Ian Slater - Rage of Battle

The swells that had been mere scratches on a blue slate from the air were now growing alarmingly, the high, white cumulus bruising, and the ocean no longer deep blue but a relentless and endless gray. But perhaps, he told himself, the swells that seemed to have grown more precipitous in the last five minutes were not harbingers of worsening weather but merely appeared more ominous beneath the leaden sky. Then he saw the Hormone, its coaxial rotors a black blur, and for a moment or two Fernshaw was convinced he was about to die, his heart pounding, thinking of his wife and four-year-old boy, the cloying smell of the claustrophobic rubber raft closing in on him, making him nauseated.

All his training against G forces was of no avail in the heaving chaos of the sea, where one second he felt his whole body grow lighter as the raft swept up the side of a fifteen-foot swell before plummeting, his stomach churning, into the next trough. Not a religious man, Fernshaw nevertheless said a prayer for deliverance, and it was only when he glimpsed the Russian chopper suspended above him, a buoyancy bag inflated around each of its four wheels, a rescue cable and harness still dangling from its side door, that he dared hope fate was finally lending him a hand — that the old law of the sea of enemies helping one another when they were in peril might yet prevail. One of the Russians in the Hormone, immediately behind the copilot, was dimly visible through the salt-speckled Perspex of the chopper. On impulse, Fernshaw waved. The man waved back and the chopper rose.

In the chopper several of the Yumashev’s rescued crew members made to cross the Hormone’s cabin to look out, but the pilot, alarmed by their abruptly shifting the chopper’s center of gravity, brusquely ordered them to “Sadit’sya!”— “Sit down!” A young cook, still shivering, ignored the order and remained standing, one hand on the cabin rail, the other clutching a rough woolen navy blanket about his shoulders, his wet hair and beard matted with oil sludge. As he watched the silvered barrel toppling from beneath the chopper, the bright orange raft slid bumpily down a swell’s steep incline as the chopper banked.

The sea erupted seconds later, the depth charge’s fuse set for poverknostny kontakt— “surface contact”—its shock wave visible, a huge ring shuddering and racing out from its epicenter, the tent-shaped raft miraculously still inflated but tumbling down the outside of a high, foaming column of water, as if caught in a mossy, green waterfall, the enemy pilot’s body, limp and lifeless, hitting the water before the raft.

The explosion, its range put at three miles by the Roosevelt’s sonar conversion computer, was heard aboard the sub as no more than a muffled cough, but it was loud enough to startle Robert Brentwood out of his light sleep, his photo of Rosemary sliding from his chest as his hand darted out to stop the Walkman from falling as he turned. Glancing up at the Control relay in his cabin, he saw the sub was maintaining the anticipated TACAMO rendezvous by crawling along at less than 3.5 knots on the emergency “bring it home” shaft against a crosscurrent. The current, surprisingly strong and not marked on the chart, was disconcertingly “mixed” in temperature and salinity.

As officer of the deck, Peter Zeldman lost no time in alerting everyone in Control to a possible inversion layer coming up. Soon every man aboard knew the sub might be approaching a “plume,” a less dense area of water caused by either fresh or hot water springs from the earth’s crust “streaming” through the colder, more dense sea around them. And everyone knew how many subs before them had suddenly plunged in a less dense column, hitting the bottom at over 130 miles an hour before tanks could be vented to regain neutral buoyancy.

The explosion, albeit muted in the distance, was at once an added strain and a possible relief for those in Control as it could mean that another Allied submarine was in the area, unknowingly taking the heat off them. On the other hand, as Zeldman pointed out to Brentwood, if it had been an enemy ASW aircraft or surface vessel searching for the Roosevelt, then the explosion some way off indicated that the sub’s pursuers were way off course and had merely been attacking blind, looking for the sub around the last reported position of the Yumashev.

But whatever was going on about him, Robert Brentwood was certain of one thing — after his sinking the cruiser, the Russians would gather their forces, and he, like the convoys, could expect more determined and pervasive attacks en route to the haven of Scotland’s Holy Loch, still over a thousand miles to the northeast. Brentwood also knew that now there was no way they could risk going up for a TACAMO rendezvous. They were on their own.

In Baltic Fleet headquarters at Baltiysk, near the Lithuanian port of Kaliningrad, a bad mood permeated the hallways, especially in the office of the Baltic Fleet’s naval intelligence unit, which reported directly to the Glavnoye Razvedyvatelnoye Upravienie— the GRU, main intelligence directorate of the Soviet general staff. No one among the Estonian workers was cooperating, including those of Russian background. The large minority of Russians in Estonia, as well as native Estonians, had been approached to see if they had heard anything about who was sabotaging munitions in the factories in and around Tallinn, the Estonian capital. They said they had not.

The GRU general had no doubt they were lying, their silence taken by the GRU as yet another legacy of what was contemptuously referred to as Gorbachev’s “glorious” reign. The Estonians had been permitted to pass laws forbidding Russian workers from voting unless they’d lived in Estonia for several years. The Estonian Russians had suddenly found themselves second-class citizens within the Soviet Union, and now they were in no mood to risk the wrath of the Lesnye Bortsy za Svobodu— “Forest Freedom Fighters” (the Estonian underground) — by helping military intelligence.

To make matters worse for the GRU, there had been an astonishing display of solidarity among workers of all backgrounds outside the Estonian capital as well. Not only were the shipyard and factory hands not saying anything, but Russian immigrant workers as far east as Kohtla-Järve, where most of them worked the oil shale deposits, were also proving to be uncooperative toward the GRU.

At first the GRU chief thought he could run the saboteurs to ground simply by tracing the serial numbers of the munitions that had been assigned to the Yumashev, most specifically the RBU rockets which had failed so miserably in the Yumashev’s attack upon the American submarine. But as his men fanned out amid the giant gantries of Tallinn’s shipyards and to the various munitions assembly and distribution centers along the thousand miles of Baltic coastline, from Virborg in the northern sector of the Gulf of Finland east to Leningrad, then west again to Tallinn and Riga, and as far south as Kaliningrad in Lithuania, they made a troubling discovery — that many serial numbers had been duplicated, in some cases triplicated, in different ports and the same port. This was bad enough, but as they tried to narrow the problem down to what specific shift, what factory or yard, had installed the fuses, they found themselves in a quagmire of administrative chaos, one of the clock-in cards being signed “MM Mouse,” and responsibility for the mess being passed around like a game of musical chairs.

Back in Leningrad Naval Base, it wasn’t a game Admiral Brodsky enjoyed playing. Below his office window, the Neva River looked leaden, the cloven sky morose, and in the autumn air he could smell the heavy mustiness of fallen leaves. An early winter predicted. This meant the Gulf of Finland could be iced over by Christmas, only five weeks off. Even with the few icebreakers he had available, Brodsky knew that early ice would spell disaster — resupply of the Baltic Fleet impossible. The thought of the fleet that had broken out into the Atlantic, after the joint Soviet forces’ assault on the Denmark Straits and the NATO Danish base of Bornholm Island, being left without vital food and munitions, unable to press its attack against the U.S. submarines, was anathema to Brodsky.