by Mack Maloney
Elvis walked past the sub’s periscope and out of the control room altogether. He climbed the ladder up through the sub’s massive conning tower to the bridge above. He stopped before he reached the main hatch, though. What was the last depth reading that had been called out? Nine hundred feet below the surface? And what had the helmsmen said was their speed? Seventeen knots?
Elvis smiled and finally opened the main hatch. Not a drop of water came in on him.
He poked his head outside — and felt only the warm breeze on his face.
What he saw was not the rolling waves of the Atlantic, but many overhanging branches belonging to dozens of strangler fig trees. And around him were the waters of a large rectangular lake, much of it hidden from view by these same dangling tree branches, suggesting a thick Louisiana bayou. The underside of the sub was resting on the lake’s smooth, muddy bottom. The lake water covered the remainder of the hull to a point about five feet up to the conning tower, and again, the overhanging strangler fig branches hid the rest.
The sub’s ballast tanks were full. If the Wyoming had to move, all they had to do was blow these tanks and the sub would gently come off the bottom. Then they could turn it around and be on their way.
Not that they were planning on leaving anytime soon.
Not when they were in the perfect hiding place.
Elvis had to hand it to Commander Beaux. He’d found them the ideal spot to stash the Wyoming. Totally isolated, absolutely uninhabited. Few people even knew this place existed or paid attention to it if they did. And, anyone who might have visited here recently was long gone by now.
Big Hole Cay.
No way it could have a better name than that.
* * *
Despite his calm performance on the phone with Admiral Brown, Commander Beaux knew he had an unexpected problem on his hands.
Almost all of the Wyoming’s remaining crew members, the people he was counting on to run the sub’s critical functions, were sick. In fact, many were deathly sick.
It had taken Beaux nearly two years to plan this undertaking. Absorbing everything he could get his hands on about ballistic subs, including stolen classified material, he knew what was needed to make them run. Depth limits, speed limits, communications arcs, tolerances to ocean temperature layers, even how many meals the galley could serve in a day. He knew how to keep the secondary battery power on. He knew how the reactor worked. He knew the basics of how the Trident missiles were fired.
But never did he think, when the day came that they finally hijacked the sub, it would have only a bare-bones crew aboard, with most of them so sick they could hardly stand.
It almost seemed like a blessing in disguise at first — that was the ironic thing. Watching over forty sailors was much easier than watching over 150. In fact, the Wyoming’s entire skeleton crew could fit on the control deck, or in the passageway nearby, which greatly helped the 616 team keep an eye on them. Getting the sub to Big Hole Cay, and before that, using selective brutality to force the weapons crew to show him how to fire the torpedoes — all of it had gone like clockwork for Beaux.
But in the time since arriving here, nearly half the remaining crew had been taken to sick bay, ravaged by the flu. And the other half, those twenty-odd sailors still performing their duties, were getting increasingly ill. Wearing flu masks and sometimes coughing so hard they lost their breath, they were at their stations only because the SEALs were holding M4 assault rifles on them. While being in a sort of a collective state of shock, the sailors were soldiering on, hoping the Navy could somehow get them out of this bizarre blue-on-blue hostage situation before they all died. But many had trouble just keeping their heads up.
The result was that Beaux and his men were forced to run a lot of the boat’s operations themselves. The nuclear reactor had been taken off-line because all the sailors normally on duty to service it were sick. But, there were other critical areas that had to keep functioning for the plan to work: environmental systems, communications, secondary electrical units and the ballast tanks. And, to keep the threat alive, 616 had to maintain the Trident missile launch console and keep enough power in reserve should things really deteriorate and they be forced to use it.
Beaux was no fool. He knew this endeavor wasn’t going to be easy. He knew some blood would have to be spilled and that he would run into unanticipated problems.
But again, never did he think he’d wind up stealing a submarine full of sick sailors.
* * *
This situation became critical several hours after breaking off communications with NS Norfolk.
