by Ian Slater
He noticed a young couple in from his neighboring village sniggering at him, the girl cupping her hand in front of her mouth, whispering to her boyfriend, then trying unsuccessfully to stop her giggling. Moh saw the boyfriend staring at him, saying something, which sent the girl into another fit of giggles, the boyfriend sniffing the air as if there was something malodorous in the room. Moh realized they were probably laughing at the smell of the fungi fertilizer, the couple looking down on him in his overalls as if he was a pig farmer. The two idiots didn’t deserve defending, he thought. He had a good mind to forget it, to walk out. But he stayed, and not just to enjoy the sight of the pretty clerk. He’d do it for his son stationed on Kinmen and for all the other young men and women who were worth defending and who were putting their lives on the line. Still, it irked him — the couple were the kind of college-educated yuppies whom Mao had sent out to the countryside during the Cultural Revolution and made work, the communes puncturing their arrogant self-assurance with real labor so they’d respect those who’d built the Revolution. Moh didn’t like the Communists, but sometimes …
Anger had overtaken his normal passivity, but now the loyal mushroom grower concentrated on the girl’s breathing again, his eyes closed from fatigue and the fantasy of having her in the dark, cool shed. From outside, a gust of gale-force wind rattled the office door. She would cling to him, frightened of the storm, the howling winds, the electric-blue lightning crashing around them, and he’d hold her, comforting her, telling her all would be well.
By the time Moh Pan reached the Civil Defense counter, his fantasies about the beautiful clerk had been sabotaged by the young couple sniggering at the smell of his work clothes. When he reported to the clerk that he’d seen some kind of aircraft or ships off the north cape, any confidence he might have had that they were Chinese Communists evaporated. She thanked him for the information and gave him a smile, but there was nothing remotely sexual in it, merely a young woman’s courtesy toward an older man. He was old enough to be her father, his son Ahmao on Kinmen young enough to be her husband. Moh felt dejected — immeasurably old — exacerbated by the feeling that the world had passed him by. Outside, a gust hit him with such force it blew him back against the glass, rattling its frame. Now he wanted to go back to the mushroom sheds for refuge. He saw his wife coming out of the market crowd, counting her money, the red currency startlingly vibrant against the nondescript gray of the town square.
“Did you tell them?” she asked perfunctorily, without looking up from the bunch of hundreds.
“Yes.”
“What did they say?”
“Nothing.”
“You have to recharge your cell.”
“Yes,” Moh Pan agreed obediently. If his cell had been charged, he wouldn’t have had to walk all the way into town and get a chance to see the young beauty.
“They were probably ours anyway,” said his wife, stuffing the money into her purse, the sea wind billowing her scarf.
“Yes,” agreed Moh Pan. “A big waste of time trudging into town.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
After helping his deckhands extract what had been Albinski’s dry suit, now looking like a black, flattened toothpaste tube, oceanographer Frank Hall decided he had to take a core from the sea bottom — see if a hot vent’s plume of superheated water was responsible for the kind of turbulence that would have fatally loosened the two divers’ air hoses and twisted the kelp around the umbilicals.
Young Peter Dixon, whey-faced, being sick in one of the dry lab buckets, didn’t hear the ex-SEAL-cum-oceanographer approaching the bright island of the stern’s deck lights, seeing only Frank’s shadow looming over him.
“Where’s Albinski’s attack board, Bud?” he asked Dixon, putting his arm on the young diver’s shoulder.
Dixon looked up from the bucket, wiping his mouth, as if he hadn’t heard the Petrel’s captain, or rather, that he’d heard him but couldn’t believe the man’s insensitivity. “Piss off!”
Frank understood, but he was captain — he shouldn’t, couldn’t, let his emotion cloud the issue. “I need to see what the temperature variant was down there. It could tell us whether a sudden release of vent pressure or whatever had anything to do with it.”
“What’s the difference, man? He’s dead.”
“You’re not.” Dixon was supposed to be a SEAL, not a baby. “Where’s the board?”
