Plague Ship

The low-light camera slung under the Nomad showed Linda that the sub was slightly off center of the first torpedo. She made an adjustment so that one set of the curved grappling arms Max had installed were directly above the three-ton weapon. She hit a control, and the tungsten-steel claws curled around the torpedo and clamped it tight to the Nomad’s belly.

Juan helped her by pumping out one of the ballast tanks to regain neutral trim. Linda eased the Nomad to the side, using its directional thrusters, a corner of her lip pinched between her teeth.

She cursed under her breath when the sub lurched past the torpedo. “Tide’s coming in,” she explained, and reversed power to back the submersible over her target.

A light on the air-lock control panel went from red to green. Eddie and Max were aboard.

For the second time, the Nomad drifted beyond the torpedo, forcing Linda to ramp up the power in order to fight the tidal waters swirling into the dry dock. The eddies and crosscurrents played havoc with the little sub. Juan was confident that if Linda didn’t think she could do it, she’d ask for his help. He let her do her job, and, on the third try, she vented air and set the submersible atop the second torpedo. She closed the claws around its tubular shape and dumped more ballast.

With a self-satisfied smile, Linda said, “Third time’s the charm.” Juan extended the manipulator arm and used its dexterous fingers to gather up the four slings they’d used to move the torpedoes and stow them in a bin under the Nomad’s chin. As soon as the arm was returned to its default position, Linda jammed the joystick hard over to rotate the Nomad in the dry dock. Signals from the LIDAR system allowed her to squeak through the partially open door and into the open water of the port.

Juan checked their battery status, their speed through the water, and speed over the bottom. He tapped the numbers into the computer to get an approximation of the Nomad’s range. Behind them, his team was getting out of their wet suits and dressing in fresh clothes they had packed earlier.

With the tide coming in harder than they’d estimated, the little submersible would have just an hour of reserve power by the time they reached the Oregon. It was an uncomfortably close margin, and one Juan was going to make worse. He had a bad feeling about the Iranian response and wanted to put distance between his ship and the Strait of Hormuz.

“Nomad to Oregon,” he radioed.

“Good to hear your voice, Chairman,” Hali Kasim replied. “I take it everything went well?”

“Like stealing candy from a baby,” Cabrillo said. “How’s the reconfiguration going?”

“Like clockwork. The fairing over the bow is gone, the funnel’s back to normal, and we’ve got a good jump on folding up the containers.”

“Good. Hali, in about thirty minutes I want you to get under way, but take her out at about three knots.” The Nomad was making four. “We’ll make our rendezvous a little farther down the coast.”

“That will put us pretty close to the shipping lanes,” Hali pointed out. “We can’t stop out there to pick you up.”

“I know. We’ll do the recovery on the fly.” Surfacing the Nomad in the moon pool was dangerous enough, but doing it with the Oregon under way was something Cabrillo would only risk if he felt it was absolutely necessary.

“Are you sure about that?” Max asked, leaning into the cockpit.

Juan turned to look his old friend in the eye. “My right ankle is acting up.” That was their code for the Chairman having a premonition. He’d had the feeling before accepting an assignment from NUMA that cost him his right leg below the knee, and in the intervening years both men had come to trust Juan’s instinct.

“You’re the boss,” Max said, and nodded.

It took an additional two hours to reach the Oregon, as she slowly steamed away from the Iranian coast.

The Nomad passed under the dark hull forty feet below the keel. The moon-pool doors were fully retracted and flattened against the hull, and red battle lamps within the ship cast the water in a scarlet glow. It was almost like they were approaching the gates of hell.

Linda slowed the submersible to match the Oregon’s sluggish pace, centering the craft beneath the opening. In a normal recovery, divers would enter the water to secure lifting lines to the Nomad, and it would be winched into the ship. Though making only three knots, it was too much of a current to dive safely in the moon pool’s confines.

When she was comfortable with the speed, she dialed off ballast, pumping the tanks so slowly that the Nomad rose in fractional increments.

“Not to add pressure or anything,” Hali called over the comm link, “but we have a turn coming up in less than four minutes.” The shipping lanes within the Strait of Hormuz were so tight that any deviation was simply not tolerated.

“Yeah, that’s not adding pressure,” Linda replied, never taking her eyes off her computer screens.

She released more ballast, her fingers featherlight on the joystick and throttle. She made tiny corrections as the opening loomed larger and larger.

“You’re doing great,” Juan said from the copilot’s seat.

Foot by foot, the gap narrowed until the Nomad was directly below the ship. They could hear the quiet hum of her revolutionary engines and the sluice of water through her drive tubes.

Linda slowed the Nomad a fraction, so that it drifted back to the aft part of the moon pool, the submersible’s rear fins and propellers less than a foot from the opening. “Here we go,” she said, and dumped the remaining hard ballast, a hopper loaded with a half ton of metal balls.

The Nomad popped up and broached the surface. Though roiled like a cauldron because the Oregon was making three knots, the water in the pool was motionless in relation to the submersible. The mini began to accelerate forward. Linda kicked on emergency reverse thrust as the little sub quickly crossed the pool, which was barely twice the sub’s length. An inflatable fender that spanned the width of the pool had been lowered to the water’s edge for just such a contingency. The sub hit it so softly that it barely compressed.

Pairs of feet slapped down on the top of the Nomad as technicians attached lifting lines to the submersible’s hardpoints. Below them, the doors were already closing. Linda let out a relieved sigh, flicking her wrists to ease the cramping.

Juan patted her shoulder. He could see the strain in her eyes. “Couldn’t have done it better myself.”

“Thanks,” she said tiredly. She cocked her head as if listening to a voice in the distance. “I think I hear my bathtub calling me.”

“Go ahead,” Juan said, sliding back off his seat and leaving a puddle on the dark vinyl. “You’ve more than earned it.”

The team was waiting under the hatch when the Nomad was set onto its cradle and the outer lid popped open. Despite the fact he was still dripping on the nonslip floor, Juan let his team precede him out of the mini. A tech handed him a headset without being asked. “Eric, you there?”

“Right here, Chairman,” Eric Stone said from his place in the Operations Center.

“As soon as the doors are closed, take us up to eighteen knots. How long before we clear the strait?”

“Two and a half hours, give or take, and it will be another fifteen hours to the rendezvous coordinates.” Cabrillo would have liked to have the torpedoes and all the technical information Eddie had pirated from the computer off the ship as quickly as possible, but the timing to meet up with the USS Tallahassee, a Los Angeles Class fast-attack submarine, had to be carefully coordinated to avoid spy satellites and the chance of a nearby ship spotting the transfer.

“Okay, thanks. Tell Hali to keep a sharp ear out for military chatter coming from Bandar Abbas. If he gets anything, wake me in my cabin.”

“Will do, boss man.”

Max was overseeing the removal of the rocket torpedoes from under the Nomad, working a chainfall himself to lower them onto motorized carts. Eddie had already placed the computer drive loaded with information into a waterproof hard case.

Juan slapped one of the weapons with his palm. “Five million apiece, plus another million for the information off the computer. Not bad for a day’s work.”

“You should call Overholt now so he knows we nabbed two of these babies and doesn’t have a heart attack