Los Angeles Class

19

To say that it was dark was the grossest understatement. Randall looked about and realized that the effect was precisely like SCUBA diving in a pool filled with ink. When he switched off his powerful little underwater flashlight, he literally could see nothing… not even the rim of his own face mask.

Even with the light on, his visible world was limited to a misty glow of swirling, drifting particles, a snowstorm illuminated by the beam. The bottom was a featureless layer, tabletop smooth, of gray silt and organic sludge, deposits laid down over centuries by the outflow of the Amur River and by the indiscriminate dumpings from dozens of factories along the banks. The surface was so fine that a single careless flick of the flipper could send it all swirling up in a vast, opaque cloud, and it was long minutes before the detritus settled out again, or was carried away on the northbound current.

He felt a tug on his safety line and looked to his right. He couldn't see Nelson on the other end of the line, and that length of nylon was only five feet long. He kept moving.

Beneath him was the curved, rusty, silt-coated surface of a thirty-inch oil pipe. The pipe had been laid across the seabed at the northern end of the strait to carry oil from the fields at Okha in northern Sakhalin across to the mainland, then up the banks of the Amur River. He checked his watch. Twenty-one minutes at depth. They were okay so far.

During the late afternoon, Pittsburgh had left the deep waters in which she'd been lurking, to the north, creeping down mile by inching mile into the southernmost reaches of the Sakhalinskiy Zaliv. While Captain Gordon had been scrupulously careful not to violate Russian national waters the previous night, when they'd made contact with Stenki, such niceties had not been possible this time. The mission plan called for the SEAL divers to survey the northernmost reaches of the slender strait between Sakhalin Island and the mainland… including checking on the location of an oil pipeline, locating Russian sea-floor listening devices and photographing and mapping them, and doing some other basic UDT survey work.

But the SEAL swimmers' range was sharply limited without an SDV, a SEAL Delivery Vehicle which could extend the range and reach of divers underwater. The Pittsburgh was hovering now just a couple miles north of this point, in waters uncomfortably less than eighty feet deep.

Randall and Nelson had taken the first survey run; Fitch and McCluskey would come out later, after they returned. Their bottom time was limited, and there was only so much they could do in their allotted hour.

He was using a Mark VI semi-closed-circuit SCUBA rig, equipment that matched the advantages of rebreathers — the bubble disperser all but eliminated the telltale cloud of bubbles associated with open-circuit units — with the deep-diving capabilities of straight SCUBA gear. With the Mark VI he could dive to a maximum working depth of 180 feet,

not that he'd be trying anything close to that on this op; working for half an hour at 180 feet required a total of fifty-three minutes of decompression time, divided among three stops along the way up… and the Pittsburgh didn't have a decompression chamber.

Best of all, it was quiet—not just an advantage but an outright necessity when working around enemy sonar equipment.

He checked his depth gauge. Sixty feet. According to the Navy dive tables, he could stay at this depth for a full hour without having to decompress. Stretch the bottom time to an hour ten, and he would need a two-minute stop at ten feet before going on.

In fact, he wouldn't be going to the surface, since Pittsburgh's forward escape trunk would never be shallower than about forty feet, thanks to the height of the sail. For short decompression times, or to simulate a wait at depth on the way to the surface, he and Nelson could endure the escape lock.

But if ever there was a guaranteed way to give a guy claustrophobia, locking him into that coffin-sized pipe face-to-face with another six-foot, two-hundred-pound guy was it.

The depth reading verified that there was a shallow ridge stretched across the channel at this point. Surface vessels could make the passage all right, but submarines would have to transit on the surface… and there was no way that an American boat could pull that off.

Randall felt two sharp tugs on the line, insistent this time, and deliberate. They were wearing the same full-face masks they'd had in Alaska, with the radio transmitters, but were not wearing receivers or battery packs this time out. There was too much chance that their transmissions would be picked up by all of the Soviet electronics in the area.

He stopped, then moved toward his swim buddy, playing his light on the bottom.

