Terminal Run

by Michael Dimercurio

  “Approach the transient site cautiously at standard speed, turns for fifteen knots, at six five eight feet depth. I want you to perform a baffle-clear counter detection maneuver at random times at intervals not to exceed forty minutes and a depth excursion to one five zero feet, also at random times, at intervals no more than fifty minutes. Until we know otherwise, assume this is a trap, that the Snare is orbiting at the sinking site waiting for us. You’ll be coming to periscope depth in about fifteen minutes after the admiral drafts a situation report. Now repeat all that back.”

  Oswald repeated back his orders while Captain Judison glared at him. When the captain was satisfied, he left the control room.

  “Helm, all ahead standard, make turns for fifteen knots, steer course north,” Oswald ordered.

  Hammerhead crept northward, her sonar suite straining to detect the Snare.

  “Conn, Sonar, transients close aboard, high negative DE.”

  Lieutenant Commander Ash Oswald scratched his belly, a nervous habit.

  “Sonar, Conn, aye, negative deflection elevation aye. Sonar supervisor to control.”

  “Yes sir,” a voice said from behind him.

  “Goddamnit, Stokes! Cut that out!”

  Stokes looked up at the conn, his expression serious. “I don’t know what the sound is. It’s almost like someone hammering on a hull.” He stepped up to the conn and flipped through the screens of the sonar display, dancing with the software for a moment, then stood up. Piped into the overhead speakers a rhythmic echoing thumping sounded. Oswald stared at the display, listening to the haunted sound, a sweat breaking out on his scalp.

  “Low DE, you said,” Oswald muttered.

  “Right below us,” Stokes said.

  “Dive, all stop.”

  Oswald kept staring at the sonar display as he pulled the phone out of its cradle by feel, his finger stabbing the buzzer circuit.

  “Captain, Officer of the Deck, sir. Request you come to the conn.”

  Hammerhead’s BRA-44 BIGMOUTH antenna protruded from the blue waves like a telephone pole in the middle of the sea. Instead of the unit interfacing with the battle network through the Comm Star satellite, or to the Internet orbital server network, the antenna transmitted a time-varying frequency to the commercial InterTel cell phone satellite. The antenna was connected on the upper level of the operations compartment to a remote unit wired into the V.I.P stateroom, receiving the transmission from the satellite phone belonging to Admiral Kelly McKee.

  It took several minutes for the conference call to go through to the Office of Naval Research, the Directorate of Deep Sea

  Submergence, and the Naval Underwater Science Center, and to McKee’s and Patton’s staff members. When the officers were all present, and the tape recording was uploaded to their connections, McKee ordered them to get him an answer in twenty minutes to the question: what the hell is the hammering sound? The ship remained at periscope depth, waiting for the return call, and when it came, Rear Admiral Huber, Director of Deep Sea Submergence, spoke on the other end.

  “It’s our unit, Admiral,” he said. “An emergency percussion beacon installed in the Mark XVII Deep Submergence Vehicle, such as the one in the special operations compartment of the Piranha.”

  “We need a rescue plan.”

  “Admiral, we don’t have a deep submergence rescue vehicle capable of rescuing them. They’re trapped inside an HY-100 steel hull, and even if we could cut through it, we don’t have a hatch to mate to on the Mark XVII, and we don’t have the ability to execute a heavy lift to pull the DSV out. But we have a source with the capability, and they have a unit close by, two days’ transit from your position, three at most.”

  “What source? A civilian salvage operation?”

  “Um, no, sir. The Royal Navy.”

  “Go ahead, Admiral Huber.”

  “We’ve got to do this in two phases. Phase one is to locate the wreck precisely and communicate with the hull. There may be no survivors down there at all. Our DSV Narragansett is being scrambled there now on a transport plane. She’ll be at the wreck site in a few hours. We’ve lined up a commercial vessel to take her there and support her initial dive. We should know by sunset the status of the Piranha. Assuming the news is good, we’ll need to ask the British team at the sinking site of the City of Cairo to re task and come to the Piranha gravesite. The City of Cairo was their ship, and they wanted to salvage it using the Explorer II and the deep diving submersible, the Berkshire, which was built in case of a British submarine wreck. The submersible can cut through thick steel with a pressurized torch and a diamond-particle injection. It

  has heavy-lift capability to remove heavy objects from a debris field. It has a separate diving chamber with a variable adaptable docking collar in case they need to rescue submariners from a hull where there is no escape trunk.”

