Nimitz Class (46 page)

“Basically, if the unforeseens pile up on us, until we have no way
out. I’m hoping to rely on you and Bill to bear all those things in mind, while I get on with the minute-to-minute detail.”

“Good. We’ll just stand at the back with our teeth gritted until we can’t stand it another minute. You do have final responsibility for your ship, Jeremy, but I can’t help feeling I’ve put you here.

“Remember, you can always say, ‘Stop, I want to get off,’ and no one will think worse of you. We’re only here to see if this is possible; not to give a concrete demonstration that it’s not.”

“Okay, sir. I’m going to the control room for a look. Supper at eight. No wardroom film tonight, I’m afraid. Not even for the first-class passengers.” But they had a long wait…

“Captain, sir. I have a possible…zero-two-zero…fifteen thousand yards…I’m about twenty on his starboard bow radar…gives him 8.5 knots on 180…we’ve got a strong commercial nav radar right on the bearing…no other traffic within five miles…turning toward for a proper look before the light goes altogether.”

“Right. I have the ship.”

“You have the ship, sir. His higher masthead light comes out at twenty-eight meters by comparison with radar, sir.”

“Okay. Up periscope. All round look.

“Target setup. Up. Bearing that…zero-two-two. Range that…on twenty-eight meters. Fourteen and a half thousand yards, sir…put me twenty-five on his starboard bow…target course one eighty-five…distance off track six thousand yards…

“Group up…half ahead main motor. Revolutions six zero…five down…forty meters…turn starboard zero-nine-five.

“Team…I’m going to run in deep to close the track for fifteen minutes. We want a good look as he passes on his way south. Then we’ll turn in behind and follow him…Make a broadcast, Number One…we’re going to be at diving stations from about 2030. And it’s going to be a long stretch. Eight or nine hours. Fix cocoa and sandwiches for 2300 and 0300.”

“Take a look, Admiral. I think she’ll do. I’d say about six thousand tons. Small container ship…nationality Russian, from what I could make out on her funnel.

“She might not be going right through. But she fits nicely for time and speed. I think I’ll just swerve back in under her, check her draft while there’s plenty of water. Then I’ll slot in behind at PD.”

“Very good, Jeremy. She’ll do.”

HMS
Unseen
proceeded to match the freighter’s speed at forty-two revolutions, 8.2 knots, and began to track the Russians back toward the entrance to the Bosporus. They ran for almost four hours, and shortly after midnight at 0030 Captain Jeremy Shaw got his visual fix.

“GPS and soundings all tie in, Admiral. Rumineleferi Fort bears two-four-zero…two miles. Leader still on one-eight-two…eighty revolutions, making 8.7 over the ground, 8.2 through the water. Current’s behind us, should go to one knot in the next two miles. Expecting our leader to come right, to about two-one-seven, any second…

“There he goes, sir. Starboard three. Call out ship’s head every two degrees please.”

“One-eight-four…one-eight-six.”

“We’re up close, Admiral. Bow right behind his stern. Range locked on his stern light.”

“We have about twelve minutes on this course before he picks up his pilot.”

Locked together, traveling at precisely the same speed, the Russian freighter and the Royal Navy submarine headed on down to the Bosporus, separated by only one hundred yards of white foaming water, the bright phosphorescence gleaming in the pale moonlight.

No one in the merchant ship noticed the periscope sliding through the wake, as they were tracked along their course, unwittingly leading the aptly named
Unseen
into a kind of Naval history.

The degree of precision being practiced by the officers of the underwater boat would have been beyond the comprehension of even the most experienced merchant seaman. They kept station to the nearest few yards, observing the angle of the beam on the freighter’s stern light, knowing that if it increased they were going too fast and dangerously close-in. If it decreased, they were slipping behind and out of the wake.

They cleared the northern limit to the Bosporus, crossing the unseen line which stretches from the fort to the headland of Anadolu, with its light flashing every twenty seconds. They ran on down the channel for another two and a half miles before the freighter began to slow down for the pilot pickup.

Jeremy Shaw was ready. They had already picked up the revs of the fast diesel pilot boat, and when the submarine captain ordered the “crash-stop” it was accomplished with maximum efficiency with nearly two hundred feet of water below the keel. As it happened,
Unseen
came to a halt more quickly than the freighter. So far so good.

