Hunter Killer Read online

  The sheer size of the fire was already causing other ships to move in for a search-and-rescue operation, and a few men who failed to make the lifeboats were jumping off the stern, like in a scene from Titanic. But the waters were clear, warm, and deep, and the tide was carrying the gas on the surface to the north, away from them. Almost every one of the seamen who had crewed the Moselle would survive.

  But the inquiries would be long and painstaking. She was the only LPG carrier ever to have a serious fire, except for one in the Persian Gulf a few years earlier that had hit a contact mine.

  By the time the order to abandon ship was given, the Hawaii had gone deep, 400 feet below the surface, making twenty-five knots away from the staggering scene of maritime destruction. Captain Schnider had only two miles at this depth and this speed, after which he would slide into the regular south-running shipping lane, and make his secretive exit through the Strait, only 100 feet below the surface at six knots.

  His satellite signal to SUBLANT in Norfolk, Virginia, would not be transmitted until they were safely in the much deeper water of the Gulf of Aden. Just one word: GASLIGHT.

  MONDAY, APRIL 12, 0900 (LOCAL)

  FOREIGN OFFICE

  PARIS

  There was an air of foreboding on the Quai d’Orsay. News of the Moselle’s demise was raging around government corridors. The President was furious, the military was demanding orders, and Pierre St. Martin was trying to prevent himself doing something that might ultimately be judged as rash.

  And, of course, the dark, satanic cloud of the United States of America hung heavily over the entire scenario. Had Uncle Sam just whacked out a couple of French oil tankers? Or had there just been two ghastly, coincidental accidents?

  Pierre St. Martin, as a lifelong career politician, knew it would be futile to ask the United States if their Navy had been responsible. And even if they answered, the Americans would certainly use the question to berate France: not every nation is willing to use destructive firepower in the cause of its own interests…do not judge others by your own infamous conduct…

  No. St. Martin could see no earthly reason to contact the United States. He paced his elegant office, uncertain what to advise the President, uncertain what, if anything, he could do.

  He was not helped by the simple fact that no one onboard either the Voltaire or the Moselle had any idea what had taken place. So far as both commanding officers were concerned, their ships had suddenly, for no discernible reason, exploded and burst into uncontrollable flames. Which did not assist St. Martin one iota.

  His tenure as Foreign Minister had always been cushioned by the comfort and elegance of the job, and its many, many accoutrements, not to mention the priceless antiques and furnishings from bygone days of French glory that perpetually surrounded him as France’s frontline executive in the global community.

  But now the whole thing was turning sour. Everything possible was going wrong. He felt powerless and vulnerable. He turned to the portrait of Napoléon, with that smug expression on his round, complacent face. And St. Martin understood, vaguely, how the Emperor must have felt as he prepared to depart for his final exile in St. Helena.

  The trouble was, at this level of government, there was nowhere to hide. Worse yet, there was no one to whom he could turn. The President, at 7:30 this morning, had been incandescent with rage. “All I have ever asked for is secrecy…and what do I get? Some jackass French officer from the Pyrenees having his photograph taken on the front of a tank! It’s probably framed now in the U.S. Embassy.

  “I get incompetence, betrayal. I ask for my massive highly paid security forces to guard one slim French lady and two children, not a group of terrorists. And they can’t even do that. And now I have America, which appears to know everything about us, blowing French ships out of the water, and you tell me I cannot even remonstrate! Pierre, this is intolerable!”

  Pierre tried to calm himself. He picked up the telephone and asked to be connected to Gaston Savary over at La Piscine. And to him he repeated the words of the President, “Gaston, this is intolerable.”

  But he was preaching to a man on his way back up the road from Tarsus. Savary knew that everything about this mission had turned out to be intolerable. And like the Foreign Minister and the President, he too believed that the U.S. Navy was banging French tankers out of the water.

  “Is it your opinion that we should cease all oil shipments from Gulf ports to France?” asked Pierre St. Martin.

  “Quite frankly, yes,” said Savary. “Because if we lost another one, and a lot of people were to be killed, there would be a major uproar in France. The people would accuse the government of callous indifference to poor, hardworking sailors, who now leave widows and fatherless children, because of our own ambitions. Pierre, we cannot afford to lose another big ship. The risks are too great.”

