This was the Halibut’s final trip to this site. Although the Navy was betting with Hiccock’s money, it was still something of a big gamble. Of course, they had gotten far less money than they had wanted, since Hiccock suddenly balked at the cost estimate for the mission. It was as if he had seen their books and realized the Navy had inserted a 300 percent mark-up in the cost. With pressure from the president, the SECNAV magically found a sharper pencil in that ring of the Pentagon and the mission had been ordered.
The risk was that the Halibut had already made five stealth trips. The first had been a magnetometer search of the one thousand square miles in which the probable debris field of the Vera Cruz could be located. Then four trips to drop off, like parachute drops, pre-positioned supplies and equipment which the DSRV needed to retrieve the nuclear crucibles the president wanted as evidence in the world court. If however, their guess that this anomaly was the Vera Cruz proved to be wrong, all the equipment and supplies would never be retrieved. Two of the units, with classified equipment, would be destroyed by a remote signal to onboard bombs. For its part, the supposedly decommissioned Halibut was nearly undetectable. Originally, the hull was laid as a diesel electric sub in 1955, but she had been outfitted in dry dock, before her maiden voyage, with a nuclear plant to enable Russ Klaven to use her for the most secret of cold-war missions. Refinements and noise cancelling modifications were added as the technology advanced. Combined with her smaller size, it made her quieter than a fish’s sneeze. In war games with American and NATO forces, the Halibut slipped effortlessly in and out of sonar nets and lines of air-dropped sonar buoys from Orion sub hunter-killer aircraft. Its level of silent stealth rivaled that of the vaunted boomers, which were fifty years younger and $1.9 billion more expensive. Halibut had been officially scuttled in 1994, but in reality it was the hull of a never-finished sub that had been taken from mothballs and in the dead of night, and with much fanfare, scuttled in her place. Thus, the USS Halibut, thanks to Clay Klaven, added one more notch to her decades of stealthy service with the greatest cover story of all: she didn’t even exist.
∞§∞
The descent of the DSRV was necessarily slow and cautious. Inside the command and control center of the fishing boat, Brooke watched the various screens and was starting to come to terms with the realization that this was the last page of the final chapter of a mission that had been written into her life. A mission that started as curiosity over the whereabouts of a Russian general turned black market czar. It was Brooke, whose antenna went up when she looked deeper, who had gotten the assignment from Bill with the blessing of the president. It had led to her meeting Mush. Being around a sub mission and back in the Indian Ocean made thoughts of him come at even greater frequency than usual. Right now she was on a make believe fishing boat, playing hi-tech hide and seek with a similarly configured, make-believe Russian trawler, and she found the game fully engaging. Of course, Mush played “catch me, kill me” every second he was on patrol against at least three nations who would love to hear of an “accidental” sinking of a U.S. Ballistic Sub, especially if one of those nations caused the accident.
“DSRV, now minus one thousand feet,” a seaman called out.
Brooke looked up, observed the blip representing the DSRV that was now one thousand feet above the sea floor, then went back to her line of thought. Her career had gone well ,and this mission would be a big feather in her cap. Maybe she should think about leaving at the top of her game. She could put this all behind her and sleep well at night, knowing she served her country with distinction and valor. She could do the Hawaii move. Maybe hire on as a local cop, no, as corporate security — as a consultant. There must be corporations in Hawaii. Then she’d have time for a life with Mush when he was home from patrol. And maybe in a few years, he’d take a desk job at Pearl or Bangor, Washington. Oooo, Groton, Connecticut, that could be great! Good schools. I wouldn’t be too old by then, maybe a kid or two.
A sigh escaped from Brooke, and it got the attention of the commander. “You okay, Agent Burrell?” Randell said.
“Sorry, just got lost there a second; where are we?” Brooke tugged at her uniform skirt. The commander had given her permission to wear her uniform below deck, but said she’d have to change into “civvies” if she went anywhere on-deck or into the superstructure. Normally, she opted to be in uniform when she was on a Navy ship. It helped her avoid unwanted attention from seamen who had been away from their wives or girlfriends for many months. Today, not so much; this particular vessel was a super-secret spy ship, operated on deck by U.S. Japanese-American sailors in civilian clothes. The daily uniform for everyone onboard was always civilian, so now she stuck out like a Girl Scout at a Sunday picnic.
“Little Chick passing through minus five hundred feet. It won’t be long until we know,” the Commander commented.
Brooke found herself looking at a green dot — a new green dot — “Commander…”
“Wags? What the hell is that?”
∞§∞
At that moment on the Halibut, the sonar man pressed the headphones closer to his head and ordered quiet. “Sir… there’s something…”
The Russian sub had come through a thermal layer close to the Halibut. The temperature anomaly had effectively masked the sound signature of each sub to the other as well as to the control ship. Neither ship was aware of the other until they were practically on top of one another.
A huge wallop rocked the Halibut. The angle indicator bubble disappeared behind the edges of the scale as the boat pitched nearly ninety degrees. Fortunately, the pitch and yaw and subsequent righting had slammed most watertight doors within the ship closed. They weren’t sealed, but they were at least shut.
