by David Poyer
Sixty.
Sixty-two.
The hull rocked and came to rest. He reached up and tapped the gauge. Something creaked up forward. The needle rested.
Sixty-three meters.
Utter silence, save for a faint crepitation as the live load of the sub’s steel transferred from the ballast tanks to the keel.
A hum from all around. Then a rapid, continuous beat. The whish, whish they’d heard twice before, as the frigate had gone over.
They crouched in the dimness. Not a man spoke. Im rubbed his stomach, squinting. Vaught slumped, staring at the useless controls. Only Carpenter, frowning as he listened, seemed still to have something useful to do. “It’s that prick with the nicked blade,” he whispered.
Sumo and Oberg slipped into the control room and hung from piperuns on the overhead, ears cocked.
A ping slashed across the hull. Every man winced, but no one moved otherwise. The sound repeated itself. It traveled from ahead to overhead and dwelt, growing louder. Dan took one deep breath after another, trying not to scream.
The sound dwindled. It receded aft.
“Moving away,” Carpenter muttered.
They stirred, exhaled, looked blankly at one another. Dan cleared his throat. “Didn’t see us. Not on that pass. Maybe we’ll get lucky.”
“So what’s the plan?”
“Wait for local sunset, by the clock. Then surface and pretend we’re a fishing dhow headed for home.”
“Headed where? The task force?”
“No,” Dan whispered. “Straight in to Abu Dhabi. If the Iranians don’t like it, at least we’ll get everybody off alive. But we’re not out of this yet. We’ve got to get the hydraulic system back, get steering and depth control, before we go up. Find where they stow these oxygen candles and light more of them. And keep working on the Shkval.”
They sat for a few moments, each alone with his thoughts. Then slowly hoisted themselves to their feet, and got to work.
25
Twelve Hours Later
Teddy rolled out from under the pump, too exhausted even to curse. The fatigue was weird, he’d never felt anything like it, even at basic underwater demolition school. His chest felt like it was in a vise, and he had to stop too often to get his breath.
He and Kaulukukui had been on the hydraulics for hours. First finding what was wrong—a stoppage somewhere upstream of the main supply and return manifolds. Locating what turned out to be a clogged filter, then figuring how to get it out. Cleaning and replacing it, recharging the pressure tanks, then getting wise too late that they should have closed the valves above and below the housing. With them open while they were cleaning the filter, air had leaked into the lines.
With Monty on the manual, they’d had to open the bleeder valves one at a time, first in the power generation system, then through the whole ship, tracing each line and cracking each valve, which were almost always snugged tight against the overhead, and venting air till they got a solid squirt of oil. Which was why he reeked of hydraulic fluid, old bilge water, and sweat.
“So that’s it?” Monty asked him.
“Find out in a minute. If the accumulator charges and everything downstream cycles. If it doesn’t, there’s more air in the system we didn’t find.”
Behind him Monty closed the manual, which he’d been translating, sentence by sentence, to the men turning the wrenches. He caught a cough in his fist, glancing at the overhead, which was dripping with condensation. Then shuddered suddenly. He’d been doing that for a couple of hours now, his rib muscles and long muscles bunching and ticcing.
They’d been at it the whole time they’d been on the bottom, with two short breaks in the control room for sandwiches, hot strong tea, and tense discussions of air compressors, pneumatic-hydraulic accumulators, and battery cooling systems. Fortunately they’d found more oxygen candles in the after torpedo room. Along with a rack of bulkhead clips, half of which were filled with machined aluminum cylinders thirty inches long and seven inches in diameter, painted chrome yellow with black stripes.
Opening one cautiously, Kaulukukui had found it lined with soft rubber. A smaller, sheet-metal cylinder nestled inside. And inside that, when he pried the spring-loaded top open, a stack of soft olive-green biscuits. Since the rack was beside an ejection tube, they’d agreed the green cakes were some kind of bubble-type countermeasures.
