by David Poyer
The next morning, Gordon lay on the fantail with the other EOD men, watching the sun come up as the sweeps maneuvered into a line of bearing across an unmarked scarlet-shimmering expanse. The rumble of diesels was reassuring under him. It was nice to be under way on their own power. The MSOs were spaced a mile apart, and he could see the other teams waiting, too.
As the morning wore on, they moved steadily ahead, like combines, he thought, each harvesting its own strip of a vast gently undulating field. Occasionally, one or the other would heave to, and a signal would flutter up its halyards and then hang limp, barely stirring; he wondered how the signalmen could read them. There was not a breath of wind. The air felt ominous and dense, like some intermediate medium between atmosphere and water. The divers lay silent in the inflated rafts; it was too hot to talk.
Finally he felt the need for a change. He got up, stretched, and wandered up to combat.
CIC was snug and dark, a grottolike retreat, and the coolest place on the ship. He stood for a while behind the petty officer on the SQQ-14. Though they still carried cutter cables and paravanes, sweepers didn’t use them much anymore. With the “Squeaky Fourteen,” a sensitive short-range sonar, they could see in front of them, see the ground below. “How’s bottom, there, Hicks?” he asked at last.
The sonarman half-turned, then faced the screen again. “Hey, Senior. It’s smooth at ninety feet. Looks like sand.”
Beside the console was a lat-long gridded bottom chart, computer-generated, with every oil drum and discarded pipe and sunken dhow marked as a chatter of black dots. It was dated the year before. Anything new since then would be regarded with suspicion. The sonarman turned a dial and a shimmering wedge of amber searched out. There was another, fainter shimmer off to starboard, the sonar of the other sweeps.
“Don’t be afraid to call me. If there’s anything questionable. We’ll be glad to check it out.”
The sonarman nodded. Gordon stood there for a few more minutes, till he felt chilled. His trunks and T-shirt were soaked and the air conditioning turned them into liquid ice. He considered going up to the bridge, then decided against it. He went back to the stern instead, stopping on the mess decks on the way for a jug of bug juice and some Styrofoam cups.
The other divers were glad to see it. He shared out the pink fluid, then settled back beside Everett. The banker had been quiet all morning, jotting from time to time in a daybook.
He muttered, “Lem, how’s Rosemary takin’ this, your being gone?”
The banker pursed his lips, glanced away, just as he had when Gordon discussed his mortgage with him. “All right.”
“You getting letters?”
“Yup.”
“Regular?”
“Yup.” He put the notebook away and looked at Gordon. “Ola hasn’t been writing?”
“No.”
“Uh-huh.”
They sat silent together for a while longer, then Gordon tried again. “We haven’t been married all that long.”
“How long?”
“Three years.”
“That’s long enough.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, that’s long enough,” said Everett. “I been married twenty-three, and that’s too long. Three sounds about right. You ain’t worried about her, are you, John?”
“Not exactly.”
“Ola’s a steady girl. She appreciates you. She put up with a lot from that bum she was married to before.”
There was nothing much more to say after that. So Terger brought out cards, and they played cribbage until it was time for lunch.
At two-thirty, the beat of the diesels suddenly ceased. A signal licked up the mast as Audacity coasted forward, her stern skating around to the east. The phone talker, comatose since he came on watch, sat up from his slump against the bulkhead. He said, “Fantail, aye,” and his eyes met Gordon’s. “EOD team, man up!”
Kearn came aft along the port side. His cheroot probed the air like an insect’s antennae. “On deck, look alive!” he shouted. “Time to earn that hazardous-duty pay.”
“Espèce d’enfoire … Let’s take that bastard down with us,” muttered Maudit. “With halothane in his tanks—”
“Pipe down, Tony. Lem, hand our gear down once we’re in the water. Lieutenant, hold this.”
Kearn took the sea painter reflexively, then looked even more sour as he realized he’d just been pressed into duty as boat tender. Burgee, Terger, and Maudit seized the body of the raft. Gordon took the bow.
The thirteen-foot Z-bird scraped over the side and hit with a hollow splash. Audacity still had way on, and Kearn almost went in after it when its drag came on the line. He cursed them all and took a turn around the life rail. No one answered or even looked at him.
