Attack Of The Seawolf

by Michael Dimercurio

  The statement went on for minute after minute, into what seemed like hours to Murphy. Through it all he tried to read and ignore the meaning of the words, but even with Tien’s flat face looking on, with Tarkowski still standing at the table. Murphy heard the words and wanted to throw up. He continued on, thinking that somehow Tien would pay, but also knowing the thought was a vain one. Finally the statement was finished.

  Tien stopped the camera.

  “Commander, I thank you for being a reasonable man. Fighter Sai, release Mr.

  Tarkowski.”

  The guard released his hold on Tarkowski, underwear and coveralls still around his ankles.

  “Let me help you, Tarkowski,” Tien said, bending and gently lifting Tarkowski’s underwear up and pulling his coveralls up over his shoulders. He zipped up the poopy suit and turned around to look at Murphy.

  The guard rolled out the camera and video equipment.

  For a moment Tien just looked at Murphy, then, his eyes still on Murphy’s face, he picked up a phone and spoke some orders into it.

  Immediately the fans wound down, the air conditioning stopped, the lights flickered. The Circuit One announcing system again broadcast Lube Oil Vaughn’s voice to the ship, the voice empty of hope.

  “REACTOR SCRAM,” the voice said.

  Tien turned to the guard: “Turn on the pier floodlights and prepare the buses. Get the prisoners offloaded immediately. I want these buses out of here in ten minutes.”

  Murphy began to protest.

  Tien ignored him as he produced a pistol and put the barrel into Tarkowski’s right nostril. After a moment’s pause, he pulled the trigger, filling the small stateroom with a crashing report. Tarkowski’s head blew apart, the back of his skull flying back against the far bulkhead. Slowly, he sank to the deck, his knees buckling.

  Tien’s pistol was still upraised at the place where Tarkowski’s face had been a moment before. Finally he holstered the pistol and disappeared into the passageway, leaving Murphy alone in his room with the corpse of Greg Tarkowski.

  CHAPTER 18

  SUNDAY, 12 MAY

  1835 GREENWICH MEAN TIME

  Go had bay point hotel, XlNGANG harbor USS seawolf 0235 beijing time

  “Conn, Sonar,” Chief Jeb’s Tennessee accent drawled, “Transients from Friendly One. The Tampa is shutting down her engine room

  “What do you make of that, Captain?” Keebes asked from the deck near the attack center.

  Pacino shrugged.

  “Lookaround number-two scope,” he called as the periscope pole came out of the well, the optic control module clunking to a halt as it cleared the well sill. Pacino snapped the grips down, pushed up his eyepatch and put his eye to the scope trained to the bearing of the P.L.A piers.

  He had expected to have to peer into the dim light, but the brilliance of the pier floodlights burned his retina. When his eyes adjusted he could see the floodlit pier and the dark shapes of the superstructures of the warships tied up pier side Between Target Three and Four the buses were lit up inside. Both buses visible in the line of sight between the Udaloy and the Jianghu had drivers waiting inside them. Pier guards wandered on the narrow strip of concrete visible between the ships, rifles at the ready as if they were expecting something. The decks of the Udaloy, between Tampa and the pier, were lit up.

  There could be only one thing going on with the pier activity and the engine room shutdown, Pacino decided.

  The Chinese were moving the Tampa’s crew to a POW camp.

  The divers had been locked out for almost forty minutes.

  With fifteen minutes to get to the P.L.A pier, that had given them less than half an hour to set up the explosive charges on the surface ships. And Morris had predicted between a half-hour and an hour to lay the charges. He had also promised to keep an eye on the pier for any off load of the crew. Were his VHF walkie talkies up and waiting for him to communicate?

  “Radio, Captain,” Pacino barked into his lip mike, “patch in the VHP freak to the SEAL team to the conn and line up the transmission on the Type-20.”

  “Conn, Radio, aye … Captain, you’re patched in.

  Type-20’s ready to transmit.” The periscope antenna was not usually a transmission device, but the radiomen had wired in the SEALs’ walkie-talkie VHF frequencies into the antenna and rigged it for transmission, thereby avoiding Pacino having to raise the huge Bigmouth antenna for transmitting.

