from the weapons console, repeating back Pacino’s mode selections, his voice sounding doubtful at Pacino’s orders to disable the safety interlocks on the weapons. Pacino looked at Keebes, waiting for Keebes to object to risking the ship with torpedoes that could turn around and impact Seawolf. None came.
“Firingpoint procedures, tubes three and four. Target Four,” Pacino ordered, raising the periscope.
“Final bearing and shoot.”
“Ship ready,” Officer of the Deck Turner reported.
“Weapons ready,” Feyley called.
“Solution pending,” Keebes said.
Pacino’s eye hit the eyepiece at waist level as the optic module rose from the well.
“Observation, Target Four …”
“Ready,” Keebes said.
“Bearing … mark!” The frigate’s bow was plowing directly toward them, her slender bow slicing the calm waters of the bay, her guns trained on their position, a crew of men standing at the antisubmarine mortar launcher in the fo’c’sle. The crosshairs of the periscope reticle framed the graceful form of the ship, and the odd thought came to Pacino that the frigate was truly beautiful, an elegant efficient design. He smirked in self-mockery: a beautiful ship, bent on killing him.
“Range mark! Four divisions in low power, angle-on the-bow zero. Down scope.”
The screws of the ship could be heard with the naked ear through the steel of the hull, the throbbing thrashing sound of their angry cavitation a clear indication of the frigate’s hostile intention.
“Solution ready,” Keebes said.
“Set.” Feyley.
Pacino was about to call shoot when sonar called over his headset:
“Conn, Sonar, we’ve got steam turbine transients and screw noises from bearing three four five, correlates to Friendly One. The Tampa’s underway!”
“Check fire!” Pacino half-shouted, realizing that the two torpedoes,
if they missed the frigate on the first attempt, would surely detect the hull of the Tampa and put her on the bottom. The screws of the frigate got louder, the sound of the violent pumping noise now blaring through the space, forcing Pacino to shout to be heard.
“Diving Officer, flood depth control at full-open and keep flooding till we bottom out,” Pacino ordered. If the frigate didn’t turn it would run right on top of them, easily shear off the sail or rip open the pressure hull. The deck sank under Pacino’s feet, his stomach rising as if he were on an elevator in a skyscraper, the ship plunging to the bottom of the deep channel.
The screw of the frigate passed overhead, its loud floosh rising to a crescendo from directly overhead, then fading away again astern. The deck below thumped as the ship’s keel hit the bottom of the channel.
“Ship’s on the bottom. Captain,” the diving officer reported.
“That bitch ran right on top of us. Skipper,” Keebes said, looking down at the Pos Two display.
“Let’s hope he’s not going to drop depth charges this way.”
“Conn, Sonar, Target Four is turning around and heading back for the P.L.A piers at max speed.”
“Probably heading back for the Tampa,” Keebes said.
The screw of the frigate passed overhead again, just as loud and insistent as the first time.
“Dive, blow depth control and get us back up, fast, depth seven nine,” Pacino commanded.
“Observation number-two scope, target four.”
The scope was up before the Diving Officer was able to get the ship back to periscope depth. Pacino waited, his lens trained upward, watching the lights from the pier fires reflecting off the gentle waves above, cursing the ship’s inertia. But now, though he felt the same impatience, he felt the steely sensation of control. He was back in command, once again able to influence the outcome of this fight. And the Tampa was underway.
His exhilaration plunged when chief sonarman Jeb reported over the headset the sound of helicopters hovering at the bearing to the Tampa.
USS tampa
Buffalo Sauer crouched outside the door to the wardroom in the forward compartment middle level, straining to hear the radio report from Buckethead Williams, who had slipped through a passageway to the second door to the wardroom. As Sauer set up with Williams, he was nearly thrown to the deck by the lurch of the ship as it accelerated backward. Buffalo glanced at his watch—Baron and the ship’s XO had gotten the vessel underway right on time, he thought.
