Tropical Terror

18

A quarter of a mile into the bay, the SEALs slowed their surface crawl and looked around. The Chief was on the far end of her grid pattern and turning for another sweep across the target area. Murdock had been wondering why the subchaser helicopters didn’t come right into the bay. There was no thermal layer there for the Chinese to hide under. Be simple to pinpoint it and blow it out of the water with a homing torpedo.

Then he remembered the Chief motoring away through the same waters, and realized the torpedo might just as well home in on the minesweeper. One of them had to give way to the other, and the admiral must have decided to let the Chief have first crack at finding the bomb.

Murdock put into operation a new system. He had the fourteen SEALs ten yards apart and each one held onto a length of one-eighth-inch line. That way they could stay together and stay in communication with each other. If any of the men saw the sub working toward them, they would give two sharp pulls on the rope. The signal would be passed from one man to the next. Three sharp pulls meant to surface at once, the chance of a deadly concussion being imminent.

The SEALs formed a 140-yard screen across the bay. Murdock anchored one end and DeWitt the other. Murdock and the men had talked about the mission. Chances were the sub would stay near the surface to keep away from the deadly bottom.

“He’ll just keep his conning tower under the water,” Murdock said. “My guess. That means we’ll stay at our fifteen feet and cruise. I hope that he knows that the bomb went into this northern section of the bay, so he’ll come in here.”

Now they prowled their turf and waited to see what happened. It could turn out to be a fool’s mission. There was a good chance they would never see the Chinese sub. If they did find it, could they keep up with it? How fast would it move in quarters like this? Five knots? Seven? Could his men catch it and hold on somewhere and hope for a chance to plant some bombs on it? The whole bucket of questions kept churning around in Murdock’s mind.

Every five minutes Murdock broke the surface and took a good look around. He didn’t want the sub to surface and put out a diving party to go after the damn bomb. He’d been up three times now, and had not seen anything except the Chief working its business on the close-in grid around the suspect spot.

No submarine.

Good and bad.

The SEALs swam along at fifteen feet at half their usual speed. There was no rush. They worked out to what Murdock figured was three hundred yards from the suspected drop spot for the bomb. He gave three quick jerks on the line and surfaced. In quick succession the rest of the SEALs came up. He swam down the line, telling them it had been a test and had worked. Next time it would be for real. But that was only if they found the sub and planted some charges.

Murdock had DeWitt lead out the line heading back the way they had come. Murdock picked up his Tail-end Charlie rope and kept watching the water toward the sea. In the dark, visibility was no more than six feet. If they did come on the sub, it might be felt and heard in the water before they actually saw it.

Four times they made the run. Each time at the end they would surface, confer, bitch, and go back for another look. The fifth time, Murdock told them to stay on the surface with a nice steady sidestroke.

Twice they came close to the Chief, but they didn’t get in its way. If it was still moving, that meant they hadn’t found anything. If they did, the captain had said they would stop and work the area with all the power they had. So far it had been moving.

Lam had been in the line right behind Murdock. Now he swam up beside his commander. He had his face mask off and his wet suit hat thrown back off his head. He had one ear in the water and waved at Murdock. He came up and shouted at his chief.

“Something down there wasn’t there before,” Lam said. “I can hear some fucker down there just purring away.”

Murdock pulled his cap off and poked his head underwater. He came up a minute later, grinning.

“Oh, yeah, but where?”

Lam pointed seaward. “Heard something last three or four minutes, Skip. Sure as hell is sounding louder. I think we got ourselves some undersea craft heading our way.”

Murdock gave two sharp pulls on the rope, then three more. SEALs began popping to the surface.

“We hear something seaward,” Murdock told the next man on the line. “Pass it along. We go down again when all have the word, and watch for this bastard, but we don’t move unless somebody knows for sure which direction.” Murdock pulled his cap back on and adjusted his mask. When he saw through the gloom of the waning moon the last man take the message, Murdock dropped under the surface and moved down to fifteen feet. He kept that depth and stared hard toward where the Pacific Ocean had to be. He couldn’t see a damn thing but water. Now he couldn’t hear what he had before. He slid his face mask down from his eyes, pulled the wet-suit cap off from his ears, and put his mask back on.

Now, at least he should be able to hear anything coming.

He soon heard something, but it was the steady diesel drone of the Chief far toward the shore. He blocked it out and tried to listen to anything from the other direction.

Nothing. He swam up to Lam, who also had his cap off. They both shook their heads and waited.

A moment later Murdock heard it. An engine. Then, slowly materializing almost directly in front of him, the ugly black snout of a submarine.

