Operation arctic sting, p.16
Operation Arctic Sting, page 16
Shortly thereafter, we began to hear mechanical sounds coming from the tube I was watching, and the outer door opened. The first thing I saw was the muzzle of an APS. As the diver moved out, I reached down and jerked off his full facemask. He was startled but didn’t drop his weapon. I disabled his comms and knocked the APS from his grip. This guy was trained Spetsnaz—he was good. Rather than attempt to retrieve his facemask, he reached back to grapple with me. I wrapped a length of cable around both his hands and looped it around his rebreather backpack. Then I grabbed my knife from its chest sheath and placed the blade against his throat. That settled him down.
I waited a few seconds more and then pressed his facemask against his face, snugging the cup over his nose and mouth. He gulped a couple of breaths, and I pulled the facemask away again. I called Bill to the open door.
“Take control of him and see that he remains subdued. Don’t give him more than two breaths at a time.”
While Bill dropped down to the seafloor with the captured diver, I wrapped another length of cable through the port door hinges. This would definitely slow them down. If they had more Spetsnaz divers at the ready, within minutes, we could expect them to emerge from one or the other of the remaining tubes.
I heard them attempt to close the port door. I could only imagine what was going through their minds. They had just lost three Spetsnaz divers after losing four earlier. Their reactor had scrammed, and their main shaft was damaged—possibly by external forces. They were bottomed in shallow water in the remote Arctic, and the crew was terrified of a possible radiation leak. The Soviet mantra had always been the many over the few. The sub slowly lifted off the bottom and began to slide backward as the small stern plane propellers took a bite. Then, with a loud rush of air, the Victor-III lurched toward the ice canopy.
I dropped off the bow and joined my companions and our two prisoners on the seafloor. Borysko hovered over us, apparently more interested in our safety than what was happening with the Victor-III.
“Let’s get back to the Proteis pronto!” I said. “They’re going to vent the sub to calm the crew’s fears. What they do after that is anybody’s guess, but we need to be long gone.”
THE LYRE—PEMMICAN ROCK
While I sat in Lyre’s Control Center making a mental inventory of our acquired weapons, Spook, who had the watch, moved Lyre down the canyon and then set a course of 290 degrees. About five nautical miles distant on the north side of the Tasmania Islands, the Victor-III was using her diesel to vent the sub’s atmosphere. We could almost hear her through our hull. She was totally blind to her surroundings, so we were able to move along smartly for an hour before we turned north to course 071 degrees for our forty-eight nautical mile leg to Pemmican Rock, the entrance to Bellot Strait. Toward the end of Spook’s watch, our track took us through the middle of Franklin Strait, halfway between Dixon Island and Cape Maguire. We were on the edge of Franklin trough that dropped to over 1,300 feet. With the bottom dropping off like that, you can get an idea of the rugged land on both sides of the strait.
We had four APSs from the original Spetsnaz divers and three more from my excursion, plus 338 APS darts. We had two SPPs from the original Spetsnaz guys and three more from my trip with their twenty darts plus seventeen four-dart loads for a total of eighty-eight SSP darts. That was a lot of firepower. Out of an abundance of caution, I turned the lot over to the COB for storage in the ship’s armory. I obtained the skipper’s permission for the COB to issue the underwater weapons directly to me, or Ham in my absence, without clearing it with him.
Our major concern was Volgograd. At last report, she was hanging out west of Pemmican Rock. Since Swordfish was headed her way for several hours now, we didn’t know what we were getting into. Plus, of course, we had to worry about the damaged Victor-III. We had left her venting with her diesels on the surface just north of the Tasmania Islands. By the time she completed venting, her reactor would have come back online, which should have mollified the crew. Her main shaft had sustained damage, and her skipper was not stupid. He had deployed the Spetsnaz divers in an attempt to surprise us and disable the Alfa. He had to know the Alfa had a titanium hull, so sinking us with the Sirena was not a realistic option.
Doc Everest had patched up the captured Spetsnaz diver, Aleksandr Alexeyev, who was wounded in both arms. Despite my dart having penetrated the Russian’s humerus, he was mending quickly. Both he and Boris Kuznetsov, the second captured Spetsnaz diver, were being held in Dive Control. Sergyi remained on Teuthis to help secure and supervise these guys. I reminded everyone that they were highly trained special operators, like our SEALS. They were dedicated to their mission and would take every opportunity to carry it out.
