Crash Dive

by Martin H. Greenberg

  Commander Ward continued his turn around the attack submarine’s control room. Well-lit, the room seemed spacious even when full, light years beyond the diesel-powered snorkel subs Ward had served on and commanded for much of his career as a submariner. The first thing he noticed upon coming aboard two years before was the air. It had a certain supernatural cleanness to it, a crisp sensation in your nose. The air felt, in fact, as if it could be snapped in two like a tree branch. The air aboard nonnuclear subs went through a predictable cycle: it began wet and stale and became steadily wetter and staler. His last boat had to surface every twelve hours or so to exchange its fouled air; the Swordtail could stay submerged for weeks and even months at a time. In his old boat, clothes were washed in the water wrung from the drippings of the air; this air was dry in your throat, at least by comparison.

  The Swordtail was a member of the Sturgeon class, which by now had almost completely replaced the diesels plying the Pacific. Even for a Sturgeon she was special, built longer than her brethren to accommodate a compartment devoted to Signal Intelligence gathering, or electronic eavesdropping. Most, though not all, of Ward’s mission included extensive covert listenings off the Russian Far East. They would slink into a position, rise from the darkness unnoticed, raise their gear, and listen. At other times they would reel out special buoys or arrays to do the same, ears pressed to the whispering sea. Several of her crew were only nominally under his command, their actions ultimately directed by the NSA’s Naval Security Group. Ward never knew completely or specifically what they did; coming to accept that was one of the most difficult lessons he had learned as a submarine commander.

  The second most difficult, perhaps, after the lesson that superseded all others: the need for patience.

  “Subchaser bearing one five zero,” warned the sonar operators as a surface ship crossed toward their path.

  Ward glanced across the control room toward the sonar compartment, washed with green from the screens where the contact had appeared. The Korean vessel, roughly the size and capability of a World War II destroyer escort or coastal corvette, had a reasonable chance of finding them in the shallow water, if its equipment was in good condition and the crew manning it alert and well trained.

  A big if, but he must play conservatively.

  “All stop,” said Ward.

  The order passed quickly to the helm and the submarine’s slow reversal ended. But even as their momentum slowed, the Korean ship began to turn to the south away from them. They hadn’t been detected.

  They waited to be sure. Ward glanced at his watch—not to see the time but to remind himself of his wife, waiting back in Hawaii. She’d given it to him before this trip, scheduled to be his last. The back of the watch was inscribed, “For our second honeymoon.” They had a long visit to Europe planned to mark his separation from the service, the end of a thirty-year hitch stretching back to the Big War, the real one.

  He wasn’t ready, not really. It was time, but he couldn’t let go. Even with the promise of being bumped up to rear admiral easing his passage—shouldn’t he just change the papers, stay on? Emma would be disappointed, but she would understand. The sea and its dark shadows, the unanswered questions and silent maneuvering: that was his life and reality. He could never leave it.

  His first ships were destroyers. He hated them, but they turned out to be good schools for this sort of work, teaching him how a surface commander thought.

  “Proceed,” he told his executive officer, or XO, when the subchaser had moved on. Like many of his other men, the XO had served with him long enough to read his mind. It took only a glance or nod to move the submarine a hundred miles.

  When they reached the deeper waters near the entrance to the port, Ward stepped to the periscope to survey the surface. He fought a slight twinge of nostalgia as he folded his hands around the handles of the scope, remembering his first service aboard a submarine. His commander had been a veteran of the war against the Japanese; he was supernaturally calm and quiet, and at times gave the impression he was sleeping with his eyes open. Some of the men who had served with him for a long time called him Old Man Buddha. Ward’s personality went in the opposite direction; even now he worked to keep himself quiet and calm, avoid the impulse to snap out commands or even spin the periscope around quickly.

  It was just reaching midnight. A fishing vessel sat about a half mile to the south, moored off the rocky edge of land. A few channel markers bobbed in the distance. The Swordtail sat alone in the dark shadows.

