Seawolf Class

1

Lieutenant John Calhoun Morton, "Jack" to his friends, turned the hatch release and pushed, easing the round hatch of the forward escape trunk up and out. With MM2 Theodore Hanson close behind, he pulled himself through the narrow opening and into the ocean. Pale light spilled up through the hatchway from the caged battle lantern in the escape trunk but was almost immediately swallowed by the inky blackness of the water. The target was still distant enough that they could risk showing the light.

By that wan glow, he could just make out the vast, shadowy bulk of the USS Pittsburgh, a Los Angeles-class submarine, hull number SSN-720, hovering in the midnight-black water beneath his gently kicking, flippered feet.

The other SEALs of First Platoon were already working in the near-total darkness, unshipping the pair of Combat Rubber Raider Crafts from the temporary deck housing aft of the conning tower and inflating them from the attached CO₂ cylinders. The Pittsburgh's conning tower — her "sail" in submariner's parlance — rose like a black, knife-edged cliff above the SEAL platoon. Then Hanson closed the deck hatch, cutting off the thin mist of light from below.

The team had practiced this maneuver in total darkness many times, however, and in moments, the inflatable CRRCs were unfolding, rising rapidly to the surface as the fourteen men of First Platoon followed them up. Morton broke the surface, spitting his re-breather mouthpiece from between his teeth and pushing his mask back on his head. There was more light here than there'd been below, but not by much. The night was black and the sky overcast, with a strong wind slicing across the surface in a fine, ice-cold spray that cut his exposed skin like a knife. Without their wet suits, the water, at forty-six degrees, would have leeched the heat from their bodies in minutes, and the SEALs would have lost consciousness to hypothermia.

Seven men piled into each inflatable boat…a close fit for large men and their gear. TM1 Cyzynski unpacked the small outboard motor from its case, screwed it down on the stern engine mount, and connected the waterproof battery. Morton, meanwhile, pulled out his Motorola headset and slipped it on, holding the needle mike close to his ice-cold lips. "Whalesong, Hammerhead. Radio check. Over."

Pittsburgh's periscope array rose like heavy, upright pipes from the water a few yards away, almost invisible in the darkness with their mottled pattern of light and dark gray camouflage paint. A special radio antenna mounted to the radar mast would provide communications for the team… so long as the Pittsburgh was able to remain at periscope depth. They needed that radar perched well above the wave crests to home them in on their target.

"Hammerhead, Whalesong" was the reply, barely heard above the keening wind and hissing spray. "Check okay." There was a pause. "Objective now bearing three-five-zero, range eight-three-five."

"Objective bearing three-five-zero, range eight-three-five," Morton repeated. "I copy. Hammerhead out."

"Good luck, Hammerhead. We'll keep a light on in the window for you."

His wrist compass showed them the correct direction, a little west of due north. When his second-in-command, Lieutenant j.g. Brad Conyers, had completed his communications check from the other CRRC, they fired up their engines and began easing away from the towering masts of the submerged Pittsburgh.

They moved against a heavy swell, and the wind battled them across the crown of every cresting wave. Lightning flared on the western horizon, briefly lighting the clouds in a stuttering white flash; a squall line was approaching. In part, the oncoming storm had dictated the decision to go with the op now, rather than waiting for a more propitious moment or a better angle of approach. The ocean swell preceding the storm, however, was going to make the approach a bit hairier than usual.

Eight hundred yards… eight football fields…but the objective was completely invisible in the dark and sleeting spray. If they maintained their heading, however, and a steady speed of five knots, despite the best efforts of the wind to slow them…

"Hammerhead, Whalesong."

"Whalesong, Hammerhead. Go ahead."

"Hammerhead, be advised target is changing heading to one-eight-zero at twelve knots. Recommend you come to new heading… make it three-one-zero to intercept."

"Coming to new heading three-one-zero. Copy."

Morton could just make out the second ISB to port, with Lieutenant Conyers at the tiller. He switched to the tactical channel. "Hammer Two, this is One. You copy that, Two-IC?"

