Los Angeles Class

26

"Time to impact, ten seconds," Latham announced. "Nine… eight… "

"Mr. Walberg! This is no time to polish the cannonball!"

"TMA complete!" Walberg yelled from the weapons board. "Solution fed to torpedoes three and two!"

"Seven… six… "

"Cut the fish loose!"

"Cutting wires!"

"Countermeasures, COB! Now!"

"Countermeasures away."

"Hard left rudder! Down planes! Take us deep!"

"Two… one… "

Every eye went to the control room's overhead as a faint, throbbing whine shrilled in from forward, passed overhead, and dwindled astern.

"Maneuvering! Ahead full! Helm! Come right two-five degrees!" The torpedo had missed, but it would begin to circle, seeking a target. "Weapons Officer! What's the status on our fish?"

"Closing with target, Captain! Running time… now twenty seconds."

"Enemy torpedoes, dead ahead! Torpedoes in the water!" Vetrov's eyes widened. "No!.. "

"Torpedos approaching at fifty-five knots, range five hundred… "

"Hard left rudder! All ahead full!"

"Hard left rudder! Ahead full!"

The deck tipped precariously as the helmsman pulled the steering yoke hard to the left, forcing Vetrov to grab hold.

"Enemy torpedoes turning to compensate."

Shit! There would be no more promotions… no new commands….

He could hear the rising hum of the incoming enemy Mark 48s.

"Five seconds to target… three… two… one… "

The detonation thundered through the sea, a deep,

swelling rumble like incoming surf. A few seconds later, a second detonation sounded, rumbling, blending with the first, sending a rippling shudder through the American boat.

"Conn, Sonar. Two direct hits. I've got breakup noises."

"We got him," Latham added.

But his voice was solemn… and there were no cheers, no smiles in the control room. Every man there knew what had just happened.

Another submarine, and over a hundred submariners, had just died.

"Sonar, Conn. Where's the Russian torpedo?"

"Bearing three-two-zero. Executing turn to starboard."

"Helm! Come left five-zero degrees! Maneuvering, ahead full! Give her every damned bit that you've got!"

"Helm left five-zero degrees, aye."

"Maneuvering. Reactor is at one hundred fifteen percent. Making turns for three-eight knots."

Again the deck canted sharply underfoot. It was like angles and dangles all over again… but with a death-serious twist. The Russian sub had been destroyed, but it was still possible that it could reach out from its watery grave and kill the Pittsburgh, with a weapon already loosed.

"What's our depth?"

"Depth one hundred ten feet, Captain. One hundred thirty feet beneath our keel."

"Thank you, Mr. Carver."

"Now on new heading, two-zero-five, Captain."

"Thank you. Sonar! Conn. Where's our friend?"

"I've lost him astern, Captain. We're going too fast. Last-known position would put it three thousand yards astern."

"If it completed the turn as advertised," Walberg said, looking at his TMA board, "it's now twenty-five hundred yards astern, closing at twelve knots. Time to impact, six minutes, ten seconds."

"COB. What's the running time on a Soviet Type C?" That was the standard 533mm wire-guided torpedo in general use in the Soviet Navy.

"Well," Master Chief Warren said, "eight nautical miles at fifty knots… make it nine minutes thirty."

Gordon checked the big clock forward. The enemy torpedo had been in the water a little less than two minutes out of a total run time of nine and a half minutes. It would catch up to them… but if they could dodge it that one time, the torpedo wouldn't have the fuel for a second pass.

"Depth beneath keel."

"Deepening, Captain. Depth beneath keel now one-eight-five feet."

"Diving Officer. Take us down to two-zero-zero feet."

"Make depth two-zero-zero feet, aye, sir."

"Let's see if it chases down after us."

"So… this is how you spend your spare time?" Randall asked.

The deck was tilting sharply forward. They were diving again, and from the faint, trembling shudder in the bulkhead, they were moving full ahead, tearing a hole through the water. They'd all heard the double detonation of Pittsburgh's torpedoes striking home. They must be running now to escape a final Soviet salvo.

"You know what they say, sir," Chief Allison said. "Submarine duty is ninety-nine percent boredom, sitting around on your ass wishing something would fucking happen. It's that last one percent that keeps life interesting."

"It's pretty much the same in the Teams," Fitch said. "You're bored most of the time, except when you're scared shitless."

"You people have a favorite watering hole ashore?" Randall asked. The sailors in the torpedo room didn't exactly seem nervous, but the air was tense. The question was meant to vent some of the pressure.