  They’d start back in just under four hours.

  “Commander? A word in private?” asked Lieutenant Higgens.

  Without answering the lieutenant, who had charge of the Sigint spaces, Ward stepped back and made his customary round of the control room, patting each man on the shoulder. The touch was more than ritual; it nourished his men, as if he fed them. Only after he had personally seen to each member of his team did he lead Higgens back to his quarters.

  “I thought we might discuss the mission, sir.” Higgens pursed his lips together in a kind of scowl that made the bottom of his cheek turn pink.

  “What would we discuss?”

  “The uh—well, we failed to get into the proper position and therefore, we did not achieve our, uh objective.”

  Ward sat in his chair, leaving the lieutenant to stand. He knew it made the younger man slightly uncomfortable, but that was for the good. With his assignment to the Naval Security Group, Higgens’s personnel records became a work of fiction, with different cover assignments hiding his real work; there was no guarantee that he was even actually in the Navy, at least until this assignment. But watching him, Ward had decided he had been aboard submarines before—but not as a man in charge of others or responsible for a mission. He lacked a certain flexibility that came with experience.

  “I’m not sure I understand what you’re getting at, Lieutenant,” he told the officer.

  “Well, sir. The Soviet boat, the submarine—”

  “It detected us and we broke off. It happens. We’ve run into Harry before,” added Ward. The sonarmen had identified the Victor boat that had ruined their mission as a particularly pesky attack sub they had clashed with several times off Vladivostok over the course of the past eighteen months.

  “When I, uh, report, what should I say?” asked Higgens.

  “Simply tell the truth, Lieutenant.”

  Until now, Higgens had appeared the very model of an officer, exactly the type that might appear in a training film admonishing sailors to worry, and worry hard, about VD and the other evils lurking in every port of call around the world. The fact that he was now in doubt—a good sign, Ward thought; he might learn to thrive in this world after all.

  “With you, uh, retiring sir and uh, this sort of thing,” added Higgens. “Well, it could be seen as a black mark, I—”

  “You don’t have to worry about me, Lieutenant.” He smiled, laughing a little as he thought of something to say. He was tempted to tell a tale of the old days, playing hide-and-seek with the Russians in diesel boats, but he resisted; it would serve no purpose.

  “War—our kind of war—it’s a strange thing,” Ward said instead. “It’s back and forth, cat and mouse. When you win sometimes you lose. And vice versa. Everything is in the mix; it’s to your advantage if you can take it. Now, Lieutenant, you no doubt got a lot of information about that Commie sub that tracked us, didn’t you?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Don’t you think someone will find that information useful in the future?”

  “I hadn’t thought of that, sir.”

  “We learn to live with ambiguity,” he told the young man. “That’s the most important thing.”

  Higgens nodded solemnly. He was back to being the man in the training film, the man who thought he knew everything and couldn’t sleep if he didn’t.

  Difficult lessons. But it would be someone else’s responsibility to teach him. Ultimately, he had to teach himself anyway.


  Ward rose. “Don’t worry, Lieutenant. I appreciate your concern. Report precisely what happened.”

  An ensign met him in the passage as he started back to the control room. “Sir, a Victor boat coming at us balls-out, dead on our nose.”

  A rope dangled from the rail of their target ship about ten feet from the stem, almost as if it had been placed there for them. Winslow grabbed hold, pausing to catch his breath. The water had to be no warmer than thirty-three degrees, but the air was quite a bit colder.

  Caruth had already taken off his mask and Draeger, a special breathing apparatus that prevented bubbles from giving a swimmer away. Using it at night seemed unduly cautious, but it wasn’t Winslow’s call. After surfacing, they had paddled their raft about three quarters of a mile up the main channel to the port, right down the enemy’s throat. Mooring it on a marker buoy, they’d then swum another two hundred yards or so to their ship. The whole time a song had been burning through Winslow’s head—Jimi Hendrix rubbing the Fender on a Dylan tune, “All Along the Watchtower.”

