Marauder (The Oregon Files)

by Clive Cussler

  “Ah get it,” MacD said. “They use it for infiltration missions the way we use the moon pool on the Oregon.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Then we won’t have easy access to that escape trunk,” Juan said. “Besides, since the only damage we’ve seen so far is in the bow, the stern is the most likely place to find survivors.”

  Max pressed on, and they spotted no other hull breaches. What they did see was an avalanche of rocks that had slid from the cliff above and landed on the portion of the hull where the stern escape trunk hatch was located. What had to be a ton was covering it.

  “No wonder nobody got out,” Max said.

  “We need to find out if anyone is conscious inside,” Juan said. “Apply the contact transceiver.”

  They could have used the robotic arm to tap out Morse code on the KC’s hull, but the banging would have been loud enough for the Barosso to hear, alerting the corvette to the Nomad’s presence. Instead, they’d fitted a special device that they could press against the nuclear sub’s hull to communicate with anyone inside by voice, just like pressing an ear to the wall.

  Max lowered the transceiver until it touched the Kansas City.

  “Go ahead,” Max said.

  Juan spoke into the microphone. “Attention, USS Kansas City crew members. Is there anyone in there?”

  Nothing but static played through the Nomad’s speakers. Juan repeated the hail.

  “You think we’ll be able to hear their voices?” Juan asked Max.

  “Never really tried this before, so they may not even be hearing us. The hull does have sound insulation.”

  Juan picked up the mic again. “KC crew members, if you can hear this, tap on the outer hatch.”

  They waited. Still nothing. Juan tried again. This time, he heard a tap of metal on metal.

  It was Morse code. Since MacD wasn’t a Navy vet, Juan interpreted the letters as they came in.

  We . . . hear . . . you . . .

  “‘We’?” Max repeated, sounding elated that they’d found anyone at all. “How many are in there?”

  Juan relayed the question.

  Twenty-six in engine room. Rest of sub flooded.

  Out of a normal crew complement of a hundred twenty-nine—maybe more, since there were Navy SEALs on board—only twenty-six were still alive. Tate had killed over a hundred U.S. sailors to cover his crimes.

  “What’s your situation?” Juan asked them.

  Have immersion suits. But hatch jammed.

  Immersion suits were emergency survival gear stored on the sub. To escape a downed sub, the sailors would put them on and enter the escape trunk’s air lock. When the hatch opened, the buoyant suits, which were equipped with short-term breathing apparatuses, would float to the surface and double as life rafts until help arrived. The problem was, the sailors couldn’t get the hatch open to escape.

  “There’s about a ton of rocks covering the hatch. How much air do you have left?”

  CO2 building. Estimate three hours O2 left.

  “I don’t think the U.S. Navy will get here before then,” Max said.

  “Then we have to get those rocks off so they can get out,” Juan said.

  “I agree. But if we start moving them around with the robotic arm, the Barosso might hear us.”

  “Let’s do it,” MacD said. “We gotta get those boys out.”

  Juan nodded. They’d have to risk it.

  “We’re going to clear the hatch so you can get out,” Juan told the desperate men below them.

  Thank you.

  Max detached the transceiver and moved the Nomad to the hatch. With careful precision, he controlled the submersible while Juan operated the robotic arm. He began lifting rocks and carrying them away one by one. It was a tedious task, but there were no shortcuts. It would be worse to cause a second avalanche that covered the hatch all over again.

  Fifteen minutes in, MacD said, “Do you hear that?”

  Juan was so intent on picking up rocks that he hadn’t heard anything.

  “What was it?” he asked MacD.

  “Ah thought Ah heard a faint tapping.”

  Juan told Max to pause for a moment. Perhaps the sub crew was trying to tell them something.

  Then he did hear it. Taps on metal. But it had a higher pitch than the ones they’d heard before.

  The tapping continued.

  “It’s another Morse code message,” Juan said.

  SOS. In DDS.

  Max looked at Juan in surprise when he understood the message.

  “What are they saying?” MacD asked. “Is there a problem in the engine room?”

  “It’s not coming from the engine room,” Juan said. “Someone is still alive in the dry deck shelter.”

  39

  When Michael Bradley first heard the faint voices emanating through the hull, he thought he’d become delusional after spending days in the dry deck shelter’s decompression chamber, hoping to be rescued. Then he recognized a few words and realized with great relief that he was no longer alone.

  Situation . . . Air . . . left . . . Hatch . . . Get . . . out . . .

  There was a rescue team outside, and it sounded like they were talking to someone, which implied there were survivors in the stern section of the Kansas City.

  He had to let them know he was alive as well. That’s when he picked up a wrench with his good arm and began slamming it against the wall.

  He did that for fifteen minutes before he had to drop the wrench due to exhaustion.

  When he first entered the chamber twelve days ago, he thought he had a few hours to live at most before his air ran out. He even wrote a good-bye message to his family and recorded the events leading up to the sinking in his little notebook.

