by David Poyer
“Sierra One, frigate, two screws, bears one eight five. Looks like she’s on diesels.”
“Where’s the other one?” Lenson demanded.
“Don’t have him yet.” He opened his eyes and cranked the dial and searched ahead, then to port. Ought to have a team plotting what he was calling out. Computing fire control solutions. But they didn’t have enough guys and even if they did, what was the point? He went back to the screen on Sierra One and picked out one of the tonals and scanned for that. No good. Tried again and got something to port. Call it as Sierra Two? He tried to lock on but it wavered and roved, the circuits couldn’t pull it out of the mush.
“Got the other guy yet?”
Sweat ran down his neck under the earphones. He felt lightheaded. “Might have something to port. Around three four zero, three four two. I could ping ’em—”
“No pings,” Lenson snapped.
Rit tried again to lock on the second contact but again the computer slipped, skidded, could not get its fingers around it. Passive sonar gave bearings, but not range. If he could ping, he could range them. Lenson was right, though, going active was a loser idea. Their only chance of getting out of here was to hide.
Where, was another question. It was just too fucking shallow. Barely enough water to get a full-sized boat all the way under. Only good thing about it, it wasn’t deep enough, at least yet, for the guys who were after them to fire a homing torpedo. And all the reverberation and bottom return would make it harder for them to hold a track, or regain it, if they did shake them off somehow. From the courses he was running, Lenson was trying to get them out to the Strait. But it wasn’t a hell of a lot deeper out there. All the deep water was to port, out where San Fran was waiting.
He suddenly yearned for the familiar spaces and smells of a U.S. sub. Hot dogs in the red-lit grill, turning on the polished rollers till you picked them out and tucked them into snug, soft, freshly baked buns . . . Rocky Road at midnight, more than you ought to eat . . . popcorn and steaks.
The unfamiliar computer in front of him, still trying for the second target, flashed a red light. He cranked the dial back, but it was gone. “Jesus fuck,” he whispered, blinking salty fluid out of his eyes. “You little bastard.” He hit the button to go back to Sierra One.
The screen leaped into bars of light. The pinging dented his eardrums. He wheeled on the rotating chair, pitching his voice to carry only to where the others waited out in the tense silence of the control room.
“Sierra One. Screws to full speed. Coming right up our ass!”
This time after the pings and the washing machine three detonations spaced out three seconds apart. Blam . . . blam . . . blam. They sounded different than the first, with less reverberation, less intensity, close but somehow flatter, more like a taut drumhead being whacked than an explosive going off. The middle one was the loudest. Dan didn’t need Carpenter to tell him what that meant: K-79 was tacked down like a beetle on a display board. They knew exactly where he was and how deep. “Shit,” he murmured, leaning on the ’scope stand and trying not to return the worried looks he was getting from Vaught and Im. Sweat dripped off his chin. Even the Korean, usually stone-faced, looked distressed. “Rit.”
“Yeah.”
“Bearing to the nearest screws that aren’t frigates.”
He waited, hanging from a pipe in the overhead. Something went tick tick tick very rapidly aft. He tensed, but it stopped.
“Can’t give you individual screws. Heavy ship traffic up ahead. Low freq. Big screws. Tankers?”
“Probably. Bearing?”
“Wide bearing spread. Basically smeared all across the horizon.”
Dan tried to think despite the dread. The charges were an order to surface. Standard procedure for an unidentified sub caught in someone’s territorial sea. Their pursuers must be uncertain exactly who they were. At no point, so far as he knew, had anyone ashore gotten a clear look at them and survived. They might think renegade Iranians were conning the stolen boat. Or possibly, that the instructors—the men Oberg and Kaulukukui had killed during the takeover—might have been suddenly ordered by Moscow to decamp for some unexpected reason.
Trying to figure out what the commanding officers up above were thinking, though, might be a waste of processing time. Whatever they guessed or didn’t, no government could let one of its warships, much less one armed with a potent new weapon, be snatched away with impunity. Not to mention all the dead and wounded troops they’d left behind. At some point, presumably one rapidly bearing down on them, warnings and orders would give way to attack.
