“We’d live a much better life, if we had it all,” said Loshak in a voice inviting intrigue.
“We’d have to have someplace to hide,” said Drukarev.
“I hear that in the Seychelles a man could pay the government ten million American dollars, and they would let him become a citizen and shield him from extradition,” replied Loshak.
“Ten million is a lot of money,” replied Drukarev. It was also coincidentally the amount Konaka had offered them just for periodic position reports after the gold was recovered. The gold in the torpedo room dwarfed Konaka’s offer. They knew what Konaka had in mind: he was going to hijack the sub and steal the gold. With the treasure right in front of them, Konaka was far from their minds.
“Think of how much would be left. I think we can live on the remaining hundreds of millions of dollars,” answered Loshak.
They both thought of the sun drenched tropical islands of the Seychelles off the coast of southern Africa. Drukarev smiled.
“We must first find what Comrade Bakhtin is looking for. We don’t want the Sluzhba to come after us. They won’t worry about nice legal technicalities like extradition. I wish we knew what Bakhtin was looking for,” said Loshak referring to the mysterious metal cylinder Bakhtin had told them about.
“Secrets, tovarisch. It is always secrets,” replied Drukarev.
“What can possibly be secret on a Japanese freighter that went down over sixty years ago?” asked Loshak.
“You and I will never know,” replied Drukarev as he remembered Georgi Bakhtin’s explicit orders. Deliver the sealed canister to Bakhtin personally. He had emphasized the word sealed. Drukarev hauled himself to his feet. “All right, Yevgeny Vladimirovich, it’s back to work for us.”
Loshak got up wearily and faced the last section of crates that they had to examine. They were also counting the gold bars for the crew to ensure they didn’t get shortchanged later on. The last section was in a particularly awkward place to access. The crates were on a torpedo shelf that was recessed into the aft bulkhead of the torpedo room, allowing access from one side only. Loshak climbed on the shelf and yanked on a crate to get it into position so that both of them could grasp it.
Loshak, after some labor, got the crate exposed enough to allow Drukarev to grab the other side. Loshak got down from the shelf and grabbed one end of the crate while Drukarev grabbed the other. They both lifted the crate and slid it toward the edge of the shelf, but the bottom of the box split and hung down enough to catch the edge of the shelf. They tried to lift it over the obstruction but succeeded only in ripping the bottom of the box completely off. Gold bars spilled out on the shelf, onto the deck below, striking their legs and feet.
They both uttered an involuntary stream of obscenities for a moment while hopping around holding their feet, then realized the need for quiet and suppressed any further noise.
ABOARD THE HAN 405
Sonarman Yi frowned and pressed his earphones closer to his ears. The sound was muffled and indistinct. Sounds of a shifting wreck? There were enough of them in the Taiwan Strait. Yi mentally removed the possibility of it being sea life - he had never heard anything like it. Some dull thudding, then sounds like human voices. Whatever it was, he had to tell his superiors. He turned to the sonar supervisor.
“I just heard something strange,” he said.
“Play it back on tape,” ordered the supervisor. Yi set it up and played the sounds over a loudspeaker. The supervisor screwed up his face in concentration, then called for the captain over the intercom.
Captain Tse Zhi-Li strode into the sonar room and went up to Yi. Without a word he held out his hand, and Yi gave him the headphones. Tse put the phones on his head and ordered the sonar supervisor to play the sounds back.
“Bearing,” asked Tse. The sonar supervisor glanced at the readout that gave the direction in which the hydrophones were pointed.
“Three, five, one, relative, Captain,” said the supervisor.
Tse nodded, then listened to the recording twice with no emotion on his face. He gave the phones back to Yi, turned on his heel, and left the sonar room without a word. Tse walked back to the conn with his thoughts focused on the sounds he had just heard. Something was out there, he thought. Some enemy was out there. His mission was to proceed up and down the strait to determine the location of the diesel fumes they had detected periodically from aircraft they operated over the strait. The fumes appeared almost regularly, approximately every forty-eight hours, and the question on everyone’s mind was whether a submarine had taken up residence in the strait.
