Kraken Rising

CHAPTER 13

Alex stayed rolled in a ball for the first few thousand feet, falling fast. He needed to minimize surface area exposure to the biting cold. Even though he wore multiple layers, and had a metabolism that could deal with extremes, he would be powerless to stop his extremities freezing solid, making fingers useless when suddenly called to do rapid or complex work.

He had a simple job to do — take out the Kunming’s offensive strike capability. The Chinese destroyer could not be allowed to rain hell down on the McMurdo base. Defang the dragon, Hammerson had said to him. Defang the dragon, and then all you’re left with is a big ugly lizard, he thought and smiled.

Alex reached a number count in his head, knowing it was time to slow his descent. He unrolled, opening his arms and legs wide. The effect was instantaneous, as the folds of synthetic material acted like a combination wing and air brake on his body, slowing him from 220 miles per hour, down to just over a hundred.

Alex bit down hard on the air tube pumping warm oxygen into his lungs. The rising atmosphere was punishing as it pummeled his body, and the cold was a thousand razor blades slashing and stabbing at him, furiously seeking any exposed flesh. He grinned around the breathing tube inside the contoured helmet. He was looking forward to hitting the water.

As he finally dropped through the cloud cover, he saw he was slightly off-target. The Kunming was a mile out to his left, and he angled his shoulder and one arm to tilt toward it, and then swept his arms back, and legs in tight together. Alex became an accelerating arrow shape. He was an insignificant dot, invisible to radar, and traveling again at 200 miles per hour. Even if someone happened to be looking in his direction, the color of his suit against the leaden sky was the perfect camouflage.

Directly below him, Alex could make out the huge torpedo shape of the USS Texas, lying about fifty feet under the surface… and then, he was in position. Once again, he opened his arms and legs, engaging the folds and struts of his suit to slow his speed — he counted down: nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one… impact.

The water surface collision was enormous, battering his entire frame. Multiple smaller bones in his body immediately fractured, and muscle, cartilage and tendon compressed and bruised. He had held his arms folded up and over his skull, but for several seconds he was stunned senseless. It was only the icy water that shocked him back to consciousness.

He sunk down several dozen feet, peeling himself from the wing-suit. He’d been lucky, since he’d missed all of the tiny bergs that dotted the water. They were impossible to see on the descent, and even though they might have been little bigger than a coffee table on the surface, below, they could easily be the size of a Buick. If he had struck one of those, he would have been paste and it was game over. As it was, he could feel the massive trauma to his body, but knew that his system rushed to repair the damage, while his mind screamed its urgency — the Southern Ocean, freezing water, the Kunming, USS Texas. His mind reset, and he let the drop-suit fall away into the dark water, leaving him just in the specially thickened wetsuit, with a slim pack attached to his stomach.

Alex kept the full helmet in place, as it provided both airflow and goggles. The keel of the Kunming soon came into view, and in another few moments he was clinging to its stern, praying they wouldn’t need to start the huge propellers as the churn would have drawn him in and shredded him in an instant.

His first task was the easiest — he needed to make the vessel go dark. To do that, he’d shut off all incoming and outgoing communications.

Alex opened a pouch in the pack on his front and brought out a flat disk which he attached to the hull, switching it on, so it first adhered, and then started to generate its white-noise net around the vessel. By the time they figured out it wasn’t a problem with their own technology, and began a search for the source, the Kunming would need to deploy divers before they found it — and that should give him more than enough time to finish his work below the ice.

Alex looked up at the shimmering gray surface, steeling himself and then rising slowly. He breached the surface and paused, taking off the helmet, its air supply exhausted. He let it fall. He then attached caps to his palms. Time to join the party, he thought, and began to climb the two dozen feet to the rear deck.

Agony; the cold air on his bare skin was a thousand daggers, but he ignored it and slowly looked along the boat’s guard rail — his plan’s success was predicated on the crew and officers’ focus being on the area where they knew the US submarine would be submerged. Then, one hand after the other, spider-like, he came up the side of the destroyer. He paused again and then slowly lifted his eyes above the railing. He slid over, tossing the suction pads back over the side.

