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  The Cold War Was Heating Up . . .

  Above and around them, the Arctic became a boiling cauldron. The sudden geysers of water were followed by immense waves that leaped into the air as great chunks of ice tumbled back into the sea.

  It was preferable to face Imperator alone than to face elements that were beyond understanding. The only option left to the captain was ninety-nine percent suicidal. As his submarine increased her depth, he ordered two-thirds speed ahead and turned in Imperator’s direction.

  His tubes were loaded. Perhaps his active sonar might work. He wanted just one return “ping,” just one confirmation of Imperator’s position, before he fired everything he could . . .

  Charter Books by Charles D. Taylor

  CHOKE POINT

  FIRST SALVO

  SHOW OF FORCE

  SILENT HUNTER

  THE SUNSET PATRIOTS

  SILENT HUNTER

  A Charter Book/published by arrangement with

  the author

  PRINTING HISTORY

  Charter edition / March 1987

  All rights reserved.

  Copyright © 1987 by Charles D. Taylor.

  This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part,

  by mimeograph or any other means, without permission.

  For information address: The Berkley Publishing

  Group, 200 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016.

  ISBN: 0-441-36934-0

  Charter Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group.

  200 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016.

  PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

  Acknowledgments

  The undersea world of our nuclear navy is a strange and fascinating place—and also one that wisely keeps to itself. I learned much about the Arctic environment from my friend, Steve Young, and his Center for Northern Studies, from Dr. Charles D. Hollister of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, and from Barry Lopez’ Arctic Dreams (Scribners, 1986). While Imperator sprang from my own imagination, I have studied designs of such mammoth submarines produced by the American Society of Naval Engineers, The Society of Naval Architects and Marine Engineers, and the Electric Boat Division of General Dynamics.

  Tom Shields was kind enough to assist me with initial introductions in New London. Others who then offered help were Vice Admiral N.R. Thunman (who initially brought Admiral McKee’s statement about George Washington to my attention), Rear Admiral Virgil Hill, Lt. Commander Cherie Beatty, Lt. Tony Kendrick, Senior Chief Robert J. Zollars of the Submarine Force Library and Museum, and especially Lt. Commander J. M. Crochet. Mike Crochet spent untold hours of his own time helping an old “surface type” understand the world of the nuclear navy. The countless little details that should make readers feel they are really sailing under the ice are thanks to Mike’s patience with me; the mistakes are distinctly my own. Those who have earned the right to wear the dolphins should understand that everything about their world does not belong in these pages; any breaches of trust or security are the end result of my own imagination.

  It is important to remember those friends who helped in so many ways—Candy Bergquist, my favorite retired typist, Dan Mundy and Ted Magnuson, who criticize so well, Bill McDonald, still our captain, Dominick Abel, my agent, and Mel Parker, whose advice is wise.

  The world’s first atomic submarine, “underway on nuclear power” on January 17, 1955, was a fantastic deterrent, for she never fired a torpedo in anger. She now lies proudly alongside her own special pier by the Submarine Force Museum in Groton, Connecticut. Report aboard for your tour of USS Nautilus (SSN-571); then take a few hours to visit the Museum, a valuable part of our American heritage.

  Once again, I want to dedicate one to

  my wife, Georgie—her love is sustaining

  and she encourages me to achieve.

  . . . It is clear that the new expansionist ambitions of the imperialists on the oceans, directed against the countries of socialism, can be countered by our seapower which is capable of exerting a sobering influence on them.

  . . . the growth of importance of submarine forces makes necessary the intensive development of submarine-hunting forces . . .

  —from The Seapower of the State by Sergei G. Gorshkov, formerly Admiral of the Fleet of the Soviet Union

  George Washington, our first Polaris submarine . . . retired without fanfare after silently and effectively performing her mission of deterrence for more than twenty years. She never fired an armed missile. In the business of deterrence, that is the absolute definition of success.

  —Admiral Kinnaird R. McKee, USN

  Director, Naval Nuclear Propulsion Program on 6 March 1985 before House Committee on Armed Services

  Prologue

  A GRAY CHEVY eased to a dusty stop at a scenic turnoff on the coastal highway in Washington State. The man who got out and stretched as he rolled up his shirt sleeves might have been a salesman taking a midday break. The automobile was registered in the same name that appeared on his driver’s license—Charles Pearson. He was of medium height, clean shaven, indistinguishable in a crowd, apparently an average working man stopping by the roadside for a breather during a busy day.

  It was a rare sunny day for late winter. Ocean waves boomed with a never-ending rumble on the rocks below. A small sandy beach interrupted the unevenness of a rocky coastline. There, seals wiggled ashore to sun and frolic, their playful barking rising as the man’s eyes methodically completed their second complete circuit of his surroundings. Satisfied, he reached in the driver’s window and extracted a set of high-powered binoculars. They’d been adjusted to his eyes that morning in his hotel room. He again looked about cautiously before scanning the hills behind him. No one there, nothing unusual he could detect. As a matter of fact, there had never been any reports of lookouts anywhere in the vicinity. Yet his comrades continued to disappear.