  But then something strange happened. The lights, heat, and air never went off. The KC was still feeding power to the DDS, so he actually had a chance to make it out if the Navy found him before the batteries died. He’d set his broken arm and secured it with duct tape to keep it in place before ransacking the decompression chamber for supplies. He discovered a small tool kit, as well as several Soldier Fuel energy bars and some bottles of water, in an emergency pack. Even with rationing, he had eaten the last bar four days before, and drank the last of the water six hours earlier that day, so he thought it really was the end until he heard the odd voices.

  After a minute’s rest, he picked up the wrench again and beat it against the metal, tapping out the same message.

  SOS. In DDS.

  He didn’t get any response. The voices had disappeared.

  But he wouldn’t give up. Not until his last breath was gone. That’s one thing the Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL training course had taught him. BUD/S was all about carrying on through pain, fatigue, hunger, thirst, and cold. Anyone who wasn’t up to the challenge could Drop on Request, DOR, which meant ringing a brass ship’s bell three times. The people who washed out were the ones lacking the will to go on in the face of agony and desperation.

  If Bradley could make it through the Hell Week of BUD/S, he was not going to ring the bell now.

  He continued banging until his muscles were on fire. He screamed to get through the pain.

  Then he heard something and stopped, dropping the wrench to the floor. There was a mechanical sound, as if a hatch were opening.

  He looked through the tiny window into the air lock and saw nothing but darkness. He used a flashlight and shined it on the hatch down to the Kansas City’s escape trunk, but it remained motionless.

  Then he heard another sound and was amazed to see a light bouncing around in the SEAL Delivery Vehicle hangar. The wheel on the hangar hatch turned.

  When it opened, a man in a black drysuit and yellow dive helmet entered. He was carrying a large dive bag with him. He saw Bradley’s flashlight and came over to the deco
mpression chamber hatch. Bradley could see that his equipment included a rebreather for the heliox tank on his back.

  The diver motioned to the air lock controls on his side. Bradley gave him the OK signal.

  A few minutes later, the lock had drained and filled with air. The diver removed his helmet and twisted the hatch wheel until it opened. The man had a blond crew cut and blue eyes that glittered with intelligence.

  “Hi, there,” he said in a high pitch that lowered as the helium left his lungs. “I’m Juan Cabrillo. Time to get you out of here.”

  “Michael Bradley,” the man said, still stunned that he was free of the decompression chamber. “What ship are you from?”

  “That’s a little complicated. I’m not in the Navy.”

  “You’re not? Who are you, then?”

  “Just a Good Samaritan. We don’t have much time before your crewmates start coming out and getting the attention of the Brazilian warship above us.”

  “My crewmates? How many are still alive?”

  “Twenty-six.”

  Bradley was both elated that some of his fellow sailors had made it and heartbroken that it was so few.

  “Only twenty-six,” Bradley repeated softly.

  “I hate to break it to you, but it has become a bit ripe in there,” Cabrillo said, pointing inside the chamber. “Let’s close it up so we can leave.”

  The only thing Bradley wanted to retain from his ordeal was the notebook. He pocketed it and stepped into the air lock while Cabrillo unpacked what he’d been carrying. It was another drysuit and helmet.

  “How did you know it would only be me in here?” Bradley asked.

  “I didn’t. Figured I might have to make multiple trips. Have you ever used heliox?”

  “Once.”

  “I hope the suit fits, because we don’t have any other options. MacD looks about your size.”

  Bradley started putting on the suit. “MacD?”

  “The guy who was wearing this suit until a few minutes ago. He’s back on Nomad, helping clear off the rear escape trunk. Besides, we only have room for two at a time in our air lock.”

  None of this was making any sense to Bradley, but he didn’t have much choice but to go with Cabrillo.

  He’d finished gingerly pulling his suit over his broken arm when they heard a loud ping.

  “Was that from your sub?” Bradley asked as Cabrillo handed him the helmet.

  Juan shook his head. “That’s from the Barosso. We need to get out of here.”

  The corvette on the surface had just scanned them with their active sonar.

  * * *

  —

  Captain Tomás Vega, the Barosso’s commanding officer, doubted that his sonar officer really had heard a scraping noise coming from the Kansas City, but he couldn’t take the chance that something else was down there. He was responsible for the nuclear sub until the U.S. Navy arrived and he wasn’t going to give his country a black eye by letting something happen to it before the Americans could attempt a rescue.

  “Anything on the scope?” Vega asked the sonar man.

  “Contact bearing two-seven-five!”

  “Identify.”

  “Small submersible. Unknown origin. It has moved away from the Kansas City.”

  Vega turned to the communications officer. “Radio the U.S. Navy. Find out if they have any ships or subs operating in the area.”

  After a minute, the comms officer said, “Negative. The U.S. says they don’t have anything close to us.”

  “Then we have to consider an unknown sub hostile,” Vega said. “Put some distance between us and the Kansas City.” He looked at the weapons officer. “Prepare to fire an anti-submarine torpedo.”

  40

  Juan’s mind was racing as he tried to put himself in the Barosso’s captain’s shoes. They would likely consider a strange sub hovering near the Kansas City a threat. That meant the Nomad was in danger, and it was defenseless.

  When Juan had squeezed past the SEAL Delivery Vehicle to get access to the air lock, he had noticed that it was equipped with two mini-torpedoes.

