Phantom

by Ted Bell

  Fifty-nine

  Stoke and Harry had returned to their battle stations in the bow after the briefing with Hawke, each of them manning a 30mm cannon. They were getting lashed with driving rain, the skies having finally opened up with a vengeance. Their barrels were so hot, they were steaming in the rain, and heavy water was coming over the forepeak where their turret mounts were located.

  Stoke heard Hawke in his earpiece.

  “You’re wasting ammo at this range, Stoke.”

  “I know. But we got more ammo than sense up here. We’re pissed and we’re letting them know it.”

  “Stoke, listen. We’re out of options. We’re forced to make a dash inside the range of their big guns. It’s going to get hot in a hurry. Time to launch our last JDAM and pray. You and Harry put your trigger fingers in your pockets and wait for my signal. When you get it, give ’em hell. You saw the photos of the Alvand. Concentrate on her primary weapons fore and aft. Got it?”

  “Got it. Good shooting with that last fish, boss.”

  “Better be. Over.”

  “Ain’t over till it’s over,” Brock piped up, earning a look from Stokely. He hoped for Harry’s sake that Hawke hadn’t heard that dumb-ass remark.

  But Alex Hawke was in the zone. Total focus. Total determination to secure victory, whatever it took. These were the moments he lived for, what he’d been born to do.

  “All ahead full! Right full rudder!” Hawke said. His voice had assumed a grim finality, the flat quality of emotionless decision. You fight or you don’t fight. You go in with the bow of your ship pointed directly at your enemy and you go well inside his range. Keeping your bow on him gives his radar and sonar a whole lot less to look at, but if something goes wrong and you have to get the hell out of there, you’ve got to change course. Then you give him your broadside, setting yourself up for a devastating counterattack on his part. That’s why starting in is the crucial decision.

  “Rudder is right full, sir, coming to course zero-two-zero!”

  “Maintain course and speed.”

  The big yacht surged ahead, smashing through the oncoming waves as the twin gas turbines spooled up and delivered power to the four enormous bronze screws churning beneath the stern. She had steadied on a course calculated to take her right into the teeth of the Vosper MK5’s guns. It was weird traveling at this speed on something so enormous but it was a good weird, Stoke thought. The enemy wouldn’t have as much time to react to a sudden incursion into their space. They were closing the distance to the destroyer escort rapidly.

  “Helm, Sonar. Target is on course bearing three-one-zero, speed twelve.”

  “Range two thousand yards, for’ard gun platform, commence firing now,” Stoke heard Laddie say.

  “Forward guns, commence firing, aye,” he replied.

  “Shit,” Harry said, opening fire.

  “What?”

  “We’re it. Our two puny 30s against a goddam battlewagon like that? We’re dicked, pal.”

  “Good attitude. I like that. Leadership in a crisis.”

  “Honesty in a crisis.”

  “Shut up and shoot.”

  “I can talk and shoot at the same time.”

  “Incoming!” Stoke said as a huge shell whistled high overhead and splashed harmlessly some five hundred yards aft of Blackhawke. And then a second sent a geyser of water a hundred feet in the air fifty meters from their starboard quarter. The Iranian gunners behind the long-range cannons were bracketing them, dialing them in. Geysers were erupting all around them now, and small-arms fire was pinging off their armored turrets and the superstructure behind them.

  Launch the damn JDAM, Stoke thought to himself, and let’s get the hell out of here before we get—an enemy shell struck Blackhawke’s foredeck barely twenty feet behind them. Boom, a big hole with fire coming out of it. The damage control guys were on it in an instant. It wasn’t a fatal wound, but it was the first real wound they’d suffered and he realized that, for all its high-tech armor, Blackhawke was not invulnerable. Stoke concentrated his fire on the winking muzzles of the enemy’s big guns, hoping to get lucky.

  “What the hell are you doing now?” Stoke said, looking at Harry.

  “Taking off this fucking plastic sport coat. I’m burning up in this thing.”

  “You can’t take your body armor off up here, man. We’re almost totally exposed.”

  “Who says I can’t take it off? I got along without it before they invented it and I can get along without it now.”

  “On top of everything else, he’s suicidal. Great comrade in arms I’ve got.”

  “Mind your own business, okay? How about that for a change?”

  Five minutes later Harry Brock spun around like he’d been kicked by a horse. He went down and Stoke saw the blood pumping from his right thigh. Stoke whipped off the scarf around his neck and did a quick tourniquet above the gunshot wound. He thumbed his radio.

  “Man down. I need a medical corpsman on the bow right this second.”

  “Aye-aye, sir. On his way.”

  “Great, Harry. Really, really good. You spend the rest of this fight lying in bed down in sick bay and leave me alone up here by myself.”

  “Gimme a fuckin’ break,” Brock said through gritted teeth. “You think I did this on purpose? Goddamn round took half my leg off. You can see the damn bone! The femur. It hurts like a bitch.”

  “Here comes the corpsman. Until then, take two aspirin and call me in the morning, asshole.”

  Hawke grabbed the radio.

  “Fire Control, Helm. Target within JDAM range?”

