by David Poyer
“Need you on the panel, Teddy. In case we ring back speed changes. What are you doing down there?”
“Some strange shit coming down, Commander. Got the motors turning, but hydraulic pressure’s dropping and no clue why. Lose that, we lose plane control, rudder, vent valves, a lot of things. Water’s rising in the bilge. High pressure air gauge is dropping, which means we won’t be able to work the clutches. Temperature’s rising in the motor core. I’m not sure exactly where it starts to melt and catch fire, but we’re over the red line already. There’s some kind of cooling system but I don’t know how to line it up. Tracing lines, trying to get pumps and compressors on—Sumo and me, we been busy.”
“Sounds like we never got all the auxiliaries on line. Okay, the temperature problem, we can drop to dead slow now. That should help.”
Oberg stuffed the last of the meat into his maw and slid past Dan to the yellow cabinet. He slowly rotated the rheostat wheel and the hum dropped a note. He said around the mouthful, “What if we have to do another sprint? We’re gonna be sucking fire and smoke. We need another guy back here. Somebody knows what he’s doing.”
“Im?”
Oberg frowned. “No. Not him.”
“He’s the only one, Teddy. I can’t navigate or evade without Rit, Vaught’s on the helm, and Donnie and Monty are on the mission objective. You’ll have to hold it together as best you can.” He looked at the panel. “What’s our battery charge look like?”
“It’s this bank of dials. Separate dial for each section, I figure. I put that mark where the needle was when we started. Maybe half what we started out with.”
Dan felt chilly on the back of his neck despite the heat. They’d used fully half their charge in the few hours since they’d cast off. That high-speed run had sucked down a lot of power.
On the other hand, they’d shaken off the frigates. Pushing the hull along at only three or four knots would take a lot fewer electrons.
“How much farther to go?” Oberg asked him. “Till we join up?”
“Uh, that question’s open till we can poke an antenna up and talk to somebody. If they’re all the way up north, three hundred miles. But I’m hoping we can get a task element to detach and come down for us. Escort us, while we figure out how to get the package off. Then figure out what to do with the boat—”
“I say keep it.”
“Not doable, Teddy.”
“The North Koreans kept the Pueblo.”
“Yeah, well, we’re supposed to be the ones who stand for the rule of law, right? And stealing somebody else’s sub doesn’t come under that. There’s going to have to be some kind of cover story, anyway.” He took a slug off Oberg’s proffered mug and grimaced; the juice was sour.
“Yeah, well, I think—”
The brown box crackled. Carpenter’s voice, tense. “Electrical, Sonar: Sonobuoy in the water. Sonobuoy in the water, starboard side, pinging on us. Lenson back there?”
“On his way.” To Dan, Oberg said, “Sonobuoy? Where’d that come from?”
“There’s an airplane up there,” Dan muttered. “That must have been what Rit was hearing.”
He was starting forward when the bitch box crackled again. This time the message was curt. “Torpedo in the water. Torpedo in the water! Coming hard left. Gimme full power, Teddy, full power! Warp speed!”
Dan scrambled forward as bread, meat, and mug hit the deckplates. The high-pitched shrill of the torpedo’s screws was bad enough. It was made mind-blanking terrifying by the knowledge it was likely to be the last sound he heard before the detonation of its warhead, followed by an instantaneous compression of the air column that would kill them all before they had a chance to drown.
But still he ran. He was swinging through the hatch when a tremendous explosion lifted the sub bodily and pitched him into the crew’s shower. He lay full length, waiting to die. A second passed. Then another, as the hull flexed, the plates under him creaking as the shock died away to a rumble.
Then he was up and running again, astonished to still be clawing at the next hatchway, launching himself into the control room. He caromed off the radar mast housing as the lights flickered back up, even dimmer now. Vaught, bent double, moaned, arms locked over his head. Dan tried twice to speak before anything came out. “Vaught. Carpenter! What happened?”
“Air-dropped torpedo,” the sonarman yelled. “Right after the sonobuoy started pinging. Somebody’s up there. Tracking us.”
