Choke Point wi-9

by Ian Slater

  Jimmy checked the fuse length for the sixth time, the primacord calculated to assure detonation of the LOSHOK just above its hull, if in fact it was the sub.

  “What’d you call me?” Tiny asked the bosun.

  “Rain-in-the-Face.”

  “Yeah, well, I don’t care. I’m tellin’ you guys, I don’t think that profile is the sub. It’s a slab of limestone and a few flakes fell off. Slab of limestone’s like assholes in these parts — everyone’s got one.”

  “What about those loose tiles they’re talking about?” countered Jimmy.

  “Tiles, smiles — BS!” said Tiny. “I had a peek at that trace when Cookie lost our drinks. I didn’t see anything. Those spots the old man saw could be anything. This strait’s full of shit that people’re chucked overboard. You know how many Coke cans and crap we pick up on sonar?”

  “Ah,” said Jimmy dismissively. “You’re just scared, Tiny.”

  “You bet your ass I’m scared. Those hydrofoils hear a bang, what’re they gonna do? Everyone’s so trigger happy these last few days. Did you see the sonar trace?”

  Jimmy shook his head.

  “Malcolm?” asked Tiny.

  “No.”

  “Lower and cut,” called out Frank. “Carefully.”

  The bosun lit the fuse and Tiny played out the charge’s line, the weight barely causing a ripple as it broke the foggy sea’s surface and was released in free fall.

  “Full ahead,” ordered Frank calmly.

  The Petrel’s sonar immediately picked up the echoes from the bunched chain weight going down directly below the LOSHOK, and it seemed off course. Had the turbulence of Petrel’s engines combined with the deep currents to create a side push? Frank wondered. Would it make any difference? Was it the sub or—

  The detonation sent the stylus crazy. A second later the sea’s surface exploded in an enormous eruption of green bottom ooze, sand, and pebbles whooshing high into the fog, sending a shock wave against the Petrel. The profusion of dead fish and other marine life that rose to the surface added to everyone’s surprise as they watched intently for signs of a sub’s wreckage. The Skate, now notified by radio about what Frank had assumed was the sub, reported she was steaming toward the oceanographic vessel to assist, but at only one-third of full speed, in the event of striking unseen wreckage in the fog. Frank could feel his heart racing in expectation, but the only thing identifiable in the dirty slurry so far was the mass of crustaceans and rock cod.

  “There’s something!” shouted young Cookie.

  “Calm down!” Tiny snarled. “There’s nothing but—”

  “No, I see it too,” said Malcolm. “Starboard aft.”

  “Me too!” added Jimmy, snatching one of the slingshots and one of the baseball-size lumps of short-fuse LOSHOK packs.

  Sandra focused her binoculars in the direction the crew were pointing. An irregular shape with a metallic appearance could be seen, despite the muddied sea that was spreading like a huge blanket in the chop created by the LOSHOK’s explosion. Sandra called the dry lab. “It’s a ray,” she told Frank. “A manta ray. A cephalic fin missing.”

  Relief and disappointment swept through the crew. Cookie suddenly began throwing up. Frank, hearing him, dispatched one of the techs to help the youth. “But don’t let him mope around. Tell Cook I said to go easy on him but to keep him occupied — light duties.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Soon the chaos of sound from the LOSHOK’s bang subsided and the Petrel, having turned about, headed back a hundred yards or so, Sandra doing an excellent job of using the ship’s bow thrusters to relocate the exact GPS position.

  The slab was gone.

  Then there was another metal-like sheet in the fog. It was vertical, and from mere inches above the sea’s surface, it suddenly rose to four feet high, then six.

  “Holy — Sub astern!” Tiny shouted so loudly that third mate Sandra on the bridge heard him clearly, as did Frank, in the dry lab. Intuitively, Sandra brought the Petrel sharply about in a tight U-turn, the ship heeling hard aport, toppling Aussie, Sal, and Choir against their bunks’ side boards and bringing the Petrel face-to-face with the ominous-looking and fog-shrouded black sub surfacing a hundred yards off.

  Frank quickly organized one of the most primitive and ancient defenses known to man on the stern of his state-of-the-art oceanographic vessel. “Grab the six slingshot packs and run up to the bow!” he hollered to the stern work party.