"One, Two, I copy. Coming over now."

Together, the two inflatable boats nosed to the left, coming onto the new heading that, according to the plot board in Pittsburgh's CIC, would let them still intercept the target. A course change. Damn… did they suspect? Morton wondered. Had they picked up a radar pulse… or the encrypted, low-wattage comm signal and been warned off?

Minute followed bone-chilling minute with no new change of course from the target. Apparently, they were altering course in an attempt to stay ahead of the weather, which was growing steadily worse.

"Contact!" RM1 Schiff called back from the bow of the rubber duck. He was holding a portable radar gun, a smaller, waterproofed combat version of the device used by state troopers to catch speeders. "He's dead ahead!"

An instant later, as the CRRC crested the next wave, the objective emerged from the darkness… a ghost ship, blacker than the surrounding night, with only running lights and a red glow from her bridge to reveal her shape through the mist.

"Whalesong, Hammerhead. We have visual, repeat visual… dead ahead, range fifty yards. Request permission to execute Plan Victor."

"Roger that, Hammerhead." There was a lengthy pause, filled with static. "You are go for Victor. Execute, I say again, execute."

As they motored silently closer, the hull of the target ship loomed huge above them. She was an aging freighter, rust-streaked and battered, with a deadweight tonnage of 4,700 tons, a length at the waterline of ninety-nine meters, and a beam of thirteen. She had the look of a small oiler, with bridge and superstructure well aft and two mast-slung cranes forward. She was the Kuei Mei out of Shanghai, and her destination was the port of Los Angeles.

The freighter was plowing steadily south now, at a speed of eight knots. From Morton's low-to-the-water vantage point, it looked as though she'd changed course to better take the heavy following seas on her quarter. It didn't appear that any alarm had been given. No one was visible on deck and there didn't seem to be any excitement or haste. The two rubber raiders shifted their angle of approach slightly to stay ahead of the target vessel; at best, the raiders could manage eighteen knots, but the seas were heavy enough to slow that best considerably, and there was a real danger that the Kuei Mei would cruise serenely by, just out of reach.

On this line of approach, the target's port side was visible. The plan of battle called for Morton's boat to take the target from the starboard side, while Conyers's team hit it from port. Morton spent several minutes carefully studying the freighter's movement, trying to judge whether the slower CRRC could cut under the target's stern to reach her starboard side…or whether it would be better to have both teams assault from port. Morton tended to be conservative, unwilling to push the all too fragile combat asset of luck, but it looked to him as though there would be plenty of room and time to spare.

If the freighter maintained her heading and speed. She had a top speed of only about twelve knots, and a CRRC could easily outsprint her, but in a long chase the advantage lay with the quarry. In this heavy sea, though, her skipper was keeping her speed to an easily controlled wallow, and the Pittsburgh had vectored the team in at just the right angle to maximize their chance of a clean intercept. It looked good.

Judging wind and wave carefully, Morton put the helm over and gunned the battery-powered engine to full throttle. The other six SEALs grabbed hold of the safety lines looped along the rubber boat's gunwales as the flat-bottomed craft slapped and jounced over the cresting waves. Icy spray drenched them all, and visibility was reduced to a wet blur that stung their eyes in salty blasts.

The Kuei Mei loomed huge and high to the left as they cut beneath the leviathan's stern and bumped hard through her wake…

"Conn, Sonar!"

Commander Thomas Frederick Garrett picked up the intercom mike beside the periscope housing and held it to his lips. "This is Conn. Whatcha got?"

"Conn, we have a possible contact, bearing two-nine-nine, designated Sierra One-two."

"What do you mean possible contact?"

"Sir… it's very quiet. More like a hole in the water than anything else. But we picked up some transient mechanicals, and Busy is calling it a sub."

"Stay on it. I'll be right there."

Hanging up the mike, he turned to Lieutenant Commander Keith Stewart and said, "You have the conn, Stew. I'll be in the shack."

"Aye aye, Captain."

