The navigation officer nodded. “The valley is two hundred feet wide and peaks at a depth of fifty feet. If we run out of room, we can ascend and maintain clearance below our keel.”
Bower firmly set his jaw, his brown eyes focused. “All right. Pilot, you have approval to follow them in.” Then, turning to the navigation officer, said, “Mr. Browning, I’m counting on you to ensure we maintain a safe distance from the seascape. The last thing I want to do is explain to Uncle Sam why I just damaged his 30-billion-dollar piece of hardware.”
“Understood, sir.”
The Omega Deep climbed as it trailed the Orcasub into the narrower underwater tributary. The valley’s bottom rose rapidly. While the massive Omega Deep followed, keeping near the top of the valley, the Orcasub trailed along the ancient river.
Unexpectedly, in sudden, rapid ascent, it climbed at a near-vertical angle. Like a modern fighter jet in a balls-out, full effort blast, it powered into what appeared to be an ancient waterfall.
Commander Bower grinned as they pursued the yellow sub from a distance. Whoever was at the controls, piloting the Orcasub, knew what they were doing. Not only did they appear to move without hesitation, but they were also following the line of the ancient tributary just above the seabed. It reminded him of an attack helicopter racing below Viet Cong radar along a valley floor.
The Omega Deep reached the top of the ancient waterfall.
Despite his hardened appearance, and normally difficult to read countenance, Commander Bower audibly gasped at the sight.
His eyes raked the unreal seascape below.
The ancient river opened up to a shallow underwater tabletop, covered in vivid and impressive coral gardens. It was a unique tropical playground that didn’t belong anywhere near where they were. Tropical fish filled the place, swimming in and out through the coral reef, which was awash with color. Hues of red and orange glowed brightly among the shifting tapestry of mustard, greens, blues, reds, and browns. A spectacular vista of coral sponges, mollusks, giant manta rays, sea turtles, and giant clams filled his vision.
Bower stared at the yellow Orcasub as a pod of dolphins raced beside it, swimming upside and by its side.
Grinning and speaking to no one in particular, he said, “Is it just me or does it look like we just entered a tropical coral reef?”
“Sure,” his XO replied. “But I’ve never heard of a coral reef so far from the tropics before.”
“Agreed,” Bower replied. “Whatever underwater landmass we’ve come across, it’s not on any maritime maps. Yeah, the geologists, marine biologists, and archeologists are going to have a field day over this when we report back.”
The depth of the tabletop was roughly fifty feet, with a narrow chasm through which the Orcasub still raced, at a depth of one hundred feet.
Under the direction of Commander Bower, the pilots positioned the Omega Deep at a depth of forty feet. The chasm was wide enough for them to descend deeper, but he wasn’t taking any chances of clipping the sharp coral sides of the valley.
Commander Bower said, “Did you know that coral reefs are some of the most diverse ecosystems on Earth. They occupy less than 0.1 percent of the world’s ocean surface, but provide habitat for at least 25 percent of all marine species?”
The crew, used to his erudite lectures, called him the “Sea Professor,” but never to his face.
His XO obligingly replied, “That’s fascinating, sir. Can you tell us more?”
Bower smiled. He had a reputation for being a scholarly bore at times, and he didn’t care. One thing he’d learned after forty years at sea, was that being CO had certain perks. This was one of them. His crew was a captive audience when he wanted to share his knowledge. And why shouldn’t he educate them in marine biology? They’d joined the Navy to see the world. He was damned sure his crew was going to really see the world, not just watch it go by.
“Did you know most of the coral reefs around the world were formed during the last glacial period when melting ice caused the sea level to rise and flood the continental shelves? This means that most modern coral reefs are less than 10,000 years old. As communities established themselves on the shelves, the reefs grew upward, pacing rising sea levels. Reefs that rose too slowly could become drowned reefs. They are covered by so much water that there was insufficient light.”
The XO, happy to play the game, said, “And yet there appears to be plentiful coral life here, at a depth of 100 feet?”
