Ian Slater: Rage of Battle

“But the British navy have responsibility for this side of the Atlantic, Captain.”

“Yes,” said Stasky, “but the British have only eight…” he remembered the Trafalgar he’d sunk “… seven nuclear submarines, Comrade. They can’t do it alone. They need American help.”

Stasky requested a printout of Roosevelt’s total complement — officers and crew. KGB’s First Directorate had assigned agents in Britain and the United States to follow family members of some of the U.S. submarine crews. Whenever one of the family went to a post office, the KGB agent, usually a woman, waited patiently behind the person in line. Chatty and friendly, the agent would “accidentally” bump the family member, apologizing profusely, quickly retrieve the dropped mail, and in the process deftly affix a quick-stick microdot chip transmitter to the targeted envelope. The transmitter could then hopefully be traced through “fleet mail.” The failure rate was high, as most of the time the microdot chip would become mangled by the post office or its shape otherwise ruptured along the way. But occasionally the concerted effort paid off. The key to the KGB’s success was their ability to keep track of the highly sophisticated “Japanese” microdot tracer sets via KRYSAT, the intelligence satellite named after Vladimir Kryuchkov, who had been personally appointed and ordered by Gorbachev in 1988 to launch the biggest KGB espionage operation since World War II to secure as many military and industrial secrets from the West as possible.

On several occasions KRYSAT was able to keep an ELLOK, or electronic lock, on one of the microdot transmitters, allowing it to be traced all the way to a fleet area. Once in the area proper, the weak transmitter signal, on the same frequency as a thousand other pieces of electronic equipment in the area, was drowned in a sea of much stronger frequencies, so that the exact position of the American sub that the targeted crew member was on was not known. But the general area of the battle group, to which sub armament resupply vessels were attached, narrowed the search area considerably. This made up for the fact, which Stasky and every other Soviet captain was aware of, that the Russian Tupolev reconnaissance aircraft, NATO designation “Bear,” with its thirty-six-foot-wide rotodome, though good enough for general maritime patrols up to seven thousand miles away, was not much help in hunting for enemy subs. The Bear’s four Kuznetsov turboprop engines were capable of only 540 miles per hour, its armament in the otherwise impressive remotely controlled dorsal and ventral twin twenty-three-millimeter gun barbettes no match against the dazzling virtuosity of the American F-15s.

Unfortunately for Stasky, while the general fleet area of the Roosevelt, like that of the two subs he’d already sunk, had sometimes been known to him, courtesy of the First Directorate’s dogged electronic surveillance, the American sub had always acted as a lone wolf. He would have to find her by himself.

To this end Stasky gave orders for the Yumashev’s “Hormone” helicopter to be launched, and reemphasized the need for full battle readiness to the 108 men manning the 54 torpedo/depth charge tubes that festooned the cruiser’s sleek flanks. As the cruiser increased speed, both men and launchers were splattered by spray as the elegant curve of the long, gray ship’s bow bucked and sliced its way through mounting seas. Next, after checking the SATNAV, satellite navigation, printout — something he could not always rely on during severe solar flare activity — the Russian captain ordered his chief engineer to be ready at a moment’s notice to “ ekhat’ polnym khodom”—” pull out all the stops.” Bringing the sub chaser to its maximum speed of fifty-nine knots would give Stasky an advantage of fifteen knots over the American.

Binoculars slung about his neck, Stasky moved out to the windward side of the flying bridge, the sudden rush of cold sea air at once invigorating and numbing. He looked down at the foredeck of his long, gray ship as it knifed through a heavy swell and knew he was ready, confident of his command, his crew, and the ship’s impressive armament. At the same time, he was too old a captain not to realize that in addition to speed and ASW weaponry — which the technical experts ashore referred to rather grandly as the “determining elements”—what you needed was udacha— “a bit of luck.”