The sonar shack was located in a room of its own, aft and on the port side of Pittsburgh's control room. Inside, the overhead lighting had been reduced so the four sonar techs on duty could better watch the vertical cascades of light on their monitors popularly called "the waterfall."

"So show me this hole in the water," Garrett said.

Chief Sonar Tech Wayne Schuster handed him a computer printout. "We've been getting bumps and possibles for maybe five minutes now, Skipper," he said. "And two minutes ago Chesty here was sure he picked up a screw, making slow revs for maybe five knots. But no engine room noise that any of us can hear."

SM1 Chester Andrews nodded. "It was there, sir. I heard it. Then I lost it. And the water out there just sounds… well… dead. I know that doesn't make sense, Captain."

"It makes fine sense, Chesty," Garrett said, studying the printout. It was an analysis of transient noises made by the sonar room computer, affectionately dubbed "Busy Bee." They showed several spikes of noise picked up by Pittsburgh's sensitive, far-hearing underwater ears. The steady, crawling thrum of the freighter's screw was clearly in evidence, as were the sharper, higher-pitched hums of the electric outboard motors on the inflatable boats. There was the low-frequency hiss and rumble of the surface waves. But behind the obvious noise…

The traces were so slight as to be damned near nonexistent… thumps or bumps that could have been anything from a fish burping… to someone dropping a wrench on board another submarine nearby. The characteristics argued against the fish-burp notion. That particular streak on the chart looked mechanical… not like a biological at all.

As for the "hole in the water," Garrett knew all too well that sonar operators, the good ones, relied on senses that were as much psychic, as much pure magic, as anything definable and measurable in the real world of science and high-tech computers. Sonar techs bragged that they still did the actual identification of the noises around the sub themselves, with some help from computer sound archives, of course. Manning a sonar station was far more art than science. A feeling that the water was dead in a certain direction might well indicate that something was there, something extremely quiet.

And in submarine warfare, quiet is always the ultimate advantage.

The question was, if there was another boat out there in the darkness someplace, whose was it? And why was it here? There were only a few possible answers that occurred to Garrett, and none of them was pleasant.

"Captain? Conn" sounded over the intercom.

"Go ahead, Conn."

"Sir, Hammerhead reports they are in position, ready to climb."

Garrett thought a moment. He had the power — the responsibility, in fact — of calling off the SEAL op if a problem arose, one jeopardizing the success and the covert nature of the mission. There was a distinct possibility that the hole in the water was a Chinese sub, one sent to shadow the freighter on the surface.

But so far there wasn't enough to go on. "Pass Hammerhead the word that they're good to go," he said. "And Godspeed."

"Aye aye, sir."

Garrett turned to Schuster. "Can I assist you through maneuver?"

Schuster's brow wrinkled. "Sir, at this point I wouldn't know what to ask for. We don't know the other boat's heading, or even his range, if he's there at all."

"Stay on him, then. If you hear anything more, give me a yell."

"Aye, Captain."

"Carry on." Garrett stepped back out of the claustrophobic enclosure of the sonar shack and walked across to one of the two plot tables aft of the side-by-side periscope housings. The freighter had recently come to a new heading, due south, a course that would take her directly across the Pittsburgh's bow in another ten minutes or so. If she was being shadowed by a sub, the other vessel ought to change course as well and might expose herself to Pittsburgh's sensitive sonar arrays.

"Maneuvering," Garrett said. "Come to new course zero-zero-five, ahead dead slow."

"Come to new course zero-zero-five, ahead dead slow, aye aye, sir," Master Chief Alex DePaul repeated from his station between and behind the planesman and helmsman, forward. Aboard American submarines, every order was repeated back verbatim, a carefully, almost religiously choreographed check that orders had been correctly given and correctly received.

This particular set of orders would bring Pittsburgh onto a course parallel with but opposite to the target freighter… and bring into better play her TB-23 towed sonar array streaming aft.

It might give them just a bit of an advantage if the freighter had a silent shadow.