Chinese? He didn’t know? He had studied the Chinese Naval forces a year ago, but he didn’t remember much of it. He functioned on a garbage-can-type principle. Gather up everything you need on a topic, sort out the important stuff you must remember, and dump out the rest of it with the garbage.

He knew the Chinese had subs, five fleet and one that carried cruise missiles. Those would be the dangerous kind. The subs all had nuclear power, so they could roam worldwide. From somewhere he remembered a black conical nose on some of the Chinese subs.

He jerked the line twice. At once Lam saw the sub as well. It was thirty feet below them and moving at maybe five knots. Crawling along, worried about the bottom.

Lam looked at him and motioned toward the big black vessel. “Follow it?” he signed. Murdock nodded. There was no time to call down more of the SEALs. They could lose the sub in the dark waters. The side of the sub was under them. They swam down to it, felt the smooth surface of the metal as it slid past them. They needed somewhere to grab and hang on.

The conning tower came toward them. They swam faster and caught it as it went by, moved upward to where they could find fittings and a rail to hold on to. When Murdock saw that Lam had caught a good hold, he sorted his memory for subs. Most had two diving planes, one set fixed on or near the sail structure and one on the bow. He hoped on the sail. He began looking around, feeling. There were six pipes or antennas sticking up from the top of the sail. None of those. Lower. He slid down the front of the sail, letting the forward motion pin him to the metal. Halfway down he found a wide wing-like device. Looked like a stabilizer on an airplane. He’d seen them on subs before. Did they move? Yes. Hinged, with an effect on the level movement of the sub.

At last he found where the movable hinging area was. He packed a stick of TNAZ on each side of the sail on the hinging area, then signaled to Lam. They swam down from the sail to the deck and let the ship move under them as they made their way to the stern. There should be another set of diving planes back there.

The turbulence at the back of the sub made it harder and there was little to hold on to. At last they found a handhold and looked over the sleek end of the vessel.

The submarine slowed. It glided through the water, moving slower and slower, until it nearly stopped. Murdock and Lam swam to the extreme end and checked where there might be exterior diving planes. They found what could be them. Nothing else looked possible. Both men pasted one-quarter-pound sticks of TNAZ explosive on the planes and inserted the detonators. They set them for fifteen minutes with hand signals, then swam for the sail and the other set of explosives.

The sub began to move again and the swim was harder. Lam beat Murdock there, and grabbed him when he almost slanted past the sail.

Murdock went down the front of the sail to the diving plane, pushed a timer/detonator into the TNAZ, and set it for ten minutes. Then the two SEALs swam hard for the surface only thirty feet above them. They hit the surface and Murdock bellowed.

“SEALs, get on dry land. Keep your head above water. Explosives planted. Go, go, go.” Far ahead he heard faint calls that they understood.

He and Lam began a fast crawl toward the point of land they could barely make out. They should have left the Hummer with parking lights on or a glow stick.

He heard some sounds in front of him, and decided it must be the rest of the platoon heading for shore.

The first explosion went off just as a small wave caught Murdock and propelled him toward the shore. The vibrations in the water made his legs tingle, and a shock wave hit him with a gentle nudge.

He stumbled ashore and found Lam and the other SEALs waiting for him.

“You found that fucker?” Bradford yelped.

“Did indeed. I heard one charge go off. Should be three more.”

As he spoke they heard a low rumble, then a second and a third.

“Four out of four, Skipper,” DeWitt said. “Did you get her in a vital spot?”

“Hope so. We worked the diving planes. Wasn’t time to get any of the rest of you on the shoot or we’d have lost the sucker. Holt, get out that SATCOM, let’s wake up some folks.”

Five minutes later the plan was set. CINCPAC had ordered the minesweeper out of the bay and two miles offshore. The more experienced sub-hunters from the Jefferson were called in to find the Chinese sub.

“If you damaged her diving planes, she won’t be able to surface or submerge any more than her ballast tanks will let her,” the spokesman at CINCPAC said. “Good work. The antisub guys should have easy pickings if the boat is still in the bay.”

The SEALs cleared their weapons of water, cleaned and oiled them as usual, and then some of the SEALs took off their wet cammies and let them dry. Murdock figured the nighttime temperature was near seventy degrees.

Ten minutes after the first call, two choppers came in from the north and east. They cruised the bay, then set up a picket fence of sonobuoys down the near end of the wide mouth of Kaneohe Bay. The other chopper laid out a line of sonobuoys at right angles to the first drop heading toward shore.