And what would be their mission? Intelligence gathering was uppermost on the minds of his superiors. Special operations could not be ruled out either. The traitors on Taiwan had been known to try that sort of thing in the past. Specially trained commando teams would be sent across the strait with instructions to photograph any military installations they could find.
Back in the days when Captain Tse was a child and Chiang Kai-shek ruled Taiwan, the Chinese on Taiwan were preparing to invade the mainland. The waters of the strait were filled with men and their weapons, each side patrolling their coasts ready to do battle, ready to kill and be killed. The commando teams back then carried more than cameras. They were ordered to sabotage gun emplacements, ammo dumps, and so forth to prepare for the inevitable invasion.
Only the invasion was never to be. The United States refused to back an invasion of the mainland by the Chinese under Chiang Kai-shek, and the Chinese on Taiwan knew they could never win without the Americans.
All long ago, thought Tse. The world has changed many times over since then, but one thing that has not changed was that the People’s Republic of China had enemies, one of which was only a bare one hundred and twenty kilometers across the Taiwan Strait. He and all the others in the PRC’s armed forces had to be ready at all times to throw back the invaders from Taiwan.
Captain Tse walked up to the chart on which was plotted his boat’s position. He had one of his junior officers draw a line from their current position at a relative bearing of three, five, one to see where the noise might be coming from. His vessel was southeast of Niushan Dao, a small island a few kilometers from the coast of China. He had ordered a speed of dead slow, the blades of his screw turning at a bare minimum. This was when the ship was at its quietest, yet still underway. The noise had been undefined, with no distinguishing beat note that would be the sound of screw blades working their way through the sea.
Tse glanced at the chart once again. The noise had come from the same direction as an old wreck, which was noted on the chart with a small silhouette of a sinking ship. Was the noise some piece of the wreckage shifting and falling? Or was there a submarine using the wreck for cover as it went about its business of spying on China?
Tse ordered silence in his ship and waited for the next sounds in the direction of the sunken ship.
KURCHATOV
Joe Malik gently opened the hatch to the forward torpedo room. He looked in, saw Loshak and Drukarev, and scowled with displeasure. He stepped over the cowling and softly shut the hatch. He walked up to Loshak and looked him up and down. The Russian was six inches taller than Malik, but the size of an opponent never fazed Malik.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Malik asked Loshak belligerently. Loshak, who was fluent in English, pretended to barely understand Malik, and made a show at guessing the meaning of Malik’s outburst.
“Ve count …” said Loshak his voice trailing off as he feigned the limit of his English. He pointed to the fingers on his hand as if he were counting.
“Counting your loot stolen from us, are ya,” said Malik.
Loshak scratched his head and looked at Drukarev who, following his partner’s lead, just shrugged. Four crewmembers arrived and picked up two of the cases of gold to be stored in a different part of the submarine. They had orders from Captain Golubev to distribute the gold evenly throughout the boat to improve the sub’s trim when they got under
way. They had taken some gold out of the forward torpedo room already and were back for more. The crewmen, two to a gold case, turned to go aft.
“Stick around, boys,” said Malik sourly. “There’s some divers outside with some more of my gold that you can steal.” He switched to passable Russian and looked at Loshak and Drukarev. “If you’re going to steal most of it from us, then you can haul it over there and put it on a shelf.”
Malik heard the muffled thump of the signal from the divers outside. He put his hand on the switch that would send seawater into the now empty torpedo tube.
“You boys ready for some action?” Malik asked sourly to the exhausted looking Russians. They just stared at him, pretending not to understand.
Joe Malik hit the switch that started the pumps to flood the torpedo tube with water as he had done dozens of times before.
HAN 405
Sonarman Yi bolted upright in his chair. He pressed the headphones to his ears to make sure of the sounds he was hearing. “I have sounds of a torpedo tube being flooded! Bearing three, five, one!” he exclaimed. The sonar supervisor was at the intercom in an instant. He repeated the information to the conn.
