Terminal Run

by Michael Dimercurio

“Yes, sir,” Chu said. “Would it be permissible for me to detach my submarines and attempt a mission of revenge against the attackers? With the duties of escorting the battle group removed, my submarines would be free to conduct forward-deployed operations, and they could experience a measure of vengeance.”

  Minister Di stared at him with dead, unsympathetic eyes. “You have a week. Do not embarrass us. Inform your commanders that capture by American forces is prohibited, and any ship in such a situation shall self-destruct and all crewmen will be killed, and the captain shall shoot himself in the head.”

  “Yes, sir,” Chu said. “If I am able, may I conduct a covert submarine mission against American targets?”

  “What are you talking about, Chu?”

  Chu gave a ten-minute briefing on the capture of the U.S. submarine Snare. “She never made it into the Indian Ocean as we had planned, since it took more time than expected to bring her under our control. But I can turn her around toward the East Coast of the United States. The fleet headquarters facilities are there in Norfolk, Virginia, as are the fleet bases. I can have my unit wait in their shallow waters and ambush the fleet as it returns to port.”

  The Politburo members asked him to leave the room for a moment. He paced nervously until they called him back.

  “Does this robotic submarine have cruise missiles?”

  “Yes, Minister Di.”

  “Can it attack American government targets? The White House, the Capitol building, the damned-for-eternity Pentagon?”

  “Why, yes, sir.”

  “Then do so, Fleet Admiral Chu. You are dismissed. Report your progress.”

  “By your leave, sir.” Di nodded, and Chu rose, bowed to the group, and hurried from the room.

  In his staff car, Chu glared at his young chief of staff. “Get Sergio on the phone. I have a new mission for his robot sub, assuming he knows where it is.”

  “One, bring the ship to mast broach depth,” Krivak commanded. Unit One Oh Seven no longer responded verbally, but it did follow orders. He did not know if it would obey orders to release weapons against another American unit, though. If the machine had gone this catatonic over shooting the Piranha, imagine how it would be if he told it to take on an American battle group

  At periscope depth, on course south, Krivak pulled off the interface helmet, and waited the ten minutes it would take him to adjust to physical reality. When his head stopped spinning he gently sat up and slowly stood, nausea churning in his stomach.

  “Wang, set up the radio we brought on the BRA-44 antenna. Once it is tuned to the frequency, I want you to give me a few minutes of privacy.”

  It took some time to get the satellite secure voice circuit synchronized with Beijing, but when he finally raised PLA General Staff Headquarters, Admiral Chu HuaFeng came up on the circuit. Krivak spent a moment trading the personal codes they had to identify each other and avoid an enemy deception maneuver. Once that was done, Krivak reported what had happened and apologized for the delay in getting to the Indian Ocean.

  “It is too late for your apology,” Chu said. “But there is something you can do for me and the Peoples Republic. I want the Americans to experience a national emotional pain far worse than the terrorist attack on New York years ago. I do not have the power to inflict serious damage, but I would like this

  generation of Americans to remember our struggle. Are you in cruise missile range of any American targets?”

  “I’ll find out, sir, but based on what I know, I’ma week’s transit away from anything worthwhile. The missiles have about a three-thousand-mile range.”

  “How many do you have?”

  “Twelve, Admiral.”

  “Are they plasma-tipped? Any chance of converting them to fusion bombs?”

  “No chance, sir. They’rein a ballast tank and we don’t have the ability to pull them out at sea. We could pull into a high bay facility and work on the missiles—”

  “No. Plasma warheads will have to do, and I want the missiles in the air soon. I want to use my limited firepower to inflict the most pain.”

  “What do you want me to attack?”

  “I want you to destroy some American symbols so that the Americans will ache for their country the way I ache for my own. I want you to target the White House. The Capitol building. The Pentagon. The Statue of Liberty. The Empire State Building. Independence Hall. The Sears Tower. I want you to extract vengeance from the American Navy—target their Unified Fleet Headquarters in Norfolk, and their Unified Submarine Command HQ across the quadrangle. I want you to hit the submarine bases in Groton, Connecticut, and the submarine piers at Norfolk Naval Station. And the tomb of their John Paul Jones in the chapel at their naval school in Annapolis, Maryland. Twelve targets, twelve missiles. You must strike with all twelve missiles at once, so that none of the U.S. Air Force coastal defenses are alerted early.”

