Payback

McCain.

“One RIB zero two five approaching. Second one — behind us — on two seven zero.”

“Drums!” yelled Gomez. “They’re rolling drums!”

“Go deep!” shouted Mervyn.

They felt more than heard the gurgle of water as Mervyn opened the torpedo tubes’ lids during the graceful descent, the meter needle in the fathometer spinning backward. They were going down like a stone. At three hundred feet there was a rush of compressed air.

“Decoy away,” said Gomez. “Tube one.”

“Decoy away,” confirmed Eddie. “Tube one.”

“Tubes two and three ready,” Gomez told him, the SpecFor warriors all watching the search scope’s screen. They were at 350 feet, approaching their crush depth at 450, Mervyn slowing the rate of descent now, the pictures of the storm-tossed surface being relayed to them via the long fiber-optic thread whose buoyant eye, no larger than a human one, surveyed the heaving surface. Because of the profusion of storm-tossed waves, however, the “rolling visibility” pictures were hit and miss, in that one moment they’d have a glimpse of the junk, the next a wall of foam, the next nothing but angry gray sea.

“Aircraft!” shouted Lee.

“It’s a seagull, for fuck’s sake,” said Aussie.

“Oh.”

The general’s voice conveyed the kind of quiet authority that everyone knew would brook no interference. “I want everyone here to calm down. Messieurs Mervyn and Gomez are in charge. Now, shut up!”

A series of sonar tones like a player piano surged into the RS’s vomit-stinking interior. Part of being a good leader, Freeman knew, was the ability to delegate authority, and right now, countermeasures against what seemed to be an impending enemy “drum” or “depth charge” attack were in the hands of the two men in the team best trained to deal with it, pilot Eddie Mervyn and copilot Gomez. The best thing his team could do was be quiet and pass the freezer bag of Arm & Hammer baking soda that the general had taken from the red fiberglass first-aid kit affixed to the RS’s midships rack, Salvini, Lee, Choir, and Aussie dutifully passing along the Ziploc, pouring liberal amounts of the baking soda on what Aussie softly called Choir’s “generous contribution” to the mission, the odor- eating molecules of baking soda absorbing the smell of sick, at least enough to make the atmosphere more tolerable.

The musical tones increased in pitch and volume as the RS decoy, a pack of miniaturized state-of-the-art electronics crammed into a six-foot-long, fifteen-inch-wide steel “fish,” or torpedo casing, flashed through the sea. Already it was drawing hostile fire, as witnessed by the Payback team via the plethora of red data lights flashing and alarm bells ringing on the main computer’s console.

“Son of a bitch!” said Gomez. “Look at this!” He was watching the luminescent trace that snaked quickly through the superimposed grids of the seabed, the decoy giving off what the RS’s designers referred to as “one-man band” signals, the “band” not referring to a one-frequency band but to the kind of one-man circus ensemble so popular in Europe, where one person behind a curtain simultaneously operates kettle drum, base drum, saxophone, cymbals, et cetera, creating the impression for the listener that there are many more players involved. The RS’s decoy was emitting a cluster of pulses that would, it was hoped, convince the junk and its two rigid inflatables that the decoy was the RS.

It seemed to be working, the voluminous thumps of depth charges, which momentarily caused the RS’s screen to shudder and grid lines to meet, coming not from directly overhead but at some distance from the RS, which was now in ultraquiet mode, all but immobile at 580 feet, and over a mile away from the decoy. Still, Eddie Mervyn expressed surprise, pointing out to Gomez an apparent discrepancy between the distance to the depth- charge detonations as registered by the RS’s passive mikes astern and the “bang index,” the informal name given by RS operators to the data block on-screen, which registered concussion waves of enemy mines, torpedoes, and other weaponry. “Should be louder trace than that,” Eddie told Gomez.

“Yeah,” agreed Gomez. “But our stern mikes must’ve been damaged too. Meaning our bang index is probably way off too.”

“What do you think, Aussie?” asked the general, less interested in the answer than in reestablishing morale.