He checked the chart again. Should be past the fifty-meter line now. “Depth, fifty,” he muttered. Hoping they didn’t hit any lumps or bumps, any wrecks or unevennesses in the bottom. “Speed: bare steerageway.”
The speed order went aft in a quiet voice over the brown plastic intercom. “Depth: Fifty,” Vaught muttered, toes nudging a red pedal before he adjusted the plane levers. They waited, looking at nothing in particular. Was that something whispering along the hull? Dan tensed, but it didn’t recur.
Four miles. So near, yet so far. Half an hour’s run at eight knots. Two hours, at the two knots they were slowing to now. But if he had to dogleg and circle, it could take much longer. He was hugging the bottom. If there was a layer, he had to be under it.
“Rit. Where now?”
“Sierra Two, ahead of us, drawing left. Sierra One to starboard, steady bearing.”
Drawing the diagram in his mind, he realized they were cloverleafing. An attack pattern that let two ships double-team a submerged adversary.
Both frigates were passing overhead, in turn, in opposite directions. As soon as one was clear, he put his rudder over and described a loop out and away before closing again to repeat the maneuver, but from the next point of the compass.
Passing information constantly, the “on” ship held contact with active sonar as it approached, dropping its ordnance as it went over. The “off” unit maintained contact at arm’s length with passive sonar, in case the attacker lost the target in its own screw-wash, the reverberation of the explosions, or the despairing twists and turns of the steadily more desperate submarine. Until the inevitable end.
He saw it clearly, including the slow pinwheel of the pattern to port. Had applied it in dozens of exercises, and once or twice, in earnest. How often, leaning over a plot table, he’d tried to put himself in the sub commander’s place! The irony was too bitter to be funny. He sucked the heated too-thin air, forcing his thoughts through the steel wool and jagged glass stuffing his skull.
The hell of it was, there was no way to escape a cloverleaf properly executed. Not unless you could escalator up and down, and the chart still gave him only fifty-five to sixty meters, though it deepened to the southward.
His sole chance lay in the counterclockwise rotation. If his attackers got out of synch, turned a trifle too early or too late or with too large a rudder angle, a pie-wedge of shadow could flick open in the pinwheel. In that moment, he’d seen a very savvy sub commander suddenly vanish. Usually he was picked up minutes later, but for that fragment of wheeling time he was impalpable, intangible, returned to the ghostliness of a subatomic particle that might or might not exist depending on whether an observer was present; while Dan had found himself chasing what he’d thought had been the sub, but which slowly faded, a mirage, a phantom.
Could he do it? He bent again over the chart, wondering about tide. Could a counterflowing tide be enough to slow a frigate on the northward petal of this deadly flower? But he didn’t know what the tide was. Or, wait, he did—they’d planned the attack for high tide, to allow room for the delivery vehicle to lie close alongside the Juliet.
Which meant the tide would be flowing out now, out through the strait.
“Sierra Two, incoming again. Pinging like a sonofabitch—switching to short range—”
“Bearing on the other one, Carpenter, Sierra One—”
“Sierra One bears on
e two five relative, starboard quarter—”
He clung to the periscope stand, mouth moistureless as baked cotton. Vaught was writhing his neck in a strange way. Im was nodding to himself, lips moving in some rapid speech that surely couldn’t be a prayer. Dan’s heart took an age between beats. The rushing grew, and mixed with it the shik-shik-shik of the blades slicing through the water, a sharp cracking as one, damaged or nicked, cavitated, trailing vapor bubbles that collapsed on themselves. The sonar screamed in their ears, exciting sympathetic vibratos in the structure around them, till it seemed the hull itself was crying and trembling under the lash that hit it once a second.
Thud. Thud. Crack. Crack. Thud. Thud. Six detonations, evenly spaced, and again, the middle two directly above. Six: the universal signal for danger at sea, for being in extremis, for the last warning. The echo of the last was still thrilling away in fainter and fainter tremolos when Dan licked dry lips and said in a voice that sounded strange even to himself: “All back emergency.”
“All back emergency—”
“Right hard rudder—”
Hoarse murmurs answered. The hull around them lurched as the big screws aft went suddenly to full astern, clawing power into the water, reversed engines and suddenly tilted rudder spinning hundreds of tons of water into a whirl pooling density that could for a few seconds suggest to probing sound the presence of a tangible body.