Beaux was down to sixteen sailors still at their posts by that point, way below the minimum required. In an effort to fix the problem, he made his way down to the Wyoming’s sick bay, carrying his M4 assault rifle with him.
The sub’s only corpsman was helping a sailor onto a cot when Beaux arrived. The sick bay was packed with men on bunks or fold-out cots or, in some cases, on blankets stretched out on the cold deck. The place reeked of illness.
“I need more people to get back to work,” Beaux told the corpsman directly. “There’s got to be some in here who aren’t as bad off as the others.”
The corpsman just shrugged. He’d probably gotten over the shock of the hijacking sooner than everyone else simply because he was so busy treating the sick.
“You’re looking for malingerers, then?” he asked Beaux.
“I’m sure there’s a few,” Beaux replied.
The corpsman just shrugged again. “There is only one member of this crew who hasn’t shown full-blown flu symptoms yet,” he said. “And that person is me. I doubled the dose of vaccine I took before I came on board, plus I’m the only one walking around with surgical gloves, and that makes a difference, probably more than the flu masks. But I’ll be honest with you — I’m feeling fatigued and weak. My throat is sore, and my stomach is beginning to act up. So, it’s only a matter of time for me, too.”
The corpsman had a hot plate on his desk. A small pot of coffee was heating on it, enough for one cup. Beaux nonchalantly poured it for himself — he had to stay awake, and the team had no more amphetamine pills. He started to walk into the infirmary, intent on finding one or two able bodies, but the corpsman stopped him.
“Can’t go in there with any airborne irritants,” he told Beaux, pointing to the steam rising out of the coffee.
Beaux begrudgingly surrendered the cup. “Make sure I pick it up on the way out,” he grumbled, finally disappearing into the sick bay.
Once he was out of sight, the corpsman cleared his throat, retrieved a mouthful of phlegm and spit it into the coffee.
“Will do, asshole,” he said.
33
Big Hole Cay
The hurricane hit at sunset.
Everyone inside the Wyoming heard it coming, this unexpected storm. The thunder sounded like artillery. The lightning caused all the electricals onboard to blink. The wind was so fierce, it seemed to be making the seventeen-thousand-ton submarine sway.
Most disturbing, though, rain could be heard pelting the sub’s hull. Like a continuous barrage of machine gun fire, it was hitting all sides at once.
And that meant something was very wrong.
The Wyoming was built to be silent, especially when submerged. It was soundproofed, inside and out, top to bottom, stern to bow. So why did everything outside sound so loud?
Having no luck getting any more sailors back to work, Beaux was in the CAAC going over the Trident launch procedures when the commotion started. Leaving Smash, Monkey and Ghost to watch those few crewmen still left on deck, he retrieved a trouble light, grabbed Elvis and together they climbed the conning tower ladder to the bridge above.
The noise outside grew the higher they went. The sound of the rain alone was deafening. Then, just as Beaux was about to open the top hatch, the sub moved dramatically to the left. It shifted so violently, at first, both SEALs thought it was an earthquake.
“Damn!” Elvis
yelled. “We’re ninety-five percent underwater. Even a two-hundred-knot wind shouldn’t be moving us like that.”
Beaux pushed open the top hatch — but the weather outside was so fierce, it nearly slammed the heavy cover back down on their unprotected heads, a blow that would have killed them both. It took all their combined strength to force the hatch back open and lock it in place.
Then they had to crawl up onto the tilted sail platform. Finally steadying themselves against the ferocious gale, they stood up and looked around.
Beaux couldn’t believe what he saw.
He screamed: “What happened to all the water?”
It was true. Even in the darkness, they could see the lake’s water level had dropped to almost nothing. No longer five feet up the sail, more than two thirds of the submarine’s hull was now exposed. It was like someone had pulled a plug at the bottom of the lake and the water was draining out.
