Sea of Shadows (For fans of Tom Clancy and Dale Brown) Read online

  Sea of Shadows

  Jeff Edwards

  Stealth Books

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  Stealth Books

  www.stealthbooks.com

  Copyright © 2010 by Jeff Edwards

  Copyright © 2004, 2006 by Jeff Edwards (as Torpedo)

  The tactics described in this book do not represent actual U.S. Navy or NATO tactics past or present. Also, many of the code words and some of the equipment have been altered to prevent unauthorized disclosure of classified material.

  This novel has been reviewed by the State Department, the Department of Defense, and the Department of the Navy, and is cleared for publication in accordance with Chief of Naval Operations letter 5511.1 (Ser N09N2/ 32532242).

  U.S. Navy images used in cover art and other illustrations appear by permission of the Navy Office of Information (OI-3), and Navy Visual News. No endorsement is expressed or implied.

  ISBN-13: 978-1-939398-00-0

  To Josh

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I would like to thank the following people for their assistance in bringing this book to life:

  Bill Keppler of the State Department Office of Protocol; Michael A. Petrillo, Arabic linguist and Middle Eastern cultural specialist; Cathy Monaghan of the British Embassy in Washington, DC; the staff of the Los Angeles office of the British Consulate-General; the Chinese Studies Program at the University of California, San Diego; TM1(SW) Gary D. Johnson; TM1(SW) Charles Copes; Peter H. Zindler, marine engineer; and several others, some of whom asked not to be named, and others whose names have slipped my leaky brain. The information I received from these fine people was superb. Any errors that have crept into this work are mine, not theirs.

  I also owe a debt of gratitude to Master Modeler Richard Melillo of The Modeler’s Art (TheModelersArt.com) for building me an extraordinary model of the DMA-37 torpedo, and to Maria Edwards for her continual support, her excellent research, and for jealously guarding my writing time so that I could stop talking about this book and actually write it.

  Last, but certainly not least, I would like to thank my editor and close friend, Don Gerrard, for believing when I had forgotten to, and for making me go back and do the hard parts until they were right.

  Missiles are fast. They’re dangerous. They’re sexy. So when we think about warfare at sea, it’s natural that missiles are the first things we think about. But we can shoot down missiles. We can decoy them with chaff—jam them—hide from them with infrared suppression systems and minimized radar cross-sections.

  Our Kingfisher sonars can detect mines, and we can destroy them or maneuver to avoid them.

  Our ships are hardened against chemical and biological weapons.

  But how do you stop a torpedo? Thirty years of R-and-D, and we still don’t have a viable system for intercepting torpedoes. We can’t shoot them down; we can’t jam them; we can’t hide from them. And, even third-world torpedoes can do upward of fifty knots, so we sure as hell can’t outrun them.

  We do have decoy systems that have shown some effectiveness, and a couple of tricky torpedo evasion maneuvers that work pretty well. But, they depend on split-second timing and perfect execution. Activate your decoys ten seconds too soon (or five seconds too late) and an enemy torpedo will eat your lunch. Hold an evasion turn a little too long, or not long enough, and it’s game over.

  We build the toughest warships on the planet, but the best engineers in the business agree that nearly every class of torpedo currently being deployed has the capacity to sink one of our ships with a single shot. To make matters worse, none of our potential adversaries believe in shooting torpedoes one-at-a-time. Typically, they shoot salvos of two or three.

  It’s inevitable. One day soon, maybe next year—hell, maybe next week, maybe an hour from now—one of our ships is going to end up on the wrong end of a spread of hostile torpedoes. And, when that happens, we’re going to discover that we are the poor bastards who brought a knife to a gunfight.

  Excerpted from the Chief of Naval Operations’ comments to the graduating class at Annapolis.

  Roll on, thou deep and dark blue ocean-roll!

