Sword Point (18 page)

Their success had brought them new problems.

When the carrier had passed, the Iskra slowly came about and left the sanctuary of the current to follow it. The silence that ran throughout the submarine for the first five minutes was deafening. All eyes were on the captain, who watched his instruments and listened for the sonar man to report any sign that they had been discovered. After ten minutes that seemed to last an eternity, Gudkov relaxed, confident that he had been undetected and could remain so as long as he wanted.

Unfortunately, the strain of the effort had worn out the crew. With the immediate danger gone, a wave of exhaustion swept over them, dulling their senses and causing some to drift to sleep. Gudkov endeavored to keep the men alert but could not fight human nature or needs. Even his young weapons officer dozed off for a brief time, during which the calculations needed to engage the carrier were not updated. A sharp rebuke snapped him back. Under the watchful eye of his captain, the weapons officer diligently updated all firing calculations for a while, but began to drift off again.

Seeing that more was needed to maintain vigilance and wanting to ease the tension, Gudkov ordered that hot tea be brought up to the control room. A sailor brought it, exercising extreme care so as not to make any noise or spill the tea. Gudkov was standing behind the weapons officer when the sailor entered the room. He put his left hand on the shoulder of the weapons officer, turned away to the sailor with the tea and said, “Give me one for the weapons officer,” as he reached out with his right hand.

The hand on his shoulder startled the weapons officer.

He jumped, then realized that he had fallen asleep on duty again. On top of this horrible realization he heard the captain order, “Give me one, Weapons

Officer.” Without hesitation, the weapons officer leaned forward, flipped red protective cover up, pressed the red button numbered 1 on the cruise-missile launch-control panel and announced, “One fired.”

The release of compressed air and the rushing noise of the cruise missile racing for the surface were heard on a half-dozen ships.

Information from sensors fed data into computers that analyzed it, compared it to historical data on diferent sounds and threats and sent its output to the officers on duty. For a second most of them failed to realize, or refused to believe, what the warning meant. Acceptance was rapidly followed by action as alarms blared, shattering the silence of the night with warnings given too late.

The missile broke the water’s surface, went into level flight and raced for the carrier.

Gudkov’s hand closed like a vise on the weapons officer’s shoulder as the

Iskra stopped shuddering from the release of the missile. Color had run from his face. Transfixed, he watched the information display as the submarine’s own sensors and computers tracked the progress of the missile.

Thoughts raced through his mind as it scrambled for a solution. It had been a mistake. A horrible mistake. But that didn’t matter. He had no way of telling the Americans that. He had no way of proving that.

They had no way of knowing that. All the Americans would know was that they had been attacked. They would now strike back, immediately, without hesitation, without mercy.

Gudkov had only two choices that made sense. Break now and run, hoping for the best without any further offensive actions, or finish the carrier while he could, then run. Whether the war started accidentally or not no longer mattered. The Iskra was in a position to strike down the carrier that it might never be able to achieve again. Without further thought and to the surprise of all present, Gudkov ordered missiles 2, 3 and 4 fired.

The weapons officer, now fully conscious of what he had done, froze. He was unable to act, move, think, or deal with the calamity he had initiated. He simply stared at the panel before him, dumbfounded, and began to shake uncontrollably. Gudkov realized that the weapons officer had lost control of himself. With all the force he could muster, he shoved the young man out of his seat, reached over and hit the red buttons labeled 2, 3 and 4. When the last missile had been launched, he immediately issued a string of orders to commence evasive maneuvers as the Iskra became the hunted.

Aboard the U.S.S. Franklin in the Arabian Sea 0413 Hours, 16 June (0043

Hours, 16 June,
GMT
)

The crew of the aircraft carrier U.S. S. Franklin were not ready to greet another day of war. After ten days of it, they were tired. The routine was the same each day. Morning air strikes off the deck before sunrise, a quick turnaround for an early-afternoon strike, another turnaround for a late-afternoon strike and preparation of a night strike by the specially equipped aircraft. Throughout the day there was continuous patrolling by fighters and E-2 Hawkeye
AWACS
. After each mission, maintenance and repairs, rearming and refueling and preparation for the next round were needed.

