Sandra’s face was cut badly and bleeding as the bosun and two other crewmen knelt beside her, doing their best with tweezers to remove the tiny glass slivers. Her white blouse and pants were splattered with oil from the compass mounting, and the chart of Juan de Fuca Strait was smeared with blood.
Aboard the Coast Guard’s Skate, the sonar operator heard the underwater whoosh of a torpedo launch, the Skate’s computer telling him it was running at fifty knots. The Skate, two hundred yards off in the fog, was seconds from impact on its present course. The captain reacted swiftly, ordering a 180-degree turn to starboard away from the unseen line of the torpedo.
It took him into the path of the second torpedo fired by the sub during the noise of the Skate’s turn. The explosion lit up the night in a bonfire of pyrotechnics that tore the stern quarter off the Skate. The ship was going down, its nose sticking up at a forty-five-degree angle. It slipped under in minutes, no time for lifeboats, the cries of its crew, many afire, lost in a cacophony of sounds, a firecracker string of its own ammunition cooking off in its superheated superstructure, its death throes further illuminated by raging fuel oil fires.
Soon all that was left was the burning oil slick silhouetting the frantic two dozen or so survivors trying to extricate themselves from the flaming patches of sea, the fire’s updrafts doing nothing to disperse the heavier sullen fog that had now swallowed up the retreating Petrel. The crew of the oceanographic ship, unarmed and in shock, were rallying to help their own wounded. An oiler on deck, one of those who’d helped make the slingshots, was suffering from an ugly head wound, hemorrhaging to death.
“We’ve gotta pick up those Skate guys!” someone said.
“We can’t,” answered the bosun. “We’re not out of the shit yet. Sub’s got — dammit, it’s a warship — it’s got everything. We slow to pick up survivors, we’ll end the same way. ’Sides, those hydrofoils’ll soon be here.”
“They’ll slow right down,” said a winch man. “Always do inshore ’cause of all the logs an’ crap floating about. Plus there’s so much wreckage in the strait they can’t risk speeding. Hit something with one of those foils at any speed, you go A over T. Quick smart.”
On the Petrel’s bridge, blacked out, as was the rest of his ship, Frank Hall knew there was only one decision he could make.
“Where the heck’s Freeman?” the first mate asked softly.
“In trouble,” replied Frank, “if he doesn’t watch that.50.”
“They’ll hear his outboard if he gets too close.”
“I know,” said Frank.
Which was why Freeman, at the tiller of the Petrel’s Zodiac, had cut the outboard, hauled it in, and joined Aussie, using paddles to move west of the sub which now seemed strangely still, as if, like some giant marine predator, it was undecided what to do immediately following the destruction of its Coast Guard prey. Or was the sub’s prop so disabled, Aussie wondered, that in an all-out run on the surface it could reach only a knot or so? The awful noise generated by the prop was so loud that he knew it would serve as a homing beacon for the hydrofoils, which would soon be on the sub’s radar.
In the eerie silence of the fogbound sea, the crescent bay’s shore, five minutes behind them, might have been a hundred miles away, and the sound of their paddles seemed extraordinarily loud to Freeman and Aussie. Perhaps because their sense of hearing, initially scrambled by the explosions of the torpedoes, was now straining to pick up any sound in the water about them, they both heard the faint rasping sound. It wasn’t the same noise as that of the prop, and had it not been for the small but persistent glow from the Skate’s dying fires, Aussie wouldn’t have seen the bulbous baseball-size head of a snorkel tube rising from the sub. He stopped paddling and, not daring to whisper, tapped Freeman’s arm twice, the snorkel rising agonizingly above the sub, the enemy craft about two o’clock to the Zodiac.
Was the sub going to dive, go on batteries for a while despite the grating prop noise, far enough again to lie low and stop all engines? Given the depth reading he recalled on the Petrel, Freeman knew that it wouldn’t be too deep for a swimmer to exit through an escape air-lock hatch and replace or “putty” in a few replacement anechoic tiles.
Skate was gone, Petrel bloodied and unarmed, and, given the fog, the two hydrofoils might not get to the sub before she dived, which it looked like she’d do at any second, because there was no one on deck. Freeman was as vain a man as any other, but he’d never allowed vanity to block efficiency, and he knew that, his A-grade fitness notwithstanding, Aussie Lewis was a younger man with more strength in his arm. So he passed the two balls of LOSHOK to Aussie and quietly tipped the outboard’s prop shaft into the water, just in case.
With his mouth against Aussie’s ear, he intoned, “Tape one of ’em around the snorkel.”
They resumed paddling, Freeman estimating it would take them five to six minutes to reach the sub. The snorkel was still inching up, rasping, the sub’s skipper obviously preferring to raise it in air rather than waiting till he was submerged, where the sound would travel four times as fast to the hydrofoils.
The problem, Freeman knew, was that it would be difficult if not impossible to maintain position in the current and tape the charge to the rising pipe. The current was getting stronger. They had maybe ten minutes.
Rorke’s ability to maneuver the “Big Cigar,” as Encino called their 360-foot-long sub, had duly impressed the executive officer, especially given the level of instability in the 6881 class, caused by its sail being located farther forward than on the earlier boats of the class. Though launch site was still minutes away, the XO foresaw no problems with the launch. Encino’s “load-out” of torpedoes and Tomahawks, following normal procedure, contained a number of variants. Of the dozen cruise missiles in the launch tubes forward of the sail, four had single thousand-pound Bullpup HE warheads, four were armed with 109D runway-cratering submunitions warheads, and the final four were capped with a doomsday “city take-out” 150- kiloton nuclear warhead.
With all presets entered into Encino’s fire-control computer console, the attack boat rose to a point sixty feet below the surface, its speed now down from thirty knots to three. Rorke had decided to start with the four 109Ds, the navigator confirming that the intersection of the coordinates was midway down Penghu’s runway, now presumably packed with PLA fighters.
The sound of hydraulics and valves opening as the twelve forward vertical tubes were flooded in the sequence Rorke had decided upon were noises that none of the boat’s officers and men wanted to hear. They had no qualms about their part in the new post-9/11 American policy of talking softly and carrying the biggest stick you could find. But flooding, then opening, the “caps,” or lids, on each of the forward-angled twelve VLTs violated the submariner’s counsel of perfection: “Thou shalt stay silent.” The gurgling and bubbling sounds were worse than most “sound shorts,” or acoustic faults, in a boat, signaling to any hostile within hundreds or even thousands of miles away where you were. And in this case, telling them you were about to launch a weapon — whether it be an antiship harpoon, torpedo, or, as now, the Tomahawk cruise missiles.
“Up attack scope!” said Rorke.
It was unlikely there would be any ships nearby, and Encino’s sonar hadn’t picked up anything unusual, but a visual sweep was needed just in case. Despite the awesome responsibility he had for launching such tremendous firepower, Johnny Rorke enjoyed the anticipatory moment of looking through the scope. He had not “danced” with either of the boat’s “ladies” since the Utah. He liked the physical sensation of watching the scope’s oil-sheen column rising to his command, the sensation of flipping down the scope’s arms, gripping their criss-cross nonslip handles and his eyes marrying themselves to the scope via the sensuously soft rubber cups that shut out all light in the CIC, including the luminescent green of the two target trackers’ computers and the bloodred of the weapons officer’s screen.
He moved as one with the scope, sweeping smartly through a 360-degree arc and back again, the reverse sweep to assure him he hadn’t missed anything during his clockwise rotation because of the different azimuth. All seemed clear.