“Well spotted, Mr. Halifax.” Bower nodded. “Sometimes coral reefs are found in deep sea, away from continental shelves, around oceanic islands and atolls. You’ll find the vast majority of these islands are volcanic in origin. The few exceptions have tectonic origins where plate movements have lifted the deep ocean floor on the surface. But even in those conditions, the coral never survives as deep as 100 feet, which is why a lot of scientists are going to be pretty excited by what we’ve found here today.”
His XO said, “Not what we found, sir. The owners of that private submarine appear to have known about it.”
“Indeed, Mr. Halifax.”
In the crystal-clear waters, through which crepuscular rays reached the seabed, the Orcasub became perfectly visible.
Bower squinted as he examined the now clearly visible faces of the pilot and copilot, encapsulated in their first-class seats on board the Orcasub as it flew quietly through the secret tropical rainforest.
The commander glanced around the Command Center. “Can anyone tell me what causes the unusual clarity of tropical waters?”
Mr. Browning, his navigator, answered first. “Tropical waters contain few nutrients. Thus, no drifting plankton, which equates to clear water visibility.”
Bower nodded, continuing his lecture on marine biology. “They call it Darwin’s Paradox. How can so much marine life flourish in such nutrient-poor conditions?”
Macintyre, the copilot on shift – a gentleman in his twenties from Wyoming who was on his second year out from receiving his coveted submariner Dolphins – dutifully asked, “What’s the answer, sir?”
Bower shrugged. “I’ve no idea.”
The crew laughed at his honesty.
There seemed to be an uncanny air of relaxed joviality on board. And why shouldn’t there be? The world’s most advanced predator was stalking a billionaire’s private sports submersible and had now located an ancient marine wonderland in the most unlikely of places.
Up ahead, the Orcasub headed to the end of the chasm, where it ran straight inside the mouth of a large underground chamber, roughly twenty feet high by thirty feet wide. Bower scanned the seascape for signs of where the submersible might have come out. There were none. The cave formed out of the mouth of a small rocky outcrop on the coral tabletop, like a monolith, with no sign of any place in which the Orcasub might disappear.
Bower said, “Pilot, all stop.”
“All stop, sir,” the pilot confirmed.
The command center remained silent while they waited patiently for the small sub to come out again, which it didn’t.
“What the hell is it doing in there?” Commander Bower asked.
“It could be trapped, sir,” the XO suggested. “You know, it’s gone inside only to get its multiple thrusters snagged on something inside.”
“I doubt it. You watched the pilot. He knew how to fly. Someone like that didn’t enter a cave on a whim. He knew what was in there. No way he was going to get trapped.”
The XO nodded. It was a valid point. “Or, it could be waiting?”
Bower’s eyebrows narrowed. “For what?”
“For us to leave it alone.”
Commander Bower met him with flat eyes. “Are you kidding me?”
The XO shrugged. “They might have spotted us. It’s possible.”
“How?” Bower asked. “With the blackbody coated hull, it should be impossible for the most advanced acoustic systems in the world to locate us, let alone some billionaire’s private submersible sports craft.”
<
br /> The XO shrugged again. “I’m just suggesting the possibility, sir.”
Commander Bower’s vision narrowed, fixed upon that single image of the mouth of the cave. The pod of dolphins leisurely raced out again, as though bored by what they’d discovered inside. The coral, which surrounded the opening was a florid mixture of rainbow hues and tropical fish.
He ran the palms of his hands through his thick hair.
For a moment he contemplated the idea of sending a team of Navy SEALs out the lockout locker in dive gear to investigate.
Or he could just wait the Orcasub out. The Omega Deep was a nuclear sub with a near infinite endurance and a little under 90 days’ food supplies. The Orcasub had less than 80 minutes dive time. He could wait. But something was bothering him.
What if Halifax was right? What if the pilots of the private submersible had spotted them?
