Straits of Power

“Understood.”

Jeffrey grabbed an internal intercom, for Challenger’s bridge. “Bridge, Captain, cut the fiber-optic cable. Clear the bridge, smartly. Shut and dog both sail-trunk hatches.”

The men on the bridge acknowledged.

The data link was broken.

“Green board, sir,” COB reported. Challenger was ready to dive.

Jeffrey watched the chronometer on his console. Each remaining second of that minute felt like a lifetime.

Everyone in the control room cringed when they heard the groaning of protesting steel. Some crewmen feared the Bunga Azul was breaking up or sinking already. But that groaning had a different cause.

“Bottom doors have not opened!” Bell reported. “Bottom doors appear to be warped and jammed by torpedo hits!”

We’re trapped. The Snow Tiger will get in position and shoot at us repeatedly after the Bunga Azul goes down…. We’re defenseless. The German will keep firing until Challenger is smashed to pieces.

Jeffrey grabbed the 1MC. It was noisy, but that was the least of his problems. It was the best way to reach anyone, anywhere in the ship, even if they were asleep. “Lieutenant Estabo to the control room smartly.”

There was another groaning noise: Siregar trying again to open the doors.

“Doors have not opened!” Bell yelled.

Challenger jolted. There was a different sound, a metallic scraping.

“Sail roof is hitting hold overhead.”

Jeffrey had only one choice. “Chief of the Watch, flood all main ballast-tank groups.”

“Flood main ballast, aye!”

COB flipped switches. A new noise started, the roaring of air forced out of the vents in the tops of the ballast tanks, as seawater displaced the air and flooded into the tanks from below.

“Chief of the Watch, flood the negative tank.”

“Flood negative, aye.”

This would make Challenger heavier, giving her negative buoyancy. Jeffrey hoped her weight pressing down on the bottom doors might make them spring open.

Challenger bounced down onto the hold’s supporting rubber blocks, landing slightly cockeyed. The control-room deck was tilted a few degrees down and to the right.

It didn’t work. The bottom doors stayed shut.

Felix Estabo arrived.

“I’ll make this short,” Jeffrey told him. “The bottom doors are jammed and we need to break them open with explosive charges planted on each hinge. Take your men and enough equipment, suit up with compressed-air tanks, lock out of Challenger, and get it done.”

“Are we sinking?”

“We will be very soon.”

Felix nodded grimly and ran below.

Jeffrey knew he’d probably just given Felix and Chief Costa and their men death sentences. Once the Bunga Azul left the surface, her depth would increase quickly. Men working in scuba would be exposed to ever-greater pressure. At some point, their compressed-air supply would start to become poisonous.

But we don’t have mixed-gas rigs that could let them cope at deeper depth. Nobody thought we’d need them.

Then there was decompression sickness, when the men came back into the ship — the bends, agonizing, and fatal if severe enough.

Jeffrey had no choice. All he could do was wait.

COB reported when the SEALs were locking out of Challenger. Jeffrey ordered the on-hull photonic sensors activated, in laser line-scan mode for illumination. Control-room monitors let him and his crew observe as the SEALs went to work with practiced skill. From his own SEAL training years before, Jeffrey assumed they’d use as a time delay — to let them get back into his ship — a proper length of fuse cord that would burn slowly even deep underwater, lit by a tiny explosive charge set off manually by a trigger and percussion cap. But the details were up to Felix.

Jeffrey watched in anguish as the men moved in slow motion through the water outside the hull, using small portable floodlights to see in the dark around Jeffrey’s blue-green lasers. If they didn’t finish fast enough and succeed in blowing open the doors, the Bunga Azul would hit the bottom. Then Challenger would never escape.

“Hold is fully flooded,” Bell reported.

“Very well, Fire Control…. Helm, call out your depth as indicated by sea pressure in the hold.”

“Fifty-five feet, sir.”

Allowing for her deep draft and her freeboard, the Bunga Azul would go under any moment.

An explosion from somewhere rocked the ship. Jeffrey thought it was another torpedo hit. He realized it was too soon for that, given the distance and speed of the Snow Tiger and her weapons. He suspected that a hot auxiliary boiler on the host ship, already weakened by mechanical stress, had burst from thermal shock when suddenly covered by much colder water.

The vibrations stopped; the Bunga Azul’s engines had gone dead. The sensation was replaced by heavy shuddering, with more metallic groans and eerie crying sounds as the Bunga Azul left the surface.

“Depth eighty feet,” Meltzer called out.

“Very well, Helm.” The deck began to tilt backward. The host ship was sinking by the stern.

Too much angle that way and we’ll never get out of this alive.

“One hundred feet amidships,” Meltzer said. “One hundred twenty at our stern.” Challenger’s stern was deeper than her bow because of the way the Bunga Azul was going down; the water pressure aft would be higher. The monitors showed that Felix and his men were still working as best they could.

“One hundred fifty amidships.”

Here’s where breathing compressed air starts getting toxic.

“Depth two hundred feet amidships, two-thirty at our stern.”

The ship kept sinking, her rate of descent slowed only by pockets of air in compartments that wouldn’t stay unflooded for long. She was also tilting more steeply backward — and so was Challenger. Jeffrey watched as Felix and his SEALs frantically laid a main and a backup detcord line, to connect all the charges at the hinges to one central detonator. They moved out of sight of any of the hull’s photonic sensors.

“Three hundred feet amidships!” From the nautical charts and Jeffrey’s mental estimates, with the forward progress the host ship had made since he’d last spoken to Master Siregar, the bottom at their position should be nearly one thousand feet deep. The carcass of the Bunga Azul continued in its death throes. Steel plates tore with screaming noises, bulkheads collapsed with sudden loud booms, air pockets hissed and bubbled away, and major welds failed with thunderclaps. Challenger slipped on the blocks and rolled, and was thrown about like a toy weighing thousands of tons.

Jeffrey saw a SEAL float past one photonics sensor, his chest and abdomen squashed, surrounded by a spreading dark cloud that Jeffrey knew had to be blood. A lanyard tangled in what was once his waist trailed off camera. His dive buddy’s corpse drifted into view, with a mangled pancake where the man’s head should be. They’d been crushed between Challenger’s hull and the side of the hold. In the control room, crewmen gasped.

“Depth four hundred feet!.. Four hundred fifty!”

“SEALs are in escape trunk with upper hatch shut,” COB finally said. “Green board, draining escape trunk’s water now.”