"Huh?" Boyce said. "Sure, coupla places. The Ram and Ewe was our favorite, until the bike gang took it over."

"Bike gang?"

Several of the torpedo-room crew started telling him about their last liberty ashore at the Tup 'n' Baa. Minutes passed….

"Time to impact, forty seconds," Walberg announced.

That was if the torpedo were racing up their ass. Pittsburgh was still moving too fast to detect the noise of its approach. Gordon was doing this all by the numbers, placing a hell of a lot of faith in the probability that the enemy torp was where he thought it was.

"Stand by CM."

"Ready with the countermeasures, Captain."

"Time to impact, thirty seconds."

Gordon waited out the seconds in a control room gone utterly silent, though as he listened, it seemed that the air was crackling with suppressed tension.

"Time to impact, twenty seconds."

He picked up the microphone for the boat's 1MC circuit. "All hands, this is the captain! Grab hold, everybody. This is going to be rough!" He released the transmit key and found the Diving Officer, at his station behind the helm and planes-man. "Mr. Carver! Blow ballast, full up planes! Put us on the roof!"

"Full up planes, aye aye, sir! Blow ballast!"

"Release countermeasures!"

"Countermeasures away!"

The Pittsburgh shuddered, then gave a mighty belch as water was forced from her ballast tanks by blasts of compressed air. Bow nosing high, she started to rise.

Faster now, and faster still. "Depth now one hundred feet!" Carver called. "Eighty feet! Sixty… fifty… "

They could all hear the high-pitched whine coming from astern, now, as the torpedo tried its simple-brained best to mark them down.

"Thirty feet! Broaching!.. "

The deck was slanted now at a sixty-degree angle, forcing everyone to cling to the nearest stanchion, table or console just to keep from being flung against an after bulkhead. For a moment, the Pittsburgh seemed to hang suspended there, halfway between sea and sky, trying, incongruously, to fly… before her bow began to descend in a fearsome blast of spray and shuddering, wrenching white noise.

Gordon felt the Pittsburgh's nose come down, felt the shock as her forward keel struck the water.

"Helm! Bring us to starboard! Hard over! Sonar! Can you track that torpedo?"

"Negative track, Captain!"

"We're at plus five by the TMA," Walberg said. "Plus eight… plus nine… "

"The torpedo missed, Captain," Rodriguez announced. "I have its screws, bearing two-zero-five, directly ahead of us, and opening the range. Damned thing passed right underneath us as we grabbed for daylight."

A few more seconds passed, as Gordon tried to find his stomach.

"Conn, Sonar. Torpedo has just gone inactive, sir. I've lost it."

Gordon nodded. "Very well. Maneuvering, ahead slow. Helm, bring us to new course two-zero-zero." He exchanged a long look with Latham and Warren and the other men at their stations. "I'm tired of this game, gentlemen. Let's go home."

"So," the thug said. "Have you heard?"

John Wesley Cabot frowned. The man sitting opposite him, seedy, a bit oily, reminded him of a thug, a heavy from an old movie, with his drooping mustache and shifty dark eyes.

"If you mean, have I heard the Pittsburgh is returning to port today, yes. Of course."

"What are we going to do about it?"

"My dear Grigor, what can we do about it? Your people had their chance. I gave you the information they needed. If they can't be more efficient in their operation—"

"Damn you. We lost one of our newest submarines! The captain was related to one of our most prestigious naval commanders!"

"I'm sorry for you, Grigor. I really am. But I did my part. It was up to your people to do theirs."

He looked away from the Russian — ostensibly a junior clerk at the Russian embassy, but in fact an agent for the GRU, Russia's military intelligence agency. Outside, the sun was shining brightly, as people — shoppers, mothers, businessmen, lawyers — went about their daily routine. He'd used this Chinese restaurant, trendy and upscale, several times before to transact business with this man and others over the past year or so.

"What happened… was very bad, Mr. Cabot. Very bad."

"Indeed, yes! A Soviet submarine, firing on one of our submarines, inside Japanese territorial waters? Yes. What will the world press have to say about that?"

"The incident is being, as you people say, hushed up. The story appeared in several Japanese papers, but we have taken steps to ensure that it goes no further. The Japanese government is not particularly stable just now. If word came out that a nuclear submarine had exploded and sunk within a few miles of their coastline, their environmentalist factions would go wild. It is in their best interests that they cooperate with us in our salvage and cleanup efforts."

