Power Play (5 page)

“As you know, sir, you’re preaching to the converted here. But I do wish we had those next three Astutes. I know no one seems to care, but we all love this country, and it gives me the creeps to think of us being virtually defenseless for the first time in centuries.

“We should have three fast-attack boats patrolling home waters at all times, whatever the cost. That way I think we’d both sleep a lot better. Especially with the fucking Russians somehow creeping around our most private seaways. Because they bloody well are, and now it’s obvious.”

The first sea lord was pensive. He leaned back in his chair and said, “I
wonder what they want, or, more pertinently, what they are looking for. I mean, they know the danger of prowling around other people’s coastlines. I just cannot understand why they would take those risks, unless they were looking for something specific.”

“Beats me,” said the submarine flag officer. “But they have been claiming in recent months to have advanced electronic surveillance able to hack into cell phones and even shore-based computer systems. I’d guess they’re on the hunt for anything that might prove useful.

“Unlike our own government, they appear to understand that navy personnel get paid anyway, so you may as well put them to work doing something useful. And in our trade, sir, any private information is likely to be precious. Especially electronic.”

“I suppose fuel’s the only cost involved in running attack submarines around Europe’s national waters,” muttered the navy’s highest-ranked officer. “And these days the Russians have tons of that.”

“It still seems pretty bloody weird,” said Admiral Young. “Wandering around the Hebrides in the middle of the night and getting tangled up with the stupid cod nets.”

“Unless they had a secret objective and believed the answer was somewhere in the Minch Channel.”

“You think they might have some idea how seriously the Americans are planning to reactivate SOSUS?”

“I’m not sure even we know that,” replied the first sea lord. “But the Russkies might know something. And they might be out there trying to find out a lot more.”

“Of course, they always hated it,” said Admiral Young. “For years it was the bane of their lives. Just imagine—they couldn’t move any big, secret submarine even hundreds of feet below the surface without getting caught. SOSUS virtually negated their whole underwater ballistic missile threat, and they never had a clue about ours, not the Vanguards, and certainly not Polaris.”

The subject the two admirals now touched upon, SOSUS, was the simple acronym for Sound Surveillance System, the American deepwater, long-range detection network, consisting of high-gain, long, fixed arrays set in cavernous ocean basins and connected to shore-based listening stations. It was the secret weapon of undersea surveillance, an almost infallible early-warning asset against Soviet ballistic missile submarines.

It utilized deep, horizontal sound channels far below the surface, which allowed low-frequency noise to travel across huge distances with extraordinary effectiveness. It started in quite a small way, but ended up as a multibillion-dollar network of hydrophone arrays, mounted on the seafloor throughout the oceans.

One of the key areas for SOSUS was the somewhat sinister and stormy section of the North Atlantic known as the GIUK Gap—a navy acronym for Greenland-Iceland-UK—the choke point of the Atlantic through which every Russian submarine from the Northern Fleet shipyards must pass if it wishes to steam south into the Western world. Of course, ships of any nationality are at liberty to sail wherever they wish in international waters. But submarines are big, furtive creatures, whose watchword is
secrecy.
They dislike being observed or located, especially Russian ones.

The GIUK Gap has been crisscrossed for years by US hydrophonic wires. No one can even enter those turbulent waters without the Americans knowing more or less what the crew had for breakfast. The system was invented during World War II and underwent a half century of improvements since right until the Cold War was over.

During that time, SOSUS had some amazing triumphs: the electronic trap caught a Soviet submarine as it crossed the gap as early as 1962. Then it located the USS
Thresher
after it sank off Nantucket in the same year. It was SOSUS that loudly flagged the lurking Soviet Foxtrot Class submarine during the Cuban missile crisis—the fabled
Charlie-20.

And it found USS
Scorpion
after she went down off the Azores six years later. For years SOSUS was top secret, but such was its efficiency that it became almost common knowledge among Western allies. Most people, however, did not understand how it worked, and when the Russian empire caved in, the Americans declassified the system, at which point it slipped quietly into the background.

