Traffic was surprisingly light today for this busy, international waterway. The Island-class Coast Guard cutter Edisto was cruising two hundred yards to port. An oil tanker… a Japanese maru … two other pleasure boats…
Still, Stewart was wary of pleasure craft while entering or leaving port. He remembered an incident while he was exec on the Pittsburgh, when a boatload of Greenpeace protestors had made a run on them while they were navigating through the waters of San Francisco Bay. And Garrett had regaled him once with some pretty wild stories… including the time a bright red cigarette boat had tried to make a high-speed run close across the bow of the brand new SSN Virginia, just outside of New London.
The Greenpeace activists could be particularly annoying. They meant well — saving the whales and the environment and all of that — but trying to come close astern a U.S. Navy nuclear submarine was just plain freaking stupid. What did they think… that the skipper was going to suddenly have a change of heart and put back into port?
Ohio, though, might be a particularly tempting target for the antinuke protestors. She was nuclear-powered, and — at least before her conversion — she'd packed the sizable payload of four megatons, total, in her twenty-four missile tubes. The fact that Ohio was now armed solely with conventional warheads meant nothing; the protestors couldn't be expected to know that Ohio was now an SSGN. Besides, they could equally well just be protesting the various skirmishes being fought around the planet in the name of the War on Terror, or the government's buildup toward war with Iran.
In any case, the lookouts had been cautioned to pay particular attention to civilian pleasure boats during Ohio's transit of the Straits of San Juan de Fuca.
"My God, it stinks!" his exec, Lieutenant Commander Wayne Shea, said. "Even over here."
"It can be pretty bad sometimes," Stewart agreed.
"I don't really care for the Canadians using the straits as their toilet, y'know?"
Stewart lowered his binoculars and shifted his attention back forward. Ohio's bow wake rippled and flowed smoothly up over the forward deck. He could see some garbage in the water, though… an empty two-liter soda-pop bottle, and a nasty-looking clump of plastic netting, Styrofoam, and God-knew-what.
"Maybe," Stewart replied, "we should dock at Victoria and issue them a citation."
Canada and the United States tended to be pretty good neighbors… but the issue of environmental pollution was ongoing and stubborn. Canada could be downright snooty at times over U.S. environmental policies — such as the celebrated rejection of the Kyoto Treaty a few years back — and over such genuinely problematical issues as acid rain from the U.S. Northeast.
But Canada was far from blameless when it came to international environmental issues. One of the worst problems was the fact that Victoria and several other cities on Vancouver and in British Columbia continued to dump raw, untreated sewage or lightly treated sewage into the Straits of San Juan de Fuca. The joke was that Ottawa would still be planning feasibility studies on B.C. sewage treatment plants when the entire strait had been filled in with solids, and the stench had made the region uninhabitable as far south as Portland.
Boomer crews joked that the passage through the sewage-laden straits was necessary to grease up the submarine's hull, so she could slip more quietly through the ocean depths.
They also joked that the pollution had been started by the Russians back during the Cold War as an attempt to seal off the straits and isolate America's Pacific boomer fleet, trapped in the Hood Canal behind a solid wall of shit.
He glanced again at the pleasure boat to port. It was closer than he liked, three miles off now, and on a slightly converging course that was bringing it slowly nearer to the Ohio. The idiot might be trying to pass across their bow.
Weekend boaters. Drunk, probably, and here it wasn't even 1000 hours yet. He found the stupidity of people amazing sometimes.
All things considered, it would be good to reach the open ocean. Submariners didn't like being on the surface, especially in such tight quarters, with no room to maneuver. Back during the Cold War, boomer skippers had submerged as soon as possible after transiting the Hood Canal, knowing that Russian attack subs were lurking just beyond the mouth of the strait. They would wait there, submerged, listening for the whisper of a boomer coming into the Pacific in order to try to tail them.
Some of the wild sea stories of those days were pretty incredible. Ohio-class boats were very quiet, and their skippers well-trained in being cunning. One common trick was to come through submerged with several surface ships making as hellacious a racket as possible. That was almost guaranteed to confuse the Soviet sonar operators, and allow the boomer to slip into the quiet depths undetected.
Nowadays, of course, they still took precautions, just in case. But chances were, no one was out there waiting for them this time….
"Missile launch! Missile launch!"
The port lookout in his manhole-sized opening in the sail aft of the weather bridge was pointing past Stewart's shoulder, screaming the warning. Stewart looked… and saw the white-star pinpoint of a missile exhaust streaking across the water.
"Where, damn it?" Shea demanded.
"There," Stewart said, pointing. It looked like a small, shoulder-launched missile — probably a Stinger — fired from that pleasure boat that had just emerged from behind Ediz Hook. "Son of a bitch!"
Stewart's mind flashed ahead through several blocks of information. If it was a Stinger, it was an infrared homing missile… and most likely one of the older models, not one of the reprogrammable upgrades.
There was no time to submerge. A Stinger had a range of… what was it? About 4,800 meters for the older models — make it three miles. Speed Mach 2.2— say half a mile a second… or less than six seconds' total flight time.
Almost without thinking, he reached past Shea and grabbed the Very pistol mounted on a rack on the inside of the weather bridge, checked to see that it was loaded, and took aim… not directly at the missile, but slightly off to the right and well ahead of the swell of Ohio's bow wake, angled high, at about forty-five degrees.
He fired, and the Very pistol thumped in his hand. The flare streaked through the morning sky, a bright point of light dragging its white contrail behind.
Everything depended on how late-model the Stinger missile was. The more recent designs had a focal plane array imaging IR sensor, which let them more effectively lock onto low-signature targets, and could be programmed to ignore many common countermeasures… including flares.
If that missile had been launched by al-Qaeda operatives — just a wild guess, of course — then chances were their toy was one of the old, early-model Stingers, one of the ones provided to the various Mujahideen guerrillas fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan during the 1980s by the American CIA.
The flare burst well ahead of the Ohio, and began drifting toward the water on its parachute. The oncoming missile, weaving its zigzag course toward the sub just above the surface of the water, seemed to hesitate… then swung hard to the right, climbing to track the flare, not the submarine. The Ohio made a far larger target, of course… but the flare was much, much hotter, a far more inviting target to the infrared sensor mounted in the missile's nose.