by David Poyer
He glanced at Im, who was watching now. The Korean pointed to the big wheel. “Main battery power,” he said, only it sounded like “powell.”
“Yeah, I got that,” Rit told him. “How about these others? Gimme some help here.” But the Korean just stared at his mouth and tapped his ear.
That left the lever down by his boots, and it was a BIG lever. He bent and was about to haul it up when Im dragged him back, talking a mile a minute in his Korenglish, which Rit couldn’t make out at all. “No. No, Uncretch! Uncretch!”
“What the fuck you tryin’ to say, guy?”
Im put his fists together. He rotated them, together. Then pulled them apart, still rotating one, while the other stopped. Rit stared, brows knit. He did it again, accompanying it with vroom, vroom, eek noises. “You understand? Uncretch!”
“Are you sayin’ . . . declutch?”
“Aie! Ke se ki. Ai sae ki! Must decrutch!”
“Where the fuck am I supposed to declutch?”
“Where? Where?” Im grabbed his arm and dragged him forward, into the engine room. He searched at the end of the big upper casings of the diesels, directly beneath what Rit made as the starboard main exhaust. Then heeled a button. He slammed over a lever and the hissing chuff of a pneumatic clutch went on, then off. He did the same thing to port, then stood back. “Tso sem ni da! Diesel decrutched. Go electric motor now.”
Rit sighed and ran a hand over his forehead. It came away dripping. His kidneys hurt. Was it his imagination, or was it getting hot down here?
The troops had left their cover behind the trucks and were advancing, driven by a short moustached Iranian on their right flank. The pier was open ground for them, too, and they obviously didn’t like it, bending from the waist as they ran. Dan fired again and again at the short guy and finally brought him down, though he was still shouting as he lay holding his leg. Dan hit him again and he quit yelling, but now the squad was only fifty yards away, nearly to the sub’s bow. Then a man wheeled and pointed, right where Kaulukukui lay, and they all began firing at him, the ones behind the trucks, too.
Dan got the guy who’d been pointing. It was much harder to hit a moving target at night than it had been in the daylight at GrayWolf. Then a flash and crack among them sent the squad scattering back to cover.
Three bodies lay motionless on the concrete as a shadow zigzagged along the camel, then swung up onto the brow. Dan switched to the three-round burst setting and triggered fast as he could, laying fire into the muzzle flashes. Sparks danced around the Hawaiian, but he reached the after hatch tent and disappeared.
Without warning a thunderous clatter burst out at the base of the sail. Suppressors were superfluous now, apparently. “Cover us,” Oberg yelled up, and Dan switched magazines and kept firing. Somebody on the other side had tracers and their bright-green trails zipped over his head and clanged on steel.
Under the storm of fire Henrickson and Wenck scrambled out and ran forward. They sprawled on their bellies and worked frantically at the lines. The heavy hawsers splashed into the water between the hull and the camel. Monty and Donnie squirmed backward as tracers flew over them, too, occasionally dipping to glance sparks off the thick steel of the hull. They got back to the sail, scrambled up, and left his line of sight, headed aft.
He ran dry and crouched as he swapped magazines again, hands shaking. The hollow metal clattered away below, into some void through which the periscope and radar masts passed. He almost fumbled the loaded one, too, but caught it before it went. Shoot and move . . . he should move . . . but this was about the best vantage point you could get . . . he compromised by dashing to the starboard side and leaning out to fire, but it didn’t make much difference to the tracers. The clang and smack of bullets hitting the sail was increasing as more of his targets realized where he was. Judging by his own experience with the AK, it was hard to hit anything more than twenty yards away, but sooner or later one of those projectiles was going to find him. Even as he thought this, firing fast as he could aim and shift, the windshield shattered as several bullets drove through it simultaneously. He fired that mag out and dropped it and tried to put the next one in, but it wouldn’t go. It took him several horrible seconds to realize he was trying to insert it upside down.
“Uh, bridge, uh, control room.”