  “Can nothing stop a U.S. Navy submarine from doing its worst?”

  “Not really. Those things can stay underwater for eight years, if necessary. At least their nuclear reactors can run for that long, supplying all the heat, light, fresh air, fresh water, and power they need. They only come up for food when it runs out.”

  “And what about sonar? We have zillions of euros’ worth of sonar on our ships. Can’t we find the American submarine?”

  “Not much chance. A nuclear boat can be anywhere, very quickly…you could be searching in the Atlantic and she’s in the Indian Ocean. You could be searching in the Pacific and she’s six thousand miles away. Give it up, sir. They think we’ve smashed the world’s economy, and they’re taking revenge. And there is not too much we can do about it, short of war with the United States, which we would swiftly lose.”

  “So your advice is simply to stop all tankers traveling from the Arabian loading docks to France?”

  “Yes, sir. That’s my advice.”

  “Then I shall have to seek further help from the Navy, Gaston. Bonjour, mon ami.”

  Adm. Marc Romanet, in his office in Brest, besieged by government departments wondering what to do, or say, about the latest American outrage, was marginally more optimistic. “Foreign Minister,” he said, “the Navy could provide an escort to the tankers, as the British did for the Atlantic convoys against the u-boats in World War Two.”

  “You mean each tanker leaving the Gulf and bound for a French port would be accompanied by a battleship?”

  “Sir, we don’t have battleships as such. I was thinking of a destroyer.”

  “La même chose,” said the slightly precious Foreign Minister haughtily. “Very large, very smelly, very noisy ships loaded with guns and shells and angry young men in badly pressed uniforms.”

  Admiral Romanet was deeply unimpressed by St. Martin’s grasp of the French Navy. “Not these days, sir,” he said briskly. “Very large, pristinely clean, guided-missile ships fitted with state-of-theart electronics incomprehensible to a civilian and crewed by very calm, very educated young men in immaculately pressed uniforms.”

  Severely put in his place by one of the Navy’s favorite sons and the head of the entire submarine service, Pierre St. Martin beat a very fast retreat. “Just joking, Admiral,” he said.

  “I very much hope so, sir,” replied Admiral Romanet. “Because in the final reckoning, should we ever come under attack, your life will very probably be in the hands of those young men in the pressed uniforms.”

  “Of course,” replied the Minister. “I was only teasing.”

  “Naturally,” said the Admiral. But he was not smiling. “To continue,” he added, “we have our newest Tourville-class destroyer, the De Grasse, exercising in the northern Arabian Sea at present. She’s our specialist antisubmarine warfare ship. If anything can protect a tanker against attack, she can.”

  “Against torpedoes? Which I believe is what the Americans used against the tankers.”

  “Tell the truth, sir, I don’t think they did. The fires were too big and too sudden, in both ships. My guess is they hit them with missiles. But the De Gra
sse is a specialist. She’s loaded with her own missiles, but her torpedo capacity is formidable, ten ECAN L5 antisubmarine active/passive, homing to six miles—with a hundred-fifty-kilogram warhead.

  “She also carries two Lynx Mk 4 antisubmarine helicopters. She has towed-array torpedo warning, radar warnings, jammers, and decoys. You want a ship to protect a tanker from underwater attack, I’d request the De Grasse, if I were you.”

  “Admiral, I thank you for this advice, which I will pass on to the President. But I must ask you: can you guarantee this destroyer will keep the tanker safe?”

  “There’s no guarantees in my business,” said the Admiral.

  “And, perhaps, unlike politicians, we do not like to say there are when there are not. But I’d give the De Grasse a fighting chance against any enemy.”

  “Thank you, Admiral,” said the Foreign Minister, who had not enjoyed sparring with a very senior officer in the French Navy who had managed to make him feel faintly absurd.

  Nonetheless, he called back the President, and, attempting a career-saving final throw of the dice, told him he could absolutely guarantee the safety of French tankers on the high seas if they were accompanied by French Navy warships, particularly Tourville-class destroyers like the De Grasse.

