By Dawn's Early Light (6 page)

1400 LOCAL
AT THE DOCK

“What's the story, Captain?” Chuck Bateman asked. Dillon and Bateman were in the narrow passageway forward of the officer's wardroom, one deck below the control room.

The
Seawolf
's other twelve officers were already crammed into the wardroom waiting for the CO to explain what was going on. The crew were at their in-port duty stations, in the crew's mess or in their bunks.

“We're heading back out in a few hours with a new assignment. Vince Howe took our patrol.”

“Did they give us something good this time?” Bateman asked. With his flaming red hair, freckles, and small-town boyish good looks he could have been a stand-in for an Irish travel poster. Some of the crew called him
Hey, Mikey,
like the little kid in the breakfast cereal ads. Not to his face, of course. He would have cut them off at the knees.

“We're going sub hunting in the Indian Ocean. This time we'll be weapons hot.”

A big grin spread across Bateman's face. “All right.”

On the way back from the CINCPAC's office, Dillon had thought about the mission and about his crew. Gooding wasn't blowing smoke rings at Admiral Puckett when he promised that
Seawolf
was up to the job. Her crew was the best, and Bateman was the crème de la crème.

Whenever he was given a job, his response was always the same: a big, sloppy Irishman's grin and the two words
all right
. He wanted to run his own boat for one tour, and then retire to become a high school physics teacher back in Boston. But the navy had other plans. He was just too good an officer to lose.

Dillon was torn two ways. He wanted to help his XO, who had become his friend, get what we wanted. Yet he didn't want to lose Chuck to another boat, let alone to civilian status.

This was an important moment in history for him. The right boat, the right crew, and the right mission.

Yeats had written about meeting your fate. Sometimes he played with the poem, changing the words to fit his mood. Jill had taught him that language was plastic, something we could use. Poetry was rare among sub drivers, but for him it was a special and highly refined form of literature, and what subs did was a very special and highly refined form of warfare.

Seawolf
was America's newest class of nuclear-powered attack submarines and would remain so until the smaller, lighter Virginia class came into service in the next few years. With a length of 325 feet and a displacement of 8,060 tons submerged, SSN21, the first of her class, was thirty-five feet shorter than Vince Howe's Los Angeles class
Springfield
, yet displaced half again as much.

Equipped with a pressurized water reactor powering two steam turbines, she generated sixty-thousand horsepower. Unlike any other submarine in the U.S. fleet she had no propeller. Instead,
Seawolf
used a pump jet drive, much like Great Britain's Trafalgar class submarines. Her speed submerged was in excess of forty-five knots, and her acceleration was noiseless, vibration free, and nothing short of awesome. There was no propeller cavitation to give them away when they put the pedal to the metal, and along with a range of super-sophisticated accoustical damping techniques she was more like a hole in the water than an actual boat.

All together she was the fastest, most maneuverable, stealthiest, and deepest diving boat in the U.S. fleet. She had better sensors, better computers and battle electronics, and better comms equipment than any other submarine. She had eight thirty-inch torpedo tubes forward for the Mark 48 Mod 4 and ADCAP torpedos as well as a very full complement of Tomahawk and Harpoon missiles and mines.

With even more to come, Dillon thought.

He nodded for Bateman to precede him into the officers' wardroom and they went in. Submarines were too small and cramped, filled with machinery almost everywhere, for the crew to jump to attention every time the captain entered a compartment. But the twelve officers crowded around the long table that was bolted to the deck stiffened slightly, as they looked up in anticipation.

“Good afternoon, gentlemen. We've been pulled off robin redbreast and have been handed a new mission,” Dillon said from the head of the table. He didn't sit down. “It's called
urgent suitor
. We're going sub hunting in the Indian Ocean. And we're going in weapons hot. This isn't a drill.”

There was a stir, but the wardroom was quiet. Dillon listened for the sounds of his boat, or rather for the absence of noise. Submarines were quiet machines, inside and out. Underway no one shouted, or even raised their voices. The habit carried over in port.