  Arkady Kovschenko—for that was his given name in his hometown of Tula, a city south of Moscow—swept the binoculars from the landscape behind him to the high pasture on the spit of land two miles down the coast. It sat on a bluff sloping sharply down to the water’s edge. He had memorized the available charts for this section of coastline, and that entire spit of land seemed to have appeared out of nowhere in the last few years.

  This was a remote strip on the Washington coast, barren enough that it had not been mapped by Soviet satellites for years. The spit’s appearance had been noted a few years back by a minor operative who found it unusual, When he suffered a heart attack soon after, apparently no one in the KGB’s cartographic division had considered the report significant. A little more than a year ago, another agent had provided sketchy reports on a strange consortium of military officers and defense contractors (mostly involved with submarines) that would meet on a monthly basis in Washington, D.C. They would also mysteriously disappear every few months after flying into the Seattle area. Strangely enough, covert checks at their normal offices would always indicate they were either temporarily unavailable to the caller or somewhere other than reported by the agent in the Northwest. When he died in an automobile accident, his carefully prepared reports seemed to have died with him. There was no correlation from the other sources that would have made his reports more important than first judged.

  If the number of Soviet agents dying in the American Northwest hadn’t finally attracted some attention in Moscow, the bureaucrats who administered these agents might have buried what would later prove to be one of the most vital intelligence coups in the U
nited States.

  That was why Charles Pearson/Arkady Kovschenko was peering intently through his binoculars at the pastoral scene before him. The powerful lenses brought the pasture and the spit to him as though they were next to the car. It appeared so natural that without his earlier training he would never have noticed the oddities he now identified. The coastline in that vicinity was punctuated by sharp grades running up from the waterline, broken only by the narrow’ flood plain of rivers and creeks flowing from the inland peaks. This spit sloped more gradually, taking on an unnatural appearance as he concentrated. The rocks seemed to have been placed there by man rather than nature. Then he noticed the grass in the pastures. Though there actually were cattle grazing there, the shading of the grass they consumed was slightly different, thicker and more textured than that nearby. It was almost as if it had been planted there to ensure that the cows remained.

  The Russian studied the rollers ceaselessly attacking the shoreline. He had been trained in oceanography classes to study the action of coastal waters, and he now saw what convinced him that perhaps a giant American submarine wasn’t just a rumor. The coloration of the water, the movement of the waves, even obviously shifted sandbars on either side indicated that a deep channel existed right to the base of that spit—and it was wide, over three hundred feet. This could be the monster’s lair.

  There was but one way to confirm his suspicions. After a final sweep of the surrounding area, he dropped the binoculars inside his car. Opening the trunk, he extracted a large, well-wrapped package, which he lugged to the edge of the slope, lowering it carefully by rope to the bench below. The curious seals wriggling over to sniff the foreign object scattered when he tossed the rope down behind it.

  Hearing the sound of a distant motor, he closed the trunk carefully. Extracting a paper bag from the front seat, he neatly laid the contents on the hood. As the only vehicle in the past twenty minutes approached, the Russian was perched on the hood of his car munching on a sandwich, a Coke bottle in his other hand. Smiling and waving to the approaching car, he was just a salesman enjoying his lunch by a scenic turnoff. The driver of the other car waved and continued on his way.

  The lunch had been an afterthought, but it tasted good. It wouldn’t hurt him to finish it, and he remained on the hood of the car, pleased with his discovery and the few relaxing moments he was able to steal.

  They would be his last for the driver of the other car had already alerted security.

  High above, in an undetected orbit, a photographic satellite recorded his every moment. The images appeared quite clearly on a small screen in the security office situated well below the grazing cows. The watch officer was alerted early on to the car that stopped by the scenic turnoff. That spot had actually been constructed to provide the best view of this artificial headland, and a warning buzzer sounded in the security office whenever a car pulled off there.

  The watch officer moved over to a periscope and studied his objective through a powerful lens that literally brought Kovschenko into the room. He depressed the automatic photograph button three times so that they would have clear pictures of the intruder, should he manage to elude them. Once the package was lowered over the edge to the sandy beach below, he then punched the alert button for the duty SEAL team.

  The Russian finished his lunch, methodically bunching the sandwich wrappers and sliding them under the car seat with the empty Coke bottle. Then he moved back inside the car, unseen by either human or satellite. Quickly he dictated everything he had seen and would attempt to accomplish in the next few hours on a tiny recorder that fit in the palm of his hand. Finally, again checking to see that he remained alone, he removed his clothes down to a bathing suit under his trousers.

  As he left the car, he placed a handwritten note under the windshield wiper—“out of gas will return.” He then engaged a switch on the tiny recorder to radiate a signal that could be picked up only by a similar instrument. Another recording had been left in his hotel room explaining where he would be going that morning. His people would be able to trace every step if he disappeared. His recorded words confirmed his impressions of the existence of a lair for a giant submarine.

