away when some comedian walks through that door and says the Brits just conceded defeat and left the Falkland Islands, which remain in Argentinian hands. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs wants to know where we stand, and the Chairman of ExxonMobil is fit to be tied.”

“That,” added Admiral Morgan, “would be a darned awkward moment.”

“You said that right,” said the President. “Let’s take a stroll along to the dining room, clear our heads and make a few decisions.”

“We may as well,” replied the Admiral. “Because when this happens, it’ll happen real quick and the lines will be very clearly drawn. Do we or do we not help the Brits? And the answer to that one must always be yes. The question is, what do we do?”

The two men stood up and pulled on their jackets. They left the Oval Office and walked along the West Wing corridor to the President’s small private dining room. The butler met them, and poured them each a glass of sparkling water, knowing that neither man ever touched alcohol during the day.

“Well, Oh Great Oracle,” said the President, “what will we do?”

“Dunno,” said Arnold, unhelpfully.

“You mean I sent the most expensive jet aircraft in the country halfway across the world to some goddamned Caribbean paradise to drag you off the beach with that goddess who married you, and at the end of it I get ‘Dunno.’ Jesus Christ.”

Arnold chuckled. “And the really bad news is I’ve just spent three weeks thinking about nothing else, night and day, and it’s still ‘Dunno.’

“However,” he added, uttering the one single word the President was waiting to hear, “I know what we
cannot
do, under any circum
stances. And that’s rustle up fifty thousand troops and somehow storm the place, with all guns firing, air, sea, and land.”

“Why not?” said the President, with synthetic innocence.

“Because we don’t even own the goddamned islands, and we would be universally accused of going to war over that oil and gas, which is a charge we’ve heard quite enough of for one century.”

“True,” said the President. “Well, what’s left?”

“Dunno,” said Arnold.

“Jesus Christ,” added the President.

“Tell you the truth,” replied the Admiral, “I’d really like time to think about this, and I’d like to have a talk with some of the Pentagon guys, in particular the Special Forces officers.

“Meanwhile, there is something that concerns me. And I’ve been trying not to dwell on it…but in the last few months we have been exercised by two substantial events.

“The first was the murder in the White House of old Mikhallo whatsisname, the Siberian. And that was also a part of what the CIA believes was a massacre of Siberian oilmen and politicians in Yekaterinburg.

“From that we must deduce that somehow Moscow is hugely concerned to the point of neurosis about developments in Siberia, and the possibility that in the end they may prefer to sell their oil not to Moscow but to their good and wealthy southern neighbors in China.

“The second great event was the Argentine invasion of the Falkland Islands, conducted with scarcely a warning, with massive confidence, and total disregard for the possibility of a vicious counterattack by the Brits.

“Both of those drastic scenarios were conducted within weeks of each other. They were brutal, ruthless, and betrayed no apparent fear of consequences. And both of them were about oil and gas—the West Siberian reserves, which Moscow wants but may not keep. And the Falkland and South Georgia reserves, which Argentina has grabbed.

“I’d sure hate to think that somehow those two events were in any way connected. Because that would sure as hell be bigger trouble than either you or I, or anyone else, could ever have imagined.”

The Admiral’s global view invariably astounded President Bedford. And the two naturally garrulous men slowly ate their steaks and “fucking dandelions” in somber, uncharacteristic contemplation.

HMS
Ark Royal
crossed the fifty-degree line of latitude in the western reaches of the English Channel, twenty miles south of the ancient Royal Navy city of Plymouth. The weather was foul, blowing a force-eight gale, and the carrier pitched through ten-foot waves, the crests of which were beginning to topple, with dense streaks of foam marking the direction of the wind.

Rain that had swept up the Atlantic in the approaching depression was light but squally, sweeping across the deck in lashing bursts against the base of the carrier’s island. The two Type-45s
Daring
and
Dauntless
ran a half mile off the carrier’s port and starboard bow.

Two miles astern of the
Ark Royal
there were three of the frigate squadron,
Grafton
,
Iron Duke
, and
Richmond
, in company with a massive fleet oiler. Captain Farmer had the
Ocean
positioned three miles off the carrier’s port quarter, with Jonathon Jempson’s
Albion
a mile astern, all of them making twenty knots.

Several hundred miles out in front were two 6,500-ton nuclear submarines,
Astute
and
Ambush
, both recently built in Barrow-in-Furness, as the newest, state-of-the-art improvements on the old Trafalgar class.

Single-shafters with two turbines apiece, they each carried submerged-launch Tomahawk cruise missiles and thirty Spearfish torpedoes. They were equipped with the outstanding Thompson Marconi 2076 sonars, with towed array, and were probably the quietest attack submarines in the deep, quieter even than
Viper K-157
, which right now was still fighting its way down the coast of Norway.

The
Astute
was commanded by Captain Simon Compton, and the
Ambush
by Commander Robert Hacking, both men experts in navigation and weaponry.

The surface Battle Group pushed on down the English Channel toward the Atlantic, through the now driving rain and plainly worsening weather. It was not yet storm force, but up ahead to the southwest the skies were darker, and the clouds seemed lower, and the warships seemed to brace for the rough seas before them.

Admiral Holbrook had planned to visit the ships one by one and address the crews, but he elected to wait until the weather improved before making a succession of windswept helicopter landings on the flight decks of his various escorts.

They were in open water now, and the waves were beginning to break over the bows of the frigates, but the forecast was pretty good, and the Admiral reckoned they’d be clear of the stormy conditions within twelve hours.

With the coast of England finally slipping away behind them, the little fleet suffered its first equipment problem. Captain Yates’s destroyer, the
Daring
, developed a minor rattle in her gearbox, which was disconcerting though not life-threatening.

The
Daring
’s engineering team thought it was minor, and they elected to keep going until they reached calmer waters, where they were certain they could conduct the repair. All of the ships carried some spare parts for the routine running of a warship in rough seas at moderate to high speeds. The engineers would not, however, wish to cope with anything much worse while so far from a dockyard.

One day later, on Saturday morning, March 19, they steamed out of the rain and gloom into much calmer waters and blue skies that would, with luck, hold fair for the thousand-mile run down to the Azores, which rise up from the seabed only just short of the thirty-degree line of longitude, the halfway point across the North 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 train
ing 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.

Thirty-six hours later, on the morning of March 25, Lt. Commander Jimmy Ramshawe set a half hour aside to scroll through the pages on the NSA’s Internet system. Twenty minutes later he was staring at the message from County Kerry. And the fifth line stopped him dead, because it contained the word
submarine
—and the teaching of Arnold Morgan cascaded into his mind: