The Trident Deception (29 page)

Four days earlier, the country’s three other P-3C wings had descended from the skies, joining Wing Two as the nation’s seventeen squadrons of P-3C antisubmarine aircraft converged on the Hawaiian island. This morning, at the edge of the base’s mile-and-a-half-long runway, Lieutenant Commander Scott Graef led his tactical team of four enlisted and one junior officer out of the Ready Room onto the white concrete tarmac. It wasn’t yet noon but it was already unusually hot for the northeast shore, as the normally reliable trade winds were absent. The heat shimmered off the runway as load crews readied the P-3Cs that had just returned from on station, refueling them and loading another contingent of sonobuoys.

One of the P-3Cs being readied was the one Graef had arrived on four days ago with the first of the VP-16 War Eagles aircraft from Jacksonville, Florida. It had taken an additional three days for the rest of his squadron to straggle in, and two aircraft had not arrived, breaking down along the way. As Graef stopped and scanned the busy Marine Corps base for the P-3C assigned to today’s mission, he shook his head at the state of the U.S. Navy’s antisubmarine patrol aircraft.

Thirty percent of VP-16’s aircraft were down hard, the maintenance crews unable to repair the fifty-plus-year-old aircraft. The replacement for the Orions, the P-8A Poseidon aircraft, had been delayed for over a decade by budget wranglers at the Pentagon, and the P-3Cs could barely support the mission they were assigned. Every American P-3C squadron throughout the world had converged on Kaneohe Bay in an effort to establish an antisubmarine barrier stretching hundreds of miles across the Pacific, and they were all in similar shape, their patched aircraft needing additional repairs as soon as they arrived.

An operable P-3C taxied to the runway in front of Graef, the next aircraft in the wheel of continuous rotation required to maintain the antisubmarine barrier. For every aircraft on patrol over its assigned station, two more were needed, one on its way out to relieve and another on its way back for refueling and a replacement crew. Luckily, the Wings had ample crews due to the number of down aircraft.

The supply of torpedoes was another matter. The bunkers at all twenty-three storage locations worldwide were empty, and the P-3C taking off was loaded out at 50 percent. Between the waterfronts on the Pacific and the P-3C squadrons converging on Hawaii, there simply weren’t enough torpedoes to go around.

The only good news was that Hawaii had just received a shipment of the Navy’s newest lightweight torpedo, the MK 54 MAKO Hybrid, equipped with a state-of-the-art guidance control section and new, sophisticated search algorithms. The decision had been made to spread the new MK 54s throughout the P-3Cs rather than concentrate them on a few aircraft, since there was no telling which crew would detect the enemy submarine. Each aircraft would have one of the MK 54 torpedoes aboard, giving them one shot at their target with the Navy’s most capable lightweight torpedo.

As the P-3C took off and a second Orion landed just seconds later, Lieutenant Pete Burwell, Graef’s Communicator, stopped beside him, shouting over the distinctive whirr of the P-3C propeller blades churning the air. “Sir, 203 is down hard. We’ve been reassigned to 305.”

Graef shook his head in disgust.

47

USS
KENTUCKY

Even though the day was ending in the world above, the sun descending toward the horizon, the
Kentucky
’s cooks had just finished serving breakfast. The submarine remained on Greenwich mean time, and Section 3 had just assumed the morning watch, beginning another artificial day aboard the ballistic missile submarine.

Course 260. Speed 10. Depth 400.

Lieutenant Tom Wilson leaned against the Quartermaster’s stand, reviewing the entry into his log at the top of the hour, mentally noting the
Kentucky
had passed the halfway mark on its four-day transit through Sapphire. Since they’d left Sierra eight-five behind two days earlier, it had been quiet, the
Kentucky
gaining only an occasional merchant who strayed from the shipping lanes. But Tom had been surprised when he stopped in Sonar during his prewatch tour; the spherical and towed array displays were lit up like Christmas trees.

There were so many contacts to the west that Sonar couldn’t even begin to sort through them all, the contacts blending together into one large, amorphous blob, forming what looked like a single contact with a bearing spread of ninety degrees, growing slowly wider as the
Kentucky
approached. The first contact had appeared eight hours ago, its faint white trace materializing on the towed array. But now there were dozens of tracks, burning in brightly with clean, distinct tonals on the narrowband displays.

The contacts were warships.

Whose they were and what they were doing hadn’t yet been determined. Sonar was working on it and finally got a break as Tom stepped back on the Conn.

“Conn, Sonar. Active pings to the west. Classifying now.” A moment later, Sonar followed up. “We’ve got multiple SQS-53 and SQS-56 sonars out there. They’re ours, sir.
Aegis
-class destroyers and
Perry
-class frigates. Ping-steal range, thirty thousand yards.”

Malone arrived in Control a moment later; he’d obviously been listening to the 27-MC over the monitor in his stateroom. After examining the sonar display on the Conn, he turned to his Officer of the Deck. “What do you think?”

“Could be some sort of training exercise,” Tom replied. “We haven’t received any changes to our waterspace assignments—we own the water. They can’t possibly be prosecuting a submarine, because if they are, they could end up attacking us.”

Malone stepped off the Conn and stopped by the navigation chart, Tom joining him at his side. At thirty thousand yards, with a ninety-degree-wide swath, the contacts blocked their approach to Emerald. The two officers studied their predicament until Tom finally broke the silence.

“There’s no way to go around them, Captain. We don’t own the water north or south of Sapphire and Emerald, and even if we did, it would take us several days to go around. Looks like we’re going to have to go through them, sir.”

“I don’t see any other choice,” Malone agreed. “Rig ship for Ultra Quiet.”

48

EAGLE ZERO-FIVE
USS
KENTUCKY

EAGLE ZERO-FIVE

The submarine hunter aircraft, call sign Eagle Zero-Five, circled above its station in the Pacific Ocean, into the final hour of its watch. Lieutenant Commander Scott Graef, seated in the forward port section of the cabin, took a break from monitoring his display and peered out the window next to him. To the north, he thought he could see another of the P-3Cs forming a line stretching hundreds of miles across the ocean. The entire Pacific Surface Fleet, it seemed, formed a similar line fifteen miles to the west. Graef, Eagle Zero-Five’s Tactical Coordinator, or TACCO, was in charge of the personnel in the cabin of the P-3C, supervising efforts to locate the submarine expected to transit through their barrier anytime now.

Returning his attention to his duties, Graef pressed his hands to his headphones, listening closely to the reports being transmitted over the aircraft’s Internal Communication System by the rest of his watch section. Two enlisted watchstanders, designated Sensor One and Sensor Two, monitored the acoustic sensor screens on the consoles further aft in the P-3C, reviewing the data from the sonobuoy field floating in the ocean below. Sensor Three scanned the aircraft’s periscope detection radar and its Magnetic Anomaly Detection displays, the latter searching for the magnetic field created by a submarine’s metal hull as it traveled beneath the waves. He also monitored the P-3C’s infrared camera as it swept the ocean surface, searching for the hot exhaust from a snorkel mast, in case the submarine was running its diesel generator. Lieutenant Pete Burwell, the crew’s Communicator and the only other officer in the cabin, sat at the NavCom station across from Graef.

They had been on station almost eight hours now, searching for a sign of the target submarine. Graef began to resign himself to another watch without a sniff of the enemy submarine when one of the three pilots transmitted over ICS, his voice emanating from Graef’s earphones. “TACCO, Flight. Are you penguins ready for a ride home?”

Graef unconsciously glanced at the patch above his left breast pocket. The operators in the back of the P-3C all wore warfare insignias on their uniforms, an emblem bearing wings. But instead of flying the P-3Cs, they operated the sophisticated sonar and fire control equipment essential to their mission. They had wings, but couldn’t fly.

Just like penguins.

A P-3C pilot had coined the term for the backseat operators decades ago, and the name stuck. In return, the penguins developed a nickname for their fellow pilots who flew them back and forth from their stations. Compared to other Navy pilots, who flew hazardous missions engaging air and surface targets, the P-3C pilots were barely more than bus drivers. A monkey could do their job.

Graef pressed the foot pedal under his workstation, activating the comm circuit. “Flight, TACCO. You monkeys run out of bananas?”

“Something like that,” the pilot replied. “Running low on gas. Approaching Go Home Fuel. Tiger One-Eight is inbound high to relieve us. Prepare to turn over the buoy field.”