Vaught choked out, as if his mouth was full of marbles, “Right hard rudder.”
Dan said over him, “All engines, ahead flank. Ahead emergency flank! Come right to one eight five, down planes, steady at sixty meters!”
An agonized groan came from aft as the spinning shafts twisted under the torsion of suddenly reversed rotation. Electric motors responded more swiftly than a surface ship’s turbines, and Dan grabbed a handhold as the rush of water grew outside, then became a roar, varied by clatters and thumps. The periscope began to vibrate alarmingly. Dan glanced at it, but said nothing. The torrent-noise got louder. And louder.
“Steady on one eight five. Steady on sixty meters.”
“Make depth sixty-two meters.”
“Control, Electrical; we’re really sucking down the power back here, I can see these needles dropping—”
Dan hit the bitch box button, it didn’t matter now how much noise he made, and yelled, “Just keep it balls to the wall, Oberg. This is our chance to shake them.”
The SEAL gave him a “roger, out” as an ominous scraping came from beneath their feet. It rose, but Dan snapped to Vaught, “Don’t touch those planes. Maintain your depth.”
“Short range pinging. Well astern.”
The Alvands were pinging on the “knuckle,” the ghost he’d left swirling in the disturbed water. But how long would it fool them? Sweat slid down his cheeks as he fixed his eyes on his watch. Twenty seconds at flank. Thirty. He fanned his face with his other hand. Vaught coughed hoarsely. At twenty knots, every thirty seconds was another three hundred and thirty yards, every minute, six hundred and sixty. The sweep hand jumped ahead. Again. Nobody spoke.
A minute.
Two. Im shook his head like a dog and a fine spray came off his black hair and hung in the light like a halo.
Three minutes. They’d gained a mile. It had to be deeper now, the bumping had eased. “Sixty-five meters,” Dan said in an almost normal voice. Three more miles and they’d be in the channel, in international waters. He felt giddy, as if he’d just stepped off a carrousel.
A tremendous detonation piledrivered the steel around them. The hull flexed, the lights flickered, dust and bits of cork flew off the bulkheads and frolicked in hazy air. WHAM. WHAM. WHAM. Three great deafening clangs like anvils dropping on them from a mile up. Vaught’s shoulders quivered. Carpenter cursed in a gabbled shriek from the sonar stack. Im staggered into the ballast control panel and recoiled, clutching his face. Alarms began beeping.
“What the fuck was that?” Henrickson yelled from forward and below.
“Limbos,” Dan said through numb lips to them all. “Antisubmarine mortars. Two hundred pounds of explosive. Depth fuzed. Fired in salvos of three. Cut those alarms off!”
Again, closer, louder, three more savage battering blows, shattering bulbs inside their thick glass safety jars, cracking gauges, shaking down handsized flakes of cork and old paint. Carpenter gripped the jamb of the door from the sonar station, face slack. “They’re not pinging. They’re firing on passive bearings. Right down our sound spoke. It’s too shallow to go this fast. We’re cavitating! Putting out too much noise—”
“Slow down,” Im said, bloody hands over his face but his eyes wide above them. “Slow down!”
Vaught glared up, shoulders hunched as if against a cave-in, pupils blank. The rocketing sub brushed something, some bulge or bank on the bottom. It lurched and rocked. Dan felt a bloodcurdling sense of something huge and solid looming just ahead. He clung to his handhold, physically biting back the commands to slow, to rise, that his cowardly self tried again and again to bark out. Bolting through the deep, through the dark, they waited for the next barrage to arc out of the walled-off sky.
24
But the third salvo hit farther away, insofar as he could judge; only rattling already broken glass, knocking free a few more paint chips, the shocks rattling away through the frames and stringers of the missile housings. Dan kept his eyes straight ahead, not even wanting to look at the seething air. The hull jarred again, then smoothed, though the shears were still vibrating as if some giant dentist were trying to wrench them out by the roots. He wondered how fast they were going, how many minutes longer they could keep it up.
“Depth,” he grated at last, trying to keep his pitch going too high.
“Depth . . . depth . . . sixty feet. I mean, meters.”
