Terminal Run

by Michael Dimercurio

  “What was that,” he asked, taking his face from the scope.

  “They’re shooting at us, Mr. First,” Fighter Ling said. “Shoot them!”

  Zhou put his eye back to the scope, but the people in the rafts were jumping off into the sea. He located the senior officer he’d been aiming at before, put the man’s chest in his crosshairs, and squeezed the trigger. The rifle jumped slightly, coughing as it fired a single round.

  “Select the rifle to full automatic, sir!” Ling shouted.

  “Damn thing,” Zhou said, finding the switch that took the rifle out of semiauto, then re sighting on the survivors in the water. He squeezed the trigger and sprayed the rafts and the men in the water with bullets until the clip was empty.

  The other rifles began firing as he down loaded the clip and put in a fresh one, then emptied that clip, the bullets flying over the sea at the Americans.

  “Look around, number two scope,” Captain Andrew Deahl ordered from the conn of the USS Essex, the Virginia-class SSN dispatched by Admiral McKee to find the Julang-class before it could form up with Battlegroup Two. Deahl stood behind the command console with the Type 23 helmet on, the room rigged for black despite the daylight hour, so that he could better see the seascape in the periscope view. The crew, stationed at battle stations since sonar had detected the Julang at long range, waited silently for the next order. When the Julang, designated Target One, had vertical surfaced, Deahl had ordered tubes one and two check fired, the attack aborted, to see what was happening.

  “Depth seven zero, speed zero, Captain.”

  “Up scope.” Deahl hit the joystick strapped to his wiry thigh and the photonic mast came out of the sail. Deahl’s view showed the underside of the waves, the computer’s superimposed bearings selected to the bearing of the Julang. When the scope broke through the waves, Deahl reported, “Scope’s breaking, scope’s clear! I have Target One surfaced. Observation, Target One! Bearing three zero five, bearing mark] Range, three divisions in low power, masthead height set at three zero feet, range five hundred yards, angle on the bow starboard one two zero! Attention in the firecontrol party—we are suspending torpedo attack until we can determine Target One’s actions. Carry on.”

  “Bastard’s probably just broken down, Skipper,” the XO said in his Baton Rouge accent.

  “Sonar, Captain,” Deahl said into his boom microphone, “do you show loss of propulsion on Target One?”

  “Captain, Sonar, no. His engines are idle, but he is still steaming.”

  “So much for that theory, XO,” Deahl said. Andrew Deahl, a thirty-eight-year-old underweight marathon runner, was new to command, having taken over the Essex a mere two months ago from a captain beloved by the crew, and so far command had been nothing like he’d imagined. The transition from being second-in-command to captain was a wide gulf to cross, and there were moments when he suffered severe self-doubts. The orders to the war in the East China Sea had complicated things, but at least Deahl had learned to lean on his executive officer, though it was hard for a New Yorker like Deahl to trust the smooth Southerner that XO Harlan Simoneaux was.

  “Captain,” the XO said in a voice that seemed too loud, “the men in the sail have rifles. They’re shooting at something!”

  “What the hell?” Deahl mumbled.

  “Oh, shit, Captain. This is where Leopard went down! They’re survivors!”

  “Snapshot tube one, Target One!” Deahl shouted. “Disable anti-self-homing, disable anti circular run, immediate enable,

  surface impact mode, high-speed active search, direct contact mode!”

  The outer door to tube one was already open. The Mark 58 Alert/ Acute had been powered up for the last thirty minutes, and the solution to the target was locked in, the weapon only waiting for word to shoot. It took a second for the weapons officer to respond to the radical settings required to get a Mark 58 to detonate on such a close target, the safety interlocks required to be removed to allow the weapon to work.

  “Set!” the XO finally said.

  “Stand by,” the weapons officer called, his console ready to fire.

  “Shoot on generated bearing!”

  “Fire!” the weapons officer called, and the deck trembled and Deahl’s ears slammed from the torpedo launch.

  “Sir, tube one fired electrically,” the weapons officer said.

  “Conn, Sonar, own ship’s unit, normal launch.”