There. Planted on the seabed a few feet from the oil pipeline, almost obscured by drifting muck, was a device rising from the bottom that almost looked like part of the construction. It was separated from the pipe, however, and appeared to be mounted on a concrete block, visible in the mud only because of its squared-off, obviously artificial shape.

The device itself appeared to be a polished aluminum sphere held clear of the sea bottom by a slender pipe. At the base were some canisters, boxes, and wiring, all of it heavily coated with silt. Nelson pointed with his light. A heavy cable, thick as a man's arm, was just visible running in one side of the object's base, and out the other.

They came in many sizes and shapes and could be hard to identify, but it was pretty clear what this one was for. It was a small sonar pickup, something akin to the American SOSUS arrays that tracked Soviet submarine movements in and out through the choke points into the world's oceans.

Hovering in place, taking care not to disturb the silt, Randall pulled out his camera, a tiny thing packed into a transparent plastic box the size of a hardback book, and fitted with mechanical controls so that the whir of a motor wouldn't trigger an alarm. He began taking photos from several angles, while Nelson made notes on a slate.

Idiots. Randall grinned as he took the pictures. They'd planted the damned thing in the shadow of the pipeline, effectively crippling its sonar "view" toward the north.

Not that American submarines were ever likely to work their way this far into the Tatar Straits again. The waters here were simply too shallow, too restricted, the possible rewards nonexistent. U.S. subs trying to hunt down Soviet vessels exiting Nikolayevsk in wartime would be far better off lying in wait for them among the Kuril passages, or in the Sea of Japan. With the possible exception of a SEAL raid to sabotage the oil pipeline with a few well-placed limpet mines, Randall couldn't think of any good reason for an American submarine to be here.

He thought about that as he took the last photograph, then reattached the camera to his harness. Damn… why had the Pittsburgh been sent here? Oh, poking around submerged pipelines, photographing and mapping seabed sonar arrays, and surveying approaches to a major shipping lane were all very SEALie things to do, all pumped full of the warrior's spirit and fairly dripping with adrenaline. But there was no hard, military or intelligence reason that this survey had to be carried out.

Certainly not one requiring the risk of a Los Angeles class submarine.

The two SEALs resumed their silent swim along the pipeline. Visibility was clearing slightly as they moved deeper into the center of the strait, where the current was stronger. Before long, the shaft of illumination from Randall's lamp pierced eight or ten feet into the murky snowstorm before being swallowed by night.

Randall was under no illusions about the necessity for military intelligence — or of commando operations such as this one. He wouldn't have been a SEAL if he had been.

Kenneth Randall's father, a Marine, had been killed in Vietnam, a casualty of the assault outside the Citadel in Hue during the Tet Offensive. A six-year-old's desperate attempts to understand why Daddy wasn't coming home again had led, inevitably, it seemed now, to a lifelong search for answers, first in the history of a war few of his friends even knew existed, then in the determined study of global politics.

Throughout the seventies and the early eighties, it had seemed genuinely possible that Russia, the "Evil Empire" as President Reagan had recently named it, was on the way to dominating the world — politically and militarily, if not by outright conquest. A staunchly conservative Ohio Republican, Randall knew, with absolute conviction, the danger to his country presented by Communism. He'd considered becoming a Marine, like his father, but ultimately decided that the Navy SEALs — the Navy's premier commando outfit that had first proven itself in Vietnam — offered him the chance of taking an active role in the ongoing, largely behind-the-scenes quasi-war against the Soviets.

During the past year, Randall had deployed to a number of far-flung trouble spots across the globe, and he'd encountered nothing to shake his conviction that the Russians would eventually take over if they weren't confronted now, with guts and resolve.

Randall rarely talked about it. SEALs didn't discuss politics — not with those outside the SEAL community, at any rate. Besides their inborn, security-conscious reticence to discuss what they did with anyone, they knew the Teams could be hurt by any association in the public's mind with Rambo and similar Hollywood myths. The news media didn't help, not when they tended to fawn over leftist causes and celebrities while routinely presenting the right as demented, fanatical, and under the thumb of religious extremists.

