Seawolf End Game (38 page)

K-955 Borei

C
aptain Zuyev knew the Iranian crew was not ready for the fight ahead of them.  Given a few more weeks, they might have been. But it was now quite clear to Zuyev that not only the Iranians, but his own political leaders had underestimated the American’s reaction to Iran seizing the Strait of Hormuz. All the bluster and threats of possible nuclear war—a bluff for certain—had failed to prevent the Western powers trying to regain the Strait. He was in the tiny radio room and accepted the message from his communications officer. It had just been decoded and Zuyev quickly read it.

“Captain?” Ahadi asked anxiously.

They’d received no more word about the battle outside the Strait of Hormuz and had assumed the Western powers had withdrawn to lick their wounds and reconsider their failed attempt. Zuyev had hoped that diplomacy would become the order of the day, and the crisis would end. But the message was the worst possible news. “The
Gagarin
is lost,” he said simply. “Her distress buoy started signaling seven hours ago.”

“But that’s impossible,” Ahadi exclaimed. “We’re perfectly silent once we’re on our fuel cell.”

“We don’t know if the
Gagarin
was running on her reactor when she was lost,” Zuyev reminded Ahadi.

Ahadi concluded, “This means the Americans or the British have made it through the barrier.”

Zuyev finished reading as the printer delivered another message, this one for Ahadi. “That will be our new orders.” Zuyev hoped those orders wouldn’t order the
Borei
into action. They were pushing the men hard, but they weren’t ready yet. If they stumbled onto an American SSN, they would be in big trouble.

Ahadi read the orders and then explained, “We’re ordered to stay hidden and take no offensive action that might threaten us; however, we are authorized to fire on any American or British warship as long as we don’t compromise our position.”

Zuyev immediately suggested what Ahadi was thinking, “All right, let’s refuel the hydrogen and oxygen tanks, then shut down the reactor and go dark. If we sit quietly, they’ll never find us.”

“What about training?” Ahadi asked.

“Battle drills,” Zuyev responded curtly. “We haven’t much time left.”

Sound Room, USS Seawolf

G
raves was worried as he watched Kristen seated in front of the spectrum analyzer. It had been nearly twenty-four hours since their duel with what they assumed had been the
Gagarin.
The
Seawolf
was now searching for the
Borei
somewhere in the Persian Gulf. Over the past twenty-four hours, much of the crew—including himself—had been able to get a few hours of sleep. But, to his knowledge, Kristen hadn’t.

“How long has she been going at it?” he whispered to Fabrini.

“At least twelve hours,” Fabrini replied in a whisper. “The fact is no one else can hear what she’s hearing, sir.”

“She’s not going to be hearing much if she doesn’t get some sleep,” Graves replied as Brodie entered.

Graves was equally worried about Brodie, who was all but mainlining coffee to stay functioning. The National Command Authority wanted the
Borei
found before the Western Allies determined they could wait no longer to take out the Islamic Republic’s nuclear threat, and their window for finding the
Borei
was shrinking.

“Anything?” Brodie asked as he entered the shack.

Fabrini glanced at Kristen. Graves saw that she looked to be on her last leg. Her normally perfectly ordered hair had slowly scattered into a mess, her usually immaculate uniform was crumpled like an unmade bed and showed the stains from brief cat naps on the floor of the sonar shack.

“Nothing yet, Skipper,” Fabrini shook his head in apology.

“She’s been on the stack for over twelve hours now, Skipper,” Graves pointed out. “I doubt she’d hear a tractor-trailer drive by.”

Brodie exhaled tiredly and rubbed his blood-shot eyes. “Pull her off, Mister Fabrini,” he ordered and stepped back out into the passageway.

Graves followed Brodie and held the door open for Kristen, who worked her way through the cramped space. Stepping into the passageway, she offered Graves a weak smile.

“Yes, sir?” she asked Brodie.

“Anything yet?”

She could only shake her head.

Brodie leaned against the far bulkhead and closed his eyes. Graves knew his old friend was racking his brains trying to come up with any idea where the
Borei
might be hiding. But lack of sleep was affecting all of them, reducing their mental capacity.

“What do you think, Jason?” he asked. “If you were a Boomer skipper, where would you hide?”

Graves thought for a moment, considering the oceanographic characteristics of the Persian Gulf. Compared to the open ocean, the Gulf was a very narrow waterway with only one exit, so the
Borei’s
potential hiding spots were equally limited.

“Are we absolutely certain it was the
Gagarin
we destroyed and not the
Borei,
Captain?” Kristen asked.

She had a good point. Both subs were supposedly using identical power plants, so their noise signature would be near identical. But Brodie shook his shaggy head. “It was the
Gagarin,”
he said as if there could be no doubt. “If it had been the
Borei,
then their skipper never would have fired on us. He would’ve stayed hidden and let us go on about our business. Boomer skippers are all about finding a nice quiet piece of ocean and disappearing. The guy who shot at us was an attack boat skipper,” Brodie concluded, confident in his conclusion.

Graves knew Brodie was probably right. No one knew submarines and tactics as well as his friend, and Graves trusted his judgment.

“So, you’re now captain of the
Borei,”
Brodie posed his query again. “Where would you hide?”

“In Iranian waters,” Graves said but couldn’t be certain. “I’d be in close where land-based planes could keep sub-hunting aircraft away from me, and where foreign attack subs would hesitate to go. Plus, there are all kinds of background noises along the coast to help mask my acoustic signature.”

