Echo Class Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Acknowledgements

  Foreword

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  Praise for the action-adventure novels by Captain David E. Meadows

  “An absorbing, compelling look at America’s future place in the world. It’s visionary and scary.”

  —Joe Buff, author of Seas of Crisis, Straits of Power, and Tidal Rip

  “If you enjoy a well-told tale of action and adventure, you will love David Meadows’s series, The Sixth Fleet. Not only does the author know his subject but [his] fiction could readily become fact. These books should be read by every senator and congressman in our government so that the scenarios therein do not become history.”

  —John Tegler, syndicated talk show host of Capital Conversation

  “Meadows will have you turning pages and thinking new thoughts.”—Newt Gingrich

  “Meadows takes us right to the bridge, in the cockpit, and into the thick of battle. Meadows is a military adventure writer who’s been there, done it all, and knows the territory. This is as real as it gets.”—Robert Gandt

  “Meadows delivers one heck of a fast-paced, roller coaster ride with this exhilarating military thriller.”

  —Midwest Book Review

  Berkley titles by David E. Meadows

  FINAL RUN

  ECHO CLASS

  DARK pacific

  DARK pacific: pacific THREAT

  DARK pacific: final fathom

  joint TASK FORCE: LIBERIA

  joint TASK FORCE: AMERICA

  joint TASK FORCE: FRANCE

  JOINT TASK FORCE: AFRICA

  the Sixth fleet

  the Sixth fleet: SEAWOLF

  the Sixth fleet: tomcat

  THE SIXTH FLEET : COBRA

  THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

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  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  ECHO CLASS

  A Berkley Book / published by arrangement with the author

  PRINTING HISTORY

  Berkley edition / February 2009

  Copyright © 2009 by The Berkley Publishing Group.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form

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  eISBN : 978-1-101-01671-8

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  Acknowledgments

  My thanks to all of you who offered your Cold War experiences. It helped in my own recall to events at sea that never made the headlines ashore. A special thanks and acknowledgment to my editor, Tom Colgan, who came up with this idea to develop a Cold War series. These books bring back a nostalgia for the era when we had an enemy that was easy to find, but hard to kill. Today, with asymmetric warfare (Pentagon-speak for terrorism), we have an enemy that is hard to find, but easy to kill. It has been fun and exciting to write this series and I hope you enjoy it also. My thanks to my agent, John Talbot, who encouraged me in this endeavor and to Tom Colgan’s right-hand person, Sandra Harding, who sends such encouraging notes and e-mails.

  My deep respects and thanks go to the readers who enjoy these action-adventure novels. I read each and every one of your e-mails to the website www.sixthfleet.com and appreciate your comments, reviews, and critiques. All the best, shipmates.

  Cheers,

  David E. Meadows

  Foreword

  This is the second in a series of novels written to capture the Cold War at sea pitting the United States and its allies against the Soviet Union. The time is June 1967, a few days before the Israeli Air Force would wipe out the Syrian and Egyptian air forces as the Six-Day War erupted. But this is not a story about that Middle East war. The story I want to tell takes place in the Pacific Ocean, far from the events unfolding in the Middle East.

  It was a watershed year for both navies, with America engaged in the unpopular Vietnam War and the Soviet Union pouring supplies and logistical support into North Vietnam. America had its advisors with the South Vietnamese military, and the Soviet Union had similar advisors with the North Vietnamese. The American Navy had decided that nuclear submarines would make up its submarine force. It still had diesel submarines, but they were on their way out. The Soviet Navy was building nuclear submarines as fast as their shipyards could turn them out, having decided to transition to a full nuclear submarine force. They were also building professional sailors as well trained and patriotic as those in the American, British, French, Italian, and other Allied navies.

  By June 1967, the Soviet Navy was a global naval power that with the passing of each year further threatened the dominance of the Western navies. It had no aircraft carriers, but like other modern nations that aspire to dominance on the seas it had started with building a massive submarine force to lead the way. Germany did it in World War II. The United States did it when Pearl Harbor left us with only submarines and aircraft carriers at the beginning of the war. The Chinese are doing it today. Countries who believe they stand on the precipice of being a global naval power start with submarines. They don’t build aircraft carriers and battleships in today’s modern era. They build submarines capable of taking the battle away from their own shores. Submarines are the military canaries of world power.