He shoved the groaning pilot aside, gaze flicking from instrument to instrument. The deckplates heeled. Loose items started skating. The turn count was going up, the knotmeter at 12 and climbing. He felt their battery charge being drained as if his own blood was leaking away, but he didn’t dare slow. No telling when the plane up there—probably one of the P-3s the U.S. had sold the Shah years before—might drop another one. Searching for them to Straitward after they’d evaded the frigates, it had gotten a reading off the magnetic effect of their hull. Then placed a sonobuoy, pinged for a hard localization, and immediately dropped a weapon. Carpenter had turned away and gone to full power, the standard and instantaneous response to a homing torp. The rudder was still over, and they were in a tight fast turn to port, coming through 170.
Carpenter called, “I heard him come in and just realized what I was hearing. Then the torp hit the water and ‘engine start.’ Maybe ten seconds worth of screw effects. Sounded like a daiquiri blender on high speed. Then it exploded.”
“It’s too shallow here to air drop on us. It went right into the bottom.” Dan checked the autopilot setting, disengaged it with the pedal, put both planes ten degrees down, looked at the gyro again. Passing 090. “Can you still hear it? Where is he? Where’s he coming in from?”
“Can’t give you a bearing. Comes and goes.”
Wenck and Henrickson crowded in, pale and shaking. Dan ignored them. He racked the rudder control over and shook the man before him. “Vaught! Get hold of yourself, guy. We can’t do without you.”
The SDV pilot lifted his head and Dan gave him another shove and he shakily took the controls again. “Come to 180, it’s shallower over there,” Dan told him. “Make your depth six-five.”
“Was that a t-torpedo?”
“Correct, Donnie. There’s a plane up there,” Dan snapped.
“Warship screws,” Carpenter called. “Bearing one-zero-zero, faint. The guy with the nicked blade, I think.”
Dan slammed his fist into his thigh. The chart showed deeper water to the northwest, in the direction of the task force. But in deeper water an air-dropped torp could recover, stabilize, circle, and acquire. He could outwait a plane, staying shallow till it had to leave. The Iranians didn’t have enough aircraft to relieve on station; this might be the only operational four-engine they had. But that aircraft was vectoring the surface units in on him. Maybe just the one for now, but there’d be others. Even if some had headed east, into the Gulf of Oman, it wouldn’t take long to call them back.
He pounded his thigh, cursing himself. For thinking they’d escaped. For putting his guys at so much risk. If he’d surrendered back at Bandar-e Abbas, they’d be alive. Captives, hostages, pawns in a major international incident, maybe even tortured, but alive.
“Splash,” Carpenter called. Vaught straightened. They sat tensely in the shaking dimness till he called again, “Sonobuoy. Dead ahead. Active ping.” They could hear that, too, a high-pitched chirp like the ringtone of a cheap phone.
He crossed the aisle into the sonar shack. “Help me out, Rit. Can he hit us? I’m headed for shallower water. On the south side of the Gulf, west of the Fateh field.”
The sonarman’s frown was pinched by his headphones. “I don’t think so. Even if he’s got another fish, it’ll just plow into the bottom again.”
Dan dragged his hands down his cheeks, fighting a premonition of inevitable death and a queer nauseating fuzziness. The whole side of his face hurt; it was swelling from the splinters he’d picked up during the firefight.
Carpenter blinked, gaze floating in space. He whispered, “Passing under the sound source . . . passing astern . . . Sierra One slightly louder, bearing drawing right.”
“Speed?”
“Twenty knots by turn count.”
Dan searched for umber Bakelite, pressed the key. “Electrical, Control. Slow to five.”
“Slow to five,” Oberg’s disembodied voice whispered back from far away.
“I turned it way down,” Carpenter muttered, adjusting a dial, flicking switches in quick succession, listening again. “Still getting those engine sounds. But no more sonobuoys.”
“Maybe his last one?”
“Maybe. One thing you might try, Commander.”
“Gimme, Rit.”
“We’re far enough away from the Strait we might have a layer here. It’d be worth checking.”
“How?”