Dillon handed a rolled chart of the Indian Ocean to Bateman. The table was cleared and they spread it out.

“The day before yesterday a Kilo boat came to the surface a couple hundred miles off the coast from Calcutta and fired a laser weapon at one of our spy satellites. In the past few weeks two more of our satellites were fired on and damaged, from the same geographical location.”

Dillon pointed to the position on the chart. “An American oceanographic research ship, the
Eagle Flyer,
saw the whole thing and called a sécurité. But the submarine fired on them, and so far as we know there were no survivors among the twenty-seven crew and scientists.

“ONI is just guessing on the type of submarine it was, but I think it's a pretty fair guess. The only nukes we have to worry about are the Chinese and Russians. I was given a fairly high confidence that they had no boats anywhere near there.”

The Kilo was a Russian-built diesel electric submarine, and possibly the most successful and widely used sub in the entire world. Like the Russian Kalashnikov assault rifle that three-fourths of all the fighting forces in the world used, the Kilo was a dead simple and exceedingly rugged design. At 230 feet in length, and displacing 3,200 tons submerged, she could make sixteen knots underwater. She carried a crew of around sixty men and officers, and was equipped with six 533mm torpedo tubes and a respectable weapons load. Since she was electric, and therefore had no reactor pumps, she was possibly one of the quietest submarines in the world.

Every submariner had a good deal of respect for the class. In the hands of a good captain and experienced crew Kilos were formidable warships. In addition to HE loaded torpedoes, Kilos were also capable of carrying tube-launched SS-N-15 and SS-N-16 long range nuclear missiles.

“A couple of hours after the satellite was blinded, Pakistan tested another nuclear weapon. This time above ground. The air force believes it was a thermonuclear device.”

Their weapons officer, Lt. (jg) Marc “Doctor Death” Jablonski, raised his eyebrows. As far as he was concerned it was only a matter of a few more years before almost every military force in the world went nuclear. When he got out of the navy and finished his Ph.D. in nuclear physics, he wanted to work at Los Alamos on the next generation clean, shock bombs that would kill only people, but leave the environment intact. It would make conventional nukes obsolete.

“The latest satellite that was taken out of service was a
Jupiter
that was put up to monitor both Pakistan's and India's nuclear development programs. We have nothing currently in orbit that can do the same job. Or at least not as good a job. Leaves them a lot of wiggle room.

“In two weeks the space shuttle
Discovery
will be launched. Two days later she'll rendezvous with the
Jupiter
and replace her optics and electronic sensor packages. During at least three orbits on the repair mission, they'll be directly over the same spot in the Indian Ocean where the Kilo fired the laser on three other occasions.”

Dillon looked at his officers. Every one of them knew what was coming next, but they wanted to hear their CO give the specific order. He felt ten feet tall.

“Gentlemen, they are not going to fire a laser at our guys aboard the
Discovery,
because we're going to be waiting for them.”

“All right,” Bateman said.

2000 LOCAL
AT THE DOCK

Security on the dock had been super-tight since nightfall. Dillon stood alone on the bridge watching the second of two twenty-one-foot Tomahawk Land Attack Missiles being eased aboard through the weapons loading hatch just in front of the fair water.

The half dozen hard hats crowded around the steeply-angled loading rail were shoreside personnel, experts at weapons-loading procedures.

Most of his crew had no idea what was being loaded, and it would stay that way until they were safely at sea and submerged in a couple more hours. Bateman, Jablonski, Chief Young, and the torpedo room red crew were the only ones in on it.

Bateman came up through the hatch, and looked over the rail. “Number one is secured,” he said.

“Good. What's the rumble from the crew, Charlie? Have the section heads been briefed?”

Bateman nodded. “They know we're loading a couple of extra weapons, but they don't know what. I don't think they'd care if they did know. Most of them would think it was cool. Marc does.”