  But there were only four packs left, Freeman having grabbed two of the baseball-size lumps and quickly stuffed them into his battle vest. With a sharp tug on the bow-knotted davit lines holding the Zodiac to Petrel’s side, the general rapidly played out the line, lowering the Zodiac.

  A sleep-dazed Aussie appeared on deck, holding his MP5. “What’s going—”

  “Get in the boat!” Freeman said. “We’re going fishing!”

  “Be careful!” Frank cautioned Freeman. “It might be surrendering.”

  “It’s turning!” Petrel’s bow lookout shouted, and everyone, including the approaching Skate a mile off, which Sandra had alerted, heard the noise. It was a tortuous creaking sound of metal against metal, the kind Aussie and Freeman had heard when they faced the Russian-made T-72 main battle tanks in the Iraqi desert. It made the four slingshot crewmen even more nervous.

  Through his binoculars, the bosun, who’d momentarily given Freeman a hand by passing down the general’s gun, could now see the source of the nerve-grating sound: the submarine’s prop rubbing against its tapered metallic sheath, which had collapsed under the pressure wave of the seventy-pound LOSHOK depth charge.

  “Where the hell’s the Skate?” someone shouted, another startled by the sputtering then quickly ensuing purr of their Zodiac’s runabout.

  “Skate’s coming!” the bosun assured the crew.

  She was, but on her radar the two blips were so close together, the captain couldn’t tell which was which, and it was too risky to open fire in the fog and noisy confusion. The Skate’s heavy machine-gun operators, however, were itching to fire, so much so that the captain repeated his earlier order, “Hold your fire!” Following the sub’s carnage in the strait, everyone wanted so badly to get even that blue on blue remained a constant danger.

  One of Petrel’s side-scan technicians ran to the dry lab’s door. No one was there. “Son of—” He realized they must all be up at the bow. Though hanging on to the lab’s roll bar at the time, he’d forgotten the violent U-turn, glued as he was to the trace. He snatched the PA mike from the wall. “Captain, dry lab. A bubbling sound from the sub, as well as the prop noise. Could be flooding her tubes.”

  “Maybe,” answered Frank. But what should he do? he wondered. It would be impossible to see a torpedo running at them in the fog. Anyway, the sub was only a hundred yards off, now nose-to-nose with his boat. Even if the Petrel moved left or right, the sub could get an angled shot, or if she opened up with small arms fire, the Petrel would be virtually defenseless.

  “Get the packs ready,” he told Jimmy, Malcolm, and Tiny, while taking up one of the slingshots himself. Then he shouted up to the bridge to Sandra, “Go full ahead, close as you can for us — then veer away!”

  She signaled with a thumbs-up.

  Frank asked, “Where’s the Bic?”

  Tiny handed him the cigarette lighter. “High tech!”

  The small orange light that the Skate’s captain, now half a mile away, saw through his binoculars, was not the flicker of Tiny’s Bic, however, but the flame from the.50 protruding from the sub’s sail like a short, stubby stick in the fog. Its burst ricocheted off Petrel’s forward deck bulkhead like supersonic stones thrown against a steel door. One of the.50’s rounds struck Malcolm in the back of his neck, felling him in a pool of blood that neither Jimmy, Frank, or Tiny saw, the three busy tossing their LOSHOK packs, the force of their thrusts reduced by the nerve-shattering fire of the heavy machine gun, as the trio hit Petrel’s deck. They crawled forward, tight up again
st the protection of the capstan as several rounds from the sub struck the spool of anchor chain, creating a shower of sparks as Petrel heeled hard aport at full speed. The wash of Petrel’s prop was now clearly visible to the sub’s machine-gun crew, who kept pouring their fire into the big target as it withdrew.

  Seeing Malcolm and dragging him into the forward lab, Frank then reached the bridge, where he saw a pale-faced helmsman, the bridge glass a milky spiderweb of bullet holes, the sparkling glass fragments crunching under his boot. Hall was surprised that he hadn’t heard the glass being hit. “Where’s Sandra?” he asked.

  “Chart room!” answered the helmsman, his voice a strangled whisper.

  Sandra’s face was cut badly and bleeding as the bosun and two other crewmen knelt beside her, doing their best with tweezers to remove the tiny glass slivers. Her white blouse and pants were splattered with oil from the compass mounting, and the chart of Juan de Fuca Strait was smeared with blood.