The sonarman blinked, as if that had been a stupid question even from an officer. “Run her as close to the surface as you can, then down again. Watch the thermometer. Exterior temperature. Plot it against depth. It’ll jump out at you.”
“I can do that,” Henrickson said from the doorway.
“Great, do that, Monty. Donnie, I want you back on the Shkval.”
“If we’re gonna die I—”
“We’re not going to die,” Dan snapped. “And if we are, I want you at work when we do. Get out of here!”
As Henrickson and Vaught conferred Dan paced back and forth, then grabbed the chart and went into the missile-control space forward of Control. He could hear everything in there, including the sonobuoy pinging as it faded astern, but it gave the illusion of being alone. Letting him squeegee his face with a handful of binocular-cleaning paper that came away wringing wet. His headache was blinding. The scrubbers obviously weren’t working, or not well enough.
A knock. He glanced up to see Im. “Yeah.”
“We have to hide. Lose frigate.”
“I agree. But how? We’re looking for a layer.”
“Maybe no layer. Find hole in bottom.”
Dan stopped mopping and focused on the guy. A bona fide littoral submariner. They’d evaded the best in the South Korean navy, right up almost to their goal. “Tell me more.”
The Korean made a dip with his hands. “Find deeper spot. Sides mask you from sonar.”
Dan nodded; not a tactic you saw in deepwater ASW, but it made sense in an environment like this. He twisted round the partition. “Rit, you figured out how to go active on that set?”
“No sweat, if Monty can tell me what some more of these labels mean. That’s the active panel up on the bulkhead.”
“Is there a forward-look mode? We need to get a sense of the bottom.”
“If I ping, that frigate’ll hear us.”
“He’s still a ways off; ping away. Find us a hole to hide in. I’ll send Monty to help.”
The sonarman looked doubtful, but nodded.
When Monty had the graph drawn, he sat back and looked it over. Temperature on the abscissa, depth on the ordinate. A jog in the line at fifty-two meters evidenced a thermocline, but the slightness of the bend wasn’t encouraging.
He’d studied shallow water propagation, but studying it and trying to use it for cover were different animals. Everyone at TAG talked about how hard it would be to find subs in shallow water. But actually aboard a sub in shallow water, he felt like a rat on a billiard table under spotlights.
He scratched his crotch—the jungle rot had gone away, but the itch hadn’t—and wished he wasn’t so scared. Ever since they’d climbed into the SDV he’d been terrified, though he thought he’d done a decent job hiding it. Still, this was the mission. Oberg acted like only SEALs were really motivated, but Monty didn’t think TAG had to take a backseat.
In the sonar compartment Carpenter was watching a screen and making a plot on a tablet. Monty showed him the graph. He glanced it and grunted. “Not much of one.”
“Enough to hide?”
“Depends how good the stack operators are topside. And how lucky we get . . . tell the commander.”
Lenson was slumped on the bench behind Vaught, eyes closed, sweat running down his face. They both looked dead. “Dan,” Monty said.
“Yeah.” He opened his eyes, and Monty showed him the paper. He blinked and cleared his throat. “Rit? What’s our bottom depth?”
“Here? Sixty-seven meters.”
A shaking hand smoothed the chart. Lenson checked his watch, touched his eye, which lurked deep in inflamed, puffy skin, and slowly made a pencil notation. Monty saw they were headed west, past an island with an oil loading terminal and pipelines leading inland. Beyond it the Gulf opened out, but the depth numbers still weren’t encouraging: 75, 88, 68. The deepest parts lay closest to the Iranian coast.
“Come to sixty,” Lenson muttered. The planesman didn’t react for a second, but then seemed to hear. He shook himself, reached out, pushed the plane controls forward. Then racked them again, forward and back, like someone who wasn’t used to a manual transmission trying to make it shift.
Dan tried to focus past the headache, but it was difficult even to see. Heading west, five knots . . . “What’s wrong, Vaught?”
“She won’t hold depth anymore. Like the planes are locked up, don’t want to move.”
Dan remembered what Oberg had said about the hydraulics. He felt as if he was in a hydraulic ram himself, being squeezed smaller and smaller, with fewer and fewer options. “Where’s that frigate, Rit?”