“I don’t give a rat’s ass,” said Aussie, “long as those friggin’ drums aren’t rolling on us. Decoy’s doing its job, that’s all that matters.”

“You’re right there, boyo,” said Choir. It was the first time he’d spoken since he’d been sick, the RS’s smooth running underwater allowing him to regain his sense of equilibrium. There was another depth boomp farther off, and Freeman could sense the lessening of tension among his battle- fatigued team. The computer screen shuddered again, but this time they could see the blossom of light on the radar, the explosion the size of a silver dollar on the screen.

“They got the decoy,” said Gomez, but the question on everyone’s mind was would the junk and the RIBs give up now, convinced they’d got the Migook raiding party?

Quietly, yet distinctly, as if the enemy above might hear him if he spoke too loudly, the general told Eddie Mervyn to release “wreckage.” Slowly Mervyn opened the vent to allow a mix of prepacked hydraulic oil, rags, and lumps of PVC insulation foam, the first kind of debris you’d see on the surface after a sub was hit, to drift up.

“Won’t that go straight up?” asked Johnny Lee. Lee knew a lot about SpecFor warfare on land, and at least seven foreign languages, but on matters of oceanography he was, as Aussie not so gently reminded him, “a dumb ass,” Aussie explaining how because of currents, salinity layers, upwelling, and the storm’s crosswinds, the flotsam they were jettisoning to fool the junk would probably surface at least a mile away — maybe more.

“Yeah,” Johnny Lee told him. “I know that, you convict. But will they buy it?”

“We’ll see,” said Freeman. “We’ll wait, see if they move off.”

“Better pray,” said Salvini, “they don’t see our eye.”

“Nah,” said Gomez. “Shit, it’s only yea big.” He made a circle with his forefinger and thumb. “No bigger’n a golf ball.”

“We’ll see,” said the general.

“I hope they don’t see,” quipped Aussie Lewis, a comment that Johnny Lee thought particularly morbid, especially given Brady’s savage demise of only a short time ago, and the fact of his own wounds, a ruptured eardrum caused by the concussion from the RPG, and what had at first sight seemed only a flesh wound on his arm but which was now throbbing with the intensity of an unlanced boil.

“Anything from our eye?” asked Freeman.

“Heaving swells,” replied Mervyn. “No traffic visible.”

“Bring her to periscope depth,” ordered Freeman. “Slowly. We’ll take a closer look.”

“To periscope depth slowly, aye,” continued Eddie, who was as anxious as his seven comrades to get moving again after the half-hour wait on the gelatinous ooze of the sea bottom. Of necessity it had to be an “ultraquiet” wait, no one moving lest he create a noise short that would betray their position to the spy ship junk and its two deadly runabouts, which might still be around despite the silence, using the sea clutter that had now obscured the RS’s radar waves, as cover. It was hard on all of them — men of action forced to wait, exercising all the techniques to fight boredom that they’d been taught from Brecon Beacons on exchange programs with the British Special Air Service in Wales to Fort Bragg in North Carolina. Even so, Aussie and Salvini especially detested the long waits, whether they were in the leech-infested jungles of Southeast Asia or in the relative comfort of the RS, Choir’s “upchuck” notwithstanding.

The RS continued to burp air bubbles from its ballast tanks as it rose from the black ocean depths toward the faintly lit upper layers of the Sea of Japan’s international waters.

“Cut red light to white — it’s daylight upstairs.”

Upstairs, Freeman knew, was by now international waters, its rules penciled out meticulously by bureaucratic gnomes in Geneva, Zurich, and Berne, rules that every blue water navy promised to abide by. But for Aussie, Salvini, Choir, and the others, the reality of international relations in the deep blue oceans that covered three-quarters of the world, hiding the great mountain ranges of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge and the deeps, such as the 28,000-foot-deep Marianas Trench to their south, could best be described as Saltwater Dodge where, like the Wild West’s infamous frontier town, the right of way belonged to the most powerful. The chaos was made worse by the stupid brown- water, that is, riverine and continental slope, “close-to-Mommy” navies, as Freeman called them, who, after the