He and his fellow SEALs went about their duties with a steady and consummate professionalism, confronting the Soviet threat in the best way they knew how — training hard, obeying orders, and looking within and to their own community for support, rather than to a largely ignorant and uncaring civilian culture.

Sometimes, in melodramatic moments — say, during a bull session in the barracks at Coronado — they thought of themselves aloud as guardians of Western civilization. They knew how ridiculous such a concept might seem to the newspapers or even a majority of American citizens. And yet…

Randall still remembered the sight of those mystery tracks on the beach at Adak. Some people might think this whole thing was a game, but he knew just how deadly serious it was.

The bottom was dropping sharply now, as the SEALs entered a deep, V-shaped valley. The pipeline, he saw, continued straight across the valley like a bridge, suspended in the dark and murky water. Shadows — something strangely regular, caught his attention at the valley's bottom. He tugged on the safety line and pointed; Nelson nodded, and the two began to descend.

The valley bottom was at seventy-eight feet, some fifteen feet beneath the pipeline in the darkness overhead. The silt here was firmer, less powdery… and was deeply etched by curiously regular markings which Randall had seen before.

They looked like the prints left by tank treads, pressed into the mud. They had to be newly made, too, because the current and drifting silt would swiftly cover any markings on the bottom, probably within a matter of hours. Thoughtful, Randall hovered above the track marks and pulled out his camera again, taking several pictures from different angles, while Nelson held the light to throw distinct shadows with high contrast.

A miniature crawler sub, probably the same make as the machine that had left the marks on the beach at Adak. After taking the last picture, he reached down and gently poked at the mud where it had been pressed down by the crawler's weight. The compacted mud dissolved in a flurry of silt. These tracks were fresh… perhaps less than an hour old. And — now that he thought about it — he could hear something in the distance, a kind of metallic purr made high-pitched and strange by transmission through the water.

It was difficult to tell direction under water, but he thought the sound was coming from that way, from the north. Pittsburgh lay in that direction, but he didn't think he was hearing the American submarine. This, whatever it was, was far too noisy… and closer.

He pointed again, and Nelson nodded agreement. Together, the two men began swimming along the valley floor, moving north. If there was something up there, they wanted to get a glimpse of it… and maybe even a photograph or two. And it was time to start heading back for the Pittsburgh, before they had to start paying time penalties on the decompression tables.

They swam for five minutes, the sound from ahead growing louder all the time. The valley appeared to slice cleanly through the ridge, opening on the other side onto a broad, flat plain, sensed more than seen in the cloudy murk.

Nelson stopped, pulling upright, and pointed. Ahead, Randall could make out a glow in the darkness, a misty light against which something large and black was silhouetted. Both SEALs switched off their own lights then, and the blackness of the undersea night closed in around them once more, enveloping them completely except for the eerie looking silver-white glow up ahead, like headlights in dense midnight fog.

Navigating by the light, they kept swimming. They were closer to the light source than they realized; almost immediately, the light resolved into the glare of a pair of headlamps. Though clearer here in the main current through the strait, with visibility at perhaps twenty-five feet, the water was still so silt-laden that the outlines of the thing backlit by the headlamps were blurred, as though they were looking at it through a thick fog.

Still, Randall could get a general impression of the thing. The lamps on the vehicle's bow cast a silvery nimbus of light and cast peculiar shadows, jet-black and ominous. As the SEALs swam around the left side of the thing, they could see that it was roughly cylindrical, perhaps five yards long and half that high, raised higher off the mud by the massive tracks and suspension. Oddly, it possessed twin screws aft, a cruciform rudder, and diving planes, as well as a tiny conning tower with a hatch; Randall hadn't imagined that the vehicle might swim like a conventional submarine, as well as crawl on the bottom, but it clearly possessed the means to do so.