They’d lit off the candles, and for a while it had helped. But the steadily worsening headaches, their irritability and stupidity and sluggishness were due not to lack of oxygen, but too much carbon dioxide. Unfortunately they hadn’t found any carbon dioxide absorbent at all. They’d traced out the air circulation and found where the sodalime canister should have gone, but there was none there or in any of the storerooms. Either they’d never been put aboard, or had all been used up and not replaced.
Monty coughed again, his heart racing and fluttering. Unfortunately what killed people in closed spaces was usually not oxygen deprivation but carbon dioxide poisoning. Which they were all on the edge of—the big Hawaiian worst of all, for some reason. Kaulukukui’s face was flushed, his hands twitched uncontrollably, and when he had to lift something he all but choked. Monty felt disoriented and panicky. Although it was hard to separate out symptomatic panic from the very real dread he felt whenever Carpenter would whisper that another ship was approaching.
If they stayed down much longer they could look forward to convulsions, unconsciousness, death, no matter how much oxygen they generated. They had to flush the boat, get fresh air in here, or they were finished.
“Okay.” Teddy wiped his hands on a piece of rag. “I’m gonna go forward, see if this fucking works.”
Sixty feet forward, Dan pressed the button that controlled the periscope. With the faintest whir the steel column began to move. It faltered halfway up, then smoothed out. Of course, he couldn’t see anything, the objective was still many fathoms down, but still he smiled. “Seems to work.”
Teddy fitted a wrench to the vent fitting on the unit cylinder on the ’scope. A jet of froth spurted. When it turned to fluid he twisted it shut again. “Good to go. V-Dag, give the rudder a shot. Full cycle, all the way left, right, back to centerline.”
“Where’s Sumo?” Dan asked him. They were all whispering.
“One of the torpedo room bunks. I told him to get next to one of those rebreathers and lie down. Got her cycled? Do the planes next. I’m gonna go back aft. Monty, what have I got left to bleed?”
“Control cylinders, change valve, telemotor pump, then all the lines from the telemotor to the control cylinders. ‘Cycle again and repeat until no further air appears.’ Remember the change valve has to be set to this word—”
“You show me, I’ll set it.”
They headed aft. Dan, left with Vaught and Carpenter and Im, cycled the scope again. It worked perfectly.
He leaned against it, waiting for his heart to stop palpitating, thighs to stop shuddering. The headache was constant now, a black wedge driven between the hemispheres of his brain. He made himself review the situation step by step. No one topside: the frigate’s screws had faded to northward hours before. Since then they’d heard only the distant rumble of tankers, passing to the north and east, and now and then the tapping whine of the motorized dhows ubiquitous in the Gulf, fishing and trading from Oman to Iraq. Pneumatics and now hydraulics back on line. He checked his watch—2034 local, the last light should be fading into the dusky rose of a Hormuz sunset—and cleared his throat. “Rit. You sure there’s no other way to get this stuff out of the air?”
Carpenter leaned slowly out of the sonar shack. “What?”
“I said, no other way to purge CO2?”
“We been through this, Commander. If we don’t have scrubbers, got to ventilate the boat. That’ll take fifteen minutes, if we have the blowers lined up when we break the surface, pop both hatches, and blow from forward to aft.”
“Okay, we pop the hatches and start the blowers. But not the di
esels.”
“Don’t have the hands to run them. Even if we got ’em started.” Carpenter micrometered a dial, attention back on the trickle of sound that was their only link to a larger world.
“Certain we’re clear? Up top?”
“Haven’t heard anything the last couple hours . . . but that layer inhibits transmission both ways. We’re down in this hole, we can’t hear them, either.”
Dan panted but it didn’t help; his eyelids kept drifting closed; it was hard to inflate his lungs, as if invisible belts constricted them. “Well, we’ll try it, once they’ve got everything lined up and tested. Keep a three-sixty watch. If you hear anything, let me know.”
Absorbed, remote, the sonarman nodded.
Two hours later Dan nodded to a stoned-looking Im at the ballast controls. He didn’t need to say anything, just nod. They all knew what he meant.
Carpenter had done one last search, all round the compass, and said they were clear.
There was still work to do. The water was still rising in the bilge. But the air was even more fouled, even more unbreathable. They couldn’t stay down any longer.
