Red Storm Rising (1986) (13 page)

“Things are looking better, Comrade,” Alekseyev reported. “Discipline in the officer corps has improved immeasurably. The exercise with 261st Guards went very well this morning.”

“And 173rd Guards?” CINC-Southwest asked.

“They too need further work, but they should be ready in time,” Alekseyev said confidently. “The officers are acting like officers. Now we need to get the privates to act like soldiers. We’ll see when Progress begins. We must have our officers turn away from the usual set-piece choreography and seek realistic engagement scenarios. We can use Progress to identify leaders who cannot adapt to a real combat environment and replace them with younger men who can.” He sat down opposite his commander’s desk. Alekseyev calculated that he was exactly one month behind in his sleep.

“You look weary, Pasha,” CINC-Southwest observed.

“No, Comrade General, I haven’t had the time.” Alekseyev chuckled. “But if I make one more helicopter trip I think I shall sprout wings.”

“Pasha, I want you to go home and not return for twenty-four hours.”

“I—”

“If you were a horse,” the General observed, “you would have broken down by now. This is an order from your commander-in-chief: twenty-four hours of rest. I would prefer that you spend it all sleeping, but that is your affair. Think, Pavel Leonidovich. Were we now engaged in combat operations, you would be better rested—regulations require it, a harsh lesson from our last war with the Germans. I need your talents unhindered—and if you drive yourself too hard now, you won’t be worth a damn when I really need you! I will see you at 1600 tomorrow to go over our plan for the Persian Gulf. You will be clear of eye and straight of back.”

Alekseyev stood. His boss was a gruff old bear, so much like his own father had been. And a soldier’s soldier. “Let the record show that I obey all orders from my commander-in-chief.” Both men laughed. Both needed it.

Alekseyev left the office and walked downstairs to his official car. When it arrived at the apartment block a few kilometers away, the driver had to awaken his general.

“Close-approach procedures,” McCafferty ordered.

McCafferty had been tracking a surface ship for two hours, ever since his sonarmen had detected her at a range of forty-four miles. The approach was being made on sonar only, and under the captain’s orders, sonar had not told the fire-control party what they were tracking. For the time being, every surface contact was being treated as a hostile warship.

“Range three-five hundred yards,” the executive officer reported. “Bearing one-four-two, speed eighteen knots, course two-six-one.”

“Up scope!” McCafferty ordered. The attack periscope slid up from its well on the starboard side of the pedestal. A quartermaster’s mate got behind the instrument, dropped the handles in place, and trained it to the proper bearing. The captain sighted the crosshairs on the target’s bow.

“Bearing—
mark!”

The quartermaster squeezed the button on the “pickle,” transmitting the bearing to the MK-117 fire-control computer.

“Angle on the bow, starboard twenty.”

The fire-control technician punched the data into the computer. The microchips rapidly computed distances and angles.

“Solution set. Ready for tubes three and four!”

“Okay.” McCafferty stepped back from the periscope and looked over at the exec. “You want to see what we killed?”

“Damn!” The executive officer laughed and lowered the periscope. “Move over, Otto Kretchmer!”

McCafferty picked up the microphone, which went to speakers throughout the submarine. “This is the captain speaking. We just completed the tracking exercise. For anyone who’s interested, the ship we just ‘killed’ is the
Universe Ireland,
three hundred forty thousand tons’ worth of ultra-large crude-carrier. That is all.” He put the mike back in its cradle.

“XO, critique?”

“It was too easy, skipper,” the executive officer said. “His speed and course were constant. We might have shaved four or five minutes on the target-motion analysis right after we acquired him, but we were looking for a zigzag instead of a constant course. For my money, it’s better to proceed like that on a slow target. I’d say we have things going pretty well.”

McCafferty nodded agreement. A high-speed target like a destroyer might well head directly for them. The slow ones would probably be altering course constantly under wartime conditions. “We’re getting there.” The captain looked over to his fire-control party. “That was well done. Let’s keep it that way.” The next time, McCafferty thought, he’d arrange for sonar not to report a target until it got really close. Then he’d see how fast his men could handle a snapshot engagement. Until then he decided on a strenuous series of computer-simulated engagement drills.