  Pacino pulled a coiled-cord microphone from a console hanging on the aft stainless steel conn handrail, punched a toggle switch on the console, spoke into the mike:

  “Whiskey, this is Bourbon, over.” He listened while looking out the periscope at the pier. Any minute the prisoners would be moved, he thought. He had to act which meant launch the missiles. He fought for control as he called into the microphone a second time.

  “Whiskey, Whiskey, this is Bourbon, over. I say again. Whiskey, this is Bourbon, come in, over.”

  Still nothing from the SEALs. There was the off chance that they couldn’t transmit, could only listen.

  Pacino decided to send his message and hope they received it. He didn’t want to think what would happen if they didn’t.

  “Whiskey, this is Bourbon, break. I am executing Plan Juliet. I say again, I am executing Plan Juliet, break. Bourbon, out.”

  What else could he do? The satchel charges were not laid in time, the SEALs had not yet opened fire on the pier, and they didn’t answer the radio call. Plan Juliet, “J” for Javelin, was the fallback.

  Pacino snapped up the grips on the periscope and rotated the control ring, sending the pole back down into the well. He turned to stand at the railing and looked out at the assembled battle stations watch standers The time had come. The show was his now.

  “Attention in the firecontrol team. We’re executing Plan Juliet; the Chinese are getting ready to off load Tampa’s crew onto buses waiting at the pier. Firingpoint procedures. Javelin missiles, tube one Target Three, tube two Target Two.”

  “Ship ready,” Tim Turner said.

  “Weapons ready,” Feyley reported from the weapon-control panel.

  “Solutions ready,” Keebes said in front of Pos Two.

  “Tube one,” Pacino ordered.

  “Shoot.”

  “Fire,” Feyley barked from the WCP, pulling the trigger. From the deck below the violent blast of the tube belching the missile into the sea popped the eardrums of the men in the control room.

  “Tube two. Shoot.”

  “Fire,” Feyley said again. Again the tube ejection mechanism filled the ship with a roaring boom as the ultra-high-pressure air loaded a piston that pressurized a water tank surrounding the torpedo tube, the pressurized water pushing the Javelin’s capsule out of the tube like a schoolboy’s spit wad flying out of a straw.

  “Tubes one and two fired electrically,” Feyley reported.

  “Conn, Sonar, own-ship’s units, normal launches.”

  Pacino wondered what the Chinese on the pier were thinking at that moment.

  “Off’sa’deck,” Pacino ordered Turner, “train the thruster to two seven

  zero and turn the ship around to the east. Let’s get the hell away from the end of the pier.”

  “Aye, sir.”

  Somewhere above them two solid fuel rockets were igniting, sending two cruise missiles at two of the surface warships. It would not do for them to remain too long under the rocket plumes, two fingers pointing at their position.

  “Conn, Sonar, we have rocket-motor ignition, units one and two.”

  Javelin Unit One was ejected from the starboard side of the Seawolf by the water pressure of the tube. Silently it glided from the tube, accelerating as it slipped past the skin of the ship and emerged fully over sixty feet below the murky surface of the Go Hai Bay. As the stern of the encapsulated missile came out of the tube door, twin fins snapped down into place and acted as elevators, turning the missile toward the surface above. The missile was moving at thirty feet per second a
s it angled upward, reaching the surface three seconds after it left the tube. The nose cone of the capsule broached, sensing balmy May air on its surface, drying out two of the electronic sensors that proved it was no longer underwater. Next, the nose cone of the capsule blew off, exposing the nose cone of the Javelin missile inside.

  For a moment the capsule bobbed in the water, the lid spinning in the night air twenty feet overhead. In the next instant the missile streaked out of the capsule, its rocket motor’s white-hot flames sinking the capsule and hurling the missile clear of the water toward the overcast sky, the moonlight glinting off the flat black of its paint. The rocket’s trail of flame extended vertically several thousand feet above the water, vanishing into a cloud.