Aircraft thundered across the deck around the clock, both taking off and recovering, sending vibrations throughout the ship and making sleep difficult for those off duty. Added to the physical strain of their job was the mental stress produced by the presence of danger, the close quarters, the irregular hours and the unending missions. A steady routine of war wears on the efficiency of men and results in less than optimum performance and in errors of judgment or downright negligence.

The men of the Franklin were preparing the planes for the early-morning strikes and routine patrols. Topside 125 fuel handlers dragged their heavy hoses from aircraft to aircraft as they topped them off. Ordnance crews were below deck, carefully loading bombs, rockets and missiles from carts scattered about and between the aircraft in the cavernous hangar deck. Plane pushers were pulling readied aircraft to the elevators that would lift them to the flight deck with small tugs. On the flight deck, aircraft maintenance crews were conducting preflight checks on planes of the first wave. The catapult crews were preparing to receive their first aircraft of the day. Farther below decks the pilots were moving from breakfast to the briefing room to receive their mission and conduct their strike planning. Throughout the Franklin the ship’s crew went about their tasks of operating, controlling and maintaining their ship and its planes.

The squawk of the general-quarters alarm caught the crew off guard.

Most couldn’t understand why the Skipper had picked that time for a drill. They were not prepared, physically or mentally, for the impact of the first missile. Though the vast size of the carrier absorbed most of the explosion, there was a sudden tilt and a shudder. Men standing on their toes or performing a delicate operation were thrown off balance. An ordnance crew squatting under the wing of an F-14

Tomcat were about to secure an air-to-air missile when the impact of the missile knocked them down. The air-to-air missile dropped to the deck and rolled into the path of a tug pulling a plane to the elevator.

The tug driver, startled by the alarm and unnerved by the impact of the missile, saw the missile drop and roll out. Without hesitation, he jerked the wheel of the tug and rammed into the wing of another aircraft that was heavily laden with bombs, missiles and fuel. The impacts of the next three missiles were masked by the thunderous series of explosions that ripped through the Franklin.

A great fireball rolled through the confines of the hangar deck, incinerating crewmen where they stood, detonating munitions lying on the deck and hung from aircraft, and feeding itself on fuel in the aircraft and in ruptured fuel lines. Crews of the Franklin’s escort watched in awe as the flames vented out from the hangar deck into the predawn darkness. The flight deck itself was ruptured as munitions from below blew great gaps in it. The all-consuming fire turned inward as well as outward, seeking out and passing through passageways that crewmen had neglected to close and through the holes created by the explosions. Men running down narrow corridors to their battle stations were met head on by the tentacles of the fireball. Those in compartments below the hangar deck were crushed by the force of explosions and fragments that ripped through the deck from above. In less than a minute hundreds of men were dead and many horribly burned.

The fireball dissipated. A stunned silence punctured by random exploding munitions was rapidly followed by a flurry of reports and activation of the ship’s damage-control system. The captain knew that his ship was hurt badly. The helmsman reported loss of steering, followed rapidly by the report that there was a complete loss of propulsion despite the fact that the engine room had escaped damage.

The captain quickly deduced that the missiles which had hit his ship in the stern had damaged the rudders and the screws. Already he could feel the Franklin slowing. The captain turned his full attention to saving his ship while escorts around the carrier scurried in a vain effort to track and kill the attacker.

Though the captain and the surviving crew would struggle against the inevitable for hours, the Franklin was mortally stricken. Too much damage had been caused to too large an area too fast. Power lines and water mains that were needed to fight the spreading fire were ruptured.

Many members of damage-control parties had been swept away in the first minutes of the calamity. By midmorning the fire was out of control.

Reluctantly the captain turned his crew’s efforts from saving the ship to saving as many of the men as possible. The transfer of the wounded was begun and preparations for abandoning the ship were made. When the Franklin finally rolled over and sank in the early evening of 16 June, she took twelve hundred men and a piece of each survivor with her.

