Los Angeles Class

20

Randall jerked upright, groping for a mask rapidly filling with salt water. He tried to clear his mask, and failed.

The right air hose on his mask was the intake, with a valve that opened when he breathed in. The left hose was exhaust, and was supposed to open when he exhaled. The Spets diver had cut the left hose, and the exhaust valve had jammed open with the inrush of water.

He couldn't worry about that now, however. He could sense the struggle in the silt-laden water ahead, where Nelson and the third Spetsnaz diver were rolling over and over in a desperate struggle. Clinging to the air already in his lungs, he kicked hard, lunging forward, emerging from the cloud just in time to see the Russian diver bury his knife up to the hilt in the side of Nelson's skull.

Nelson's legs kicked spastically, then stilled. Randall screamed into his water-filled mask and slashed out, cutting the Russian's arm, then thrusting and stabbing, trying for his air hose, his mask, for any vulnerable target.

The Russian lost a valuable second trying to pull the knife free from Nelson's head, then turned to face Randall's wildly slashing attack. Randall's blade caught him under the chin, biting deep. The man's head went up, his mask filling suddenly with dark blood, as he reached for his throat; more blood flowered into the sea around his throat and hands.

Randall delivered a killing thrust between the diver's fourth and fifth ribs, then, sheathing his blade, he turned to examine Nelson. The SEAL was sinking slowly, arms limply extended in front of his body, the knife still buried in his skull.

Shit, shit, shit! …

Reaching out, he pulled Nelson's mask off, removed his own, then pressed the other SEAL's mask to his own face and cleared it, taking in several deep breaths. He began unbuckling the harness for his own diving rig. He would use Nelson's instead; his swim partner wasn't going to need it.

Before he could begin removing Nelson's gear, however, he heard a metallic clank. Rotating in the water, he could just make out the shadow of yet another diver emerging from the conning-tower hatch of the Russian crawler sub. Light spilled upward into the silty water, stage-lighting the swimmer's torso and masked head. The other man raised something bulky in his hand… and then a needle-sharp contrail stabbed through the water with a sound like ripping cloth.

The projectile shrilled within inches of Randall's head, and he felt the slap of concussion as it passed.

Reacting without thinking, Randall dropped Nelson's mask and swam as hard as he could toward the Russian sub, now a vaguely lit blur against a vaster blur of dim light. Salt stung his eyes, but he ignored it, racing for the cover of the crawler's track assembly. Again came the tearing-cloth sound, and something skimmed just above Randall's back.

The Russian diver, he thought, was using some sort of projectile weapon designed for underwater combat … and his best guess was that it was something like the old Gyrojet.

The U.S. military had experimented with pistols firing rocket-propelled bullets back in the 1960s, but given up on them because of one serious design flaw. A regular bullet emerged from the gun with a muzzle velocity that could only drop as it encountered air resistance or — in the case of a bullet fired under water — water resistance. Gyrojets worked just the opposite. It took time for a miniature rocket, once ignited, to accelerate to a velocity that could kill the target, which meant they were less than lethal at point-blank range. The Navy had worked with several designs for covert underwater work, however; Randall had worked with one of them himself on a test range. Whatever its other flaws, a Gyrojet's projectile could travel a lot farther in water than a bullet, and several top-secret spin-offs had been employed over the years in an attempt to arm SEALs and other elite commandos for underwater combat.

Still holding his breath, Randall took cover beneath the swell of the Russian vehicle's hull, close beside the port-side tracks. Pausing only a moment to unsheathe his knife again, he launched himself up and then over the curve of the hull, lunging for the dimly seen shape of the other diver.

He had only an instant's glimpse of the Russian Spets swimmer, his legs still inside the open airlock set into the top of the vehicle's squat conning tower. The man was raising the bulky-looking underwater pistol for another shot when Randall collided with him.

They grappled above the yellow-lit, open hatchway, Randall grasping the Russian's right hand and the gun, the Russian clutching Randall's right hand and the knife. Randall used his forward momentum to knock the Spets diver over backward, bending him back over the edge of the open hatch. A third time the sound of ripping cloth shrilled, accompanied this time by a heavy blow to Randall's left side.

The pain followed a moment later, shrill and burning, but he kept wrestling the Spets swimmer back, gripping the man's right wrist and bending it backward until the fingers opened and the rocket-projectile weapon dropped into darkness.

Releasing the man's empty hand, Randall clawed the mask from the other diver's face and ripped at the mouthpiece clenched between his teeth. Bubbles exploded in his face and he could hear the man's strangled, drowning scream. The Spets swimmer thrashed and struggled, but Randall held him pinned in the hatch, blocking his attempts to reach his air hose or Randall's face. The Russian's grip on his right wrist increased, exploding into blinding pain, and Randall lost his knife.