Alex had memorized the Chinese boat’s schematics, every room, armament, and crew capability. He had several immediate targets to destroy — the Kunming had anti-air, anti-surface, and anti-submarine missiles, deck-top mounted guns, as well as two 30mm close-in weapon systems (CIWS) that would be ferocious against an exposed submarine hull. The upside for him was that the missile launchers were single system, which meant the firing mechanism could shoot multiple missile varieties, but it was the same battery — knock it out, and you take them all out. The other guns would need individual attention.

Alex stayed low and moved fast. He was a dark blur speeding along the deck to his first target. The rear half of the destroyer was primarily multi-function phased array radar — numerous sensors and sonar. Basically, it was the eyes and ears of the ship, which was now blinded and deafened by the white-noise net that he’d attached to the Kunming’s hull. Their problem would not become apparent until the comm. team sent or expected to receive a communication.

Alex darted forward again. It was the front third of the ship where most of the dragon’s fangs were embedded, and that section was directly under the raised bridge; it would be impossible to avoid being seen. He needed to rely on speed and accuracy, and then be gone within seconds.

Alex flattened himself on the external shielding, and paused to suck in a deep breath. He blinked hard to dislodge ice crystals that had formed on his lashes. His short dark hair was frozen solid against his scalp. His body’s regeneration capabilities had to continually work to repair a body under attack from the freezing cold and its determination to turn his limbs, and face, to solid ice. He laid his head back against the cold steel and counted down.

Three, two, one, zero… Alex exploded forward, his hands going to the pack on his front, and drawing forth several discs that looked like hockey pucks. His first destination was the two 30mm CIWS cannons. To each, he fixed a plasma disc, and pressed down on their timers. He then sped away to the smaller deck-mounted weapons. Once again, he attached several of the pucks, flicking on their pulses, and darting away.

By now, shouts had come from the upper deck, and the sound of running boots on steel. They would find him with their gun sights soon, and he had just one last job — the huge single system multiple missile launcher. No matter what came, this weapon needed to be taken out. Alex ran hard, a puck in each hand, his focus on the central launching barrel, when the bullet caught him in the shoulder, spinning him to the deck.

The bullet was a small caliber high velocity slug — probably fired from a QBZ-95 assault rifle. Alex was glad that whoever had fired it didn’t have it on full automatic, as the Chinese gas powered weapon had an 80-round drum, and could spit them all in under a minute.

Alex rolled and came up fast. More bullets pinged off steel around him, and he rolled and ran hard now, swerving and running to complete his mission, and also running for his life. Within ten feet of the missile launcher he leapt, and threw the discs hard — one went in, the other stuck to the outside, near the base — had to be good enough, he thought, as there would be no second attempt.

Time to go. He turned, accelerating. More bullets whizzed past — angry lead bees looking to inflict their fatal sting. When Alex was six feet from the railing, he dived, spearing down the forty feet of the raised hull towards the dark water of the Antarctic.

It was like a cold fist on his face and head, but he swam down deep, feeling the grind of the bullet in his shoulder, and aware of the air bubble tunnels the bullets made as they chased him down.

He had about a thousand feet to cover to make it to the USS Texas for an underwater entry. The Chinese would have high velocity sniper rifles deployed on the deck now, so surfacing was out of the question. The wound in his shoulder was a dull throb, but the puncture in his suit allowed more of the sub-zero seawater to enter, thankfully numbing the wound, but also freezing his limbs, and making his movements slower and more cumbersome.

The gunfire had ceased, or perhaps his hearing had shut down as he swam. He concentrated on counting his strokes, knowing each one took him six feet closer to his goal, but burned just a little more energy from his limbs, and a little more oxygen from his lungs.

How many strokes have I made? A hundred? More? CO2 was building up now, entering his blood stream and his brain, and making him drowsy. Flashes of light began to go off in his head, as the oxygen in his lungs was depleted. He was so tired, and all that remained was a calm voice in his head, Aimee’s maybe, he wondered, that told him to relax, to sleep. To simply stop and take that first big, deep breath of pure, warm oxygen. He hadn’t even realized he had stopped swimming. Then came the soft voice, sniggering at him. You lose, it whispered.

As his vision clouded, something loomed huge in the dark water before him. There came a sudden tightness as something circled his wrist, and then wrapped around his waist. He stopped caring, and his body simply hung limply in the thing’s grip as it came at his face, pushing something into his mouth.

