Threat vector

by Michael Dimercurio

  Almost 150 kilometers north, the Azov unmanned aerial vehicle dived for the sea and disintegrated on impact. Thirty seconds later, the self-destruct charges blew the remainder of the airframe apart.

  Four hundred meters overhead, the Antay pod's EHF antenna retracted, the door shutting over it, the pod watertight. Seconds later it vanished from the waves and began its trip deep, finally latching onto the top of Vepr's rudder. By that time all turbines were online, and the horizontal plane thrusters started. The submarine lifted off the sand and rocks of the bottom and turned to the southeast.

  Bryan Dietz climbed vertically up the ship-control console to where he could get a grip on the door to the systems booth, throwing it open so he could use the doorjamb as a ladder step. With the handle of the battle lantern held in his teeth, he hauled

  his wiry body up the side of the systems room to the central passageway forward, crawling on what used to be bulkheads. The door to the sonar room was open, Chief Cook hanging out of it. Dietz stood on the passageway bulkhead and tried to see if the chief was still breathing. He was; his head was bruised, but otherwise he seemed whole. Dietz pulled him out of the doorway and laid him on the woodgrain wall paneling, then craned his neck up into the space. One sonarman was conscious, his eyes as wide as quarters, in the corner and making whimpering noises. The other two were down but breathing.

  "Come on," Dietz said to the conscious sonarman. "Give me a hand."

  The sonarman didn't move, his eyes still huge. Dietz reached in to grab him, but he withdrew back into the space between the former deck and the bottom of the sonar flat-panel display console. And Dietz, having become more comfortable around computers than people, pursed his lips in disgust and pulled out of the sonar doorway and continued on a few feet to the door to radio. He keyed in the combination. The door fell away down into the darkened room.

  Dietz found the bulkhead-mounted battle lantern and snapped it on. The inside was a mess. Several radio drawers had come out of their racks, severely injuring the two duty radiomen. Dietz climbed in and checked them, but they were covered with blood and cold. The nightmare was growing worse every second, he thought, grimly laying the younger of the two radiomen gently aside so he could get

  into the storage locker. The inside was a cluttered wreck, but Dietz found a functional slot buoy. One last look at the room, and he climbed out and continued down the passageway past the door to the ESM electronic surveillance measures room beneath him and to the computer room over his head. He came to the stairwell. The ship's ladder's steep steps turned onto their side seemed surreal in the conical beam from the battle lantern.

  "Dietz, you up?" his radio blared. Dietz turned down the volume while stepping through the railing of the stairwell to the lower level.

  "Go, Nav," he said into the mike.

  "Where are you?"

  "Opening the hatch to the torpedo room compartment. It's heavy. Wait one."

  Dietz shined the lantern into the porthole in the face of the hatch to the torpedo room, praying that none of the weapons had fallen off the racks or leaked. A fire or contaminated atmosphere would kill the survivors, and God knew they hardly needed any more bad luck. The room looked clear. Dietz put down the lantern and the slot buoy anc put his fingers on the latch, undogged the mechanism, and heaved against the fireproof hatch, latching the heavy steel door vertically above his head. He shined the beam inside the room, repeating his prayer for the integrity of the torpedo fuel tanks. Things seemed relatively intact. Dietz climbed in and shut the forward hatch after him, redogging it in case a leak started while he was inside.

  The narrow catwalk through the room led be-

  tween the rows of rack-stowed weapons, which seemed inert despite the roll of the ship. Carefully Dietz crawled over the torpedoes and kept scanning for a leak of self-oxidizing fuel. It took ten minutes to reach the aft bulkhead of the room, ten minutes of inching his way along the cold cylinder of one of the Mark 58 torpedoes. At the aft bulkhead he shut the hatch of the torpedo room behind him and emerged into the tilted-over auxiliary machinery room, the home of the emergency diesel and the hatch to the bottom of the escape chamber.

  And immediately Dietz smelled something wrong. He turned to face forward, and saw the hatch of the battery compartment, a six-foot-tall enclosure built beneath the torpedo room. The hatch looked entirely normal, as normal as it could tilted ninety-five degrees from its usual state with only the light of the battle lantern illuminating it, except that something dripped slowly from the rounded square of the hatch. Dietz kept shining the light on the drip, keying the microphone of the VHF radio.