Randall's lungs were bursting. He couldn't simply out-wait the Russian; he was willing to bet that the Spetsnaz drownproofed their own recruits just as the SEALs did, and conditioned them until they could hold their breath for long minutes underwater. Randall had already been exerting himself for a good thirty seconds or more since his last breath. In a breath-holding contest with this guy, he would lose.

Somersaulting over the Russian's head, he grabbed the flailing, bubbling air hose with his left hand, turning so that he was now behind the Russian, his feet braced against the Soviet sub's conning tower, yanking the other man over backward. He tried to pull the air hose to his face to steal a quick breath, but the Russian twisted in the hatch and pulled the air hose and mouthpiece away.

With horror, Randall saw the air hose tear wide open with the rough handling. Bubbles filled the water, blinding them both. The Russian was groping at his waist, trying to draw the knife scabbarded there.

Randall beat him to it. He could see the knife, while the Russian was trying to reach it by touch alone. That tiny advantage was enough; he grasped the hilt, found the catch-release, and drew the blade with a sharp snick of steel on plastic. The Russian raised his arms, trying to block him, but the SEAL slipped the blade home, puncturing the wet-suit- covered skin of the man's left armpit, driving it in hard and deep. The Russian struggled, blood pouring into the water, but his thrashings quickly became weaker. Randall withdrew the blade, then cut the struggling man's throat with a single sharp, clean slash.

His lungs burning, Randall pulled the body clear of the hatch and sent it drifting into the darkness at the sub's starboard side. Feet first, he dropped into the yawning, yellow-lit opening, pulling the hatch shut above him as he moved down, squinting as he tried to find the controls he knew must be there. Turning the hatch locking wheel until the dogs engaged, he turned in a steel compartment somewhat shorter than a coffin, looking for the vent, blow valve, and WRT and sea flood valves.

Physics, he reasoned, worked the same on Russian submarines as on American boats, and they should share similar controls. Good design demanded those controls be placed where he could see them, where they would not be blocked by his own shadow cast by the single small lighting fixture in the trunk.

Then again, these were the people who planted a sonar unit where it couldn't see past a thirty-inch seabed oil pipe.

There … up high, a series of four valves, and they were even signed. Voshdooh pavlenye — that was air pressure, the equivalent of a blow valve. More navodnyat' — sea flood? Vodoeem navodnyat' was the WRT flood, which meant that Vipuskat' must be vent….

Blow valve first. He turned it, fighting desperately the need, the demand to draw breath. He felt the pressure on his eardrums growing, and swallowed hard to equalize. The largest valve was unlabeled, but it must be the WRT flood valve. He turned it, opening the connection to the submarine's Water Retaining Tank. The pipes rumbled and rattled, and he quickly closed the blow valve. As the sound died away, he closed the WRT valve, then opened the vent valve.

Air was being forced into the escape trunk. The surface bubbled and churned as it dropped past his head. Turning his face upward, he gulped down a deep, desperately needed breath… and another… and another.

He might be giving himself a case of the bends, but all he could do was try to slow his breathing, keeping each breath as normal as he could once the gasping stopped.

The interior hatch was in the wall in front of him, five feet tall and rectangular, with rounded corners. No window, thank God. If there was anybody left on board this thing, they'd most certainly heard the racket when he started draining the airlock and were waiting for him to come out.

Reaching down into the water, he slipped off his swim fins. If he was going to face another Spetsnaz trooper, he didn't want to trip over his own flippers and fall flat on his face. As he bent, the pain in his side struck him like a hammerblow. He looked, and saw blood welling up from a deep slash in his side, and the grating sensation told him he had a busted rib. The Russian's Gyrojet projectile must have been kicked out of the gun like a conventional bullet, with enough kick to cause some serious damage. It didn't feel like it had entered his body, though; it felt as if it had glanced off the rib, breaking it as it passed.

The pain nearly brought him to his knees, and each succeeding breath hurt worse.

A small speaker set over his head crackled. "Gennadi?" a voice called, tinny and rough. " Vih tudah?'

Reaching up, gasping again at the pain, he touched the intercom switch. "Da!" he called back. He didn't have to fake the pain-rough edge to his voice, the disguising gasp. "Da! Ya raneen.!'

Telling the Russian on the other side of the watertight door that he was wounded might explain any strangeness in his voice, and just might make the other guy lower his guard for a moment.