  “Why would they do a merchant salvage mission with a Royal Navy sub rescue craft?”

  “It’s practice for a sub rescue mission.”

  “So this dry of Cairo salvage is purely a practice drill?”

  “Not quite, Admiral. The City of Cairo was a small British ocean liner, eight thousand tons, four hundred fifty feet long, a two-piper, at sea in 1942 going from Bombay to England with three hundred souls on board, half of them crew and half passengers. She was torpedoed by a Nazi U-boat, U-68.”

  “But why would the Brits want to salvage an old rust bucket tramp steamer cut in half by Nazi torpedoes?” McKee asked.

  “Because before it sank it was loaded with three million ounces of silver in two thousand boxes of silver coin.”

  “Ah.” The admiral nodded. “Okay. So how do I get the Explorer II here?”

  “You’ll have to call the mission commander, Peter Coilings worth, personally, Admiral. He’ll be giving up a silver hunt on your say-so with no details, with his own government lining up against ours.”

  Ten minutes later, the stateroom door opened just as McKee was re dialing the Pentagon.

  “Sir, we may have a detect on the Snare, east of here at periscope depth,” Karen Petri said, her expression finishing her sentence—hang up the phone so we can go deep and pursue. But McKee needed to get to the Explorer II and get her on the way to the sinking site.

  “Get Judison in here,” he snapped to Petri, still looking at the phone so he could dial.

  Judison ran into the room a moment later, while the Pentagon operator attempted to complete a UHF connection to the HMS Explorer II.

  “Sir, we’ve got a narrowband detect at two-fifty-four hertz, bearing two nine five. We’ve got to give chase.” The large

  captain was winded from his dash up the ladder from the middle level.

  “Send out a UUV or several to the bearing,” McKee ordered. “And launch a Mark 8 Sharkeye downrange, but keep this ship at periscope depth, right here.”

  Judison nodded and vanished. He would be launching unmanned underwater vehicles toward the bearing of the Snare detect, and some Mark 8s, a torpedo body with an acoustic daylight sonar reception pod, which would drive away from the ship to a planned point in the sea and shut down. The Sharkeye sonar sensors would deploy in the sea both above the layer and below, extending the ship’s onboard sensors by hundreds of miles. The UUVs, Unmanned Underwater Vehicles, unlike the stationary deployed Sharkeyes, would drive silently in the sea, mobile listening platforms. With two UUVs and two Sharkeyes, the ship could both remain here at PD and scan the sea for hundreds of thousands of yards to the northeast, to the bearing of the Snare.

  “Hello?” Admiral McKee barked into the phone.

  Commander Peter Collingsworth, Royal Navy, looked out of the commander’s porthole of the submersible Berkshire at the hold bulkhead of the steamship City of Cairo. He wore welder’s goggles as he watched the arm arc downward with the torch, melting through the rusting steel of the ship’s hold. As he sliced the lower horizontal section of the hold cut, the intercom beeped.

  “Commander Collingsworth?” It was the
voice of the Explorer 7/’s captain.

  “Collingsworth, here, over,” he said in annoyance, trying to concentrate on the cut.

  “Commander, I’ve got a rather unusual item to report to you. We’ve just received a satellite phone call. From the Americans, of all people.”

  Collingsworth kept cutting, finally saying, “Hard to believe the Americans are calling us.”

  “The transmission is apparently coming from the Atlantic,

  sir, from the American submarine Hammerhead, a Virginia class. The phone call is from an admiral named McKee, the commander of the U.S. Submarine Force.”

  “Go ahead, Knowles.” The cut was a fourth of the way through the horizontal marked line. In a few minutes Collingsworth could stop the cutting torch and prepare to lift out the plate and expose the silver.

  “He wants to talk to you. Commander.”

