Eagle Trap by Geoffrey Archer

Author:Geoffrey Archer
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781448151608
Publisher: Random House

Wednesday

00.45 hrs

The Nimitz Class aircraft carrier USS Carl Jackson was steaming at an easy eight knots, just south of Cyprus, ninety-five thousand tons of war-fighting machinery powered by two nuclear reactors.

Her schedule specified she should’ve been heading west to Gaeta in Italy for maintenance and shore leave, following the spring exercise. But a signal from CINCUSNAVEUR in London had turned her massive bows east again.

On the Flag Deck, Rear-Admiral James D Bock slept fitfully. The orders he’d been given were clear, yet obscure: to position his Carrier Battle Group within striking range of Lebanon, but with no explanation as to what their mission might be.

The instructions had come direct from the White House.

Above the grey, steel island that housed the bridge and flight control, the skeletal communications mast reached up, its black paint and jumble of antennae giving it the look of a tree scorched by fire.

Amongst the radar and satellite dishes, a UHF rod aerial downlinked data from the ES-3A Viking aircraft conducting its ELINT mission over the eastern Mediterranean. The plane was like an airborne vacuum cleaner, sucking up radio transmissions in the military frequencies. It filtered out the routine and relayed anything in Russian back to the carrier.

The SIGINT section on board the Jackson was deep in the citadel below the island. The large spools of multi-track tape decks turned slowly, and the two Russian-speaking signals analysts hopped from channel to channel, listening for the unusual.

For twenty-four hours now they’d been on full alert. A Tango class submarine had passed from the Black Sea to the Aegean two days earlier. Any Russian naval activity was unusual now, since the disintegration of the Soviet Union. It had headed east, travelling on the surface to maximise its speed. South of Cyprus it had finally submerged, to escape detection.

The US Navy had tried to track the boat on sonar as it sped towards the Lebanese coast. A hard task in the Mediterranean, where the density of shipping and the water conditions give the submarine the advantage.

A couple of hours ago they’d struck lucky. A British Nimrod maritime reconnaissance plane from Cyprus had detected the Tango’s radio mast raised above the water. Listening, presumably. So far they’d not heard the submarine transmit.

Commander Norman Tracy paced about in the half-darkness of the Combat Direction Centre, the central nervous system of the USS Carl Jackson. As Operations Chief he could have left things to the lieutenant on watch, and gotten his head down. But he was uneasy. Why had the Battle Group been sent east? What was the big secret?

Something was up. They’d listened to Voice of America and the BBC World Service for hints, but there’d been none. No news of an impending crisis in Lebanon; no orders yet for special missions; no reconnaissance flights in preparation for bombing raids. They’d simply been ordered to build up the surface and sub-surface picture within a hundred miles of Lebanon.

The surprise appearance of the Russian Tango had produced a little excitement. It was a

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