But it was still there. And so were many of its listening stations, situated mostly on remote coastal sites. There was one on a steep headland on the southwest coast of Iceland, NAVFAC (Naval Facility) Kevlavic; one on the storm-swept coast of Halifax, Nova Scotia; another in Barbados, where they nailed
Charlie-20.

No one has ever officially revealed the full extent of the SOSUS network, but suffice it to say Great Britain played its part. There was an important US listening station in the remote military station of St. Mawgan,
North Cornwall, with a straight-line radar shot to the North Atlantic, and another on high ground above the Pembrokeshire coast at Brawdy, overlooking the Irish Sea.

The Scottish stations were always secret, but the Americans had them placed in the best possible locations on the west coast, especially where the unseen beams of SOSUS protected the joint US-UK submarine lanes, which led to the Firth of Clyde and the home moorings of the Polaris, and Trident ballistic missile bases at Faslane and Holy Loch. The underwater system could provide early warning too against intruders into the deepwater submarine training grounds of the Western Isles.

There is no record of any Soviet or Russian submarine ever entering those hallowed waters. At least there wasn’t during all the years those hard-eyed US Naval personnel manned the SOSUS listening stations. But things went very quiet as the 1990s progressed and the twentieth century turned into the twenty-first.

The glinting eye of America’s longtime secret weapon became inevitably dimmer. Defense cuts meant many of the listening stations on the eastern Atlantic were surreptitiously closed down. Great Britain’s Royal Navy took an endless beating at the hands of political accountants who believed the Silent Service was largely unnecessary.

Aside from the times when there were no warships to patrol the UK’s island waters, most of the time there were only a half-dozen warships available for deployment. The start of the second decade of the twenty-first century was approximately the time when the world once more became seriously restless.

And, as ever, in the thick of the ensuing turmoil stood Russia, growing ever richer on the back of its Siberian oil fields and moving steadily backward in its state reliance on a secret police force to keep the populace in order.

Internationally, too, Russia appeared to have learned nothing, standing by the ayatollahs of Iran, supporting the terrorists of Hezbollah and Hamas, inflaming the Israelis, all to the anger of the United States.

Of course, Russia had its own reasons to behave as it did, the close ties to Tehran being one of them. Despite the Kremlin’s endless games with smoke and mirrors, one of its absolutely definite modern programs was to raise its aged navy from the dead.

The first sea lord had a brief outline on his desk that showed a rising
Russian underwater force, comprising major improvements to the three near-moribund twenty-six-thousand-ton leviathans of the deep, the Typhoon strategic-missile boats, now once more going to sea. There were plans for a total of eight of the supermodern Borey Class intercontinental missile boats and nine improved Deltas.

The new Yasen Class attack submarines were back on the starting blocks, and ten of the Akula Class hunter-killers were being either refitted or newly built. Sierras, Viktors, and a couple of dozen patrol subs, mostly Kilo Class, were also being brought forward.

The surface fleet was also undergoing a twenty-first-century facelift. After years of decline, there was a major modernization program for Russia’s old aircraft carrier the
Admiral Kuznetsev,
the Kirov Class battle cruiser
Pyotr Velikiy
was in refit, and there were multimillion-dollar expenditures earmarked for three eleven-thousand-ton cruisers.

Programs to produce some of the world’s most modern frigates and corvettes were well under way. A careful study showed Russia’s naval export orders to China were becoming very strong, and they plainly planned to finance their own new, sleek navy with profits from the Chinese.

“And here we sit,” growled the first sea lord, “just about the first stop on any southward movement of the Russian battle fleet, and we’re on our last legs as a seagoing nation. It was not so long ago the Soviets were scared shitless of meeting Royal Navy warships and submarines on the high seas. It was not so long ago we quietly put one of their noisy old Oscars on the bottom of the Atlantic for straying too close to our shores.
And now look at us! Jesus Christ!
”

“It’s also pretty bloody tragic we can’t help the Americans much with the reopening of SOSUS,” said Admiral Young. “If important data are located in the British listening stations, we just don’t have the equipment here to intercept, or intervene, or even to conduct real surveillance. We’ve lost our teeth.”