  “Well received, Knowles, but what is going on? Have we any guidance from London on this matter?”

  “Captain Baines is on holiday until day after tomorrow, sir.”

  Collingsworth decided to talk to the Yank and see what the bastard wanted. “Hold on, Knowles. Stand by to patch him in. I have the plate, Jenson. Disconnect the temp derrick. Damn, there’s too much dust. I can’t see anything but sediment, and we don’t have the battery amp-hours to wait for it to settle. We’ll have to come back.”

  “You want to make a quick grab and see if you can get a silver box?”

  “No, we could break the box and have coins all over hell. Tomorrow’s another day. We’ll be right back, and with Explorer II hovering topside, no one’s going to be down here to grab our take. Knowles, I’m commencing ascent now. Patch in the admiral.”

  “Here he is in three, two, one. Admiral McKee, can you hear me?”

  “I can hear you. Commander Collingsworth, do I have the pleasure of speaking to you directly now, sir? This is Admiral Kyle McKee, but you can call me Kelly, It’s good to meet you over the radio, Commander. How is your salvage going? Over.”

  Collingsworth made a face of irritation. “Admiral, this is Commander Peter Collingsworth. You may call me Commander. What is the nature of your request, sir? Please state your business, over.”

  “Of course, Commander. I can tell you’re a busy man. Fact

  is, we have a little emergency out here a bit north of you and we need your help. And we need it immediately, over.”

  “I receive you, Admiral, but please state the nature of your emergency.”

  “Commander,” the voice said on the radio, “we have it on good authority that you have a deep diving submersible and an autonomous diving bell on the Explorer II. I’m afraid we’re going to need them both at north latitude twelve degrees and longitude twenty-three west, a bit over nineteen hundred miles from your salvage site. If you get going now, you can be here in two days. We’ll have a U.S. contingent to meet with you here, over.”

  “Admiral, I still don’t know what you are talking about. I shall ask you again—please state the nature of your emergency, over.”

  “Commander, that rig you’rein right now was built to rescue survivors of a sunken submarine, is that fair to say?”

  “Yes, Admiral, that’s the fundamental duty of the Explorer II, but unless there’s a sub to salvage we use the system for other purposes.”

  “So, can I tell my superiors you’re on your way?”

  Collingsworth’s face grew beet-red in the dim interior light of the submersible. “Admiral, you still haven’t stated your emergency. I’m going to have to terminate this conversation, sir, over.”

  “Commander, I think I just did state my emergency.”

  Collingsworth hesitated. “Sir, am I to understand that you have a sunken submarine emergency?”

  “Peter, let me put it to you this way. If you were at the coordinates I just described, at a depth of eleven thousand feet, you’d see a large metal object and a scattered debris field and you’d hear hammering from inside the object. Do you get what I’m saying?”

  Collingsworth rubbed his beard. Good God, he thought, the Yanks had lost a sub in the Atlantic and were asking him to come to the rescue, with survivors waiting for him. There was no time to waste. He glanced at his panel and called to Jenson.

  “Jenson, rig for an emergency ascent. Taking her up to ten

  feet per second rise. We should be on the surface in eighteen minutes. Knowles, this is Collingsworth on freq two, over.”

  “Go ahead, Commander, we’re alone on frequency two.”

  “Knowles, immediate execute, prepare to depart station at maximum speed. Start all turbines and be ready to answer all bells in twenty minutes. Station the underway watch section and plot a course for north latitude twelve, west longitude twenty-three at full ahead speed. And get the Admiralty officer of the day on the tactical freq immediately. I’m making an emergency ascent, and I’ll be on the deck and brief you further then. Do you copy?”

  “Yes, sir, prepare to get underway, understood.”

  “Admiral McKee, this is Collingsworth. I hope you understand we can’t just go running off to help you with your crisis without orders from the Admiralty. From what I read in the news files the Prime Minister is not entirely happy with you chaps about now. In fact, I could find myself in a spot of bother simply for talking to you this wonderful afternoon.”

  “Commander Collingsworth, the President is prepared to speak directly to the Prime Minister about this.”

