Warriors

CHAPTER 24

The central companionway was wide and mostly featureless save for the miles of tubing and conduit. At least forty feet in diameter, it seemed to be little more than an oval stainless steel tube with a flat, honeycombed deck that ran the length of the vessel. Missiles forward, reactors aft, he knew that. But, Taylor wondered with mounting curiosity, where the hell were the crew quarters?

A sub this size would carry a complement of at least 150 souls. So where was the damn head? The wardrooms? Where was the galley? Where were the pots, the pans, the dishes, and the damned garbage? And, most curious of all, where in God’s name was the sub’s control room?

“Skipper, hold up,” a young crewman said in his earphones. “It’s Sparky, sir. I got something back here. Almost missed it.”

“What have you got, Sparky?” Taylor called back.

“Recessed panel in the bulkhead, sir. Large enough to be a hatch.”

“Open it,” Taylor said, making his way back.

“Can’t, sir. Look. No handle, nothing.”

“Gotta be a way… wait, a keypad.”

Taylor looked at the thin outline carved into the bulkhead. About seven feet high by four feet wide. Definitely a hatch into a room of some kind. He leaned forward and peered closely at the keypad. There was something else above it. In the low NVG light, he’d almost missed it.

“Okay, here we go, gentlemen. Small brass construction nameplate screwed into the bulkhead. And with some kind of writing below… looks… yeah, it’s Chinese…”

“A giant Chinese sub with almost forty nuclear warheads just outside U.S. territorial waters?” Sparky said. “Holy shit, where’s Wolf Blitzer when you need him?”

“Yeah. This vessel is Chinese, all right. Wouldn’t you just know it? Seaman Ka-Ching, get up here now, I need a translator.”

An athletic young seaman in heavy black glasses came forward, stood on tiptoes, and peered at the small steel plate for a second or two.

“Bingo,” the sailor said.

“What’s it say, Ka-Ching?”

“Here at the top it says ‘Gaius Augustus’… gotta be the name of the vessel. Weird, right? A Roman name? I think, anyway. Well, and then, right below that, ‘First Centurion of Rome.’ ”

“What’s this bit at the bottom?” Taylor asked.

“Down here at the bottom it says, ‘Control Room/Sonar. No entry.’ ”

“No entry? A control room you can’t enter?”

“That’s what it says, Skipper.”

“Well, guess what. We’re entering it. Ordnance, gimme a thin line of C-4 around the edges. Blow it. Rest of you guys come with me out of harm’s way.”

They moved along the corridor to get away from the blast and Taylor got on the radio to Stubbs, whose detail was doing the bow recon. “We got a control room back here, Stubbs, but we have to blow the door. Just a heads-up so you don’t shit your Jockeys, Ensign. Stand by… okay… thirty seconds… fuse lit… Count it off…”

BOOM!

The noise was deafening inside the length of the closed tube. But the door was gone, blown inward. Taylor entered first, sweeping his automatic weapon side to side. Not a soul. He flicked on his helmet LED light as did the others. Shafts of pure white light now crossed and crisscrossed the darkened space.

“Control room, clear!” he said, motioning his detail inside.

It looked like a control room, all right. Extraordinarily high-tech but still recognizable. But the first thing they noticed was that it was a control room with no goddamn place for the captain to sit. Or, they saw looking around, anybody else for that matter. Weird. You spend all day staring at an instrument panel, you need a place to sit!

But there was at least a periscope!

It emerged up out of a well and disappeared through an opening in the overhead. Clearly, there was a deck hatch directly overhead for when the periscope was deployed, but they’d missed it somehow. There were no eyepieces. Clearly, whatever the lens saw was projected directly onto digital displays. But how the hell did you control the thing? How did you steer the boat, for God’s sake? Another mystery.

The control room was nothing but an austere space packed to the gunwales with twenty-first-century technology. Racks upon racks of servers obviously capable of feeding data throughout the sub via wired and wireless networks. Large digital monitors, imaging technologies including what looked to be IR camera feeds for night vision, sonar screens for acoustic data, laser-ranger finders, huge bundles of fiber-optic cables snaking across the deck (really odd!) they couldn’t help tripping over.

To port were all the combat and situational awareness systems, hundreds of terabytes of processing power to crunch data during combat and arrive at the most complete picture of the wartime environment. And next to that, a grid showing all forty long-range missiles in their silos, their current status, “Armed,” and the myriad of systems’ readouts that accompanied any complex launch platform.

“I feel like I’m in the middle of a Matrix movie,” Sparky said, “just walking around the set looking for my Xbox joystick.”

“Yeah. Not exactly a user-friendly workplace environment, is it, gentlemen?” Taylor said. “All right. We’ve seen it. The weather topside’s not getting any better. We’ll go aft for a quick recon of the stern compartments, verify whether or not there are survivors. And then get the hell off this ghost ship.”

