Charles Taylor: Boomer

Arrow was short and compact, like his submarines, with neatly combed, short, brown hair and inquisitive blue eyes. His voice was sharp and authoritative, even in simple conversation. “I was thinking accident when Alaska didn’t report,” he said after shaking hands with the others, “but there’s something I haven’t quite been able to put my finger on, even when Nevada remained silent.” It was a way of opening a troubling discussion, words that he’d been considering since he’d come back to the building a few hours before. The only time he’d been out of his office in the past six days was to have breakfast with his wife and to see the kids off to school each day. “You see neither of them reported any troubles, not even a hint, before they got under way. Equipment casualties happen. I know that.” He shrugged. “Yet both of them were as clean as Mother Hubbard’s proverbial cupboard, according to Bart Bockman.”

“I noted that,” the CNO commented dryly. Larsen was a man who spoke only when he had something specific to say. He often made a statement out of a question, but left no doubt he was looking for an answer. “What’s bothered me more since then is the late report about Pasadena. ”

“We’ll give the attack boats the benefit of the doubt, Admiral,” Arrow responded. “ Pasadena was ordered to shift patrol areas in transit. I assume they’ve been copying their broadcast. There was no need for her to acknowledge unless they had a problem. They weren’t a part of that communications experiment. On the other hand, the boomers don’t exactly ask permission to use the head, even when we really have something critical for them.” He shrugged again. “If it hadn’t been a special situation….” But there was no point in finishing the sentence, and his voice trailed off.

“And do you think the same thing that silenced Pasadena silenced the other two?”

Arrow shook his head. “Doubtful. They were in three different locations … three different situations. The operating sector for Alaska was well north of Pasadena’ s last position, and Nevada was much farther than that. Pasadena had been asked to confirm at a later time — using a simple burst transmission that would be almost impossible to isolate. Acknowledging that message would be more courtesy than anything else, and the last thing we need in this Navy is courtesy. Otherwise we’d be encouraging a bunch of magpies out there. We may still hear from her. For all we know, Wayne Newell’s busting ass trying to repair radio problems.”

“No backup equipment?” Larsen inquired.

“Yes, there is,” Arrow responded evenly. “But once again, considering security requirements, I’d give them the benefit of the doubt.”

All the responses were exactly as Larsen anticipated. Neither questions nor answers brought a solution. Submarines were like cats, or they were supposed to be — absolutely silent until they pounced.

There was an aspect still bothering Mark Bennett. “There’s one thing I’m not sure of, and I’d like to see if your people can set it up for us. I’m a suspicious son of a bitch, and I want the location of every Soviet ship in the northern Pacific, and I’d like to see what they’ve been doing for the past four days … where they’ve been. Can you do that?” His eyes had never left Arrow’s.

“Give me half an hour, maybe an hour if we’re going to back them up a few days.” Arrow stuck his head into the outer office and explained what had to be done to his flag lieutenant. Then he glanced over his shoulder. “Any of you as hungry as I am? Great way to kill time.”

As they followed Arrow out of the room, a name that had been hovering on the fringes of Mark Bennett’s mind flashed repeatedly, a gaudy neon sign in a sea of confusion. Since that initial message, he’d been asking himself if any single individual might be capable of meeting this unknown threat in the limited time span available. His answer was suddenly very clear — Ben Steel, captain of Manchester, the man he was sure would one day fill his own shoes. But was it possible … could he be close enough? Frankly, Mark didn’t have the vaguest idea what Manchester would be close enough to.

The SSV-516 was barely making headway through choppy Pacific waters a few hundred miles south of the Aleutians. She was the largest intelligence collector in the Soviet fleet, a low, wide-beamed surface ship displacing almost five thousand tons. Much of her weight was electronic equipment, and she presented a strange sight with two spherical radomes for satellite communications perched on the forward deck housing. There were also three huge masts mounting a variety of intelligence-collecting equipment. The ship was squat and odd-looking, more than fifty feet from beam to beam to accommodate excessive storage space for long at-sea periods. She also possessed missiles and guns for her own defense, an unusual feature for a vessel never designated as a warship.

She’d been at sea for more than a month now, most of her time spent cruising the northern Pacific. A certain element among those people who sailed her were convinced that their ship would eventually be the most famous in Soviet naval lore. SSV-516 was already responsible for the loss of more enemy firepower than any other vessel in history. And she had yet to fire a shot in anger.

The reason for these unique victories was deep within the main deckhouse. There, nestled in the center of a restricted high-security area, was a compartment that few members of her crew could possibly comprehend. The single door was guarded twenty-four hours a day by burly, heavily armed individuals who were said to belong to the GRU, the military-intelligence branch of the armed forces. Those who were allowed inside the space had come aboard by helicopter two weeks after the ship had left her homeport. SSV-516 had steamed within two hundred miles of Petropavlovsk, a naval base at the tip of the Kamchatka peninsula, to receive the specialists.

The electronics within this room were highly sophisticated, so much so that few within the Soviet Union were aware of their existence. Using coded radio signals that could not be interpreted by any other instrument, these black boxes allowed the operators to activate a transceiver in a high-altitude, elliptical-orbit satellite. They could even reorient the satellite to direct its blue-green laser beam to a designated sector on the surface of the Pacific. The beam could penetrate several hundred feet of seawater. An aircraft or ship would have to be near the direct path of the beam in order to intercept — and the odds of that occurring were infinitely small.

The men who designed and operated this equipment had a single mission — to control the movements of an American 688-class attack submarine. They were able to accomplish that mission with relative ease for a single, simple reason — the operators aboard the submarine had no idea that they were being so effectively manipulated. Their communications equipment had been specially adapted for that purpose by the replacement of a couple of harmless-appearing circuit boards during their fast repair period alongside a submarine tender. Not only were incoming transmissions controlled, regularly received frequencies appeared dead. While seemingly impossible at first glance, it had not been overly difficult to achieve this modification, not when the years of patient, long-range planning were considered.

There are times when the outrageous becomes pathetically simple. Soviet electronics technicians, trained for years to operate under the guise of American technical specialists, had completed the alteration during the installation of updated equipment.