This was why the rain sounded so loud from the inside: so much of the hull was now above water. This was also why the Wyoming was at a tilt. Resting on the slippery, muddy lake bottom, with hardly any water to support it, the hurricane winds were blowing it over.
Fighting the severe gusts and rain, Beaux aimed the trouble light back at the channel opening 100 feet beyond the sub’s stern. This was the place the 616 had widened on the backs of the twenty day laborers in the run-up to the Wyoming’s seizure. Expanding the mouth of the channel had been necessary to get the sub into the lake.
But now he saw the channel opening was clogged with trees, beach debris, sand and mud, effectively damming it and drastically reducing the flow of water into the lake.
Beaux spun Elvis around and pointed out the situation to him.
“What the fuck?” Elvis yelled over the storm. “That’s impossible!”
Had the hurricane blown the trees down, felling them perfectly over the opening? Or had a great swirl of flotsam washed ashore and completely jammed the gap? Both were highly unlikely — yet there were no other explanations.
Then, in the midst of all this, they saw something else. Not at the clogged channel opening, but at the far end of the sub’s deck itself. Caught in the trouble light’s beam, close to the suddenly exposed tailfins.
There was a man down there. He was soaking wet, wearing a tie-dye shirt, ragged pants, a knit hat jammed on top of dreadlocks, and jammed on top of that, of all things, a welder’s mask. In fact, he was welding something on the sub’s tilted hull.
“What the fuck?” Elvis yelled again.
“Who the hell is that?” Beaux screamed. “What’s he doing?”
Then two more men appeared on the sub’s tail, both also soaked to the skin. Barely visible through the sheets of rain, they were wearing brightly colored African dashikis.
Neither SEAL had brought his assault rifle, so Beaux grabbed Elvis’s .45 automatic and aimed it at the men. But before he could squeeze the trigger, the bridge was suddenly awash in orange sparks. Someone was shooting at them! In an instant, dozens of tracer rounds were ricocheting off the top of the sail, one of them blowing the trouble light right out of Beaux’s hands, another destroying the sub’s periscope.
Both SEALs tried to duck — but it was too late. They heard one especially loud crack! and a bright flash of orange went by them. The next thing Elvis knew, he was looking down at his left hand.
It was covered with blood — and holding his severed right ear.
* * *
It was all Beaux and Elvis could do to retreat back down the conning tower ladder. Dripping wet and shaking, they staggered into the control room, which like the rest of the boat, was now at a pronounced slant. Elvis was bleeding profusely and still clutching his ear.
The other SEALs were shocked.
“What the hell happened up there?” Monkey yelled at them.
“We don’t know,” Beaux shot back. “The water is running out of the lake. We’re almost totally exposed. And there’s some crazy guy down on the deck with a welding rig. And someone started shooting at us!”
The three other SEALs exchanged troubled looks. The sick sailors still on duty just listened in, confused. The water is running out? People on the deck? People shooting at them? What was Beaux babbling about? They were supposed to be in the middle of nowhere.
“Wait a minute,” Smash urged them. “Are you sure about all this?”
Beaux was sure — and he knew it was a disaster in the making. When Team 616 attacked the Russian training sub a week before — a target of opportunity if ever there was one — they’d first disabled it by planting a charge near its exterior propeller shaft while stalking it in their mini-sub. When the Russian captain beached his injured, unarmed vessel, the 616 first sealed all its escape vents, and then broke inside. They practiced rounding up the crew and securing the boat, and — when their impromptu training exercise was over, well, the witnesses just had to go. But that sub had also been off-kilter, because of how it wound up on the beach, and moving around inside it had been extremely difficult. Now the SEALs were facing the same thing here, but on a much grander scale. Even worse, the low water level meant they didn’t have the depth needed to blow their ballast tanks and leave here if they wanted to.
But most troubling of all, someone was out there.…
Smash was still disbelieving. “How can this be possible?” he exclaimed. “We checked out this place a million times. There’s not supposed to be anyone around for miles.”
