“I don’t think that’ll work, either,” Cabrillo said. He looked to his side and nodded.
To Tate’s shock, into the frame stepped a very much alive Langston Overholt.
“Hello, Mr. Tate. I’m happy to still be on two feet, but I’m sorry to see you again.”
Tate sneered at the two of them. “You think you’re so smart.”
“Not that smart,” Cabrillo said, “but smarter than you. If you were really smart, you’d leave Chile right now and find some hole in the world to climb into. Because the U.S. government is going to come looking for you.”
Tate could feel himself losing control. He took a seat in his command chair and held the armrests in a vise grip.
“You’re the dumb one, Juan, if you think I’m going to leave now. Not when I’ve got you on the ropes. I’m coming to find you, and there’s no place for you to hide.”
He slashed across his throat, and the feed cut out.
Everyone in the op center was staring at him, but no one dared speak.
“Contact the Wuzong,” Tate barked at Ballard. “Tell Admiral Yu that we’re going to war.”
58
With Vargas’s expert help, Jefferson steered the damaged Deepwater through a passage so shallow and narrow that the much larger Portland could never follow. However, the winding waterway ended a mile later in a circular cove. They were safe for now, but trapped. At least they hadn’t had any casualties more serious than wounds requiring a few stitches.
“How long will it take to effect engine repairs?” Jefferson asked her XO.
“A day at best,” he replied. “We barely made it here before we had to shut the engines down to keep them from seizing up completely. Even if we get them running again, we’ll only be able to run at ten knots max.”
“I don’t care. I want us moving as soon as possible. Make it so.”
“Aye, Captain.” The XO left for the engine room.
“We’ll never outrun the Portland,” Vargas said.
“We wouldn’t have anyway,” Jefferson said. “Dirk Pitt himself told me that she could cruise faster than forty knots. I thought he was pulling my leg until I saw that old freighter firing missiles.”
“Then, what do we do? We won’t even have the fog to conceal us.”
It had been five hours since the devastating sea battle, and the fog was beginning to lift.
They hunched over the map of the area. Jefferson traced several routes through the islands, but they all led back to two exits into the Pacific, one to the north and the other to the south. It would take them hours to get out, and the Portland could be waiting between them at either choke point.
“Why don’t we wait here until the Chilean authorities arrive?” Vargas suggested.
“You saw the Portland’s armament,” Jefferson said. “A Coast Guard vessel would be cut to shreds by the Portland, and it might take two days for Chile’s Navy ship to get here. It doesn’t matter anyway. Our radios and satellite transmitter are toast.”
“I thought your chief scientist said they’re still getting data from the sonobuoys and the webcams.”
“We are. That’s why I could warn the Oregon about the torpedoes. The data is coming in, but we can’t send anything out to the Oregon except by short-range radio.”
“From what their captain told us about Oregon’s own damage,” Vargas said, “I don’t think they’ll be much help, either.”
“Then we need to sit tight here until we can make headway.”
The mission’s chief scientist, Mary Harper, burst onto the bridge. The slender woman, in her fifties, was breathless from running.
“Mary, what’s going on?” Jefferson asked.
Harper planted a laptop on the console. She clicked, and it brought up a waveform from one of the sonobuoys. Jefferson recognized it as the signature of the song of the humpback whale.
“We just heard this from Sonobuoy Two,” Harper said.
She played the audio clip. It was the familiar hoots, rumbles, and whistles of a humpback whale communicating with its pod.
“What’s so unusual about that?” Vargas asked, confused as to Harper’s sense of urgency. “We hear whale songs all the time in the waters around here.”
Harper shook her head. “No, this is what you hear.”
She played a second audio clip. To Jefferson, it sounded similar to the first one.
“Isn’t that the same thing?” Vargas asked, even more puzzled now.
“Not at all,” Harper said. “The second one you heard is the song of the southern ocean humpback whale. The first one you heard—the one detected by our hydrophone—is the song of the northern Pacific humpback whale.”
Now Jefferson was just as bewildered as Vargas. “What are you saying?”
“Humpbacks learn songs from each other,” Harper said. “The songs are very distinctive to each community of whales. The whales from the northern Pacific never interact with the ones in the Southern Hemisphere. They each have their own language, so to speak.”
“So we shouldn’t be hearing this song in Chile?” Vargas asked.
“It would be unprecedented for a northern Pacific humpback to travel this far south. They usually only leave the Arctic to breed in Hawaii or Mexico and never come below those latitudes.”
Jefferson was getting exasperated with the discussion.
“Dr. Harper, I applaud your scientific enthusiasm, but, if you didn’t notice, we’re a little busy with trying to stay alive right now.”
“I know, I’m sorry,” Harper said. “But there is a point to this. When I heard the song repeat, I compared it to the previous version. It was exactly the same. And I do mean exactly. That just doesn’t happen.”
Vargas raised a quizzical eyebrow at Jefferson. “She said she has a point, but I don’t get it. Is this a critical whale thing that I don’t understand?”
