by Dirk Patton
It took a few minutes and all of us sat in silence, listening to Jessica breathing as she worked. Finally, she spoke again.
“Okay, sir. I’ve got eighteen bodies showing on thermal.”
I nodded to myself, remembering that was the number Bering had already told me to expect.
“I’ve got the Hyundai’s engine glowing red hot and four more engines that are still warm enough to show up, but much cooler. They’ve probably been turned off for a while.”
“What are they doing?” Lucas asked.
“Sixteen are gathered in a loose group near the west end of the building. The other two are at either end. I’m guessing lookouts.”
“What about EM?” I asked, meaning electromagnetic emissions.
“Quiet, sir. No phones or data devices in use. They’re EM silent.”
Great. I was hoping at least one of them was talking to someone and we might be able to gain some intelligence by tapping into the call.
“Can you see anything else?” I asked.
“No, sir. They’re still in the group and the two sentries haven’t moved.”
“Okay, I’m going to leave the line open. Speak up if anything changes.”
I turned sideways in my seat to be able to see everyone as Jessica acknowledged my order.
“Ideas?”
I was mainly speaking to Lucas, but wasn’t going to exclude Rachel or Bering.
“Eighteen men and we know they’re already armed with rifles. Right?” he asked, turning to look at Bering who nodded confirmation. “So, we’re outgunned five to one…”
“Four to one,” Rachel said, cutting him off.
“Four to one,” he said, cutting his eyes at me. “They’ve got watches posted, which means they’ll see us coming. We have no idea what the interior layout is. Basically, that means we’re fucked if we try an assault. I wouldn’t even attempt this without vastly superior numbers and some toys that we don’t have.”
Everyone was quiet, thinking about what he’d said. I agreed with him, then reminded myself of the old adage, “fight with what you have, not what you want.”
“Jessica, is there any way to get above the building without being seen? An adjacent roof that’s higher?”
“Hold on, sir.”
It took her a minute of clicking and looking to answer.
“The west end of the building is close to the property line. Right across the fence is an electrical supply warehouse. It’s eleven feet taller than the target and can be accessed from the far end which would conceal you from the target.”
“Can you see roof access?”
“Yes, sir. There’s a couple of hatches. Looks like a metal roof and the slope isn’t too bad. Definitely appears manageable.”
“What are you thinking?” Rachel asked.
“Who’s got the best arm?” I asked without answering her question.
49
Adrienne looked around the control room, ensuring the crew was ready even though she knew it wasn’t necessary. They were all trained and dedicated professionals. But she still felt better to see each of them prepared to fight.
They were currently submerged to a depth of seven hundred feet, trailing the Russian boomer by a thousand yards. It had taken a lot of time and careful maneuvering to locate the enemy submarine, but they had done it. It was being monitored on sonar and the computers had developed a firing solution for the torpedoes which had already been loaded into their electronic brains.
Even though the unique noise generated by the boat’s screws told them it was a match for Russian manufacture, it was not in the database of signatures maintained by the US Navy. But all that meant was the sub had never been encountered before. The sounds of its reactor operating, the propellers turning and the hull slicing through the ocean depths had not been recorded and cataloged.
She double checked the distance and bearing to their target, receiving confirmation that the enemy was proceeding along at a sedate pace of six knots. This also told her that the North Carolina hadn’t been detected. The communist bastard didn’t have a clue he was about to blown out of the water.
“Weps,” she said, speaking to the Weapons Officer. “Are we prepared to reload all tubes upon firing?”
She knew the answer, but asked anyway.
“Aye aye, ma’am. Torpedo room reports ready.”
Taking a breath, Adrienne felt the electricity in the room as the crew waited expectantly for her order.
“Tubes one through four, fire!”
“Belay that order!” A strong voice shouted from the entrance to the control room.
Everyone spun around in surprise, the Weapons Officer’s hand hovering in mid-air over the controls that would release the torpedoes. Commander Talbot, appearing in the peak of health, frowned as his eyes flicked across the room and came to rest on Adrienne.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing, XO?” he barked.
“Skipper?” she whispered, staring in disbelief.
“I asked you a question, Commander Cable!” he snapped, striding into the room.
Pausing in front of Adrienne, he turned to the Weapons Officer.
“Spin down those fish and close outer doors!”
The young man stared at his Captain with his mouth hanging open, then looked at the XO who was just as shocked and confused as he was.
“Weapons hold,” Adrienne said without taking her eyes off Talbot. “Captain? What…”
“What the hell is the matter with you XO? All of you?” he asked, looking around at the obviously stunned crew. “Who are you shooting at and why?”
He took a step closer and Adrienne involuntarily moved back, keeping distance between them. Pausing, Talbot frowned at her reaction.
“XO, you’d better start explaining what you’re doing and why you’re trying to fire torpedoes without my knowledge or permission,” he said in a low, stern voice.
“Skipper,” she started, then stopped and looked around at the expressions of fear on the crew’s faces.
“Spit it out!” Talbot snapped.
“Sir, you’re dead!” she finally blurted.
For a moment, it was so quiet in the control room she could hear her heart pounding in her ears. The Captain stared back in surprise.