  “Leave it to me, Admiral. Once I have fired the missiles, I will need to abandon ship. I can put it on a default course for the Bo Hai Bay, but I fully expect that my firing position will be found and that the U.S. Navy will fill the water surrounding that position with ordnance. There will be nothing left there.”

  “Good luck, Krivak.”

  Chu broke the circuit. Krivak disconnected the radio and

  went down the ladder to tell Wang he was done, then climbed back into the interface couch.

  “One, plot our position on a global chart, then form a circle that shows the range of the Javelin cruise missiles.” Krivak studied the chart. “Plot the great circle route that brings Washington, D.C.” New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, Groton, Connecticut, and Norfolk, Virginia, inside the circle.” The track flashed up on the display. “Now calculate, using speed thirty knots, the time of arrival at the range circle.”

  The time flashed where the track intersected the range circles —showing Monday afternoon local time. With a missile flight time of two hours, he could have target impact before the close of business. Perfect—just in time for the evening news.

  Krivak disconnected from the interface and plugged his satellite phone into the antenna. The number for Pedro was set to the speed dial. As he waited, the deck rocked gently in the swells at periscope depth.

  “Yes,” Amorn’s voice crackled.

  “Amorn, it’s me.”

  “Excuse me, sir?”

  “Amorn, it’s me. Krivak. On the Snare, dammit.”

  “Yes, sir, I can hear you now.”

  “Listen to me. Get a motor yacht, a fast one, and get it to the Atlantic coordinates I’m about to read to you.”

  Amorn copied the latitude and longitude of the firing point.

  “When can you gel there?”

  “The Falcon is ready now. We can get a yacht out of Bermuda and be there by Sunday night.”

  “Get to the coordinates no later than two a.m. Monday morning. If you get there early, just wait for me. I’ll get one last piece of business done, and then I’ll be leaving the ship.”

  “We will stand by there.”

  “I will see you then, my friend. Goodbye.”

  Krivak clicked off the connection and took the ship’s ladder up to the interface bay and climbed back in the couch. When he was reconnected to the ship, he ordered One Oh Seven to

  descend from mast broach depth and continue their transit deep. The deck inclined downward as the ship plunged deep and sped up to thirty-five knots.

  Captain Lien Hua and First Officer Zhou Ping rushed aft to find the chief engineer. Leader Dou Ling, standing on a rubber mat wearing rubber boots and rubber gloves in front of the open electric plant high-voltage main distribution panel. A rope was tied around his waist as if he were a prisoner, the rope held by two enginemen standing well away from the panel.

  “Can you repair it?” Captain Lien asked.

  Dou sounded peeved when he answered, spitting his spent cigarette to the deck. “Captain, either I’ll fix it or I’ll take four hundred and eighty volts right up my ass, and you can eje
ct my burned-to-a-crisp corpse out the torpedo tube. Now, Captain. Mr. First, if you two don’t mind, can I finish this lecture and reach into the panel now?”

  “Go ahead, Leader Dou.”

  The chief engineer reached into the panel as carefully as if trying to steal jewels from under a laser burglar alarm. With a rubber-handled wrench he painstakingly unscrewed a copper bolt from an arcing copper bus bar, and pulled the scorched bars out of the cabinet one by one. Over the next two hours he worked. When he withdrew from the panel his coveralls were soaked.

  “How is it?” Zhou Ping asked.

  “It’s fucking bad, Zhou,” Dou roared. “If it weren’t, would I be risking my damned neck in an energized panel? Now, by your whore of a mother, will you leave me the hell alone?”

  Zhou’s face flushed with anger, but there was nothing he could do. Either Dou fixed the electrical panel and the other fifty things that had exploded into flames when the American torpedo had hit, or they would remain dead in the water, easy prey for an American torpedo from another of their lurking submarines, or even from an over-the-horizon cruise missile.

