by David Poyer
Enzweiler nodded. “Sounds reasonable. For now. I’ll put the staff at your disposal. What can I do?”
“Well, sir, if I could keep Commander Danenhower on the engineering casualties, that would really help. And if you could—yeah, actually, if you could bird-dog exactly what happened to the admiral, that would be great. I’ve been concentrating on the ship, but—”
“Danenhower, sure. On Lenson, point me where to start.”
She told him that would be the helo air controller, and to try to generate a last known position to pass to Higher. At the moment, though, there didn’t seem to be any ongoing search-and-rescue activities. In fact, the Aegis picture showed nothing at all between Savo and the coast, from which they were now receding at a little better than a walking pace.
Her husband might be out there. Still alive. In the water.
But the message had been pretty definite. Shot down over Ningbo. No chute.
She bared her teeth. He’d only just transitioned to the F-35. He wasn’t familiar with the aircraft. And the bastards had sent him into the heaviest antiair defenses in history.
She’d find out who’d sent him. And somehow, make them pay.
A jittering, a flicker, and the screens went blank again. “Shit,” Mills muttered. He yelled across to the control station, “Where’s my data, Chief?”
“Just a fuckin’ minute … we’re being fucked with, for sure. I’m not getting anything from the main body, or the Japanese either.”
Despite being officially neutral, the Japanese had been feeding them a radar picture during the strike. But losing data, plus their own damage, made Savo blind to any renewed attack.
She was raking at her fingers again when the 21MC clicked on. “CIC, DC Central, Skipper?”
She hit the switch. “CO.”
“Lieutenant (jg) Jiminiz. Ma’am, we seriously need to counterflood.”
She suddenly realized she was looking downhill at the port displays. The list had increased. “We’re still taking water?”
“Affirmative. One gen’s not enough to power self-defense, maintain firemain pressure, and run the pumps. Main 1 fire’s out, but we’ve got toxic gas leaks into Aux 2 and Main 2, from the halon flood. Halon turns into phosgene at high temperatures. At current flooding rate”—a pause, during which Cheryl could hear someone protesting in the background—“at current rate, we’re pushing stability boundaries in an hour.”
She told him, “I’m hearing this, but heating halogenated hydrocarbon inhibitors in enclosed spaces doesn’t produce phosgene, Lieutenant.”
“Sorry, ma’am, but the book says halon breaks down to mixed chlorine and bromine toxics: Fluorophosgene, hydrogen chloride, carbon monoxide. Our guys in Aux 2, MER 2, and Shaft Alley are working in masks.”
“Okay, I stand corrected. We counterflood, then what?”
A new voice: the senior engineering chief. “McMottie, ma’am. Then we get 1A GTM running, then Number Two GTG on the line. That gives us full electrical power and propulsion on the starboard shaft. At that point Main 1 should be cooled down enough we can get a repair team in and start patching and dewatering.”
“And the port shaft?”
“Forget that, ma’am. Main reduction gear’s gone, turbines are junk. We’re a one-shaft pony from here on.”
Okay, Ticos could run at almost twenty knots with one screw. If she had electricity restored, got the side patched, and the flooding contained … “Sounds like a plan. What do we need to do up here, Chief?”
“You know that better than me, Skipper. Keep our heads down until we can get things running again, I guess.”
She double-clicked the Transmit lever and sat back. “Still no data,” Mills murmured.
Cheryl stared at the display, more and more disturbed by the lack of visibility astern. The most threatening quarter for any renewed attack. “Donnie? Chief? How far left do I have to come to get a look over my shoulder?”
He said twenty degrees left or right of their base course would do it. She checked the pit log. Six knots. Better, but still … she hit the intercom to the bridge. “OOD, CO here. Come left to zero-eight-five degrees. Hold for one minute, then return to base course.”
* * *
TWO hours later they were up to twelve knots. But the list had increased, and Damage Control reported difficulty getting the flooding isolated and shoring into place.
“Feel it?” Jiminiz was wading ahead of her through the gloom of Main 1. Teams were at work clearing wreckage and removing bodies. The space had been desmoked, but he was coughing and wheezing. “How she’s taking longer, to come back?”