We considered building a cage because submarines don’t have brigs. That turned out to be impractical. Ham came up with a better solution. We locked them into the DDC Main Lock under two atmospheres pressure. They could move about, eat and sleep, and communicate with us. When we needed the Main Lock, we transferred them into the Entry Lock for the duration. Our own corpsman, Jimmy Tanner, maintained a medical watch over Alexeyev. When the wounded diver needed medical attention, Jimmy entered the lock, breathing pure oxygen with a mask so he wouldn’t subject himself to any decompression.
Earlier, when we captured the Carp diver, Leonid Volkov17, Sergyi extracted a promise of good behavior from him. Unlike our present captives, Volkov was not Spetsnaz. These guys would resist to the death.
We cleared our baffles hourly during our transit, but the unknown Victor-III was undetectable while on his auxiliary props until we were very much closer. In the third hour of Bert’s watch, Okean finally picked up Volgograd, quietly hanging out two nautical miles west of Pemmican Rock. We knew Swordfish was out there, but she was too quiet. We knew that Carp was somewhere to the south, kept there by Frisco, but we expected Frisco to join us for the Bellot Strait transit. Obviously, that would free up Carp to rejoin the fray. Shchuka was still AWOL, but since the Soviet sub north of us turned out to be Volgograd, Shchuka could be anywhere. Of one thing we were certain, she had not returned to the barn. My guess was she was hanging out in the south end of the Gulf of Boothia.
Why was Volgograd just hanging out? She had to know that our subs were aware of her presence. Could she be waiting until she detected the Lyre in order to blow us out of the water? Apparently, that was what the Swordfish skipper thought because he moved his sub between us and Volgograd, informing us of his intent by Secure Gertrude. Then he commenced pinging directly at the Soviet sub. Apparently, that was more than Volgograd could handle. She headed north at flank speed.
That left the damaged Victor-III somewhere south of us. Obviously, she had a role to play, or she wouldn’t have been here in the first place. Since our intent was to transit Bellot Strait, I had Sam, who had been on watch for a half-hour, carefully move Lyre north, placing us between Pemmican Rock and the strait entrance.
“Mac…look at this,” he said once we were in position, pointing to the Akkord display.
Akkord clearly showed Pemmican Rock and the bluffs defining the entrance to Bellot Strait. Frisco appeared about ten nautical miles south. What had caught Sam’s attention, however, was a flashing string of the Russian letter м stretching between the bluffs all the way across the entrance to Bellot Strait. Although I suspected what it meant, I grabbed the Okean manual to look it up. Sure enough, the м indicated мина—Russian for mine.
“Teuthis, this is Lyre,” I transmitted on the Secure Gertrude. “Okean has detected a string of mines across the entrance to Bellot Strait. Apparently, Okean is programmed to pick them up.”
“Stand by, Lyre.”
A few minutes later, Teuthis called. “The strait entrance is just over a half mile wide and a thousand feet deep a bit south of the centerline. The canyon is a sharp V-shaped trench at the bottom. Can the Akkord display a three-D view?”
I checked the manual. To my surprise, it did, and I switched to that mode. I called Teuthis back. “Akkord has a fully integrated three-D display with navigation and contacts. Thirty-six mines cover the entire entry from ten feet above the trench floor to about forty feet from the surface. The mine density near the trench bottom is double.”
“Roger that. Stand by, Lyre.”
A few minutes later, Teuthis called again with the outline of a battle plan.
My job was simple. I proceeded to a point about a quarter mile west of the entry and dropped to a few feet from the bottom—980 feet exactly. I had never taken Lyre this deep. I knew she was capable of at least 3,000 feet, perhaps as much as six. Interestingly, her titanium hull compressed very little—virtually no creaking or other stress-related noises that we normally experienced when taking a submarine deep.
Five hundred feet above us, Teuthis readied a wire-guided torpedo, opened a torpedo tube outer door, and fired the fish—which meant activating the fish so it swam out the tube. Under the watchful eye of Senior Chief Firecontrol Technician Ogden Winder (good old Oggy), a firecontrol technician steered the fish to its destination using a joystick. When the fish was directly in the mine swarm near the trench bottom, the skipper ordered the detonation.
