Kilo Class (11 page)

“No, ma’am.”

Her heart fell. “How long, Lieutenant?”

“Right now, he’s expected to return toward the end of January. We’re looking at a five-week window.”

“A five-week widow,” she murmured. And then, “Thank you, Lieutenant. Please tell my husband I’ll be thinking of him.”

“I certainly will, ma’am.”

“Oh, Lieutenant, are you going with him?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Tell him to drive carefully, won’t you?”

“I sure will, ma’am.”

At which point Jo Dunning put the phone down and wept. Just as she had wept last summer when all of their plans were ruined because of another operation at the end of the world down in the South Atlantic. Except she had not known at the time
where
he was.

And as she sat now in her father-in-law’s wooden rocking chair, staring out at the sunlit waters of Cotuit Bay, she could think only of the terrible, deep waters in which she knew her husband worked, and the monstrous, black seven-thousand-ton nuclear killing machine of which Boomer Dunning was the acknowledged master. No one, in all of military history, had ever hated anything quite so badly as the lovely Jo Dunning loathed the United States Navy at this particular moment. Her tears were tears of desolation. And fear. No one ever said it, but everyone even remotely connected with the submarine service knew the dangers and the anxiety that pervaded every family whose father, son, or brother helped to operate America’s big, underwater strike force.

It was not that she couldn’t cope with it. Jo thought she could cope with anything, even, if it came to it, the death of her husband in the service of their country. It was only the hateful unfairness of it all. Why Boomer, why her wonderful sailor-husband, and not someone else? But she already knew the answer to that. She’d been told often enough. Because he was the best. And one day he was going to be a captain, and then an admiral, and then, who knows, she said aloud, “President of the Universe for all I care.”

Jo composed herself quickly. At thirty-eight, she still looked perfect, and she was still dewy-eyed over her husband. She adored even the sight of him in uniform, this handsome, commanding man, about a half inch taller than six feet, blond hair, massive arms and tree trunk legs. Boomer looked like what he was: an ocean-racing yachtsman when he had the chance, a man who was an America’s Cup-class sailor, a true son of the sea. His father had been very much the same but had left the Navy after World War II, as a lieutenant commander, and proceeded to make a great deal of money with a Boston stockbroking firm.

Jefferson Dunning was close to eighty years of age and was busily spending some of it wintering on a Caribbean Island. But he had deeded the house on the Cape to Boomer years previously, in order to skate around heavy Massachusetts inheritance taxes. Boomer was a better sailor than his father had been, just, but was not as financially astute. He would have no need to be. He would inherit a reasonable amount of money, and Jo herself would one day share with her two sisters the legacy of the family boatyard up in New Hampshire.

She was a curious dichotomy, Mrs. Boomer Dunning. A lifelong dinghy sailor, she was an ace racing the local Cotuit skiffs, and she could handle any powerboat around. She’d been doing that all of her life. Jo was, however, a lousy driver. Which was why at this moment the Boston Whaler was jammed into the side of the Dunning garage. Jo judged water distance better than land distance.

She was never really comfortable amid the glitz of the acting trade, although her looks might have carried her far. She had quite enjoyed living in New York and attending acting classes. But her first television soap opera part had been, well, a bit wooden. The Hollywood producer who had once written of Fred Astaire, “Can’t act, can’t sing, can dance a bit,” would probably have remained unimpressed had he studied the young Jo Donaghue in screen action.

She had a couple more chances, including another soap, which ran for eight weeks, after which things went quiet. At twenty-three, she was going nowhere. In the spring of 1988 she was introduced to a young Navy lieutenant at a yacht club dance in Maine. Cale Dunning had just crewed on a big ketch up from the Chesapeake. He was from Cape Cod, and they were married within five months, just before he decided to spend his career in the submarine service.

Even now, on this sunny but now depressing Saturday morning, Jo would not have traded one day of her life as Mrs. Dunning for the leading role in any movie. All she wanted was for him to come home for Christmas. And that was not going to happen.