“Talk.” Rounds hammered on the sail, nearly drowned the voice from the tube.
“This is Rit. I uh, think we might be ready to get underway here.”
“You can answer bells?”
“Put it this way, you give me a bell, I’ll see can I answer it.”
“Good, Rit. Real good. Im any help?”
“Actually he’s not doing so bad.”
“He was XO of a Romeo. They can’t be that different from Juliets.”
“Yessir, he, he helped out a lot. Once we figured out what the fuck we were saying. You got like an indicator box up there, with a pointer?”
“Hold on. I’ll look.”
He put his head up and nearly got a bullet through it. So close he felt the air buzz against his face. They were trying another rush, this time from up the pier. He hadn’t seen any trucks up there, so it must be a security response team from the frigate. Sailors, in other words, not troops. It’d take them time to get sorted out, but the jaws were taking shape. When they closed he’d be taking fire from two sides. He fired in their direction, just to slow them up a little, and glanced sternward to see the last line slither over the hull and drop into the black water.
He turned his cheeks to catch the wind direction. The seething, dust-laden breeze was from the east. At last, a break. It would drive them off the pier, and from the position of the sail in relation to the hull, should push the bow out a little faster than the stern. Already there was a black ribbon of water between the bow and the camel it had been snugged up to. A sizzling spray of yellow-white sparks burst like a firework.
“We just parted the shore power cable, Rit.”
“Fuck it, we don’t need it now. Find that box yet, sir?”
He ducked and ran his hands around where he figured the conning officer would stand. A protuberance. He stood and fired toward the trucks, again in the opposite direction, then ducked again and put the weapon light on it. A metal box the size of a loaf of bread, a dial with two hands, below it a knob. “Uh, got it. Definitely the EOT.” The engine order telegraph. You turned the knob, the first indicator swung; the command showed up on a corresponding dial in the engine room, usually with an audible signal, too. The engineers matched the pointer to acknowledge the order, then went to work to “answer the bell.” He twisted experimentally.
“D’you just turn it?”
“Yeah, just twiddled it. Looks like five ahead speeds, three back, if the red ones mean astern. Is your dial on like, ahead slow?”
“If that’s the first one after C, T, O, then looks like a lower case N—”
“That’s ‘stop,’ Rit. Russian C’s pronounced S, Russian R is pronounced P. Stop.”
“Got it. You want ahead slow now?”
“No! First we need rudder control.”
“That’s a whole ’nother question, Commander.”
He bobbed up and fired, cursing himself. He should have had someone on that, too. “Who’s down there? Im, I know, but is Henrickson down there?”
“No, but Vaught’s still in the control room.”
Moving lights caught his eye, and the rumble of a powerful engine over by the main channel. Something was skimming across the water. Headed their way.
“Yeah? Good. Put Im on the motor panel, okay? He doesn’t need to hear to watch the EOT. Then go forward and see if you and Vaught have rudder control. And put some fucking timeliness on it this time. They’re crawling up our ass, out here.”
“Moving fast as I can, sir.” Carpenter sounded injured, but Dan didn’t care. If they didn’t get moving soon, they were all going to be, in the words of a Georgia bumper sticker, opening a can of whup-ass that would land them in a
world of hurt.
Monty hung on the starboard side of the sail watching the lights move closer. Then they didn’t move, at least not against the black water. Just stayed steady, and got bigger.
He was puffing from the run back from the stern. He didn’t like this. Didn’t like guns, even when he was the one shooting. It hurt his ears and he was pretty sure he hadn’t hit anything.
Oberg, in his face. “What the fuck you think you’re doing?”
“Just taking a—”
“Just taking shit! If they’re not shooting at you, you’re not doing your job. Get down on that camel and put some fire out there, asshole!” Monty’s ears rang again as a slap banged his head against the sail.
He lifted the submachine gun and aimed it. Right at Oberg’s back. Then swung it ten degrees to the right and fired. The SEAL flinched away from the blast, but didn’t even turn around.
