by David Poyer
“Let’s get some of these Korean kids home too,” O’Quinn rasped. Then slid, cursing, scrabbling, and went down again. Back here the water, the gratings, everything, was coated with oil. Dan hoped the stuff didn’t catch fire. They’d be well and truly screwed.
Then he smelled it, what O’Quinn had told him about. A nitric burning stink, like the afterlingering of a fireworks show, or a burned-out roadside fusee. What the hell was it? It wasn’t anything he’d ever smelled before aboard ship.
The ship rolled and something let go with a grinding clatter in the dark. Whatever it was, it sounded like it was right above them. Dan cowered, his arm whipping up in protective reflex. But nothing came down. Yet. He shouted, “Where the hell are they? You sure about this, Joe?”
O’Quinn was coughing, and Dan felt the tickle in his lungs too. The fumes, or smoke, or whatever it was, was getting thicker. “Just a couple more yards,” he grunted between coughs. “Right under here. Duck under this thing.”
WHEN they finally reached the door, Dan saw the problem. One of the generators had come off its foundations, sheared its bolts, and been toppled by the sideways snap of explosive shock. A corner of its steel-I-beam base pinned the door closed.
He figured it was some sort of stern compartment, a Nixie handling room or the towed array deployment gear, like O’Quinn had said. The deepest, remotest manned station, all the way aft, all the way down. The door’s dogs were turned to the open position. Whoever was inside must have done that. But they couldn’t pop it against the weight.
They were both coughing now, unable to stop, the biting pungent fumes making it impossible to get a full breath. No wonder the others had stayed forward. He and O’Quinn leaned on the door, panting and bracing themselves against another heavy roll, another cacophony of terrifying sounds from above them. Something was hissing and bubbling not far away.
“They don’t get power back pretty damn quick, she’s going over,” Dan gasped.
“Probably going anyway. With all this water.”
O’Quinn’s placid tone was so at variance with what he was saying that Dan glanced over in surprise. His face—what little of it was visible in the gleams from the lights far behind them—was smudged with oil, but the man was smiling. “Uh, you all right, Joe? Breathing this shit—”
“Huh? Never better.” O’Quinn studied the fallen machinery. The frame pinned the hatch closed. The black water moved across its foot, a little higher each time the frigate rolled. He groped along the bulkhead and came up with a dogging wrench. He slammed it on the hatch, two, three times.
Dan listened but nothing came back. No answering concussions, no yells, nothing but the distant bubbling, the uneasy squeak of steel on steel. He coughed. Got out, “You heard somebody inside?”
“Yeah. Hear ‘em shouting?”
“You sure, Joe?’
“Hell yeah, I’m fucking sure. There it is again. Say you didn’t hear that?”
Dan hesitated, remembering what Henrickson had told him about O’Quinn. The Buchanan disaster. Hadn’t his disgrace and dismissal been for leaving men trapped below? Was this some kind of flashback, some aural hallucination? He tried to catch O’Quinn’s eye, but the man was already tugging at fallen metal. “Come on here, goddamn it. Put your back to it.”
“Uh—I don’t hear anything, Joe.”
O’Quinn didn’t answer and Dan gave up questioning. Maybe he did hear something—it was hard to tell with all the other noise around them. He got his back under a corner, where he could brace his legs. They grunted in unison a couple of times, then put all they had into it. The generator didn’t move an inch, not a millimeter. There was no give to it at all.
The hull around him tilted farther, groaning. Black water bulged out of the dark and surged over the tops of his boots. He heard the damage-control parties shouting behind them, but they seemed more distant than before. Were they withdrawing? Called back out? Even… abandoning ship? He kept expecting another detonation, this one final: the flash, then the black end. He drew down acrid air, fighting an overpowering urge to bolt. “Joe, you really sure—I don’t hear—”
“I fucking heard them, Lenson. We’re all they got.” O’Quinn sounded frantic now. His oily hair stuck up in spikes. He was bent, feeling around under the black water like a man who’s lost his keys. “You want to fucking get out, hey, go! Save your own ass, all right?”