  “I’m going forward,” Zhou announced, the chief engineer

  snorting. The captain should have reprimanded the engineer, the spoiled technician, but he placed as much trust in the bastard as he did Zhou.

  Zhou found his way to the stuffy command post, its battery casualty lights making the space irregularly and dimly lit. They couldn’t even submerge to hide from the American satellites until Dou completed his work in the engineering spaces. A feeling of impending doom filled Zhou, and for a moment he contemplated writing his mother a farewell letter, but then realized that if he did, it would either end up on the bottom or burned to cinders by the next weapon impact.

  The submersible Narragansett approached the third location, which the topside side scan sonar had indicated was promising. The first contact had turned out to be a rock ridge and the second an uncharted sunken steamship, rusted and forlornly listing to port, her three stacks reaching for the surface at a depth of 2,479 feet. The steamer had a hole in the hull, probably from a German U-boat. The bottom of the shipping lanes on either side of the Cape of Good Hope was a ship graveyard, the storms and fortunes of war taking their toll on the ships of every generation since man had first gone to sea.

  Lieutenant Evan Thompson pulled up on his thruster levers as the third object grew closer in the haze. The approaching object lay on its side against a rock outcropping. It was the sail of a submarine, but amputated from the main hull. A debris field surrounded the sail. Thompson radioed up the find, the video feed from his cameras traveling up the tether to the salvage ship Emerald on the calm seas on the surface. He followed the trail of debris, the seafloor changing from rock to sediment, until he arrived at a sloping section of sand. In the bright light of the submersible, the sandy slope looked different from the surroundings. The sand there had waves in it at regular one-meter intervals. The sand on this ridge looked smooth, bulging at one end. He was getting an annunciator flashing alarm on his console. It was from the audible sonar

  system. He flipped a toggle switch and patched the sonar into the overhead speaker. The sound was unmistakable, a hammering on a steel object. The hammering came regularly, one second between hammer blows.

  “Emerald, Narragansett, ” he called.

  “Go ahead, over.”

  “I’ve got a hammering at one second intervals from a large ridge in the sediment. I’m approaching to see if I can detect a hull.”

  “Roger. Is the hammering by hand?”

  “Negative. It sounds extremely regular. Probably an emergency percussion beacon. Hammering just stopped, over. Mark the time.”

  “Roger. Zero six forty-three.”

  Unfortunately the Narragansett’s manipulator arms were primitive. But Thompson should be able to attempt to penetrate the sediment ridge and see if he struck metal.

  He approached cautiously and speared the manipulator arm into the muck. The arm stopped. He could not tell if the resistance were from hitting a glancing blow and the viscous sediment stopped the arm or if he had hit metal. He tried again, more at a right angle to the surface of the sediment. There was no doubt—he had just hit something solid. There was no bell tone ring from the steel, since the sediment would just muffle the sound of the arm striking the object. He retracted the arm to drive the DSV around the lump in the seafloor and map it out.

  “Emerald, Narragansett. We have a manmade hull down here.” Thompson said emotionlessly, knowing his radio and video call would be repeated for the brass. “I’ve detected several more hammer blows. I’m going to attempt to rig up an acoustic detector on the surface and locate the hammering more accurately.”

  Over the next hour Thompson worked to place hydrophones on the surface of the sloping ridge. The hydrophones listened to the hammering and triangulated it to a single location. The Emerald would soon be sending down an underwater telephone device on a cable. The unit consisted of a transmission hydrophone connected to an amplifier to a cable to the surface ship. The hydrophone would broadcast the voice of someone talking on the connection into the hull. If someone trapped inside shouted, the reception hydrophone would pick it up and amplify it for the listeners on the surface ship. It was crude and often was too indistinct to communicate effectively, but if it worked they could tell the survivors to hold on.

  While Thompson waited for the underwater telephone, he brushed off a part of the surface of the metal, exposing the skin, and spot-welded a lug to the metal, then threaded a cable through the lug. It was like trying to thread a needle while wearing metal mesh gloves, but after twenty minutes of trying, he managed to get the cable through the lug. He secured the cable at the hull end and released the float on the other end. The float ascended to the surface, marking the location of the wreck in case heavy weather required them to abandon the sinking site.