The Pentagon, Washington, D.C. 2230 Hours, 15 June (0330 Hours, 16 June,
GMT
)

Like everyone else on the staff, Lieutenant General Horn was confused as to what the Soviets were up to. On one hand they attacked the U.S.S. Franklin and on the other they maintained the same routine patrol patterns and activities throughout Southwest Asia that they had been running since the U.S. had gone into Iran. Even the Soviet carrier group in the Indian Ocean was maintaining its past level of operations without any hint of deviation.

Initial reports from Iran showed that ground and air operations were at the same level as they had been for the past four days. The first satellite photos of the day showed that the Soviet 28th Combined Arms Army was where intelligence had projected it would be at first light.

Soviet aircraft continued the same level of operations north of their self-imposed limit.

Only the submarine attack was out of the norm.

There had been a lively debate between the intelligence officers of each of the services and the Joint Staff as to what was happening. Many felt that the commander of the submarine had jumped the gun and had launched his attack too early (as had happened just prior to the invasion of Finland in 1940, when a Soviet artillery officer had fired a preparatory bombardment twenty-four hours too soon). Another theory was that the Soviets were simply trying to slip in a cheap shot, hitting just one ship in the hope that they could provoke the U.S. into overreacting or could take out a major warship without the U.S.

reacting at all. A few believed that the Soviet attack was meant as a warning, an attempt to scare the U.S. off from going deeper into Iran.

One young naval commander had even put forth the idea that the sinking of the Franklin had been an accident, that someone had gotten excited in the heat of the moment and fired.

Whatever the motivation or reason, the facts were that a Soviet submarine had attacked a U.S. warship in international waters and, according to reports so far received, had caused tremendous damage and hundreds of deaths. The President had asked for recommendations from the Joint Chiefs of Staff by midnight. An initial briefing on the situation, followed by presentation of several recommendations, had taken less than an hour.

Horn now had thirty minutes to review the situation and present to his boss, the Chief of Staff of the Army, his recommendation on not only what should be done in response to the attack but also what changes, if any, the Army needed to make in current plans and operations. The Navy was already preparing to initiate operations against Soviet forces in the immediate area. The Chief of Naval

Operations had ended his briefing to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of

Staff by saying laconically, “Just give me the word, and those bastards are history.”

Horn believed that the attack was a warning and an intentional act. The 17th Airborne and the 28th Marine Regiment had consolidated their toeholds in Iran and were expanding them. The 12th Infantry Division’s lead elements were landing at Bandar Abbas at that very moment. The convoy carrying the 10th Corps’s equipment was entering the Indian Ocean. The Air Force was well established and in strength in Iran and Oman. These developments, coupled with intelligence reports that the Soviets were having severe logistical problems complicated by guerrilla activity along their lines of communication, led Horn to the conclusion that the Soviets were desperate.

Desperate people do desperate things in an effort to correct the situation.

Horn intended to recommend that the U.S. retaliate in kind immediately.

The current situation and Soviet logic and actions reminded him of the story of

Brer Rabbit and the Tar Baby. The rabbit, finding himself with one hand stuck on the Tar Baby, hit the Tar Baby with his free hand, only to get it stuck. When that happened, the rabbit kicked the Tar Baby in an effort to teach the Tar Baby a lesson and free himself. That also failed. The rabbit continued to attack the Tar Baby until he was so stuck that he had no hope of freeing himself. The Soviets, with one hand stuck in the fight against the Iranians, would now find their other one stuck dealing with the U.S.

Navy. Horn’s only concern was what would follow. Would the Soviets continue to fight the Tar Baby until they were totally committed or would they see the light and back off?

In the Indian Ocean 0845 Hours, 16 June (0545 Hours, 16 June,
GMT
) The crews of the aircraft carrier Gorki and her escorts had been at general quarters for over two hours without a clue as to why. Aboard the Gorki all they knew was that something out of the ordinary had happened. The officer on duty had roused the Admiral before dawn.