The Halibut’s captain shook off the ringing in his head, caused by its impact with the edge of the chart table at full force. As the boat righted herself, and he tried to ascertain what had happened, there was a loud bang. Immediately, the boat rose violently up, the hull popped and groaned, and everyone was slammed to the floor.
∞§∞
Aboard the modified Akula class Russian sub, Captain Vashilli was killed instantly when the conning tower was crushed and peeled back as easily as the top of a sardine tin, the result of the top of his sub slamming into the bottom of the forward hull of the older, heavier American sub. The tons of water pressure at that depth caused the entire Russian boat to implode as its pressure hull was violently breached and everything inside was instantly crushed. The huge explosive release of air had lifted the Halibut above it two hundred feet in only a few seconds.
∞§∞
The crew of the Halibut was reeling; each had been sledge hammered by the impact and floored by the rapid ascent from the explosive air. For the Halibut, it was the luck of the accident that the Russian sub’s conning tower, her weakest part, had hit her low and forward. The Halibut absorbed the impact of the top of the Russian sub’s conning tower across the full breadth of the hanger-reinforced hull. The crack in the forward part of the Halibut’s hull occurred over several seconds. That allowing the lone occupant of the forward torpedo room, Ensign Jack Hargroves, to ‘dog it down’ — turning the hatch wheel and securing the seal of the already slammed shut door. This valiant action prevented the flood that entered the torpedo room and drowned him from flooding the rest of the ship.
Halibut’s sonar man got to his senses and put on his headset. He reported what he heard: “Sir, I got a popping, crackling sound in my cans, consistent with a hull breach.”
∞§∞
The cold, dead hulk of what had been a noble Russian boat slipped deeper and deeper into the murky black. The two-man crew in the DSRV was jarred by the implosion of the sub, but had no idea what had happened. Their calls to Halibut went unanswered, causing them to think they were suddenly alone. “Henhouse, this is Little Chick, do you copy?”
∞§∞
Onboard the Halibut, the captain learned that his forward torpedo room was flooded, but sealed by a heroic se
lfless act. He made a mental note that if they survived this, he’d recommend Hargroves for the Medal of Honor, posthumously. He ordered the ballast adjusted to right the boat under the dead weight of the flooded bow. The few leaks that popped up were being handled by chocks, wedges, and leak collars. He agreed with his chief of boat that they were watertight and seaworthy, although unable to make full forward speed.
∞§∞
Down in the DSRV Little Chick, the crew members clicked into their four-point seat restraints and rotated to nearly vertical in an attempt to use their strong lights to see above them. As if they had turned on the high beams in a blizzard, the visibility got worse because the plankton and other organisms reflected light right back to the crew through the three-foot-thick polycarbonate front window of the DSRV. Still, being human, they invested a few more seconds in this futile endeavor than logic would have dictated. But it was enough time for the lights to catch a glimpse of an enormous black mass plunging downward toward them. The pilot of the submersible pulled back on the hand grips, and the machine did a sort of back flip as he gunned the small motors and tried, in an upside down orientation, to gain distance between them and whatever it was that was coming.
∞§∞
“Henhouse, this is McDonald. Henhouse, this is McDonald. Henhouse, what is your situation?” Brooke watched as the commander of the surface control ship she was on kept clicking the transmit switch and showing just the slightest bit of frustration over not being able to raise the sub and find out what had happened.
Then the magnetometer operator reported, “Sir, I recalibrated the Maggie and there is a mass concentration sinking fast at Chicken Coop One.”
The commander had two simultaneous thoughts. One: code-naming the operation after reading a nursery rhyme to his four-year-old daughter, when this retrieval looked like a lark, had been a mistake. Two: that the Halibut had sunk. He turned to his first officer. “What do you think, Hal?”
Hal lifted the peak of his Yankee’s cap, which had a small metal insignia of his rank in the middle of the interlocking N-Y (his only concession to being an officer aboard this U.S. Navy spy ship), and said, “Is Halibut’s VLF carrier still intact?”
“Good point; Wags?”
“Checking — yes sir, Henhouse is still broadcasting VLF.”
“Triangulate for position. Radio, try hailing ’em again,” the commander said.
“Henhouse, this is McDonald, what is your situation?”
The wave of relief swept through the boat as they heard, “McDonald, this is Henhouse. We have suffered a breech but we are contained and all watertight seals are holding. One fatality.”
“Any idea what hit you?”
“Whatever it was came out of nowhere. I’m guessing you didn’t experience any event?”
“No. Why?”
“That rules out a seaquake or tsunami.”
“Ben, we got a Maggie reading that something big just went down in your area. We thought it was you.”
“My sonar man said something before the bang. Said there was something in the water and then reported sounds consistent with a hull breaking up.”
Brooke got it right away, “Time to recalibrate your equipment, commander. Someone just snuck up on us.”
“And obviously he couldn’t see the Halibut either,” the commander countered. Brooke noticed he had switched into a mental state that could best be described as deep contemplation.