  He hated when that happened. Music couldn’t get unglued in his mind.

  Under certain conditions his close-fitting diving suit could feel almost toasty—but these weren’t those conditions.

  “Fuckin’ water’s cold,” Winslow said, pulling himself against the side of the ship.

  The spook didn’t answer. He began hauling himself up slowly, pausing only to signal that Winslow should stay back until he was aboard. Winslow wasn’t about to argue—the January wind gusted well over ten knots, and as cold as the water was it was warmer than the air.

  He’d never bitch about the cramped SDVs—newly developed SEAL Delivery Vehicles or minisubs—again.

  While he waited, Winslow stowed his gear in his waterproof pack, then took his knife from its sheath at his belt. It was a small airman’s survival knife, its five-inch blade easier to handle than the more ominous looking nine-inchers that were common issue. In knives as in other things, size could often be deceiving.

  Their target drew less than a thousand tons. If the diagram of its layout Caruth had shown him was accurate, it stretched one hundred and seventy-six feet. Winslow had been aboard luxury yachts that were bigger.

  He watched Caruth disappear in the darkness above. Water slapped in a harsh staccato against the ship. About a hundred yards to the north a row of small patrol vessels jumbled up and down against a wooden pier. Beyond them shards of lights and faint, dull yellow streaks showed there must be other ships here, though he couldn’t see them. Whatever was on shore was enshrouded in darkness.

  The air was so cold it tasted like the inside of a snowball. Winslow slid his gloved thumb back and forth across the top edge of his knife, as if he were honing his finger.

  Hendrix’s guitar riffed. He thought of the girl he’d been screwing when the knock on the hotel room door came. She had melted around his legs, a warm wetness.

  The knock had surprised him so badly he’d fallen from the bed, grabbing his pistol from the floor. Two Army MPs—that was different—appeared in the doorway. He came within a finger’s twitch of blasting the SOBs with the .45, but at least the bastards had the good sense to back out and let him dress before driving him off.

  A tiny light waved above him. Caruth’s signal.

  Winslow’s first tug took him out of the water; his second bashed his knee into the hull at just the right angle to send a shock of pain through his right medial ligament, which had been partially tom a month before on his last assignment in Vietnam. He kept pulling himself upward, transferring most of his effort from his legs to his arms, eyes pasted on the blackness above. As he pulled himself over he fell on a body, and for a moment thought it was Caruth; only the flicker of his companion’s wrist lamp a few yards away told him it wasn’t.

  Winslow paused to open his waterproof sack for his silenced gun, a silenced version of a Kulspruta m/45 “Carl Gustav” hand-tweaked by an Army Special Forces friend and delivered to him with great ceremony after a mission in the Vietnamese Highlands a year before. Caruth returned with a rope. He tied one end to the dead man’s leg, then let him down the side so gently there was no splash. Without saying a word, the spook started back in the direction he had scouted earlier, expecting Winslow to follow. They made their way through a hatch, paused momentarily, then ducked to the right, their way lit by the dull glow of Caruth’s wrist light. As Caruth turned Winslow nearly ran into him, his face smacking the thick waterproof pack the other man had strapped to his back. He froze, sensing the footsteps of a guard before the Korean appeared at the intersection of the two passages.

  One of Kevin Winslow’s many specialties was taking men down quickly without noise or fuss; he could do so with a variety of weapons, including his bare hands. He had had the chance to practice this skill several times, and if he wasn’t so meticulous about cleaning his equipment, the knife in his right hand would still bear traces of his last victim, three months dead. But never had Chief Petty Officer Winslow seen a man killed quite so quickly as the guard who turned the comer in front of him; Caruth took a step and the Korean simply slid to the deck beneath him. God’s own angel could not have taken a life more efficiently.