Brodie nodded, apparently pleased with his line of thought. Then he looked at Kristen. “Lieutenant, what would you do?”

She looked to be far beyond the capacity for rational thought. Sheer exhaustion didn’t come close to describing the way she appeared. She was all but dead on her feet. “I think the XO might be right, sir,” she agreed. “But that’s still a lot of water to search.”

“So where?” Brodie asked.

 She ran her hands through her disheveled hair and answered, “If I were driving the
Borei,
I would hide near one of the oil rigs. The transients coming off the rigs, especially any drilling rig, would mask a submarine from underwater detection. Plus, any aircraft we have looking for them would have to stay clear of the oil rigs as a flight hazard. Even if an aircraft did overfly the area, it is doubtful their magnetic anomaly detectors would pick up a submarine with all the metal on the oil rigs.”

She stifled a yawn while Brodie and Graves exchanged looks. Graves could see Brodie agreed with her. It was the perfect place to hide in the shallow Persian Gulf, and Graves thought her reasoning was logical despite her lack of rest.

“All right, Jason,” Brodie ordered, “let’s start with the platforms in Iranian waters. Have Ryan prepare a search pattern. If necessary, we’ll go from rig to rig until we find them.”

Graves concurred and then spoke to Kristen, “Why don’t you get some sleep, Lieutenant? You’re no use to us fumbling and bumbling. Go get some rest and then come back fresh.”

She shook her head and jerked her hand back toward the sonar shack. “I’m okay,” she lied. “I just needed to stretch my legs and get some fresh air.”

Charles Horner appeared in the hatchway carrying a message in his hand. “Captain?” he called out to get Brodie’s attention.

“Whatcha got, Charlie?”

“We just received this on the VLF net. It’s from CENTCOM.”

Brodie looked it over. Graves could see his friend’s exhaustion turn to disgust.

“What now?” Graves asked. “More prodding to find the
Borei?”

“Worse,” Brodie admitted. “The National Command Authority has decided they can’t wait any longer. H-Hour for the start of the air campaign is in just under twenty-three hours.”

“What if we haven’t found the
Borei
yet?” Kristen asked. “If she’s equipped with even one nuclear missile, she’ll fire as soon as we begin taking out the Republic’s nuclear arsenal.”

“Get me Weps,” Brodie said to Horner and then turned back to Kristen. “Then we’d better find them,” he said, as if it were as simple as that.

“They want us to launch our Tomahawks as part of the opening attack,” Graves read out loud as he studied the
Seawolf’s
target package. Because the
Seawolf
was in so close to the Islamic Republic, CENTCOM believed they could hit their assigned cruise missile targets before the Iranian defenses would have a chance to react.

“You need to see me, Captain?” Andy Stahl asked as he arrived.

“Target package for our TLAMs,” Brodie explained as Graves handed Stahl the message.

“You’re kidding!” Stahl replied as he studied the message. “What if we haven’t found the
Borei
by then?” Clearly Stahl understood the need to remove this significant threat, which begged the question: why didn’t CENTCOM?

“H-Hour for the attack is set; the JCS, the NCA, and NATO have all signed off on it,” Brodie answered tiredly.

Firing Tomahawk cruise missiles at the start of an air offensive wasn’t unusual for American submarines. It was the fact that CENTCOM wanted the
Seawolf
to participate when the sub was in the middle of a completely incompatible mission to find the
Borei
that irked them. The hunt for the
Borei
required stealth, whereas launching a series of Tomahawk missiles would be like shooting up a flare. Wherever the
Borei
was lurking in the Persian Gulf, they would detect the launch and know precisely where the
Seawolf
was seconds after firing the first cruise missile.

Sound Room, USS Seawolf

T
he
Seawolf
moved northward through the Persian Gulf, staying in shallow water. Their course took them through a seeming endless maze of oil platforms as they searched for any hint of another submarine. Fabrini stayed in the sonar shack, monitoring his sleepy sonar operators. He’d been able to get Martinez, Hicks, Greenberg, and Goldman some sleep, but Kristen had stayed. How she stayed awake he wasn’t sure. The mental exhaustion created by maintaining complete concentration for hours on end was the reason they had multiple teams of sonar operators and why the teams rotated frequently.

Fabrini had kept a close eye on her ever since her brief break seven hours earlier when she’d met with Graves and Brodie in the passageway. Following that short meeting, she’d been relatively alert initially, but soon her head had begun to bob every few minutes, and he knew he had to force her to come off the analyzer and get some real sleep.

He had only hesitated this long because he’d hoped she might detect something. The other operators had shown themselves incapable of hearing what she could, and so he’d believed she was their best chance for success. But her task was made significantly harder by the amount of manmade noise in the Persian Gulf. Thousands of oil rigs were emanating sound into the water, and the
Seawolf’s
sensors vacuumed it all up. This cacophony of sound had to be filtered out before she could have any chance of finding the
Borei.

Fabrini stepped up beside her, seeing her head droop. He thought she was asleep. Her eyes were closed and her glasses far down on her nose. He was about to shake her awake when he saw the slightest movement of her right hand on the joystick. Her eyes opened, and she turned toward him. She looked awful.

“I’ve got something,” she whispered. “Plant noises, I think. Very faint.”

Fabrini snapped his fingers toward the other operators and checked the bearing she was listening to, but he saw absolutely no hint of anything on her waterfall display. “Bearing two-nine-eight,” Fabrini told the others as he grabbed the microphone.