Monkey examined Elvis’s wound and said: “Maybe someone was hunting? Some rifle shots can go a long way.”
Elvis was instantly furious. “Hunting? At night? In a fucking hurricane?”
The sub’s corpsman was on hand, checking the ill sailors being made to stay at their posts. He gave Elvis a cursory glance then retrieved a towel from his medical bag.
Out of sheer desperation, Elvis turned to the corpsman as he was applying the towel to his wound and asked: “What do you think happened?”
The corpsman just shrugged and replied, “I think someone tried to shoot your ear off — and succeeded brilliantly.”
* * *
Elvis was taken to the sick bay, where the corpsman stitched him up as best he could. There was no hope of reattaching the ear, but Elvis insisted the medic keep it in the infirmary’s icebox.
The corpsman was loath to give Elvis a bunk that would be better used by a sick sailor, so he took the wounded SEAL down to the torpedo room, one level below. It was a relatively roomy compartment, one of the few places aboard the sub that actually had both head- and legroom. It was used occasionally as the sick bay’s annex.
The corpsman set up a cot right next to the starboard-side torpedo tube and helped Elvis lie down. Elvis complied without a word, keeping his assault rifle close by.
Then the corpsman left, intent on flushing Elvis’s severed ear down the toilet.
Elvis tried to lie still, praying sleep would come. “Maybe I’ll wake up and it will all be a bad dream,” he thought.
And he did drift off after a few seconds, only to be startled awake by a loud noise.
It took him a few moments of painful listening before he realized someone was banging on the torpedo tube.
From the inside.
* * *
Up in the CAAC, three of the four remaining SEALs had climbed into their battle gear. Flak jackets, body armor, Fritz helmets, extended ammo belts. They were ready to deal with the bizarre situation outside.
Who was the strange man on the sub’s deck and what was he welding? How did the channel mouth get all jammed up? And who was shooting at them? Beaux, Ghost and Smash were going up top to find out and to defend their position, leaving Monkey behind to guard the sailors on deck.
But just as they were ready to climb the conning tower ladder, all the lights on the submarine suddenly went out.
They’d heard a dull thud an instant before they were plunged into darkness. It took a few seconds before the sub’s emergency lights finally blinked on. But they sent little
more than a dull, greenish glow throughout the control room, casting eerie shadows everywhere.
“Now what’s happened?” Beaux bellowed.
No one seemed to know. Beaux turned to a young ensign, the highest-ranking crew member still on the deck, and demanded an answer. The ensign guessed that with the reactor turned off and the submarine relying purely on battery power, a short circuit had occurred somewhere in the power bus.
So, how could they fix the problem? Beaux pressed him. The submarine equivalent of a tripped circuit breaker had to be pushed back in place, was the ensign’s reply. Exactly where that breaker was located, though, was the question. There was so much redundant wiring on the Wyoming, it could be in one of a dozen places.
Beaux’s head began pounding. His stomach was starting to ache. He didn’t need this, not now, not ever. He barked at Smash to go with the CAAC’s electrician to locate the tripped breaker. Then he reaffirmed that Monkey should remain on deck and watch the sailors.
Then he and Ghost headed for the bridge to deal with the problems outside.
* * *
The Wyoming was built in sections. The nose contained the sonar equipment. The next section carried the torpedoes. Then came the CAAC, the crew’s quarters, the reactor, and the forest of Trident missiles. Toward the back of the boat was the maneuvering room, the atmospheric control room and the engine room. All of them contained some sort of circuit breaker.
Smash and the electrician made their way through each compartment, aided only by a single flashlight. It took twenty long minutes, walking the whole way on a tilt. But after examining all the breakers and finding none had tripped, the electrician said they had to check out the main electrical room, way at the end of the boat.
It was here they finally found the cause of the blackout — and it had nothing to do with circuit breakers.
The sub’s primary power cable, looking like an anaconda and nearly a foot around, was lying on the electrical room floor, smoking and in pieces.
It had been blown in two.
