Virginia Class

16

" 'Next time, Jack, write a memo.' "

That line from a well-known submarine movie of a few years back, or something much like it, had lately become something of a mantra for John Stevens. The officer from the terrorism branch of the CIA's Directorate of Global Affairs said the words again to himself with a grim smile as he flew through the wind-and-rain-lashed darkness on board one of the Navy's heavy-lift transport helicopters. He'd loved that movie when he'd first seen it years ago as a young Green Beret officer. He'd never expected to live it, however.

At the moment, he was balanced more or less uncomfortably on one of the hard, fold-down seats on the Sea Hawk's cargo deck, scarcely able to move. He had traded his Washington pinstripes for a wetsuit with rubber boots and gloves, a lightweight helmet, an inflatable life jacket, and a harness securing him to a length of white line coiled carefully on the deck and secured by heavy clasps. A waterproof document case was strapped to his thigh. The wetsuit trapped his body heat so that he was sweltering in its close embrace.

The Sea Hawk's crew chief stood over him in the red-lit compartment. "Can you hear me okay?"

It was hard to hear above the roar of the massive, seven-blade rotor, but the crew chief's bellow carried. Stevens nodded.

"Okay! Skipper says we have contact!" The man held up a gloved hand, showing his widely spread fingers. "Five minutes!"

Stevens nodded again. His hand touched the document case for perhaps the hundredth time that night, reassuring himself that it was still there.

The trouble was, this adventure had begun with a memo… and it was not something that his superiors cared to broadcast by radio, even coded. They'd flown him first to Yokosuka, where he'd arrived after Virginia's departure and just before the shoot-down of Flight 1125. There'd been talk of trying to have him rendezvous with the submarine south of Taiwan, where the Virginia was supposed to pick up a SEAL element, but the timing had not allowed for that. Instead, he'd been put aboard a C-2 Greyhound, a COD aircraft — COD standing for Carrier On-Board Delivery — and been flown out to the deck of the USS Franklin D. Roosevelt. The Roosey currently was part of CBG-8, traveling west through the Luzon Strait north of the Philippines en route to the Spratly Islands.

And from there, two hours ago, he'd been bundled up in the wetsuit and life jacket and put on board the Sea Hawk. They were going to attempt an at-sea transfer.

Normally that wouldn't have been much of a problem, but the weather had turned foul in the past twenty-four hours. Right now, most of the Spratly AO was blanketed in a thick storm — rain and lightning and high-gusting wind — and the fact that it was still the wee hours of the morning didn't help one bit. The SH-60H was equipped with night-flying gear, Stevens knew, but even the best technology could be easily confounded by Mother Nature.

Despite the storm, they'd apparently made contact with the Virginia, which meant she was on the surface and waiting for him somewhere up ahead. Stevens began taking long, deep breaths, trying to quiet the panic he felt.

John Stevens had begun his career in the Army, almost twenty years earlier, and after making sergeant he'd been accepted by the Special Forces, the Green Berets of song and legend. He'd resigned after sixteen years in the service, ten of them as a Special Forces operator. The politics of peacetime conflict were tougher to face than incoming hostile fire, and in the drawdown after the Second Gulf War he'd decided to call it quits.

However, the contacts he made with the Company — the CIA — had stuck with him, and when they'd offered him a job with the agency he'd agreed. For a time, he'd trained new recruits at a secret facility outside of Williamsburg, Virginia, the "Farm," but later he'd been transferred to a desk in Langley. He'd thought he would be there for the rest of his new career.

But when the director of DGI had needed someone with specific elite military experience — the sort of experience that trained men to do crazy stunts like jump into the ocean out of a helicopter flying through a raging storm — Stevens had volunteered. He still wasn't sure why.

Maybe he'd just wanted to get back in the field, back in harness once more.

He tugged at the harness and the lifeline. Yeah, he was in harness all right. Next time, don't send a memo. Get someone else in the office to do it!

The crew chief jerked a gloved thumb upward. Clumsily, he got to his feet, using a handrail to stay upright as he moved toward the open side door.