Cheryl nodded, shining a flash on the grating beneath their boots. She sensed that wrongness. The ship rolled harder, stayed over longer, and came back grudgingly. It wasn’t just that they were losing buoyancy. With each added ton of “free surface”—water that could shift back and forth, gaining momentum with each roll—the righting arm that levered them back to vertical shrank. When it reached zero, nothing in this world would keep ten thousand tons of steel from turning turtle.
She half hiked, half skated along a slick canted catwalk of perforated steel. The urine gleams of battle lanterns probed the dark. The thunder of pine wedges being hammered in reverberated in the choking dim. She peered down through the catwalk to a dully gleaming, oily blackness that surged this way, then that.
At the hole in the side coveralled figures toiled like miners at a coal seam. They were struggling to heave a steel I beam into position against a stringer in the overhead. Once there, it would brace a plywood-and-mattress soft patch set athwartships the hole. There were other gaps too. She could see daylight, and with each roll water burst through, running down first in trickles, then sheets, to cascade through the gratings into the bilges. Men and women groaned together in the effort to lift the beam. She stepped forward and added her shoulder, twisting to protect her fractured arm. The burden rose, but halted, wavering, just short of the stringer.
The straining sailors groaned louder, and it lifted another inch.
Suddenly it slipped away, barely missing a seaman’s head, and slammed down with a booming splash. The sea bulged darkly, and a huge surge burst through, knocking sailors to their knees. They retreated, scrambling as wood and sodden mattresses tumbled end over end, knocking more people down. A petty officer hauled Cheryl back as another beam slammed down at her boot-toes.
“I don’t get it,” Jiminiz muttered. “We got three pumps running. Shouldn’t be taking water this fast.”
Cheryl glanced down again at the black surface below. Her imagination, or was it already closer? “Are we sure this is the only penetration?”
The Damage Control assistant scratched his ear. “The only one reported.”
“So this is flooding both the MER and Aux 1.”
“Yeah, but we got the hole in Aux 1 sealed.”
“Is the level there rising, or dropping?”
“It’s holding steady.” He shrugged.
“Then we’ve got another penetration somewhere,” she told him. “We need to get somebody over the side, check it out. Let’s do it while we still have daylight.”
* * *
THE diver found another hole, below and aft of the one they’d been trying to patch. But by the time he confirmed that, Savo had lost another two hundred tons of buoyancy.
Leaving Cheryl, back in the pilothouse, pondering a dilemma as she looked down on a forecastle that was already noticeably closer to the water.
Savo still had power, though they’d had to drop to ten knots again. But the flooding was gaining. Slowly, but the end could not be many hours away.
Abandon ship? Unfortunately, they didn’t have enough boats. One rigid-hulled inflatable had been destroyed in the fire. A third of the life raft inventory was gone too, holed by fragments or destroyed in the fires.
She couldn’t help thinking again of Indianapolis, torpedoed in 1945 and forgotten by the chain of command. Hundreds of men had drifted for days, baking
in the sun, ravaged by sharks.… She tried to raise Higher again, then broadcast a general Mayday. With no response.
Danenhower let himself onto the bridge. The engineering officer looked utterly weary, coveralls stained with grease and soot. He joined her on the wing, hacking black phlegm into a tissue. “The warhead separated from the airframe just before it hit. Both parts went through the hull.”
“Can you patch it?”
“We can’t reach it to patch, not with the rounded hull form. And we can’t compartmentalize it.” He grimaced. “We tried concrete, but it runs out the bottom. That whole area of the hull’s shredded. I’m running every pump, but eventually the ones in Aux 2 will be submerged. The failures will percolate aft as we go down by the head. Until…”
“I see.” She glanced inside; anxious faces stared back. “How long? Can we hold it off overnight?” With twelve more hours, they might get through the strait. Still in trouble, but at least whoever picked them up might not turn them over to the enemy.
“Lemme do the math again.” Danenhower punched the screen of his PDA. Finally he shook his head. “No.”
A clank as the door undogged. Van Gogh let himself out, followed by the sonarman chief. “Skipper, Commander,” he muttered.
She nodded. “Guys?”