The water was being forced now past his legs. He reached up and grabbed the locking wheel to the inner hatch and felt someone turning it from the other side. He grasped his knife and waited, fighting the pain and weakness. A moment later, the dogs opened and the hatch swung outward with a clang. Water still in the airlock rushed over the combing and onto the steel deck beyond.

Inside, a young Russian sailor, wearing the red-and-white-striped T-shirt of the Soviet Naval Infantry, clung to the open hatch. His eyes bulged when he saw Randall, who took a step across the combing, lunging with the knife.

The Russian was too agile, and Randall too weighed down by his wound. He missed and nearly fell as the Russian yelped and backpedaled.

Randall had an instant's glimpse of the submarine interior, a cylindrical, steel-walled compartment cluttered with pipes and valves, wiring bundles and instrument panels, air tanks and supply lockers. A pair of narrow bunks were stacked up to starboard; beyond was a control room, of sorts, a padded shelf just big enough for a man to lie flat on, extending forward into the silvery hemisphere of the plastic viewing bubble. The air stank, a foul, gagging fog of diesel fumes and oil, gasoline and sweat. The Russians' snorkel system must not be completely efficient.

The Russian sailor was clawing at one of the racks, where a military-style belt and holster were hung from the frame. He slid a pistol — a deadly little Makarov automatic — from the holster just as Randall collided with him.

They fell together, slamming into the racks, Randall grappling for the other man's gun hand. The Russian was smaller than Randall, and didn't move with the fluid, graceful training of a Spets. Probably he was just a sailor, the submarine's driver, perhaps… but that Makarov was the perfect equalizer. If Randall, weakened by the wound in his side, couldn't disarm the man…

The pistol went off, the explosion close beside Randall's head, deafening and shocking. The detonation was still ringing when Randall heard the stuttering ping-ping-ping-pang of the ricochet, as the bullet bounced wildly about the interior of the vessel.

Both men ducked instinctively; Randall, by chance, was staring across the Russian's shoulder at the plastic viewing bubble when the ricochet ended with a final, sharp crack,ac-companied by a brilliant white star's appearance dead center in the bubble.

With a final surge of fast-draining strength, Randall picked the Russian up and slammed his back against the metal framework of the bunks. The man shrieked. Randall pulled him forward, then slammed him once more, hard enough to snap his spine. The Makarov clattered to the deck. The Russian's eyes glazed, and his head sagged; Randall dropped him like a sack of meal, then delivered a single quick mercy thrust with the knife.

The narrow steel compartment appeared to be spinning, and it took a moment for Randall to figure out that the spinning was in his head. Carefully, he made his way forward, lowering himself belly-down onto the thin padding of the pilot's couch to inspect the damaged canopy.

Not good. Not good at all. A needle-thin jet of water was spraying into the compartment through a tiny hole in the center of the starred plastic. As he watched, the starring worsened, a craze of cracks spreading out from the impact. He heard the snap of yielding plastic above the thin, high hiss of water.

He began searching about the compartment for something, anything, with which to seal the crack. Sealing putty… a rubber patch… hell, chewing gum … but all he could find was a roll of heavy gray tape, something like duct tape. He tried applying that to the crack, but it slid uselessly from the wet plastic and stubbornly refused to stick.

He heard another crack, and the stream of incoming water grew thicker. That canopy wasn't going to hold for very much longer.

And Randall was rapidly running out of options.

"We've got trouble, Skipper," Rodriguez announced. "Sierra Three-one, Three-two, and Three-three have just gone active. They're moving this way, banging away like metalsmiths in a boiler room."

"Did they hear us?"

"I don't think so, sir. It looks like they're spreading out in a line and just moving south blind. Uh… they might be trying to drive us."

"Which implies they knew we were here all along. Damn…. "

"If we wait here too long," Latham pointed out, "we'll be trapped against the coast."

"We still have divers out, Mr. Latham."

"New contacts," Rodriguez said. "Bearing zero-three-zero, range … estimate thirty miles. Multiple contacts, can't sort them out yet…. "

Gordon could picture the strategic situation. Pittsburgh was at the bottom of a bowl… and three separate groups of Soviet ASW ships were positioned across the bowl's mouth, while a fourth group charged in to stir things up.

If they didn't leave, and quickly, they would be trapped.

But Gordon was unwilling to abandon any of Pittsburgh's own… even passengers.

You didn't abandon shipmates, no more than SEALs left their own wounded behind.

Randall used the last of the surgical tape he'd found in the first-aid kit, snugging it tight against his chest. That kit, which he'd found secured to a bulkhead and marked with a red cross, had provided him with gauze, scissors, and a goodly amount of white tape. All he needed to do, really, was staunch the bleeding a bit, and tape his ribs tightly enough that he didn't puncture a lung.