“In we go.” They scrambled over in tennis shoes and swim trunks. Gordon held the walkie-talkie high. The boat rocked dangerously till he sat down. Everett began lowering gear from the deck. Evinrude and gas tank. Wet suits, three Mark 16 UBAs, fins, and masks. Net bags with tools, time fuzes, and smaller gear.
Last came the tricky stuff: two twenty-pound haversacks of C-4, already made up with det cord. Gordon stowed these carefully under the overhang at the front of the raft. It was supposed to be stable to shock and heat, but it wasn’t good practice to take chances. Not till you had to.
Lem squatted on the sheer strake, then jumped down. Gordon nodded to the lieutenant to cast off as Burgee yanked the starter. The motor caught at the first pull and they curved off to port, bobbing as the wake caught up to them.
He turned on the walkie-talkie, holding the stub antenna vertical. “Hicks, this is Chief Gordon.”
“Hello, Senior.”
“What have we got?”
“A nice solid return. Survey shows nothing at that position. It’s out along two-two-zero from us, about four hundred yards.”
“Do you hold us on the fourteen?”
“Not yet. Have you got the marker over?”
Gordon looked aft. Terger was just lowering it. The metal reflector, diamond-shaped to show up clearly to sonar, went down on twenty feet of bright yellow polyethylene. “It’s going in now.”
Apparently an officer, Kearn or Hunnicutt, had come in; the scope operator’s tone went suddenly formal. “Audacity One, this is Audacity, I hold you now. Proceed on two-two … correction, two-one-zero till I tell you to stop.”
Gordon rogered and repeated the course to Burgee. The boat lifted her nose and began porpoising through the swell. Spray arched up and blew over them. He tasted for the first time the bitterness of the Gulf.
Back at the sonar, safely out of range of danger, Hicks would be watching the two pings—the possible mine, and the smaller return of the nonmagnetic marker on the raft—converging. The gray hull of the sweep shrank steadily.
“Audacity One: Slow down. I see you twenty yards right of track.”
“Slowing, coming left to two-oh-five magnetic.”
Burgee had already reduced speed; Gordon motioned to cut it even more. Slow and quiet, that was how you approached a possible mine. All their gear was designed for low magnetic signature, but it still had some, and a gradual approach reduced their impression on any sensors. The Evinrude was barely audible now, and with its above-water exhaust, they’d be putting even less noise into the sea. A few minutes later, the radio said, “Audacity One … stop.”
The purr eased to an idle. They lost way at once and began to bob, jostling men and gear about on the floorboards. “Where do you hold us now?” Gordon asked the radio.
“Wait a minute … okay, got you. A little ahead.” The sonar-man jockeyed them about for a few more minutes, then abruptly told them to drop. Gordon nodded and Terger popped a buoy. He lowered the little mushroom anchor cautiously. A moment later, the red buoy, still inflating, bobbed up hissing on a wave.
“Let’s get moving,” Gordon said.
Not knowing what kind of mines they’d be facing, he’d decided to use the Mark 16s. This
was a low-magnetic-signature rig compared to standard gear, and since it was semiclosed, recycling used air instead of releasing it to the sea, it was quieter, too. This might be important. There were mines that could listen, feel, sense metal near them, count, do everything but smell.
The others helped them into the UBAs. The oxygen tank, CO2 scrubber, and breathing bag were housed in smooth plastic on the diver’s back. Breathing was through twin hoses, like the old “Sea Hunt” scubas. Gordon finished adjusting his straps. He set the handwheel and turned the flow valve, tucking the mouthpiece between his teeth and lips. He took five slow breaths, sucking it in deep. Some said they couldn’t tell any difference, but to him the helium-oxygen mixture felt cold and thick and tasted steely. He finished the last breath, pinched off the tube, tongued out the mouthpiece. “How do I sound?” he asked Burgee.
“Donald Duck himself.”
He nodded. Helium gave your voice that quack. He stared over the side, his fingers moving over his gear. He clipped the electronic oxygen readout onto the side of his mask, sprayed the faceplate with defogger, and put it on.