“Looked at the chart again, ma’am. Thought you might want to see this.”
Cheryl flattened the paper. A penciled circle around a blue area. “There’s nothing here.”
“It’s a seamount,” the sonarman said. “Part of the same chain as the Ryukyus, but it doesn’t break the surface.”
Zotcher handed over a printout of classified submarine hydrography. It showed the depth as ten to twelve meters. Last, Van Gogh produced an old book with blue damp-warped covers. “Found it in a Royal Navy survey, too. They note it as a ten-fathom reef, but it’s a submerged atoll. A flat-topped seamount.”
She coughed into a fist, doubt worming her stomach. Scratched furiously at the itch between her fingers, breaking the scabs. Fuck, it was going to start bleeding again now. “So which is it, ten meters, or ten fathoms?”
“I’d trust the later survey,” Danenhower put in.
“And how far?”
Van Gogh said, “Thirty-two miles, bearing one-three-seven true.”
They waited. She thought of asking Enzweiler. Then steeled herself. The chief of staff outranked her, but he wasn’t the skipper.
She held their gazes, smothering any uncertainty or irresolution. She could mourn, for her husband, for her dead. But they didn’t want to see her doubt, or be weak, or show fear.
She took a deep breath. Lifted her chin. “Monitor the rate of flooding,” she said, startled at the firmness of her own voice. “Keep me informed. For the present, maintain course. Another hour, and then I’ll decide.”
2
In the Karakoram Mountains
THE old mirror was wavery, speckled, dim. Holding it against the pick-pocked, just-excavated rock face, Master Chief Teddy Oberg inspected his own warped visage.
His beard was going gray. Scars radiated from his nose like ejecta from a lunar impact crater. His eyes: blue, cold, the corners seamed. His skin: bronzed and rough. Hair: shoulder length, longer than he’d worn it on the Teams, twisted back into a knot.
“Zhè rúhé bangzhù women?” And this does for us exactly what? Nasrullah, the rebels’ supply honcho and go-between to the lowlands, pointed to the mirror. He spoke in the pidgin Han that was the main tongue Teddy and the rebels shared. Though Teddy was making some progress with Uighur.…
Obie angled the mirror down the new tunnel. Rays from the entrance, glary with snow, ricocheted into the darkness. Mujahideen, bent double, chipped laboriously, chewing into the mountain’s guts. One raised an arm, shielding his eyes from the sudden dazzle.
“We want all the mirrors we can get,” Teddy told Nasrullah. “I saw this in the White Mountains.”
“Al-Qaeda?”
“Exactly.”
“You fought Muslims then. Why soldier beside us now?”
“What can I say, the world changes.” Teddy shrugged. He lowered the mirror. Set it against the granite wall, reslung his rifle, and limped for the main entrance, favoring his injured foot.
He was still a SEAL, but he barely felt like one anymore. Salena, the cop he’d been dating back in LA, was a distant memory. A scene from a film he’d watched too long ago to really remember. Hollywood? He could hardly believe he’d wanted to make movies once. No, that was all gone. Blown away like poppy pollen on the thin cool winds of war.
After escaping from a POW camp, he and “Ragger” Fierros had stumbled down out of the mountains in time to witness a mujahideen attack. Since the Americans had been firing back at the government troops too, the rebels took them along when they withdrew. After a jolting ride in the back of a pickup, then a long, blindfolded climb, the captives had been shoved into this same cave complex to be judged.
And nearly executed. But Teddy had saved them with a lie: that he was with the CIA, and could provide support for their revolt against Beijing.
Today he’d find out whether he could make that lie into something closer to the truth.
If not, he could face that same court again.
The outside air was icy keen. As snow blew past he drew his blanket close, huddling near the entrance so as not to stand out to any overhead surveillance. Doubtful in this weather, but best to play it safe. He wore the same threadbare shalwar kameez as the Uighurs, the same flat wool cap, and over his shoulders the POW-issue blanket that had covered him during the escape. He fingered the Chinese rifle’s stock. He’d taken it from a trooper shot down by the muj during the attack on the town.
Before and below spread the valley. Not a building within sight, though in summer flocks would pasture down there. Rock. Snow. Low brush, at the lowest altitudes. Knife-sharp ridges, deep ravines, a deserted, rugged Mars-scape, shadowed even in daylight.
