Straits of Power (47 page)

Virginia class:
The latest class of nuclear-propelled fast-attack submarines (SSNs) being constructed for the United States Navy, to follow the
Seawolf
class. The first, USS
Virginia,
was commissioned in 2004. (Post–Cold War, some SSNs have been named for states since the construction of
Ohio
-class Trident missile “boomers” has been halted.)

Wide-aperture array:
A sonar system introduced, in the U.S. Navy, with USS
Seawolf
in the mid-1990s. Distinct from and in addition to the bow sphere, towed arrays, and forward hull array of the Cold War’s
Los Angeles
–class SSNs. Each submarine so equipped actually has two wide-aperture arrays, one along each side of the hull. Each array consists of three separate rectangular hydrophone complexes. Powerful signal-processing algorithms allow sophisticated analysis of incoming passive sonar data. This includes instant ranging (see above).

Acknowledgments

T
o begin, I want to thank my formal manuscript readers: Captain Melville Lyman, U.S. Navy (retired), commanding officer of several SSBN strategic missile submarines, and now director of Special Weapons Safety and Surety at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory; Commander Jonathan Powis, Royal Navy, who was navigator on the fast-attack submarine HMS
Conqueror
during the Falklands crisis, and who subsequently commanded three different British submarines; retired senior chief Bill Begin, veteran of many “boomer” deterrent patrols; and Peter Petersen, who served in the German Navy’s
U-518
in World War II. Thanks also go to two navy SEALs, Warrant Officer Bill Pozzi and Commander Jim Ostach, and to Lieutenant Commander Jules Steinhauer, USNR (retired), diesel boat veteran and naval aviation submarine liaison in the early Cold War, for their feedback, support, and friendship.

A number of other navy people gave valuable guidance: George Graveson, Jim Hay, and Ray Woolrich, all retired U.S. Navy captains, former submarine skippers, and active in the Naval Submarine League; Ralph Slane, vice president of the New York Council of the Navy League of the United States, and docent of the
Intrepid
Museum; Ann Hassinger, research librarian at the U.S. Naval Institute; Richard Rosenblatt, M.D., formerly a medical consultant to the U.S. Navy; Commander Rick Dau, USN (retired), former operations director of the Naval Submarine League; Bill Kreher, current operations director; and retired reserve U.S. Navy Seabee chief “Stormin’ Normand” Dupuis.

Additional submariners and military contractors deserve acknowledgment. They are too many to name here, but continuing to stand out vividly in my mind are pivotal conversations with Commander (now Captain) Mike Connor, at the time CO of USS
Seawolf,
and with the late Captain Ned Beach, USN (retired), brilliant writer and great submariner. I also want to thank, for the guided tours of their fine submarines, the officers and men of USS
Alexandria,
USS
Connecticut,
USS
Dallas,
USS
Hartford,
USS
Memphis,
USS
Salt Lake City,
USS
Seawolf,
USS
Springfield,
USS
Topeka,
and the modern German diesel submarine
U-15.
I owe “deep” appreciation to everyone aboard USS
Miami,
SSN 755, for four wonderful days on and under the sea.

Similar thanks go to the instructors and students of the New London Submarine School, and the Coronado BUD/SEAL training facilities, and to all the people who demonstrated their weapons, equipment, attack vessels, and aircraft at the amphibious warfare bases in Coronado and Norfolk. Appreciation also goes to the men and women of the aircraft carrier USS
Constellation,
the Aegis guided missile cruiser USS
Vella Gulf,
the fleet-replenishment oiler USNS
Pecos,
the deep-submergence rescue vehicle
Avalon,
and its chartered tender R/V
Kellie Chouest.

The Current Strategy Forum and publications of the Naval War College were invaluable. The opportunity to fly out to the amphibious warfare helicopter carrier USS
Iwo Jima
during New York City’s Fleet Week 2002, and then join her sailors and marines in rendering honors as the ship passed ground zero, the former site of the World Trade Center, was one of the most powerfully emotional experiences of my life.

First among the publishing people deserving acknowledgment is my wife, Sheila Buff, a nonfiction author and coauthor of more than two dozen books on health and wellness, hiking, and nature loving. Then comes my agent, John Talbot, touchstone of seasoned wisdom on the craft and business sides of the writing profession. Equally crucial is my editor at William Morrow, Mike Shohl, always enthusiastic, accessible, and inspiring through his keen insights on how to improve my manuscript drafts.