My Akkord display showed the results. Twelve of the mines disappeared, leaving a gaping hole at the bottom of the mine curtain. I was not immediately aware of what happened next. I learned about it afterward. Teuthis had gone to Battle Stations to fire the torpedo. Shortly after the explosion, King detected the nearby presence of the damaged Victor-III. Immediately thereafter, he heard two torpedo tube doors open. Without hesitating a moment, Cmdr. Roken got a single-ping range and snap-fired a torpedo. Then he released two noisemakers port and starboard, snap-fired a second fish, and dropped toward the bottom and the hole he had just blasted through the mine curtain.
The Victor-III fired two torpedoes. The first diverted toward one of the noisemakers and detonated harmlessly. The second locked onto Teuthis just as Teuthis passed through the hole. The Soviet torpedo was programmed for an intercept course. It had no way of detecting the mine curtain. It struck a mine 600 above the bottom and detonated, taking another eight mines with it. At virtually the same time, the skipper’s first torpedo slammed into the Victor-III’s torpedo room, ripping a gash in the submarine’s hull. Before the concussion subsided, the second fish found its mark, the twin screws on the stern planes. It ripped off the stern planes, opening the engine room to the sea. The explosions took out both the forward and after main ballast tanks, causing the doomed Victor-III to drop toward the seafloor, slamming into the bottom 300 feet from my location.
My thoughts turned to the men trapped in the doomed Victor-III. Sure, I was aware that they had attacked us first at the Tasmania Islands and again at Pemmican Rock. That didn’t change the fact that, depending on how many men perished from the breach of the forward and after compartments, sixty or more men were still alive inside the hulk. The Victor-III had a large escape pod, but the surface above them was ice-covered, and there was no other sub nearby to rescue the survivors.
That wasn’t strictly true, of course, since Volgograd was somewhere to our north, and we thought Carp was down in Victoria Strait, probably headed in our direction. Teuthis was already well into Bellot Strait, but both Frisco and Swordfish were nearby. Since Frisco was not really capable of breaking through the heavy ice, I decided to call Swordfish on the Secure Gertrude.
“USS Swordfish, this is Lyre, over.”
“Lyre, this is Swordfish. To verify your identity, where did Roger Staubach attend college? Over.”
“U.S. Naval Academy,” I answered.
“Why did he go Supply Corps?” Swordfish asked.
“Red-green color blindness,” I answered, hoping I remembered correctly. “This is Lt. Cmdr. Mac McDowell, commanding,” I added.
“Okay, Commander, it’s your dime.”
I explained the need to break up the canopy over the downed Victor-III.
“Roger, Lyre. Follow Teuthis into Bellot Strait. San Francisco will tail you, covering your six. Swordfish will break the ice as you requested and will guard the Bellot Strait entry until you enter the Gulf of Boothia.”
THE LYRE—BELLOT STRAIT
Bellot Strait is a thirteen nautical-mile-long, scant half-mile-wide-cut between Boothia Peninsula to the south and Somerset Island to the north. The north side rises steeply to 1,500 feet, and the south to 2,500 feet. Tidal currents reach eight knots and reverse with the tide. A thousand-foot trench runs for six-and-a-half nautical miles along the strait from the western end to Halfway Island. The remainder of the strait is about 500 feet deep, terminating at Fort Ross on Somerset, an abandoned Hudson’s Bay Company outpost.
Fort Ross was established in 1937 and abandoned in 1948 due to continual heavy icing and difficulty reaching the outpost. The fort, actually two small buildings, overlooks a quarter-mile wide, very shallow impassable slot between the fort and Long Island to the south. Our path would take us south of Long Island—still shallow water, but passable, especially at high tide.
Potts had the watch as we entered Bellot Strait, but I remained in Control to handle anything unexpected. We were two hours ahead of high tide, which gave us about five knots of current going our direction.
“Activate the secure depth-sounder,” I told Potts, “and take us down to a hundred feet above the bottom. Maintain that depth until we reach Halfway Island. Remember,” I told him as an afterthought, “the tide is giving us an extra five knots right now. It will slow for the next two hours until it reaches zero. That’s about the time we should be navigating through Brentford Bay south of Long Island.” I showed him the paper chart. “It gets pretty shallow here, but these depths are for mean lower low tide. We will be at the opposite end of the tide scale.”
