Terminal Run

23

Commander Rob Catardi shivered beside the atmospheric control panel. The analyzer had good news for them on carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide, but the problem was oxygen, which was at 19.9 percent and falling fast. The oxygen bleed valve was fully open, and not a molecule of gas was coming out. Catardi had pulled out the piping manual for the DSV and checked the oxygen system, hoping for a shutoff valve between banks for the command module and the larger cargo module, and to his joy, there was a cross-connect shutoff. He followed the piping in the overhead until the stainless-steel pipe penetrated the command module bulkhead. Right before the penetration he found the shutoff valve. It was open, and the system was empty. He opened and shut the valve four times, but there was no response. It was obvious that they would suffocate down here. In ten hours, when the rescue craft arrived, they would be unconscious.

They had paced themselves for the arrival of the rescue DSV, but this wasn’t over when it got here. It would have to slice through the two-inch-thick steel of the Piranha’s hull, and grab on to and remove a plate above the DSV. One mistake with the removed plate, and it would fall and crush them. The rescue submersible would have to weld the docking collar onto their DSV, then cut into their hull and tunnel through all the cables and ducts and piping, which would contaminate the atmosphere with toxic chemicals from burning cable insulation There was a week of work to do before they could get inside the DSV, and by the time the rescuers got in-hull, the surviving crew of the Piranha would all be long gone.

Even if they had plenty of oxygen, the cold would get them. Catardi could see his breath, and there was nothing here to keep him warm except a few survival blankets, most of which he’d given to the others before they fell asleep in the frigid command module.

Catardi had always wondered whether he would want to know in advance of his death, or whether it would be best to be blindsided. He had once thought that he’d like five minutes, so he’d see it coming, enough time to say goodbye perhaps, but not so much warning that he would be gripped in fear for days on end. But this warning was more than five minutes. He probably had ten or twelve conscious hours left, and then he would be gone. When they did cut into the hull, they would find him frozen, his body at thirty degrees Fahrenheit, and dead as the steel of the bulkhead. He crouched at his pile of padding and wrapped himself in his blanket. From where he sat he could see the other three, their plumes of breath vapor rising. Pacino had gone to sleep, as ordered. Schultz and Alameda had never awakened, a bad sign. Catardi had awakened after an hour or two, too nervous to sleep anymore.

He had informed the topside ship, the Emerald, that they would not be talking any further, since it would keep them from sleeping to conserve their oxygen. Emerald had promised to find a way to get oxygen and power into their hull, but it was too big a task. They had hinted that the weather above was getting rough from a storm that had been in the eastern Atlantic. Catardi had said goodbye to the fuzzy voice hours before and requested they not call him again. False hopes were worse than hopelessness. He lay down on the padding, then changed his mind and got up to walk to Pacino, Alameda, and Schultz. He wanted to see their faces and say a farewell. He reached out for Pacino’s forehead and pulled the kid’s hair out of his eyes, thinking he’d failed the young man. Then Carrie Alameda, who looked like a child when she slept.

He touched her hair and her cheek, then moved on to Astrid Schultz, the pretty blonde who had sent Catardi’s wife into fits of jealousy when she was first assigned to the Piranha. Catardi stroked her cheek, mentally thanking her for all she’d done, and saying goodbye to her. Finally he returned to his padding and pulled the thin blanket up to his nose, took one last look around and shut his eyes.

He knew he should consign himself to sleep, but he was too afraid. He knew that once he shut his eyes, that would be the end. There would be no waking up from this nap. It would be better, he knew, to get through the last horrible hours in slumber than to experience them awake. He didn’t want to be awake when the already dim lights flickered out. He felt his eyes fill with moisture and he finally was able to shut them, telling himself to slow his breathing and sleep. Every time he did, he felt his heart pound in his chest as the fear rose into his throat. There was one thing that seemed to calm him down, and it was thinking about Nicole, his young daughter, wondering what she was doing right then. He hoped she was not watching a news report and crying over him. He had thought they would keep the lid of classification on this sinking, and only tell the world when it was all over. He mourned the loss of her photograph, the one that had been bolted to his stateroom bulkhead. The one that had probably been blown to cinders in the first internal torpedo explosion.