  “Admiral, I’ll talk to my superiors, but I can offer you no guarantees.”

  “Pete, can you at least get the Explorer II on her way? You can always turn her around if your bosses say different.” There was a pleading tone in the admiral’s voice.

  Collingsworth nodded. “Yes, Admiral, I can get on the way. You understand, of course, that the Admiralty could turn me back around at any time. We’ll contact you in an hour, Admiral. Collingsworth out.”

  Collingsworth sat back against the submersible bulkhead and shook his head. Good Lord, he thought. One minute all he could think about was cases of silver on the bottom, and now there might be sunken survivors who could die if he hesitated even one minute. Hold on, Yanks, he thought.

  “Commander, the Admiralty officer of the day is waiting for you.”

  “Patch him in.”

  20.

  At five a.m.” Admiral Chu HuaFeng’s limo came to a halt in front of Beijing’s Hall of the People. He swallowed hard and got out of the car, the walk to the Party Secretary’s conference room seeming to take forever.

  Inside the ornate room the members of the Politburo waited for him. He sat at the end of the table between General Fang Shui, the supreme commander of the PLA, and Admiral Dong Niet, the admiral-in-command of the PLA Navy.

  “Sit,” Fang said. “Leaders, you all know Admiral Chu HuaFeng. commanding admiral of the submarine force.”

  “Are you gentlemen comfortable?” Premier Baolin Nanhok asked in a saccharine voice.

  “Yes, sir,” the general answered for them. “Good. Perhaps you would like to watch a movie with us. A very entertaining one.”

  The lights went out and a digital movie played on the display screen. Admiral Chu watched in dismay as the ships on the horizon exploded one by one into incandescent brightness, the white fireballs turning orange and rising in mushroom shapes to the sky, until the seascape looked like a forest of mushroom clouds. When the movie ended, he found himself blinking back hot tears of fury and sadness at the incredible loss of life, his comrades, thousands of them, all dead.

  “Who did this?” asked the Minister of Defense, Leader Di

  Xhiou, his voice quiet and friendly. When there was no answer, he flew out of his chair and screeched, “Who did this?”

  Chu cleared his throat when it became apparent that Admiral Dong would remain silent. “Leader Di, it is fair to assume that the American carrier surface action group caused this slaughter, or perhaps their submarines, or both.”

  “Submarines that your forces wer
e supposed to protect the battle group from, Admiral Chu? A carrier surface action group that your submarines were supposed to sink?”

  Chu considered defending his actions, but decided to get this meeting over with and get on with his prison sentence, or his firing squad.

  “Correct, sir, on both counts.”

  “So, I can assume that you agree with us that you failed?”

  “Yes, sir, you are correct.” Chu looked down at the table. “On behalf of the submarine force, I respectfully apologize and take complete responsibility for our failure.”

  There was silence for a moment, and then Leader Di spoke.

  “Well then, gentlemen, perhaps there is hope for the PLA after all.” Chu looked up at Defense Minister Di. “We have one truthful man in the military, one man with character, one lone man with accountability, sitting before us. Vice Admiral Chu, you may remember this day as the worst of your career, the day our battle group sank under the fire of an unseen enemy, but you will also remember it as the day you took command of the remainder of the PLA Navy. You are now a fleet admiral. Dong, perhaps you should hand him your stars.” Two Red Guards entered the room, on either side of Admiral Dong. Dong stood and pulled off his epaulette insignia and slid the stars over to Chu. Minister Di did not acknowledge him as he was led from the room. Dong looked back at Chu one last time with sad, dark eyes, eyes that would be shut forever within the hour.

  Chu swallowed. “Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.”

  “Now, to business, Fleet Admiral Chu. It would appear our offensive is in trouble. You are now in command, but obviously of a reduced force. What will you do with it?”

  “I will deploy it in an antisubmarine-warfare formation with a random zigzag and maneuver it to the Indian Ocean. I will send my submarines ahead to look for the attackers.”

  Di nodded. “Very well. Good luck to you and your fleet. But I warn you now, Admiral, do not lose a second battle group or else this war will be over before it has begun.”