“Dr. Harper has a Ph.D. in marine biology,” Jefferson said. “I’m sure she wouldn’t be wasting our time if this weren’t important.”
“Thank you, Captain Jefferson,” Harper said, annoyed but plowing ahead. “I wasn’t finished. When I heard the repetition, I turned up the sensitivity of the hydrophone and canceled out the waveform of the whale song. When I did that, I heard this coming from the same direction as the humpback signal.”
She played another audio clip. This one was fainter, and it took a moment for Jefferson to recognize it for a man-made sound. When she did, she looked at Harper with surprise.
“Am I crazy,” Jefferson said, “or is that the sound of a ship’s propeller?”
59
The extreme depth of the fjord they were navigating allowed the Chinese sub Wuzong to glide through the channel at one hundred feet below the surface, making it undetectable by any aircraft flying overhead. So far, they’d detected no ships.
Admiral Yu Jiang calmly watched the depth gauge and asked for constant updates from his sonar officer.
His executive officer, on the other hand, had been agitated ever since they had left the vast empty spaces of the open ocean.
“These underwater canyons are getting narrower the closer we get to the mainland,” the nervous XO said. “Perhaps we should have stayed at the entrance to the northern pass as Tate wanted us to.”
Yu sneered at him. “And simply wait for the Oregon to come to us?”
“Tate said that he would herd the ship in our direction. You would get the glory of sinking her.”
“Of course that’s what he would say. But he wants revenge just as much as I do. I could sense it in his voice. He will attack the Oregon the moment he sees her. He’s just using us to keep her from escaping.”
“The Wuzong was not meant to operate this close to shore.”
“Don’t you trust our country’s scientists?” Yu asked him.
“I do,” the XO said. “But
we have never tested the new sonar system in real-world conditions.”
“Then consider this the test. Not only will we get our revenge, we will prove the viability of our experimental sonar and acquire a valuable new weapon when Tate hands over his designs for the sonic disruptor.”
Underwater, a submarine was virtually blind, relying on inertial navigation and existing maps for plotting its course. In the open ocean, where undersea obstacles were few and well documented, this type of navigation was sufficient. Passive sonar provided positional information on moving objects like ships and other subs.
But to see subsurface obstacles closer to shore required the use of active sonar, which sent out a powerful ping that reflected off of stationary objects. The echolocation provided a detailed image of the surrounding topography, but it also revealed the sub’s position and its proximity to any ships in the vicinity.
For that reason, military subs rarely ventured into shallow waters unless they were in friendly ports and had the benefit of seeing traditional navigational markers like buoys and lighthouses, while either on the surface or below, using the periscope.
But Chinese researchers had come up with a compromise that allowed their nation’s subs to venture into foreign waters without being detected. They had installed an active sonar on the Wuzong that simulated the call of the humpback whale.
The sonar signal was emitted at the same intensity as the song produced by an actual whale. This meant that its reflected signal was less powerful than that produced by a traditional sonar, so the sub had to move much more slowly than normal, like a car creeping through pitch-black night with weak headlights.
Any ships hearing the signal would simply think a whale pod was passing by, never suspecting that the song had been recorded from a whale in Hawaii. And since humpbacks ranged over the entire world, the sonar could be used anywhere without raising suspicions.
“Any ships in the area?” Yu asked the sonarman.
“No, sir,” the executive officer replied. “The only man-made object on my scope is that buoy we just passed.”
Yu knew that the Deepwater was conducting oceanographic research in the area. He suspected it was something boring, like the analysis of water temperature or tidal movements. His sub wouldn’t trip any of those types of sensors.
“Clearance?”
“One hundred meters from the bottom,” the sonarman said. “Three hundred meters on either side.”
Yu smiled at his XO. “You see? Plenty of room.”
The XO pointed at the map. “It will get narrower soon.”
“Then we will go even more slowly. We’re going to check every channel that the Oregon could fit into.”
“Certainly not this one, though.” The executive officer was pointing to a waterway that bent around on itself and dead-ended in a cul-de-sac. It was more than two miles long, and entering it would require a tight U-turn. One mile in, then another mile back to the end after the turn.
Yu nodded firmly. “Yes, that one, too. The end widens enough for us to make the turn to exit.”
“I highly advise against us entering that fjord. We don’t want to get stuck in there.”
“I’m not going to pass it and risk missing the Oregon because we lost our courage.”
“It’s not courage, sir. It’s just that—”
Yu put up a hand to interrupt him. “Your objection is noted. Is there anything else?”
The XO backed down and shook his head.
“How long until we reach that offshoot?” Admiral Yu asked.
“Thirty minutes.”
“Fine. When we reach that point, I will guide us in personally.”
“Should I raise the antenna and inform the Portland of our status?”
Yu bored through his executive officer with an icy glare. “We will contact Zachariah Tate when we have something to report.”
“Understood, Admiral.”
The XO didn’t say another word, and Yu leaned down to continue poring over other potential hiding places for the Oregon.