“Guess it’s over there,” said Dixon, indicating the shining pile of brown vegetation beneath the A-frame, where the long tendrils of kelp had been cut away from what had been Albinski’s dry suit.
Frank gingerly extracted the attack board from the pile of water-slicked tendrils, cut the nylon fishing line by which it had been attached to Albinski’s arms, and handed it up to the bosun.
“Mother of—” began the bosun in shock.
Scrawled on the attack board’s slate was one word: Minisub.
Frank strode to the deck’s intercom mike midway between the winches. “Bridge?”
“Bridge here. Go ahead.”
“Call COMSUBPAC-9. Urgent. Send chopper immediately.” Next Frank turned to the bosun. “Assemble the crew. Dry lab. Everyone except watch personnel.”
It wasn’t until the bosun saw Frank working the tumblers on the dry lab’s safe that he realized why Hall hadn’t ordered the bridge to transmit the discovery of a hostile minisub in American waters directly to COMSUBPAC Jensen. The Petrel, as a civilian vessel — though contracted by the Navy and using a Navy transport helo in its hangar — had no coding computers aboard, and anyone could have picked up a plain language transmit, including those aboard the hostile. The helo would have to take the message.
This delay in getting the message to Admiral Jensen by chopper was to prove fatal, however. In retrospect, to some critics it was far more damaging to the United States in the near future than the not so sensible delay caused by the decision in December 1941 to send the warning of an imminent attack on Pearl Harbor to Admiral Kimmel by telegram.
In the next hour the President let it be known publicly, via the TV and cable networks, that in order to “calm down the rhetoric between”—He had wanted to say, “between China and Taiwan,” but Eleanor Prenty convinced him to change it. “—the People’s Republic of China and the people of Taiwan,” he had dispatched elements of the 7th Fleet to the Taiwan Strait — the McCain—and that because of commitments elsewhere in the ongoing war against terrorism, he considered it prudent to send the USS Turner and its battle group as well. This announcement, the President hoped, would send a clear message to both potential combatants to back off or risk the ire of the United States.
It was a monumentally bad decision because it was based on insufficient information: first, about who exactly was attacking whom, and second, on not yet having received the information, because of Petrel’s helo delay, that a hostile sub had apparently penetrated the “American littoral,” or coastal waters, well within the two-hundred-mile limit, a limit extended in modern times, updating the old three-mile limit derived from the fact that in the days of sail navies, the maximum range of a man-o’-war’s cannon had been three miles from shore.
The President was not the first occupant of the White House to have made a bad decision against the onrush of escalating developments, nor, because of the unforeseen consequences of his public address, would he be the only President — like JFK during the Cuban Missile Crisis — who would come to think that it might be his and America’s last decision.
There was harried activity aboard the Turner’s core battle group, which, under the overall command of Admiral J. Bressard, was made up of the Nimitz-class carrier itself, two guided missile Aegis cruisers, a four-ship destroyer squadron, the replenishment vessel Salt Lake City, plus two nuclear attack submarines — one of them Captain Rorke’s USS Utah. The battle group was ordered to maintain station, ready for immediate turnaround. Ten ships in all, nine of them already leaving Washington State’s naval base at Everett and the Brem
erton yard, the group’s replenisher to follow as soon as she was “choc-a-bloc” with supplies, in the words of her highly efficient, no-nonsense captain, Diane Lawson. Fuel for the huge, 98,000-ton Turner was no problem, its two Westinghouse nuclear reactors having enough power to drive its four shafts for ten to fifteen years, or for a million nautical miles, before the fuel cores needed to be replaced.
Below, in the carrier’s garage-smelling hangar deck — nearly one and a third times bigger than a football field and three stories high — an army of mechanics of the carrier’s 2,800 air wing personnel were feverishly getting ready for the arrival of the air wing from Whidbey Island. This would consist of eighty-five aircraft, including twenty F-14 Tomcats, F-18 Hornets, A-6E Intruders, E2 Hawkeyes, EA-6B Prowlers, S-3 Vikings, and six Seahawk helos, the last of the urgently recalled ship’s personnel on leave having readied the ship only forty minutes before she’d cast off from the Bremerton yard.