Captain Tse, who had been leaning over the chart table, straightened quickly and looked at his crew in the conn.
“Man battle stations!” ordered Tse. The crew ran to their stations as they took in the electrifying news.
“Right standard rudder. Come to course zero, four, five,” commanded Tse. He decided against increasing speed in the chance that whoever was out there hadn’t heard them yet. He went to the intercom. “Sonar, give me a blade count.”
The sonar supervisor listened on a separate set of earphones and shook his head. He pushed the talk lever on the intercom. “No other sounds. No sound of screws at all.”
Tse rubbed his forehead in puzzlement. Was this contact dead in the water? Or did his sonarman mistake the eternal gurgling sounds of the sea for a torpedo tube being flooded with water?
KURCHATOV
Joe Malik glanced at the gauge, which showed that the torpedo tube was full of seawater. He pressed the button that opened the outer door. He heard a low metallic squeal and thought that he might have to get some of the divers to reapply some grease to the doors.
Above all, he thought, let’s not attract any attention from the wrong people.
HAN 405
“Conn, sonar. Contact is opening outer doors!” exclaimed the sonar supervisor.
The words from the sonar crew convinced Tse that there was an enemy lurking in the direction of the old wreck. “Ahead flank!” he ordered in a calm voice. “Load torpedo tubes one and four.”
Captain Tse grabbed an overhead handhold as the boat gained speed around him. His crew was tense but ready. They had trained a long time, and now they would be put to the test.
KURCHATOV
The sonarman on Hendrick’s submarine listened intently for a short moment, then decided that this new set of sounds needed the captain’s attention. He stood and walked over to the opposite bulkhead and yanked on his shipmate until he was fully awake.
“Go get Golubev,” he said. “We have a hostile contact!”
The sonarman’s words jolted the man into action, and he ran off the find Captain Golubev. The sonarman resumed his seat in front of the sonar console, and he instinctively reached for the sonar computer, which was used for comparing sound signatures with stored versions of known ships and submarines. His hand rested on a vacant spot on the console, and he cursed the decision of the Russian Navy to take out all sonar and fire control computers before they set sail.
Golubev rushed in and the sonarman handed him the headphones. He listened for a moment, and he confirmed that the sounds of the screw beating its way through the water meant that this was another submarine, probably Chinese. He guessed that it was one of their better subs, and he knew that he and all the people on board were now in imminent danger of being fired upon.
Golubev tore the headphones off and threw them to the sonarman and ran to the conn. He went to a newly installed control panel with its red Cyrillic letters spelling out EMERGENCY RECALL in Russian. He flipped up the red switch protective cover, then immediately pushed up the toggle switch. The sounds of killer whales filled the sea around the submarine. They had set this equipment up in the event he had to immediately recall all the divers back to the submarine.
This is a pretty thin disguise, thought Golubev. The captain of the hostile submarine would have to be pretty stupid to think a bunch of whales suddenly showed up. But we couldn’t have any obviously man-made noises to recall the divers, he concluded.
Once I get all the divers aboard, thought Golubev, then what do I do?
HAN 405
Captain Tse looked at the intercom with a pained expression. Has the crew in sonar lost their minds? Whale sounds? The thought crossed his mind to ask them if they believed that the whales were about to launch a torpedo at them. It was a humorous thought, but he did not smile. The time was not right - it wouldn’t do to smile when your ship could be under attack. He would laugh about it later.
Was this some new trick from their enemies? Or was it a new type of active sonar that was made to sound like a whale? He strained his hearing and could just detect the siren sounds above the breathing of his men and the thumping of his own heart.
“Sonar, are there any sounds of screws?” asked the captain impatiently over the intercom.
“No, sir,” answered the sonar supervisor.