“It’s not that the Americans don’t trust us,” replied the navy boss. “But they can’t really count on us. After all these years, we’ve just faded out of the picture. The United States knows we’re loyal, and they know we’re competent. We’ve just been disarmed by our own side. We can’t really help anyone anymore.”

“Pretty damn depressing, eh?” said Admiral Young.

“Yes, but the trawler men may not have died for nothing . . . It’s about
time I had a chat with the US Navy Department in Washington—just to alert them we think the Russians are on the move in more ways than one.”

“That’ll wake ’em up, sir. They get extremely spooked about renegade submarines, as you know.”

 

 

 

Captain James Ramshawe, the Australian-sounding but American-born intelligence chief at the National Security Agency, shared his old title of director these days. Since the Chinese and the Russians were suspected of hacking into the Internet systems of the Pentagon, Boeing, Mitsubishi, and other military installations in the early part of the century, a new appointment had been made—commander of cyber warfare.

The immensely popular former West Point lecturer General Harlan Forster had been selected, and while the Pentagon had always hoped the top man at Fort Meade could stand tall over all branches of the secretive spy center—interception, code breaking, cryptology, and cyber warfare—that had proved too difficult.

By 2018 the duties had been separated. Captain Ramshawe, the eavesdropping and spying maestro whose operation intercepted almost 2 billion signals a day, retained his old office on the eighth floor of building OPS 2B, and he retained his old areas of responsibility.

A brand-new headquarters was constructed on the same floor for General Forster, whose duties were wide ranging but essentially defensive. He was provided with a gigantic staff, a brand-new operational building, and a brief to provide the United States, and all of its military and military-related organizations, with protection from any foreign “invaders” trying to launch attacks through cyberspace—hacking, that is, into America’s most secret computer systems, listening to the most secretive messages, discovering the innermost workings of the greatest superpower the world has ever known. With every passing year of the twenty-first century, the march of the cyberspace vandals had become more intense.

And one ultramodern objective on an ancient military adage had jumped into focus: to dismantle your enemy, you must dismantle his intelligence,
communications, and forward planning. Where once this meant erecting electronic radar pylons on the coast of the English Channel to foil the advance of Hitler’s air armadas, now it meant something similar, but about four zillion times faster and ten zillion times sneakier.

And despite the colossal volume of information bombarding the electronics of the National Security Agency, the word
submarine
never failed to cause every nerve in Ramshawe’s personal early-warning system to vibrate.

The encrypted message from the Pentagon this morning was pretty lucid
: RN suspects Russian sub operational in Western Isles off the Hebrides—almost certainly responsible for that Scottish trawler vanishing with six crewmen last week. Dragged her down by accident.

“Good question,” Ramshawe muttered to himself. “What the hell were they doing creeping about the Hebridean islands in the middle of the friggin’ night?” He’d read about the tragedy days ago, and he’d logged it in his computer to revisit.

It was a constant theme. After years of having their backs rammed against the harbor wall in search of funds, the Russians were nowadays much more solvent. The days were past when dockyards shut down because the government could not pay the electric bills, never mind the workers’ wages.

Today the Russian Navy was going to sea and refitting their old boats, which had lain idle for so long. They were conducting sea trials, recruiting to the navy again. Once more slipping into that tiresome old Soviet mind-set, that half-paranoid compulsion to spy on those they perceived as enemies.

“Crazy but dangerous” was Ramshawe’s considered opinion of Russians, as he worked his way through the secrets of the world’s great military powers. He gave little thought to the stupendous effort made by the United States of America to keep private every single electron in its arsenal and to spend literally billions and billions of dollars annually finding out precisely what everyone else was up to.