by Ian Slater
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
If the sub’s diesel-electric capability of attaining absolute silence made for evasion of sonar signals amid the cacophony of competing ocean noise, the four terrorists banging and otherwise working at the sub’s stern did exactly the opposite. Which was why the sub’s captain continued to exhort his men to hurry. Aussie could see that at this rate, by the time the patrol craft out of Keystone or an antisub plane from Whidbey Island reached the sub, it would have jettisoned the basket.
But neither the sub captain nor Freeman, who was totally occupied by the dangerous business of staying alive long enough to delay the sub, had factored Frank Hall’s Petrel into the equation. The moment his highly sensitive sensors, normally used to detect the whereabouts of dummy torpedoes fired on the test range, picked up the loud banging — vectoring in the sub’s exact location — Hall had decided to investigate, to see if it was friend or foe. If the latter, he would “lend a hand,” as he put it to his first mate and crew. Besides, as an ex-SEAL, Hall had a personal aversion to people who fired torpedoes at civilian vessels.
“Lend a hand?” asked the bosun hesitantly. “What exactly does that mean, Captain?”
“Don’t know exactly. But I’m working on it,” answered Frank, having already instructed the Petrel’s helmswoman to swing about, putting the vessel on a course for the banging noise that was still blipping as an amber dot on his sonar screen.
“It’s close inshore,” said the first mate. “Between Pillar and Slip Points.”
“This is voluntary?” pursued the bosun, adding quickly, “I’ll go, but some of the crew—”
“The crew’s American, aren’t they?” said Frank.
“Yes, but—”
“I want to be fair,” answered Frank. “If any of the crew want out, I’ll understand. They’re free to go overboard.”
“Into the RIB?” said the bosun.
“Five second fuses for the balloon-carried charges?” asked the first mate.
“No,” Hall corrected him. “If this bogey’s the terrorist sub — which I’m sure it is, given the location of that fish that was fired at us — we’re going to need our RIB and our whirly bird in—” He glanced up at Petrel’s chronometer. “—in about ten minutes at full speed. So batten all hatches and get the helo ready to fly.”
“Sir,” interjected the mate, “Doppler scope shows fog moving in quickly along the coast.”
Hall acknowledged the meteorological information. This time of year fog was always moving in, then out, then in. He turned back to the bosun. “I’ll fill in the pilot on the GPS, et cetera. While I’m doing that, I want you, six crew, and the chief,” by whom he meant Petrel’s chief engineer, a man of fertile imagination and outstanding mechanical aptitude, “to mold a dozen or so five-pound blocks of LOSHOK — five-second fuses — and jerry-rig four slingshots for them. Big slingshots. Got it?”
Before the bosun could respond, Hall turned to the first officer. “Mate, I want you to organize a few charges for our helo, about seven pounds apiece, then tell the pilot I want a word with him.”
The bosun’s earlier sense of excitement, gained from his skipper’s infectious enthusiasm, was suddenly arrested. He wasn’t concerned so much by the prospect of handling the packs of ammonia-dynamite cartridges, but by having to insert the fiddly, thumbnail-sized blasting caps used at the end of the fuse or primacord that would have to be attached to each LOSHOK’s primary charge. He’d never seen anyone killed by an accident with cartridges of LOSHOK, but he knew a few ex-Marine geology seismic technicians who were missing fingers from having to handle the tiny blasting caps under this kind of time pressure.
“Cut five-second fuses for the five-pound slingshot packs,” Frank told the bosun.
“How long for the helo packs?” asked the first mate.
“I don’t know,” said Frank. “We’ll have to cut them to order, depending on the wind.”
“No wind now,” said the mate. “Doppler shows—”
“Fog!” shot back Frank. “Yeah, I know — you told me before. We’ll just have to do the best we can.”
The bosun and mate exchanged worried glances. It was the first time Hall had implicitly confirmed that he was playing all this by ear, that he wasn’t at all sure that whatever he had in mind would work. Well, thought the bosun, he’ll have to explain his general idea in a couple of minutes, at the most. Short, if not so sweet, because in another six minutes they’d be closing on the sonar’s blip.