  "Yo, Nav," he said, his voice steady but his heart in his throat, "we got a major problem down here in AMR One. I've got battery acid dripping out of the battery compartment. Give it a few minutes and it'll eat through the gasket, and once it hits the seawater and oil in the machinery bilges, we've got chlorine gas and hydrochloric acid. I don't need to tell you, that's damn bad for children and other living things."

  "Roger, Dietz. How much time you think we have?" Judison's voice boomed.

  "Grab an emergency air mask and set your watch, Nav. If we're not out of here in ten minutes, we won't be getting out of here. And, Nav?"

  "Yeah, Dietz."

  "If you have any ideas at all about how to get an unconscious person to hold his breath to get out the escape trunk, write them down and submit them for extra credit."

  "I might have to take a gentleman's C on that one, Dietz."

  "Right now I'd be ecstatic to get a C."

  Dietz loaded the signal ejector and fired the radio buoy out horizontally, hoping the emergency C0 2 canister would work and that the unit wouldn't just hit a sandbank. When he'd hit the launch key, he shut the outer door, drained the tube, and opened the breech door. The tube was empty, so at least the buoy had left the ship.

  That done, he began the trip back to control to help Judison get the others. This time he took the aft stairwell in the machinery room. Two trips through the torpedo room would be tempting fate.

  "Sir, flash message down from the ComStar satellite, loaded into your WritePad," the radioman said.

  Rear Admiral John Patton nodded, reaching into his bag for his WritePad while his staff truck bounced on the two-lane blacktop highway leading from the interstate to Portsmouth Naval Hospital, where he hoped to see Patch Pacino, who, rumor had it, was showing brain activity after all. Admiral Murphy had called and said he'd meet Patton in the

  hospital room. Patton clicked through his software, finding the message flashing on his queue.

  241945ZJUL2018

  FLASH FLASH FLASH FLASH FLASH FLASH

  FM USS DEVILFISH SSNX-1

  TO COMUSUBCOM

  SUBJ SOS

  TOP SECRET

  //BT//

  1. (TS) USS DEVILFISH DOWN THIS POSITION. SINKING RESULT OF MULTIPLE PLASMA DETONATIONS.

  2. (S) POSITION LATITUDE 37DEG47MIN36SEC NORTH/LONGITUDE 75DEG04MIN54SEC WEST/ DEPTH 112 FEET BOTTOMED.

  3. (S) SHIP HEELED OVER 95 DEGREES MAKING ESCAPE TRUNK FUNCTION UNCERTAIN. TWENTY-SEVEN (27) INJURED AND UNCONSCIOUS INCLUDING COMMANDING OFFICER, FORTY (40) CASUALTIES, TWO (2) MEN FORWARD OF FRAME 110 CONSCIOUS AND UNINJURED: NAVIGATOR AND ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE OFFICER.

  4. (S) DAMAGE ASSESSMENT: ALL POWER LOST. BATTERY COMPARTMENT LEAKING ACID. TORPEDOES SEEM INTACT. ATMOSPHERE BECOMING CONTAMINATED. REACTOR COMPARTMENT BELIEVED FLOODED. NO CONTACT WITH WATCHSTANDERS AFT OF FRAME 110.

  5. (S) WITHIN TEN MINUTES OF THIS TRANSMISSION FORWARD SURVIVORS WILL BE ATTEMPTING EMERGENCY SUBMARINE ESCAPE.

  6. (S) REQUEST IMMEDIATE SURFACE RESCUE AND AIRCRAFT MEDEVAC OF INJURED. IN ADDITION REQUEST IMMEDIATE RESCUE FORCE TO ASSIST IN SURVEY OF AFT COMPARTMENT AND ASSISTANCE IN EVACUATION OF INJURED MEN AFT.

  //BT//

  "Holy shit," Patton mumbled, reaching for a satellite secure voice handset.

  It took forty-five minutes to haul the injured to the lower hatch of the escape chamber, and by
then the battery-acid leak had become a steady drip. Dietz glanced at it through his emergency air mask, knowing that hydrochloric acid would eat his lungs in seconds if he breathed in the gas. There would be only minutes to get the two loads of survivors to the hatch. The semiconscious and unconscious were given emergency masks and walked to a position at the base of the hatchway. Judison would go up with the first load and the emergency surface kit. Dietz would bring up the second round.