  Ten thousand fleets sweep over thee in vain;

  Man marks the earth with ruin-his control

  Stops with the shore;-upon the watery plain

  The wrecks are all thy deed, nor doth remain

  A shadow of man's ravage, save his own,

  When for a moment, like a drop of rain,

  He sinks into thy depths with bubbling groan,

  Without a grave, unknell'd, uncoffin'd, and unknown.

  — Lord Byron, The Dark, Blue Sea

  PROLOGUE

  In the language of its builders, the weapon’s name was Ozeankriegs- fuhrungtechnologien Deutsches Exportmodell DMA37-R5092—Ocean Warfare Technologies German Export Model DMA37 (Serial Number R5092). On the munitions inventory, its name was shortened to R-92. But the weapon did not know either of these names. It had no name for itself. It was not even aware of its own existence. It waited in its shipping canister, cradled as snugly in the cylindrical steel container as a high-powered bullet in the chamber of a rifle. Cold. Sightless. Unfeeling. Not sleeping, merely unawakened.

  R-92 was a state-of-the-art acoustic homing torpedo. It was a cybernetic predator: an electro-mechanical killing machine. Fast. Smart. Unbelievably lethal. Every component, from the shark-like hydrodynamic form of its fuselage—to its multi-spectrum acoustic sensors—to the axial-flow turbine that formed its engine, was optimized for the undersea environment. Its brain was a fifth-generation digital computer, hardwired for destruction with a machine-driven relentlessness that no living predator could match. R-92 and its brethren had been honed for the chase and the kill by two and a half centuries of technological evolution.

  But R-92 knew none of these things. It simply waited.

  CHAPTER 1

  USS TOWERS (DDG-103)

  NORTHERN ARABIAN GULF

  SATURDAY, 05 MAY

  1114 hours (11:14 AM)

  TIME ZONE +3 ‘CHARLIE’

  Bowie timed it carefully, lifting each foot at just the right second as he ducked through the hatch combing of the open blast door and ran out onto the forecastle of his ship. Twenty-one laps around the deck today and his breaths were still coming evenly, but the air was hot and so humid that it felt like breathing soup. Sweat plastered his short black hair to his forehead, and his sleeveless U.S. Naval Academy T-shirt stuck to his skin, the faded goat mascot logo blending into the perspiration-darkened fabric. It wasn’t even noon yet, and the sun was already fierce enough to blur the visual horizon with rapidly evaporating water. At least the seas were calm at the moment—not exactly a given in the Arabian Gulf this time of year.

  His crew called him Captain Jim Bowie, which was a technical misnomer on two counts. In fact, his name was Samuel Harlan Bowie, and his actual rank was commander. The title of Captain was honorary; by ancient nautical tradition, the commanding officer of a naval warship is always referred to as “Captain,” no matter what actual rank he carries. The Jim part had been following him around since childhood, a nearly inevitable consequence of having grown up in San Antonio, Texas, with the last name of Bowie. He’d long since given up the battle and accepted his nickname. It beat the hell out of what his buddies had called him at the Academy, anyway.
/>   Bowie curved to his left, cutting between the ankle-high platform of the forward missile launcher and the low wedge of the 5-inch gun mount.

  From a visual perspective, the gun was the most arresting feature on the forecastle. Its strange geometric shape and steeply angled sides gave it little resemblance to any of the generations of naval artillery that had preceded it, but the long steel barrel that protruded from the forward slope of the wedge left no doubt as to its purpose.

  Situated aft of the gun, the forward missile launcher was not nearly as visually impressive. To the untrained eye, the launcher looked like a grid of square hatches set flush into an ankle-high steel platform. The innocuous-looking hatches were armored with Kevlar-reinforced steel, and every hatch concealed a vertical missile silo, known as a “cell.” Loaded in those cells, and their twins in the aft launcher, were the missiles that comprised the ship’s real destructive force.

  When he reached the far side of the launcher, Bowie curved left again, back toward the superstructure. Another of the tricky step-duck maneuvers carried him through the port side blast doors and into the port break. This short stretch of enclosed passageway shielded him from the sun, giving him a few seconds of shade and relatively cool air. Then he dashed out into the sun again, running down the port side main deck toward the stern.