They were going up. Or trying to.
Through the black pickle that soured his brain he worried whether they had enough high-pressure air to blow, and whether the suction of the silt they lay on would let them go. The only plan he had in that case was for the team to free-ascend from the aft escape trunk, marginally closer to the surface than the forward one, since they lay nose-down. Sixty-three meters. Over two hundred feet. Sumo and Oberg might make it, but he didn’t think the rest of the team would.
He just wanted to get everybody home. To hell with the mission. Maybe it had been too big a bite from the start.
A rushing hiss walked away, making the hull crackle and tremble. Dan pressed the lever on the bitch box. Murmured, “Stand by motors.” A double click answered.
Im stood by the ballast control panel, staring into space. Vaught sat rigid at the helm, a bucket beside him; he’d vomited twice. The air howled in its bonds, streaming out of the banks into the ballast tanks. Dan watched the needle drop with absolute concentration. If they didn’t have enough air to blow . . . but the Russians built their subs with a lot of reserve buoyancy . . . he pushed the fear away. In a few seconds, they’d know.
A popping bang from forward. They all three looked instantly to the depth meter, but it didn’t stir. “Planes full up,” Dan muttered, just to be saying something. Like a robot, Vaught pushed the control levers forward. Wenck was at the forward hatch, Oberg would take the after one. As soon as the water rolled off the deck they’d undog and throw them open, and Sumo would punch the blower switches.
Im hit the last button and air richocheted away. “Full rise,” Vaught muttered.
The bow stirred. Sooner than he’d expected, and he grinned. On their way up! Carpenter leaned out, smiling, too. Suddenly they were all smiling, especially when the needle jumped suddenly, all at once, to sixty, and the hull rolled around them and went slowly and not much but definitely nose up.
“Lifting,” Dan said out loud. He hit the button. “Ahead one-third,” and snapped off and said to Vaught, “Two seven zero, let’s get outside this Iranian Advisory Zone on the chart.”
The helmsman repeated it in a stronger voice than Dan had heard from him in some time. He looked up, yearning for the night air that would soon be blowing through the ship. Never had he realized how much he loved air, how gratefully his lungs would draw in that first cool fresh breath. Even the powdered dust that misted it; he looked forward eagerly to crunching it in his teeth.
The needle ticked past fifty meters. Dan glanced at Im, but the Korean was already adjusting, playing the valves like an organist to counteract the increased buoyancy as they rose. On the surface there’d be a froth, a white eruption of bubbles, but at night there would be no eye to see beneath the fuzzy stars. He’d checked the almanac in the chart room and moonrise wasn’t till 0330.
Still rising . . . forty meters. No one budged. Motors hummed softly aft. Dan studied the chart again, walked his fingers across it for the hundredth time. They’d covered a hundred miles out of Bandar Abbas. It couldn’t be more than two hundred more to the Task Force. An F-18 could cover that in twenty minutes. Oberg had the SatCom ready below the after hatch. As soon as it was open, he’d climb on deck and squirt the message off.
So it was over . . . all but offloading the weapon, the documents, the tapes, and let Chone and Pirrell unravel whatever secret it held. He stretched, telling his pattering heart and laboring lungs it would only be a few more minutes.
“Thirty meters,” Im muttered. He cast Dan a questioning glance, then looked at the periscope. Dan hit the button and it rose silently, the remaining bulbs of the emergency lighting gleaming off the stainless barrel like distant suns through a dusty nebula.
“Steady at ’scope depth?” Vaught muttered, hands on the plane control.
Dan was about to say no, go right on up, but a last reservation made him hesitate. “Uh, right. Ten meters, periscope depth, I’ll check around. Then we’ll surface and blow.”
He bent to the eyepiece, cupping his palms around it. Nothing but black. Black.
Then a different texture of black. “Ten meters,” Vaught murmured.
He had visual. A far-off light, a low star, maybe, or a working light on an oil platform. He checked the bearing, confirmed Vaught was headed west by northwest, and set his feet and began clicking around. To the north, nothing. The objective was too low to pick up the mountains of the Hormozgan, and no dhows or tankers seemed to be out tonight. He panned right, past more darkness, then picked up a distant white beacon that flashed three times about every fifteen seconds.