  For three hours Thompson assembled the underwater telephone. It was not so much assembly as it was reassembly, since he had to remove and replace the hydrophones in an attempt to get a clear signal from inside the vessel. Chances were that it would not work, since too many things could distort sound in such a situation, but his office mate at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute had engineered a computer software application that would take the blurry transmissions and clean them up so that they could be understood. When the underwater telephone work was done, it was time for the Narragansett to try to communicate with the wreckage. Thompson clicked the microphone and said slowly and distinctly, “Is this the submarine Piranha!”

  His stomach churned as he waited for a response.

  Captain Rob Catardi sat up in the dark, only the glow of an instrument panel for light.

  “Captain,” Pacino’s voice said in his face. “There was a knock on the hull.”

  Catardi’s heart thumped in his chest. “Energize the percussion device full-time,” he ordered.

  A booming voice suddenly sounded throughout the DSV, coming from outside the hull. They could tell it was a voice but couldn’t make out the words. Catardi and Pacino began screaming at the overhead. The voice came again, but then went silent. There were more scraping noises, until a half hour later the voice came through the hull again.

  “Is… this… the… submarine… Piranha?” the voice asked.

  Catardi held up a finger. “Let me speak,” he said quietly to Pacino. He looked up at the overhead and shouted, annunciating clearly while projecting his voice, “This is Captain Rob Catardi of the submarine USS Piranha. Do you read me?”

  There was a pause, then: “Roger … we … read … you.”

  “Are you rescuing us?” Catardi asked.

  “Not yet,” the blaring male voice said. “We are the Navy DSV Narragansett, here to locate your position. The rescue will be done by a British deep-submergence rescue vehicle. The Brits will be here in seven zero hours, over.”

  Seventy hours. Catardi sat down on the deck, dejected. They might not have enough c
urrent or oxygen to survive that long.

  “Narrangansett, you must expedite the rescue. I say again, expedite the rescue. We will not last seven zero hours. We are low on battery amps. Temperature is extremely cold. We are running out of medical supplies and oxygen will be out in two days. You have to make the rescue in forty-eight hours or less, over.”

  “Piranha, Narragansett, understand. We will pass the word along. Are you in the deep-submergence vehicle?”

  “Yes. We are in the command module of the DSV in the special operations compartment. I believe the submarine hull has been damaged and breached, but the DSV hull is stable, over.”

  “Roger, Piranha, understand. Request list of survivors and their medical status, over.”

  It was a short list, Catardi thought, as he reeled off the information.

  “We have the list, Captain. We will be patching in a DynaCorp expert on the DSV to see if he can talk you through a system lineup to conserve your resources. Please standby, out.”

  What the hell were they supposed to do? Catardi thought, but he smiled at Pacino.

  “We may make it out of here yet.” He grinned.

  “I hope so, Captain.”

  “How are Alameda and Schultz?”

  “Still out. I’d feel better if they were conscious. If they have brain injuries they may never wake up.”

  “Let them sleep. If we get them conscious, they’ll breathe air faster. We won’t make it forty-eight hours. If fact, you and I should try to sleep until the DynaCorp technician comes on the underwater telephone rig.”

  “I don’t think I’ll be able to sleep, sir. But I’ll try.”

  21.

  Commander Kiethan Judison cursed as he scanned the command console’s firecontrol display. The Snare, Target One, was over two hundred forty thousand yards distant to the northeast, far outside of weapons range, and her speed was higher than the Hammerhead’s, even if the ship was ordered to a reactor-ruining emergency flank. If Admiral McKee had hung up the phone when Judison had asked him to, the Snare would not be so far downrange.

  But the worst news was the Snare’s course—northwest. She had no reason to be going northwest. He stormed off the conn, hurried up the stairs to his stateroom, and grabbed a world globe, a ceremonial gift from a Royal Navy submarine commander from the last time the ship had visited Faslane. The sepia-colored globe in one hand, a grease pencil in the other, he barged into the V.I.P stateroom just as McKee was dialing the phone.