morning run for them.
Choir took off his sunglasses and looked at his compass. “ Six miles to the choppers,” he said. “How you holdin’ up, boyo?”
Lawson didn’t answer.
“Hey,” said Choir, “you all right?” There was still no answer. Choir unbuckled, leaned forward over the driver’s column, and felt for the Delta man’s carotid artery. It was beating, slowly but steadily. Lawson had a babylike expression on his face.
“You bastard!” said the normally polite Choir. With Aussie’s second morphine shot in him, Lawson had been blissfully out of it all the way across the ice.
It didn’t take him long, but by the time Robert Brentwood got into the SCUBA suit that was the fold-down bunk’s mattress, his face was glistening with perspiration and the approaching blip of the other sub was much larger on the screen, now being only nine hundred yards — a half mile — away. Brentwood spat into the SCUBA helmet’s face mask, rubbing the spittle around on it so as to prevent condensation.
“Nice shooting!” David told Aussie, watching the faint glimmer of the Hind’s debris burning as he helped Salvini lift the M-60 from the Arrow’s nose.
“Thanks, mate,” Aussie told David. “Wasn’t a bad shot at that. Now all we have to do is walk to the choppers.”
“What d’you say?” asked Salvini. “Must be eleven to twelve miles?”
“Nearer eleven,” said Aussie, “as the crow flies. Everybody up to it?”
“No worries, mate,” said Salvini, borrowing the Aussie’s accent.
“ ‘Sat a fact, mate? A dozen Foster’s you’re the first to beg—
“Is she any good?”
“Hey,” said Salvini, “you’re travelin’ light. This M-60 weighs a ton, man. Plus I’ve got the two oh three,” he added, slapping the grenade-launcher barrel on his personnel M-16.
“Oh, tell the about it, Salvini,” said Aussie, shouldering the sniper rifle case.
“Knock it off, you two,” said David Brentwood. “We’re not into the woods yet and We’ve got—”
“Shush!” It was Aussie. “You hear that?”
All Brentwood and Salvini could hear was the blizzard, its cold dropping the temperature another ten degrees to minus forty, turning their perspiration to ice — a major danger, even to the Arctic-trained commandos. You had to keep moving, cool off gradually, otherwise the perspiration could encase you, despite the layers, in a sheath of ice. Hypothermia could set in without you knowing it. You’d start to feel peculiarly warm, slow, and comfortable, the agony of frost nip passing through frostbite and then — to nothingness.
“Can’t be anything,” said David to Aussie’s inquiry, though he was conscious his ears were still ringing from the battle.
“A motor?” proffered Salvini, still hearing only the blizzard.
“Nah,” said Aussie. “ ‘S gone now.” They started off, Aussie pulling back his parka’s Velcro mouth guard then ripping the wrapper from a Hershey bar. As far as he was concerned, it was the only good part of the rations. “Thought I heard a dog.”
“Sure you didn’t fart?” asked Salvini.
“Oh, very droll. Very fucking—”
“Shut up!” ordered David. “Save your energy.” They had a minimum of eleven miles with heavy pack. They should make it in less than two hours, providing they kept a strict east-northeast heading. David slipped the compass string about his neck, not standard marching procedure but he didn’t want to veer off the 22.5-degree heading by even a few yards. He would need to glance at the compass often without having to dig into his pockets, letting in the frigid air.
As Robert Brentwood sat in the pitch darkness of the five-foot-diameter, six-foot-high escape hatch, the luminescent glow of the pressure gauge became visible only when the escape chamber was already half full of water. The surge was less violent now than the initial rush of water, but he was still uncomfortable. Compared to his last semiannual “submarine survival” update course in the Norfolk, Virginia, water tank, the claustrophobia he was suffering now was markedly more severe. He hadn’t suffered from it when he first joined the navy — it had crept up on him over the years, the fear kept at bay in the much larger nuclear subs. But even there it had become exacerbated after he had lost the USS
The temperature of the water swirling about his neck was only two degrees or so above freezing, shocking his system until the microslim water layer between the Arctic SCUBA suit and his skin could steady the heat exchange ratio. His body’s thermostat adjusted as he kept clenching and unclenching his fingers in the tight yet spongy rubber gloves. He told himself, forced himself, to be calm, feeling only an inch or so away from sheer terror as the water level reached the base of the SCUBA helmet and began creeping up, covering the visor. He counted slowly, as he had habitually done during the yearly prostate examination, the naval doctor impatiently ordering otherwise imperturbably calm officers not to stiffen up. “Relax the sphincter, man. Relax, damn it!”
Then the gauge, as well as the cessation of the rushing water, told him he could now open the top hatch. The moment he’d done so he felt his body rising effortlessly, the flippers grazing the hatch edge, his breathing still too fast — the visor, despite the spittle precaution, suddenly misting at the shock of seeing the other GST only sixty feet away. While stilled in neutral buoyancy, its bow had a slight up angle, its fat teardrop shape outlined in the blackness by beads of phosphorescent freshwater plankton, first cousins of the kind that gave sea waves their luminescence even on the darkest night. Unhesitatingly looping the basket he’d made from his T-shirt under the knife scabbard so as to prevent its sinking should he be buffeted by an upwelling, he swam, arms by his side, straight for the GST, struck by the irony that, though he would show up on the enemy’s sonar as a very discernible blip, his shape like the seal he’d fired upon, they would be as confused as he had been.
It was only then that he saw what could only be a raft, its outline, for some inexplicable reason, only partially delineated here and there by phytoplankton. It looked to be about thirty feet square, half as long as the GST itself, its neutral buoyancy assured by what must obviously be depth-sensitive floats.
Exhilarated by the discovery of how it was that the midget subs were in effect hauling their own torpedo and cruise missile resupply, the raft probably holding eight missiles at least — two salvos’ worth, in addition to the four already on the GST — it took him only a minute to swim to the raft.
About to place a lump of C-4 plastique from the T-shirt basket, he felt a U shackle, about five-eighths inch in diameter, he guessed, connecting the cables between the enemy GST and its raft. Using the handle spike on the end of his knife he unscrewed it and immediately felt the raft moving away from him. Now it could not act as a flotation platform for the GST. Next Brentwood turned his attention to the GST.
Within ten feet of the sub, he noticed the curved phosphorescent outline of the GST break, as if a string of pearls had been cut, most of the microscopic creatures disappearing as quickly as they must have alighted on the midget submarine. Without their guiding light he slowed, not wanting to bump into the hull but rather stand off it. Feeling the long, horizontal, stovepipe shape of one of the cruise missiles, he looped the T-shirt basket about its twenty-one-inch-diameter mouth, tying the basket tightly. Next, he pushed the basket’s “goodies,” as Johnson had referred to the centrex plastique, hard between the mouth of the cruise and the algae-slicked metal of the V-weld that connected the cruise tube to the pressure hull.
Making sure, purely by feel, that the six-inch-long detonator was firmly embedded in the plastique, he turned the timer knob sharply counterclockwise, feeling the soft click. Glancing back, he saw his own sub clearly outlined by the phosphorescent phytoplankton. He turned and, kicking hard, started back to the sub, then felt a vibration behind him to his right. He turned to see a spume of luminescent bubbles erupting behind him from the hatch of the enemy GST. The trail of bubbles then abruptly changed from the vertical to the horizontal as the attacker, his knife trailing a secondary stream of bubbles, came straight at him.
It was all confusion, but instinctively Brentwood’s left arm shot for the thinner trail to grab the knife arm.