Morton held the outboard's tiller over as TM2 Ciotti secured the magnetic mooring rings to the hull of the freighter alongside. Ciotti reached well up above the level of the CRRC to give it enough play on the mooring lines so a passing wave wouldn't drag it under… or leave it dangling high and dry against the ship's side. After crossing under the Kuei Mei's stern, they'd worked their way forward down the starboard side, so that they were now secured beneath the loom of the freighter's bridge and deck housing.

All of the SEALs had removed their diving gear— flippers, masks, rebreather units, weight belts — and stowed them in mesh bags secured to the inside of the rubber raider. Still dressed in their death-black wet suits beneath Nomex hoods and flight suits — plus assault vests, UBA life jackets, and black rubber boots— they carried the standard subsurface assault loadout known as VBSS, the Navy's acronym for Visit, Board, Search, and Seizure. Each man carried his primary weapon, for most an H&K MP5SD3 with attached laser optical sights and integral silencer. MN1 Vandenberg was packing a Remington 300 combat shotgun with folding stock and a cut-down barrel. The men also had secondary weapons — sound-suppressed Smith & Wesson "Hush Puppies" — plus spare ammo, flares, strobes, grenades, bricks of C-4 explosives, detonators, chem lights, flashlights, knives, medical and E&E kits, personal Motorola radio sets, and night vision goggles. Each SEAL Team member looked like an invader from another world, hulking, bulky, and decidedly other than human.

"Whalesong," Morton whispered into his Motorola mike. "Hammerhead One, at the mark. Ready to climb."

"Whalesong," Conyers's voice added a moment later. "Hammerhead Two, at the mark and ready to climb."

"Hammerhead, Whalesong, wait one." Seconds dragged past with agonizing slowness as the CRRC bobbed and slapped alongside the moving freighter. Then, "Hammerhead, Whalesong" came back, slowly and with deliberate emphasis. "You are go for Operation Buster. Repeat, go. Go. Go."

"That's the word," Morton told the others. "Let's do it."

Schiff finished unshipping and assembling the climber's extension pole and grapple — basically a painter's pole equipped with a grappling hook at the business end attached to a rolled-up caving ladder. Letting the ladder unroll, he reached up high, standing in the CRRC with the steadying support of the others, to hook the end of the pole over the freighter's freeboard three meters up, securing it to the gunwale.

In seconds TM2 Ciotti was on his way up the ladder with an ease born of long practice and rigorous training. Schiff went next, vanishing into the darkness overhead, while the remaining five men waited in the bobbing CRRC below. For a long moment there was no sound but the wind and waves, and the heavy chug of the freighter herself as she churned through the swell.

Then a pencil flash signaled once… twice… then two more times in rapid succession. Morton went up the ladder next, gripping the metal rungs with ridged Nomex gloves and leaning far back to maintain tension for the climb. Vandenberg came up behind him, followed by Young, Cyzynski, and with Hanson bringing up the rear. Like shadows, silent and all but invisible, they swarmed up the ladder, rolled over the railing, and dropped onto the deck, immediately taking up their combat positions, H&Ks covering every direction.

A Chinese sailor lay facedown a few feet away, his blood intensely black in the green-yellow monochromatic glow of Morton's night goggles. He wore civilian clothing, the garb of a merchant mariner, but a Type 56 rifle, the Chinese equivalent of the ubiquitous AK-47, was slung over his back, muzzle down. His throat had been cut.

Young and Hanson heaved the body over the railing, careful to drop it well aft of the moored CRRC below. It vanished with a splash instantly silenced by the wind and the hissing ship's wake.

Morton held up his gloved hand, fingers flickering in well-practiced sign-language gestures. You…you… forward. You and you, aft. You two with me…

The huddle of seven black-clad men broke into fire teams, each gliding silently toward memorized and practiced objectives. Having studied the Kuei Mei's deck plans and layout for hours back at Coronado, they knew exactly where they were going. They'd run endlessly through mock-ups of the vessel at the Special Warfare Center, practicing their moves, with the roles of the Chinese crew played by U.S. Marines. Each man knew exactly where he was going and how long he had to get there.