“I’m not going anywhere, I’m just asking—”
“Ask about the guys in that compartment. Figure how they feel right now. Okay? Get on the other end of this thing. Not that. The I beam there. Yeah, that one. That attached to anything? See if we can get it over here.”
The beam seemed to be part of a demounting kit, kept to swap out the generator. In the dark it was hard to be sure, but it appeared to be eight, nine feet long, a chunk of solid steel with some machined fitting at the end Dan didn’t recognize. Halfway through getting it dragged over to the door Dan grasped what the other had in mind. He sweated his end up as O’Quinn, knee-deep in water now, fought to force the butt end under the generator frame.
“Uh, hey—Joe? We actually get this hatch cracked, this water’s going to flood it. If it’s not flooded already.”
O’Quinn held up a thin snake Dan recognized after a moment as a hose. “What’s that?” he muttered.
“Compressed air. What was hissing and bubbling, under there.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Get it to ‘em, maybe they can breathe.”
“But if it’s flooded—”
“If it was flooded, would we be hearing guys screaming under there?”
“But I don’t actually hear—”
“I heard’em.”
Dan muttered through gritted teeth, “I hear people screaming sometimes too, Joe.”
O’Quinn waited, not looking at him. At last he inclined his head slightly, cocked, as if trying to identify distant music. “You hear them,” he muttered.
“Yeah.”
“And then what?”
“And you don’t listen. You hear them but you don’t listen. You can’t. You just go on.”
He straightened and sucked a breath so stacked deep with oil fumes and the choking smoke that his parched throat flamed. Circuits were snapping off in his brain. Red sparks arched and fell gracefully at the corners of his vision. “We’re… losing the oxygen down here, Joe. Let’s get serious. You really hear somebody? Or are you just remembering them from—before?”
O’Quinn bent him a look of the most complete hatred Dan had ever met. “Get the fuck out of here. No—wait. I need you. They need you. Or I’d tell you to go blow yourself! Now put your fuckin’ weight on that thing!”
The beam took their weight, but instead of levering up the frame under their combined straining, it slowly bent. Nothing else moved, and Dan realized it was futile. Even if there were someone down there. Even if O’Quinn wasn’t just hearing things, they were doomed.
But then the darkness rolled again. A wave crashed from outside, and somehow the added momentum or the cant added just enough to their grunting efforts that the lever came down a little more. Then even more.
The corner of the foundation pried slowly up. Maybe six inches. They worked the butt in farther, so it wouldn’t slip, and tried desperately again to lever the generator up and off the hatch. But it didn’t go. Just hung there, six inches of gap.
“Hold it there,” O’Quinn grunted.
“Joe—”
To his astonishment and horror O’Quinn was on his hands and knees, then on his belly. In the water. Working hard with the dogging wrench.
A black crack showed. Dan groaned, trying to hold up the enormous weight of the frame single-handed. Cramps knotted his back. His arms were numb. He panted, but what his lungs sucked in wasn’t air but some fiery gaseous acid. He watched for a hand to appear in the crack. For a flashlight to shine through, a face to appear, arms to push, a shout to echo.
Nothing. He said through teeth bared in ef
fort, “There’s nobody there, Joe.”
“Yes, there is. Hold it up—”
“Maybe there was—”
“Get it up,” O’Quinn shouted. ”Now,” and Dan gave a despairing heave and the older man did too, his back braced against the steel.
The whole great mass squealed upward another inch, another couple of inches. As it did the crack widened, and Dan was appalled to see O’Quinn stretch out around the frame and with a quick squirming motion thrust his hands, and head, and upper body inside the black gap.
“Joe!” Dan shouted, straining with desperate effort against the lever, praying it didn’t slip. If it did it would close the door again, on O’Quinn’s skull.
But the ship rolled, and he couldn’t hold it. Slowly the generator began to descend. He heard a soft grunt from the man beneath it as the weight came down on him.
With a burst of dizzying effort that ripped something in his back he pulled the lever down, steel scraping against steel, getting just that much more lever arm on it, and put all he had, more than he had, into it. The descent halted. The generator hovered, poised, as he strained and panted, then came back up a little. “Get out of there,” he squeezed through locked teeth. “I can’t hold this. Joe! Get outl”
But O’Quinn either ignored him or didn’t hear. He squirmed again, sending ripples across the water, and crawled forward even more.