  Caruth moved on. Winslow followed, carefully stepping over the body, knife and gun balancing rods in his hands. He felt a shock of fear as something moved in the passage beyond them, faint footsteps warning that someone was coming their way. Caruth’s light disappeared and he stood back tight against the wall of the narrow passage, blurring into the shadows. As Winslow narrowed his shoulders and did the same, the sound of the steps moved away, up a short flight of stairs, and then merged with the vague noises of night. Caruth and Winslow continued about three more yards to an open, unguarded hatchway.

  The Signet compartment. No guard. Papers lay everywhere on the deck. There was a large black burn-bag near the hatchway. A few panels had been smashed with axes and the pungent smell of fire hung in the air.

  Caruth kneeled, slid off his pack. But instead of taking out charges, he took out a camera.

  They’d come all this way to take pictures?

  Pictures first, then blow it. Had to be. Though now that he eyed it carefully, Caruth’s bag seemed suspiciously small.

  Wouldn’t take much to wax this place.

  Several cipher machines lined the port side of the compartment, next to two consoles of electronics gear. Two or three of the machines and one of the consoles had been damaged by a few blows from an ax, but even from across the room Winslow realized the crew had failed to destroy it.

  Caruth stopped taking pictures. He stowed the camera and started out of the room.

  Winslow caught his arm. “Hey, aren’t we blowing the gear?”

  “No.”

  “Wait.”

  His companion’s face whirled next to his. It seemed to glow with heat, but his expression was not one of anger; it was simply blank.

  “We’re just here to take pictures?” asked Winslow.

  “I was told you were a capable man.”

  The spook’s response so baffled Winslow that he was unable to say anything more. Caruth turned and slipped through the hatch and continued up the passage; the SEAL had to practically run to catch up.

  They turned a comer and stopped. Light flooded from an open doorway a few feet ahead; they could hear voices.

  Korean.

  It was the mess. Caruth stood against the door, listening. Finally, he took a step backward, going around Winslow and then leading him down the passage to a set of metal steps upward. As they reached them, a strident set of footsteps bounced off the bulkhead at the top.

  “Down,” Caruth hissed, pulling Winslow with him to crouch beneath the steps as two Korean guards descended.

  By the time Ward reached the control room, the Soviet attack submarine had closed to five hundred yards. Dubbed Sierra One—a naming convention that simply meant it was the first sonar contact they had made—the enemy submarine was making almost dead-on for them, its nois
y propellers churning at almost thirty knots.

  “Trying to scare us?” the XO asked.

  “If he knows we’re here.” They had calculated that the Soviet boat would pass no less than fifty yards above them—damn close, all things considered. But moving would give themselves away. Ward saw only two reasons the Victor boat would rush toward the port like this: either he had heard an American boat was en route and wanted to get there first, or he knew exactly where Ward was and wanted to scare him away. In either case, moving was a bad idea.

  “It’ll be close,” said the XO.

  The commander nodded.

  “Gibby says it’s Harry.” The XO nodded toward the sonar room, where one of the technicians had tentatively identified the contact from their library of previous encounters. “Good old Harry.”

  They’d lost, or thought they’d lost, the Russian submarine after more than eighteen hours of cat and mouse off die coast. By that time he’d already ruined their mission; they were heading back toward Japan when the new orders had come for this job.

  Had the Russian come south in their wake? Or was he, too, on a new mission? Ward imagined his counterpart in his control room, plotting his course.

  This fast—he would not suspect the Swordtail sat ahead.

  “We could get deeper without too much problem,” suggested the XO, meaning that Harry was unlikely to detect them because of his rush. It was a guess based on their past experiences.

  “Hmmm,” said Ward. “Not yet. As long as he stays on his course we’re fine.”

  They waited. It took roughly a minute for the Russian to pass over them. Ward could feel the submarine coming. Its noisy five-blade propeller churned the water like a mad flipper. He put himself in the enemy commander’s head as it passed overhead—I’ve beaten the Americans.