Submarine

Jessup moved to the for'd end of his bridge, where the wind was buffeting the slab face of Carl Vinson's tiered island. He held on to the frosted rail, watching her gigantic flight deck below him, stretching forward eight hundred feet from the point at which he stood. Even this huge carrier was moving about in these dreary, green seas; Carl Vinson's bows were pitching rhythmically, wisps of spray drifting upwards and turning to ice before slatting against the steel upperworks of the island. The aviators were taking these harsh conditions in their stride, operating a thousand miles from their carriers, refuelled in flight by tankers. The arduous weather was claiming more casualties among his airmen than was the curiously negative response of the enemy, Yes, Operation sow was certainly putting to the test those years of peacetime training, those Goddam years of pinching and scraping to keep the fleets in being while Uncle Sam picked himself up again after the Vietnam syndrome, a malaise ably exploited by Soviet subversion throughout the free world. Jessup's eyes were watering as he peered into the icy wind: the deck-handlers were hard put to it in these conditions, but the spirit among Carl Vinson's 6,400 men was improved now that there was a purpose to the eternal flogging of the Atlantic: the Phantom and Tomcat squadrons were landing on and taking off with admirable precision. He wondered how he himself would cope with these sophisticated flying machines with speeds of mach 2.5-plus: his flying days were over, but he still yearned for his old Corsairs. Flat-tops were fun in those days, less intense: airplanes did not cost millions of dollars apiece; pilots did not take years to train; and the atom did not drive the carriers… Thank God it would soon be over. The President had been briskly curt this morning on the telephone, before passing Jessup over to the Secretary of the Navy: SACLANT had been given another twenty-four hours to bring the operation to its conclusion. Tomorrow at midnight Nato's disposition deployments must be withdrawn from the Barents — the Kremlin was now thoroughly suspicious and running out of patience. SACLANT must not be caught with his pants down when, or if, the Kremlin carried out its threats.

But until Operation SB proved its point, the Kremlin was still retaining faith in its last resort, second strike capability, the SLBMS fired from their invisible SSBNS. The world was still one step away from the holocaust, and Nato had failed to sink the SSBNS it had boasted it could. The total score of fifteen still fell short of the twenty commanded by the President to clinch deterrence and to bring back peace. Destruction of the Typhoon remained the key, but the despair beginning to be felt by Jessup's staff was difficult to combat as they monitored Safari's abortive chase.

Jessup twitched back the sleeve of his wind-cheater: 2105. His staff had been deploying and monitoring Nato forces like pieces on a chessboard since 0900. It was time for him to rejoin his hard-worked team, if only as a dismal witness to the escape of their quarry: the elusive Typhoon would soon be lost under the polar ice. He turned and elbowed his frame through the starboard screen. The door banged shut behind him, as he made his way down to the anti-submarine control centre.

The first watchmen were already installed, the plotters going smoothly about their business of monitoring the movements of all deployments, past, present and future. Whereas earlier there had been an ill-concealed pessimism in the control centre, Jessup, standing before the displays, detected immediately that the atmosphere had altered: there was a bustling confidence which had been absent when he quit to snatch his breather. He dropped into his chair and watched as the computers flipped their data on to the screens. His staff captain had taken charge, a sure sign that something was developing — but first, Jessup needed to recap on the day's events. He swept his eye over the 'past' screen, focussing on the red and blue tracks, the enemy's and Nato's respectively.