Turn the page for a preview of the next thrilling
Jeffrey Fuller adventure
from Joe Buff,
SEAS OF CRISIS,
coming soon in hardcover
from William Morrow.

Late June, 2012

W
ar isn’t hell, it’s worse than hell,
Commander Jeffrey Fuller told himself. He sat alone in his captain’s stateroom on USS
Challenger
, whose ceramic composite hull helped make her America’s most capable nuclear powered fast-attack submarine. But Jeffrey was not a happy camper. Despite his many successes in tactical atomic combat at sea in a war that the Berlin-Boer Axis started a year ago—and despite his repeated brilliant achievements in special operations raids against hostile territory—very recently, for complicated reasons, Jeffrey had felt like a has-been. His two Navy Crosses, his Medal of Honor, his Defense Distinguished Service Medal, and his whole crew’s receipt of a Presidential Unit Citation some months ago, all put together couldn’t dispel his present dark mood.

Challenger
was five days out from Pearl Harbor, deeply submerged and steaming due north, already past the Aleutian Islands chain that stretched between Alaska and Siberia. She was bound for the New London submarine base, on Connecticut’s Thames River, having been sent by the shortest but most frigid possible route: through the narrow Bering Strait choke point looming a few hundred miles ahead, separating the easternmost tip of pseudo-neutral Russia from mainland Alaska’s desolate Cape Prince of Wales. Jeffrey would sail way up and past Alaska and Arctic Canada. Then he’d sneak through the shallow waters between Canada and Greenland, into the Atlantic, to arrive at home port in two weeks for a reception that he already dreaded.

No one from
Challenger
—including Jeffrey—had even been allowed ashore at Pearl. Taking on minimal supplies and spare parts, and embarking five somber, tight-lipped passengers—an inspection team maybe, or investigators from JAG?—had occurred entirely by minisub.
Challenger
hid underwater, off the coast from Honolulu, frustratingly near its enticing beaches, bars, nightclubs, and more. No fresh fruit or vegetables were provided by the Pearl Harbor Base, to replenish what had already run out since the ship’s last port of call. This was supposed to be for security, but Jeffrey thought that was just an excuse; it felt much more like punishment. It was as if, after his most recent mission, despite his major contributions to the Allied cause, he’d become a pariah, shunted out of sight and out of mind by the powers-that-be.

Forget about me, it’s an insult to my crew’s dedication and courage.

Jeffrey was smart and self-aware. He knew his unpleasant mood wasn’t due to exhaustion, usually a chronic problem the way he drove himself. He and his men had had ten days of wonderful leave in Australia, including much consumption of the excellent local beer—cut short by sudden orders to proceed with greatest possible stealth to Hawaii. Also cut short, alas, was his newly made contact with a Royal Australian Navy commander named Melanie, of whom he carried deliciously vivid memories...but missing her wasn’t the cause of his funk. He’d been gone from her now for a longer stretch than he’d known her.

He wasn’t morose either, after the fact, for the adversaries he’d killed; his soul adjusted better than most to this dehumanizing cost of war. Nor was his mood caused by concern for his crew’s survival, for the outcome of an impending battle that Jeffrey might well lose—he’d long since mastered these stresses and strains of command through brutal experience. The cruise home should be a milk run.

But there were no new medals awaiting Jeffrey at Pearl Harbor for the latest tremendous things he’d accomplished, despite an earlier message implying there would be. No admirals came to shake his hand, no squadron commodore gave him a pat on the back. And Jeffrey was sure he knew why.

He’d broken too many unwritten rules—too many even for him—on that fateful mission spanning half the globe. He’d stepped on too many toes, made too many new and wellplaced political enemies in Washington, while exercising initiative that had seemed to make sense at the time: He’d won a vehement shouting match quashing a civilian expert whose advice he was supposed to respect. On his own accord he’d clandestinely violated a crucial ally’s sovereignty, leaving the seeds for what could still become a disastrous diplomatic incident. Worst, while obeying orders he knew he could have chosen to ignore, he and everyone else on
Challenger
had had to listen, horrified, doing nothing but flee while dozens of good men—friends and colleagues—died under Axis attack in the Med.