When Buckethead reported that he was ready, Buffalo called out the order to storm the room and then kicked in the locked door. Actually the door did not open fully but stopped halfway. And even as Buffalo saw the reason for the door stopping he realized that he was in for another scene like he’d just survived from the crew’s mess. The body of a man on the floor had kept the door from opening all the way. The man leaned against a sideboard, legs thrown out in front of him, eyes sunk deep in his sockets, face terribly pale.
Buffalo launched himself into the room, trying to avoid stepping on the man’s legs. Once he was inside the stench hit him, as bad as it had been in the crew’s mess. He had a brief impression of the room around him, the central feature being a large table used for the officers’ meals and meetings. On top of the table were two bodies, the skin of their faces green with decay, the foreheads open and raw from bullet wounds. Both men looked vaguely young, although the bloating of the corpses hid their ages, as did the facial wounds. They were both wearing the silver dual bar insignia of lieutenants. The thought
occurred to Buffalo that the men in the room were meant to see the butchered, decaying corpses of their fellow officers, perhaps as a reminder not to do what they had done. Perhaps the dead lieutenants had tried to escape or defy the guards.
Seated around the table were the ship’s officers, eight of them. The scene was eerily grotesque, as if the Chinese captors had insisted that the officers sit about the table with the dead bodies lying out on it like some sort of nightmare meal. Each man’s chair was drawn up to the table, and the men on the far side of the room all had their heads on the table. The others, the ones with their backs to the doors, were sitting straight up, as if at attention. Whether that was by order of the guards or because of revulsion at the dead bodies, Buffalo had no clue. For a moment Buffalo was reminded of plebe year at the Academy, the harassed plebes sitting around their tables at attention, forbidden to look at their plates, their eyes locked into the distance by order of the first-class midshipmen.
The men at the table had eyes staring blankly like that, except haunted by madness rather than mere fear.
Buffalo looked toward the wall of the room opposite his door and saw Buckethead sailing into the room. For a moment he wondered what had taken Williams so long, but then as he saw the way Buckethead’s body seemed to float slowly into the room he realized that he was experiencing the dilation of time peculiar to intense injections of adrenaline, and that he himself had only been inside the room for less than a second. Williams saw the scene in the corner of the room at the same time Buffalo did.
A Chinese guard had a pistol to the head of one of the officers seated at the table. As he watched, the guard pulled the trigger. Before Buffalo or Buckethead could react, the guard turned his pistol to the next man at the table and fired. The man slouched in his chair, his head hitting the table. It was only then that Buffalo realized that the men against the far wall had their heads on the table because each of them had already been executed.
For a moment Buffalo was thrown off-balance as the guard continued to execute the men at the table rather than defend himself by shooting at the invading SEALs, and by the awful reality of watching men being executed at a table without resistance. What had these men seen that paralyzed them so, even in the face of certain death?
One answer came as Buffalo aimed his MAC-10 at the guard and squeezed the trigger, the HydraShok bullets exploding the interior of the guard’s abdomen, his pistol dropping to the ground as his body slammed against the aft bulkhead and slipped toward
the deck.
The answer in Buffalo’s mind kept his trigger finger tensed, continuing to shoot into the guard’s body.
These men had seen things so horrible that they no longer wanted to live. For them, death was a deliverance.
Buffalo was suddenly thrown into the sideboard by the force of the ship turning, the deck tilting as the ship came around. He found himself staring into the glassy eyes of the man lying on the deck, the one who had been lucky enough not to have had to sit and stare at the rotting corpses. The man wore the single silver bar of a junior-grade lieutenant on the collar of his coveralls. Above his left pocket was a set of gold submariner’s dolphins. His eyes were dead, as if he had been lobotomized. Buffalo waved his hand in front of the man’s eyes. At first the man blinked, then shut his eyes. Buffalo shook him, heard mumbling. He put his ears next to the man’s lips, straining to make out a voice distorted by thirst and hunger and sickness and fear. Finally came the words.
