Jo stared out to the horizon, across Deadneck Island to the waters of Nantucket Sound. Her husband might well be driving Columbia in the near future out into what he cheerfully called his “beat,” the vastness of the North Atlantic and the terrible depths of an ocean that had petulantly swallowed the Titanic, and a thousand others, not so very far from these tranquil bays. She looked back out across the harbor and waved as the tugboat went by. George replied with a resounding, short, double blast on the horn, which scattered the cormorants along the docks. Basically, George Gillmore did not require that much of an excuse to make Eileen G sound like his own fighting ship. Boomer always said the tall, bearded Gillmore might have made a pretty good captain of a Naval warship.
As Jo reflected, Boomer himself was in private conference in a specially fitted and specially guarded Operations room, euphemistically called a “Limited Access Cell,” at SUBLANT HQ, which would serve as the command center for all the US dealings with the Chinese submarines.
Here the US Navy Black Ops team would finalize everything — their various positions on the ocean, their patrol areas, their cycle of operations, their dates, their orders, their rules of engagement, their overall targeting, their charts — everything required for the efficient management of a small force of submarines with a special tasking.
Even the signals left this room carefully encrypted. If you took papers in — any papers — you couldn’t take them out again without special signatures and meticulous logging. Armed guards stood before the doors. No one was allowed access without a special pass. And these were issued only on a need-to-know basis. Even executive officers and navigation officers were not permitted inside, except for prepatrol and postpatrol briefings. Four communications staff kept watch behind those doors at all times.
The successor to Admiral Mulligan, and now the new Commander of the Atlantic Submarine Force, was Admiral John F. Dixon, an austere and rather forbidding man with a narrow, serious face, renowned for his meticulous preparation. This severe appearance, however, shielded his subordinates from a reckless, youthful past, which had almost caused his removal from the US Naval Academy. There was something about a large bronze statue of a departed admiral, which had been, mysteriously, filled with water by an unknown expert with a small drill; the statue peed for three days from a tiny hole in the front of its dress trousers.
Admiral Mulligan always called Admiral Dixon “Johnny.” The statue incident was rarely, if ever, recalled, but there were those who felt that its distant, hysterical memory among those senior officers who were there might yet prevent the efficient submarine chief from making it to CNO.
Before the small meeting began, Commander Dunning was requesting that despite the long mission he was about to undertake, he still be guaranteed the one-month sabbatical he had been granted throughout the month of February. Admiral Dixon approved the request. Columbia was due in for maintenance that month anyway, and he knew that the Cape Cod commander would be away for four weeks. Should there be a foul-up in the North Atlantic it was unlikely that Columbia would be required to pursue its quarry around the world, and Admiral Dixon did not anticipate a foul-up.
“You going away with Jo?” he asked.
“Yessir. I’m sailing a sixty-five-foot ketch from Cape Town to Tasmania. We’ll probably have a couple of friends with us, and there’ll be a couple of deckhands and a cook to make it all bearable. We’re really looking forward to it. I’ve never been through those southern waters. And we haven’t had a good vacation for years.”
“Blows a bit, down there.”
“It’d better. I don’t have that long!”
Admiral Dixon smiled, and the two submariners walked over to the chart desk, a big, sloping, high, polished table, which had belonged to the Admiral’s grandfather. On the ledge below were sets of dividers, steel rulers, and a calculator. Spread upon the surface beneath the desk light was a detailed map of the northeastern Atlantic, placed on top of a large map of the world. He was a man who had given the subject a lot of thought.
“Okay, gentlemen,” Admiral Dixon began, “to bring us all up-to-date. Until a few days ago we expected the two Kilos to make their journey home to China on the surface. We now have reason to think that the submarines will dive close outside their workup base, then proceed west out of the Barents Sea along the Russian coastline. We expect them to run on down past the North Cape, off Norway, and straight down the northeast Atlantic.
“From there they might swing through the Gibraltar Strait, where we will be able to see them but unable to do much about it. They would then transit the Mediterranean, the Suez Canal and the Red Sea, which are also somewhat difficult areas for our purposes.
“They may of course head on south and skip Gibraltar. Though it’s longer, it’s a more straightforward route. They would then head around the Cape of Good Hope, across the Indian Ocean, and through the Malacca or Sunda Straits. By then they may have acquired a close surface escort. We will concentrate on taking them out good and early, somewhere before they get through the GIUK Gap. If they choose to make a covert dived passage all the way to China, and we lose them, the search area becomes hopelessly large. We want them as they approach the GIUK Gap.”
The Admiral referred to one of the most important choke points on this planet — the great narrowing of the waters in the northern reaches of the Atlantic, the tightest point in the entire ocean, where Greenland, Iceland, and the UK’s northern coast form a direct northwest/southeast line 1,300 miles across. Situated directly on this line is the 500-mile-wide island of Iceland, which cuts the navigable waters considerably. This relatively small area — the deep, icy waters where commanding officers have been trained for generations — was the great hunting ground for US and UK submarine strike forces.
Throughout the Cold War all Russian submarines heading for the Atlantic traveled through the GIUK Gap under the watchful attention of their American and British adversaries, deep beneath the surface. Night and day, month after month, year after year, the two great Naval allies watched and waited. Few Soviet submarines ever made their way through the GIUK undetected.
There are three main routes through the Narrows: closest to the UK, east of the Faeroe Islands, which stand four hundred miles northwest of Scotland’s Cape Wrath; west of the Faeroes across the Aegir Ridge; and through the Denmark Strait, which runs between Iceland and Greenland’s Grunnbjørn ice mountain. These are lonely, haunted waters. Only four men survived when the giant forty-two-thousand-ton British battle cruiser HMS Hood was sunk by the Bismark in May 1941.
Admiral Dixon placed his steel ruler across the Gap and muttered, “Somewhere in here, Boomer. We’ll take ’em out just before they head into the Gap.”
“Yessir. And the sooner the better. Actually I had been considering the possibility of the Barents Sea, as soon as they clear the Murmansk area?”
“I don’t think so. It’s a bit too close to their starting point. Ideally, it would be perfect if we could catch them right off the North Cape, right here,” the Admiral said, pointing to the large map spread out before them. “It’s deep water, and it’s off Norway rather than Russia, and they could scarcely avoid it if the buggers are on their way home to China.
“Trouble is we don’t have the time. They’ll be off the North Cape two days after, which will almost certainly be a Monday morning. It might take us till Friday before we realize they’re not coming back. By which time they’ll be well down toward the UK. For our first contact we’ll have to rely on SOSUS.”