  The words were barely out of the sonar supervisor’s mouth before the view out the Type 23 went white, then blinked out. Deahl blinked, but the interior of the helmet was dark. Something had happened to the Type 23 mast, he thought. It was then that the sound of the explosion came roaring into the hull, and the ship trembled violently as if struck by a huge sledgehammer.

  “Conn, Sonar, explosion from bearing to Target One.”

  “Well, obviously,” Simoneaux said sarcastically.

  “Raising number one scope,” Captain Deahl said, selecting his thigh controller to the starboard periscope. The second Type 23 rose out of the sail and penetrated the waves, and when it did, all Deahl saw was a large orange and black mushroom cloud and debris falling from the heavens in large metal chunks, the flotsam field growing with each second.

  “Target One is gone,” Deahl said with a flat voice. He just realized he may have made a grave error, because if there had been floating survivors within two hundred feet of the hull of the Julang, they were survivors no more.

  “Officer of the Deck, vertical surface the ship!”

  “Captain, bodies in the water, thirty degrees off the port bow!”

  Commander Deahl guided the Essex to the position the OOD had pointed out and ordered all stop.

  “Get the divers in the water,” Deahl commanded.

  Over the next two hours they combed the waters of the Julang sinking site, harvesting thirty-five bodies, a dozen of them dead, the remainder unconscious. Among the living were five Chinese, two of them officers if Deahl had interpreted the insignia on their uniforms correctly. The dead were wrapped in trash bags and brought to the frozen stores room. The living were brought to the crew’s mess, Deahl ordering the tables unbolted from the deck to create more space for them, the crew’s mattresses spread out on the floor. The medic, a senior chief petty officer on his last sea tour, attended to the wounded. Captain Deahl watched from a corner of the room until the medic came up to him, the older man wiping sweat off his forehead.

  “What’s the word. Chief?”

  “They’re all lucky, sir. About a million cuts and lacerations and broken bones between them, and a few gunshot wounds. The Leopard XO, Phillips, is in good shape except for a bullet through the upper arm. Captain Dixon took two rounds in the shoulder and one in the chest, and he had internal bleeding, but he’s stable.”

  “A round in the chest and he’s still alive?” Deahl asked.

  “He had a souvenir in his chest pocket, something heavy and made of gold—a locket or a watch or something. It’s a dented lump curled around a mushroomed AK-80 round now, but it saved his life. That bullet would have gone straight through his heart.”

  “Lucky guy,” Deahl muttered. “What about the Chinese?”

  “They’ll fare the best, Skipper. They were on the Julang sail, so the explosion threw them clear. I think one of them is the captain.”

  “Bring me to him.”

  The senior chief led Deahl to the Chinese commanding officer. It was strange, Deahl thought. With his eyes shut, a blanket over him, and an IV needle in his arm, the Red officer looked as innocent as a sleeping child. Hardly the devil that Deahl had imagined. It was just war, Deahl told himself. If not for the war, this guy probably had a house and a wife and kids, an annoyed squadron commander, a ship that needed maintenance, a crew that needed leadership, and all the other headaches of life. In a way, Deahl realized he had more in common with the Chinese officer than he did with a typical civilian back home.

  “Thanks, Senior,” Deahl said. “Inform me when any of t
hem regain consciousness.”

  Deahl walked down to the control room and addressed the officer of the deck.

  “Keep steaming north until we find Battlegroup Two,” he said. “And be damned careful of any more Chinese submarines.”

  23.

  Commander Rob Catardi shivered beside the atmospheric control panel. The analyzer had good news for them on carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide, but the problem was oxygen, which was at 19.9 percent and falling fast. The oxygen bleed valve was fully open, and not a molecule of gas was coming out. Catardi had pulled out the piping manual for the DSV and checked the oxygen system, hoping for a shutoff valve between banks for the command module and the larger cargo module, and to his joy, there was a cross-connect shutoff. He followed the piping in the overhead until the stainless-steel pipe penetrated the command module bulkhead. Right before the penetration he found the shutoff valve. It was open, and the system was empty. He opened and shut the valve four times, but there was no response. It was obvious that they would suffocate down here. In ten hours, when the rescue craft arrived, they would be unconscious.