And as a final, lethal touch, two torpedoes were mounted on the hull, up high, to either side of the conning tower. They were a lot smaller than Mark 48s, probably 406mm ASW torps, a type carried by Soviet helicopters and light patrol craft. Crawlerski subski, it seemed, packed a sting.

Randall did some fast thinking. That type of torpedo, just sixteen inches thick, packed a seventy-kilogram warhead… not enough to sink a vessel as large as the Pittsburgh, but powerful enough to do her some very serious damage. Was the crawler sub's appearance here coincidence, or something more sinister?

Pittsburgh was certainly picking up the sounds from that thing. It wasn't moving at the moment — simply sitting still, but an engine on board was idling. As the SEALs got closer, Randall saw a pipe or hose extending from the rear of the conning tower toward the surface. A snorkel, then, allowing a diesel engine to run while the submarine was submerged without swiftly poisoning the air for all on board. The upper end was probably kept at the surface by a ring bladder or flotation collar.

What the hell was the crawler doing here? Was its presence coincidence, or did it have something to do with the Pittsburgh

Consulting with hand gestures, Randall and Nelson untied the safety line that had kept them together in the heavy silt. The current, stronger now, was moving them slowly past the Russian machine, along its port side. Side by side, they started working their way closer to the hybrid monster, careful to stay out of the illumination of its headlamps.

From abeam, they could see the overall design more clearly, and Randall began taking photographs. The rounded forward end of the cylinder was glass or plastic, though it reflected light and darkness with an opaque, mirrorlike silver sheen, and they couldn't see in. A pair of manipulator arms were mounted to either side of the cockpit, each equipped with a small video camera and light. The vehicle had been designed to carry out underwater construction, repair, or maintenance. Possibly they used it for seabed construction at oilfields like Okha.

But… why the torpedoes?

An instant later, Randall was too busy for questions, as powerful hands grabbed him from behind, and a hand wielding a diving knife snaked out of the night toward his face.

"Any ideas yet on Sierra Four-five?" Gordon asked.

Rodriguez was seated at his console, leaning forward, eyes closed, right hand lightly touching the headset he wore. For a moment, watching him, Gordon had the feeling that Rodriguez wasn't really there in Pittsburgh's sonar shack, but somewhere else… his mind and focus and being projected out into the black and watery universe beyond Pittsburgh's hull. The green-lit cascade of the sonar's waterfall drew its arcane lines and wiggles on the display screens before him, but Rodriguez appeared to have forsaken the visual world entirely, in favor of one composed entirely of sound.

ST3 Dave Kellerman sat at Rodriguez's right. He was also listening through headphones, but his eyes were on the waterfall… or on Rodriguez. His silence suggested that he'd been left far behind by his more experienced — and talented — mentor.

"I would have to say it's a diesel engine," Rodriguez said after a small eternity of minutes had dragged by. "Pump noises, and a reciprocating engine — cylinders and pistons. What it sounds like, Captain, is a tractor. I know that's impossible…. "

"Not necessarily. The Japanese have used tractors with sealed cabs for underwater work for years. I think those are diesels. They use long hoses from the shore or a boat so they can breathe."

"Could be something like that, I suppose," Rodriguez said. "A Russian oilfield machine, maybe? But what would it be doing out here?"

"Checking that oil pipeline, maybe," Gordon replied. "Or it's something new out of Nikolayevsk, and it's out here on trials or for testing."

Rodriguez reached behind him and made a quick entry on a computer keyboard. "I'm going to run it through the library anyway, and see what comes up. I've never heard anything like this, but there might be something in the record."

All American submarines carried a computer record of the myriad sounds acquired and stored by generations of previous submarine voyages, as well as clips from ASW sonars and seabed SOSUS nets worldwide. In general, any sound could be broken down into one of four broad categories. There were the biologicals, sounds made by the world of life around them — whales singing and shrimp mating and fish making some of the most bizarre sounds ever recorded on the planet. There were the geothermals, also natural sounds, but these produced by nonbiological sources — steam hissing and shrieking under pressure just above a seabed river of molten lava, the clatter of an avalanche, the grumbling sounds of magma moving beneath the thin skin of a deep ocean trench, the outrush of hot water from sea-floor thermals.