“Those are batteries. Okay, it’s confirmed.” Lowe handed over the satellite photographs. A number of trucks were visible, and though most had their loadbeds covered by canvas, the loadbeds of three were exposed to the high-flying satellite. What he saw were the bathtub-shapes of oversized battery cells, and gangs of seamen manhandling them across a pier.

“How old are these shots?” Toland asked.

“Eighteen hours.”

“Would have been useful this morning,” the younger man grumped. “Looks like three Tangos nested together. These are ten-ton trucks. I count nine of them. I checked around, each individual battery cell weighs two hundred eighteen kilograms empty—”

“Ouch. How many to fill up a sub?”

“A lot!” Toland grinned. “We don’t know that, exactly. I found four different estimates, with a thirty-percent spread. It probably differs from ship to ship anyway. The more you build of a design, the more you’re tempted to fool around with it. That’s what we do.” Toland looked up. “We need more access to these.”

“Already taken care of. From here on we’re on the distribution list for all shots of naval sites. What do you think of the activity for the surface ships?”

Toland shrugged. The photographs showed perhaps a dozen surface combatants, ranging from cruisers to corvettes. The decks of all were littered with cables and crates; a large number of men was visible. “You can’t tell much from this. No cranes, so nothing massive was being onloaded, but cranes can move, too. That’s the problem with ships. Everything you need to know about is under cover. All we can tell from these photos is that they’re tied alongside. Anything else is pure supposition. Even with the subs, we’re inferring that they’re loading batteries aboard.”

“Come on, Bob,” Lowe snorted.

“Think about it, Chuck,” Toland replied. “They
know
what our satellites are for, right? They know what their orbital paths are, and they know when they will be at any given point in space. If they really want to fake us out, how hard is it? If
your
mission was to fake out satellites, and you knew when they came, you think you might play games with the other guy’s head? We depend too much on these things. They’re useful as hell, sure, but they have their limitations. It’d be nice to get some human intelligence on this.”

“There’s just something weird about watching a guy pour cement into a ship,” Flynn observed on the ride back to Murmansk. No one had ever told him about ballast.

“Ah, but it can be a beautiful thing!” exclaimed their escort, a junior captain in the Soviet Navy. “Now if only your navies can do the same!”

The small press group that had been allowed to stand on a pier and watch the neutralization of the first two Yankee-class fleet ballistic missile submarines was being carefully managed, Flynn and Calloway noted. They were being driven around in groups of two and three, each group with a naval officer and a driver. Hardly unexpected, of course. Both men were amazed that they were being allowed onto so sensitive a base at all.

“A pity that your president did not allow a team of American officers to observe this,” the escort went on.

“Yeah, I have to agree with you there, Captain,” Flynn nodded. It would have made a much better story. As it was, a Swede and an Indian officer, neither a submariner, had gotten a closer look at what the reporters called the “cement ceremony,” and reported somberly afterward that, yes, cement had been poured into each missile launch tube on the two submarines. Flynn had timed the length of each pour, and would do some checking when he got back. What was the volume of a missile tube? How much cement to fill it? How long to pour the cement? “Even so, Captain, you must agree that the American response to your country’s negotiating position has been extremely positive.”

Through all this, William Calloway kept his peace and stared out the car’s window. He’d covered the Falkland Islands War for his wire service, and spent a lot of time with the Royal Navy, both afloat and in naval shipyards watching preparations for sending the Queen’s fleet south. They were now passing by the piers and work areas for a number of surface warships. Something was wrong here, but he couldn’t quite pin it down. What Flynn did not know was that his colleague often worked informally for the British Secret Intelligence Service. Never in a sensitive capacity—the man was a correspondent, not a spy—but like most reporters he was a shrewd, observant man, careful to note things that editors would never allow to clutter up a story. He didn’t even know who the station chief in Moscow was, but he could report on this to a friend in Her Majesty’s embassy. The data would find its way to the right person.

“So what does our English friend think of Soviet shipyards?” the captain inquired with a broad smile.

“Far more modern than ours,” Calloway replied. “And I gather you don’t have dockyard unions, Captain?”