Catardi let his thoughts wander, imagining his self flying out of this cold dark steel coffin and rising out of the sea and ascending in the air over the Atlantic Ocean, soaring higher over the earth until he returned to the house he and Sharon had shared with Nicole in a time far in the past, and he came up to the door during the summer and Nicole came out and hugged him and squealed Daddy Daddy Daddy and he lifted her into the air and said her name and they chased each other in the yard and played hide-and-seek and piggyback and all the other games she adored. And when dusk came he carried her into the house and read all her favorite stories to her, seeing every page, making every funny voice she liked, singing the funny songs he’d invented for her and listening to her giggle, and then kissed her forehead and told her to sleep. He felt her arms go around him one last time, and he stood back and watched her fall asleep until her breathing was slow and steady, and he turned out her light and stood there in the dark by her side, making sure no monsters were there to get her, and when Catardi himself fell asleep, there were tracks of tears leaving his eyes and streaking down his temples into his tangled gray streaked hair.

Outside the intact hull of the Piranha’s DSV the mangled hull of the ship lay buried in the sediment of the bottom, with just a few places where the muck had been wiped off for the hydrophones. The hydrophone cable and the locator buoy cable rose away from the dark wreck on the bottom and made their way to the surface, where night had fallen. There were no stars because of the dark clouds, and the seas rose as the wind began to howl, making the cables vibrate and sing as they came over the fantail of the salvage ship Emerald and continued into her equipment bay. At the temporary consoles set up in the crew’s mess room Lieutenant Evan Thompson sat at a console and monitored the noises coming from the interior of the DSV. It had been quiet for some time, only muffled footprints falling on the deckplates, then a muted sobbing, and then nothing. They were either sleeping or unconscious, Thompson thought. He pulled off his earphones and sighed, draping his palm over his eyes and accepting the coffee brought by the mess captain.

The British were making better time than expected, and were due by dawn, but there was nothing they would be able to do. The storm was getting worse. The captain of the Emerald had made plans to disconnect the hydrophone cables and get back to port, or if it got as bad as the reports said, make his way north to get out of the storm path. Thompson hoped they stayed long enough to turn over the operation to the Brits, but the crew of the Emerald was responsible for ship safety. It was their call. Thompson put the headphones back on and put his head on the horizontal table of the hydrophone console and shut his eyes, deciding he would sleep like that in case they called for him.

The night passed as the Emerald rocked in the waves, but there was not a sound from inside the wreckage of the USS Piranha.

Captain Lien Hua turned on his side and snuggled into his pillow, the sounds of the air handlers blowing cool air through the ship comforting, as always. He opened his eyes for a moment, but the room was dark. He heard muffled voices, outside in the passageway, perhaps. He would instruct Leader Zhou Ping to make sure the crew stayed away from his stateroom. He yawned and prepared to go back to sleep, but realized there was something wrong. He sat up in the bed with a panic rising in his throat, suddenly realizing that the whispering voices were not speaking Mandarin or Cantonese, but some other language. He put his hand out where his sea cabin’s foldout desk should be, but it was not there. Neither was the phone console, nor the ship-control display. He swiveled to put his feet on the deck, but his mattress was already on the floor, a cold tiling beneath his bare feet.

“What’s going on?” he shouted, running until he hit a heavy curtain, then pulling it aside. He was in a red-lit passageway outside an open curtained area. There were two men standing there, wearing dark coveralls, much like what he was wearing, except they had an enemy symbol on their sleeves — a patch with the image of the flag of the United States. Lien stood and stared, then looked up at the cables and ducts in the overhead. This could easily be the Nung Yahtsu, but things were backward, the bulkheads were too dark, and the deck plate covering was a tile, not rubber with antiskid bumps. He was on a ship, perhaps a submarine, but it was not Chinese. He looked slowly at the Americans, then raised his hands in surrender.

They motioned him to follow them down the passageway to a steep ship’s ladder. He walked behind one American and in front of the other, down the red lantern-lit companionway to a door marked with English words. One of the crewmen knocked, and he was led into a small stateroom, the three meter-square space resembling his sea cabin. A slight man stood up from his small table, a bigger man with him. They both spoke their odd-sounding language, but Lien shook his head, wondering why they didn’t just shoot him right then. The slight man motioned him to sit, and when he did, Lien began to shiver, perhaps from the cold of the room, or perhaps from his fear. The man wrapped a wool blanket around his shoulders and spoke into a telephone, and soon a cook arrived with a pot of tea. Lien refused to drink it. A foreign-smelling plate of food was placed in front of him, and despite his ferocious hunger, he ignored it.