The other two categories embraced man-made sounds. The general category included thousands of recordings of everything from fishing smacks to supertankers, and other artificial sources as well — the clank of warning bells on navigational buoys as heard from underwater, for example, or the noises of an oil-rig drilling operation.

The final category was warships, a listing of every ship and submarine so far cataloged, from friendly, neutral, and potentially hostile sources. Using the library, a sonar crew could swiftly ID any given target… and could often pick out characteristics of an individual vessel, old friends as Rodriguez sometimes called them. A good sonar man like Rodriguez often could pick the individual differences that separated one Russian Typhoon, for example, from another, by a system that seemed more magical — or at least parapsychological — than otherwise. A boat's sonar library, however, gave quick, sure matches to almost anything the vessel's sonar might encounter.

"How about the other Sierras?" Gordon asked.

"We've got three main groupings now, Captain," Rodriguez told him. One to the west… that first batch we picked up yesterday, heading south. It looks like they've gathered off of Vlasjevo, four vessels, all small, coastal patrol stuff."

Gordon nodded. They'd followed the progress of those sonar contracts for most of the past twenty-two hours. Whether they'd moved in on Stenki, or were simply part of a routine patrol was still unknown, but it didn't look good for Johnson and Smith and the two Russian agents. At the moment, there was little that could be done.

"The second is moving toward us slowly from the north," Rodriguez continued. "Three large contacts, five small ones. Range thirty to forty miles, best guess. I keep losing them outside of the convergence zones, but they seem to be maintaining a heading dead on toward the Straits."

"Or toward us. And the third group?"

"Sierra Three-three and Sierra Three-four. They're close enough now I can hear their captains jingling change in their pockets while they walk the bridge. A pair of Grisha IIIs. Range approximately five miles. They seem to be idling, not doing much of anything."

A tone sounded from the library, accompanied by the clatter and hiss of the printer spitting out a sheet of paper. Rodriguez snagged the sheet, glanced at it, and handed it to Gordon. "Sounds like we have a match for a Swedish UUO, sir."

Gordon read the printout. More than once in the past fifteen years, the Swedish Navy had picked up unusual sounds off their coast, sometimes deep inside their territorial waters. Sometimes, the sonar contacts were visually identified — as when a Soviet diesel sub ran aground in Swedish waters recently. More often, the contacts were lost… and few were completely identifiable.

Apparently, the Swedes had more than once tracked contacts in and around their naval facilities at Karlskrona and the island of Gotland that had sounded suspiciously like underwater tractors. Similar contacts had been tracked along the Alaskan coast a few years back as well. Naval Intelligence speculated that the contacts represented a very small Soviet submarine with tracks like a tank, designed for beach reconnaissance and amphibious operations. Never identified — at least, not in reports that Gordon had seen — the contacts were called Swedish Unidentified Undersea Objects, or UUOs.

He handed the printout back to Rodriguez. "Is this contact getting closer?"

"Doesn't seem to be, sir. Range is maybe fifteen hundred yards. It was moving when I first picked it up a few minutes ago, but it's been stationary since."

Gordon visualized the chart of the area back in the control room. The UUO, whatever it was, was in the general area of the pipeline the two SEALs had gone out to investigate. Chances were, they would hear the thing themselves and check it out.

He just wished there was something more material he could do to help them. At the moment, though, all he could do was what submariners did best… sit and wait.

Randall clung to the hand with the knife, tucked hard, and somersaulted, pulling his attacker over his back as he rolled. Breaking free, he twisted around as his flippers hit the muddy bottom, stirring up a boiling cloud of silt.

The other diver recovered and came at him again, knife hand extended. The guy was clad in a wet suit, like the two SEALs, but of unfamiliar design. He was big, heavily muscled, and wearing what looked like first-line military underwater breathing gear, either a rebreather or a semi-closed-circuit rig like Randall's with a hell of a good disperser.

