Felix’s voice came over the intercom circuit from the lock-out trunk. “Fire in the hole in one minute.”
“Fire in the hole, one minute, aye,” Jeffrey said with immense relief; Felix had at least survived the ordeal so far.
The charges would detonate soon. If they failed, Challenger was doomed.
Felix’s words had been slurred, more than just from grief at losing two more men. Slurred speech was one of the first signs of decompression sickness.
Jeffrey grabbed the 1MC mike. “Corpsman and all assistants to forward escape trunk. Prepare to receive three decompression-sickness casualties plus two dead. Bring casualties into minisub and use as a recompression chamber.”
“Captain,” the phone talker said, “corpsman acknowledges, is headed for escape trunk.”
The best immediate treatment for the bends was to return the men to a pressurized environment. Then, standard tables told how to decompress in gradual stages so their bodies could adjust with minimum lasting ill effects.
On the monitors Jeffrey saw bright flashes, and through the hull he heard dull thuds and felt new shocks. The SEALs’ explosive charges had detonated.
“Bottom doors falling away!” Bell reported.
“Chief of the Watch, shift all variable ballast to forward tanks smartly.” COB acknowledged. Challenger began to right herself, still half inside the sinking host ship’s hold.
“Helm, make your down-angle thirty degrees by the stern planes. Maximum down angle on the fore planes. Ahead one third.”
From tilting backward, Challenger quickly went to nosing down by the bow. Her pump-jet propulsor kicked in, and drove her out from under the Bunga Azul. Jeffrey gave orders and Meltzer made Challenger level off. COB’s fingers danced on his console, restoring neutral buoyancy and trim. Challenger was free, a working warship again — and a powerful enemy was rushing to deliver more killing blows. Jeffrey had to engage his opponent as soon as possible, but Shakir Island still sat between them.
“Fire Control, tubes one through seven, target remains Snow Tiger. Program dogleg course past intervening terrain. Launch on generated bearings, at ten-second intervals, shoot.”
Generated bearings meant the weapon-system computer’s best estimate of an updated firing solution, projecting ahead in time from the last stream of data the Bunga Azul’s antennas could feed. Bell and Torelli did as ordered; it took a full minute from shooting the first fish until the last weapon was launched.
“All tubes fired electrically!” Torelli said. “Good wires!”
“All units running normally,” Milgrom confirmed.
“Helm, put us behind the Bunga Azul, follow her down, be careful of our weapon wires.” Meltzer acknowledged. This would be a very tricky maneuver. Jeffrey had seven wide-body Mark 88 torpedoes dashing through the sea. Their attack speed was seventy knots, and their crush depth was the same as Challenger’s — fifteen thousand feet. Jeffrey had fired at a target he couldn’t detect, even on active sonar, because of where he and the Snow Tiger were, the island’s underwater mass in the way.
Given Challenger’s torpedo-tube design, if he reloaded, the control wires to the weapons already fired would be cut. They’ll have to search and home on their own. I need to saturate the Snow Tiger’s defenses, to exploit the element of surprise.
The Bunga Azul hit the bottom with a loud thud, and a final screech of tortured metal.
“Fire Control,” Jeffrey ordered, “program all units to go to autonomous active search as soon as past Shakir Island.” The gravimeter showed that the seafloor a few miles ahead was wide open, and the slope down to past three thousand feet was smooth. Outside the Shadwan Channel, beyond the mouth of the Jubal Strait, there was nowhere for the Snow Tiger to hide. Bell and then Torelli acknowledged Jeffrey’s order.
“Fire Control,” Jeffrey snapped, “launch the off-board probe in fiber-optic tether mode. Send it around and past the Bunga Azul’s hulk on a course due east at its maximum speed.” Twenty knots for short sprints on its batteries. “Reload tubes one through seven, high-explosive Mark Eighty-eights, smartly.” A rapid second salvo was everything now.
“Torpedoes in the water,” Milgrom reported. Outside the host ship, Challenger’s sonar arrays could pick up sound acutely well. They’d registered echoes of torpedo-engine sounds, bouncing off the submerged side of Shakir Island — exactly as Jeffrey had intended, knowing that his bow sphere was blocked from directly ahead by the hulk Meltzer hid behind. “Series Sixty-fives, inbound.” Milgrom gave their bearings and ranges. There were eight of them.
Had the Snow Tiger’s captain detected Jeffrey’s first salvo coming at him, and launched a salvo of his own? Is he guessing, trying to obliterate the Bunga Azul whatever her condition, or does he know by my fish that I got out of the host ship intact?
The wire-guided 65s went active. Sweet, metallic tings came over the sonar speakers. Several 65s — their weapons technicians perhaps fooled because of Jeffrey’s previous trick of having the Bunga Azul sit on top of a shoal — homed on reefs or small islands in the distance back behind Challenger. Their engine noises and pinging receded harmlessly up the Shadwan Channel. At least Jeffrey hoped they’d be harmless — it seemed less likely that their target seekers would acquire the spindly pylons of a drilling platform; those people had probably shut down and evacuated to shore at the first sign naval combat was brewing.
But two 65s detected the wreck of the Bunga Azul, and began to circle around it, as if looking for something hiding there.
Uh-oh. Jeffrey was glad the Bunga Azul was much bigger than Challenger.
He ordered Meltzer to move Challenger around the other way, to keep the wreck between them; Milgrom and Torelli fed steering cues to Meltzer’s main display. Jeffrey saw that Meltzer’s hands on the control wheel were white knuckled.
Jeffrey realized how sore his own fingers felt, from hours of gripping the rail out on the bridge wing of the late and much-lamented Bunga Azul. He looked at his hands, and prayed that the master and all his men had made it into the lifeboats okay.
It’s not too late for her to save Challenger one more time.
The torpedoes hit the sunken cargo ship with mighty eruptions. Challenger rocked, and her control-room crew were shaken in their seats. Milgrom had known to turn down the sonar speakers, but the big warheads going off so close were intensely loud through Challenger’s hull.
Without waiting for the cacophony to die down, Jeffrey shouted, “Sonar, does off-board probe detect propulsion noise from Snow Tiger?” The probe was miles ahead, with a broad view out to deep water.
“Affirmative! Snow Tiger is at high speed, appears unable to achieve sixty knots for effective tonal masking. Hull singing suggests damage to outer hull from air-dropped torpedoes or depth charges.”
“V’ r’well, Sonar.”
He’s been banged up by those helos and planes. It’s the cost of coming shallow and going active, to attack a host ship before its guest submarine could depart. If he’d opened fire from out in deep water instead, his weapons would’ve had a twenty-mile run up into the shallows, and his intended victim might have gotten too much warning…. He did exactly what I would’ve done.
The Snow Tiger’s captain paid a price for his tactics, but he was full of fight and acting very aggressively, and his 65s were dangerous — one solid hit would crack Challenger’s hull.
“Tubes one through seven reloaded,” Bell said.
“Fire Control,” Jeffrey rapped out, “firing point procedures, Mark Eighty-eights in tubes one through seven. Target is the Snow Tiger. Make tubes one through seven ready in all respects including opening outer doors…. Tubes one through seven, launch on generated bearings, at ten-second intervals, shoot.”
When his seven new fish were launched, Jeffrey had Meltzer hover behind the wreckage of the