They ran on south in the pitch-black depths of the water, rounding the big left and right turns, still at periscope depth, right behind the freighter. They slipped under the “Fatty Sultan” at 0130, and prepared to meet the sudden right-and-left turn of the “chicane” off Kandilli, where the channel was narrow but deep, and the current fast and awkward.

But the freighter skipper steered steady and true, straight down the middle of the lane. He kept his speed constant, and the unseen watchers a hundred yards astern detected no alteration in the revs of his engines. No one was yet aware of the covert Anglo-American submarine operation. Above
Unseen
the military radar of Turkey swept silently over the water, but nothing locked onto the lone periscope slipping along in the turbulent white water which marked the trail of the freighter.

Jeremy Shaw eased the helm, steering course two-three-two, as they came into another straight area, where the channel grew more shallow, with the great span of the Bogazi Bridge almost overhead. They had been unbelievably lucky.

Through the periscope,
Unseen
’s CO could now see the yellow quick-flash of the bridge light to starboard, and the quick-white to port. The span passed overhead at 0141. A ferry crossed west to east up ahead, but well clear of the oncoming freighter and her shadow.

They were two minutes short of the shallow sandbank in the middle of the south lane—the one with two wrecks already on it—when the first danger signal flickered into life. Up ahead, running hard toward them, almost on the middle line of the shipping lanes, was an oncoming contact. They could see she was very wide on her course, going fast, rounding the right-hand corner marked by the Kizkulesi tower. What they did not know, at this stage, was that she was a twenty-thousand-ton Rumanian tanker.

The submarine would meet her just as they too had to swerve to the center to avoid the second wreck. There was not sufficient water here to go deep and get under her. There was only thirty meters at best charted on the edge of the shoal. The tanker drew about ten meters.
Unseen
would need at least twenty more.

Admiral MacLean and Jeremy Shaw had about five minutes to come up with something. Their options were running out.

“Christ! This thing is a fucking size,” the CO reported as he peered again through the periscope.

Then, just to compound matters, he spotted what looked like another ferry up ahead, crossing east to west right in their path. Then the totally unthinkable happened. The sonar officer called suddenly, “Control Sonar…our leader’s revolutions are decreasing, sir.”

Jeremy Shaw showed signs of real strain for the first time.
“Jesus!”
he exclaimed. “We really do not need this. No wonder it’s fucking illegal.”

Unseen
was now on an underwater collision course with the Russian freighter’s screws, a life-threatening maneuver for everyone who sailed in the submarine.

Captain Shaw recovered his composure…“Revolutions twenty…turn fast starboard two-four-zero.”

Now the Russian freighter too began a long starboard swing toward the docks on the European side, but at least he kept going. The navigator called out that the fifteen-meter wreck was passed. But the Rumanian tanker kept coming, five hundred yards now, still too wide.

Jeremy Shaw and Admiral MacLean knew the shallow-drafted ferry could go straight over the casing provided it missed the fin and periscopes. But if the submarine pressed on down the left side of the down lane, they would be unable to avoid being mowed down by the Rumanians, who were not only blind to the submarine, they were running too wide and too fast.

Unseen
was unable to move right because of the shoal and the twenty-meter wreck, unable to veer left because that would take her onto the Kizkulesi bend, and, while the tanker might miss them, they had no way of knowing that another big merchant ship was not driving round on the inside of the bend.

All the admiral could do was to suggest they make like a “dead pig”—that is, show as little periscope as possible, drifting just below the surface with the south-running current, easing over the sandbank, making no speed until they could go deep around the next corner. “That should keep us marginally out of the line of collision with the tanker, and the Turkish radar operators will take us for a hunk of flotsam,” said the admiral.

“If their helmsman makes even one minor mistake, he’s going to break this submarine into two very large pieces,” muttered the captain.

It was a passive maneuver, and the more courageous for that. But it was their only option. Within seconds they heard the propeller of the big tanker come thrashing down their port side, missing them not by the two hundred yards Admiral MacLean had estimated—cutting his normal safety margin by 60 percent—but by about forty yards.