Hall grabbed the PA mike. “Attention all hands. This is the captain speaking …”
“A slingshot?” the chief engineer asked the bosun.
“Yeah,” said the bosun, making a skeptical “I know” face to the clutch of oilers who’d also been summoned. To his surprise, however, the chief turned casually to his engine room watch, raising his voice to compete with the thunder of Petrel’s 1,500 horses while the normally “off-watch” engine room crew attended to the engines’ glistening, oil-slicked pistons. They were pounding hard, to spin the prop to maximum revolution, the oceanographic vessel shaking so violently at fifteen knots that every rivet seemed on the verge of popping.
The chief was holding up two twelve-foot-long pieces of aluminum rod. “Take these to the pipe bender, guys. I want you to turn out four Y shapes. No soldering to get a single stem — haven’t got time. Means you’ll have a long, skinny U-handle for each slingshot. We’ll use some of our quarter-inch rubber tubing for the slings. Okay?”
“Yeah, Chief, but what’d we use for that part — you know — that’ll actually hold the LOSHOK as we pull it back?”
“For chrissake,” retorted the chief. “I have to tell you everything? I dunno — use your initiative. Cut sections of leather from your belt.” He pointed to “Tiny,” Petrel’s big, overweight diesel mechanic. “Use Tiny’s belt. Enough for twenty slingshots, right, Tiny?”
“Yeah, very funny!”
“Go!” commanded the chief. “I want you back in five. Fastest gets extra shore leave.”
“Gimme that friggin’ rod!” said one of his crew. A few seconds later he was spinning one of the vices’ handles, the jaws opening like a gopher.
“Hurry up!” his helper, Jimmy, said, adding, “You’re like an old woman.”
“Up yours,” retorted the other crewman, Malcolm, already having made the first bend in the pipe. “This sucker’ll throw a baseball a hundred yards.”
“You won’t be throwing a ball,” Jimmy said. “You take time winding up with that LOSHOK like you do at baseball, you’ll blow your balls off!”
Malcolm didn’t answer for a few seconds; he was already making the second bend in the aluminum rod, sweat pimpling his forehead, tongue squeezed hard between his teeth in concentration as he made the third bend. He then swung the four-foot unbent section wide, its end clipping Jimmy on the stomach. “I won’t be firing the slingshot, Jimmy. You’ll be.”
“No way, José!”
Frank Hall’s voice couldn’t be heard on the PA system in the engine room, and so he sent down a crewman to tell them. Petrel was bucking the incoming tide, reducing the ship’s speed by two to three knots. Even so, the ETA was about seven minutes.
“Can you finish in time?” inquired Frank’s anxious messenger.
Neither Malcolm nor Jimmy bothered answering him. Not a second could be wasted in superfluous conversation. “Tiny!” yelled Jimmy. “We need your—”
But the big oiler had already taken off his leather belt, and cut four six-inch-long strips from it.
“Atta boy!” Next, Jimmy turned to Malcolm. “Tubing, Mal!”
Malcolm handed him the flexi quarter-inch rubber hosing.
Jimmy, his face now streaming with perspiration, could’ve kissed Tiny when he saw that the big mechanic had already punched holes at either end of the four six-inch sections of belt leather, because all he had to do was slip the rubber tubing through both holes and tie a knot. He gave the completed slingshot to Frank’s messenger. “Try it
out topside. Lose it and I’ll—”
“I won’t,” said the messenger, scuttling up the grated stairway.
“Use somethin’ that weighs about five pounds!” Jimmy hollered after him.
Meanwhile, Malcolm was halfway through the series of bends required for the second slingshot, his job made easier because a crewman had already cut the second twelve-foot rod into the required lengths.
Ten feet below the surface of the crescent bay and six feet ahead of him, in what would normally have been the crystal clear water of the bay, Peter Dixon saw a huge inky stain in the dull, fog-filtered light. Unlike an oil spill, it swayed back and forth in an underwater ballet. It was kelp, he realized, extending left and right of him as far as he could see. He couldn’t help but recall the bloody ooze that had once been Albinski, his swim buddy, and momentarily he panicked, turning to go back to the stack to rejoin Freeman, Sal, and Choir. Then he saw that an arm of the kelp had moved around in back of him. He might have to surface right here, at what he guessed was about fifty yards from the sub, and take his chances, knowing the MP5’s maximum effective range was fifty yards. Surface or run?