  Aboard the Coast Guard’s Skate, the sonar operator heard the underwater whoosh of a torpedo launch, the Skate’s computer telling him it was running at fifty knots. The Skate, two hundred yards off in the fog, was seconds from impact on its present course. The captain reacted swiftly, ordering a 180-degree turn to starboard away from the unseen line of the torpedo.

  It took him into the path of the second torpedo fired by the sub during the noise of the Skate’s turn. The explosion lit up the night in a bonfire of pyrotechnics that tore the stern quarter off the Skate. The ship was going down, its nose sticking up at a forty-five-degree angle. It slipped under in minutes, no time for lifeboats, the cries of its crew, many afire, lost in a cacophony of sounds, a firecracker string of its own ammunition cooking off in its superheated superstructure, its death throes further illuminated by raging fuel oil fires.

  Soon all that was left was the burning oil slick silhouetting the frantic two dozen or so survivors trying to extricate themselves from the flaming patches of sea, the fire’s updrafts doing nothing to disperse the heavier sullen fog that had now swallowed up the retreating Petrel. The crew of the oceanographic ship, unarmed and in shock, were rallying to help their own wounded. An oiler on deck, one of those who’d helped make the slingshots, was suffering from an ugly head wound, hemorrhaging to death.

  “We’ve gotta pick up those Skate guys!” someone said.

  “We can’t,” answered the bosun. “We’re not out of the shit yet. Sub’s got — dammit, it’s a warship — it’s got everything. We slow to pick up survivors, we’ll end the same way. ’Sides, those hydrofoils’ll soon be here.”

  “They’ll slow right down,” said a winch man. “Always do inshore ’cause of all the logs an’ crap floating about. Plus there’s so much wreckage in the strait they can’t risk speeding. Hit something with one of those foils at any speed, you go A over T. Quick smart.”

  On the Petrel’s bridge, blacked out, as was the rest of his ship, Frank Hall knew there was only one decision he could make.

  “Where the heck’s Freeman?” the first mate asked softly.

  “In trouble,” replied Frank, “if he doesn’t watch that.50.”

  “They’ll hear his outboard if he gets too close.”

  “I know,” said Frank.

  Which was why Freeman, at the tiller of the Petrel’s Zodiac, had cut the outboard, hauled it in, and joined Aussie, using paddles to move west of the sub which now seemed strangely still, as if, like some giant marine predator, it was undecided what to do immediately following the destruction of its Coast Guard prey. Or was the sub’s prop so disabled, Aussie wondered, that in an all-out run on the surface it could reach only a knot or so? The awful noise generated by the prop was so loud that he knew it would serve as a homing beacon for the hydrofoils, which would soon be on the sub’s radar.

  In the eerie silence of the fogbound sea, the crescent bay’s shore, five minutes behind them, might have been a hundred miles away, and the sound of their paddles seemed extraordinarily loud to Freeman and Aussie. Perhaps because their sense of hearing, initially scrambled by the explosions of the torpedoes, was now straining to pick up any sound in the water about them, they both heard the faint rasping sound. It wasn’t the same noise as that of the prop, and had it not been for the small but persistent glow from the Skate’s dying fires, Aussie wouldn’t have seen the bulbous baseball-size head of a snorkel tube rising from the sub. He stopped paddling and, not daring to whisper, tapped Freeman’s arm twice, the snorkel rising agonizingly above the sub, the enemy craft about two o’clock to the Zodiac.

  Was the sub going to dive, go on batteries for a while despite the grating prop noise, far enough again to lie low and stop all engines? Given the depth reading he recalled on the Petrel, Freeman knew that it wouldn’t be too deep for a swimmer to exit through an escape air-lock hatch and replace or “putty” in a few replacement anechoic tiles.

  Skate was gone, Petrel bloodied and unarmed, and, given the fog, the two hydrofoils might not get to the sub before she dived, which it looked like she’d do at any second, because there was no one on deck. Freeman was as vain a man as any other, but he’d never allowed vanity to block efficiency, and he knew that, his A-grade fitness notwithstanding, Aussie Lewis was a younger man with more strength in his arm. So he passed the two balls of LOSHOK to Aussie and quietly tipped the outboard’s prop shaft into the water, just in case.