The Turner’s CBG deployment to join McCain was seen by some young Americans on the liberal left as “excessive,” even “bullying,” in nature, but the beginning of the twenty-first century had taught many Americans, and not only those in the country’s armed services, that it was best to contain a danger rather than let it fester unchallenged as happened to the Taliban in Afghanistan. And 9/11, showing terrorists reaching into the heart of America itself, had certainly influenced people as well.
The White House, meanwhile, was receiving “Presidential Eyes Only” traffic from the U.S. Embassy in Beijing, General Chang having advised Bill Heinz that the Gong An Bu believed Li Kuan’s terrorists might have penetrated American seaports, particularly on America’s west coast. Chang said that suspected Xinjiang and Kazakhstani terrorists “under questioning” by the Gong An Bu had revealed that small suicide inflatable boats and dirty bombs, possibly hidden in SeaLift containers, had been smuggled into American and possibly Canadian waters.
Aboard the USS Turner, in what at the time seemed an unrelated and banal incident, Admiral Bressard was told that the fan room located on the third deck, port side, was experiencing some difficulty, which meant air circulation wasn’t up to par. The world being divided into those who are always too hot and those who are too cold, the “hot” mechanics were complaining so much it was suggested that the two enormous steel doors dividing the hanger into three distinct areas be opened. The officer of the deck refused. The idea of having the two huge doors closed in these hectic hours of getting underway was that if a fire or explosion occurred in one or more of the planes or from the ordnance — of which there was three thousand tons, in addition to the ship’s 2.68 million gallons of aviation fuel — the doors would seal off the hangar into three distinct zones, each as survivable as the other two thousand watertight compartments throughout the twenty-three transverse and longitudinal bulkheads.
Admiral Bressard looked ahead into the darkness of the Juan de Fuca Strait and at the two protective Aegis cruisers. The one off to his right was all but invisible against the rugged mass that was the southern coast of Vancouver Island. The silhouette of the other Aegis, on the Turner’s left flank, was lost against the coast of Washington’s Olympic peninsula. Then came the 4,315-ton Arleigh Burke — class destroyer squadron, two abaft and two astern of the carrier, and up ahead one of the two escorting flank attack submarines, the smallest vessels in Turner’s battle group. But having twelve vertical launch tubes for nuclear warhead Tomahawk cruise missiles, each of the converted Lafayette-class subs packed a powerful punch. The other sub, maintaining station farther west, moving slowly at sixty feet below to join the battle group, was Rorke’s 7,800-ton Utah, none of its crew happy at having been so near yet so far from home.
Alicia Mayne was the unhappiest of all, keen to get off the boat onto terra firma and back to her lab. She liked Rorke and the super politeness of the Utah’s crew, a naval tradition whether on sub or carrier, where long, narrow passageways, needed to make room for more equipment and close living quarters, demanded exceptional courtesy. But Alicia yearned for the lavish comforts of a full-size bedroom, the sheer pleasure of a walk outside, the sensuous feel of rain on one’s face. No matter how much modern commentators emphasized the roominess of the 377-foot-long, thirty-four-foot-diameter Virginia sub compared to other subs, it was still a submarine, a cooped-up world in which the normal rhythms of life ashore are lost. Only the “redded out” lighting, making the submariners’ eyes more able to adjust from red to the darkness, should they have to surface, told them it was night in the world above.
Alicia could smell steaks cooking in the galley, and she heard the whir of the big mixer mashing potatoes and the thud from what she guessed was something bumping against the hull, forward and below the sail. Then all hell broke loose.
The explosion shook the Utah like a toy, things crashing everywhere, burned wires smoking, and suddenly the pastel blue of the wardroom walls bulged out in huge blisters from the intense heat. She could hear men yelling and screaming, the sub still shaking so violently that what she took to be dust falling was in fact fine particles of pipe-wrap insulation squeezing through multiple fissures in the pipes’ sheathing. From a broken elbow joint, superheated jets of steam sliced across the passageway in which she could already hear doors and hatches slamming shut, turning the long, cigar-shaped sub into a series of watertight compartments, so that whatever section had been hit might be effectively sealed off from all others.