He blinked across snow-hazed miles to a wall that blocked the sky: the snow-covered, frowning Pamirs. Remembering another snowfall, another high mountain pass. The mission to kill bin Laden.
He hoped this turned out better.
A hiss, a crackle. He pulled out the cheap walkie-talkie and faded behind a rock rampart. But the transmission, mountain-faint and scratchy, was in Uighur. “Qing shuo hányu,” he snapped. Speak Han.
“Yes, Lingxiù.” Chief, sort of, what he’d asked them to call him. “This is Tok. Have man with us now.”
Tok was “Tokarev,” given name Guldulla, the co-head of the guerrillas. “Copy. What’s he like?”
“Hard to say. Maybe Russian?”
Obie frowned. “Russian?”
“That’s what he looks like. He will not say his name. Says, only to you.”
He cradled the radio, pondering. He’d asked Fierros, when his fellow escapee had decided to try for the border, to send someone back if he could. There was an opportunity here for the Allies. But a Russian?
He could be a spy, a double agent. If there was any possibility of that, he couldn’t bring him here.
“Meet me at the spring.” He jacked a cartridge into the rifle, then began limping down the mountain.
* * *
THE guy looked Slavic, all right, with salient cheekbones. His dark stubble was rimed with ice. A straight, thin blade of a nose. Deeply hooded, altitude-bloodshot eyes in a hue Teddy couldn’t quite make out. He stood beside the frozen stream in hiking boots and an ancient greatcoat that could have been issued by the army of the tsars, but at least looked warm. Thin insulated gloves were modern, but the earflapped fur hat said Russian again.
“So, you walked in?” Teddy asked warily. In English.
“All the way from Manas. Master Chief Theodore Harlett Oberg, USN, I presume?”
No discernible accent. East Coast Standard. They shook hands guardedly. Teddy said, “So, where are we from? You’re not a Team guy, are you?”
“Former Ranger. Call me Vladimir.”
<
br /> “You look Russian.”
“I’ve passed for that.”
“So did I, after we escaped. Pretended to be hunters.”
A squint. “Did it work?”
“Not all that well. So what’s the news? We winning the war?”
“It’s not going all that well, no. Oh. I was told you wanted one of these.” Vladimir dug into his greatcoat, and the Uighur behind him lifted his shotgun. Teddy gestured him to stand easy.
“Fierros said you wanted a good thin-blade,” the CIA man said. “A Boker fighting knife, ceramic blade, that do the trick?”
Teddy turned it over in hardened, cold-blistered fingers. Flicked it open, then closed. “Nice,” he grunted.
It would do for a bona fide. Unless of course the Chinese, or their Iranian allies, had captured Ragger and were running this guy in. But you couldn’t start a revolt without taking risks.
“Let’s go on up to the main cave,” Teddy muttered. “It’s too fucking cold to talk here.”
* * *
BATS twittered and squeaked far above. Worn carpets and low tables of rough wood were scattered across water-eroded limestone. To one side dozens of ancient Buddhas lay toppled, shattered, faces gouged back into emptiness. Carvings on the rock walls were scarred by bullets. A crushed mass of ancient parchment shoaled the corners, layered with centuries of bat guano. Black banners hung behind a lectern. “Dandan!” Teddy yelled into the recesses of the cave.
The field officer revealed a tactical vest, a maroon turtleneck, and a holstered Glock as he unbuttoned to sit cross-legged on a bare-napped carpet, sweeping the tails of his coat aside. A fire of dry brush crackled in the far corner, eddying a silver snake of smoke along the ceiling. “Cozy,” Vladimir said, looking around at reclining men chatting over tea as they took a break from digging, at the sleeping pallets, at the crack in the rocky overhead that sucked the smoke up to vent somewhere higher up the mountain.
Teddy nodded. “Used to be some kind of hermitage.”
“How’s the leg? You were wounded on the Woody raid?”
“Yeah, it’s never really come back.” He massaged his calf, where the muscles knotted at night in agonizing spasms. “I take it Ragger made it back in one piece.”