The larger man pulled out a large flexible flat panel display, and after working with it, a map of China came up on it. He pointed to Beijing. Lien looked up — was he being interrogated? He shook his head, and the man sat down.

Not that it mattered. They would execute him soon anyway.

“Captain Pacino, ship is submerged at one five zero feet with a satisfactory one-third trim,” Lieutenant Vickerson reported. “Sounding is five six five fathoms.”

Pacino stood on the conn in the rigged-for-red control room of the Devilfish, thinking the last time he had been here, the ship was returning from the East China Sea after the last tussle with the Reds. He concentrated on the moment and looked at the female officer.

“Very well. Increase speed to standard and take her to four hundred feet, flat angle.”

Vickerson stared at him. “Depth limit is one five zero feet, Captain. The shipyard said the welds weren’t completed. We’ll flood before we get to two hundred.”

The XO walked to the conn from the navigation station aft, his face a fearful mask in the eerie red lights of the overheads. “Sir, Vickerson is right.”

Pacino nodded. “I know. Take her down, OOD. Flat angle.”

“Aye, sir,” she said, and made the orders.

Pacino picked up the 1MC microphone, his voice booming throughout the ship. “Attention, all hands,” he said. “This is the captain. As you all know, we have been sent on an urgent mission to sink the Snare, which has gone seriously out of control and has fired upon one of our own ships. The Piranha is on the bottom and the Snare has run out of weapons range of the Hammerhead. She is on her way east to fire weapons at American targets, but she will never make it to the range circle of her missiles, not if the Devilfish has anything to say about it. However, in order for us to fight the ship in this battle, we must have all combat capabilities. I am ordering the torpedo tubes prepared and I will be modifying the Tigershark torpedoes so that we may engage the Snare. I am also ordering the ship be taken to test depth so we can see if we’ll flood or stay intact, because when we take on the Snare we will be fighting her from the deep, not from periscope depth talking to an Air Force bomber. Therefore, because I am betting that the shipyard has done better work than they are willing to take credit for, Devilfish is now proceeding deep. All hands, rig ship for deep submergence. Carry on.”

Pacino replaced the microphone in the cradle and looked up to ten pairs of doubting eyes. Vickerson turned and looked at him, biting her lower lip.

“Captain, two hundred feet, sir.”

“Very well.” Pacino stood straight on the conn, glaring at the depth gauge.

“Two fifty, sir.” Vickerson swallowed. “All stations report ship rigged for deep submergence, sir.”

“Very well.” On every level of every space, phone talkers would prowl with flashlights, hoping to find a leak before the ship flooded catastrophically. The difference was critical, as the old submarine saying went — you find a leak, flooding finds you.

“Three hundred feet, sir.”

“Proceed to test depth, Officer of the Deck, thirteen hundred feet.”

“Thirteen hundred feet, aye, sir. Ship is at all ahead standard.”

“All ahead full,” Pacino ordered, knowing that full speed at test depth violated the ship’s operating envelope, since a jam dive at full speed would send them plunging through crush depth before they could recover.

“Full, aye, Captain,” Vickerson replied. Pacino smiled to himself — she was beginning to learn. It was obviously harder for Vermeers, who stood there with beads of sweat on his forehead.

“Five hundred feet, sir.”

The ship kept plowing deeper, until a loud groaning shriek sounded from above the control room, making Vermeers jump. “It’s just the hull adjusting to the pressure, XO,” Pacino said.

“I know that, sir,” Vermeers said. “I’m wearing dolphins.”

Pacino glared at the depth gauge.

“One thousand feet, sir.”

The phone on the command console buzzed. Vickerson lunged for it, looking up to say, “Torpedo room reports a leak on tube three’s inner door, sir. Leak is dripping, but increasing to a steady drip.”

Pacino nodded as if it were good news. “Very well.”

“Aren’t you taking us up, sir?” Vermeers asked.

Pacino glared at him.

“Eleven hundred feet, Captain.”

The hull shrieked again, a loud series of pops roaring from left to right and echoing in the depths of the seas. Vermeers tried to maintain a war face, but it was not easy for the young officer.

“Twelve hundred feet, Captain.”