  Seconds later the Unit Two capsule of the second Javelin penetrated the surface, the second nose cone blowing toward the sky, a prelude to the

  second missile’s liftoff sequence. Milliseconds later the second unit roared out of its capsule and flashed toward the sky, its flame trail illuminating the end of the supertanker pier and the water of the slip between the tanker and P.L.A piers. The second unit flew up into the night sky as if chasing the first unit, the twin missiles’ exhausts blindingly bright, their noise deafening.

  At four thousand feet the rocket motor of Unit One cut out, the missile still rising skyward from the momentum of the initial thrust. At forty-five hundred feet eight explosive bolts detonated at the ring joint between the missile and the solid rocket booster. At five thousand feet the unit’s upward velocity stopped and for a moment the unit flew horizontally, until the missile nosed over and began a dive, popping out the wings and the air-intake duct, the rudder turning, taking the weapon toward the north as it began to pull out of its dive.

  Moments later the second unit also discarded its rocket motor, came to its peak altitude and nosed down toward the ground, this unit turning south. As both weapons picked up speed in their plunge toward earth, the jet engine sustainers came on-line, propelling both units at speeds just under Mach 1, the better to avoid a sonic boom that would give the missiles away. Once their rocket trails vanished, the missiles would likewise disappear, vaporizing into the radar grass and ground clutter.

  The first unit pulled out of its dive at an altitude of forty feet, continuing to the north, flying over the P.L.A Navy compound and continuing north and inland, flying over the dingy buildings of the village of Dagu.

  The second unit pulled out and headed south, hugging the coastline of the bay.

  Both weapons had been “over-the-shoulder” shots.

  The distance from the Seawolf to the targets had been much too close for the units to perform their climb outs jet engine light-offs, pullouts and target approaches in a mere two hundred yards. The minimum firing range was four thousand yards. The weapons had to be ordered to reach their targets by first flying away from them, then when stable at low altitudes to turn and fly back.

  Unit One continued north for a mile, then wiggled the rudder and pulled three g’s in a 180-degree turn.

  Once settled on the southern course, back toward the pier, the unit turned on its radar seeker, the superstructures of the enemy surface ships memorized. It flew south at 570 knots, returning over the village of Dagu, intent on finding its surface-ship target at the P.L.A Navy piers. While Unit One flew in from the north. Unit Two made its 180-degree turn, steadying up on a course of due north, the ground of the bay’s coast streaking by beneath the fuselage.

  Now at the pier, the two missiles flew in on straight flight paths, one from the south, one from the north, radar-seekers searching, warheads arming.

  Fighter Sai climbed out of the hatchway and stretched on the curving hull of the Tampa. He was hungry.

  Leader Tien Tse-Min was obsessed, he thought, never stopping an interrogation until he’d gotten the last possible bit of information, and confession-reading.

  The man was a pain in the ass. He put his outsized hands in his pockets and slowly walked toward the gangway leading to the Kunming, the destroyer tied up between the American submarine and the pier. As soon as the guards on the pier were ready and the buses were started, he would begin offloading the prisoners for their all-night trek to the Shenyang Camp.

  Sai wasn’t told how long the men were to be kept there, but if they were going to Shenyang the stay would probably be permanent. Who cared? This was all a welcome diversion in the war with the White Army. As soon as the prisoners were moved he would return with Tien to Beijing and join the P.L.A forces guarding the city from the expected White Army offensive.

  He felt better as he thought of killing Taiwanese soldiers and turncoat mainland rebels.

  Abruptly, the noise of a crashing explosion sounded from behind him.

  He slammed into the deck of the gangway, startled when the noise did not end but continued, an earsplitting shriek, from the direction of the supertanker-pier. For a moment he thought that a supertanker had exploded into flames. Slowly the noise receded, and by the light of the fire behind him he found the railing of the gangway and pulled himself up.

  In the sky to the south, two rockets were blasting into the atmosphere, their tails spewing white smoke that seemed to originate at the seaward tip of the empty supertanker pier. He hurried back down the gangway, turned toward the access hatch and lowered himself down the ladder to the Tampa’s upper level.