“Still closing.”
“Control, Electrical.”
“Control, go.”
“Reading zero on aux hydraulic pressure.”
“Copy. We’ve lost the planes up here.” Dan pressed the switch again. “You’ve got to get it back, Teddy. We’re not going anywhere without the planes, without the rudder.”
“We need time. And somebody back here to translate these schematics for us.”
Dan lurched up. Headed for the sonar room, but almost fell before he got there. He clung to the periscope stand. His vision swam. He panted. Got a little strength back, and went on.
Carpenter was hunched over the screen. A curious pattern of numbers lay traced across three sheets of his tablet, which he’d torn out and taped together. “We’ve got to find someplace to put her down, Rit.”
“Might have found a hidey hole.” The sonarman tapped the paper. “Down to sixty-plus-some meters. Two hundred yards to either side, it’s thirty meters. Looks soft, though. A couple of sharp returns that might be rock, but mostly mud and sand.”
“That’s not on the chart.”
“But it’s there. Half a mile back. Bearing zero nine five. Would have called you, but I kept hoping for something deeper.”
Dan caught the web of his thumb in his teeth and chewed it. The headache made it nearly impossible to see. He kept wanting to sit down and drift off. Some demon in his brain kept whispering that it didn’t matter what they did. He panted, trying to force oxygen into his sluggish blood.
“Losing depth control,” Vaught called. “Rising.”
“Right rudder,” Dan called.
“Losing rudder control.”
He hit the bitch box. “Electrical, Control. Teddy: we need hydraulic pressure.”
Oberg sounded drugged. “No shit, Commander. But I got to figure what’s wrong before I can fix it.”
He wanted to give up, sit down, drift off into the peace. He bit painfully at his own flesh. “Then we’ll maneuver with the engines. Left motor ahead standard. Right motor stop.”
“Port ahead standard, starboard stop, aye.”
“Still going up. Passing forty meters.”
“Im! Get us heavy. Get that across to him, Monty. Help him out on the ballast control.”
He dragged his attention back to the gyrocompass. It was rotating only gradually, ticking off degrees like a roulette wheel coming to rest, but it was rotating. He did the math in a brain that seemed to be only able to light up on
e room at a time. The others were going dark one after the other. Assume a turning circle of a hundred yards. Half a mile back to the depression. He dragged sweat out of his eyes, then jabbed the inflamed tissue with a fingernail. He nearly screamed, but the world sharpened. “Steady . . . steady on . . . uh, one-zero-zero.”
“I’ll try, but—”
A thud, then another. Im, flooding the forward and middle groups to counteract their surfaceward drift. The air racketing away down the lines sounded weaker. They were using the last of it. Would they be able to blow the tanks, when the time came to surface? Another faraway clunk as the valves closed. Dan watched the depth gauge. It hovered, then slowly reversed. He blinked back blackness, checking the pencil mark on his chart where Carpenter’s valley must be.
“Passing zero nine zero. Rudder doesn’t respond.”
“Electrical, Control: both ahead one-third.”
“Ahead one-third.” Sumo, with Oberg muttering in the background.
“Descent rate, one meter per minute,” Im announced, too loud. Henrickson made a shushing motion.
“Electrical, Control: starboard ahead standard, port engine stop.” Dan checked his watch, let twenty seconds tick past. “All stop.” The Hawaiian repeated the order. “Rit, get a ping. See that depression yet?”
“Dead ahead. Two hundred yards.”
“Secure active sonar. Flood forward.”
Hiss. Thud. A chuckle of water far away. The harsh rapid breathing of frightened men.
A slithering, like a great python winding through a sandy forest. A lurch. A bump. Then scraping, lurching. Stones rattling past. The nose tilting down. His eye was epoxied to the depth gauge. Forty-eight meters. Fifty. They kept sliding, the rattling intensifying. Fifty-two. Fifty-four. Fifty-eight.
The rattling, hissing, and lurching ebbed. Dan stared at the gauge, willing it to keep going down. The higher the walls of this undersea valley rose above them, the less detectable they’d be.