Captain Gilbert nodded his head in agreement. She was sharp, and willing to give him an honest assessment, not just want she thought he wanted to hear. “She’ll do,” he thought.
“Good answer, XO,” he replied. “The P-8s will be helpful, but we are going to have to rely on our helicopters and our towed sonar arrays. I’m going to want to have the squadron deploy with two ships always racing in front of the convoy: one listening with the towed array, while the other moves ahead to get in position to do the same. They will pretty much leapfrog each other all the way to Europe, clearing a path for us. The ones on the flanks will have to stay ready to move to where we think we have a possible sub. We’ll have one ship trailing the convoy, and our ship will remain near the center of the convoy with our towed array deployed.”
Gilbert took another sip of his coffee before continuing, “The fastest ship we have in the convoy can only make ten knots. So that will unfortunately be the max speed the convoy can make.”
“How do you want to deploy the helos?” Tiffany asked, wanting to know if the ship’s two helicopters would need to have some sort of special schedule.
“We have twelve ASW helos in our group. We’ll look to keep two of them in the air at all times. That way we can keep two more on standby, and the rest will alternate in three-hour shifts. I spoke with the captains of the Amphibs; they are going to have several of their helicopters readied for ASW work in case we need additional support. Our helicopters are going to be flying a lot — hopefully, we won’t have any maintenance problems on the voyage over,” Pat replied as he looked off at the clear skies in the horizon.
“At least the weather forecast looks good for the next four of five days,” he thought.
“I’ll make sure the air boss knows what kind of schedule to set,” LCDR Brewster responded. Captain Gilbert didn’t say anything, so she asserted, “I’ll be back on the bridge if you need me, Sir.”
She left the captain to be alone with his thoughts. The next couple of weeks were going to be busy, and she figured he probably wanted some time to think before the tempo picked up. Once they got to New York, the convoy would begin to set sail. The other escorts had already arrived, and the three Marine ships were following the Churchill up the East Coast.
Hunting in the Atlantic
Captain Yuri Popov was sitting in his captain’s chair, taking a few minutes to read a book that his wife had given him before they left port. He was growing impatient waiting for the American convoy to head towards him, however, the latest satellite intelligence showed that the convoy had finally left New York and should transit through their ambush soon.
Captain 2nd Rank, Mikhail Borodin, had been the executive officer of the Orel for nearly a year when they set sail three weeks ago. He glanced over at Captain Popov reading a book, and decided to pull out his textbook on naval strategy to study. “It’s such a privilege to sail under such an experienced and respected commander like Popov,” he thought as he got settled. “I’d like to get my own command in the next few years, if the Russian Navy would ever stop decommissioning the submarine fleet… it’s becoming harder to get promoted in a shrinking navy. I don’t know for sure if I will ever be able to follow in my father’s footsteps and have my own ship like he did in the Red Navy,” he lamented.
“Con, Sonar. We have possible surface contacts,” announced the sonar room, breaking up the quiet.
“If NATO knew we had stolen the blueprints to the newest British sonar systems, they would be breaking out in hives,” thought Captain Popov in amusement. The British had developed a new advanced sonar array that could detect ships hundreds of miles away; the Russians had naturally found a way to pilfer the designs rather than invent their own version of this technology. The key to this new sonar system was the intricate software that analyzed the hundreds of acoustical noises and distilled them down to determine which ones were probably manmade noises. Those noises could then be further isolated and analyzed to provide a fairly accurate assessment of what they were looking at.
Captain Popov tucked his book away in his jacket pocket, then turned to one of his officers, “Take us to periscope depth. I want as much targeting data as we can get from the Radar Ocean Reconnaissance Satellite (RORSAT),” he ordered, and the submarine soon began to rise. A few minutes later, the submarine leveled off and the periscope began to ascend. Captain Popov squatted down and performed an awkward circling duckwalk with his eyes glued to the scope as he performed a quick 360° search of the horizon, making sure there wasn’t a ship that had somehow snuck up on them or a helicopter nearby.
Nodding in approval, he ordered, “Raise the periscope the rest of the way up, as well as the detection antenna.”
They had the scope up for less than thirty seconds, just long enough for them to see where the ships were and obtain the targeting solutions they would need from the RORSAT above them.
The captain looked at his communications officer. “Deploy the buoy,” Popov ordered. “I want as much targeting data as possible.”
The Americans and the rest of NATO had been under the assumption that the Russians had ended their RORSAT program shortly after the fall of the Soviet Union. However, the People’s Republic of China and the Russian Federation had worked together to develop a much more accurate means for their navies to track and monitor their mutual enemies. They had even built a system that could use their data to guide their anti-ship cruise missiles to their targets, just as the Americans had done with their satellites.
The tension in the submarine mounted as the reality began to set in that they were about to attack the American Navy. This was something they had all trained for, but most honestly never thought would happen.
“Captain Popov, it looks like they have two destroyers in the lead. One is located here,” explained Captain Borodin, pointing at the location on the map board. The RORSAT had provided them with excellent targeting data. “The other is located here. Looking at the satellite images, it looks like they have one on each flank, one in the center, and one pulling up the rear.”
Popov could see that they had identified the locations of six destroyers. “Where are the Akulas on this map?” he asked.
Borodin brought up the coordinates for the Akulas’ projected locations and plotted them in relationship to the convoy and the destroyers. “They should be right here, just at the outer edge of the left side of the convoy. They are not quite in range of their torpedoes, but they are not that far outside of range either.”
“Weapons-what targeting solutions do you have for our missiles?” Popov asked his weapons officer.
The Orel was equipped with 72 SS-N-26/P-800 "Strobile" anti-ship missiles. Each missile was nine meters in length and their ramjet engines could propel them at a surface speed of Mach 2 (nearly 750 meters a second). Each missile carried a relatively small 250kg warhead, which would detonate shortly after its armored tip punctured the hull or bulkhead of a ship for maximum damage. What NATO did not know about the new Strobile (which came into service with the Russian Navy in early 2017) was that it was fitted with an improved radar homing head. The Strobile used an all-weather monopulse active-passive radar with frequency hopping capabilities, which meant it would be nearly impossible for an adversary to jam its satellite guidance system once it had been launched.