Hunter Killer (49 page)

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.”

“FIFTY!” yelled the President. “FIFTY! That’s ridiculous.”

“Sir, I have told you already. The U.S. Navy is invincible.”

At which point the President of France lost all semblance of control.
“YOU ALSO TOLD ME THAT DESTROYER WOULD PROTECT THE TANKER…YOU…YOU GUARANTEED IT…YOU SAID IT WAS A SPECIALIST ANTISUBMARINE WARSHIP…AND IT TOOK THE UNITED STATES ABOUT ONE MINUTE TO BLOW IT IN HALF! FUCK YOU, PIERRE. DO I MAKE MYSELF CLEAR? F-U-U-U-U-CK YOU!”

“I was only repeating naval advice.”

“GAZING AT YOUR NAVEL…THAT’S THE NEAREST YOU GET TO KNOWLEDGE!” he bellowed. “I am surrounded by lunatics. My friends and my enemies. Imbeciles and killers. And I am sick to death of it.”

At which point, the butler entered the room to announce the arrival of Gen. Michel Jobert’s staff car at the main door downstairs.

“Bring him straight up,” said the President, not even looking at the man.

And three minutes later, the Commander in Chief of France’s joint service Commandment des Opérations Spéciales walked into the room. General Jobert had presented himself with the task of trying to prove what had happened in the Strait of Hormuz and in the Red Sea. He instantly announced that he was the bearer of important information, which was just as well, given the general atmosphere in that room—the President fit to be tied, his Foreign Minister cowering before the onslaught.

“Sir, as you know,” said the General, “we were unable to discover anything about the
Voltaire
or the
Moselle
. However, today’s atrocity is very different. Most of the
De Grasse
’s ship’s company survived, that’s 20 officers and 294 men.

“Their sonar room caught an incoming torpedo three hundred meters out. They even had its bearing. They have the recording and the software, with someone calling out ‘Torpedo! Torpedo! Torpedo!’

“It’s the first time we have had incontrovertible evidence that our ships were hit by a malevolent enemy. And, sir, it gets better: Four of the crew of the
Victor Hugo
were watching the destroyer burn when two guided missiles came in and smashed into the tanker’s hull. They saw them in the air, aimed straight at the ship, sir. They were right there on the high portside rail.

“Mr. President, we are in a position to go to the United Nations with irrefutable evidence that the United States has committed at least two most terrible crimes on the high seas.”

The President smiled for the first time that morning. “Paul Bedford may have thought he had enough to accuse us publicly, but we
really
have enough to nail the Americans.”

“Except for one thing,” said St. Martin. “The Americans will deny it flatly. They’ll just say it was the Japanese or someone.”

“Not quite,” interjected General Jobert. “When a sonar search system acquires an incoming missile or a torpedo, it instantly bangs it into a software program that identifies the type of sonar the enemy is using.”

He saw the President’s slightly puzzled face, and simplified the matter. “Sir,” he said, “if I walked out of that door and shouted something from the other side, you would know it was me. You’d recognize my voice. Same with a sonar system. When it receives a radar or sonar beam, its computer can identify the source of that beam. In this case, according to the
De Grasse
’s ops room, a Gould Mark 48 ADCAP transmitting active. That’s American. And, sir, the Omanis are just helping us to airlift the entire contents of the destroyer’s operational computer system, before she sinks.”

Again, the President smiled. “Then we have them, General?”

“Yessir.”

“Then we shall humiliate the mighty U.S.A. publicly. I shall broadcast to the entire world, tonight, condemning their actions. I’ll describe them as cold-blooded killers, cowboys, bandits. Irresponsible. Reckless. I’ll say the United Nations should not even be in New York. It should be in Paris. Center of the world…where people are…well, civilized, not madmen.”

“Steady, sir,” cautioned St. Martin. “The Americans would be glad to be rid of the UN. What do they call it…? Yes, the Chat-terbox on the East River.”

“Hmm,” said the President. “We shall see, Pierre. We shall see.”

And that night the roof fell in on international relations between France and the United States of America. The French President made his broadcast at 7
P.M
. in Paris, in precisely the terms he had outlined in the Elysée Palace for St. Martin and General Jobert. It was theatrical, accusing, rude in the extreme, and political to the nth degree.

The French President threw at the U.S.A. every insult every French President has longed to utter since World War II. Not even De Gaulle, at his most insufferably imperious, had ever let fly at the world’s policemen with quite that much venom.

And he ended it with this jackhammer flourish: “As from this moment, the envoys of the United States are no longer welcome in this country,” he thundered. “I hereby expel them all. I hereby close down their embassy, which pollutes the beauty of the Avenue Gabriel, not three hundred yards from where I am standing.

“I know that under international law that building and that land is officially designated land of the United States of America. As from this week, it is restored to its proper title deeds. Gabriel Avenue, in its entirety, belongs to
LA FRANCE!”
And he raised both arms in the air and signed off with the joyous shout:
“VIVE LA FRANCE!…VIVE LA FRANCE!”

When he marched off the wide upper landing of the Elysée Palace, stepping between the television arc lights, he entered once more his private drawing room and clasped the hand of General Jobert, who had sat and watched the performance onscreen with the Foreign Minister.