The chart showed Jazireh-ye Farur, Farur Island, with a triple flash every seventeen seconds. He took a careful bearing and memorized it, then continued right. Another dim, low light. More stars. Then a scattering of peach-tinted sodium vapors bled radiance high into the nighttime sky. The SiC or SiD oil fields, he guessed.
“Check out around one five zero,” Carpenter muttered from the sonar.
“What’s that?”
“Don’t know. Pump of some kind.”
“That’s what I was looking at a second ago. An oil and gas field. Probably compressor equipment.” Dan swung to the bearing nonetheless. A wave chopped over the top of the objective. When it subsided he frowned.
“What you see?” said Im.
“A shadow . . . an island? An abandoned platform?”
Just as he realized it was a ship, hove to with lights out, a dull red flicker lit its deck. He screamed, “Right hard rudder. Ahead flank! Down planes, go deep, go deep!”
The explosion seemed to Obie much louder than any of the previous ones, a terrific crack that slammed him into the panel and whipsawed the hull up and down. Even Kaulukukui barked in surprise where he lay on the deckplates, a Draeger under his head and the mouthpiece between his lips.
“You hangin’ in there, buddy?”
“Fuck you,” the Hawaiian mumbled around rubber.
Metal clanged off and struck again as it tumbled aft. Seconds later two more detonations clanged, but muffled, distant, below them.
Teddy jogged all the way aft, then back, searching the overhead; that first one had sounded like a hit. There was crap all over the deck, mugs, clipboards thrown out of lockers, more glass from more busted light domes, but he didn’t see any water. Yet. He came back to the brown box near the compressors and keyed it feeling as if his lungs had turned to concrete and someone had sucked all the brains out of his skull through his nose. Everything went black, red, then black again. He coughed and tried to get enough air to not keel over. “Control, Electrical. Something hit us a hard lick back here.”
Carpenter: “That fucking frigate’s back. Or I should say, never left. Clobbered us as we came up through the layer. Couldn’t hear it before, same reason it couldn’t hear us.”
Lenson cut in. “Damage report? Any leaks ba
ck there?”
“No, but I heard something tear away to port. Piece of the superstructure?”
“Probably the port plane. We’re getting a hangup when we cycle, and pulling to that side. Can you check the rams?”
He said yeah, and clicked off, crawling on all fours aft, pointing his flashlight over all the ram gear. Found another brown box. “Don’t see anything wrong back here. The hydraulics are still go.”
“Then the plane’s shot. One of the Limbos must have hit it.”
“Better than the hull, drown us all.”
“Still giving me flank power, Teddy?”
“Sure am, Dan. But those needles are just about at zero.”
Dead silence, then the click of the intercom going off. Then back on again. “He’s coming in for a reattack. Give me all the juice you can, Teddy. Find a rebreather and put it on. Then go aft and load up those countermeasures.”
Dan hung on the ’scope, incoherently cursing whoever commanded that dark frigate. That commander had lost his quarry, but he hadn’t given up. Instead he’d lingered, placing himself exactly where any sound from his own pumps and rotating machinery would be masked by the racket the oilfield pumps and compressors made. Crap! Why did he have to get one of the smart Iranians? Cursing himself, too, at the same time, for not just surfacing. Taking the hits, maybe losing the boat, but at least, getting his guys out and overboard. They’d have air to breathe at least. Not this murky miasma that was killing them.
Someone was calling him. A loud voice, urgent tones. He panted, trying to bellows embering neurons back into flame, to pierce the spinning blackness with a steadily dulling understanding.
“Commander! Planes down, passing thirty meters. Rudder still hard right.”
“Full ahead.”
“We’re at full ahead, both motors.”
Im said urgently, grabbing his sleeve, “Countermeasure!”
Dan shook off his fingers. “I’ve got it. Just watch our fucking bubble.” He staggered to the box that held the candles, bent over it, sucking the smoky hot air coming up. Coughed, and rasped hoarsely, “Steady on one-seven-zero.”