It would mean that nearly 30 billion dollars of research grants had been wasted. By him.
A moment later, he forgot about the problem, because Sonar Technician Callaghan interrupted his thoughts. “Sir, I’ve got a contact for a second submarine. It’s laying on the seafloor with a cracked hull.”
“How close?”
“Four thousand feet. At a course of 220 degrees.” Lieutenant Callaghan’s face had paled. She swallowed, hard. “And, sir, it’s American.”
*
Belinda held her breath, waiting for the commander’s response.
Despite the implications of a sunken U.S. submarine, Commander Bower moved with a kind of considered grace, calm and contained. He leaned in next to the young STS, with his left hand on the console beside her, and his right on the back of her chair. He took a deep breath in and out and nodded his head in confirmation. He knew exactly what he was looking at.
He tapped the screen lightly with his index finger where the readout showed “60HZ,” and asked, “What depth do you have it at?”
“Hard to say for certain, sir.”
“Hazard an educated guess?”
“It could be somewhere between one and three hundred feet.”
He frowned. “Nothing more accurate than that?”
“No.”
“What’s causing the difficulty?”
Despite the circumstances, she smiled. He hadn’t asked her why she couldn’t do it. “We’re not getting a direct line of sight from the sound. It’s being blocked and bounced around some sort of submerged valley.”
“All right. You said it appears to be transmitting a repeated sound?”
“Yes. It’s similar to Morse Code, but I can’t decipher it.”
“Really?” The CO was already reaching for a second headset. “Can I hear it, please?”
She plugged the second set of headset leads into her hydrophone audio output. “You’re good to go, sir.”
She watched as he listened to the playback of the alien sound.
His focus was shifting fractionally in and out, his brows rising and falling a little, the shape of his mouth always changing, as if he was constantly thinking. He studied the sonar screen and listened, simultaneously taking everything in, as though there was a computer behind his eyes, running at full speed.
This was another reason the crew sometimes called him the Professor.
Every member of a submarine crew, of any rank, knew a little about every single station on board. It was set up so that in battle, particularly in the event of a hull breach, you never knew where people would end up. It was vital that people knew how to perform tasks and operate in roles they were not normally commissioned to work. This went double fold for a commander of a U.S. submarine, who needed to demonstrate leadership at every level of the ship.
The human ear of a healthy young person can hear at a range between 20 and 20,000 Hertz, but by the time a person reaches forty, their high-frequency range diminishes to below 12,000 Hertz. Professor or not, it seemed impossible to her, that the CO could discern and identify the sound that appeared alien to her well-attuned ear.
The CO bit his lower lip and removed the headset, handing it back to her. The lines in his face seemed to deepen and darken in the bare light. He took his time before he spoke. “I’ve heard that sound before…”
She cocked a well-plucked eyebrow. “Really?”
“Yeah. You were right. It’s similar to Morse Code but different. In fact, it is Morse Code after its been broken down using a cipher. The code is relatively simple. It had to be. You see, it was designed to be used by senior submarine officers, ranked XO and above, as a means of top-secret communication during an emergency.”
“Do you know what it says, sir?”
Commander Bower sighed heavily. “It says, we’ve been sunk by hostiles. Have tried to escape. Unable to reach surface due to attackers.”
*
Commander Bower was not known for reckless or fickle behavior.
Nor had he reached such a height in the U.S. Navy’s command structure by being careless. He understood the only fight you were ever certain to win was the one you didn’t enter. He would have never needlessly endangered his crew and the 30-billion-dollar piece of military hardware under his command. He should have surfaced to make an immediate satellite report to the Pentagon, who would have sent him another two submarines and an aircraft carrier at the least.
But for some reason, one he would never have the time to understand, he made the worst decision of his career.
In another three weeks, he’d complete his initial evaluation of the experimental stealth submarine. It would be his last command and a fitting send off after an exemplary career.