“XO, you’ve apparently had some sort of psychotic break. I don’t know what you think you’re doing, or what you’ve told the crew, but you are relieved! COB, escort Commander Cable to her quarters and post a guard!”
The Chief of the Boat didn’t respond and Talbot whirled to stare at him.
“COB. I gave you an order!”
“I’m sorry, sir,” COB said, glancing quickly at Adrienne. “The XO is right. You were dead! I saw your body myself.”
The Captain turned slowly, looking at each crew member in turn. Seeing the same expression on each face, he strode across the deck and reached for a small safe. Adrienne spoke a warning and COB stepped in front of the skipper, stopping him from dialing in the combination and accessing the pistol that was stored inside.
“Stand aside, COB, or you will join the XO in being charged with mutiny!”
“I’m sorry, sir. I can’t do that. This isn’t a mutiny.”
“Captain,” Adrienne said softly, waiting until Talbot was facing her. “Sir, you were dead. Four hours ago, in your quarters. An aggressive respiratory infection that didn’t respond to antibiotics.”
“You’ve lost it, XO! And the rest of you are buying into her delusion. As you can see, what she’s saying is a lie!”
Adrienne stared at him, creeping gooseflesh running up and down her arms. There was no doubt. She had been with him when Doc had given up and turned off the ventilator. He hadn’t even taken a final breath without the machine’s assistance. Had just passed. Peacefully. Then how the hell was he standing here?”
“I’m sorry, skipper,” she said, then looked past him. “COB, confine the Captain to his quarters until further notice.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said
, starting to reach for Talbot’s arm, stopping before he came into physical contact with the man he’d seen die.
The Captain glared, looking around the room for support that wasn’t there. Only confused and frightened looks.
“This is mutiny, XO!” he growled, trying one last time.
“No, sir. I don’t know what the hell it is, but it certainly isn’t that.”
Talbot nodded, then started to turn to face COB. Halfway through the movement, he threw a punch that flattened the older man and lunged for the closest control station. For an instant, Adrienne and the crew were frozen by the sudden violence, then several of them leapt for the Captain with warning shouts.
Their hesitation was all the time he needed. Slamming a young sailor aside with his shoulder, Talbot slapped several controls in fast sequence before being tackled to the floor by three crewmen. The strident collision alarm began blaring, loud enough to drown out the cries of the men battling with their skipper. An instant later, a loud roar rumbled through the hull as high pressure air was pumped into the ballast tanks. The Captain had triggered the process for an emergency ascent to the surface.
Adrienne dashed forward and, ignoring the alarm, shut down the sequence of events that were already causing the boat to rise in the water. The crewmen who’d been knocked aside scrambled into his seat and silenced the alarm.
“…turning!”
Adrienne heard a shout from the sonar operator and yelled for him to repeat.
“We’ve been heard! Target is responding! He’s speeding up and turning!”
Ice water ran through Adrienne’s veins. The Russian sub! In her shock at seeing her dead Captain suddenly walk into the control room, she’d forgotten there was a very dangerous adversary out there.
“Fire all tubes!” she shouted.
“Tubes one through four have launched and are being reloaded, Captain!”
“Conn, Sonar. Target is maneuvering. He’s opened outer doors!”
“Torpedoes running normally, ma’am,” a calm, professional voice called out.
“Flank speed!” Adrienne called as she stumbled back from where the skipper was being held down. “Stay in his baffles!”
She knew the Russian was trying to simultaneously evade her attack and return fire. They were close together and her best hope was to remain tight to the stern of the enemy boat. Torpedoes have built-in safeties that prevent the warhead from arming within a preset distance from their launch platform. This is to prevent a submarine from accidentally sinking itself and she planned to take advantage of staying inside the other sub’s safe zone until the torpedoes she’d already fired had done their job.
Talbot had stopped struggling, lying on the deck and staring up at her with hate filled eyes. She ignored him, listening to a steady stream of reports from around the room.
“Conn, Sonar. Target is still maneuvering and I’m hearing sounds of a launch!”
“Sonar, Conn. A launch of what?”
Fear that the boomer was operating under standard orders to fire its nuclear payload if attacked, she raced forward to the sonar room. The sailor manning the equipment looked up in fear.
“Computer says it’s a Squall, ma’am.”
“Emergency surface!” Adrienne shouted as she ran back to the control room. “Release counter measures!”
A Russian Shkval, or Squall, torpedo is rocket powered and can reach a peak speed in the water of two hundred kilometers an hour. But with speed comes noise which means it deafens itself and cannot find or home in on a noise source while the rocket is in operation.
To be a viable weapon, it will travel at very high speed to come into proximity with its target, then switch to a conventional mode of propulsion. At this point, its seeker head will activate, identify and home in for a kill. Adrienne’s only option was to get away as quickly as possible and leave counter measures in her wake to distract it.
“Torpedoes one, three and four have acquired target and are closing at five hundred yards. Number two has malfunctioned.”
The report heartened her. At least the Russian was going to the bottom. She knew that once an American torpedo was locked onto its target, a kill was almost a hundred percent assured.