Wind shrieked and shuddered beyond the door, though it was impossible to tell how much of that was the helicopter's rotor wash, and how much the storm. The rain, whirled by the prop wash into a fine mist, wet his face, and glowed a bright blue-white in the glare of the helicopter's external lights. Leaning against the side of the door and looking out and down, he was appalled at first to see nothing but glare and darkness. Only after several wind-blasted moments could he make out the vague shape of something in the water below — a long, lean shadow rolling in the swell.

Another helo crewman stood by the door, loading a weapon that looked like one of the old, Nam-era thumpers, a stubby shotgun with a barrel as long and as thick as his forearm. Instead of inserting a round at the breach, however, he was adjusting the fit of a blunt harpoon secured to the other end of the safety line attached to Stevens's harness.

The crew chief tapped his shoulder. "Your vest will inflate when you hit the water!" the man shouted into his ear. "Just relax and let them do the work, okay?"

He nodded, not trusting himself to speak. It had been way too long since he'd done this sort of thing.

As a Green Beret, he'd trained for helocast missions, launching himself out of a low-flying helicopter into the ocean, sometimes at night. It was a fast, slick way to insert a squad into a coastal area.

It was also dangerous.

The SH-60 was easing its cumbersome bulk closer to the water, and Stevens could see the submarine more clearly now, a black rectangle erect in a wind- and spray-blasted sea. He thought he could see figures on the deck in front of the sail, made visible by bright orange life jackets, but he couldn't be sure.

The man with the thump gun took aim and fired, sending the harpoon arcing down through the darkness, the white safety line unraveling behind it. In more traditional maneuvers at sea, in a technique that went back six hundred years at least, a rope could be passed from one vessel to another by attaching it to a "monkey's fist," a length of heavy cable knotted into a ball that could easily be thrown from one ship across the deck of the other. The thump gun and harpoon served the same purpose here, sending the line falling through the night and across the deck of the submarine below. Closer now, Stevens could see the crewmen on deck scrambling to grab the line and begin reeling it in.

The crew chief unfastened the clips on the coil of line and tossed it into the night. Stevens now stood on the SH-60's cargo deck with the other end of the safety line in the hands of the sailors below. "Good to go!" he shouted, clapping Stevens on the back.

Stevens took a final, quick mental inventory, then launched himself into the dark.

The prop wash from the SH-60 pressed him down like a giant hand, and, despite his best efforts, he felt himself begin to tumble. If he became tangled in his safety line, he might easily drown. Training asserted itself, however. He crossed his legs, folded his arms across his chest, and tilted his head as far forward as possible, a posture designed to keep the water from blasting up his nose with explosive force when he hit. For a dizzying moment, he was suspended between glare and darkness….

He hit the ocean, plunging deep, the jar of the impact hammering his body. For a moment, he thought he'd been driven too deep… but his life jacket, a model designed for aviators to inflate automatically in case the wearer was unconscious, popped into reassuring fullness, first slowing, then halting his descent. The impact had blasted the breath from his lungs, but only a few seconds passed before his head broke above the waves again, and he pulled down a deep and satisfying chestful of wet, salt-laden air.

Above him, the helicopter was all but invisible, a dim shadow masked by the twin suns of its landing lights illuminating the ocean below. Its prop wash actually flattened the waves around him, creating a vast circle of wind-blasted relative calm. Turning in the water, he could see the black wall of the submarine's sail perhaps thirty yards away, towering against the night. He felt a hard tug at his harness; sailors on the submarine's forward deck were pulling in the safety line now, dragging him toward the sub. He remembered the crew chief's injunction and relaxed, letting them do the work.

He guessed it would take them five or ten minutes to drag him on board.

"Up periscope!"

The gleaming tube of the main periscope rose in front of Captain Jian; he snapped down the handles and rode them to the full up position, pressing his eye to the eyepiece and walking the scope in a full-360 as it cleared the water.