“Steady on, Vaught. They missed us.”
The pilot didn’t answer, flexing his arms and shaking his shoulders. Dan hoped he was getting a grip. He patted Im’s back and pointed a finger at Carpenter. The submariner’s cheeks gleamed with thick sweat; he cradled his arm. Dan checked his watch again and was startled. Nine minutes at flank speed. They had to be getting close to the channel. “Rit. You okay?”
“Arm hurts like shit . . . I might of broke it. Hit it on the console edge when I went over.”
“We’ll look at it when we’re out of this, but right now I need you back on that stack. Find me a single slow-speed screw out around two-seven-zero to zero-zero-zero.”
The sonarman nodded and vanished. A broken arm would hurt like hell, but Carpenter hadn’t said another word. Dan paced, wondering if he should come right. Or go deeper. Or put the planes on full rise, back to ’scope depth, and check his six.
He smiled grimly. Why bother? He knew what he’d see. The same two Nemeses barreling after him. With the noise K-79 was making, the scream of collapsing bubbles howling off her madly spinning screw, there was no way he could lose them.
He had to find a place to hide.
Im’s nose was bleeding but he ignored it, only snuffling up the blood as it threatened to choke him. He clung to the handhold above the ballast panel, blinking through a headache that gradually became blinding. He peered through the smoky, dusty air, wincing as hot metal sizzled deep in his head. And suddenly he understood what was wrong.
The commander was staring off into space. He knew that whitened set of the lips. Had seen it on his own commanding officer, when they’d been under attack. Hearing their comrades go down around them, the crackling death-throes of heroes making the ultimate sacrifice. All to get them through. But they weren’t going to get through this time if they couldn’t breathe, and just breathing grew harder with each passing minute.
Sleepiness, fatigue, clouded judgment, headache: it seemed to be happening more rapidly than it should, given how few they were, but judging by his symptoms, carbon dioxide was building up in their air. Maybe Lenson could get them out, maybe he couldn’t, but if it got much worse they’d just black out. He rubbed snot and bloo
d from under his nose and lurched forward to grab Lenson’s sleeve. The commander flinched and stared down. “I light oxygen?”
Lenson blinked, then nodded. Im half-read his lips. “Good idea. Know where they are?”
He pointed to a knee-high metal box pierced with louvers. “Every compartment.”
“Great.” Lenson blinked again and dragged a palm down his face. “But not in the compartments we don’t have guys in. Okay? Dog off the after torpedo, the engine room, unless Oberg needs to get back there. How long do those candles last?”
He thought he had that. Maybe his hearing was coming back? “Burn for six hours. Enough oxygen for a day. Maybe more.”
“Is there tanked oxygen? They’ve got to have some tanked, too.”
“No. Checked tanks.” He gestured, hands out, forgetting the English word. “Nothing.”
“Empty?”
“Empty. Yae. After candle, only breathing set.”
Lenson looked disturbed but said nothing more, just snapped back to his trance. Im headed for the box and lifted the lid.
Inside nestled a matched pair of two-foot-square yellow metal canisters. Exactly like the ones on his old boat. He stripped off the seals and pulled the igniter tab. The fireworks smell of hot perchlorate stung his nose but he bent in to whiff the thin gray smoke, and felt the fatigue lift and the headache lessen.
He checked the depth and looked at Vaught, then went aft. He lit one of the two candles outside the galley, and started to unseal the second.
Then hesitated. The commander had said, only the compartments the team was in. He looked forward, then aft. Finally he reached down and pulled out the cartridge he’d just yanked the tab on, intending to carry it aft and swap it out with one of the others.
Instead the whole bottom of the cartridge fell out. Burning perchlorate and flakes of its rusty steel casing, neglected and corroded through, followed it onto the deckplates. A cloud of white powder rolled out. He beat at the hot chemical, coughing in the thick white smoke that mushroomed suddenly along the overhead as the hot chemical hit a greasy spot on the deckplates. He glanced around for a fire extinguisher. He dashed into the galley, found a flat tin, and got it under the heap of chemical smoldering on the deck. It smoked and hissed as he tipped it into a stainless sink, but it was safe now, under control. He blew out and backed away, dusting his hands.