Morton and the two he'd kept with him, Schiff and Vandenberg, made their way forward to a cargo hold access hatch located in the deck just below the loom of the deckhouse and bridge. The hatch cover was secured by steel bars and a padlock, but a moment of Vandenberg's expertise with a pick released the bar and allowed them to quietly slide the cover back. The hold yawning beneath them was dark — reassuring since the lack of light suggested a lack of guards — and one by one they slipped over the hatch combing and made their way down the vertical ladder to the cargo deck below.

VBSS at times resembled a boarding action of the Age of Sail — storm aboard, guns at the ready, taking down the crew and securing the ship before they knew what had hit them. That was SOP so far as raids on suspected drug smugglers went, for instance, or when Intelligence had determined that a suspected terrorist was definitely aboard a certain boat.

There were times, however, when stealth was called for, especially when the intel picture wasn't clear. Intelligence had pinpointed the Kuei Mei's probable cargo as something of interest, but the key word there was probable. In the shadow world of military intelligence and espionage, where nothing was quite as it seemed, a strike force sometimes had to develop its own intelligence, at least in so far as confirming Washington's suspicions was concerned.

And that was the first operational goal for Hammerhead, now that they were on board. The hold was too dark even for starlight optics. Pulling flashlights from their combat vests, the three SEALs made their way through the freighter's hold, which was stacked high with cargo pallets and wooden crates. Destination manifests attached to some of the crates identified them, in English and Pinyin, as machine tools and parts destined for the port of Los Angeles.

Using his Mark I diving knife, Morton prized back the lid to the nearest crate. Inside, beneath a layer of packing material, was…

Something that looked like a heavy tool die.

Schiff pried open another crate nearby. "Negative here," he whispered over the tactical channel, his voice rough in Morton's earplug speaker. "Machine parts."

"And here," Vandenberg said from another crate, farther aft.

"Keep looking," Morton said. The cargo they were looking for would be only a portion of the freighter's entire load. There would be plenty of legitimate cargo, if only to increase the chances of slipping the illegal stuff past U.S. customs.

They went through several more crates, scattering their choices around the hold to get a fair sampling. Morton finally chose a crate at the aft end of the compartment, one underneath a stack of other crates, so that he had to pry the side off to open it up.

Inside were half a dozen M-22 assault rifles, the export version of the Type 56, wrapped in plastic sheeting and coated with Cosmoline. They were missing their magazines, but Vandenberg found plenty of those a moment later in another crate nearby, while Schiff turned up a third loaded with 7.62mm rounds. The contraband seemed sequestered in the forward port corner of the hold, well away from the deck hatches. As the three men concentrated their search there, they found more crates, all labeled "machine parts" and "machine tools," which contained hundreds of the export assault rifles, plus magazines, ammunition, grenades, explosives, bulletproof vests. One large crate held the Chinese version of the Russian RPG-7 rocket-grenade launcher.

The SEALs continued their sampling, finding still more crates of weaponry. Especially worrying were the RPGs, which could take out a police armored car… or an airliner lifting off from a runway.

And all headed for Los Angeles.

"They have enough shit here to start a small war," Vandenberg whispered.

"Maybe that's the idea," Schiff replied.

"The war's already under way," Morton told them. "Beijing just wants to make some money on the side. But they're going to find out that this cargo was a damned bad investment."

The Beijing government had tried this before. Early in the Clinton administration the government had sold off the old Navy base at Long Beach, California; the facilities had been purchased by a Chinese firm as a commercial seagoing freight terminal. Despite its ongoing cosmetic overhaul and the occasional free-market protestations, the PRC was still a Communist state, and the trading company at Long Beach was little more than a front. Several Chinese freighters at Long Beach were discovered to be in violation of federal arms import regulations. Their cargoes had included automatic weapons and ammunition apparently brought into Los Angeles for sale to none other than the Crips, the Bloods, and other notorious street gangs.