  Dietz and Judison manually pulled the lower hatch of the escape trunk open. The heavy hatch opened into the trunk with the hinge vertical in its 90-degree-rolled position. The trunk was a large airlock designed to "lock out" up to nine Seals with full combat gear and breathing apparatus at once. If the occupants wore only lightweight Steinke hoods, it would accommodate more than twice as many men. But making it work in the horizontal instead of the vertical would be the trick, Dietz thought, with no power

  and no hydraulics, and perhaps with no high-pressure air.

  The two men lifted the injured and the unconscious into the trunk and fitted their Steinke hoods. The clear plastic hoods, covering the head and strapped onto the torso, were designed to be filled with high-pressure breathing air at the same pressure as the surrounding depth, so that as the swimmer ascended into shallower water with lower pressure, the excess air would spill out the bottom of the hood rather than overinflate the unit.

  Finally all the hoods were on the survivors. Dietz plugged in the air hose and handed it to the navigator, then handed him the backpack survival package. As Dietz stepped to the hatch, he turned to look at Judison. The realization dawned in him that if something went wrong, this would be the last time they saw each other. The falling expression on the older man's face reflected that he, too, was coming to the same thought. The two had played poker together since their first days aboard back when Kelly McKee had taken command from the legendary John Patton. They had anchored the ship's Softball team, played backfield on the Devilfish football squad. At that moment Dietz saw that if he gave the moment the slightest significance, he would bring down bad luck on both their heads.

  He casually nodded at Judison, bringing the hatch off its seating surface by two inches, then called, "See you in a few, Kiethan." He pulled the hatch shut before the navigator could reply, spinning the dogging wheel hard. He tapped twice on the metal of the hatch and waited. Over the next incredibly slow

  ten minutes, Judison filled the Steinke hoods of the injured crewmen with air and flooded the trunk, opening a valve to the sea and venting the air out. In normal operation, the trunk would have had a space of trapped air behind a vertical steel curtain so that the upper hatch could be opened without the space being completely underwater, but not so with the trunk tilted over. Judison would have to completely submerge the interior, open the trunk upper hatch, and maneuver the injured out the hatch. The buoyancy of their hoods would send them to the surface above. When he was the last remaining, he was supposed to shut the outer hatch and hear it click in the latch. If he failed to accomplish that, if his own Steinke hood's buoyancy carried him to the surface before he was able to shut the hatch, Dietz and the other men would never make it out alive.

  Dietz stood there in the space, still wearing his emergency breathing air mask, waiting for the trunk outer hatch to shut. He heard the sound of the trunk flooding, even the clunking noise of the upper hatch opening, but for a long time there was silence. While he waited those seemingly eternal minutes to see if Judison would be able to shut the outer hatch, he scanned the room and the remaining injured.

  Captain Petri was out cold, leaning against the die-sel engine's exhaust manifold. The others were lined up next to her, the emergency breathing air masks snaking through the space, plugged into each other and to the manifold in what used to be the overhead. Dietz looked over at the battery hatch, which was now streaming battery acid into the bilges. A green cloud was starting to form. He checked his watch,

  knowing that if the chlorine gas and hydrochloric acid reached any significant concentration, it would defeat the seal of the breathing masks and destroy their lungs. They'd die horribly painful deaths before they ever reached the inside of the trunk.

  Panic began to swell inside Dietz as he thought he smelled something inside his mask. A sharp pain stabbed his chest—the acid hitting his lungs—and he began to pound his battle lantern against the wall of the escape trunk, but there was no response. He tried to convince himself that Judison was already gone and had already shut the upper hatch, but he heard two knocks back.

  "Hurry up!" Dietz shouted, his voice hoarse.

  He could wait no more, he decided, and threw open the two valves of the trunk drain pipe. Seawater poured into the space. With the trunk tilted over, it would only drain halfway, but that should be enough if Judison had been able to shut the upper hatch.