Nothing. Darkness and rain, with waves periodically surging over the periscope like dark blankets. The range was still fairly long — estimated now at 6,100 meters. On a clear, sunlit day with a flat sea, he might have been able to see the target at that range, but on a night such as this — not a chance.

He wanted to confirm the sea state, however, and check for nearby ships or aircraft that sonar might have missed.

"Down scope. Weapon status."

"Tubes one, two, three, and four loaded, Captain. Tubes dry. Outer doors are closed."

"Very well. Prepare to fire tubes one, three, two, and four, in that order. Target is Ch'ien Nine-five. Set for acoustical homing."

"Torpedos one, three, two and four set for acoustical homing, Captain."

Jian took a deep breath. He was gambling everything here… but opportunities such as this one rarely presented themselves.

If the sonar evidence was to be believed, Ch'ien Nine-five was now on the surface six kilometers away. There were numerous unidentifiable sounds out there as well, but the sounds of waves breaking over a hull riding on the surface, the clatter of cables or ropes on a deck, and the hiss and rumble of a ship's propeller straining to keep the vessel on-station in a rough sea were unmistakable. Jian's best guess was that the target had either surfaced to rendezvous with a helicopter — possibly to take on supplies — or because of some problem on board, fire or reactor failure. It seemed madness to perform a supply operation in this weather, but Yinbi's sonar had not picked up any of the characteristic sounds of an emergency, and he could think of no other reasonable explanation for the target's behavior. American attack submarines did not surface unless they had to.

In any case, Yinbi's luck was holding. They'd followed Ch'ien Nine-five's projected course and thirty minutes ago had picked up sounds of a submarine blowing ballast. Cautiously, Jian had closed the distance, creeping forward to close to attack range. His orders to destroy an American supercarrier be damned. The American submarine was almost certainly one of the new Seawolf vessels, an incredibly valuable U.S. naval asset. Sinking that submarine would quite nicely strike the blow intended by Operation Yangshandian, a multibillion-dollar target the Americans simply could not afford to lose.

And if a supercarrier showed up, there would be time to sink her as well.

Another deep breath. This begins it.

"Flood tubes and open outer doors…."

Sonar Technician First Class Ken Queensly leaned far back in the chair at his sonar console, ears encased in headphones, his eyes closed. To the untrained ear, the noise hissing and rumbling through his headset would have been just that — noise. And, in fact, most of it was noise that could be ignored — the sounds of water breaking over Virginia's bow, of booted feet on the forward deck, the stuttering clatter of the helicopter hovering above the water off the port side.

But a computer command had muted those known and catalogued sounds to a faint and manageable level, leaving Queensly free to probe the depths surrounding the Virginia with a sense far more acute than vision in these circumstances.

His eyes snapped open. He'd heard something, a faint sound that commanded his attention simply because it was different from all of the other background noise. He checked the trace on the waterfall, of course… but he was already reaching for the intercom switch that would put him in touch with Captain Garrett.

"Bridge!" he shouted, startling the sonar techs in the compartment with him. "Sonar! Probable torpedo tube flooding and tube doors opening!"

"Sonar, Bridge," Garrett's voice came back, rough with the blowing wind. "Roger that. Bearing?"

"Bearing approximately zero-nine-zero! Designating contact as Sierra One-seven-two!" He froze, hearing another, more deadly sound. "Torpedo in the water!"

Garrett glanced to starboard, toward the east… but of course saw nothing but night. He hit the 1MC switch by his hand. "Sound general quarters! Torpedo in the water!"

Instantly, the hollow Bong! Bong! Bong! of the sub's emergency warning bell echoed through the hull.

"Sonar, Bridge! How far?"

"Estimate six thousand meters, closing at fifty-five knots. Captain! Two… no, three torpedoes in the water!"

Six thousand meters at fifty-five knots… very roughly a kilometer and a half per minute. Virginia had four minutes before disaster.

Below him, on the forward deck, half a dozen sailors in blue foul-weather gear, bright orange life jackets, and safety harnesses securing them to the deck were hauling at the line fired from the helicopter. The man at the end of that line was lost somewhere in the waves off to port. How far off was he?