By feel alone, Dixon switched the safety off, selecting the automatic position, and pulled the cord on his CO2 cartridge to inflate his flotation vest, to relieve him of the necessity to tread water in the chop as he fired.
The moment he surfaced, the gunner’s feeder on the sub spotted him, the dark green kelp — black in the fog — having drawn his attention. What saved Dixon from the first burst was the height of the gunner. He was short, and the few seconds it took for the gunner to up his hand grips to sustain close-range fire, Dixon got off two three-round bursts. The 9mm thudded into the work party, two of the men splashing into the water. Dixon waited in a trough in the bay’s chop before firing again, and hit a third terrorist.
Freeman, manning the RIB’s bow-mounted M-60 as it now shot out from the sea stack’s protection to assist, opened up with one-in-five tracer, the white streaks flying high over the sail before he heard his rounds striking, sparking, on the sail’s port side. The M-60 failed to penetrate the high-tensile steel, but the tracer was worrying the sub’s gunner and his feeder, who pushed the ammunition belt so high above his head while ducking to avoid being hit that Freeman thought his gun would jam. It didn’t, the next burst from the.50 “cracking” in the air, missing Dixon but raking the peaked bow of the RIB another fifty yards to the west. It splintered the inflatable’s fiberglass keel, the disintegration at a chop-pounding thirty knots sounding like the multiple splitting of thawing spring lakes. Rather than chunks of ice disintegrating, however, the fiberglass came apart in lumps that bore an uncanny resemblance to cotton candy.
The RIB was sinking, but Freeman doggedly squeezed off a three-second burst even as the inflatable sank nose down into the choppy sea. The burst was so long that the M-60’s barrel turned dull red, as it was wont to do after a quick hundred rounds. Sal was convinced that if he’d been able, the general would have snatched and fired his MP5 or thrown a couple of his grenades at the sub, except for the fact that he was sinking.
“C’mon, General!” Sal shouted. “Head for the falls — three o’clock!” As the overheated barrel sizzled, releasing vapor into a fog that was quickly growing thicker, obscuring the sub, Choir and Sal saw the general with his hands still on the M-60, seawater spurting up through the multiholed deck. As Freeman was obscured from sight, the fog was pierced by tracer, which, given the RIB’s acute angle, had no possible chance of hitting the sub.
Aussie Lewis, hearing the noise of the firefight, along with the surge of the RIB’s prop as it raced through the water, dived and kicked furiously to clear the turbulence of the falls. Submerged and without an attack board, he was keeping the distance count in his head — usually a simple enough task, but under fire, demanding. When he judged he was within range, his vision blocked by the inky droop of what had become a bay-wide blanket of kelp, he came up, wiping kelp off his mask, glancing quickly to see whether Sal, Choir, Freeman, or Dixon was in his line of fire.
He saw nothing but fog and the dark stain of kelp off to his left, beyond which he then spotted his four SpecFor buddies. They were swimming toward the now deserted beach where discarded boxes and drums were afire, suffusing the fog with an orange glow. The fierce crackling noise of knotted pine packing cases going up in flames made it sound as if a distant firefight was in progress, when in fact no one could be seen in the cave or along the sand and rocky shoreline.
Like the others still swimming toward the shore, Aussie had lost sight of the sub in the dense fog that kept rolling in. All he was aware of now was the soft whir of a helicopter that was already above him before he recognized its telltale, muffled engine sound. It was a two-seater Little Bird, PETREL II stenciled along its tail boom. The chopper swooped over Freeman, Choir, and Sal, as well as Dixon, who was in the process of joining his comrades, still about forty yards from the bay’s shore. Aussie guessed, correctly, that the Little Bird’s infrared homer had been drawn into the bay by the heat of the fires on the beach.
He dove again and kicked hard for the beach, making better time submerged than his surface-borne comrades. He was slowed, however, by more kelp, and when he surfaced again, his ears were ringing from the noise of the two approaching ships that the others had also heard and also were as yet unable to see. As Aussie drew closer to the other four members of the team, he surfaced. His kelp-draped head startled the nerve-rattled Dixon, who was about to fire when he recognized the floppy SEAL hat above the mask of the “creature from the Black Lagoon,” as Salvini would later call Lewis.
