Call-up papers had been sent out to one million American men and women, ordering them to report at varied Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine boot camps for basic training. It was something that the President had not consulted with General Shaw, ostensibly because the plans for this eventuality had been drawn up decades before, but the Commander-in-Chiefs reticence had made him suspicious. The general ordered a random selection of the personal details of those who had been called up, and he hadn’t liked what he had seen so he had made his next request more specific. He knew a number of individuals who qualified for this call to arms, and right now he was seriously pissed that most did not appear on the current list.
Not a single name associated with any of the President’s chief contributors, or in fact any of the top two hundred richest peoples sons or daughters appeared on the list. The great bulk of those expected to put their lives in harm’s way were working class. Any person at college, or expected to enter college in the next twelve months, had been given deferments, it was a clause that had been added in the last week, without the military’s knowledge. Despite the offered deferments, many young people at college had put away their books for the duration and gone of their own free will to the recruiting centres.
Henry Shaw had two of his own children in the service of the country, a son flying AV-8Bs off the Inchon, and a daughter who was the TAO aboard the USS Orange County. His youngest son qualified for this call-up but his name did not appear, as if that little detail was supposed to appease the general, and ward off the eruption that was looming.
He had allowed himself to think that in this adversity, this president would do the right thing, but he had learnt that despite all that had happened, the President was planning for the future, currying future favours; business as usual.
Well General Shaw was having none of it, he cancelled fifteen thousand notices to those who came from the lower wage brackets, or whose families would suffer undue hardship without them. Most, though not all were family men and women, and they were substituted with the names of sons and daughters of politicians, billionaires, millionaires, oil company executives and captains of commerce. His own youngest son’s name was included, as was that of the Presidents eldest. The first to receive the notices were a couple of hundred individuals who were already in Federal service, their once smart business suits were not smart anymore, and pedicured digits were encrusted with the grime of digging bodies out of building in the Capitol, and burying them in mass graves. The armed forces did not have any use for lawyers right now, so they would all find themselves assigned as recruits, earmarked for the infantry and Marine Corps as riflemen, once the boot camps had finished with them.
The President wanted him visiting the battlefronts so he packed his bag and handed over to Admiral Gee, who would hold the fort until Henry’s return.
With that done he contacted personal friends and acquaintances on both sides of the Atlantic, and arranged a meeting.
From the southeast of Iceland, stretching away toward the Hebrides is a wide, deep-water basin. After rounding the North Cape it was an area that the soviet submarines could traverse with the added protection of its depths before running the gauntlet of the line of hydrophones in the GIUK Gap.
Almost without exception, the diesel-powered vessels had run long and hard on their batteries the previous night, and now needed to snorkel in order to charge them again. They had left Norway’s area of responsibility but were now in the hunting grounds of the British, American and Portuguese Maritime patrols in the sky, British ASW surface units and Canadian and US hunter killer submarines. Although all the aircraft would land on the Faeroes, Danish sovereign territory, to refuel and rearm at some point, the Danes would not take part in the operation as her small, Gulfstream maritime patrol aircraft were for shipping and fisheries protection, not submarine hunting.
In order that NATO aircraft did not end up dropping on NATO submarines, the aircraft were deployed far out across the basin, leaving the western edge of the basin, and the twenty miles either side to the silent service.
HMS Illustrious, with her helicopters and her frigates were west of that point, and representing the last line of ASW ships that the soviets had to get past before they reached the shipping lanes. Of course the ships would not pack up and go home if any leaked through, but this was their best chance at stopping the threat against the convoys.
‘Trident Eight Four’, a RAF Nimrod MR2P out of Kinloss, via refuelling in the Faeroes, had expended its load of sonar buoys and been relieved by a Portuguese P-3 Orion in order to return to the tiny islands and reload. They were now five minutes out, with a full load once more when one of the operators got a contact.
“Pilot, faint surface contact, bearing three two seven… range eleven thousand.”
The news that the submarines, or at some of them could shoot back, had come as an unwelcome surprise for the crews, and until such time as a defence could be devised, the crews were trying all manner of things to fox the submarines. The pilot of Trident Eight Four put the nose down, at the same time as throttling back to reduce the aircraft’s heat signature, and in the back a crewmember got ready some magnesium flares, in preparation to eject them should anything nasty be awaiting the aircraft.
The Portuguese P-3 had also detected what was in fact a snorkel, and the Orion was much closer.
They watched the Orion on radar as it began its run, and then the P-3s track vanished, without any warning whatsoever. The only thing the Nimrods pilot could be reasonably sure of was that if it had been a missile it had not come from the radar target, it was too far away. He noted the position that the Orion had disappeared, and swept in on the same line, but dropping a torpedo a mile short of that position. The Nimrod was dropping flares every few seconds, and the big aircraft banked hard after releasing, which probably saved all their lives.
They had inadvertently turned toward the undetected Whiskey class boat, and the aircraft’s bulk masked the heat signature of the four BMW/Rolls-Royce BR 710 turbofan engines, and the launched-at-depth air defence missile curved down to follow the last flare ejected by the Nimrod crewman. At only 100 feet altitude when it ignited, the flares life was very limited, but the heat-seeking missile followed it down and impacted with the sea.
Aboard the Whiskey, the LAD mast was retracted when the Nimrods Stingray torpedo was detected and following Russian Naval doctrine the diesel boat went to flank speed, turning towards the threat. The theory was that if they closed the distance quickly, the torpedo may not have had sufficient time to arm itself, but the Stingray was armed the moment its drogue chute detached from its anchor point at the weapons stern. The warheads and fuel in the Whiskeys torpedoes, sitting on racks in the forward torpedo room blew when the Stingray detonated on the submarines bow. Trident Eight Four had circled around, still ejecting flares manually and they saw the sea heave upward in a tall pillar of angry water. As the column of water subsided, the Whiskeys stern broke the surface with its propellers still turning as it rose vertically from below the surface for a moment, before disappearing back into the depths.
The sound of the concussion warned the snorkelling Kilo, which now sought to get below the thermal layer where the sonar returns from any buoys dropped by the hunters would be distorted. However, the Nimrods pilot was confident that they had a good enough fix without dropping buoys, and the aircraft’s bomb-bay opened as the aircraft swept in, another Mk-50 dropped clear and splashed into the cold sea. The Nimrod was on a roll, three minutes later the Kilo surfaced; wallowing in the waves as the crew took to inflatable life rafts.