The pain was manageable — barely. He pulled the top of his wet suit back into place and zipped it up, moving experimentally. Yeah… not bad at all. If he focused his mind hard, he could beat the pain down. There were syrettes of what was obviously morphine in the first-aid kit, but he wasn't going to touch those. He needed a clear head… especially since he was going to have to go back outside. The thin stream of water from the cracked canopy was hissing still, and the deck was already covered to a depth of five or six inches, lapping in dark, bloodied waves about the broken body of the Russian sailor.

The problem was what to do next. Pittsburgh was a mile or more away. He had no SCUBA gear — correction, there was undamaged equipment on at least two of the bodies outside, including Nelson's, but to get it, he would have to lock out of the Russian sub — a process that took several minutes at best — and still have air enough to swim out and find it, in total darkness and swirling mud.

And if he didn't find it, and quickly, he was dead; he wouldn't be able to hold his breath long enough to lock back inside once more.

On top of it all, the wound in his side would slow him, and would certainly make it all but impossible to draw the deep breaths he would need to oxygenate his blood. The mere thought of taking a deep, chest-expanding breath made him wince.

So… what was left? He could try driving the submarine closer to the 'Burgh, but he had his doubts that he would be able to operate something as complex as a submarine tractor. His Russian was good enough to puzzle out the Cyrillic labels over the valves in the airlock, but operating heavy machinery would be damned chancy at best. Besides, how was he supposed to navigate? The Pittsburgh was doing her best to keep quiet and out of trouble; he could drive this thing around in the darkness and murk until doomsday and not get close enough to see her… and if he switched on the crawler's sonar — he was pretty sure that that was the active sonar switch — and if he could interpret it, chances were the Pittsburgh would assume bad guys were hunting for them and move well clear.

Damn it, there had to be something he could do. If he couldn't go to the 'Burgh, maybe he could bring her here … or at least McCluskey and Fitch. Randall and Nelson were due back aboard just about anytime now; when they were late, the other SEALs would be champing at the bit to come find him.

Would Gordon let them? He would have to weigh Randall's recovery against the safety of the vessel. He might rule out a rescue attempt as too risky, and Randall wouldn't blame him at all.

Damn, damn, damn. He couldn't think straight. The pain in his side was gnawing at him, and shock was setting in, leaving him light-headed, trembling, and fuzzy-brained.

The need to do something other than wait and watch the incoming water drove him back to his feet, and into a determined search of the Soviet crawler's interior. The vessel was cramped, obviously designed for a crew of one or two, and no more than two to four passengers, and even that many would be crowded inside this narrow tube with a claustrophobic coziness that made Pittsburgh's torpedo room seem as roomy as the wide-open spaces. Most of the bulkhead space not occupied by pipes, valves, and wiring conduits was taken up by storage cabinets of various descriptions, including lockers for canned food, bottled water, tools, charts, a camera, spare parts, survival gear, life jackets. What he was hoping to find, however — another set of SCUBA gear— was not there, though he did find the lockers, now empty, that had held the tanks, wet suits, and other diving gear worn by the four Spets swimmers outside.

He finally found a possible jackpot tucked into a rack beneath a fold-down chart table, a pair of emergency breathing masks and air bottles. They were handheld — the bottles were only a foot long and four inches wide — with a trigger valve and a rubber mask at the business end. Similar devices were used on board American vessels; during a fire in an enclosed space, they could keep a man breathing long enough for him to find his way out of a smoke-filled compartment.

It wouldn't deliver air under pressure — not the pressure of the sea at a depth of eighty feet. It might not work at all… or it might kill him. But if it worked, it would give him a few minutes of air… enough, possibly, to have a chance at finding the SCUBA gear outside.

On the other hand, he would need light to find the bodies. His own underwater flashlight had been dropped somewhere along the line… probably during the hand-to-hand action when Nelson had been killed. Without light, he had little chance of finding the bodies, and the needed gear they wore.

Well, then… could he turn the Russian crawler ninety degrees? He knew about where the bodies were — fifteen or twenty feet off the port beam. If he could rotate the crawler that far, its headlamps might give him the illumination he needed.

But there was that problem of maneuvering again. Moving forward and lying once more on the couch, ignoring the spray of icy water, he studied the controls for several minutes before shaking his head with frustrated exasperation. It would take a lot of experimentation… and a wrong move while he was playing with the controls could set him in lurching charge to God knew where … or upset the delicate balance among the ballast and trim tanks and put the vessel hard over on its side.

Well… at worst, he could use the emergency air mask to make it to the surface. He would have to go slow and be sure to breathe out all the way up, but he ought to be able to make it. Eighty feet wasn't far.