The gap between the hull and the camel was opening. The sub was pivoting right, accelerating as the wind’s force accumulated. Dan took too long looking. A bullet beside his head spattered him with fragments. They stung like hot needles in his cheek, eyelid, eyeball. He clawed at the pain before he stopped himself. He stuck his head up and fired till the magazine was empty. Only one more. The troops were coordinating their efforts now, two squads providing covering fire while the third rushed. Only thirty yards away, and their aim was getting better. Shots crackled from the north, too. The sailors were uncoordinated, but they were advancing as well.
Hand over his eye, he shouted into the voice tube, “Carpenter!”
“He’s here, sir!” Wenck squeaked.
“Have we got steering?”
“He says he’s not sure, Commander. Can you see the rudder?”
“No, there’s no upper control surface. Has he got a rudder indicator?”
“He’s got an indicator. He’s got an indicator.”
“Does it move when he turns the wheel?”
“There’s no wheel, sir. Just levers and a compass of some kind. Are we moving, up there?”
“A little. Coming right.”
“Well, the compass doesn’t move.”
“For fuck’s sake, Donnie. Is Vaught there?”
“Wait a minute . . . they tried the black lever. The indicator’s moving.”
He stuck his head up again. The frigatesmen had almost reached the stern. Another squad was leapfrogging, scrambling ahead as behind them the others fired from cover. And someone was getting smart: the trucks were grinding forward, sheltering the troops behind them. More headlights on the highway. Reinforcements. The battle rattle was continuous now, the clamor of bullets like heavy hail on an iron shed. He ducked again as fiery trails passed through the space his skull had just occupied. He put the weapon light on the engine order telegraph, grimaced at the stab in his eye as he unthinkingly tried to open it, and rotated the knob to what he guessed was ahead one third, ahead slow. After a long moment the second indicator jerked over, past, then backed up to line up with it. Im, responding to the bell.
“Donnie, listen up. What’s that indicator read? What you think is the rudder indicator?”
“Zero at the top. Then down the right side, ten, twenty, thirty. Looks like it stops at forty, but it doesn’t have the numbers for forty.”
“Is there a red zone or something almost to forty?”
“There’s a red line at uh, about thirty-eight.”
“Then on the left side? Same numbers and line and everything?”
“Same on the left side.”
“Where’s the pointer now?”
“Straight up. Zero.”
“Great, Donnie, great. That’s it, all right. Now: tell Vaught, or whoever’s on the console—”
“It’s V-Dag.”
“Uh-huh. Tell him to get his rudder over to right thirty degrees. Right thirty. Don’t go past thirty, but get it over and hold it there.”
He could faintly hear Wenck passing it on. Then, struck by a thought, shone the weapon light around the cockpit. At waist level . . . there it was, another heavy steel box, another heavy glass port, and under the glass, another dial. He twisted a knob and it illuminated. The same dial and pointer Wenck had just described.
“Okay, I’ve got one up here, too. Is there an RPM indicator?”
“There’s a fuck of a lot of dials down here, sir. We’re trying to figure this. They’re in Russian and what looks like Iranian.”
Shouts from the pier. Dan risked a glance over the coaming. “Uh, Russian . . . can Monty read them?”
“Monty’s up on deck with you. Isn’t he? Is that rudder going over, sir? Is it showing up on your indicator?”
Dan put the light on it again. “Yeah.” He poked his head up again, but things were too hot to leave it up. Still, not only was there more water between the hull and the camel, maybe fifteen feet now, but the pier was starting to move aft. Which meant the sub was moving ahead.
Which meant the bell was taking effect. They were getting power to the screws. The bow was swinging faster now as the rudder took hold. Both forces, wind and rudder, were pushing her toward the center of the basin. Get out there, hang a left turn, and if judged it right, they should be lined up for the exit and after that, the open Arabian Sea.
“Donnie? We’re underway. Slack rudder to right twenty degrees. Right, twenty degrees rudder.”