The phone buzzed again. Vickerson listened. “Sir, tube three leak is now streaming.”

Pacino nodded, glancing at Vermeers, who nodded in imitation.

“Thirteen hundred feet, Captain,” Vickerson reported. “Tube three leak is streaming so hard the water is hitting the deck twenty feet away, sir.”

“Cycle tube three’s outer door,” Pacino ordered. “And all ahead flank.”

Vermeers’s face looked white even in the red-lit room. If full speed were dangerous at test depth, flank was suicidal. Especially before the ship had undergone sea trials. The deck below Pacino’s feet began to tremble as the ship sped up to flank speed.

“Aye, sir, opening outer door, tube three, door open, and shutting outer door.”

Pacino waited.

“Sir, tube three leak is down to a slow drip.”

“Very well. Offsa’deck, take the ship to five four eight feet, thirty degree up angle.”

The deck rose steeply. In the upper level, the sound of dishes breaking in the galley could be heard, several crashes of books and equipment sounding from the middle level. The crashing had barely stopped when the deck leveled out.

“XO,” Pacino said dryly, “I think you could do a better job stowing for sea. Should I take a few more angles, or do you think you can identify and fix the problems?”

“I’ll take care of it, sir.”

“OOD, I want you to increase speed slowly—”

“Sir, we’re already at flank—”

“—by coordinating with maneuvering and raising reactor power one percent at a time until you get a main lube oil bearing discharge over-temperature alarm, then back down one percent, which will be the emergency flank setting. Make sure the engineering officer of the watch has all main lube oil cooler balance valves fully open before you start.”

“Aye aye, Captain,” Vickerson said, more calmly this time as she hoisted a phone.

“You know you’ll ruin the reactor and make the ship a high radiation area by going above one hundred percent power, Captain,” Vermeers said. “We’ll be back in the shipyard for two years if you go over a hundred and ten percent.”

“I’m well aware of that, XO, just as I am that the Snare is out there spinning up twelve cruise missiles.”

Pacino stood on the conn, feeling the deck of the Devilfish shaking, waiting until he could get to the intercept point with the Snare.

The president of Cyclops Systems Incorporated, Colleen O’Shaughnessy Pacino, had designed the current generation of submerged battle control systems since the SSNX had first gone to sea, a soaring success for both Colleen and Michael Pacino since Cyclops got a bigger, more lucrative contract and they had gotten married. But the good times were in the past, since now Colleen Pacino was about to answer to Congress for the failed Tigershark torpedo program. That had been her biggest problem until, twenty hours ago, her husband had told her about the nightmare with Anthony Michael.

“Of course I’ll go,” she had said, as she sat up in the bed and swept her raven-black hair out of her face.

The chopper flight had gone on for hours. Finally the chopper hovered over the rear deck of the Explorer II and lowered her down to the deck. By the time she was taken inside she was soaked from the high winds and the driving rain.

Commander Peter Collingsworth met her in a narrow passageway. He had a solid body that could stand to lose a few pounds and stood taller than average, with a full red beard, a tangled mop of reddish-brown hair, jolly blue eyes, a freckle covered nose, and a firm handshake. His voice was higher than his body would suggest, his manner open and friendly. Colleen threw the hood off her head and shook out her hair in the towel she’d been given, gripping the Royal Navy commander’s hand.

“I’m Colleen Pacino,” she said. “I’m a defense contractor sent out by Admiral Patton. One of the survivors in the Piranha is my stepson.”

Collinsworth nodded seriously, releasing her hand. “Welcome aboard Explorer II. I’m the venture commander. The captain of the ship is Kenneth Knowles, who is on the bridge. I’d offer you something to drink, but I assume you’ll want to get to business. If you’ll use this empty stateroom, you can take a shower and change into dry coveralls. I’ll meet you in the control room in five minutes.”

Colleen nodded, ducked into the stateroom, dived under the warm fresh water shower, toweled off, and donned the British coveralls with the odd emblems above the pockets. When she emerged, a crewman was waiting to take her to control, a large but crowded space jammed with monitors, computers, radios, and other equipment. She could hear Collingsworth talking to one of his officers, his voice calm and confident. When he was done he came over to Colleen. She expected him to give a speech about the weather being too severe and the rescue taking too much time.