  “Perhaps organize them into half a dozen groups,” he said ambitiously. “Six of these Tourvilles would probably do the trick,” he added jauntily. “Antisubmarine specialists, of course.”

  The President did not know any better than St. Martin that the French Navy owned only two of the Tourvilles, and the other one was on sea trials in the north Atlantic. Instead he trusted the word of his Foreign Minister, which would not do him much good. Meanwhile, St. Martin continued his rock-steady progress toward the gallows.

  WEDNESDAY, APRIL 14, 1430 (LOCAL)

  STRAIT OF HORMUZ

  Capt. Bat Stimpson had the North Carolina in the identical position he occupied on Sunday morning just before he sank the Voltaire. The Virginia-class hunter-killer was steaming slowly up the Strait of Hormuz, two hundred feet below the surface, awaiting the arrival of another tanker, chartered by TRANSEURO, this time a ULCC, the 400,000-ton Victor Hugo, fully laden with Abu Dhabi sweet crude bound for Cherbourg.

  The coded signal from SUBLANT had been retrieved from the satellite in the small hours of that Wednesday morning. It read: 140400APR10. ULCC Victor Hugo heading east along Trucia coast from Abu Dhabi loading platforms. Escorted by French ASW DDG De Grasse. ETA your datum Strait of Hormuz 1600. Eliminate them both.

  Bat Stimpson did not bother to gulp this time. The orders were succinct and perfectly straightforward. The Victor Hugo was already around the Musandam Peninsula and past Oman’s rocky headland of Ra’s Qabr al Hindi.

  The North Carolina ops room knew it was their approaching target because the sonar room had picked up the sonar transmissions of the De Grasse, unmistakable on D-Band, Thompson Sintra DUBV 23. French warship.

  At 1510, the operators picked up the De Grasse’s military air/surface search radar transmissions, right at the end of its sixteen-mile range. Again unmistakable, beaming out from the top of the destroyer’s mast, Thompson-CSF DRBV 51B on G-Band.

  The Torpedo Director deep below the ops room in North Carolina was already making his final checks. He had prepared two weapons in case there was a malfunction. But Captain Stimpson was confident they could sink the destroyer with just one wire-guided Gould Mark 48 ADCAP fired from seven thousand yards. They would take the destroyer before they hit the tanker because, again, they would use submerge-launch Harpoons against the ULCC, in order to burn the colossal amount of crude oil.

  Right now the ops room had the Victor Hugo and the De Grasse steaming on a south-southeast course, at seventeen knots, 200 yards apart, the destroyer positioned off the tanker’s portside bow.

  And on they came, hard on their course, headed for the mouth of hell.

  Ready number one and number two tubes, 48 ADCAP.

  Aye, sir.

  Fifteen minutes passed, and the sonar room called, “Track 34…bearing one-seven-zero…Range six miles.”

  And now the guidance officer was murmuring into his microphone constantly. The North Carolina seemed to hold her breath as the sonar team checked the approach of the French destroyer, calling out the details in that hyper-tense calm that grips a submarine in the moments before an attack.

  The XO had the ship, and Bat Stimpson stared at the screen. Then he called, STAND BY ONE! Prepare to fire by sonar.

  Bearing one-two-zero…range 7,000 yards…computer set.

  FIRE! snapped the CO. And everyone felt the faintest shudder as the big ADCAP thundered out in the ocean, instantly making forty-five knots through the water, straight toward the projected line of approach of the De Grasse.

  Weapon under guidance, sir.

  Bat Stimpson ordered the torpedo armed, and 5,000 yards away, still running fast through the water, it began to search passively for the warm hull of the destroyer.

  Three minutes after firing, the Mark 48 switched to active homing sonar, pinging its way toward the destroyer. Now it could not miss, and it locked onto its target.

  It was just 300 yards from the warship, when the French sonar room, taken by surprise, caught the torpedo flashing in toward the stern, where the four huge turbines drove the twin shafts.

  TORPEDO!…TORPEDO!…TORPEDO!…RED ONE SEVEN FIVE…ACTIVE TRANSMISSION…RANGE THREE HUNDRED YARDS.