Lieutenant Burwell, monitoring the conversation between the TACCO and the pilot, gave Graef a thumbs-up, then held up his index finger on one hand, and all five fingers on the other.

“We’re already on it,” Graef replied. “We’ll be ready to swap in fifteen minutes.”

To the south, one of the VP-8 Tiger crews, flying a P-3C with its tail number ending in eighteen, was inbound high and would arrive above Eagle Zero-Five, the two aircraft circling as they completed turnover of the sonobuoy field. As Lieutenant Burwell prepared to send the frequencies of their sonobuoys to his counterpart on Tiger One-Eight, Graef’s thoughts and eyes drifted down to one of the torpedoes in the P-3C’s bomb bay, visible through the forward view port in the aircraft’s deck.

The MK 54 torpedo was almost a foot longer than the other torpedoes the aircraft carried, its extended guidance and control section packed with advanced new algorithms and microprocessors ten thousand times more powerful than the 1980s vintage MK 46 torpedo it was replacing. Once the MK 54 entered the water, it would energize the sonar in its nose and begin its search, and Graef knew that if they dropped their new weapon close enough, their target would not get away. But only if they detected their target in the first place. As Graef wondered if any of the P-3Cs would locate the submarine, one of the Sensor Operators broke onto the comm circuit.

“TACCO, Sensor Two. Have a contact, buoy three-four, bearing zero-nine-seven, up Doppler. Contact is approaching Distro Field from the east, classified POSSUB high. Request box sonobuoy pattern built off buoy three-four.”

Sensor Two had detected a contact with a high probability it was a submarine, approaching buoy 34 on a bearing of 097. But the sonobuoys in the Distributed Field were spaced so far apart that they held the contact on only one buoy, so they needed to drop a more closely spaced sonobuoy field near buoy 34 to determine the contact’s position, course, and speed. Graef turned his attention to his display, noting the estimated locations of the sonobuoys they had dropped in the widely spaced Distributed Field four hours ago. Unfortunately, the buoys below were no longer where they’d been dropped, floating on the surface of the water, drifting in the ocean currents. They needed to know exactly where buoy 34 was now, so they could lay the box sonobuoy field around it.

“Flight, TACCO. Request mark on top, buoy three-four.”

The junior of the three pilots, sitting between the Patrol Plane Commander and the second most senior pilot, acknowledged Graef’s request, then dialed up channel 34 on the RF receiver. The needle on the direction finder in front of the Patrol Plane Commander pegged to the right, medium signal strength. The PPC twisted the yoke in the direction of the needle, banking Eagle Zero-Five to starboard, continuing the turn until the needle steadied straight up. The signal strength increased gradually as the P-3C sped toward buoy 34 below them.

“TACCO, Flight. Stand by to mark.”

The PPC monitored the buoy’s signal strength, waiting for the power to peak and then fall off, indicating the aircraft had just flown directly over the buoy.

“Now, now, NOW!” the PPC called out as the signal strength peaked.

Graef logged the buoy location into the tactical system, then waited as the contact algorithms recalculated the target’s bearing using buoy 34’s updated position. Meanwhile, Lieutenant Burwell quickly calculated the required positions of the new buoys in the box pattern built off buoy 34.

“TACCO, NavCom. All expendable drop points calculated.”

After reviewing the coordinates for the new buoy field, Graef sent the coordinates to the cockpit. “Flight, TACCO. Here’s your expendable points.”

A moment later, the PPC replied, “TACCO, Flight. Coming left to Expendable One.”

Eagle Zero-Five turned to the north and decreased in altitude as the crew prepared to drop their closely spaced field of sonobuoys. One by one, the buoys left the P-3C, splashing into the ocean below.

USS
KENTUCKY

“Conn, Sonar! Close aboard splashes, port and starboard sides! Flyover, south to north!”

Tom acknowledged Sonar’s report, then punched up the Captain’s stateroom on the 27-MC, requesting his presence on the Conn.

Malone arrived in Control seconds later. “What have you got?”

“Flyover with close aboard splashes. Looks like a sonobuoy field is being laid around us. First pass on a south-north axis.”

Another announcement over the 27-MC interrupted Tom’s report. “Conn, Sonar. Second flyby. Another series of splashes just ahead.”

“Man Battle Stations Torpedo,” Malone ordered. “This is the Captain. I have the Conn.”