Now, however, Salvini, the general, and Choir were not watching Aussie, but the cliff face. Like a motorist seeing an onrushing car too late, everything had slowed to breath-stopping slow motion as the Little Bird pilot, his helmet visible despite the fog, realized the fire his infrared had detected was just that — a fire on a beach and not a burst of radiant heat from a fleeing sub. He took the Little Bird up sharply, avoiding the cave’s mouth and most of the soaring green cliff face — but not its overhanging lip of vegetation-covered rock.
The helo’s blades sliced into the hidden underside of the overhang then dropped, tail rotor first, plummeting down to the beach. Freeman’s team involuntarily braced for the explosion they all expected, and it came a few seconds after impact, the flames belching upward, illuminating the cave mouth. For the first time, they saw an aluminum ladder, about twelve feet long, leading up from the beach to the cave, clearly visible as the heat of Little Bird’s conflagration, which included the three packs of LOSHOK, melted the ladder’s struts, the struts drooping like strips of spaghetti as the ladder collapsed into a whitish, stringy pile of molten metal.
While Freeman’s swim team approached the beach, they could see the fiercely burning hulk of the helicopter, and two dead terrorists floating just out from the beach, their oil-slicked bodies reflecting the fiercely burning remains of the chopper. As the pilot’s khaki-green uniform turned black, his stomach bursting, the general looked away. It wasn’t squeamishness — he’d seen much worse. Rather, it was a habit adopted years before the war on terrorism when a suave young Grand Prix champion had been invited to address a NATO officers’ mess in Heidelberg. “Whenever there is the catastrophe on the circuit,” he had told his American hosts, most of them officers from armored units, “you must never watch — you understand? You must watch your bottom, because in that moment when you are watching the catastrophe in front of you, the driver on your rear will take advantage of your lack in concentration and — voilà!—will attack from behind and win the race. Yes?” There had been a lot of Belgian beer drunk that night, and a lot of drunks, bored with the routine of guarding the Fulda Gap through which Soviet armor was expected to pour if the Communist Warsaw Pact attacked. No one had even heard of Jihad, bin Laden, or Li Kuan in those peaceful cold war days. But Douglas Freeman, then due for his “bird,” his promotion to colonel, had remembered every word that the
“Bottom Belgian,” as he was called, had said. And now Freeman, though sorry for the pilot, watched his rear, turning seaward, and caught a glimpse of the sub as the thick fog in the bay momentarily thinned, burned off by the heat from the helo and beach fires.
Though Freeman, now swimming to catch up to the others, couldn’t hear the sound of the prop yet, the sub seemed to be moving, perhaps using its battery power, not wanting to be heard leaving the bay.
“Sub’s escaping!” he yelled. Yet he felt a surge of hope. The fact that the sub was still on the surface could only mean she hadn’t yet reached water deep enough to submerge, and the fog was too thick to permit the terrorists to see the landmarks they’d used as channel markers.
By the time Freeman had called to his comrades above the noises of the beach inferno and crashing waves, the sub had vanished. No one except Dixon doubted him, the raw-nerved diver remembering, as Freeman did, something he had been told at the beginning of his career and seen verified by his own experience: that under high stress, combatants become powerfully predisposed to see what they expect. Perhaps Freeman had projected the image of the sub, in his mind’s eye, out into the fog. After all, Dixon had seen two terrorist underwater swimmers in the kelp that turned out to be peripheral trails of submerged kelp.
“You sure, sir?” he called.
“Yes—”
“General!” It was Sal, hauling himself ashore. “On the beach, one o’clock.”
It was a small, fifteen-foot aluminum boat, on pushcart wheels. A golf-cart-like handle stuck up from under the bow, a good-size cream-colored outboard was on the stern, and the paint was blistering from a combination of radiant heat from the fires to the left and from the Little Bird’s crash. The helo’s explosion had created a firebreak in the scattered line of burning debris, a break without which the aluminum boat, its wooden trailer already smoldering, would itself have been engulfed in flame.