Dan couldn’t see his head now. Or his chest. O’Quinn’s elbows worked at the edge of the door. His boots dragged, kicking, splashing, thrusting his body into the closing gap. Dragging the hose behind him.
Dan thought to grab for his leg, but that would mean slacking off on the lever. If that frame came down it’d crush him. “Joe. Joe,” he yelled, but got no more answer than before.
The boots gave a final kick and vanished at the same moment the generator began to descend again.
Dan was straining to hold it up, straining too to hear anything from below, when the ship went over.
She’d been rolling hard all the time, of course, but this was different. The swift jerk was like dropping the trap of a gallows. That steep, and that fast. Black water surged around his legs. From behind him came a prolonged, polyphonic chorus of ghastly screams. From above, what had a moment before been beside him but was now suspended terrifyingly came the shriek of ripping metal and the rushing hiss of a malevolent and powerful demon abruptly set free.
Its breath swept over him, icy, misting, and with it came a terrible aching emptiness in his head. Cylindrical tanks tumbled end over end in unnatural slow motion. They tolled and clanged like the iron bells of hell as they caromed and pinballed through the maze of rails and gratings, valves snapping off, spraying out whatever they were discharging. Some kind of gas—
He didn’t see where the spark came from, only felt its instantaneous expansion into a bloom of yellow-white flame as overwhelming as the noon sun, ramming toward him through the beveled air. The shock blew him into a darkness as solid as if both his body and his instantly extinguished mind had been frozen now and forever into black everlasting ice.
18
35° 07.5’ N, 132° 19.3’ E The Korea Strait
HE came to surrounded by creaking, whimpering, the crash and shush of seas going past. And the loveliest music ears could register: the faraway clatter of diesels, the muffled pulse of turning screws. He lay without moving, mind at first drifting, then as he returned sending queries to the outskirts. His arms and legs sent back the dull aches of bruises and sprains. His back hurt. His lungs burned. His worst fear was that his neck might’ve been injured again. The last time, he’d nearly been paralyzed. But when he wiggled his toes he could feel every itchy fiber of a cheap wool blanket.
He snapped his eyes open and half pushed, half rolled out of the bunk. Just as he started to fall his hand flew out, faster than thought, and snagged the bunk frame.
He was on a top bunk in the frigate’s little sick bay. The whimpering came from a seaman whose ribs were being wound with yards of elastic bandage. Other Koreans sat about on the tile deck, nursing splinted arms, mashed fingers, bandaged heads.
The little corpsman who’d attended him before, the one they called “doctor,” looked up at Dan’s sudden near precipitation down out of the overhead. He smiled, cheeks wrinkling, and gave him a long, incomprehensible oration, complete with gestures. Dan could only nod and smile back. The tickle in his chest grew and he coughed and coughed. Then swung his legs over the edge and made as if to climb down. The other patients stared at him. Then, under the urging of the doctor, they stood—those who could—and helped ease him down, one with an unsplinted arm, another turning a bandaged shoulder away to let him lean on the other.
He teetered on the tilting deck, clinging to the bunk frame, and felt the world slip away again. The black loomed and wavered around him, shot through with golden lights.
The doctor waved something acrid under his nose. It stung like being teargassed, and he gasped and blinked. He pushed it away and staggered toward the door. Halfway there he realized he was still in his skivvies.
HENRICKSON did a double take when Dan wobbled into CIC. Dan had to admit that in the South Korean-issue coveralls, with most of his hair burned off, he must be a sight. “Commander. Uh, great to see you made it. They said you were hurt. Where’d you get the cool duds?”
“Sick bay.”
“And the thong sandals? Which are cute, by the way. Specially with the white socks.” The analyst steadied him as he winced his way down into a chair. “Sure you’re okay? Looked like that hurt. That cough doesn’t sound too good, either.”
“They gave me some white pills.”
“Hwang said you got knocked out.”