  Throughout the Cold War, both sides fought never
-ending battles for political victory through brushfire wars. The Middle East became the proving ground for the superpower giants, where clashes between proxies forever drew them nearer to cataclysmic events that could have turned the Cold War into a hot one. Nineteen sixty-seven was such a year, and the actions in the pages to come take place as the Arab militaries of Syria and Egypt rattled their war drums and announced to the world that they intended to wipe Israel from the face of the earth, and Israel responded with the air attack of June 5. It was also a time when superpowers were shown that their proxies were not without their own nationalistic ideas, as the Israelis intentionally attacked the USS Liberty on June 8.

  At-sea clashes, collisions, and events are always easier to hide from the public, and many things that occurred between the Soviet Navy and the United States Navy will be taken to the grave by the men and women who served “haze-gray under way” over the horizon from their homelands. During the Cold War, confrontations between the two great powers out of sight of the shore never stopped. Whether it was cutting across the bows of ships to make the skipper take emergency maneuvering actions, or the continuous tracking, targeting, and simulated sinking of each other’s naval forces: Things happened.

  The Cold War is filled with documented incidents of confrontations and events that occurred at sea. And there are many more sea tales and hints of conspiracy in both navies that never made the newspapers of the era. Things happened. Sometimes men died. Sometimes ships and submarines disappeared. The belief that what happened at sea stayed at sea was a half-truth of the Cold War. The seas were where the Soviet and Allied navies looked for ways to flex their navy muscle; where captains and crews thrilled to the race of adrenaline through their bodies, while wondering if this “might be the time,” when an at-sea brushfire roiled across the oceans and trampled across the beaches, inciting a global conflagration. Every incident held that possibility, and it was only through the restraint of both navies’ commanding officers and professional crews that this never happened.

  But let me tell you a little bit about this story. It pits against each other two career navy captains, who must try to figure out what the other is about to do, execute the dangerous orders of their superiors, and complete their missions without starting World War III. The Soviet submarines in the story are the Echo I class K-122 and the Echo II class K-56. Both are real, both existed during this period, both are nuclear, and both have a “real” history you can find on the Internet. While I populate the two subs with characters, rest assured I have no idea who the professionals were who actually manned them.

  The primary American ships in the story are the destroyers USS Dale and USS Coghlan. USS Dale is the protagonist for the story, and I used a real Forrest Sherman class destroyer of that period, the USS Davis (DD-973), as the model. Though I identify them as Forrest Sherman class destroyers, the names of my destroyers honor two of the three that made a suicide run against a superior Japanese fleet in the World War II engagement known as the Battle of the Komandorski Islands. USS Dale was DD-353 and USS Coghlan was DD-606; the third destroyer was USS Monaghan (DD-354), a survivor of Pearl Harbor. This Komandorski battle stopped the Japanese from landing troops in the Aleutians. The three destroyers survived because a lucky hit by one of them killed the Japanese admiral leading the enemy battle group. The destroyers had been considered expendable and the torpedo run against the Japanese suicidal, with full expectation by Rear Admiral Charles McMorris that the ships would be destroyed. This story could not have been written if the Coghlan had not survived. My father was a first class radioman on board that destroyer during that fateful run. Someday I may write the story of that battle. My father, like many others on those three ships, never forgave McMorris for abandoning them to their fate while he sailed away with his cruisers to “fight another day.”

  In this story, none of the personalities on the Soviet boats or the American warships are real. They are fabrications of my imagination, and as with all works of fiction, this one carries a disclaimer inside the cover. As for the Soviet submarines, I have no knowledge of who the skippers were, or the Navy souls who manned them. It has been my intention in writing this series to capture the professional life of both navies, the humanity of the characters, and the challenges of the Cold War that catapulted our forces against each other.

  Some literary liberty is taken in the story. For example, throughout the book, local Subic Bay time is used for both navies even though the Soviet Union always used Moscow time for its fleet. Trying to coordinate two different time zones was too confusing for the writer to keep track. Both navies show knots for speed, but the Soviet Navy used the metric system while the U.S. Navy used the English system of inches, feet, yards, and nautical miles. A nautical mile is two thousand yards, for the landlubbers among you.