  They had paced themselves for the arrival of the rescue DSV, but this wasn’t over when it got here. It would have to slice through the two-inch-thick steel of the Piranha’s hull, and grab on to and remove a plate above the DSV. One mistake with the removed plate, and it would fall and crush them. The rescue submersible would have to weld the docking collar onto their DSV, then cut into their hull and tunnel through all the cables and ducts and piping, which would contaminate the atmosphere with toxic chemicals from burning cable insulation There was a week of work to do before they could get inside the DSV, and by the time the rescuers got in-hull, the surviving crew of the Piranha would all be long gone.

  Even if they had plenty of oxygen, the cold would get them. Catardi could see his breath, and there was nothing here to keep him warm except a few survival blankets, most of which he’d given to the others before they fell asleep in the frigid command module.

  Catardi had always wondered whether he would want to know in advance of his death, or whether it would be best to be blindsided. He had once thought that he’d like five minutes, so he’d see it coming, enough time to say goodbye perhaps, but not so much warning that he would be gripped in fear for days on end. But this warning was more than five minutes. He probably had ten or twelve conscious hours left, and then he would be gone. When they did cut into the hull, they would find him frozen, his body at thirty degrees Fahrenheit, and dead as the steel of the bulkhead. He crouched at his pile of padding and wrapped himself in his blanket. From where he sat he could see the other three, their plumes of breath vapor rising. Pacino had gone to sleep, as ordered. Schultz and Alameda had never awakened, a bad sign. Catardi had awakened after an hour or two, too nervous to sleep anymore.

  He had informed the topside ship, the Emerald, that they would not be talking any further, since it would keep them from sleeping to conserve their oxygen. Emerald had promised to find a way to get oxygen and power into their hull, but it was too big a task. They had hinted that the weather above was getting rough from a storm that had been in the eastern Atlantic. Catardi had said goodbye to the fuzzy voice hours before and requested they not call him again. False hopes were worse than hopelessness. He lay down on the padding, then changed his mind and got up to walk to Pacino, Alameda, and Schultz. He wanted to see their faces and say a farewell. He reached out for Pacino’s forehead and pulled the kid’s hair out of his eyes, thinking he’d failed the young man. Then Carrie Alameda, who looked like a child when she slept.

  He touched her hair and her cheek, then moved on to Astrid Schultz, the pretty blonde who had sent Catardi’s wife into fits of jealousy when she was first assigned to the Piranha. Catardi stroked her cheek, mentally thanking her for all she’d done, and saying goodbye to her. Finally he returned to his padding and pulled the thin blanket up to his nose, took one last look around and shut his eyes.

  He knew he should consign himself to sleep, but he was too afraid. He knew that once he shut his eyes, that would be the end. There would be no waking up from this nap. It would be better, he knew, to get through the last horrible hours in slumber than to experience them awake. He didn’t want to be awake when the already dim lights flickered out. He felt his eyes fill with moisture and he finally was able to shut them, telling himself to slow his breathing and sleep. Every time he did, he felt his heart pound in his chest as the fear rose into his throat. There was one thing that seemed to calm him down, and it was thinking about Nicole, his young daughter, wondering what she was doing right then. He hoped she was not watching a news report and crying over him. He had thought they would keep the lid of classification on this sinking, and only tell the world when it was all over. He mourned the loss of her photograph, the one that had been bolted to his stateroom bulkhead. The one that had probably been blown to cinders in the first internal torpedo explosion.

  Catardi let his thoughts wander, imagining his self flying out of this cold dark steel coffin and rising out of the sea and ascending in the air over the Atlantic Ocean, soaring higher over the earth until he returned to the house he and Sharon had shared with Nicole in a time far in the past, and he came up to the door during the summer and Nicole came out and hugged him and squealed Daddy Daddy Daddy and he lifted her into the air and said her name and they chased each other in the yard and played hide-and-seek and piggyback and all the other games she adored. And when dusk came he carried her into the house and read all her favorite stories to her, seeing every page, making every funny voice she liked, singing the funny

  songs he’d invented for her and listening to her giggle, and then kissed her forehead and told her to sleep. He felt her arms go around him one last time, and he stood back and watched her fall asleep until her breathing was slow and steady, and he turned out her light and stood there in the dark by her side, making sure no monsters were there to get her, and when Catardi himself fell asleep, there were tracks of tears leaving his eyes and streaking down his temples into his tangled gray streaked hair.