All Lieutenant Taylor and his men found in the stern were the sub’s nuclear reactors. There were no sealed watertight compartments. No crew quarters, no heads, no messrooms. There were no survivors aboard because there was no place, no room, for survivors to be!

When they’d completed searching every square inch of the vessel, Taylor radioed Stubbs and told him to get his men headed back to the amidships section where they’d entered the sub. On the double. He wanted to get back aboard the motor launch and back to Dauntless to inform the captain about everything he’d seen.

He already knew what he was going to say, and he could already hear what the captain would reply. He got the old man on the radio:

“Captain, there are no survivors. Because that vessel out there is the world’s first USV.”

“The first what?” the skipper would say. “No survivors?”

“There is no crew. No provisions for one. She wasn’t built for that.”

“What the hell was she built for?”

“It’s a submersible launch platform, sir. Just massive reactors and forty huge long-range nukes being driven around the world’s oceans by some sub driver-controller in an underground bunker in Beijing.”

“Are you out of your mind, son? What did you call this fat bastard?”

“A USV. I made it up.”

“What’s it stand for?”

“Unmanned submersible vessel.”

“Are you out of your effing mind, son?”

“No, sir.”

“Get your ass back here for debriefing. Now!”

Taylor froze. The goddamn sub had started to move!

First he knew in his gut the sub’s silent reactors had come back up online. Then he heard the powerful roar and whir of the massive props at the stern. He felt the ship shudder… She was moving forward, gaining momentum… and then the unmistakable roar of seawater flooding into the three-foot hole they’d cut in the hull. Mother of God, the dead boat had somehow come back to life; he could feel it, hear it, all around him.

And she was submerging.

The giant USV nosed over into a steep dive.

“Stubbs!” Taylor shouted. “Evacuate immediately! She’s diving!”

“Aye, sir! We’re on our way. We see the water now, sir! A goddamn flood of green water sloshing right for us! It’s ankle… no, it’s knee-high already, Skipper!”

“How far are you from the breach we cut in the hull?”

“I’d say four hundred yards… but… there’s no way to tell, Moose. We’re going to be swimming in a second or two here… ”

The roar of the flooding breach amidships in the hull was deafening. “Move faster! Whatever it takes, man. I’ll meet you amidships, Stubby. Move your ass! Count your guys off as they go out the hole. I’ll do the same. Go, go, go!”

With no handholds or overheads inside the steeply down-angled companionway, Taylor and his five-man stern detail practically tumbled forward toward the bow. Taylor knew Moose and the men now struggling back from the bow had the opposite problem. They’d be scrambling up a slippery slope into an onrushing flood tide.

Death had been the last thing on his mind on the bridge this morning. But now… he knew a couple of things:

There was no crew.

That’s why wherever sat the asshole who was driving this boat, he had brought her up vertically. With no men aboard, it simply didn’t matter — the angle, the speed, nothing.

And now… with all that water weight accumulating in the bow…

She was going into a vertical dive.

Taylor could now see the dark green water pouring in. He could see men from Stubbs’s detail fighting uphill against the invading seawater, grinding through thigh-high water in a last-ditch effort to reach the escape hole.

One young sailor, whose blue shirt was drenched with salt water and blood, had gotten there first. He had a one-handed death grip on the perimeter of the hole, water pouring down over his head. He was reaching down to his guys with his free hand in a desperate attempt to haul them up and out.

Taylor saw one bow guy get out, then another, then a third, all kicking frantically and clinging to the heroic sailor risking his life for his comrades. The guy was literally fighting the sea. He was obviously in excruciating pain, his arm muscles surely giving way, and Taylor could see in his eyes that he was done.

He reached him and grabbed his straining forearm.

“Go! Go! Go!” Taylor screamed in his ear, prying the guy’s fingers from the rim. “I’ve got this! You are relieved, sailor! Swim for it!”

Another of Stubbs’s guys instantly appeared and Taylor got him out fast. That was five, he’d counted. Taylor waited, holding on, knowing the whole bow detail had to get out first. There was one to be accounted for. He’d give Stubbs a minute and then he’d have to… a cry above the frothing seawater.

“Sir!”

It was Ka-Ching. His normal smile was replaced by a mask of terror, his right hand raised toward Taylor in what looked like a plea.

Taylor took his hand and pulled him up into the roaring funnel that was the hole.

As Ka-Ching kicked up and away toward the surface, Taylor saw the rest of his own guys clawing their way toward him as the speed of descent increased every second.

Where the hell was Stubbs?

He grabbed the nearest hand and yanked with all his strength.

They were all seconds away from plunging to the bottom of the ocean — taking with them the knowledge of a watery grave and certain doom.