For Alex, everything went black.

Onboard the Kunming, confusion, chaos, and shouted orders rolled across the deck and out over the freezing water. Diver detection systems were brought online, and these used sonar and acoustic location to track small movements in the water. Snipers waited, rock steady, for the intruder to surface or for the system to pinpoint his position. Below deck, engineers were running system checks, trying to ascertain if the intruder had disabled any of their infrastructure.

The loud and blaring klaxon horn was finally shut down, but the entire crew was deployed to searching the ship. Seaman Qui Long was the first to find one of the discs, stuck limpet-like, to the top of the 30mm cannon. He tried to dislodge it. It wouldn’t budge. He called over his shoulder for assistance, and then drew forth a knife from his belt and tried to wedge it under the object, without success. It was like it had become welded to the steel of the ship.

He called again for help and more sailors rushed to him, as he continued to struggle with the hockey puck sized pellet. He grunted in his efforts. “Stuck tight. Maybe an explosive.” His lips turned down in scorn. “Small. Unlikely to damage the armor plating.” He gripped it harder and tugged again.

As if in response to his derision, a small red light started to glow on its surface. Unbeknown to the sailors, the plasma-mine had initiated a tiny nuclear fusion. Inside its tiny casing, the miniature reactor collided particles and gamma rays with molten salts to generate trapped energy as pure heat — in two seconds it went from the sub-zero surface temperature of the steel plating to two thousand degrees Kelvin. Qui Long’s hands were vaporized to the elbow and he fell back screaming with the skin on his entire body red and peeling, as the now glowing disc sank into the gun, turning the surrounding steel to gray liquid as it went.

The same thing was occurring to all the guns, each of them having their barrels or firing mechanisms melted beyond use. The Kunming had just been taken out of the game.

Water bubbled around Alex as it rapidly drained away. The tightness around his waist was still there as he moved into full consciousness, and he jerked back, immediately banging hard into the side of the submarine’s seal tube.

“Easy there, big guy.”

Alex’s vision cleared, as the Special Forces underwater portal was flushed and filled with air. Two men in bulky ice-environment wetsuits stood close by, breathers now dangling at their necks. One had been holding him up, and now stepped away.

“Okay, now?” The man’s breath steamed in the freezing tube.

Alex nodded and shook more clarity into his mind. The heavy door-wheel was spun from outside, and there came a sudden sibilant hiss, as the watertight seals were pulled apart and the oval door swung open.

He then stepped into the artificial light in the metal corridor of the USS Texas, and sucked in a deep draft of the warm air. His exposed skin prickled from the sudden change in temperature.

“Jesus Christ.” A sailor stood waiting, mouth open. He stepped back as Alex moved further into the corridor. “Ah, Petty Officer Third Class, Anderson.” He saluted.

Alex nodded, peeling off his gloves. He went to return the salute, but caught sight of his own hand — it was blue, and the fingers still wouldn’t bend properly. He’d only ever seen skin like that on fresh corpses pulled from icy water.

“Commander Eric Carmack sends his regards, sir,” Anderson said in a rush.

Alex began to peel himself out of the wetsuit. He felt the pain in his shoulder, and looked down at the ragged bullet hole there. He tugged harder on the neoprene suit and a partially flattened metal slug fell to the deck.

Petty Officer Anderson looked down briefly at the remains of the high caliber bullet. When he looked back up, his eyes went to Alex’s wound, and became transfixed.

Alex could feel the familiar tingling over the trauma site, as the bullet wound began to heal, the skin around the meaty hole bubbling, and then pulling closed before the seaman’s eyes.

“That… musta hurt,” Anderson said, swallowing, with an attempted smile that was more of a grimace.

“Every time,” Alex said, and rolled his shoulder. He turned away; there was no time for conversation. “You have a package for me.” It wasn’t a question.

Anderson nodded. “Your kit and the skidder is juiced and ready. We also have a medic waiting to see you, if…”

“Don’t need him. Commander Carmack on the bridge?”

“Sir.” Anderson pointed. “Follow me.”

“I know my way.” Alex headed for the bridge and Carmack, feeling impatience rising in his gut. Time was moving against him, the race was on, and he was already playing catch-up. He moved fast down the steel corridor, Anderson jogging in pursuit.