Nimitz Class (4 page)

“I am not telling you to like it. DO IT!”

“Remember it is your fault if this goes wrong.”

“If it goes wrong, that won’t matter.”

“I want to be in our spot early, and get settled before we reach the entrance. We want a good visual night ranging mark on him. His overtaking light will do fine.”

“Slack Greek prick, leave them on all day.”

“I noticed. Use height ten meters on stern light.”

“What about his radar, Ben?”

“He won’t see us in his ground wave, and if he does, he’ll think it’s his own wake. This chap is no Gorschkov. He can’t even remember to turn his lights off.”

“What about other ships in channel?”

“Anyone overtaking will stay well to one side. Oncoming ships will keep to the other. My only real worry is the cross-ferries. That’s why we want to be going through the narrowest bits between 0200 and 0500, when I hope not to meet any of them. Bloody dreary if one of them slipped across our Greek leader’s bum and we rammed him.”

“How come, Ben, you know much more about everything than I do?”

“Mainly because I cannot afford mistakes. Also because I had a brilliant Teacher…bright, impatient, clever, arrogant…Stay calm, Georgy. And do as I say. It’s dark enough now. Let’s range his light, and close right in.”

Eight miles off Diego Garcia the weather had worsened, the warm wind, rising and falling, making life endlessly difficult for the aviators. On the flight deck of the U.S. carrier
Thomas Jefferson
the LSO’s were in their usual huddle, taking advantage of the comparative quiet, talking to the pilots of the seven incoming flights from the day’s combat air patrol, four of them circling in a stack at eight thousand feet, twenty miles out.

The day-long exercises had demanded supersonic speed tests, and many landings and takeoffs. There had already been two burst tires, one of which had caused an incoming F/A-18 Hornet strike-fighter to slew left on the wire, and damn near hit a parked A-6E Intruder bomber.

Gas was now low all around. Tensions were fairly high. And before the six fighters came in, the entire flight deck staff was preparing to bring down the quarterback, Hawkeye, the much bigger radar early warning and control aircraft, unmistakable because of its great electronic dome set above the fuselage.

Jim Adams was calling the shots. Earphones on, yellow jacket visible for miles, he was racing through his mental checklist, yelling down the phone to the team below on the hydraulics. “Stand by for Hawkeye, two minutes.” He knew the hydraulic system was set properly, and now his eyes were sweeping the deck for even the smallest speck of litter. No one gets a second chance out here. One particle of rubbish sucked into a jet engine can blow it out. The whiplash from a broken arrester wire could kill a dozen people and send an aircraft straight over the bow.

Jim looked up, downwind. The Hawkeye was screaming in, the arresting wires spread-eagled on the deck, ready for the grab of the hook. Down below the giant hydraulic piston was in position, set to withstand, and stop, a seventy-five-thousand-pound aircraft in a controlled collision of plane and deck.

“Groove!!”
bellowed Jim down to the hydraulic crew. This was the code word for “she’s close, stand by.”

Seconds pass.
“Short!”
—the key command, everyone away from the machinery.

And now, as Hawkeye thundered in toward the stern, Jim Adams bellowed:
“Ramp!”

Every eye on the deck was steeled on the hook stretched out behind. Speech was inconceivable above the howl of the engines. The blast from the jets made the sky shimmer. At 160 knots the wheels slammed down onto the landing surface, and, right behind them, the hook grabbed, the cable rising starkly from the deck in a geometric V. One second later the Hawkeye stopped a few yards from the end of the flight deck, the sound of her engines dying quickly away.

Suddenly there was pandemonium, as the deck crews raced out to haul the Hawkeye into its parking place. Jim Adams shouted into the phone to change the settings on the hydraulics, the LSO’s were getting into position, one of them talking to the first Tomcat pilot, very carefully: “Okay one-zero-six, come on in—winds gusting at thirty-five, check your approach line, looks fine from here…flaps down…hook down…gotcha…you’re all set.”

Lieutenant William R. Howell was back in the game, with a new RIO, and a big plaster over his eyebrow. His pal Jim Adams was double-checking everything, as always. One by one he shouted his commands: “
Groove…Short…Ramp!”
—until Billy-Ray was down, to universal shouts of “Good job!” “Let’s go, Billy-Ray!” It was always a little tense on the first landing for a crashed aviator. Up in the control tower, Freddie Larsen was permitted to stand and watch, and if his arm had not hurt so badly he too would have clapped when Billy-Ray hit the deck safely. “That’s my guy,” he yelled without thinking. “Okay,
Billy-Ray!”
Even the
Thomas Jefferson’s
commanding officer, Captain Rheinegen, himself a former aviator like all carrier commanders, allowed himself a cautious grin.