  With his mouth against Aussie’s ear, he intoned, “Tape one of ’em around the snorkel.”

  They resumed paddling, Freeman estimating it would take them five to six minutes to reach the sub. The snorkel was still inching up, rasping, the sub’s skipper obviously preferring to raise it in air rather than waiting till he was submerged, where the sound would travel four times as fast to the hydrofoils.

  The problem, Freeman knew, was that it would be difficult if not impossible to maintain position in the current and tape the charge to the rising pipe. The current was getting stronger. They had maybe ten minutes.

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  Rorke’s ability to maneuver the “Big Cigar,” as Encino called their 360-foot-long sub, had duly impressed the executive officer, especially given the level of instability in the 6881 class, caused by its sail being located farther forward than on the earlier boats of the class. Though launch site was still minutes away, the XO foresaw no problems with the launch. Encino’s “load-out” of torpedoes and Tomahawks, following normal procedure, contained a number of variants. Of the dozen cruise missiles in the launch tubes forward of the sail, four had single thousand-pound Bullpup HE warheads, four were armed with 109D runway-cratering submunitions warheads, and the final four were capped with a doomsday “city take-out” 150-kiloton nuclear warhead.

  With all presets entered into Encino’s fire-control computer console, the attack boat rose to a point sixty feet below the surface, its speed now down from thirty knots to three. Rorke had decided to start with the four 109Ds, the navigator confirming that the intersection of the coordinates was midway down Penghu’s runway, now presumably packed with PLA fighters.

  The sound of hydraulics and valves opening as the twelve forward vertical tubes were flooded in the sequence Rorke had decided upon were noises that none of the boat’s officers and men wanted to hear. They had no qualms about their part in the new post-9/11 American policy of talking softly and carrying the biggest stick you could find. But flooding, then opening, the “caps,” or lids, on each of the forward-angled twelve VLTs violated the submariner’s counsel of perfection: “Thou shalt stay silent.” The gurgling and bubbling sounds were worse than most “sound shorts,” or acoustic faults, in a boat, signaling to any hostile within hundreds or even thousands of miles away where you were. And in this case, telling them you were about to launch a weapon — whether it be an antiship harpoon, torpedo, or, as now, the Tomahawk cruise missiles.

  “Up attack scope!” said Rorke.

  It was unlikely there would be any ships nearby, and Encino’s sonar hadn’t picked up anythi
ng unusual, but a visual sweep was needed just in case. Despite the awesome responsibility he had for launching such tremendous firepower, Johnny Rorke enjoyed the anticipatory moment of looking through the scope. He had not “danced” with either of the boat’s “ladies” since the Utah. He liked the physical sensation of watching the scope’s oil-sheen column rising to his command, the sensation of flipping down the scope’s arms, gripping their criss-cross nonslip handles and his eyes marrying themselves to the scope via the sensuously soft rubber cups that shut out all light in the CIC, including the luminescent green of the two target trackers’ computers and the bloodred of the weapons officer’s screen.

  He moved as one with the scope, sweeping smartly through a 360-degree arc and back again, the reverse sweep to assure him he hadn’t missed anything during his clockwise rotation because of the different azimuth. All seemed clear.

  “Down scope.”

  With flight instructions for each missile in the computers, Rorke initiated what would be a ripple launch. The first missile fired would be one of the outermost of the six-tube configuration on the starboard side, followed immediately by the corresponding missile of the portside six.

  “Commence launch,” said Rorke. This was for the crew’s benefit, as the countdown the weapons officer had already initiated was an automatic, computer-controlled function.

  The crew heard the explosive charge that, along with an enormous whoosh of compressed air, ejected the cruise missile, thrusting it through the thin plastic membrane at the top of its launch tube into the sea, from sixty feet below the surface. The boat lurched slightly as the 2,650-pound Tomahawk exited the boat, seawater immediately rushing into the empty launch tube, the Tomahawk’s booster firing underwater, twenty-five feet above the sub. The missile, broaching the sea’s surface, shivered with the tremor of the booster’s fiery exhaust, the missile’s protective wing cover popping off, tailfin shrouds also discarded, four tailfins extending to steady the Tomahawk’s angle of flight.