  Outside the intact hull of the Piranha’s DSV the mangled hull of the ship lay buried in the sediment of the bottom, with just a few places where the muck had been wiped off for the hydrophones. The hydrophone cable and the locator buoy cable rose away from the dark wreck on the bottom and made their way to the surface, where night had fallen. There were no stars because of the dark clouds, and the seas rose as the wind began to howl, making the cables vibrate and sing as they came over the fantail of the salvage ship Emerald and continued into her equipment bay. At the temporary consoles set up in the crew’s mess room Lieutenant Evan Thompson sat at a console and monitored the noises coming from the interior of the DSV. It had been quiet for some time, only muffled footprints falling on the deckplates, then a muted sobbing, and then nothing. They were either sleeping or unconscious, Thompson thought. He pulled off his earphones and sighed, draping his palm over his eyes and accepting the coffee brought by the mess captain.

  The British were making better time than expected, and were due by dawn, but there was nothing they would be able to do. The storm was getting worse. The captain of the Emerald had made plans to disconnect the hydrophone cables and get back to port, or if it got as bad as the reports said, make his way north to get out of the storm path. Thompson hoped they stayed long enough to turn over the operation to the Brits, but the crew of the Emerald was responsible for ship safety. It was their call. Thompson put the headphones back on and put his head on the horizontal table of the hydrophone console and

  shut his eyes, deciding he would sleep like that in case they called for him.

  The night passed as the Emerald rocked in the waves, but there was not a sound from inside the wreckage of the USS Piranha.

  Captain Lien Hua turned on his side and snuggled into his pillow, the sounds of the air handlers blowing cool air through the ship comforting, as always. He opened his eyes for a moment, but the room was dark. He heard muffl
ed voices, outside in the passageway, perhaps. He would instruct Leader Zhou Ping to make sure the crew stayed away from his stateroom. He yawned and prepared to go back to sleep, but realized there was something wrong. He sat up in the bed with a panic rising in his throat, suddenly realizing that the whispering voices were not speaking Mandarin or Cantonese, but some other language. He put his hand out where his sea cabin’s foldout desk should be, but it was not there. Neither was the phone console, nor the ship-control display. He swiveled to put his feet on the deck, but his mattress was already on the floor, a cold tiling beneath his bare feet.

  “What’s going on?” he shouted, running until he hit a heavy curtain, then pulling it aside. He was in a red-lit passageway outside an open curtained area. There were two men standing there, wearing dark coveralls, much like what he was wearing, except they had an enemy symbol on their sleeves—a patch with the image of the flag of the United States. Lien stood and stared, then looked up at the cables and ducts in the overhead. This could easily be the Nung Yahtsu, but things were backward, the bulkheads were too dark, and the deck plate covering was a tile, not rubber with antiskid bumps. He was on a ship, perhaps a submarine, but it was not Chinese. He looked slowly at the Americans, then raised his hands in surrender.

  They motioned him to follow them down the passageway to a steep ship’s ladder. He walked behind one American and in front of the other, down the red lantern-lit companionway to a door marked with English words. One of the crewmen

  knocked, and he was led into a small stateroom, the three meter-square space resembling his sea cabin. A slight man stood up from his small table, a bigger man with him. They both spoke their odd-sounding language, but Lien shook his head, wondering why they didn’t just shoot him right then. The slight man motioned him to sit, and when he did, Lien began to shiver, perhaps from the cold of the room, or perhaps from his fear. The man wrapped a wool blanket around his shoulders and spoke into a telephone, and soon a cook arrived with a pot of tea. Lien refused to drink it. A foreign-smelling plate of food was placed in front of him, and despite his ferocious hunger, he ignored it.