"Of course." Cabot smiled. The Russians must know that, by now, U.S. Navy SEAL divers had been all over the wreckage of the sunken Mike, submerged in just two hundred miles of water ten miles off the north Hokkaido coast. He wondered what intelligence coups they'd turned up already.

"We want your assurances, Mr. Cabot, that our property be respected. We want no CIA recovery attempts… like your theft of our Delta submarine in the 1970s."

"I can make no promises."

"This incident could hurt you personally, Mr. Cabot. You, a senior CIA officer? Betraying his country? You are already in far too deep to back out of our agreement."

Cabot sighed. "You can't threaten me, Grigor. I am not one of your agents to be ordered about like a clerk. I have my own connections. And my own security. If I was to name you and several of your… associates as the men who'd approached me, tried to get me to sell you secrets, who do you think they would believe? You? Or me?"

Grigor folded his hands. "Why did you turn traitor, Mr. Cabot? You seem to be a wealthy man. Respected. Secure. The money we are paying you… "

"Is a pittance, yes."

"Then… why?"

"Let's simply call it ideological reasons, Grigor."

Grigor would never understand, because he did not see his own country as did Cabot, who'd spent ten years as a high-level Agency analyst of the Soviet economy. The Soviet Union was very nearly bankrupt, and it was their military, as much as the rampant corruption and inefficiency of their bureaucracy-managed industry, that was running their treasury face first into the ground. They were spending hundreds of billions in an attempt to keep up with the United States in ballistic-missile defense, in space- and electronic-warfare systems, in ICBMs, and in submarine technology. The efforts of the Walker family and other traitors had helped them leapfrog their submarine technology almost on a par with that of the U.S., but they were not going to be able to hold that parity for long. It was simply too expensive.

If, however, they could capture and copy one of America's latest SSNs, they could not only achieve tactical parity, but they could anticipate coming technologies, and keep up with the United States, or even surpass her, for the next several decades. And they would save tens of billions of dollars in the effort.

And why did Russian tactical parity interest Cabot and a few of his highly placed, well-manicured friends? Simple, really. If the Soviet Union went bankrupt, the government could fall. Outright anarchy and civil war were possibilities, as was a military coup. In any case, the Soviet Union would be forced to drop out of the Cold War, no longer able to play the superpower game.

And if that happened, certain defense contractors and military-technology industries — including the Electric Boat Division, which built America's nuclear submarines, and several West Coast aircraft companies — might well suffer catastrophic losses as they stopped receiving government contracts for new weapons systems. Projects like the new Seawolf submarine project, or the almost magical Aurora hypersonic reconnaissance plane, might be canceled by a cost-conscious and myopic Congress.

And that would cost Cabot and his friends millions in secret investments, and potentially billions in future profits and dividends.

Ideology indeed. Cabot was a devout capitalist.

It would have been perfect, he mused. The loss of the Pittsburgh would have helped the Soviets in their race to catch up with American submarine technology, and would also have been a blow to American defense assets. The playing field would have been leveled.

The game would have gone on.

"I do not understand you, Mr. Cabot."

Cabot smiled. "It's not important that you do, Grigor. Cheer up! We lost our chance this time. But there will be another! I promise you!"

Yes, the game would certainly continue….

O'Brien stood beside Benson, Scobey, Boyce, Jablonski, and Douglas, watching as the bikers swaggered toward them.

"It's you pukes again, is it?" the leader sneered. "Didn't learn your lesson last time? Maybe you faggots want some special instruction!"

"We just came here for a drink, gents," Scobey said. "We don't want any trouble."

"You got trouble, sailor boy! We don't want your kind hanging around here, ain't that right, guys?"

The other bikers chorused their assents. There were twelve of them, all of them big and heavily built, most tending toward paunches and overweight, but all powerfully muscled. Twelve bike gangers and six sailors squared off against one another in the parking lot next to Macy's Ram and Ewe. The back of the lot overlooked the Mare Island Channel, with a view across to the southern half of Mare Island. The Pittsburgh was visible from there, tied to her moorings at Pier 2. A dozen motorcycles were parked en masse, up against the low guardrail that separated the parking lot from the twenty-foot drop to the channel.

"Maybe you guys don't understand," Douglas said. "This is a public bar, not your personal, private hangout. So, if you boys have a problem with us having a drink here, maybe you're the ones in need of an education."

"C'mon, Dutch," one of the bikers said. "I'm sick of this. Let's redecorate the pavement with these pansies."

"Yeah," said another. "Let's do 'em."