  Too late. Too close. The Mark 48 slammed into the stern of the De Grasse, detonated with barbaric force, blew the stern clean off the ship, split the shafts asunder, and blasted the engine room to rubble.

  Eight men died instantly, and within moments the ship began to sink, stern first, as water cascaded through the open aft end of the warship. No one had been expecting anything like this, and there were several bulkhead doors and hatches left open.

  This might have been construed as shortsighted, since the destroyer’s entire raison d’être was to protect, and perhaps fight, as she moved through a possible war zone.

  However, 200 yards away, onboard the tanker, men stood at the rails on the high bridge and gazed in astonishment at their mighty escort, which had not only blown up but also appeared to be on fire at the aft end, and sinking as well.

  And as they watched, incredulously, several of them saw the unthinkable, as two sub-Harpoon missiles came scything through the crystal-clear skies and smashed straight into the hull of the Victor Hugo. They blew most of the 1,000-yard-long deck 100 feet into the air, straight out over the starboard rails like a can of sardines, opening sideways.

  Again, the crew was largely saved by the great distance between the upperworks and the long front end of the ship, which housed the oil. Four men, who were working for’ard, were of course killed instantly, and the ensuing fires were unimaginable. From the bridge, it looked like a lake of pure flame roaring up into the stratosphere. Crude oil is hard to ignite, but when it does it’s extremely difficult to extinguish.

  As with the Voltaire, the Master of the Victor Hugo had no option but to abandon her. There were two gigantic, thirty-foot-long jagged holes in the tanker’s port side, close to the waterline, and there was oil leaking out into the ocean but burning fiercely.

  The fire was growing hotter by the second. If the Captain and his crew did not get off this massive ship in the next ten minutes, they would surely fry.

  At that point, with the lives of everyone onboard the two ships hanging in the balance, Captain Stimpson elected to leave the area. He made one final visual observation of the havoc he had wrought, and then ordered the North Carolina deep again, instructing the helmsman to turn away, south.

  “Bow down ten…depth two hundred…make your speed twenty…course one-three-five…

  In his seaman’s heart, he hoped that rescue would be prompt and thorough, using every possible ship and helicopter the Omani Navy possessed. For the catastrophe was closest to their shores. But he could not afford to dwell on the unfairness of the
sailors’ fate. France had transgressed the natural laws of survival on the planet earth. And she deserved every last bit of vengeance the U.S.A. chose to inflict upon her.

  The warship, and the men who sailed it, was the responsibility of the French Navy and the politicians in Paris. Captain Stimpson believed the survivors should be well compensated. Like him, they were only carrying out their orders.

  SAME DAY, 1600 (LOCAL)

  ELYSÉE PALACE

  PARIS

  The President of France had been this angry before, but not in living memory. He twice banged his fist down upon his Napoleonic sideboard, which made the Louis XVI Sevres porcelain cups dance up and down on their saucers and the silver Napoleonic coffee pot bounce on the polished inlaid surface of the sideboard.

  Another couple of whacks like that and the burly little former communist mayor could have done about a million dollars’ worth of damage.

  “I AM NOT PUTTING UP WITH IT,” he roared. “THEY CAN’T…THEY…THEY…THEY CAN’T KEEP DOING THIS. IT’S…IT’S LUNACY…WHO THE HELL DO THEY THINK THEY ARE?”

  “That, of course is the main trouble, sir,” replied Pierre St. Martin. “They know who they are.”

  “Well, whoever they are, they can’t just keep sinking ships and killing people.”

  “Sir, they can. And I believe they will, until we stop trying to ship oil out of the Middle East. They have issued a very firm warning, and with that dreadful bastard Morgan in the White House, they are going to continue.”

  “Then you are saying we must stop trying to keep this country running?”

  “No, sir. I am not. But we have to find other ways of importing oil than with tankers out of the Persian Gulf—”

  “But, Pierre,” interrupted the French President, “that’s just not acceptable. We cannot just lie down and give in, like a…like a…poodle.” The President was so angry he could hardly speak.

  “Sir, we have to, because those submarines of theirs are impossible to deal with. You cannot even find them, far less destroy them. And even if we did, the Americans could probably produce fifty more.”