As the computer technician repeated the order Dan gripped the indicator, sucking air with the faintest taste of hope. They couldn’t extract? Too far, too many troops, too many patrol boats? Now they were protected by a steel hull nothing short of a five-inch shell could even dent. They’d just steal the whole fucking submarine, and worry about what came next when they were outside territorial waters. At which point the U.S. Navy would be there to protect them.
But the clatter of fire was even louder. He shifted to the cover of a retracted antenna mast and looked over again, lifting his head gradually till only his eyes were above the coaming.
Tracers arced through the night. Fresh headlights from armored personnel carriers. Massive, tracked machines, they trundled like dinosaurs onto the pier. A crewman swung a long-barreled gun and cut loose. Its blows made the rifle bullets sound like a gentle rain. Sailors and troops lined the pier, blazing away as K-79 slowly withdrew. Some were leaping down onto the camel, running along it after them. Sirens whooped in the destroyer nest. He looked out into the basin again, to lights weaving back and forth between them and the exit. Patrol craft? Harbor craft? They were clustering right where he had to steer to escape.
It wouldn’t be easy. Maybe the whole idea was stupid. Maybe they just should have surrendered. But he didn’t pass down any more orders. Just ducked, clinging to the antenna mount, listening to the tolling of the heavy rounds as they walked up the sail toward him.
Maybe it wouldn’t work.
But he was sure as hell going to try.
21
The motion was uncannily smooth compared to the vibration and bow wave of a destroyer, or the turbine-drone of a frigate. K-79 precessed out into the basin, filtering between the gust-whipped curtains of dust-laden wind, the beams of hazy light that searched for her, noiselessly as the Ancient Mariner’s uncanny barque. The only clue they had way on was the steady march of lights. The racket aft continued, augmented by more heavy machine guns, Dan assumed from the rest of the armored personnel carriers. He kept his eyes front, but the five or six square inches of the back of his skull felt totally vulnerable. He wouldn’t have any more time to think about it than it would take for one of those slugs to traverse his cranium and paté his brain across the shattered windshield in front of him.
Tracers rainbowed overhead, burning through the murk. It took a moment before he realized they were coming not from behind, but ahead. From flashes low to the water, dead on the bow.
“Commander. We moving?”
Carpenter, from the control room. Dan bent to the speaking tube. “Yeah, we’re underway. Heading for our next turn.”
“To port?”
“Correct, to port. But not just yet.”
Okay, Dan thought, trying to organize what had to be done next when all he wanted to do was clamp his hands over his head and cringe. The answer came up in red flashing letters: communicate. Get the word out to CTF 152 that TAG Charlie needed help, the extract had gone to shit. They needed air support and surface units, and somebody to get them off this sub, a helo or at least somebody with a small boat capability.
They had to get on the horn ASAP, but he couldn’t cope with the SatCom, too, right now. Not on top of everything else. “Rit, where’s Monty?”
“Not down here, sir. Isn’t he with you?”
“Up here? No. He was on the camel—”
With a horrible sensation, he realized exactly what he’d just said. He twisted and stared back. The pier was two hundred yards away, and lined solid with muzzle flashes.
“Monty,” he screamed down the trunk, stripping his throat raw. “Monty!”
No answer. “Oberg!”
“Yeah!”
The response had come from forward. He climbed the pelorus and leaned over the coaming. The SEAL looked up from a slouch against the radar housing that made up the leading edge of the sail. Ahead of him the sea was foaming as the still-ballasted-down bullnose, so near the waterline it was nearly submerged, pushed through the water. “Tell me Henrickson’s down there,” Dan howled.
“Henny? No, he ain’t here.”
“Fuck me,” Dan muttered. He felt like fainting, like throwing up. The last time he’d seen the analyst, Henrickson had been prone on the camel. Firing back. Not looking like he was enjoying himself, but putting down fire. Covering the others, as they cast off.
He looked aft again. No way on God’s green earth they could head back into that dusty wind, that hail of lead. Where Henrickson was probably still huddled, head down, listening to the fire going out over his head, watching K-79 get smaller, fading into the night.