O'Brien touched the needle mike he wore, a loaner Motorola borrowed from the SEALs. "Rattlesnake, this is Sewer Pipe. We have positive target acquisition."

"Roger that," a voice said in his ear. "Stand by."

"Huh?" one of the gangers said. "What's that all about?"

"Reinforcements," O'Brien said. And then the motorcycle thundered around the bend, cornering off the street and tooling across the parking lot.

Randall pulled to a halt a few feet away, dropped the kick-stand, swung out of the saddle, and tilted back the visor of his helmet. He was wearing civvies — leather, mostly, but with a Grateful Dead T-shirt underneath. The crazy idiot had flown down to San Diego on a military hop as soon as Pittsburgh had docked and he'd been debriefed… then caught another transport all the way back to Mare Island. He'd claimed he wanted to make an impression, and that his bike was the way to do it.

A battered Chevy followed him in and parked. Fitch and McCluskey got out, banging the doors behind them.

"Nice bikes," Randall said, eyeing the herd. He picked out the leader with a glance. "Which one's yours?"

"The chromed panhead," the biker said. He spat, hands flexing. "What's it to you, shithead?"

"I just heard you weren't extending proper hospitality to out-of-town visitors. Thought maybe you needed a lesson in manners." He jerked a thumb at one of the machines. Fitch and McCluskey walked over, picked up the 450-pound machine between them, and slung it in one smooth heave over the guardrail and into the channel.

"Hey!" The biker took a staggering step forward, eyes bugging from his head. "You… you… " He sputtered a string of acid epithets, then shrieked and charged, hands outstretched.

Randall took two steps forward, caught the front of the biker's leathers, and tugged him forward, off-balance as he ran. The man yelped… then dropped gasping as Randall rammed his windpipe with fingers sharply folded at the middle joints.

"What the fuck?" a big ganger screamed. He reached into a pocket and produced a switchblade, which flicked open with a click, the blade shining in the sun.

Randall rolled aside as the ganger lunged. One hand slashed down, grabbing the knife hand and turning it inward. The knife spun from nerveless fingers … and then that biker joined his leader on the pavement.

"Anyone else?" Randall demanded. A second bike, chosen at random, sailed over the safety rail and hit the water with an oily splash.

The fight that followed was mercifully brief. O'Brien had expected that the submariners would get to join in… but ten seconds after the third biker crashed to the parking-lot pavement, five more were on the ground with them, unconscious or groaning, and the remaining four were in full flight down the street.

"Well," Scobey said, slapping a high five with Randall, "buy you guys a drink?"

"Absolutely, Big C," Randall replied. "After you?"

Laughing, the seven sailors entered the Ram and Ewe. "It's the Burghers!" the waitress cried.

"Hello, Carol."

"Roger!" She embraced him. "You're all right? I was so afraid when those animals walked out of here…."

"Never better. Let me introduce my friends…. "

Scobey and Douglas walked up to Macy, who was at the bar. "What do we owe you?" Douglas asked.

"Wha— huh?"

"We're the ones who were in here last month, and the place got kind of dinged up. We want to pay for the damages." Master Chief Warren had let them tap the enlisted man's fund aboard the Pittsburgh; it was important to maintain good relations with the civilian element ashore.

Macy licked his lips, looked tempted, then shook his head. "Doesn't matter. Insurance took care of it all, y'know?" Flashing lights pulsed outside the front windows. The police had shown up a few minutes after the sailors had gone inside, along with an ambulance. They were picking up the garbage left on the pavement outside, and not asking too many questions. COB, it turned out, had some friends with the Vallejo Police Department after all.

"I… ah… I gather the gangbangers aren't coming back?" Macy added.

"If they do, it'll be a mistake they won't forget," Scobey said. "Y'know, this used to be a pretty nice liberty hole," he added, looking around. "I think we can guarantee you a good weekend business. If you don't mind 'our kind' hanging around."

"Why should I mind? I love Navy guys! Hey! Carol! First round of drinks is on the house!"

The others cheered. "We'll even help you decorate if you like," Scobey told the owner.

Later, they sat at a table, hoisting filled glasses. Carol sat on Benson's lap, listening to the stories, and adding a few of her own. She seemed like a good sort, O'Brien thought. She and Benson made a great couple.

He was glad that Ben had decided to stick with the Silent Service.

"Here's to the Pittsburgh!" Scobey cried.

"Pittsburgh! "

"And to shipmates," Randall added, "old and new!"

"To shipmates."

SEALs and submariners.

It seemed an unbeatable combination.