Their own house was in Groton, Connecticut, near the big US submarine base, New London. But she and their two daughters, Kathy, thirteen, and Jane, eleven, often came up to their grandparents’ Cape Cod house during the winter when it was empty. The whole family had been together here during the Thanksgiving holiday three weeks ago, and this particular weekend had been arranged for Jo to put the house in shape for Christmas next week. Now none of that would be necessary. Jo and the girls might as well stay in Groton, where there were other Naval families close by, old friends who would invite them to parties where no one would mention the absence of Commander Dunning. Special Ops were like that. They cast a cloak of secrecy over their participants, and all of those on the fringes. Jo knew she could be talking to a colleague of Boomer’s who had at least some vague idea of where Boomer was on Christmas Day, but that nothing would ever be mentioned between them. That was how it was, and she was not some skittish television actress anymore. She was the wife of a US Navy nuclear submarine commander, and she might one day be the wife of an Admiral.

Jo wandered outside to retrieve the stupid fishing rod and to work out a way to remove the Boston Whaler from the right-side garage wall without driving the Jeep into the other side. She stepped once more out into the cool bright December morning and gazed along the water, up the narrows and into North Bay. There was still some foliage left on the trees lining the opposite shore of Oyster Harbors, since it had been a warm and late fall. The reds and golds on the Cotuit side were brighter in the midmorning sunlight, and the flat, calm, empty channel out beyond the open harbor made her think, as she had many times before, that this place was indeed paradise.

The sailing boats and the fishing boats were almost all put away for the winter now, except for those that belonged to the Cotuit Oyster Company. The only sign of marine movement was the big Gillmore Marine tugboat
Eileen G
, now chugging quietly out of the Seapuit River, beneath the steady grip of the master dock-builder and waterman George Gillmore himself.

Soon the winter would set in here, and North Bay might freeze right over, and docks might move in the ice. George Gillmore would soon be working overtime to protect the waterfront bulkheads and piers all around these bays. The high winds would swing in from the Canadian northwest, and snow would cover the summer gardens, and the spring would be cold, and wet, and late coming. But the weather neither inspired nor depressed Jo Dunning. She considered this place to be paradise in wind, rain, or shine. And rarely a day went by without her thinking of the years she and Boomer would have here together when, finally, he retired from the Navy.

Jo stared out to the horizon, across Deadneck Island to the waters of Nantucket Sound. Her husband might well be driving
Columbia
in the near future out into what he cheerfully called his “beat,” the vastness of the North Atlantic and the terrible depths of an ocean that had petulantly swallowed the
Titanic
, and a thousand others, not so very far from these tranquil bays. She looked back out across the harbor and waved as the tugboat went by. George replied with a resounding, short, double blast on the horn, which scattered the cormorants along the docks. Basically, George Gillmore did not require that much of an excuse to make
Eileen G
sound like his own fighting ship. Boomer always said the tall, bearded Gillmore might have made a pretty good captain of a Naval warship.

As Jo reflected, Boomer himself was in private conference in a specially fitted and specially guarded Operations room, euphemistically called a “Limited Access Cell,” at SUBLANT HQ, which would serve as the command center for all the US dealings with the Chinese submarines.

Here the US Navy Black Ops team would finalize everything — their various positions on the ocean, their patrol areas, their cycle of operations, their dates, their orders, their rules of engagement, their overall targeting, their charts — everything required for the efficient management of a small force of submarines with a special tasking.

Even the signals left this room carefully encrypted. If you took papers in — any papers — you couldn’t take them out again without special signatures and meticulous logging. Armed guards stood before the doors. No one was allowed access without a special pass. And these were issued only on a need-to-know basis. Even executive officers and navigation officers were not permitted inside, except for prepatrol and postpatrol briefings. Four communications staff kept watch behind those doors at all times.

The successor to Admiral Mulligan, and now the new Commander of the Atlantic Submarine Force, was Admiral John F. Dixon, an austere and rather forbidding man with a narrow, serious face, renowned for his meticulous preparation. This severe appearance, however, shielded his subordinates from a reckless, youthful past, which had almost caused his removal from the US Naval Academy. There was something about a large bronze statue of a departed admiral, which had been, mysteriously, filled with water by an unknown expert with a small drill; the statue peed for three days from a tiny hole in the front of its dress trousers.