The officer laughed. “We have no need for unions in the Soviet Union. Here the workers already own everything.” That was the standard Party line, both reporters noted. Of course.

“Are you a submarine officer?” the Englishman inquired.

“No!” the captain exclaimed. A hearty laugh.
Russians are big on laughs when they want to be,
Flynn thought. “I come from the steppes. I like blue sky and broad horizons. I have great respect for my comrades on submarines, but I have no wish to join them.”

“My feelings exactly, Captain,” Calloway agreed. “We elderly Brits like our parks and gardens. What sort of sailor are you?”

“I have shore assignment now, but my last ship was
Leonid Brezhnev,
icebreaker. We do some survey work, and also make a way for merchant ships along the Arctic Coast to the Pacific.”

“That must be a demanding job,” Calloway said. “And a dangerous one.”
Keep talking, old boy
. . .

“It demands caution, yes, but we Russians are accustomed to cold and ice. It is a proud task to aid the economic growth of your country.”

“I could never be a sailor,” Calloway went on. He saw a curious look in Flynn’s eyes:
The hell you couldn’t
. . . “Too much work, even when you’re in port. Like now. Are your shipyards always this busy?”

“Ah, this is not busy,” the captain said without much thought.

The man from Reuters nodded. The ships were cluttered, but there was not that much obvious activity. Not so many people moving about. Many cranes were still. Trucks were parked. But the surface warships and auxiliaries were cluttered as if . . . He checked his watch. Three-thirty in the afternoon. The workday was hardly over. “A great day for East-West détente,” he said to cover his feelings. “A great story for Pat and me to tell our readers.”

“This is good.” The captain smiled again. “It is time we had real peace.”

The correspondents were back in Moscow four hours later, after the usual uncomfortable ride on an Aeroflot jet with its Torquemada seats. The two reporters walked to Flynn’s car—Calloway’s was still
hors de combat
with mechanical problems. He grumbled at having gotten a Soviet car instead of bringing his Morris over with him. Bloody impossible to get parts.

“A good story today, Patrick?”

“You bet. But I wish we’d been able to snap a picture or two.” They were promised Sovfoto shots of the “cement ceremony.”

“What did you think of the shipyard?”

“Big enough. I spent a day at Norfolk once. They all look alike to me.”

Calloway nodded thoughtfully. Shipyards do look alike, he thought, but why did Polyarnyy seem strange? His suspicious reporter’s mind? The constant question: What is he/she/it hiding? But the Soviets had never allowed him on a naval base, and this was his third tour in Moscow. He’d been to Murmansk before. Once he’d spoken with the Mayor and asked how the naval personnel affected his administration of the city. There were always uniforms visible on the street. The Mayor had tried to evade the question, and finally said, “There are no Navy in Murmansk.” A typical Russian answer to an awkward question—but now they’d let a dozen Western reporters into one of their most sensitive bases. QED, they were not hiding anything. Or were they? After he filed his story, Calloway decided, he’d have a brandy with his friend at the embassy. Besides, there was a party celebrating something or other.

He arrived at the embassy, on Morisa Toreza Embankment across the river from the Kremlin walls, just after nine o’clock that night. It turned into four brandies. By the fourth, the correspondent was going over a map of the naval base and using his trained memory to indicate just what activity he’d seen where. An hour later, the data was encrypted and cabled to London.

The TV news crew was having a great time. It had been years since they’d been allowed to film a Soviet military unit in action, and the entertainment value of the mistakes they saw gave plenty of spice for a piece on the NBC Nightly News. As they watched, a tank battalion was stalled at a crossroads on Highway 101, fifty kilometers south of Berlin. They’d taken a wrong turn somewhere, and the battalion commander was screaming at his subordinates. After two minutes of that, a captain stepped forward and made a few gestures at the map. A major was banished from the scene as the younger man apparently solved the problem. The camera followed the dejected major into a staff car, which drove north along the main road. Five minutes later, the battalion was mounted and rolling. The news crew took its time reloading its equipment into their carryall, and the chief reporter took the time to walk over to a French officer who had also observed the procedure.