  At first glance, Bowie was more likely to be taken for an accountant than a naval officer. His long face and narrow cheekbones gave him a clean and efficient look that his neatly trimmed black hair seemed to echo. His lips were thin and slightly turned down at the corners, creating a permanently thoughtful expression that reinforced the image of humorless efficiency. The laugh lines around his mouth were the only giveaways of the imaginative and playful spirit that hid behind his somber brown eyes.

  A shade under six feet tall, he had a compact physique that was neither skinny nor overtly muscular. At thirty-eight, he was in the best shape of his life. He was also at the pinnacle of his career, and he knew it. No matter where he went from here, it would be downhill.

  Certainly there were more promotions in his future (barring death or major screw-ups), but this was his one shot at his lifelong dream: command of a warship. He was trying very hard not to count the days, but he knew he had less than four months left to enjoy it. Then Bowie would have to turn command of the Towers over to someone else and move on to the next phase of his career. He didn’t like to think about that, but he knew the Navy’s advancement pipeline all too well. After the Towers, he’d be transferred to a shore duty billet, probably a career-enhancing staff position at the headquarters of one of the major commands—part of the Navy’s plan to give him political seasoning that he didn’t want, in preparation for selection to full-bird captain.

  His next chance to command at sea would probably be as commodore of a destroyer squadron, overseeing other people’s ships. Command of a squadron was an important job, but it was too much like being an astronaut’s boss, instead of an astronaut. If he was very, very lucky, he might be able to wrangle command of one of the Aegis guided missile cruisers. But there weren’t very many of the old Ticonderoga Class cruisers left to go around, and the Navy wouldn’t be willing to waste a valuable full-bird captain on a destroyer or a frigate.

  He reached the amidships break, where the forward deckhouse ended and a narrow section of open deck separated the forward superstructure from the aft superstructure. He edged closer to the lifelines as he ran, giving himself a cushion of space in case someone opened one of the watertight doors without warning. He’d made that mistake years ago, as a boot ensign on the USS Bunker Hill. A second class Signalman had opened a door right in front of him, and Bowie had slammed into the reinforced steel while running at full-tilt. A sprained wrist and two black eyes had given him a personal reminder of one of the most basic principles of physics: Force = Mass × Acceleration.

  Bowie passed an exhaust vent and caught a half-second blast of what seemed to be cooler air. The temperature differential was a sensory illusion, caused by the movement of the air over his skin. In reality, the exhaust from every vent on board was precisely monitored and alternately heated or cooled to match the ambient temperature of the air surrounding the ship. The system was expensive, and a pain in the ass to maintain, but it made the ship functionally invisible to infrared sensors or heat-seeking missiles. And in this age of three-dimensional Battle Space Management, stealth was paramount.

  His ship, USS Towers, had been built from the keel up with stealth in mind. She was 529 feet long, 66½ feet wide, and (if the media hype was to be believed) virtually invisible. The fourth (and last) ship in the heavily modified third “Flight” of Arleigh Burke Class destroyers, Towers was an example of cut-ting-edge military stealth technology. She was not, however, the “ghost ship” suggested by news magazines and Internet Web sites. In fact, from his vantage point running circles around her deck, it was difficult for Bowie to imagine how the destroyer even rated her official classification as a “Reduced Observability Vessel.”

  The low pyramid shapes of her minimized superstructure and the severely raked angle of her short mast gave her a decidedly strange profile, but she was far from invisible—up close anyway. From a distance of a few thousand yards, however, that began to change. Ninety-plus percent of her exposed surfaces were covered with polymerized carbon-fiber PCMS tiles. Although designed primarily to absorb enemy radar, this newest generation of the Passive Countermeasure System had another handy feature: the rubbery tiles were impregnated with a phototropic pigment that changed color in response to changes in lighting. In bright sunlight, the tiles were a dusty blue-gray that blended into the interface between sea and sky remarkably well. As the light dimmed, the PCMS tiles would darken accordingly, reaching a shade approaching black when the ship was in total darkness.