  After slipping the compact recorder under a loose rock at the edge of the cliff as he prepared to lower himself, his descent to the seal beach was rapid. Detritus preceding his approach irritated the seals until they finally moved offshore. The Russian removed a wet suit, breathing apparatus, diving mask, miniature underwater camera, and an electric pulling motor from the package.

  By the time he entered the water, the leader of the SEAL team was in the security station watching. He’d seen those motors before and knew how fast they could pull a swimmer. Checking his watch, he calculated within minutes when the Russian would approach the thousand-yard barrier.

  There was little effort involved on the part of the SEALs. When they unexpectedly appeared around him, the Russian reached futilely for the knife in his belt. But before he could remove it from the sheath, a dart with an explosive head had already penetrated his chest cavity, disintegrating his heart.

  That night his body was towed out to sea and dumped, along with his equipment, in a weighted bag. Before nightfall, his car was a compact lump of metal in a junkyard a hundred miles distant. The area surrounding the car had been swept electronically.

  Like those who had gone before him, there was no evidence that he had ever existed. But the compact device he had secreted under the rock had gone undetected. It would be turned up a few weeks later by what appeared to be a highway crew—a sweep team sent out by the Soviet intelligence officer in Seattle. It would be confirmation that the next man would utilize in the quest for a menace the Soviets had yet to ferret out.

  In an even more remote part of the world, an equally determined individual was embarking on a similar quest. He was an American but he was not masquerading as a Russian on the forbidding Soviet Kola Peninsula. There was no need for such cover in the bitter arctic winter.

  He was one of an elite few able to survive comfortably in that territory. His training was unsurpassed, primarily because he was the originator and instructor of the most rigorous cold-regions survival course. Swathed in white, not a centimeter of skin was exposed. His unique clothing was lightweight yet insulated against colder temperatures than he now faced, and his eyes were screened against the cold and the whiteness. A minuscule oxygen generator enhanced his breathing. Worldly needs were carried on his back, including an inflatable cocoon to protect him from the elements when he burrowed under the snow to rest.

  The Norwegians had offered a miniaturized snowmobile, which had been politely rejected based on his assumption that the Russians guarded against such machines with sniffers capable of detecting the slightest trace of exhaust. Preferring to operate on his own, his training and stamina more than made up for any benefit a fallible machine might provide.

  His mission was limited—a maximum of three days, he insisted. Longer would surely mean he’d failed. His superiors made one last offer, an honorable way to drop out. They would wait another month or so until the seasonal storms passed, then try satellite photography. He refused. The final transmission from one of his men—his closest friend—near Murmansk indicated the Soviets had been prepositioning tanks, artillery, and supplies near the Norwegian border under the cover of arctic storms. Only the Russians were capable of such large-scale movements that time of year. If the report was accurate, they would easily filter troops in to operate the weapons under the cover of the long arctic nights. Unanticipated, they could conduct a blitzkrieg-type sweep into Norway. His best man had died to relay that—he could not live with himself if he waited until the Soviets proved the report correct. The result could be Soviet occupation of the land mass controlling access to the Arctic.

  The bleak landscape had been photographed repeatedly the past year by satellite, and terrain models had been constructed. There were obvious locations to conceal vast numbers of weapons, easy to camouflage and perfect fo
r launching an assault as the weather broke.

  He slipped across the border on cross-country skis less than forty miles from two of the three most logical spots. He navigated with a compass and a watch, matching his pace against the distance. The darkness, the snow, and the cold, punctuated by the persistent winds, provided the gift of security as the hostile terrain enveloped him.

  The initial cache lay in a depression, and the downhill slope he anticipated there was nonexistent. Instead, a fuel storage area had been established in its place. The camouflage cover combined with the drifting snow to create a smooth-appearing surface when he should have been moving gently downhill. Little time was required to estimate the amount of stored fuel. It would support a massive assault. A satellite recorded the data he flashed skyward in a short, simple code. Aware there were no guards, he then rested under the protection of the Soviet camouflage.

  Two hours later, refreshed, he skied the track of a frozen river at a rapid pace. Pride and ego spurred him on through the frigid, never-ending darkness. No other man could accomplish what he was now enjoying. Single-handed, he was defeating the Russians at their own game.

  Anticipation of success, the thrill of superiority, each played a part in his undoing. The prepositioning of such vast arms supplies could not go totally unprotected, regardless of the hostile environment. A small unit of KGB guards had been attached to a post near the tank depot. They had no need to patrol their position. Rather, they utilized electronics to monitor their surroundings. The American had no indication when he tripped the beams, but a red light and soft warning buzzer alerted the KGB duty team.

  The Russians employed snowmobiles. They were protecting their own assets and had no reason to be elusive when the alarm was tripped. Each man covered a preplanned sector. With no idea of the cause of the warning or its threat, they traveled without lights. There was no wildlife able to trip their beams, so it was almost certain their quarry was human. And, in such a hostile locale, there would be only one purpose. The well-armed troops remained in constant radio contact.