60
Thank you for the heads-up, Captain Jefferson,” Juan said after hearing the audio clip that the NUMA commander had played for them over the encrypted radio channel. Everyone in the op center had gone quiet to listen to the underwater propeller.
“What do you make of it?” Jefferson asked.
“I’m not sure.”
“Is it the Portland?”
“No, I can say for sure that it isn’t.” The jets of water produced by the magnetohydrodynamic engines would never be mistaken for a ship’s propeller. “Can you play it again?”
After several repetitions, Linda Ross, whose hearing was still diminished but now functional again thanks to two weeks of recovery time, said, “Chairman, I ran the sound of the screw through our military database. The sound fidelity isn’t very good through the radio connection, but the computer says it most closely matches the audio profile of the screw on a Type 039A Chinese diesel-electric submarine.”
A murmur went through the op center. Juan certainly hadn’t expected that result.
“Although I never considered the possibility it was Chinese, I thought it might be a sub,” Jefferson said. “My chief scientist, Mary Harper, thought the screw was too far below the surface to be a ship.”
“And you said it’s heading toward us?” Juan asked Jefferson.
“Yes. Dr. Harper estimates that at the rate it is traveling, the sub will be able to see you in less than thirty minutes. That is, if her captain is crazy enough to enter the channel where you’re anchored.”
The Oregon had taken refuge in a long fjord that was the shape of a U-bend pipe used in plumbing. The Deepwater had come this way two days ago because one of the biggest penguin rookeries they were studying was located on one of the fjord’s pebble beaches. Jefferson said she briefly saw the Oregon on the operational webcam before the ship went out of frame.
On the map, it seemed that the fjord had only one way in or out. However, what used to be a peninsula that separated the two long arms of the fjord was now an island. Until recently, a glacier flowed down to the sea near the entrance to the fjord, but the ice had melted after the latest maps had been created just a few years before.
That left a gap barely wider than the Oregon. Only the most desperate circumstances would spur an effort to squeeze through it. One wrong move or rogue current and the jagged rocks would rip a mortal gash in the hull. While the sub would never come through the cut through the peninsula, it might attempt going down the length of the fjord.
“I wouldn’t discount anything at this point,” Juan said, “including Tate attacking your ship.”
“But we went through a channel that even I was reluctant to enter. There’s no way the Portland could get to us in here.”
Juan looked at the map. The Deepwater was ten miles to the south in a broad cove surrounded by mountains. Jefferson was right that the Portland couldn’t get in there, but that wouldn’t stop Tate.
“If he finds you, Captain Jefferson, Tate could come at you with small boats or a helicopter. You’ve seen too much for him to just let you go. He’ll either take you hostage or wipe out your whole crew and scuttle the Deepwater. Do you have any defensive armaments to repel boarders?”
“Does a flare gun count?” she asked sarcastically.
“Won’t hold a candle to the kind of firepower he’ll be bringing. I’m going to send you some help.”
“That would be much appreciated,” Jefferson said. “But how will they get here?”
“We’ve got a helicopter, too.” He told her the tail number so she wouldn’t be afraid to see it approach.
“Our landing pad is clear.”
“They’ll be in the air in ten minutes.” Juan knew it was risky. The helicopter might be seen by the Portland, but he felt that it was better than leaving the Deepwate
r defenseless.
“Thanks for sending them.”
“It’s the least I could do for warning us about the sub. I look forward to meeting you when this is done.”
“Same here,” Jefferson said and then signed off.
Juan turned to Linda. “Get Gomez to fire up the helicopter. Take MacD and Raven with you. Bring some extra weapons along to share. And tell Gomez to stay as low as possible. I don’t want the Portland to spot you and shoot you out of the sky.”
“Neither do I,” Linda said and hurried out of the op center.
Juan would use drones to keep a watch out for the Portland, but they’d used them all up during the battle in Rio and hadn’t had time to replenish them.
He went over to Max and asked, “What’s the latest casualty report?”
“Three injuries. Doc Huxley is treating them and said none of them requires surgery.”
“That’s good to hear. And the damage report?”
“Not much better than the last one,” Max said with a shake of his head. “Both port venturi tubes are out of commission.”
“Any way to fix them?”
“Not without a dry dock. Which means we’re down to half speed at best. Plus we have major damage to our maneuvering thrusters. I know you were thinking we might be able to head through the eye of that needle where the glacier used to be, but there’s almost no chance we’d get through unscathed. The radar is gone, and the sonar is nonfunctional because we’re using it for protection against Tate’s sonic disruptor.”
Juan mulled over all that information, then said, “Weapons?”
“Port torpedoes are empty. Starboard torpedo launchers are off-line because of the flooding. Exocet missiles are down. We’re lucky they didn’t cook off after that Harpoon hit. We might be able to get missiles to operational status with a day of repair work.”
“Which leaves us with what?”
Max sighed. “The 120mm cannon and the Gatling guns are still functional.”
“Neither of which are powerful enough to sink the Portland without a sustained barrage. Any good news?”
Marauder (The Oregon Files) Page 27