The red buoy waited a few feet away, tossing nervously at the entrance to the deep.
“Tony, you ready to go?”
“Helium check.”
“You sound like a real Frenchman, talking through his nose.”
“Ça pue le fauve, les français.”
He raised the walkie-talkie again, told the ship they were going in, and handed it to Everett. He looked around one last time. The sky was so bright.
He picked up the net bag and thrust his legs over the side. Without a ripple, he merged feetfirst with the sea.
* * *
The water was warm as urine and faintly tinged the same color. Still, visibility was good; he could see the buoy line thirty feet away. He twisted in a slow circle beneath the raft, checking for snakes. But there was nothing in the water with him but a slow mist of plankton. There was a distant eerie crackle, shrimp or some other bottom dweller. The sea was never silent. It always reminded him how transient their presence in it was.
Maudit appeared feetfirst, the usual conservative EOD water entry. He oriented and did a three-sixty search, too. Gordon grinned around his mouthpiece, then stopped. It wouldn’t hurt to keep an eye over their shoulders. The list of nasties here was longer than in Lake Champlain. Sea snakes, scorpion fish, sharks, sea wasps so poisonous they could paralyze a man.
He’d seen a buddy die off Kwajalein from carelessness. They’d stopped to refuel on their way to Vietnam, and decided to go for a dip beside the runway. The man had reached for a pretty shell on the bottom. It had stung him. He’d lived for about half an hour, smoking a cigarette at first, then going slowly rigid till he could no longer breathe or blink or even beat his heart.
Above them, the prop began to sing, then faded slowly into the distance. Gordon located the buoy line, yellow against sepia, ducked his head, and began swimming down it.
There didn’t seem to be a current. He cleared his ears twice as he dropped. The air hissed past his teeth and chilled his tongue. Something jangled in his tool bag and he shifted it around till it stopped.
He waved Maudit a hold-up signal at thirty feet. If it was a moored mine, it shouldn’t be much deeper than this. He pulled out his buddy line, clipped a second one to that, and snapped the pair to the buoy line.
They swam in a twenty-foot circle without seeing anything. Maudit added his line and they made another, much wider circle. But still they found only the sea, darker, still seething with the fine soup of near-microscopic organisms. He wondered what they ate. Then he wondered what ate them. Probably the shrimp. Their clicking was louder now. He examined the darkness below, a drab, ominous green-brown.
He looked at the compass again. Their target, the metal thing that hadn’t been here a year before, couldn’t be far away. Maybe it was deeper. Maybe he was swimming just past it. Maybe it was off to the side.
At that moment, Gordon sensed something ahead of him.
He reached out to snag Maudit by the backpack. They hovered, and then, together, moved forward, very slowly indeed.
Through the seething murk something took shape, a presence darker than the surrounding sea. A shadow, looming up from the deep. A roundness, with points crowning its smooth curvature.
He knew what it was before there was time to think. He’d seen them the first time he’d gone through Mine Warfare School, twenty years before. He’d flash-carded this patient silhouette a thousand times.
A KMB-9. Old, but deadly still. It hung motionless in the gloom, a black sphere a meter across. Five hundred pounds of cast explosive, enough to snap the keel of anything up to a battleship.
He glanced at his depth gauge. Set at thirty-five feet, just right for a fully loaded tanker. A cable led down into the gloom, into the mad, shrill chorus of clicking and whistling, as if a million devils waited down there for him.
He signaled to his partner and approached the mine, sculling with his arms at a creeping pace. Foot by foot, it grew more distinct. Corrosion and slime coated the black body. He let himself rise a little and examined the horns. This was a contact mine. When they were pressed in, struck by a passing ship or tossed back into the hull as the bow wave passed, they shattered a glass capsule of acid, sending a current to the detonator.
It hung patiently in the gloom, silent, obsolete, simple, and deadly.
Okay, to deal with it. A contact mine could be rendered safe, but there was no point in disarming this one. They’d explode it in place. First, though, he had to make sure of one thing. He valved off a little air and sank, swam beneath it, past the cable, and came up the other side.