The swirling turbulence in the wake of this massive hull, twenty thousand tons of steel barging through the narrow waterway, threw the submarine well off-course. She swiveled fifteen degrees to port
before she steadied. “Ah yes, we’re heading straight toward Asia now—that was rather a novel way of doing it,” the admiral muttered.

“Not so bad, sir,” said the navigator. “We’re a bit late for our turn to the south round this bend anyway. I’m happy on the western side of the channel. The water’s deeper.”

Just then, a new call rang out in the Royal Navy submarine, which was still making like a “dead pig,” with only her periscope showing intermittently. “Control Sonar…
new contact!
Designated track four-three. Bearing one-eight-five.”

“Christ!”
snapped the CO. “This is a big bastard and we’re right ahead of him, bang in his path. Put him at seven hundred yards. Give him twelve knots. Bloody hell, he’s in the wrong lane.”

“We’ll
have
to go deep,” snapped Admiral MacLean. “
Jeremy
…half ahead…four zero revolutions…five down…thirty meters…call out the speed.”

“Sir…”

“Two knots.”

“Christ. He’s turning. Midships. Starboard thirty.”

The CO barked,
“Down all masts. Ease to ten…steer one-eight-three…thirty-one meters.”

“Twenty-five, sir.”

Then the sounder called the depth below the keel, “Sounding ten meters, sir.”

“Slow ahead.”

“Still one-eight-five. He’s louder. All other contacts blanked.”

“Thirty-one meters, sir.”

“Sounding five meters, sir.”

The admiral: “Yes, here he comes, Jeremy. That’s his bow pressure pushing us down.
Foreplanes full rise
.”

“Sounding two meters, sir.”

“Nice and level, Jeremy. Don’t want to put the propeller in the mud.”

“Right, sir. Depth holding…that’s the suction along his hull.”

The admiral gave out his last commands: “
Half-ahead. Four
zero revolutions. Seventeen and a half meters
…but keep her level at first, Jeremy.”

The words of the sounding operator—“Two meters, sir”—were almost drowned out in the roar of the big freighter’s props as she thundered overhead, charging through the water at twelve knots.

“Track four-three right astern. Bearing zero-zero-four, sir. Very loud. Doppler low. Same revolutions, one-two-four.”

Admiral MacLean stepped aside as the submarine headed back up toward the surface of the mile-wide and now deeper waters of the harbor of Istanbul. Slowly
Unseen
climbed to periscope depth as she silently entered safer waters.

Fifteen minutes after the near-miss, life was just about back to normal in the control room and plainly the worst was over. Captain Shaw handed over to his first lieutenant, joined the admiral and Baldridge for a cup of tea in the wardroom.

“I’m sorry I was a bit pushy there, Jeremy,” said Admiral MacLean. “But I reckoned I’d seen a lot more of those shallow-water, close-quarters situations than you had.”

“Absolutely, sir. I was getting a bit mesmerized looking through the periscope. Anyway I think I had missed the navigator’s clue that we were in deeper water, and could go under him. Thank you, sir.”

Unseen
headed out of the wide southerly channel which flowed past the eastern shoreline of the old city of Istanbul. There was more than fifty meters of water here, and less than three miles to the open reaches of the Sea of Marmara.

Jeremy Shaw wondered when they should send in a satellite message to the duty officer in Northwood. “And one to Washington?”

“I’d say we ought to do it right away,” said the admiral. “We’ve done it. And that’s that.”

“Do you have a code word for a successful mission, Bill?” asked the captain.

“Sure do—
home run
—that’s what they’re waiting for. Straight to Admiral Morgan, Fort Meade, Maryland. It’s nine o’clock at night there, but he’ll be around in his office, waiting to hear.”

The CO sent for a messenger to take a drafted signal for transmission. Then he left the wardroom, leaving the admiral and Bill alone.

“Let me ask you something, sir. Would you have done it, if you had known in advance what it was going to be like?”

“No, Bill. I would not. I understood the risks, but I did not think we would run out of luck quite so often! We were nearly killed twice in ten minutes. That first freighter that nearly hit us was closer than I have ever been to death. I actually thought the second one was going right through us.”