“Yeah, but I’m okay.” He blinked and got back a very bad image: a pair of boots disappearing into a black maw. “Joe! Where’s O’Quinn? You seen Joe? He was down there too.”
“Haven’t seen him. Wasn’t he with you?”
“For a while.” O’Quinn hadn’t been in sick bay, which probably meant nothing good. He tore his mind away from that hellish last image, tried to Velcro it again to the tactical situation. Which was still, as far as he knew, critical. “I see we’re under way again.”
“Diesels only. Turbines are out of alignment.”
“Fuck. That limits us to—”
“About fifteen knots, yeah. But at least we’re not pinned in the troughs. Like we were there for a couple of minutes. She damn near went over.”
He’d definitely take the diesels over nothing. The rolling was still violent, though; gear and trash littered the deck, shifting underfoot with every roll; it was obvious without asking that the stabilizers were still down. He didn’t mind. His inner ear seemed to prefer a rhythm, even if violent, to a motion it couldn’t predict. He noted power was back, too. The radars were on, the lights were bright and steady, the overhead speakers hissed.
He kneaded his face. “Okay. What’s happening with the task group?”
Monty laid it in in broad strokes. Kim Chon and Cheju were thirty miles ahead, following the predicted course of the remaining subs. The PCC was very low on fuel, as was the flagship herself. “Fifteen percent last I heard. Even if we had the turbines, we couldn’t run them long.”
“That’s not very fucking much fuel. You can’t go down to zero, not in heavy seas like this. Even in a new ship.”
Henrickson frowned. “You can’t?”
“Sludge, Monty. Especially for a diesel, you don’t want to suck up whatever comes out of the tanks with those last few gallons.”
“Huh. Then we got even less than I thought. Anyway, we’re headed two one zero. That gives us all this motion, but Jung’s determined to hang on. Just limping along after the other guys in the task group. If he could get a helo out here, I’m sure he’d have crossdecked long ago.”
Dan was starting to ask about remaining weapons loadout when the commodore appeared at the doorway. He clung there through a roll, then came the rest of the way in. He stood swaying
, glaring fixedly at the plot. Then saw Dan, and worked his way over, holding equipment as he progressed, as the space rolled and pitched and heaved and yawed around him. Dan noticed a slick of water sheening the deck. Where had that come from? CIC was many feet above the waterline. He tried to get to his feet but Jung’s palms pressed his shoulders down. “Commodore,” he said.
“Did the doctor release you, Commander?”
“Not exactly. Sir.”
“I see.”
Close up Jung was stubbled gray. His eyes looked like the flash hiders of overheated.60s. Dan thought about asking him about O’Quinn, but decided to keep the question for someone from ship’s company. The commodore lowered his voice. He added, “A Romeo ran aground off Kanjolgap. North of Pusan.”
“Trying to slip down the coast?” Henrickson said.
“Apparently. Very close inshore.”
Dan deep-kneaded his neck, trying to corral his thoughts. “You think, another infiltration team? Trying to land near Pusan?”
“That I don’t know.” Jung thrust his hands into his pockets and came out with a crumpled pack. He fished one remaining silver-tip out and Bogarted it, blinking across the compartment. He seemed to lose the thread, then flinched and shook himself like a wet Labrador. “We’re not getting much out of Seoul just now. I do have a channel to CNFK. An aide there. We’re close enough I was able to get him on my cell.”
“That’s got to be one good cell phone,” Dan said.
“We are actually not that far from the coast here. But it is a good phone, yes. Samsung—Korean-made.” Jung smiled; then his eyes went dead again. “He told me ROK Marines stormed the sub. The crew fired back. The last few killed each other as they were boarded, rather than surrender. No one survived.”
Dan found himself remembering the distorted face that had charged at him out of the darkness. “Yeah. They tend to do that. Was there anything—interesting—aboard?”
“Not in the sense you mean.” Jung closed his eyes, swayed as they rolled; Henrickson reached to steady him. Dan realized the commodore was close to losing consciousness. He spoke like a player with dying batteries. “Nothing radioactive. Only small arms, light machine guns, supplies. Burst-transmission radios.”