But he didn't like that idea, not one bit. A SEAL never surrendered… and surfacing would be tantamount to surrender, since about all he could do once up there was cling to the snorkel float and wait for a Soviet warship to spot him and pick him up.

No. That wouldn't do at all. If he were lucky, they would put a bullet through his brain right then and there, but he knew they wouldn't waste such a valuable asset as a captured U.S. Navy SEAL. He would be interrogated. Eventually they would break him — he'd been taught that all men can be broken, given time — and there were things locked away in his brain that the KGB would be very interested in indeed.

Maybe he could swim for the Siberian coast… maybe he could make contact with the Russian resistance… maybe… maybe… maybe…

No. Too many maybes, and his wounded side would keep him from moving very far, or very quickly. Unless he found a way to communicate with the Pittsburgh, he would die here.

The question, then, was how to communicate with the Pittsburgh. Radio was out, of course, even if he knew Pittsburgh's operating frequency, even if they were monitoring equipment that usually wasn't in operation when they were submerged. Radio waves simply wouldn't penetrate that far underwater unless they were pretty low frequency and high-powered. Sonar would do the trick — sound traveled tremendous distances in the sea, and much more quickly than in air… but the Russians would hear it. Even sonar listening devices badly placed in the shadow of an oil pipe would pick up that kind of signal, delivered at close range.

Still, sound appeared to offer him his best chance. A good loud bang — say, by smacking a bare piece of the crawler's hull with that spanner wrench over there — would definitely reach the Pittsburgh.

The problem was how to convey any useful information, without being heard by the Russians. They knew Morse code as well as he did, and would be drawn like flies to shit if he started hammering out anything like a regular code. And yet it had to attract the attention of the Burgh's sonar crew.

All assuming, of course, that the Pittsburgh was still there. He looked at his watch: 2320 hours. He was way overdue. Was the ' Burgh even still in the area?

Well, there was one thing he could try….

"You gotta let us go out and look for them," Chief McCluskey said. Belatedly, he added a growled "Sir!" McCluskey was a big, barrel-chested man with a bullet head and hair trimmed down to the consistency of a light fuzz, and the scowl he wore now could have curdled milk at twenty paces.

"And where would you look, Chief?" Gordon replied, keeping his voice reasonable, conversational. "It's a big ocean and the middle of the night. What are you going to do, trace out Randall's planned recon route? You could pass five feet away from him and never know he was there."

McCluskey opened his mouth to reply, then seemed to think better of it, clamping his jaws shut. Beside him, Fitch shook his head. "Man, we can't leave 'em behind, sir."

"I don't intend to. Not if I can help it. But…" He stressed that last word hard, and let it hang there in the air of the control room for a second or two. "But we're not going to go about this in a haphazard way. It's obvious they ran into some sort of trouble out there, or they would have been back aboard by now, right?"

"Yes, sir." McCluskey's words were a most reluctant admission.

"They might have encountered a patrol, Russian swimmers. I can't imagine what else they might have run into… "

He stopped. "Actually, now that I think about it… "

"What is it, sir?" McCluskey asked.

"Sonar picked up a contact out there. Close. We think it's a Russian crawler. It's possible they ran afoul of that."

Fitch and McCluskey exchanged glances. "They might use something like that to guard or maintain their oil pipeline," Fitch said.

"Exactly. Now, if you two just go swimming out there after them, I run the risk of losing both of you as well. And I have another problem. We've got Russian ASW ships closing on us, banging away on their sonar like drivers at a tiger hunt. From the look of things, they know we're in the area. And that, gentlemen, is not good. Among other things, it means we don't have much time."

"So… so what do you intend to do, Captain?" McCluskey wanted to know.

"I intend to move south, toward the sonar contact… but very, very slowly. I'm going to have Rodriguez listening for anything that might give us a clue. If your people are in trouble, they have sense enough to make noise that we can pick up."

"Well, they might not," McCluskey said, "if they thought that making noise would put the sub at risk."

"I can appreciate that. What I suggest is that you two suit up and get in the escape trunk. And wait. If we pick up anything that sounds unusual, we'll let you know over the 31MC and send you out. But only then. We can't afford the time to have you quartering a couple square miles of seabed out there looking for them. Clear?"

"Clear, sir. But, if I might say—"

"Conn! Sonar!"

"A moment. Sonar, Conn. Whatcha got?"

"Sir, can you come up?" Rodriguez said. "We're picking up something weird."

"On my way." He glanced at the SEALs. "Suit up. This might be it. XO! You've got the conn!" Turning away, he hurried forward toward the sonar shack.