Beijing's involvement in the bloody gang warfare in America's streets seemed to have less to do with fomenting armed revolution than it did with seeking profit. The People's Republic had been publicly chastised and the incidents largely forgotten.

But the political landscape had been changing rapidly of late. In 1993, Islamic terrorists had detonated a bomb at the base of one of the World Trade Center towers in New York City, in the heart of the downtown financial district. The plan, apparently, had been to topple one of the 110-story towers into the other, causing untold devastation and loss of life.

Those in the know had been briefed on something even more disturbing, something withheld from the general public: Buried in the basement rubble of the blast, a second bomb had been discovered, a chemical device set to release a large amount of cyanide gas well after the first blast. Had that weapon been detonated as planned, hundreds of police, firefighters, and paramedics would have been killed… and the poison cloud might well have spread across lower Manhattan, gassing untold thousands of civilians to death.

Few civilians were aware of this as yet. The administration, apparently, wished to avoid panic or a violent anti-Moslem reaction. But terrorism had come to the heart of America with a new and horrifying urgency, awakening the country's defenders to the reality of a new and potent threat. America was under attack by enemies who could slip in and out almost at will, across unguarded borders, by airliner or ocean freighter.

Just because you're paranoid, Morton thought, repeating the old joke to himself, it doesn't mean the bastards aren't out to get you.

"Hammerhead Two, this is Hammerhead One," he called softly, engaging his mike. "Two, this is One. Do you copy?"

No response. Hammerhead Two was investigating the hold forward of the one Morton was in. "Whalesong, Hammerhead. Do you copy?" Again no reply. Likely, the massive steel bulkheads were interfering with the transmission. They'd expected as much. "Okay," he told the other SEALs. "Let's get back on deck and see if we can get a clear signal."

Their op orders required that they buck their discovery up the intel ladder, then wait to see what came back down.

He just hoped they wouldn't have to wait long. Each additional minute on board the freighter increased the chances of their discovery, and this was not a good place to be caught.

"Conn, Sonar!"

"Conn here. Go."

"Sir, we have a definite contact, Sierra One-two, bearing two-eight-four, range approximately six-zero-zero."

"On my way." Commander Garrett hurried across the bridge to the sonar shack, stepping into the narrow room. Chief Schuster was waiting for him with another printout. "Nailed the bastard," he said, grinning. "Course one-eight-zero, slipping along right behind the freighter." He pointed at the printout. "These sounds right here? They're from the freighter…and you can see where she cut back on her revs here, slowing down… and going to a stop. This over here… that's Sierra One-two. He's real, real quiet, but he cut back on his revs a moment ago and started cavitating."

Cavitation occurred when a ship's turning screw slowed too quickly, causing bubbles to collapse against the blades' surfaces — bubbles that popped and crackled with a distinctive signature easily intercepted by a sub's sonar. Turning the Pittsburgh parallel to the other vessel's southward course exposed the entire length of her trailing TB-23 streaming sonar array. That made Pittsburgh's underwater ears both more sensitive and more precise, allowing a rough guess at the target's range of about six hundred yards.

"Andrews," Garret said. "Any sign that he's heard us?"

"Can't tell, Skipper," Andrews said. "Target's not acting like it."

"Yeah," Schuster added. "The real question is, does he know yet that the target has visitors… and has he guessed that those visitors must have come from another sub in the area?"

"Best guess on class?"

"Definitely a delta-echo, sir," Andrews said, referring to a diesel-electric motor. "Sounds like a Kilo… or maybe doesn't sound is a better way to say it. I keep listening and… there's just nothing there. Dead, like."

"Something that quiet," Schuster added, "I'd have to go with a Kilo."

"Yeah. That's what I'm thinking," Garrett said, nodding. "Okay. Keep on him. I want to know if he so much as reaches back to scratch his ass."

"You've got it, Captain," the sonar chief replied.

Garrett stepped back out of the sonar shack and returned to his usual position beside the periscope platform. A Kilo, trailing a Chinese freighter. This was not good… not good at all.

The SEAL platoon out there might just find itself flat out of luck.