Out of the corner of his face mask, Randall saw that Nelson was also locked in hand-to-hand combat with another diver. He could spare no attention for his partner, though, because his own attacker was lunging at him with the knife.

Randall blocked the thrust and got the man's arm in a bonebreaker lock; his attacker countered, though, with a leverage move that flipped Randall away with almost contemptuous ease.

The other diver was strong. Randall was pretty sure these guys must be Spetsnaz, Spetsialnoye Nazranie or "forces at designation," the Soviet military equivalent of U.S. Special Forces and SEALs put together. They were a highly trained elite operating under the Russian Glavnoye Razvedyvatelnoye Upravlenie — the GRU, which ran most Soviet military intelligence operations. If so, he and Nelson were up against men as well trained, possibly, and certainly as deadly as Navy SEALs.

His opponent lunged again; Randall responded by deliberately dragging his flippers through the silt on the bottom, creating an inky cloud as effective as a squid's defensive jet of black ink. Instead of ducking, he twisted to the side, grabbed the Spetsnaz swimmer's outthrust arm, and pulled himself in close, using his free hand to drag his own Mark I SEAL knife from its scabbard.

The other swimmer twisted, breaking Randall's hold, and slashed backhanded with the knife. Only the fact that the two men were moving more slowly in the dense medium of the water gave Randall the time to roll clear.

Hands grabbed him from behind, one around the chest and upper arms, the other coming down on his head, the hand grabbing for his mask. A third Russian diver…

Again, he tucked and rolled, this time catapulting himself and this new foe over in a tight, hard somersault that threw the man on his back into the first diver in a tangle of legs and arms.

Randall had trained long and deeply in several martial arts. His official SEAL training had emphasized a Korean martial form called Hwrang-do, but he'd studied jujitsu and aikido as well.

Though the moves and countermoves couldn't apply underwater — the medium was too dense, and there was no way to gain leverage from the floor — certain principles did, among them the fact that a man actually had an advantage over two opponents that he lacked when facing only one. Being better off fighting one-against-two seemed counterintuitive, but made sense. His two opponents couldn't communicate with one another, would have trouble synchronizing their moves and attacks, and might even get in one another's way.

And that was exactly what he'd just done to them, dropping the one Spets diver on top of the other. For a critical second or two, they thrashed, trying to right themselves, get untangled from one another, and launch another attack. And that second was all that Randall required.

Before the two could separate, Randall lunged with his knife at a barely visible target, aiming the point of the blade at the second diver, at the angle of his jaw and his throat. Razor-honed steel sliced through wet-suit rubber and foam… and a black cloud flowered, adding to the murk. Grabbing the man's head, he used the added leverage to slice deeper, harder, finishing the job. Pulling the blade free, he pivoted to face the first swimmer, almost invisible now in mud, blood, and night black gloom.

The first diver had taken advantage of the second or so while Randall was killing his partner to reorient himself, and prepare his own thrust. His knife hand flashed close beside Randall's mask, and he felt the blade catch and pull on his equipment.

He slashed a parry, cutting rubber and flesh. The knife hand withdrew, and in that moment Randall closed, grasping the other diver's face mask and air hose, pulling them off and away.

Bubbles chirped and warbled, exploding into the silent near darkness. Randall actually heard the other man bellow, the sound muffled by the water as the Spets diver thrashed and churned, trying to find his air hose and mask. Randall lunged again at the man, now completely distracted from the fighting and, a moment later, the diver was drifting toward the mud, faceup, with bubbles and a stream of black blood issuing from his mouth.

Spinning, knife at the ready, Randall searched for Nelson and his opponent, but could see almost nothing in the gloom save the glare of the Russian submarine's lights. He could see shadows struggling, a few feet away, and began swimming toward them, knife ready.

He drew breath… and nearly choked on the seawater that filled his mouth and began filling his mask. He could hear the ringing of bubbles on his left, and, reaching up, felt the severed air hose on his own equipment.

He was about to drown, unless he could think of an alternative … and damned quickly….