The real price of that ambivalent inaction under fire only began to show on the transit across the vast Pacific from Australia to Hawaii.
Challenger
should have steered in the opposite direction, toward Boer-controlled South Africa, to engage and eliminate front-line Axis naval units there; eager to clear their names via further mortal combat against a hated foe, the crew grew restive at being banished toward a safe rear area.

It was then that some of Jeffrey’s men began to have nightmares so bad that they’d wake up screaming, reliving the deafening battle from which Jeffrey ran. Tragic, yes, but unacceptable on a warship that needed to maintain ultraquiet. There was little that
Challenger
’s medical corpsman, a rotund and normally jolly chief, could do for them. Six of Jeffrey’s people were offloaded, also by minisub, at Pearl as psychiatric cases. Not one new crewman transferred on, odd in itself since rotation of U.S. Navy personnel was a common procedure—and in this situation another bad sign.

Jeffrey was working more short-handed even than that. One of his star performers, Lieutenant Kathy Milgrom of the UK’s Royal Navy, who’d served as
Challenger
’s sonar officer on the ship’s most vital missions, had been summarily detached. Jumped two ranks to Commander, she was now an influential advisor on the Aussie naval staff in Sydney. This was terrific for Milgrom, and Jeffrey was very glad for her, but he’d been miffed that he found out about it only when she got the orders directly and then told him; the way it was handled violated correct protocol. Now, that incident seemed like the first harbinger of Jeffrey’s abruptly downgraded status in the eyes of his superiors.

Also during his Australian leave, Jeffrey found out from his father—who’d rocketed from dull bureaucrat to a very senior position in wartime homeland resource conservation at the Department of Energy—that Jeffrey’s ex-girlfriend, edgy and self-reliant Boer freedom fighter Ilse Reebeck, was under arrest for treason, an alleged double agent for the Axis. Before deploying to the Med, Jeffrey was grilled about their relationship by the Director of the FBI in front of the President of the United States, with the director slinging rhetoric that made Jeffrey look pretty bad. The president had taken a shining to Jeffrey at the Medal of Honor presentation, followed by a private chat, earlier in the year. He had no idea where he stood with his commander in chief these days. The rumors of Ilse being held in solitary confinement, leaked to him by his dad but neither confirmed nor denied through normal channels, were another contributor to Jeffrey’s mounting sense of trouble. His tentative moves intervening on Ilse’s behalf had been curtly rebuffed, with sharp instructions for him to stay within his proper sphere—undersea warfare, not domestic counterespionage.

So
Challenger
was back to having an all-male crew, which should have simplified his leadership problems, but the effect on morale wasn’t positive when word got around. The men admired Milgrom’s talent, and Ilse’s as a combat oceanographer, and they believed—with the strength of sailors’ superstition—that Ilse’s being on board in the past had brought the ship good luck.

Privacy was scarce-to-nonexistent on a sub; scuttlebutt and gossip—and wild speculation, too—traveled fast. His crew, each a hand-picked volunteer who’d passed the toughest imaginable screening, were seeing the same tea leaves that Jeffrey was trying to read. They could sense what he was feeling, no matter how hard he bottled it up to do his duty as their captain and carry on as if all were routine. When he offered quick words of greeting or encouragement, as he moved around his ship that bustled like a snug beehive—with everyone as familiar to him as if they were part of his family—the words rang hollow.

Jeffrey was easy to read; deceit in face-to-face interactions simply wasn’t in him. He’d found out the expensive way, early in his Navy career, that he was awful at poker. In stark contrast, the personal anonymity from the opaqueness of the ocean—combined with getting inside an enemy sub captain’s mind through a sixth sense that Jeffrey possessed in uncanny abundance—posed the sort of contest, the winnertake-all blood sport, that he excelled at and most craved. The higher the stakes the better, at this type of game, and Jeffrey never felt so alive as when nuclear torpedo engines screamed and their warheads erupted, while he snapped helm orders to maneuver
Challenger
like a fighter jet under the sea.

On his latest missions the stakes had been as high as they could come, possibly shaping the outcome of the whole war. But this last time, it appeared, Jeffrey had gone too far in some ways, and not far enough in others. He suspected there were whispers in the corridors of the Pentagon that he was an uncontrollable cowboy, a loose cannon who second-guessed others too much—and when it mattered most, his jealous rivals would be saying, he’d shown a streak of cowardice. Jeffrey knew he’d done the right thing at every stage of that mind-twisting mission, but what he knew inside didn’t count. He was on his way into professional obscurity, dead-ended at the rank of commander, bound for some desk job far from the action. His own worst nightmare was coming true: He was being beached, before the war had even been won.