Every submariner knew the score. The captain of an American submarine was expected to think first of the mission, then of the safety of the submarine, then the safety of the sub's nuclear power plant, and only after that of the safety of the crew. The mission, the boat, the plant, the crew. That simple, deadly equation was hammered into every sailor during his training at New London and was part of the responsibility borne by every submarine officer. Right now, that "package" out there in the water was completely expendable. To save his command, Garrett was prepared to order the sailors on deck to toss the safety line overboard and immediately get below. Virginia needed to maneuver, and every second of delay brought that hostile torpedo closer, eating away at his tactical options.

"Deck there!" he called over the loudspeaker. "Cast off the line. Clear the deck!"

He could see the stunned consternation of the sailors below in the way they froze in midmovement. Then the chief in charge of the working party barked an order, and they gathered up the line on the deck and hurled it over the side.

"Maneuvering! This is the Captain! Dive the boat!"

He scrambled for the inviting circle of the sail hatch beneath his feet….

Stevens was less than twenty feet from the side of the Virginia when he saw the sailors on board scoop up the free coils of line they'd already gathered in and throw it at him, casting him helplessly adrift.

What the fuck? …

With growing horror, he saw the sailors vanishing down a hatch in the deck, saw the Virginia's sail begin to surge forward… and down.

The submarine was submerging!

He screamed in helpless fury against the storm, against the night, against the nightmare unfairness of being abandoned this way….

"Radio room! Flag Bravo Five-one! Tell them the package is in the water!" Maybe the hovering Sea Hawk would be able to find the CIA officer in the ocean… and maybe not. That was no longer Garrett's problem. The survival of the boat was.

"Come right to course two-seven-zero," Garrett barked. "Ahead flank."

"New course two-seven-zero, aye! Ahead flank, aye!"

"Make depth one hundred feet!"

"Make depth one-zero-zero feet, aye, sir!"

"Weapons status!"

"Tubes one and two warshot loaded," Lieutenant Carpenter replied from the weapons board. "Mark 48 ADCAP."

"Snapshot, two, one!"

"Snapshot two, one, aye aye!"

It would take about forty-five long seconds for the final preparations in the torpedo room, including flooding the tubes and opening the outer doors. In the meantime, though Virginia was swiftly submerging, he could not order a deep dive, not without complicating the flooding and pressurization of the tubes.

He could, however, begin putting some distance between Virginia and the unknown attacker out there. The incoming torpedoes were moving at an estimated fifty-five knots. Virginia could manage thirty-eight… maybe forty over the short haul, which meant that the enemy fish would only creep up on their target at a relative speed of fifteen knots. The course change put the torpedoes behind the sub and racing to catch up.

Meanwhile, Virginia was submerging to take full advantage of her natural element, the sea. The roll and bump to her hull, so pronounced when she'd been on the surface and subject to the battering of the waves, steadied almost at once as her ballast tanks filled and she slipped swiftly into the depths of the night-black abyss.

"Course now two-seven-zero," Chief Bollinger announced from his chair overlooking the steering and dive controls. "Speed coming up to thirty-five knots… thirty-six knots…"

"Sonar, Conn," Garrett called. "What's the status on those fish?"

"Now four, repeat, four torpedoes in the water, Captain. Estimate the closest at 2,500 yards. Sir, they appear to have been fired by a single hostile in a staggered spread."

"Speed now forty knots, Captain," Jorgensen said. "Eng says we can't hold this for long without busting a gut."

"Very well." Twenty-five hundred yards presented a running time of a hair over one minute at fifty-five knots. At a relative speed of fifteen knots, the running time extended to five minutes. He'd bought them that much time, at least, and there was a slender chance they could outrun the things until they ran out of juice.

The control room crew manned their stations, worked their consoles, with a grim and death-silent concentration. They would all know by now that Virginia had abandoned a man to the ocean topside.

Being submariners, they would also know why. With enemy torpedoes bearing in on the Virginia, they would know their survival depended on Garrett's decisions, even when those decisions were tough ones.