“What took you so long? God, what took you so damned long? …”
The man lost consciousness, collapsing in Buffalo’s arms. Buffalo glanced at Buckethead Williams, whose jaw had tightened.
Buffalo reloaded his MAC-10 while speaking into his lip mike, trying to raise the men he’d sent to the chiefs quarters, “Peach” Pirelli and “Roadrunner” Kaplan.
“Peach, Roadrunner, you up?”
“Roger, One.”
“What’s the status?”
“CPO quarters are a meat grinder Mr. Buffalo.
They’d executed five of the chiefs before we could nail the guards. Just like the crew’s mess. Almost as if they were carrying out orders in case of a raid. Like they were expecting us.”
“How are the survivors?”
“Pretty bad, One. Must have been tortured. They seem like they’re in deep shock.”
“Roger. Keep Roadrunner there and meet me in the passageway to make sure the level is clear.”
Any remaining guards hiding in cubbyholes or staterooms would need to be dealt with before the middle level was considered secure. When it was, they’d help the other teams on the other levels. Until then, it would be best to stay out of the line of fire.
As Buffalo made his way down the narrow passageway, he almost hoped to see another Chinese guard.
The more he saw of the prisoners, the greater the itch in his trigger finger.
CHAPTER 22
SUNDAY, 12 MAY
1907 GREENWICH MEAN TIME
go had bay, XlNGANG harbor USS tampa 0307 beijing time
Leader Tien Tse-Min felt the rush of air as the bullet flew by his ear, felt a sticky wetness on his neck from the blood that came from Captain Murphy, who twitched in his arms. The commando had shot at him and instead hit the captain. He dropped the hostage and the pistol and bolted for the ladder behind him, thrusting himself out of the cavern of the submarine, wondering if he would feel the rounds of the American’s machine gun crashing into him. What he heard were the sounds of the commando’s footsteps as the man ran toward him, but fear propelled Tien out of the hatch and onto the deck before the man got to him. Tien wondered momentarily if the commando had been running to catch him or to attend to the captain. It no longer mattered. He felt more than heard the two additional bullets from the direction of the American, but the shots missed and by then Tien had reached the top of the ladder.
He emerged from the forward hatch to a fiery landscape, the destroyer hulks burning, the fuel in the water of the slip burning, gunfire coming in from the pier, the helicopters overhead spraying bullets onto the ship. He had a brief impression of motion, of the destroyers and the pier moving away from him as the submarine, incredibly, moved
backward, the water of the slip flowing swiftly over the bow as the ship backed up. It was true—the Americans had somehow found a way to recapture the submarine and were driving away with it in spite of the platoon of heavily armed guards Tien had stationed in the ship’s control room. How could his troops have been overcome in seconds since the explosions sounded from the pier?
Impossible or not, it was happening right before his eyes. He continued out of the hatch, his body’s momentum propelling him forward along the sloping bow of the submarine. He took a deep breath and dived into the water of the slip, closing his eyes against the scummy oil floating on the surface, came up for air, spitting out brackish bay water, and watched as the submarine backed clear of the slip, two heads visible at the top of the ship’s conning tower, one of them driving the submarine.
Tien swam to the berth that had been occupied by the frigate Nantong astern of the sub. He could only hope that it would be chasing the American submarine.
He found a maintenance ladder leading up to the pier, and climbed out of the oily bay water. In front of him were the troops of an armored unit of the P.L.A, the troops firing their weapons without effect at the retreating submarine.
Tien watched as the ship pulled out, the wake boiling around its bow as it reversed its way into the channel water of the bay.
He found the man who seemed to be in command and took his radio, calling for the Hangu airfield, where he knew there was a fleet of Hind assault helicopters.
On the third try he reached the base and convinced the duty officer to scramble the helicopter gunships.
“How long for the Hinds to get here?” Tien shouted.
“Five minutes.”
Tien waited, hoping that five minutes would be soon enough.