  Although the cumulative effect was a far cry from invisibility, it camouflaged the ship’s outlines enough to make her hard to see at a distance, not only reducing the range at which she could be detected visually, but also making it difficult for any optically based sensor—from the human eyeball to high-resolution video cameras—to determine her size, course, or speed.

  A state-of-the-art thermal suppression system performed similar magic for the ship’s infrared signature, while the radar-absorbent PCMS and the carefully calculated geometries of her hull and superstructure gave the long steel warship a radar cross section only a little larger than the average fiberglass motorboat.

  Every cleat, chock, and padeye was designed to fold down and lock into its own form-fitting recess in the deck when not in use. Although intended strictly as a means of shaving another fraction off the ship’s radar cross section, the hide-away fittings made for a remarkably uncluttered deck—which in turn made it a pretty good place to run.

  The high-tech razzle-dazzle extended to the ship’s acoustic signature as well. Seventh-generation silencing, including an acoustically isolated engineering plant, active noise-control modules, and the venerable (but still effective) Prairie and Masker systems, made Towers a difficult target for passive sonar sensors. Popular rumor held that she, and her sister ships in the Flight Three Arleigh Burke Class, were quieter cruising through the water at twenty knots than most warships were tied to the pier. That was an exaggeration, but not by much.

  When he came to the aft end of the superstructure, Bowie curved to his left, dodging a pair of Gunner’s Mates engaged in lubricating Mount 503, the aft-starboard .50-caliber machine gun. The arc of his improvised running track took Bowie around the aft missile launcher and back to the starboard side of the ship. The aft missile launcher marked the halfway point for each lap.

  Only four more laps to go. Bowie’s daily routine called for twenty-five and a half laps, which he had worked out to be about three miles. Once upon a time he’d done five miles a day, but then he’d discovered that while on board ship he didn’t eat the right kinds of foods to fuel that sort of regimen. The extra mileage had pushed his metabolism into the catabolic zone, burning up
muscle tissue as well as fat.

  Maybe when he returned to shore duty he’d need to crank back up to five miles a day to keep away the nearly inevitable swivel-chair spread. But that was in the future, a future that he wasn’t quite ready to think about. A future in which he would no longer command what he considered to be the finest warship in the Pacific Fleet.

  Bowie increased his stride a little as he turned up the starboard side. The ship’s motion through the water generated relative wind, and running toward the bow, he was headed back into it.

  Off to his right, an oil tanker was passing down the starboard side. It was an enormous thing—a supertanker—nearly twice as long as Towers, with an unloaded displacement of about three hundred thousand tons, rising maybe fifty feet above the water and obscuring his vision to starboard. The paint on its orange hull and white superstructure was bright and well maintained. It rode low in the water now, a sure indication that its tanks were full. Based on its size, Bowie estimated that it was carrying somewhere around two million barrels of oil.

  The supertanker was about fifteen hundred yards out and nearing its closest point of approach. Bowie already knew that the big ship would pass Towers with a comfortable safety margin, but he couldn’t stop himself from rechecking its position and heading every time he came around the deck for another lap. He knew that the Officer of the Deck had the situation well in hand, but—when it came to collision avoidance—it never hurt to have another pair of eyes open.

  In the distance astern of and beyond the tanker, a pair of oil platforms squatted on the horizon, their images wavering like mirages in the desert-heated air. The larger of the platforms belched enormous plumes of fire into the sky as its flare tower burned off the natural gas that accumulated as a natural consequence of the oil-pumping process. It was a routine procedure that the local oil rig crews referred to as “off-gassing.” The Middle Eastern oil fields were so productive that it was marginally cheaper to incinerate natural gas than to containerize and ship it.