He circled it very slowly with his mask two feet away. He was looking not only for identification but for signs of tampering, new bolts or attachments.
Gordon couldn’t help thinking just then of a pineapple mine, years before.
There was a scratch in the paint of the bottom hemisphere. A few barnacles had already attached themselves to the shiny metal. He decided it was accidental, dinged when unknown hands had shoved it off the stern of a dhow or coaster.
He realized then he’d been holding his breath. He inhaled and exhaled several times, flushing his lungs, and checked the oxygen readout. It glowed a reassuring green.
Okay? Maudit, holding up the copacetic sign, with his eyebrows raised behind tempered glass.
Okay. He backed off, fumbled in his bag, came up with a yellow Nikonos.
When he was done taking pictures, he motioned the other man forward and took the haversack from him. He pulled a bungee cord from his belt. This would be the dangerous part. And thinking this, he signaled clumsily in alphabet code: Tell them mine. And he pointed up.
His partner nodded and began finning sunward. When he was out of sight, Gordon took several slow breaths, flushing his lungs again.
When he felt better, he slung the haversack over his shoulder and took the bungee in both hands. Moving very slowly, like a man trying to rope a squirrel, he edged up on the sphere from below. It was supposed to take a hefty impact to crush the ampuls, but the wires leading into them could corrode. Then a bump would set them off. After all, these things were fifty, sixty years old, some of them. He hoped they weren’t too fragile. He was going to bump it around some. Right now.
His hands brushed it. The first time he’d actually touched it. The metal was cold and rough.
Gordon attached one of the bungee hooks to one of the grommets in the haversack, then held the charge in his left hand while he reached around the mine with his right. He pulled the elastic taut and made the other hook fast on the far side. Then, holding the haversack against it, he reached round the mine, keeping the bungee taut, and hooked it up over a padeye.
He let go and backed away. He began breathing again, then noticed that his oxygen light was blinking. Time to valve off. He retreated to twelve feet just for good practice, purged bubbles into the sea, and waited till the light glowed solid again. Then
, hand extended for the dangling sling of the haversack, he went in again.
Maudit reappeared above, dropping toward him out of the light like a descending angel. The far-above sun sprayed topaz rays from his black silhouette. Gordon hesitated for a long moment with the strap, then dropped its loop over a horn. He was careful not to touch the prong itself. It settled into place and he backed off again.
It looked good. The bungee held the olive-drab pack against the curved black belly, about where Australia would be on a globe. Then he recalled he hadn’t gotten the det cord. Stupid. He unbuttoned the haversack and pulled out the coil of explosive cord. Maudit came around the mine—he’d been checking the placement—and Gordon handed it to him.
There. He backpedaled another three feet and breathed again, surveying his work one last time. The mine spun on its cable, disturbed, but already damping out as the horns swayed leisurely through the water. He glanced at Maudit; the other diver’s eye closed in a wink behind the mask.
Gordon gave him a thumbs-up.
The pale thread spun out behind them as they ascended. When they broke surface, he thrust back his mask, blinking as salt water splashed into his eyes. Then he kicked himself high, craning around for the boat. He caught it four or five hundred yards off. A faint shout came across the water. He raised his arm and signaled them in.
“What was it?” Everett asked as he pulled them in.
“KMB-9. Russian. Got the popper set?”
“Almost ready.” Burgee lifted the plastic float to show him, then resumed work. Maudit handed him the bitter end of the det cord. He carefully divided it and attached the blasting cap and time fuze. He held it up and looked at Gordon, who nodded.
“Want to pull it?”
“Live dangerous, Clint.”
The electrician grinned. There was a double crack, a puff of white smoke, and the fuzes began hissing. He pitched the float over the side. “Fire in the hole!”
The ship grew much more slowly, it seemed to him, than it had receded. Burgee had the engine all out and they skipped over the waves. Finally, they reached the minesweeper. They tossed gear up to the deck, scrambled up, catching splinters on the wooden hull, and hauled the raft up after them as the MSO gathered way. The Z-bird seemed a hell of a lot lighter now. Adrenaline, Gordon thought.