“Mrs. Pacino. here’s how we see things. Emerald has shoved off and hightailed it out of the storm. She’s disconnected from the hydrophone cables and left the buoy locator for the wreck floating, and we’re retrieving it now. Once we have it aboard we’ll set up the stabilizer system to hover in place over the wreck. The submersible will be going overboard next with the hull-cutting rig.”

“Where is it?” Colleen asked. “I didn’t see it on the deck.”

“It’s in the belly of the ship. It goes down from inside, so we’re not weather limited. It’s lowered by two arms that take her clear of the keel, and that way she can dock on the way up even in a hurricane. There’s something about bad weather and sub wrecks that go together like tea and milk. The Admiralty wouldn’t let a little weather stop a rescue.”

Colleen smiled genuinely for the first time in days.

“Now, the rescue won’t go as planned because we’re out of time. According to the chaps on the Emerald, the sounds have stopped from in-hull a few hours after Captain Catardi reported that the oxygen levels were falling whilst he was suffering from extremely cold temperatures. If we don’t have those crewmen up here in four hours, we’re all wasting our time. We propose using an experimental and potentially dangerous plasma explosive torch over the command module of the sub’s DSV. The idea is it will slice through thick steel in minutes instead of hours. But anything that has the energy to melt through submarine hull material has energy enough to damage the survivors, even breach the hull of the DSV. But there’s no time for anything else. Can you authorize us to use this method?”

“How long will it take?” Colleen asked.

“An hour.”

“Then hurry,” she said.

Collingsworth nodded and jogged down the passageway and disappeared into a hatch. Colleen checked her watch. In an hour, dead or alive, they’d have Anthony Michael back.

“One, display the chart with the cruise missile range circle and our position, and show the estimated time to arrive at the range mark. Good, now please set up a targeting routine with a close-up of the following locations for target selection.” Krivak had no idea what the latitude and longitude of the White House was, but he’d zero in the crosshairs on Washington, D.C. until he found it. Then he’d lock in the target and move on to the next missile. He worried briefly that One Oh Seven would refuse to launch the missiles, but he wouldn’t know until he fired the weapons.

He thought for a moment that he should approach the firing point in a random zigzag, to throw off any American military units that would try to stop him. It seemed excessively paranoid and would make the time to missile impact much longer. He ruled the idea out. Snare would proceed straight on. He might even speed up from thirty-five knots to fifty, but that might create a train wreck of noise and invite detection. No. the middle course was best. He congratulated himself for his good instincts, and when the targeting was done, there was nothing left to do but wait.

Wait and plan his escape, because once the missiles flew out of the sea, there would be twelve missile trails pointing to his location. If the U.S. military detected him with the launch, Snare wouldn’t last an hour. If he did survive the launch, and the missiles made it to the coast, the hunt for Snare would happen after impact. Either way, he would be a dead man if he remained aboard. He would need to abandon ship in the middle of the ocean, which was not a pleasant thought.

There was no real need to rush this. Better to arrange for Amorn to be ready to pick him up at the launch point and spirit him away from the Snare. The question was — what to do with Dr. Wang? Leave him aboard to fend for himself? Shoot him as they left the Snare! Or take him into the business?

Krivak told One Oh Seven to slow and come shallow. He’d patch in the cell phone connection to Pedro and Amorn and arrange to meet them in a chartered yacht near the firing point. He’d set the Snare to sail to China then, and by that time he’d have an idea what to do with Wang. A couple of nine-millimeter rounds in the eyes would probably be the best solution, though, he thought. The Snare could be the doctor’s coffin, and he could die with his creation.

Admiral John Patton hated the evacuation bunker’s office. It was cramped and smelled like moldy concrete. He tried to concentrate on his E-mail when Commander Marissa Tyler, his aide, peeked in the door, a look of concern on her face. He motioned Marissa to take a chair.

“Trouble?” Patton asked.

“One of NSA’s satellite cell phone network monitors filtered and saved a call. The keyword was Snare. Here’s the conversation.”

Marissa pointed her pad computer at the main display monitor, and the sound playback module flashed at the screen. She pointed the laser pointer at the play function.

Amorn, it’s me. Krivak. On the Snare, dammit.

Yes, sir, I can hear you now. Listen to me. Get a motor yacht, a fast one, and get it to the Atlantic coordinates I’m about to read to you.

Patton listened to it two more times, then began to draft a message to Kelly McKee.