Alarms continued to sound, the OOD calling for damage reports as Rorke ran from his stateroom to Control and other men rushed to their stations. Rorke could feel the sub desperately trying to assume her emergency up angle in order to surface, but the forward ballast tanks were obviously damaged. In fact, there was a gash approximately three and a half by one foot wide on the starboard bow tank between the chin’s sonar array and the sail. The pumps seemed unable to evict the torrent of water required to give the Utah the positive buoyancy she needed to rise, which she had to do quickly before becoming so heavy she’d be driven to the bottom. Rorke immediately ordered all engines stopped, diving planes at surfacing elevation, and the crew ready to abandon ship.
The starboard-side bulkhead of the battered forward tank was showing spider fissures visible only on the control monitor’s zoom, and in the few seconds it took for the operator to tell the OOD about it, the spidery fissures had gone to a “visible web,” the tiny cracks emitting powerful pencil-lead-thin jets of water. Rorke quickly realized that with the air pressure coils in the ballast tank ruptured, there was no hope of the Utah surviving, unless he could somehow achieve an emergency blow. In its present fragile state, the boat hovered dangerously close to negative buoyancy. If that happened, it would plunge, reaching breakneck speeds, plummeting past its crush depth and smashing into the seabed, its air-filled chambers popping like tin cans under the sledgehammer weight of the ocean.
In a matter of milliseconds the explosion of the seabed-planted mine had not only ruptured Utah’s ballast tank, but generated a pulsating white-domed bubble of carbon dioxide and methane gas that struck the aft bulkhead above the prop. The speed of the explosion’s shock waves, excited by the prop’s normal cavitation or bubble-producing motion, created a partial vacuum. The sudden whack of the explosion’s pressure wave, traveling at Mach 4, deformed then oscillated the entire structure of the sub, in effect whipping the boat, ripping bulkheads away from their longitudinal stiffeners, and causing massive flooding.
Now that the integrity of a half-dozen previously watertight compartments was breached, the flooding could not be contained, and thirty-two officers and men in departments aft of the sail drowned within minutes of the roaring deluge invading their home. The encased pipelike housing for the SOSUS “python” was torn asunder from the sub’s flank like some long worm tube, breaking up, its contents of black, oil-encased “hockey puck” microphones spilling into a frenzy of white water. It marked the catastrophic end of one of America’s preeminent warships, a weapons platform that had contained more than twice th
e firepower of all the ordnance dropped by all combatants in World War II.
Rorke had ordered Beaufort life raft drums released, and Alicia Mayne to be the first out of the sail’s hatch. She’d been through the drill often enough, but actually doing it, hitting the cold, ear-dinning horror of a battering in total darkness, was terrifying. Her body was caught in the vicious vortexes of contrary forces from the sinking boat and the boiling sea, and further battered by debris, her arms flailing, breath failing, her nostrils clogged. Her chest seemed about to explode, and her lips felt as if they were afire in the fierce upstream of acidic effervescence that was now highly poisonous due to the chemical reaction between seawater and the dying sub’s gutted battery compartment.
The resulting greenish-yellow clouds of dirty chlorine that had already suffocated a dozen or more of Rorke’s crew were now visible as a smudge on Darkstar’s routine overflight, the explosion itself heard by the handful of isolated settlements on both the American and Canadian sides of the fifteen-mile-wide strait. Some of the submariners who, in fate’s strange grasp, had popped through the chaos of swirling sea and debris to the surface of the strait, were relatively unharmed. The screaming of others was a terrible testimony to the burns and injuries inflicted by the firespill spreading across the previously black surface of the sea, its flames illuminating hundreds of pieces of debris, the unidentifiable shapes, some afire, floating around and around Alicia and everyone else who’d made it out.