“Communications depth,” the captain ordered. He turned to his communications officer. “Send this message: We have contact with possible hostile submerged vessel located approximately sixteen kilometers due east of Niushan Dao.” The officer immediately scrambled to the communications station to comply with the order.
They will send more ships to try to get this intruder to surface, Tse thought. Or perhaps it will be a full-blown attack on this quiet foe. Either way, we will be ready.
KURCHATOV
Steve Hendrick maneuvered the ROV with its sack of diamonds into a submerged cave. He hit the release button on the control console to jettison the sack just as the whale sounds filled the sea around the sub. The load of diamonds sank quickly to the bottom of the cave in twenty feet of water. Emergency recall, he thought. I’d better finish up here and see what’s happening.
Hendrick ran the ROV up to the surface to allow its antenna to receive GPS signals from the constellation of orbiting satellites. Hendrick glanced at the latitude and longitude readouts on the control panel in front of him and committed the numbers to memory. He would be coming back soon to retrieve the diamonds from their underwater hiding place. The TV screen, displaying the signals from the ROV, showed the island of Niushan Dao in the distance with a stubby looking lighthouse on its highest elevation. Hendrick set the ROV controls to automatically return to the submarine and quickly went out the door to find Golubev.
Viktor Golubev watched nervously as the divers quickly climbed down the ladder leading from the airlock. He cautioned them in frantic whispers to be quiet as they took off their tanks and laid them gently on a folded blanket provided by one of the crew to prevent any metal-to-metal sounds. They immediately went into the decompression chamber.
Meanwhile the rest of the crew was shutting down the few remaining noise producing devices normally left on. Air circulating fans went off and the atmosphere quickly grew stuffy. Golubev cautioned everyone to sit still and not move at all for fear of making some noise recognizable to the submarine lurking a mile away. Golubev filled Hendrick in on the situation.
“What do we do about it?” asked Hendrick in a whisper.
“Nothing. We wait,” replied Golubev.
“Wait for them to go away?” asked Hendrick.
“Or to fire a torpedo at us,” whispered Golubev.
Hendrick faced blanched at the prospect of a torpedo being fired at the rattle trap they were in. He felt fear but wouldn’t give in to it.
“How
long can we stay like this?” asked Hendrick.
Golubev looked at his watch and did a mental calculation. “Six hours.”
“That’s all?” asked Hendrick with a touch of panic.
“We need some battery life to get out of here. That shortens the absolute maximum time we can stay down,” said Golubev. He turned and walked down the corridor to sonar with Hendrick following him.
Golubev leaned over his now sweaty sonarman and asked for the status with his eyes.
“Nothing changed. He’s still about two kilometers out just circling,” said the sonarman in a hushed voice. He sat up suddenly and pressed his earphones closer. “Wait.”
A minute went by, then another, moving each of them through time with an agonizing slowness.
“Possible surface combatant,” said the sonarman. Golubev didn’t react at all.
Hendrick touched Golubev on the arm. “We better think about a way out of here.”
Golubev nodded. “This surface ship will be the one to flush us out of our hiding place with depth charges. I will get the crew ready to move quickly if an opportunity presents itself.”
Hendrick nodded. At least Golubev and he were on the same wavelength. The Russian captain went off quietly to get the crew ready to lift off the bottom if he saw a chance to escape. The surface ship’s sonar began to fill the water around them with pulses of sound. Hendrick knew the noise would increase in volume until the water surrounding the sub quivered with the power of the ship’s sonar.
The sonarman mumbled something in Russian. Hendrick caught only “- in the water.” Hendrick considered asking the man what was in the water, but knew he didn’t want to hear the answer.
Thirty seconds later, they heard a muffled explosion some distance away.
The sonar man said something else, but Hendrick didn’t listen. Twenty seconds later they heard another explosion, this time much nearer. The hull rang with the intensity of the blast. The noise was loud enough to induce pain in Hendrick’s ears. Even the calm sonar man sitting next to him was gripping the table in front of him so hard his knuckles were white.
Hidden Sun Page 16