  It took several minutes to find Leader Tien Tse-Min, and when Sai reported what he had seen, Tien’s face became flushed. It was the first time Sai could remember Tien showing any emotion.

  Commander Jack Morris thought he had heard something, a thudding sound. Almost like one of his air bottles had knocked against the other, but the bottles were covered with rubber to deaden any such noise.

  After a moment he heard the sound again, and then nothing more. The trouble with interpreting sounds in water was the sound velocity. With two ears, listening in air, sound speeds were slow enough so that one ear heard a noise before the other, giving the brain a clue to the direction of the noise. Underwater, sound velocity was so quick that both ears heard a noise at the same time, making it impossible to determine what direction the sound had come from.

  Morris decided to take another look at the pier. He tugged on his buddy-line to Black Bart and the two men slowly ascended to the surface between the bow of the seaward frigate and the stern of the neighboring destroyer. Morris was preparing to unbuckle the lanyard to Bart and climb up on the pier pilings when he saw the white plume of a rocket exhaust overhead, terminating at an orange point of light high in the sky above.

  Quickly Morris submerged, pulling on Bart’s lanyard, pulling him deep. Morris hauled in the line, putting his mask up to Bart’s. Morris directed him to the outboard destroyer while Morris headed for the inboard destroyer. Only an emergency would make Morris split from his swimming partner. This was definitely an emergency … two cruise missiles were on the way in to hit the very ships on which his men were laying explosive keel charges. The demolition operation would have to be aborted; the men would have to be extracted and prepared for boarding the Tampa.

  Morris gave hand signals to Bart in rapid Ameslan, the sign language for the deaf: “You and first platoon go to bow, attack ship immediately after missile impacts.”

  As soon as the Javelins exploded, Bart’s bow platoon would board and take the hatch forward of the sail. At the same time Morris’s second and third platoons would board and take the aft section of the ship, third platoon going in the aft hatch to the engine room second platoon in the amidships access to the aft part of the forward compartment.

  “If no impact in fifteen minutes, missiles are dead and we go back to kill the destroyers.” Bart nodded.

  “Lennox goes with me,” Morris’s hand signs added. Bart gave an okay sign. Morris slapped his head, a SEAL gesture for good luck.

  As Morris swam the length of the destroyer’s barnacle-encrusted hull, waving the men away from their demolition task, he had to consider why Seawolf had launched. What c
ame to mind was that the Tampa crew were being moved and Pacino hadn’t had time to tell him. Morris bit angrily into the rubber of his regulator—he hated a plan that stumbled. Now the element of surprise was gone, risking his men even more, unless he could get aboard the Tampa while the crews of the surface ships and the guards were still confused over the damage from the missiles.

  He gathered with the second and third platoons under the Tampa’s huge spiral-bladed screw and checked his watch. Bart would be assembling

  the first platoon at Tampa’s bow. He pulled the platoon leaders close. One shone his hooded light on Morris while Morris gave the hand signals that relayed his orders for the platoon assignments, adding that he and Lennox would go into the forward compartment with the second platoon. He looked at Lennox, who seemed under control, but his eyes were just a fraction too wide, betraying his fear. Hell, Morris thought, if Lennox were to check my eyes he’d see the same thing.

  The only difference was that this was his job. And he was good at it.

  Morris checked his watch again. 0249. He pointed to the surface and pumped his fins, taking his men shallow. The missiles should be impacting in the next few moments unless they veered off course or were shot down. He reached out, felt the steel of Tampa’s tapering aft-section under her screw and followed the curvature upward to the rudder, then continued forward to the top of the hull, still submerged. He put his fins on the top of the hull and swam the remaining few feet to the surface. The pier was lit with floodlights, as were the destroyer decks. The Tampa’s deck was lit only dimly by the wash of light from the neighboring ships. He caught sight of a guard hurrying into the forward escape-trunk hatch, a surprised look on his face.

  Morris brought his watch up. 0250. He would have to wait another ten minutes before hitting the submarine’s deck. That or the missiles would have to arrive.

  He ducked his head back below the surface and checked his men. All signaled okay.