  “Close. Give me another thousand meters and I’d feel better. Good news is they’re a big target and they can’t turn their bow to us and keep up this fire. Okay, we’ve got him cold now, skipper. I’ve got a shot . . . now!”

  “Fire torpedo,” Hawke said.

  “Fire two, aye!” the FCO said.

  “Shit!” the FCO shouted, moments later.

  “Talk to me,” Hawke said.

  “Number two did not eject! We got a fish running hot in the tube! Damn thing is screaming like a banshee.”

  Hawke looked at Laddie. This was bad. The torpedo should have been blasted out of the torpedo tube by the high-power ejection system. Instead, it was somehow stuck and the forward torpedomen could hear it running in the tube. A critical situation because the fish would be armed within a matter of seconds and then almost anything could set it off. In addition, the overspeeding motor could conceivably break up under the strain and vibration. That alone might be sufficient to cause an explosion that would blow the bow off.

  “FCO, try again. Manual. Use full ejection pressure.”

  Hawke felt the seconds pass.

  “Helm, FCO, fish did not eject, repeat, did not eject. System check indicates an outer tube door malfunction.”

  “Can you disarm?”

  “Hell, no . . . I mean, no sir. We’re trying to get the door to . . . uh, okay . . . this is definitely not an electronic malfunction. It’s mechanical. Weapon’s hot and the damn door is jammed. Tube’s flooded. I can hear the screw whining from here. Pressure inside that tube now causing enormous strain. So, this is time critical, sir.”

  “How much time?”

  “I’ve never had one jam before so I don’t really know how long we’ve—”

  “So how do we unjam it?”

  “Not easily. We’ll need to stop the ship and
put a diver down. Pry it open from the outside. That’s the only way.”

  “We stop this damn boat here in the kill zone and we’re all bloody dead.”

  “It’s the only way, sir . . . live torpedo . . . going critical . . .”

  “Stoke,” Hawke said, interrupting, “you hearing all this?”

  “Loud and clear. I’m ready to go down now. Tell the chief bosun to get his ass up here with a mask, fins, and a crowbar so I can pry the damn thing open.”

  “I love you, Stoke. Hard aport, engines full stop. Starboard gun crews, fire as enemy hoves into range. Laddie, smoke the boat. Put me in fog so thick they’ll think we vanished.”

  The skipper pressed a large heavy button mounted on the bulkhead beside him. With the push of that button, Blackhawke discharged and completely disappeared inside a massive fog of man-made smoke.

  Stoke, wearing goggles, fins, and a lead-weighted belt, hit the water feet first, crowbar in hand. He swam down to the starboard tube near the keel and used two suction cups to clamp himself onto the hull, tether his belt in position at the jammed door. He glanced at his dive watch and the red sweep second hand was rotating at warp speed. Less than five minutes.

  Shit!

  He tried to stick the sharp end of the iron bar into the side of the door opposite the hinge. Nothing there. The door was flush with the hull. He could see the thin outline of the edges but he couldn’t feel them with his fingertips . . . the fit was too tight. This is what you get when you give a builder a blank check: perfection. All he had was brute force.

  He’d just have to jam the damn bar into the hairline crack using every ounce of his considerable strength. He figured he could get the thing open but he was worried about one thing: getting the hell out of the way of that damn JDAM when that door finally popped open . . . he slammed the crowbar’s thin edge right into the seam. Nothing. Once more. Twice more. On the third try, the bar went right through the hull.

  Oh, yeah.

  He torqued that bar hard toward the hinge and the little mother popped right open. He heard the whine of the engine and saw the thing coming barreling straight at him. The round red dome of the torpedo’s warhead was right in his face He was seconds away from instant death, either decapitation or vaporization if the warhead blew emerging from the tube. Instinctively, he ripped the cups off the hull, ducked, and the messenger of doom screamed out of the tube, missing the top of his head by maybe an inch.

  Stoke clawed his way to the surface. He’d be damned if he’d miss this action. This was some serious Class-A wartime shit he was into now. This was living, baby, living large.

  “Torpedo is away,” the FCO said, exultation and relief evident in his voice. “It is on track and I calculate thirty seconds to impact.”

  All eyes on the bridge strained to see the dim grey outline of the Alvand through the thinning smoke.

  “It’s going to be a hit,” Laddie said, grinning ear to ear. “A bloody, ruddy, beautiful damn hit!”

  There was a loud WHAM when the warhead went off, almost instantaneously followed by a much louder and more prolonged WHRROOOOM, so close it sounded like one explosion.

  “Must have hit the ammunition magazines,” Laddie said. “Looks like she was carrying an extraheavy load, probably intended for Taliban forces in Afghanistan. That’s why she’s riding so low in the water.”

  “I’d like to see her riding a whole lot lower,” Hawke said. “Let’s go in and give those bastards a fast ride to the bottom. All ahead flank, maintain course.”

  “Aye-aye, skipper,” Laddie said grinning. “All ahead flank, maintain bloody course.”