Commander Bower had always followed protocol. Forty-three years in the Navy – nearly thirty of those in Command – and he’d never broken from standard operating procedures… until today. It could have been because retirement was around the corner. In another four weeks, after the completion of the initial testing of the unique stealth technology and his brainchild, the USS Omega Deep would return stateside, marking the end of his final command.
In the back of his mind, all he could hear was the hull number at the end of the encrypted message:
SSN23 – The USS Jimmy Carter.
His first command.
Now, he was witnessing her first hand, destroyed at the bottom of the ocean. His submarine. His men and women. If it wasn’t for the chance discovery of the blackbody material used to construct the USS Omega Deep, he too might have been among those lost.
Either way, he made a decision then and there that went against the Navy’s protocol. Instead of surfacing to alert his superiors, he gave a very different order, the biggest mistake of his career.
“Pilot. New course, bearing: 220. Full speed.” Commander Bower swallowed hard. “Let’s come around and see if we can find any survivors.”
“Copy, setting a new course. Bearing: 220 degrees, full speed, sir.”
“Weapons control,” Bower said in a cool and even voice, “I want all available torpedoes ready to fire on my command.”
“Understood, sir.”
The Omega Deep raced toward the stricken American nuclear attack submarine. Inside, the command center was silent. Every member of the crew focused on the task at hand within their respective stations. They were riding near the surface, their keel just twenty feet shy of the massive submerged rocky tabletop.
Commander Bower turned to Lieutenant Callaghan. “Have you found our enemy target yet?”
“No, sir,” she replied.
“Keep looking. I know the CO of the Jimmy Carter personally. If he and his crew haven’t reached the surface in this shallow depth, mark my words, there will be an enemy submarine in these waters preventing him.”
“Understood, sir.”
To the navigation officer, he said, “Have you got a LIDAR map of the wreck site?”
“It’s just coming up now, sir,” Browning replied, pointing to an image – similar to a bathymetric map of the seafloor. “The Jimmy Carter appears to be at the bottom of this shallow ravine her
e, at a depth of 100 feet.”
“Is there room for the Omega Deep to descend to that depth?”
“Yes, but we won’t have a lot of room to maneuver if we get into trouble.”
“Understood,” Bower said. “I think it’s fairly safe to say, we’re going to encounter trouble.”
The Omega Deep slowed to a stop directly above the wreck site. Commander Bower stared through the downward facing spherical viewing dome. There, his eyes swept the scene below. A relatively narrow ravine – approximately one hundred feet wide and fifty feet deep – came to a rocky conclusion. The seabed was mostly black sand. Embedded in the middle of that sand were the wrecked remains of the USS Jimmy Carter.
Bower felt the bile rise in his throat at the sight, and his face twisted into a mask of incognizant fury. The submarine appeared intact with its keel deep in the sandy seabed.
“Sonar. Anything?” he asked.
“No, sir,” she replied. “I’ve got good visuals up to three miles with no contacts. There’s a chance a submarine is hiding inside one of the trenches farther out than that, but right now, we’re on our own.”
One of the modifications on the Omega Deep compared to traditional attack submarines, was the addition of a lockout trunk above and below the main hull. This allowed for deep sea rescue missions to be carried out if needed by direct connection to the other submarine.
Dwight Bower grinned sardonically. “Pilot, can you see their forward escape hatch?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Think you can line up our keel-based lockout locker and make a connection?”
“Yes, sir.”
Bower glanced above at the upper viewing half-sphere. There were no boats or submarines in view. “All right. Weapons, let’s be ready for any attack.”
“Understood, sir.”
Ballast control took on some more water, and the Omega Deep sank toward the wreck of the Jimmy Carter.
The pilot and copilot adeptly maneuvered the bow thrusters until the Omega Deep was directly above the stricken submarine.
A Navy SEAL team, positioned within the keel lockout hatch said over the internal radio, “We’re not getting a seal. We need to descend a little deeper. Maybe another foot.”
Omega Deep (Sam Reilly Book 12) Page 4