“Squall has transitioned,” the report continued. “Weapon is pinging.”
“Release more counter measures!” Adrienne ordered, her voice surprisingly calm.
Her order was acknowledged and she heard faint thumps as large, pressurized cylinders were ejected from the hull. Once clear of the sub, they would begin to release the inert gas, creating a cloud of bubbles in the water that would confuse an enemy torpedo and mask their presence.
Several seconds later there was a muted cheer at the report of the destruction of the Russian sub. Adrienne didn’t join in the celebration. She was nervously watching their depth on the fathometer unwind as the North Carolina raced for the surface.
“Conn, Sonar! Squall has acquired! Range is nine hundred yards, bearing two three zero.”
The Russian torpedo hadn’t been fooled by the counter measures and was currently pinging with active sonar as it homed in on its target. Adrienne issued new orders, stopping their race for the surface and going to flank speed on a heading away from the torpedo, but she knew they couldn’t outrun it. Even without its rocket motor, it was faster in the water than they were and would catch them before it ran out of fuel.
With nothing to do other than wait for the inevitable, she stepped to where Talbot still lay on the deck. In the absence of a struggle, the three men who’d held him down had backed off slightly, but he hadn’t tried to get off the deck.
“What happened to you?” she asked, kneeling at his side.
“This is on you, XO,” he said, staring at her with hate in his eyes.
After a long pause, she nodded her head and stood. Ordered the release of an emergency buoy that would carry a copy of the boat’s electronic log to the surface where it would be transmitted back to Pearl Harbor. The North Carolina might be lost, but she’d ensured the people of Hawaii weren’t going to die in the furnace of a nuclear fire. Smiling to herself, she listened calmly as a detached voice reported the rapidly shrinking distance to the Russian torpedo and the time to impact with her boat’s hull.
Twenty seconds later, a hammer-like detonation near the North Carolina’s stern blasted it sideways in the water. Both propeller shafts were sheared away, leaving gaping holes for seawater to pour in. The hull, compromised by the pressure wave of the exploding torpedo, failed and a raging torrent began flooding in, dragging the boat down to its final resting place in the Tasman Sea.
50
Igor, Shevchenko and Strickland huddled behind a small building at the edge of another tiny village. It was spread out in the valley beneath them, hugging the banks of the Ankara river. This part of Siberia was well removed from any of the strategic targets attacked by the Americans, either with the Thor rods or the nerve agent tipped missiles, and had come through unscathed. The power was on, a scattering of lights twinkling in the early morning darkness.
They were nearly ten miles south of the village where they had recovered Irina’s uncle. The structure they sheltered behind was part of a police outpost and held the only vehicle they’d yet encountered, an enclosed snow-cat. About twice the size of a normal snowmobile, it had the same configuration of two skis in the front and a single, wide track in the rear for propulsion.
Igor and Strickland exchanged glances as Shevchenko moved closer to inspect the machine. He began nodding almost immediately, then looked at Igor.
“It is the one, but the man driving was not police.”
“Doesn’t matter,” Igor answered in Russian. “If it’s here, then Irina must be here.”
The older man nodded and they moved out of the rough shack and took up position behind it.
“What are we doing, Ivan?” Strickland asked, looking at the main building below their position through his night vision goggles.
Igor stared at it, recog
nizing the same design that had been used all over Russia. He was certain this was a Soviet era structure that combined an office, barracks and holding cells. They had been built all over, some of them in completely inexplicable locations, but the old Soviet Union had been a very large place with lots of remote areas.
The Communist Party had operated under the doctrine that it was necessary to have an official presence in as many places as possible. They viewed it as both a show of a strong hold on the country as well as a method to legitimize their claim to foreign lands that had been gobbled up as they expanded their hold. Igor didn’t care about any of this. His only concern was to recover Irina before she was taken to Irkutsk and vanished into the mafyia’s underworld of prostitution, drugs and other criminal activities too numerous to list.
“Calling a Russian Ivan, who isn’t named Ivan, is actually rather insulting,” Shevchenko said to Strickland in perfect, Oxford accented English. “His name is Igor and you should show him respect by calling him such.”
Strickland looked around in surprise. Igor didn’t understand everything that was said, but knew the young American had just been schooled.
“Who the hell are you?” the SEAL asked.
“Admiral of the Fleet, Fyodor Shevchenko. And if you call me Ivan, I will slit your throat in your sleep.”
The two men stared at each other for a few beats, then Shevchenko smiled. Strickland had no idea if he was joking or serious, but saw something in the man’s eyes that confirmed he was much more than a run of the mill prisoner.
“We go,” Igor said, ignoring the exchange and pointing at Strickland. “I go to back. You front. Da?”
“Okay, Iva… Igor,” Strickland said.
Igor pointed at the spare AK rifle that was slung around the American’s shoulders and tilted his head at Shevchenko. The SEAL nodded and removed it, passing it across to the older man along with a stack of loaded magazines they’d taken from the dead guards. The Admiral expertly checked over the weapon and nodded.
“If we don’t come out, you must go without us,” he said in Russian.
“To where?” Shevchenko asked.