The mission first. Then the vessel. And then the men.

Four minutes, now.

"Tubes one and two flooded!" Rodriguez shouted.

Wallace squeezed back out of the way. His heart was pounding, his hands slick with sweat. This was his first qual rotation in the torpedo room, and it was promising to be an exciting watch. Shit… ten minutes ago they'd had him swabbing the deck with a mop and bucket, and now…

He was watching a gauge on the fire-control panel. "Outer doors open!" he called, when two lights flashed red.

"Snapshot," Chief Giangreco yelled, bringing his palm down on the big red firing button. "Fire number two!"

Nothing happened.

"Shit!" Giangreco growled. "Hang-fire!"

Wallace stepped back, putting himself as much out of the way as possible, as Giangreco and Rodriguez bent over the fire-control panel, trying to find out what had gone wrong. Giangreco hit the intercom switch. "Conn, Torpedo Room! Hang-fire on number two!"

They were in trouble. That much he knew. A snapshot order meant that an enemy had fired torpedoes at them, and that the captain was sending a torp or two back in the direction from which the attack had come, an unaimed shot-from-the-hip that might get lucky.

But the first torpedo fired had failed to leave the tube. It would not be armed as yet — it had to travel a certain distance before its warhead went active — but the situation was still incredibly dangerous. If one thing had gone wrong, chances were a whole cluster of things had gone wrong as well….

He looked aft, at the stolid, watching faces of the Navy SEALs. The torpedo room was the one compartment on board with room enough to house Virginia's eight guests. Bunks had been unfolded along the bulkheads, above and below the stored, quiescent, black-and-red giants, the torpedoes waiting on their hydraulic racks, making the normally neat and hyper-efficient space of the compartment seem a lot more crowded and claustrophobic than usual. The SEALs, too, were standing back out of the way, close by the watertight door leading into the aft end of the torpedo compartment.

"Shit and double shit," Giangreco said. "The whole firing net's gone!"

"One of the fucking three-Cs?" Rodriguez asked.

"Maybe…."

Wallace leaped into the central passageway and raced aft, toward the midsection of the torpedo room. Rodriguez's words had triggered something.

Two days ago, Wallace had been down here as part of an ET work detail, swapping out 3C chips from a routing station buried in the port-side bulkhead. Chief Kurzweil had told him at the time that some of the computer chips could fail when current went through them, starting a fire….

The panel was hidden behind one of the SEALs' racks. He grabbed the mattress and yanked it out into the passageway. "Hey!" one of the SEALs shouted.

"What the fuck?…"

But Wallace had exposed the sealed access panel where he and Chief Kurzweil had been swapping out one of the 3Cs. He pressed the palm of his hand against the access panel. Usually, the bulkheads were cool… but the panel was warm to the touch. "Fire!" he shouted. "Fire in the bulkhead, right here!"

Rodriguez, Giangreco, and two other torpedomen were with him in an instant. The access panel was locked and there was no key, but Giangreco had a pry tool in one hand. "Out of my way!"

The flat end of the tool went into the grip recess, and Giangreco strained against it.

"You sure, kid?" Rodriguez asked Wallace. "I don't smell no smoke." He sounded worried, though. Of all the possible dangers on board a submarine, none — not even a casualty in the reactor room — was as dreaded as fire.

"I helped replace one of those computer chips here the other day," Wallace said. "It's right there, behind that panel. And it feels warm…."

"If you're wrong, Wall-eye," Giangreco growled, "the cost of the repairs comes outta your hide!"

Then the panel snapped open. Sparks danced and crackled, and, an instant later, smoke billowed from the opening in a thick and acrid cloud.

Rodriguez was already leaning against the 1MC. "Fire! Fire in the boat!"

"Secure that door!" Giangreco bellowed, and one of the SEALs aft slammed the watertight door shut and dogged it. Their first duty was to contain the fire — and the potentially deadly smoke — and keep it from spreading through the rest of the boat.

Only then could they begin to fight the fire.