And now, with a night exercise coming up, there was a change of deck crew. The launch men were moving into position, and aircraft were moving up from the hangars below on the huge elevators. All around, there were young officers checking over the fighter bombers, pilots climbing aboard, another group of engines screaming; uniformed men, many on their first tours of duty, were on their stations. The first of the Hornets was ready for takeoff. The red light on the island signaled “Four minutes to launch.”

Two minutes later the light blinked to amber. A crewman, crouching next to the fighter’s nose wheels, signaled the aircraft forward, and locked on the catapult wire.

The light turned green. Lieutenant Skip Martin, the “shooter,” pointed his right hand at the pilot, raised his left hand, and extended two fingers…“Go to full power.” Then palm out…“Hit the afterburners…” The pilot saluted formally and leaned forward, tensing for the impact of the catapult shot.

The shooter, his eyes glued on the cockpit, saluted, bending his knees and touching two fingers of his left hand onto the deck. Skip Martin gestured:
“Forward.”
A crewman, kneeling in the catwalk narrowly to the left of the big fighter jet, hit the button on catapult three, and ducked as the outrageous hydraulic mechanism hurled the Hornet on its way, screaming down the deck, its engines roaring flat out, leaving an atomic blast of air in its wake. Everyone watched, even veterans almost holding their breath, as the aircraft rocketed off the carrier and out over the water, climbing away to port. “Tower to Hornet one-six-zero, nice job there…course 054, speed 400, go to 8,000.”

“Hornet one-six-zero, roger that.”

“Ben, we got rattle. Up for’ard.”

“Damn!
We’ll have to stop, right away, fix it. We can’t afford to travel one more mile with that.”

“No problem. I will fix. Soon as it’s dark. Very quiet here anyway.”

“At least the rattle’s gone. But I really am very sad about your man. It sounds heartless. I don’t mean it to be so. But I just hope they never find his body.”

“No time look anymore. Not blame anyone. Just freak wave. I seen it before. Now we say good Catholic prayer for him.”

“I should like to join you in that.”

Inside the mess room of the
Thomas Jefferson
, still off Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, big Jim Adams was giving a party in one of the ward rooms. Four hours earlier he had received a message that his wife Carole had given birth to their first son—a nine-pound boy, whose name would be Carl Theodore Adams. This, Jim explained, had been agreed two years ago, the first name for the longtime Red Sox outfielder Carl Yastrzemski, the second for the legendary Red Sox hitter Ted Williams.

And now little Carl Theodore had come in to land, and the aviators on the carrier were exercising two of their other major skills—making their two cans of beer (permitted on the sixtieth day out) last for about four hours, and feeling truly sorry for other human beings on Planet Earth who were not involved in the flying of jet fighter planes off the decks of the biggest aircraft carriers in the world.

A visiting commanding officer from one of the destroyers, Captain Roger Peterson, trying to dine in peace in a far corner with Captain Rheinegen, remarked to him that it takes a crew of more than three thousand men to keep the boisterous, white-scarved, winged heroes in the air.

No one heard, and it would scarcely have mattered if they had. Because the one shining fact known to any aviator is that all other
forms of life, including submariners (especially submariners), guided missile experts, gunnery officers, navigation and strategic advanced warfare staff, were, and would ever be, their absolute inferiors.

Meanwhile Big Jim was up on his feet sipping his second can of iced beer, the last of his ration, making a little speech, in which he announced that Lieutenant Howell was to be Carl Theodore’s godfather. This provoked yells of derision, that Billy-Ray was a godless hillbilly and poor little Carl Theodore would receive no moral guidance in his whole life.

Billy-Ray stood up and told them that in his opinion such criticism was essentially “bullshit,” since his dad was a churchgoing Methodist back home in Hamlin, and that he considered himself an ideal choice.

This caused Big Jim to stand up and admit that Billy-Ray was only his second choice, but that since Yaz himself had not made himself available he was happy to move the selection process from an outfielder to a hillbilly. Anyway, he had instructed Carole to give birth while he was at sea because that would allow him to be first man off the ship when the
Thomas Jefferson
finally returned home in September.

“Okay, Ben, here’s island now. Can’t see much, on red 40, visibility not good.”

“Anyone live there?”

“Don’t know. Maybe few Spanish fishermen, but empty. Maybe your Teacher say city size of Moscow there but no one notice.”

“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.”

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 of
Jane’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.