  The dry deck shelter air lock was nearly full of water when Juan said to Bradley, “Does that SDV work?” Their helmets used acoustic transducers for underwater communication.

  “The batteries should still be charged,” Bradley said in a chipmunk-pitched voice now that his lungs were full of the heliox.

  “Have you operated one before?”

  “Only in base exercises as the weapons officer. I was supposed to take it out on my first operational training mission before we went down.”

  “Then consider this your replacement mission. If the Brazilians fire a torpedo, my submersible is too slow to evade it.”

  “They don’t know you’re here?”

  “We had to make this a covert rescue operation. I can’t explain why right now.”

  “What can we do?” Bradley asked.

  “Do those mini-torpedoes on the SDV have active warheads?”

  “Yes, but we can’t fire on a friendly warship.”

  “That’s not what I’m thinking. Let’s get it out of the garage. I’m driving.”

  Juan opened the hatch to the hangar and found the controls for extending the cradle holding the SDV. The external cap was already pivoted to the side from when Juan entered, so the cradle motored back until it reached its limit.

  The SDV was intended to be a method for SEAL teams to approach shore without being seen. It had the cigar shape of most other submarines, with a large propeller powered by rechargeable silver-zinc batteries. Unlike other subs, however, the SDV’s six seats were open to the sea, which allowed for easy ingress and egress by SEALs in their scuba gear. All electronics were sealed, but the controls were exposed to the water.

  This SDV was armed with two Compact Rapid Attack Weapons, or CRAWs, which were miniature torpedoes meant for attacking small surface vessels or subs. They were mounted one to a side on fuselage clasps. With a warhead weighing just forty-five pounds, the CRAW wouldn’t inflict much damage upon a two-thousand-ton corvette even if Juan wanted to target it. But the CRAW could provide them with some defense against an anti-sub torpedo launched from the Barosso.

  He and Bradley swam out of the hangar. It was too dark to see the rear escape trunk hatch, but Juan spotted the Nomad’s lights a hundred yards off the KC’s port stern. While they unmoored the SDV from the cradle, he called Max.

  “Did you get the rocks cleared?”

  “It was going to take hours to pick them up one at a time because they were so small, so I bulldozed the rest of them off. I told the sailors inside, and the first two crewmen are getting in the escape trunk now to evacuate. But we have a new problem.”

  “The ping?” Juan asked. “I heard it.”

  “We’re pretty exposed out here,” Max said. “Did you find anyone? Are you ready to go?”

  “Got a sailor with me. He was the only one.”

  “We’ll come pick you up, then.”

  “No, take shelter by the cliff edge. We’ll come to you in the SEAL Delivery Vehicle. I’m worried that we may need it.”

  When the SDV was completely detached from the cradle, Juan got into the driver’s seat while Bradley sat in the passenger seat next to him. Juan went over the joystick and trim controls. It looked like a standard mini-sub layout. He switched on the power, and the control panels on both sides lit up.

  “No time to go through a checklist,” Juan said. “Are you ready?”

  “Aye, sir,” Bradley replied.

  Juan put it into reverse and backed away slowly from the dry deck shelter. When they were clear, he lifted from the deck and motored toward the Nomad.

  He was about to tell Max that they’d escort him to a spot farther along the cliff’s edge and out of view of the Barosso when he heard a splash.
>
  “Fish in the water!” Bradley squeaked. The effect would have been comical if they weren’t being shot at.

  “Bearing?” Juan asked.

  “One-seven-five.”

  Right behind them. Juan swung the SDV around to put them head-on with the approaching torpedo.

  “It went out and now is turning around as it descends,” Bradley said. “One thousand yards and closing fast.”

  “Fire CRAW One,” Juan ordered.

  “Torpedo away!”

  The mini-torpedo unlatched from the side of the SDV and shot forward, playing out a hair-thin wire behind it.

  “Impact in twenty seconds. They’re both doing more than fifty knots, so this is going to be like hitting a bullet with a bullet.”

  Juan peered over at Bradley’s sonar screen and saw the two dots racing toward each other.

  Juan counted down the last ten seconds in his head. When the dots fused as one, he steeled himself for the explosion. But nothing happened.

  The dots raced away from each other.

  “It missed!” Bradley yelled, pounding the bulkhead in frustration.

  “Fire Two!” Juan called out.

  “Two away! Ten seconds to impact.”

  “Does the torpedo have a self-destruct?” Juan asked.

  “Yes.”

  “We can’t afford to miss again. On my mark, activate self-destruct.”

  “Understood.” Bradley placed his finger over a red button. “Ready.”

  Juan was hoping to overload the enemy torpedo’s sonar array or disrupt the guidance system with a nearby blast.

  He looked at the screen and counted down in his head again. Three . . . two . . .

  “Now!”

  Bradley jammed his finger on the button.

  The CRAW detonated, the flash visible in the distance. It was immediately followed by a far bigger explosion.

  A second later, the SDV was buffeted by a huge shock wave. It tossed the submersible sideways, and Juan struggled to stay in his seat as it slewed around.