Holt had the SATCOM set for TAC Two, and they listened to the sub-hunters talking in their helicopters.

“So what can he do?” one voice asked. “He can only blow his tanks and surface so he can repair the diving planes. If that’s what his problem is.”

“Yeah, I’ll give that bastard another problem if we find him. I have no contacts on my line.”

“None here either. Let’s move the box down the bay. He can maneuver left or right. My bet is he’s moving down-bay to the slightly deeper water.”

“In a hundred feet we could see him in the daylight, couldn’t we?”

“Probably. Dropping a new line southeast continuing my line.”

“I’ll box that in on the end. Think he’ll surface and try to get away in the night?”

“He can do maybe twelve knots surfaced. He’d do better to stay down and get about twenty-five.”

“Hey, contact on number two and three. He’s moving south. Range, four hundred yards. Dropping one Mark 46. It’s in the wet.”

“Home in on him, you motherfucker!”

“Yeah, go, go.”

The SEALs gathered around the radio.

“Twenty-nine, thirty, thirty-one. You missed, Cowboy.”

“It’s circled around and taking another reading on all that metal mass. It won’t miss. Oh, Lordy, look at that eruption of water and metal and Chinese body parts soaring into the air.”

“Home Base, this is Birdgame Two. I have a kill. I repeat, I have a kill on one Chinese submarine.”

“Very well, Birdgame Two. Stand by for continuing orders.”

“Survivors?” the other chopper pilot asked.

“At fifty or sixty feet there should be dozens. Sub like that should carry seventy-five men. If it’s one of their attack boats.”

“Birdgame Two, drop flares over any wreckage spotted and watch for survivors. Fifty Marines from the air base there are on the way to pick up and control any survivors. How is your juice?”

“In the seventy-five-percent range, Home Base.”

“Stand by.”

Murdock had Holt switch the SATCOM to the CINCPAC channel. He got contact on the second call.

“Murdock, just heard about the Chinese sub. We’re inserting the minesweeper again, but she tells me there will be junk and metal all over the place now, and that will make it a dozen times harder to find the device.”

“Commander Lawson on the sweeper was hunting for the right frequency on a transponder. Did he have any luck?”

“Didn’t mention it. He’ll be on station in a little over an hour. He’ll call you on this channel when he’s in position again.”

“Thanks, CINCPAC. Will contact him then. Out.”

Most of the SEALs went to sleep then, half in the Humvees, half out. The rescue operation went on most of the night with choppers showing lights and the Coast Guard and Marine boats picking Chinese sailors out of the bay. Last count Murdock heard was forty-five, some with serious injuries.

The Chief came back on-station and contacted Murdock on the SATCOM.

“Murdock, good work on that sub. Now, how do we find the damn bomb? I’m not at all optimistic about a quick find. We’ll have dozens of chunks of metal all over this end of the bay.”

“What about the right frequency for the transponder we think is on the bomb?”

“Not a lot of help. We have three that could work. We’ll try them when we get some of this junk out of the way. The survivor guys are just about ready to wrap up. They’ll be back with the daylight to pick bodies off the shore and out of the surf line.”

“The Chinese know by now that they lost the sub. They’ll be furious and might just shoot the bomb. The quicker we can find it the better.”

“You can send out a signal to that transponder?”

“We have the gear. You want to come on board with three of your divers so you’ll be ready if we get a contact?”

“Good idea. Can you send a boat?”

“If you don’t want to swim out.”

“Please send the damn boat.”

Murdock rousted out the best swimmers and divers he had. Ed DeWitt would be one, Mahanani and Lam the other two. They stepped into the boat from the Chief at a little after 0400, and were met at the minesweeper with dry cammies, jackets, hot coffee, and sandwiches.

Commander Lawson took them into a room filled with electronics. “We do a lot of work from here. We have seven frequencies we want to try out. So far the first two did not produce any return. We’re on number three now. We transmit for thirty seconds, and do that three times. If we hit it right, there should be an almost immediate response.”

Fifteen minutes later they were on the next-to-last frequency. The technician triggered the transmission and sat back as he had done more than twenty times before.

“We have a response, sir,” the chief said. “We have a continuous reply on that frequency. I can have direction for you in a few seconds.” He worked some instruments in front of him. “Sir, that’s at one hundred sixty degrees. You want sonar to give us a range?”

“Yes, Chief. That would be good.”

“Range is two hundred and eighty yards.”

Commander Lawson looked at Murdock. “Don’t just sit there, SEAL. Go get into your diving gear and let’s retrieve us a damn nuclear bomb.”