  Please, God let the Nav have shut the upper fucking hatch

  The trunk continued to drain, but Dietz could no longer wait He undogged the inner hatch and tried to push it open, but it would not budge, because Dietz was pushing against a crushing wall of water, the three-foot depth of it exerting hundreds of pounds of force against the hatch. Only equalizing the pressure would allow him to overcome the weight of the water. That or fully draining the trunk. He watched the drain pipe, the water level in the space rising, now above Captain Petri's thighs; the other crewmembers submerged in the drainage and bilge water—and battery acid—up to their waists. Dietz

  pushed frantically, but the hatch still would not budge.

  Fright was now crawling down his throat, and his motions became jerky, instinct taking over for conscious thought. He found a valve operating lever, a six-foot-long piece of three-eighths steel with an operating box wrench on the one end, a T-handle on the other, and tried to pry open the hatch just a fraction of an inch, fiercely pushing against the steel, but it wouldn't budge.

  He was starting to scream in frustration when he felt a hand on his shoulder. He turned to see the face of Captain Petri. Her left eye was black and closed, but her good eye was squinting at him with an expression of anger. Her steely voice sounded distorted through her mask as she said, "Dietz! Knock it off and use this! We'll push together." In her other hand was a crowbar with a sharp flat claw tip. Dietz looked at her stupidly until she pushed her way past him and wedged the claw between the hatch and the seating surface.

  "Hammer it in between with this," she shouted, pulling a heavy toolbox out of the water of the compartment. "No, just hold the crowbar!"

  Dietz held the bar as she whacked it with the toolbox. Finally she tossed it, the heavy box splashing and vanishing in the black water outside the circle of the battle lantern.

  "Now, help me pry," she commanded.

  Dietz put both hands on the bar, glad to have his panic focused on this task, and he pushed harder than he could ever have imagined. He could actually see the thick crowbar beginning to bend with nothing

  happening to the hatch, until at last it opened a slim crack. The water inside the trunk came spraying violently out of the crack between the hatch and the seating surface. The firehose spray was strong enough to knock him off his feet if he hadn't been completely pumped with adrenaline. As the water came out he kept heaving against the bar, until eventually the water flow eased enough that Petri could open the hatch an inch. The water was spilling slowly now, and Dietz shoved hard one last time, the hatch coming fully open.

  "Come on," he screamed, reaching for the first of the unconscious men. Man after man he put into the space, Petri helping him, until they were all inside. Dietz shut the drain valves, waved in Petri, and took one last look at the space. The water had risen to a few inches short of the bottom coaming of the escape trunk hatch, the water now lapping the battery hatch, but with the rising cloud of green a few seconds in this air would mean death. He grabbed the battle lantern and reached for his hose connection, ready to unplug as he looked up at Petri.

  But she wasn't moving, just staring at the water arou
nd her waist.

  "Captain, come on," he shouted. "We've got to go! The chlorine will kill us if we stay. Come on!"

  But Petri lifted her head slowly and looked at him. There were tears streaming out of both eyes, and she had begun to shake. For a moment Dietz thought she must have been succumbing to the hydrochloric acid in the air, but there was something else going through her head.

  "Captain! Come the fuck on" he screamed again. But she shook her head.

  "No," she said slowly, sadly. "You go. Get the men to the surface. I'm the captain. I lost this ship. I'm staying here. I'm going down with the Devilfish."

  She said it with an air of finality and turned her back on Dietz. Her famous-last-words speech barely registered in his panic-stricken mind before the battery hatch blew open. Battery acid flooded the space, and the chlorine hissed up. Without conscious thought Dietz raised the battle lantern in his hand and swung it as hard as he could in a perfect softball homerun arc, connecting solidly with Petri's skull. The captain collapsed like a rag doll into the water of the flooded space. Dietz tossed the battle lantern into the escape trunk with one hand while grabbing Petri with the other, and before he knew it, the hatch was shut and dogged.

  Dietz flooded the trunk while he pulled off the emergency masks of the injured and jammed lolling heads into Steinke hoods, then used the air hose to fill the hoods, Petri's second-to-last, his own last. Then he watched the water level rise. Claustrophobia grabbed him by the throat as the water level climbed high over his head. He shut the vent valve and swam to the latch of the outer hatch and shoved it mightily. He had expected it to be as hard as everything else had been that afternoon, but it flew open, almost expelling Dietz into the sea. He held on to the latch and forced himself back inside the trunk. He threw out the men one by one, their hoods shooting them to the surface.