* Lieutenant Pig Wilson lay on the deck forward of the port rack of torpedoes in the forward compartment’s lower level torpedo room, waiting for the last Chinese sniper to make a mistake. When he and Chief Python Harris had first inserted into the room there had been at least a dozen guards. The initial volley of shots had dropped four, sending the others for cover. Unfortunately, there were too many places to hide in the room, including inside the tubes themselves.
In the rush of taking the room Pig had heard a torpedo tube door slam shut. No doubt one of the guards had dived into an empty tube, hoping to pop back out unexpectedly and shoot the SEALs from behind.
But Pig knew how to lock a tube from the central console in the room. He peeked up at the torpedo room central console. The top of the console was burned out and full of holes, but the controller section for the port tube bank looked as if it had been hastily repaired and rewired, the plastic function keys ripped out with crude toggle switches installed in their place.
Hoping the repaired switches worked, he had thrown a switch and watched as the thick steel ring rotated over the dogs of the inner tube door. He could hear the faint sound of a man shouting, the sound muffled and resonant, as if the noise came from inside a metal can, which in a way it did. Pig threw a second switch to vent the tube to the torpedo room, opening a valve in a pipe on top of the tube, the pipe intended to make sure no trapped air remained in the tube when it was filled with water. The third switch was the best;
the marking above it said FLOOD. Pig hit the switch, opening up the tube to the water in the tube tanks, filling the tube with seawater all the way to the vent valve, which automatically shut when the tube was full of water. There followed a rushing noise, louder shouts from the tube. By the time the vent valve shut, the tube was full of water, and all human sound was extinguished.
But they couldn’t all be that easy, Wilson knew.
The room was the most vulnerable of all the spaces they would be raiding, full of weapons and their high explosive warheads as well as the volatile fuel. A single bullet would be enough to cause a fire that could kill the whole ship … the self-oxidizing torpedo fuel, once lit, could not be extinguished by anything—it burned under water, it burned when blasted by a CO^ or PKP or foam-extinguisher, it just burned until the fuel was gone. That kind of violent fire would blow every warhead in the room, creating a chain reaction that would breach the hull, perhaps even cutting the ship to pieces. One goddamned bullet.
When the stun grenade exploded in the space, Pig held his breath, but heard
only the clatter of guns dropping to the deck and the screams of the guards as the stun juice hit them. After a moment of quiet, Pig and Python began to search the space.
Fighter Sai, the last Chinese P.L.A guard remaining alive aboard the Tampa, managed to escape Pig and Python and bolted for the stairs leading from the torpedo room to the middle level, his AK-47 clattering against the rails of the stairs as he ran. He ran aft along the passageway between the crew quarters and officers’ country, heading toward the crew’s mess to the tunnel and the aft compartment. He knew a hiding place where he hoped they wouldn’t look for him.
When the Americans thought they were safe in their recaptured boat, he would emerge and take over the ship, killing the complacent, overconfident Americans with some of their own weapons. Or at least he could sabotage the vessel, sufficient to sink the ship somewhere in the bay.
Sai reached the corner of the galley and turned into a short passageway leading starboard. He thought he heard an American shouting something and worried he’d been seen. At the end of the passageway was the massive hatch to the aft compartment that lay open on its latch. Without stopping to shut the hatch Sai climbed through and ran along the tight tunnel leading to the aft compartment, and felt the deck tilt as the ship turned at high speed.
Midway along the tunnel Sai stopped at the door to the room he privately called the forgotten compartment.
Forgotten because it seemed to be between the forward and aft compartments, but other than the one tunnel going through it there was no access to the space. The one door to the space was set into the wall of the tunnel and it had a window with a mirror that rotated with a hand wheel providing a view into each corner of the room. Inside the space there were large pieces of equipment, mostly tanks or storage containers.
Sai knew that no one ever ventured into the room because the oval door to the space was locked with a thick chain and padlock. No one went in, no one ever came out. There were a hundred places where no one would see him from the tunnel. He was feeling better.
Attack Of The Seawolf Page 21