Dillon had never kept any essential information from his crew, and especially not his officers, until now. When he'd received his orders he'd glanced over at Admiral Puckett, who looked like an accountant tallying up the ledgers. If the numbers worked out on the plus side, Dillon was in; otherwise he would be relieved of his command on the spot, and someone else would take his place. Another CO, another boat.

The fact of the matter was that only the boomers carried nuclear weapons these days. But he was being asked to load two Tomahawk missiles equipped with the W-80 two-hundred-kiloton nuclear warheads.

The cold war was over; the Russians had gone home to try to straighen out the terrible mess that their economy and government was in. Attack submarines and most surface ships in the U.S. fleet almost never carried nuclear weapons. There was no need for them.

If by chance a nuclear accident happened, or some rogue captain figuring his butt was about to be hung out managed to launch a missile and it detonated on any target anywhere in the world, the U.S. would be in major trouble. If World War III didn't spark off, America's last remaining shred of credibility with the rest of the world would be gone and buried, possibly forever.

Nuclear weapons were nothing more than a deterrent, never meant to be actually used unless all else failed. And the SOP specified
all else
.

Admiral Puckett's argument had been crystal clear to Dillon. Someone in Pakistan arranged to have the U.S. satellites watching over its shoulder put out of commission. They did not care if innocent American civilians were killed. They would not want the shuttle
Discovery
's crew to fix the satellite. They would try to stop the repair mission. Any interference would be dealt with swiftly and harshly. Pakistan was a nuclear power, and it was controlled by a very unstable military government.

Seawolf
was to carry two McDonnell Douglas B/UGM-109 Tomahawk TLAM-N nuclear missiles. If the situation came to it, authorization to release would be sent either by extremely low frequency (ELF) transmission, or via the SSIX high speed satellite submarine communications system.

At that point Pakistan would have been informed that a nuclear armed U.S. submarine was ready to strike.
Seawolf
would be right in the middle of it, with every eye in the world watching.

Dillon watched as the missile disappeared into his boat. It would be slid along torpedo alley through three decks where it would come to rest in its loading rack. The deck openings would be secured and
Seawolf
would be ready to carry out her very clear-cut mission.

Make the rendezvous point. Find the Kilo boat and stop her before she fired at the
Discovery
shuttle repair effort. If possible find out whose navy the submarine belonged to. Report ASAP.

All of that without getting his own boat shot up, and without starting a regional nuclear war that could easily spread to most of the hemisphere.

“Skipper, I don't think that I'd be so enthused about this mission if we were just supposed to go out there and protect one of our spy satellites,” Bateman said.

“I know what you mean,” Dillon said looking at his XO. The boat and dock were bathed in a harsh violet light that made him uneasy. It was otherworldly. “But our astronauts will be up there. If one of them happened to look down at the wrong time the laser pulse could blind him, maybe even mess up his space suit's life-support system.”

“Yeah. And did you take a look at the
Eagle Flyer
's crew roster? Most of them were scientists, four of them kids, and five of them women.”

“I know,” Dillon said. Bateman and his wife Kathy had tried for the past four years to have a child without success. Adoption was out of the question because he was gone too much. At least for the moment. In the meantime Kathy's biological clock was counting down. As a result Bateman was a pushover for all women and for any kid under the age of twenty. The younger crew members who knew the score made jokes, but they looked up to him as an older brother, or an uncle.

“They didn't give a damn,” Bateman mused.

Dillon watched as the loading gear was lowered back into the boat and the work lights shut off. “As soon as number two is secured and we're put back together, make the boat ready for sea.”

“Aye, aye, skipper.”

“What about the new crewman we picked up?” Dillon asked.

“Engineer's Mate Bob Crawford. I put his folder on your desk.” Bateman took a last look around, then started down the hatch.

“Charlie?”

Bateman looked up. “Sir?”

“They can't do that sort of thing to our people. It's payback time.”

A big grin spread across Bateman's face. “All right,” he said.