Akkord had made passing through the hole in the mine net simple. Akkord also displayed both sides of the strait, making our navigation easy as we whipped along at fifteen knots thanks to the tide. We reached Halfway Island in a half hour. From there, the bottom shallowed until we reached Zenith Point.
“Make your depth one-zero-zero feet, Potts,” I ordered. “Make your course zero-nine-zero degrees and slow to five knots.”
We were two-and-a-quarter nautical miles from some very shallow water, and I didn’t want to be surprised. I checked Okean’s upward-looking beam. The ice canopy was mostly brash—shattered floes because of the eight-foot tide difference. It never really got a chance to consolidate. There were no serious underwater ice impediments because the constant ice motion kept breaking up the floes.
After two miles, I ordered, “Potts, bring us to periscope depth and watch the bottom carefully. We’re at high tide. Total depth ahead of us is about eighty-six feet. That puts twenty feet between our keel and the bottom.”
I checked Akkord and my paper chart. “We’re one-point-four miles from Magpie Rock.” I pointed at the Akkord display. “We want to pass Magpie down our starboard side. Set course zero-nine-four.” I pointed again. “Keep a sharp eye. We’ve got twenty feet under our keel from here to Magpie.” That was twenty feet with the high tide.
It was a nail-biting seventeen-minute trip, made more difficult because Magpie Rock was misplaced several hundred yards on our paper chart. Once we cleared Magpie Rock, I dropped us down to eighty feet and ordered course 110 degrees that took us into Brentford Bay through a mile-wide gap between the Fox Islands to the north and Brands Island to the south. Several minutes later, Frisco appeared behind us, slipping past Magpie Rock, still watching our six. We began to pick up traces of what turned out to be Drum, keeping our front gate clear. For the moment, at least, we did not have to be concerned about the three remaining Soviet fast-attacks.
My battery charge meter indicated less than ten percent. We really needed to recharge Lyre’s batteries. Seven-and-a-half nautical miles directly ahead lay horseshoe-shaped Grindle Islands, with a two-and-a-half nautical mile, eighty-foot-deep, protected basin between the horseshoe arms. Cmdr. Roken and I agreed to take advantage of this protected spot for the charge.
From our perspective, the Grindle Islands offered a safe haven from the Soviet submarine wolfpack that seemed intent on hunting us down. Despite our now fairly expansive Arctic experience, I guess we still did not really understand the many danger sources in this remote part of the world.
THE LYRE—BOTTOMED AT THE GRINDLE ISLANDS
Cmdr. Roken and I discussed our options over the Secure Gertrude.
“The water between the arms seems to be about eighty feet deep, according to both Sozh and my paper chart,” I told the skipper. “I suggest that Lyre enter the basin first and bottom near the end pointing west. Then you can follow to bottom alongside. Drum can maintain station a mile or so to the northeast as insurance while we charge.”
“I think your plan is good,” Cmdr. Roken told me. “Do we know anything about Polar Bear activity around here?”
“Nothing except our general understanding that they prefer land-sea ice combinations to just land or sea ice,” I answered. As I thought about it, I added, “Since bears will certainly be present, I recommend that all three divers carry APSs with a spare magazine.”
“I’ll order it,” the skipper replied.
Potts brought us to the end of the basin during the last hour of his watch. Barry followed up on Teuthis, settling next to us on their skids a half-hour later. The ice cover above us was about two feet thick but broken into ten to twelve-foot floes. Since the water surrounding the Grindles was relatively deep, tidal currents tended to flow around the island complex rather than through it. Consequently, as the tide changed, the floes above us jostled in place more than moved past us. Even though we were headed into a low tide, the ice noise was tolerable, and on Teuthis, Benny Simms was able to keep watch on the basin entry.
With Ski still out of commission and both Harry and Whitey not fully recovered, Ham was left with only Jimmy, Jer, and Sergyi, who had remained on Teuthis at my direction for just this eventuality. Harry and Whitey pressed down but did not dress out. They were to tend the divers.