As the cruiser raced eastward, hoping to close the gap between herself and her American quarry, Stasky found himself trying to imagine what the enemy captain, Brentwood, and his crew were like. Was there anything in the profile printouts that he could pick up on, turn to his advantage? Despite all the mumbo-jumbo and psycho-babble of some of the printouts, which had gotten worse during the “liberalism” of Gorbachev’s time, Stasky had to admit that sometimes a submarine had been found out and sunk because of a small inattention to detail by just one member of its crew. He recalled the Soviets’ loss of a state-of-the-art Alfa-class HUK sub because a disgruntled crewman on garbage disposal detail had failed to make sure the compacted bale of trash had been properly weighted and bound. Loose foil from the frozen food wrappers bobbing up to the surface, though invisible to the naked eye, especially in fog, had nevertheless been picked up by a U.S. satellite’s infrared eye.

Going back inside the bridge, Stasky ordered the officer of the deck to give him a printout of all the Roosevelt crew member “summaries” on file. Glasgow had reported, for example, that Robert Brentwood was engaged — to a schoolteacher in Surrey. But this information, garnered from the London Times announcements column, didn’t strike the Russian captain as in any way significant. That is, until his first officer pointed out, half-jokingly, that at least Brentwood’s insurance rates would fall. When Stasky asked what he meant, the officer explained that on one of the prewar programma voennogo obmena— “military exchange programs”—he’d been on in America, he had discovered that in the United States and other capitalist countries, when a man is married or has children, his insurance rates fall because the insurance companies’ statistics showed that with increased responsibility for a wife and/or children, a man tended to be much more cautious, to drive more carefully, bol’she oboronitez ‘no —”more defensively.”

Stasky nodded thoughtfully, looking down at Brentwood’s printout again. More defensive! It was the samy kray— ”the edge”—that might make all the difference, especially if the Roosevelt was heading out for convoy patrol. Such escort duty was an added incentive for a sub captain not to fire the first shot, not to do anything that might betray his position. To play defensively rather than offensively. Oh, certainly it might account for only a fraction of a second, but in a fraction of a second — another man’s hesitation — Stasky knew he could fire everything he had.

“Yes?” asked Rosemary Spence, indicating the student at the back of her Shakespeare class, the boy’s eyeglasses opaque discs in the artificial light.

“Well, miss, it seems as if Lear only makes sense when he’s crazy. I mean, when he’s sane, he doesn’t make any sense at all.”

Normally Rosemary Spence would have pressed the student on why he thought that about Lear — was it his own or had he lifted it from Orwell’s essay, “Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool”? But this afternoon her heart wasn’t in it, her attention waning as she worried about Robert.

On the night before he’d left Oxshott on his way back to Scotland, there had been antiaircraft missile fire all along England’s southeast coast — the Soviet air forces pounding the ports, all but destroying a convoy of forty ships that had made the long and dangerous three-thousand-mile voyage from Newfoundland only to come under the fierce bombardment of over five squadrons of Soviet fighter/bombers as the weary convoy approached the Southampton loran station. As the stalks of searchlights clustered like enormous celery sticks, separated, and closed again, trying to hold their Soviet targets, the explosions of iron bombs shattering the docksides of southern England, and the yellow tails and scream of air-to-air and ground-to-air rockets ripping the night sky asunder, she and Robert had made love. And now she held the memory close, it helping her get through the daily anxiety of wondering where he was, whether he was safe. She also tried to escape from the worry by burying herself in her work. But teaching Shakespeare always brought her back to the multitudinous calamities that befall even the most innocent, let alone those at war. To make matters worse, every day more and more countries were being drawn into the maelstrom — all the experts proven disastrously wrong as the war leaders, fearing a nuclear holocaust, held back from pushing the button, unleashing instead a conventional, albeit high-tech, war that was now three months old and showed no signs of letup as country after country, fearful of being caught alone in the storm, threw in its lot with either the NATO alliance or the Soviet armies.