He listened to the steady rushing sound that came from the air-circulation vents in the overhead of his cabin. The air inside the forward parts of
Challenger
was always cool, to keep the electronics from overheating. Jeffrey was very used to it, but this evening for some strange reason he felt chilled into his marrow. Then he understood.

The cycle of death-defying adrenaline rushes, followed by high-level awards and attention, had for him become addictive. Jeffrey was experiencing the symptoms of withdrawal, leaving him utterly empty inside.

He looked up for a moment at the bluish glare of the fluorescent fixtures, like plant grow-lights to keep submariners healthy while deprived of any sun for weeks on end. He glanced at the grayish flame-proof linoleum squares that covered his stateroom deck, then gazed around at the fakewood wainscot veneer, and bright stainless steel, lining the four bulkheads of his tiny world. He pulled a standard-issue brown sweater out of a clothing drawer, one made of wool with vertical ribbing, putting it on over the khaki uniform blouse and slacks he always liked to wear while under way. He was still cold.

Outside his shut door, in the narrow passage, he heard crewmen hurrying about now and then, on their way to different stations to perform the myriad tasks that helped the ship run smoothly every second of every minute of every single day. There was no margin for error on a nuclear submarine. Jeffrey dearly loved this endless pressure, much as he’d grown accustomed to the constant, potentially killing squeeze of the ocean surrounding
Challenger
.

He sighed. Too soon another man would sit at this little fold-down desk, sleep in this austere rack, put up photos of wife and children, and assert his own personality and habits onto the crew.
Challenger
would have a different captain, because Jeffrey’s run of luck as captain had finally run out.

Someone knocked.

“Come in!” Jeffrey welcomed any distraction.

His executive officer entered, Lieutenant Commander Jackson Jefferson Bell. A few inches taller than Jeffrey, but less naturally muscular, Bell was happily married and had a six-month-old son to look forward to seeing again, once they arrived in the States. Cautious in his tactical thinking when Jeffrey was super-aggressive, Bell complemented Jeffrey perfectly in the control room during combat. Often he’d played devil’s advocate in engagements where split seconds mattered, when the waters thundered outside the hull and
Challenger
shook from stem to stern as if tossed by an angry sea monster—and Jeffrey’s crew looked to him to somehow, some way, keep them alive, while an Axis skipper did his damnedest to smash their ship to pieces and slaughter every person aboard.

Right now Bell seemed uncomfortable, as if he could tell that their prior working relationship would end soon. Comings and goings, joinings and separations, were a normal enough part of life in the Navy. This time, though, it was different. Jeffrey and Bell’s parting would not be a happy one for Jeffrey, and he knew he’d miss Bell a lot. Their hair’s-breadth survival so many times, the shared exhilaration with each added victory, had brought the two men close.

Jeffrey grimaced to himself.
Bell will have a new boss.

Jeffrey understood Bell’s perspective. He needed to attend, first and foremost, to his own future career. Bell had a family to support. If he survived the war and wanted to stay in the Navy, he’d require as much space between himself and Jeffrey’s now-tainted reputation as he could get.

Bell had arrived to give his regular evening 2000—8 p.m.—report as XO to his captain. Bell’s words held no surprises. He wrapped up crisply and left, pulling the door shut behind him. Toward the end of his verbal update on the status of the ship and her machinery and equipment and personnel, Bell avoided making eye contact. It was as if he was embarrassed for Jeffrey, and tried to hide it, but the more he tried to hide it, the more he made things worse.

Two more weeks of this before they got to New London, Jeffrey told himself. He was a lame duck in every sense of the word. He didn’t like the sensation, not one bit.

At least they didn’t relieve me of command right there at Pearl. Probably only because nobody with the right credentials was free.

Jeffrey needed something more than meaningless paperwork to keep busy. He refused to start mental rehearsals for the court martial which might be coming—that was just too defeatist, too morbid. There’d be plenty of time for it later if need be, and as a decorated war hero—a national celebrity— such drastic measures were unlikely. No, exile to semioblivion in some token land activity was a more probable disposition for a commander who’d become an awkward case to those on high, key officials not just at the Pentagon but in the CIA and the State Department too, coming together at the Cabinet level.