Warriors

CHAPTER 21

Lieutenant Moose Taylor was first to scramble up the rope ladder and onto the acres of steel deck. And so it was that he was first to make the earliest of many startling discoveries his men would find aboard this “rocket ship” (as the captain was now calling it) that had come from beneath the sea.

Nobody, not the captain up on the bridge or anyone else on board Dauntless had even gotten a glimpse of the entire structure of the sub due to the thick fog.

But from where Moose was standing, all alone amidships on this vast black steel plain, Taylor made his first amazing discovery.

There was no damn conning tower on this thing!

Really? A submarine with no conning tower? What the hell was going on here? He could see all the way to the stern… and there was nothing. There wasn’t even a damn periscope, communications aerials, nothing… which raised a question: How the hell did you steer the damn thing?

He adjusted his headset lip-mike to raise Stubbs down in the patrol boat. “Turtle, this is Joyboy, you copy?”

“Copy.”

“You are not going to believe this shit, brother.”

“Talk to me, papa.”

“There’s nothing up here to see. A clean deck. I mean, a vessel three football fields long with no conning tower? No abovedeck superstructure whatsoever. No nav systems, radar, or comms aerials. Nothing! Just one giant long-ass empty deck stretching for miles in both directions. It’s nuts! How the hell do they see to navigate this mother?”

“Port lights in the bow? Below the waterline? Like that Nautilus James Mason skippered in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea?”

“Locate the conn in the bow? You know what, Ensign Stubbs? That’s not the stupidest idea you’ve ever had. But, still… okay, I’m stamping my boots on the hull. See if I get a reaction inside… It’s all clear up here, Stubbie, send the first guy up the rope.”

A few minutes later, Taylor stood on the wet deck in the thick fog, helping his men scramble up onto the broad foredeck. The entire deck, far broader than any sub deck he’d ever seen, was covered with a strange, spongy black rubber grid. Like a honeycomb. It was obviously meant to be slip-proof and it felt good underfoot. Whoever had designed this crazy monster may have forgotten to give it a conning tower, but he sure as hell knew what he was doing otherwise.

“You’re not going to believe this,” he’d say as each man mounted the final step of the ladder. “Look down there. No conning tower. No periscope. No nothing.”

“Holy shit, Lieutenant,” Stubbs said, gaining the top and looking from stem to stern at the wide featureless deck. “I had to see it with my own eyes to believe you. Kinda creeps me out, Skipper. It Came from Beneath the Sea kinda thing, you know?”

“Boo!” Taylor said, and Stubbs jumped back but only a little and a couple of guys snickered. Taylor was the kind of young officer who could get away with stuff like that because you could do it right back to him and he didn’t get all ranky about it.

“Okay, rescue team on me,” Taylor said, and the mystified team from Dauntless hurried back from wandering around in awe to huddle up with their commanding officer.

With the entire team gathered round him on deck, Taylor barked out orders. Check sidearms and weapons. Be alert for any sound of survivors. He would take five men forward to inspect the vessel. Locate the hatches and listen for signs of life. Stubbs and his five-man squad would go aft and do the same.

They would meet back here amidships in ten minutes.

Taylor fanned his men out and they all walked six abreast toward the bow, eyes down, scouring the decks. He searched in vain for nonexistent hatches and found not one. But that was far from the most troublesome thing.

The really bad thing was a seemingly endless number of long-range missile silos. There were silos arrayed to port and starboard. In fact, the entire forward section of the submarine deck was an ICBM launch pad. He counted the hatch covers. Twenty to port. And twenty to starboard. Not just your everyday submarine missile launch tubes, either. Monsters.

These hatches were six feet in diameter, the covers twice as big as New York City manhole covers.

Forty giant nuclear warheads.

Forty?

On one behemoth of a sub? With no freaking conning tower and not a solitary sign of life aboard?

Whatever this goddamn thing was, it was not good news.

“You found what, sir? Lieutenant?” Stubbs asked Taylor when they regrouped amidships. The temperature was dropping rapidly, and another storm front was moving in from the west, winds topping forty knots riffling the surface, sweeping across the seas and plowing up huge, heaving waves in endless ranks toward the horizon.

Taylor told him about the forty launch tubes he’d seen forward. “What about you guys? Anything?”

“Nothing,” Stubbs said. “Nothing nearly as interesting as what you found.”

“Nothing,” Taylor repeated.

“A whole lot of nothing, sir, that’s what we found. I don’t know exactly how to tell you this but… there are no hatches on this boat, Lieutenant. Not a one.”

“Yeah, I know. Did you hear anything? Anything human, I mean. Banging a coffee cup on the overhead like the old WWII movies?”

“Nada, sir.”

“There’s got to be a way inside this damn thing.”

“You’d think.”

“Well, we can always go back and tell the skipper, sorry, we couldn’t find the crew, sir.”

“That would be a very bad idea, sir.”

“So we’ll torch our way in. There’s a broad section of bare deck just aft of the missile silos. We’ll use acetylene and go in there. Cut a hole in her and see what we see.”

“I’ve got two men with torches, sir.”

“Good. Let’s get moving.”

It was the work of about twenty minutes to cut a three-foot-diameter hole in the center of the hull. Taylor dropped to his knees on the rim and peered down inside. It was dark, but he could make out a fairly wide companionway going fore and aft. Oblong shaped. No visible lighting. No sign of life at all.

And eerily quiet.

“We are a boarding party from the USS Dauntless,” he called out through his loud-hailer. “Do you require assistance?”

He got only a hollow echo in reply.

He repeated the message twice more to no effect; as he got to his feet, he heard his radio squawk in his headset. It was the captain.

“Lieutenant Taylor, what the hell is going on over there? Any survivors?”

“No exterior hatches, sir; we had to cut our way in. They’re not answering our hails, sir.”

“For crissakes, Lieutenant.”

“They’re either all dead or they’re trapped in a different watertight hull section from the one we penetrated. If I had to guess, sir, I’d say any survivors would have ended up in the stern sections after that insane high-speed ascent straight up.”

“Agree, Lieutenant. Go find ’em and report back when you do.”

“Aye-aye, Captain,” Taylor said and signed off.

“Wait. Look at that!” Ensign Stubbs said. He dropped to one knee and peered inside.

“What have you got?”

“Some kind of a hazy red light. Just started blinking. Seems to be in the companionway, way forward of our entry point.”

Moose said: “Same drill below as topside. Two details, one goes forward, one aft. My detail goes aft. I want to find survivors. And I want to get a look at the reactors. Stubbs detail goes forward. Find out what kind of missiles this ghost ship is packing. Weapons at the ready. No LED lamps unless it’s an emergency. Use your night vision. Clear every goddamn room and call it. Got it? And watch your asses. This thing spooks me. It feels like a colossal goatfuck just waiting to happen.”

Five minutes later, they were all belowdecks and gathered inside the belly of the beast.

Standing in the grey and misty sunlight directly below the gaping hole they’d cut in the hull, Taylor said a silent prayer for the safety of his men. Then he lowered his NV goggles and led them aft toward the stern. They moved in single file, slowly along the length of the dark tube, ready for anything. The ship had clearly powered down after the furious ascent.

It may have been dead in the water.

But it was a killing machine. And it exuded a kind of dark kinetic energy they could feel in the marrow of their bones.