A few seconds later, he hit the switch on his mike. “Henhouse, can you continue your mission?”
That surprised Brooke.
“McDonald, assessing status of Little Chick now,” Halibut’s captain reported.
“Henhouse, advise when you know.”
Brooke got up and walked closer to the commander. “You really intend to continue as if nothing happened?”
“If we have operational ability, then yes.”
“Okay, fill me in here. The thing sinking to the bottom, that’s a sub right?”
“Probably.”
“There are men on that sub and you don’t know if it’s an American or NATO sub.”
“Whoever they are, at this depth they are all dead.”
“Yes, but what if it sunk from the surface? Then there would be survivors.”
“First off we’d have seen a surface ship from fifteen miles off, and second, what do you propose we do about that? We are on a dark mission here. Survivors would compromise our mission and this boat’s secrecy.”
“Look, I was alone up there when the Vera Cruz sank, and I am here right now, alive, because someone didn’t give me up for dead.”
“Agent Burrell, you are here to advise and observe. I am the mission runner, and as long as there is a chance we can complete our mission and maintain operational integrity, we go. And that, Lieutenant Burrell, is an order, my order.”
Brooke’s blood started to overheat. She was about to pull rank as a White House operative, but she thought of Mush. His command. How as master and captain of a ship, the one essential was that his authority could not be undermined. So she flipped on her brain’s safety switch and said, “Yes sir,” and returned to her seat. She saw a second thought slam into the commander’s head. “Has there been any nuclear signature?”
“Reviewing now — there is a slight level but far less than a crippled nuke would put out. It could be natural background radiation in this part of the ocean floor, sir, but definitely not any indication of rupture of a containment vessel. So, sir, if it was a sub, the reactor scrambled and for now it is contained.”
“Okay, but I want you on that monitor. If it raises one rad, I want to know about it and we all get the hell out of here.” He then turned to Brooke, the slightest attitude of contrition visible on his furrowed brow.
∞§∞
On the Halibut, the captain was trying to raise the DSRV, “Little Chick…Little Chick.”
∞§∞
The DSRV, caught in the tremendous eddy of the sinking sub, was lifted up and arced around like a Ferris wheel going in reverse, its tiny motors no match for the swirling water rushing to fill the hole where the giant hull was falling. It was only the skill of the driver and his adroit manipulation of the handgrips that directed the attitude of the motors, allowing the tiny craft to just miss the descending bow of the crippled craft. As it slid by, the DSRV’s lights briefly illuminated the bow and the name Vladivostok. The wreck plummeted through their position, two hundred fifty feet above the ocean floor. Then the currents quieted and they were finally able to take stock of their situation.
∞§∞
“Henhouse, this is Little Chick.”
“Good to hear you, Chick. What is your situation?”
“A little shook up, but still watertight and we have maneuverability; batteries are good, air supply nominal.”
“Did you see whatever that was?”
“Affirmative. Russian Akula class sub, read Vladivostok. Deep sixed.”
The captain’s eyebrows rose at that bit of data.
The guys in the DSRV continued, “Henhouse, do we abort?”
“Hold for orders, Little Chick.” The captain switched the frequency on his overhead panel and hit the transmit switch, “McDonald, this is Henhouse; Little Chick is good to go. I recommend proceeding unless you got a big picture reason to abort?”
∞§∞
With that, Commander Randell turned to his radar and sonar techs, “What is the trawler doing?”
“Still in place, no increased EE, sir. It looks like he’s unaware of any calamity.”
This confused the commander. Surely they were listening and the implosion of the Akula was a giant noise in the water. “Sonar, where’s the thermal layer?”
Wherever warmer water lies atop cooler water, a sonic wall of sorts is created. Therefore, it was possible the trawler never heard the implosion. The sonar man affirmed that the position of the temperature gradient could have shielded the Russian spook ship from the acoustic waves. He knew it was just a mat
ter of minutes before the Russian trawler would try to make contact or try to ascertain the Akula’s situation. It meant there was a window of opportunity to complete the mission. “Little Chick, let’s keep dancing.”
“Affirmative.”
∞§∞
The Akula landed upside down three hundred yards east of the shipwrecked hull, which was suspected to be the target ship. The DSRV buzzed down and hovered at fifty feet above the wreck. They radioed back to Henhouse confirmation that they were indeed above the Vera Cruz.
∞§∞
The news was met on the control ship with a slight cheer. Brooke, however, was processing all the data she had absorbed. The cop in her took over the meeting going on in her head. “Commander, what was the Akula doing here? Why is that trawler here? Why would the Russians be as interested in this wreck as we are?”
“It’s possible they want those crucibles back.”
“Doubtful; they are old tech to them. No, the only value they have is the value they have to us — evidentiary.” Brooke’s mind reached for a criminal motivation to the Russian behavior she had just observed. Returning to the scene of the crime was axiomatic. However there was one reason that would compel a perpetrator to return. “Commander, call off the DSRV!”
The commander turned with a look that said, “Why would I do that?” as he said those exact words.
The God Particle Page 22