  ONE

  Thursday, June 1, 1967

  CAPTAIN Second Rank Kostenka Bocharkov spun the search periscope in a complete three-sixty circle. Not a damn thing in sight. An empty ocean stretched for at least fifteen miles in each direction. The Pacific waves were calm, barely lapping against the scope, but then the K-122 was barely making way at periscope depth. Too much speed at this depth created a wake behind them that the Americans could see.

  Bocharkov released the handles for a moment and rubbed his thumb across his fingers before grabbing the handles again. The Soviet captain second rank stopped the scope when it was aligned forward with the bow of the K-122. For nearly a minute he observed the direction of the swells.

  “Course?” he shouted.

  “One-one-zero, Captain!”

  He squinted, watching the swell of the waves again. It was amazing how easy it was to determine wind direction with heavier waves—not sea state five and above. Those waves were too rough and would have kept him down a hundred meters in the relative calm of the seas beneath. The Pacific was a calm ocean in comparison to the violent North Atlantic where he started his career.

  Finally satisfied, he took one last full-circle glance around the ocean before leaning away from the scope.

  He looked around the control room. “All clear. Sea state is one. Wind is north by northeast. Report.” He glanced at the navigator, who had leaned up from crouching over his charts. An unlit cigarette drooped from the man’s lips. As if feeling Bocharkov’s gaze, Tverdokhleb looked up at the skipper and pushed the heavy black-rimmed glasses up off the tip of his nose.

  “Sonar reports passive detection,” Lieutenant Commander Orlov, the operations officer, announced, bringing Bocharkov’s attention away from the navigator.

  “Comms, Comrade Orlov? We still have comms with the Reshitelny?”

  Orlov looked at Chief Starshina Volkov. “Chief, hit Boyevaya Chast’ 1 and ask the communicators the status of our secure communications with the Kashin class destroyer trailing the Americans.” Internal communications within Soviet warships were the same, with BCh-1 allocated to the communicators, 2 for surface ships, 3 for sonar, and so on down the list.

  Nearly thirty seconds passed before the officer of the deck, also the operations officer, replied to Bocharkov’s question. “The destroyer is still with the American carrier Kitty Hawk, sir. We are receiving a constant stream of targeting data from it. It is being inputted into the firing panel.”

  Bocharkov looked at the panel located on the aft port side of the K-122. Chief Starshina Diemchuk stood near the panel. Red and green lights, some steady, most flickering, readily told any observer why submariners referred to the firing panel as the Christmas Tree.

  Bocharkov brought his eyes back to the periscope and did another search. The Kashin class destroyer had been tailing the American aircraft carrier for two weeks—ever since the Kitty Hawk departed its homeport of Yokuska, Japan.

  He leaned away from the periscope, looked at Diemchuk, but spoke to Orlov. “And what is Weapons doing with the targeting data?” He caught the sideways glance exchanged between the chief of the boat, Chief Ship Starshina Uvarova, and the planesman he was always hovering
near. Bocharkov smiled. He had yet to meet a chief of the boat who did not believe he was the real owner of the submarine. That was what made the COB so almighty important.

  “They are refining the firing solution, Captain. We will be prepared to surface and simulate firing at your command.”

  “Very well.” He let out a deep sigh. “Continue with the exercise. Remind everyone that no missile doors are to be opened when we surface,” he warned. There would be no accidental launch, and if the Americans did stumble across them, there must be no misinterpretation of the K-122 intentions.

  The Americans knew that to fire the missile required the Echo I submarine to surface. The Americans called the missile Shaddock. He wondered why. The Soviet nomenclature for the missile was the P-5.

  Surface he would do. Firing also required that they open the missile hatches. That he would not do. If the Americans spotted the K-122, the closed missile hatches would ensure they understood this was an exercise. If a war were to start between the imperialists and the great Soviet Union, let it begin elsewhere. Not here in the South China Sea between the Philippines and Vietnam.

  He glanced at the clock on the aft bulkhead of the control room. It was always night in a submarine until the periscope broke water. Four o’clock in the afternoon and barely a cloud in the sky. Why could they not do their exercises at night? A surfaced submarine was anathema to everything a submariner trained to do, especially during daylight hours.

  “Sir, we have the targeting data refined.”