Admiral Mulligan always called Admiral Dixon “Johnny.” The statue incident was rarely, if ever, recalled, but there were those who felt that its distant, hysterical memory among those senior officers who were there might yet prevent the efficient submarine chief from making it to CNO.

Before the small meeting began, Commander Dunning was requesting that despite the long mission he was about to undertake, he still be guaranteed the one-month sabbatical he had been granted throughout the month of February. Admiral Dixon approved the request.
Columbia
was due in for maintenance that month anyway, and he knew that the Cape Cod commander would be away for four weeks. Should there be a foul-up in the North Atlantic it was unlikely that
Columbia
would be required to pursue its quarry around the world, and Admiral Dixon did not anticipate a foul-up.

“You going away with Jo?” he asked.

“Yessir. I’m sailing a sixty-five-foot ketch from Cape Town to Tasmania. We’ll probably have a couple of friends with us, and there’ll be a couple of deckhands and a cook to make it all bearable. We’re really looking forward to it. I’ve never been through those southern waters. And we haven’t had a good vacation for years.”

“Blows a bit, down there.”

“It’d better. I don’t have that long!”

Admiral Dixon smiled, and the two submariners walked over to the chart desk, a big, sloping, high, polished table, which had belonged to the Admiral’s grandfather. On the ledge below were sets of dividers, steel rulers, and a calculator. Spread upon the surface beneath the desk light was a detailed map of the northeastern Atlantic, placed on top of a large map of the world. He was a man who had given the subject a lot of thought.

“Okay, gentlemen,” Admiral Dixon began, “to bring us all up-to-date. Until a few days ago we expected the two Kilos to make their journey home to China on the surface. We now have reason to think that the submarines will dive close outside their workup base, then proceed west out of the Barents Sea along the Russian coastline. We expect them to run on down past the North Cape, off Norway, and straight down the northeast Atlantic.

“From there they might swing through the Gibraltar Strait, where we will be able to see them but unable to do much about it. They would then transit the Mediterranean, the Suez Canal and the Red Sea, which are also somewhat difficult areas for our purposes.

“They may of course head on south and skip Gibraltar. Though it’s longer, it’s a more straightforward route. They would then head around the Cape of Good Hope, across the Indian Ocean, and through the Malacca or Sunda Straits. By then they may have acquired a close surface escort. We will concentrate on taking them out good and early, somewhere before they get through the GIUK Gap. If they choose to make a covert dived passage all the way to China, and we lose them, the search area becomes hopelessly large. We want them as they approach the GIUK Gap.”

The Admiral referred to one of the most important choke points on this planet — the great narrowing of the waters in the northern reaches of the Atlantic, the tightest point in the entire ocean, where Greenland, Iceland, and the UK’s northern coast form a direct northwest/southeast line 1,300 miles across. Situated directly on this line is the 500-mile-wide island of Iceland, which cuts the navigable waters considerably. This relatively small area — the deep, icy waters where commanding officers have been trained for generations — was the great hunting ground for US and UK submarine strike forces.

Throughout the Cold War all Russian submarines heading for the Atlantic traveled through the GIUK Gap under the watchful attention of their American and British adversaries, deep beneath the surface. Night and day, month after month, year after year, the two great Naval allies watched and waited. Few Soviet submarines ever made their way through the GIUK undetected.

There are three main routes through the Narrows: closest to the UK, east of the Faeroe Islands, which stand four hundred miles northwest of Scotland’s Cape Wrath; west of the Faeroes across the Aegir Ridge; and through the Denmark Strait, which runs between Iceland and Greenland’s Grunnbjørn ice mountain. These are lonely, haunted waters. Only four men survived when the giant forty-two-thousand-ton British battle cruiser HMS
Hood
was sunk by the
Bismark
in May 1941.