  Blackhawke, now on a collision course with the Iranian destroyer, went storming in, under the enemy’s lee. She must have been a sight to the Iranian skipper as she advanced, her gun ports flung open, rolling her starboard cannon out as she came. The enemy vessel had been grievously wounded by the torpedo, but she was not out of the fight. Her big guns had not been damaged by the fire from the bow, and Hawke’s yacht was sustaining damage despite the high-tech Kevlar and ceramic armor. What the enemy skipper had not experienced was the unsettling scenario of ten Bushmaster 44s, each firing high-explosive shells at the rate of two hundred rounds per minute.

  That was two thousand high-explosive projectiles being hurled at the enemy every minute. Withering fire was an understatement.

  Alvand was now just over a thousand yards distant. You could feel the tension grow around the helm as the silhouette of the big destroyer hove into plain view out of the fog. The drumbeat of heavy rain from above. Below deck, scores of gunners, anxious sailors waiting for the signal to open fire.

  “Closing fast,” someone muttered.

  “Steady, lads, steady,” Hawke said quietly, as they drew near. There was no indecision in that voice now, only steely determination. He was taking the fight right to them, right down their bloody throats, his bow pointed dead amidships of the enemy. Laddie glanced over at him. Surely he wasn’t thinking of ramming?

  He held his breath and waited for Hawke to signal a tack to port, bringing their starboard guns to bear once more on the enemy. The seconds turned into hours. Enemy rounds were shooting great columns of water into the air all around them. Some of them were striking home and the beautiful ship was sustaining significant damage. All they had to fight back with were the two bow cannons, doing what they could, but it was not enough. This was insane! But he knew Hawke’s reputation. The man had absolutely no qualms about ordering a tactic with even the slimmest margin of success if he felt it would ultimately serve the cause of victory.

  “Sir, would you like the conn?” the skipper asked Hawke, seeing the closing distance dangerously diminishing and mopping perspiration from his brow. The silence at the helm was roaring inside his head.

  “I would, thank you for offering,” Hawke said. Laddie stepped aside and Hawke took the wheel.

  “You have the conn, sir.”

  “I have the conn,” Hawke confirmed, as tradition dictated.

  “Conn, aye.”

  “Gun crews ready,” Hawke said into the command radio. “Fire as she bears.”

  “Ready, aye.”

  “Come left on my order.”

  “Ready about, then, gentlemen.”

  “Ready about, sir.”

  “Hard aport,” Hawke barked, spinning the big wheel hard left so lightly though the tips of his fingers it seemed a blur, effortless. Carstairs watched this performance in awe. Here was a seaman in action. Here was a true warrior.

  Blackhawke’s massive bowsprit missed the hull of the enemy vessel by no more than a foot before finally falling off to port. It was as fine a piece of seamanship as Laddie Carstairs had ever witnessed in a lifetime at sea. The big black yacht rounded up into the wind and lay alongside the enemy at her stern quarter, slowing and matching her speed and course; Hawke’s devastating guns were now at the closest possible range. The Iranian destroyer’s big guns were now totally out of the picture, as their elevations would not allow for a target this close to their hull.

  But Blackhawke’s powerful Bushmaster 44 cannons were just six feet above the waterline.

  Hawke’s plan all along, Carstairs thought, thinking of all the lives aboard this ship that had just been saved by the man’s natural naval battle instincts.

  Get inside a man’s range and pull a gun.

  The secret to close work, and by God Hawke knew it, on land
or on sea.

  At that exact moment, a SEAL team sniper fell from high in the rigging, landing on the deck just in front of the bridge windows, splayed out, a small fountain of blood bubbling at his belly, and clearly dead. Hawke was not looking at him, for he was looking at the enemy with total concentration.

  “Starboard gun crews, fire as she bears, gentlemen.”

  “Firing as she bears, aye.”

  “Navy Six, Helm.”

  “Navy Six, go ahead, sir.”

  “Mr. Stollenwork, are your snipers in position for gun action?”

  “Affirmative. SEAL Six is go.”

  “I want suppression on the enemy automatic weapons who’ll be firing down on us from the rails. Kill them or keep them away from the gunwales, aye?”

  “Aye-aye, skipper. Wilco.”

  “Stoke, Helm. You okay up there by yourself?”

  “I got a loader up here now. I’ll fire number one, then move to two while he reloads. How’s Harry?”

  “He’ll live. He’s lying down in sick bay yelling at everyone. I’ll say this for him. He likes a fight.”

  “I do too. Do what you got to do and don’t worry yourself about me.”

  “We’re on it.”

  And by God, they were.

  The heavy cannons were pouring rounds into the Iranian destroyer right along the waterline. They were literally slicing through the hull and exploding on the far side, opening up her starboard side to the sea.

  “All ahead one-third,” Hawke said.

  Blackhawke began edging forward, the thunderous roar of her cannons and the result of that fire slicing the Alvand’s hull open like a tin can.

  The enemy vessel came to a dead stop. Her decks were awash. Her propellers blown off.

  And then the most amazing sight anyone on board Blackhawke had ever seen.

  She literally started sinking before their eyes. She was just going down, not at the stern or the bow. The whole damn boat was sinking at the same rate.