Seawolf End Game (36 page)

Kristen stepped to the side to allow him to pass in the cramped quarters.

“Not at all, sir,” she said, a bit startled at having him suddenly in front of her. “I was just leaving.”

He moved to the side, releasing the hatch as she stepped toward the door. For a brief moment they were only a hair’s breadth apart. She paused, her hand touching the handle to the hatch, but she didn’t grip it. He’d paused as well, and she could smell his essence suddenly beside her, surrounding her, engulfing her.

Kristen opened her eyes, her disciplined mind unable to dismiss what she was feeling. She looked up into his eyes, seeing the weariness evident there. He was about to say something, perhaps some comment to cause the brief, unexpected moment to pass without another thought. But the words disappeared on his lips as he looked at her.

Kristen heard Patricia’s words echoing in her ears. She’d never seized the moment. She’d never enjoyed the few opportunities life offered. Patricia had cast off convention and had still achieved her goals. Kristen had suppressed the natural rebel within her and had suffered for it.

“Lieutenant?” Brodie’s voice was different than she’d ever heard it. The tone was no longer strong or commanding. He sounded almost timid, perhaps even a little afraid.

“Captain?” Kristen replied hungrily but with a hint of fear as well. She felt his warmth just beyond her own. She could almost drink the scent of him.

There could be nothing.

They were a lifetime apart.

They could be nothing, she reminded herself as her secret side, the side she’d suppressed for so long, leaned slightly forward. Her eyes saw his lips hesitating near hers. She could feel the desire a breath away.

“Kris…” he whispered, his tone filled with many meanings. He didn’t want it to happen. He’d kept his distance. He’d tried to ignore her. He wanted her to leave. But he was too tired. His strength—his resolve—gone. So many thoughts conveyed with but a word.

“Sean,” she answered him, feeling the same fears, the same concerns.

Inside her head, she heard the secret rebel within screaming to finally be let out, shouting for her to finally reach out and grasp what she wanted. She was in a dream world as she felt her left hand touch his right arm. She could feel the tension in his muscles as he resisted. She wanted him so terribly, nothing else mattered. He was everything she’d ever imagined and more. Kristen didn’t want another moment to slip by without him knowing how she felt.

She relished the feel of his rough skin against her cheek. She could hear his breathing; long, deep breaths drawing in her scent. She felt his chest brush against her own. Her body tingled with energy and excitement but also apprehension.

Kristen felt his warm breath against the side of her neck. She turned her lips hungrily toward him. She kissed the side of his neck, tasting the salt on his flesh.

“I can’t,” he whispered before she felt his lips touch her closed eyes.

“I know,” Kristen agreed as her left hand slipped behind his neck and pulled him to her.

She felt him resist; his hands were on the bulkhead on each side of her as if to hold himself back. But whatever defenses he’d erected crumbled as she pulled him to her, finding his lips with her own. She felt the strength within his powerful frame melt as his arms encircled her. Tentatively at first, his hands gripped her and then, as the last vestiges of resistance collapsed, he pulled her tight, crushing her to him.

His lips were more pleasurable than anything she’d ever imagined. She felt her arms pulling herself up to him as if afraid he might pull away. She felt the bulkhead behind her as he pressed her against it, her boot heels pushing against the bottom of the bulkhead trying to lift herself up against him. She felt her hands move through his thick brown hair as her lips pressed against his, refusing to let go. She could no longer discriminate her own throbbing heart from the thunderous pounding of his…

Sound Room, USS Seawolf

T
he high pitched whine from the WLR-9 acoustic intercept box sounded through the sonar shack, awakening Kristen with a start. She was seated on the floor, her knees drawn up against her chest, her head and arms resting on them. She scrambled to her feet. The alarm had awakened her, but Kristen’s head was still filled with the cobwebs of sleep.

“What’s going on?” Kristen asked as she struggled to regain her senses. It seemed like a moment ago she’d been in his cabin… but it had been nothing but a dream.

Just a dream…

As she regained her wits, Kristen recognized the WLR-9 alerting them to an inbound torpedo. The sleepy sonar operators sprang to action too late. The
Seawolf
was traveling through the Persian Gulf searching for any hint of the
Borei.
The groggy sonar operators and the hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of computers and acoustical equipment had failed to detect another submarine as it slipped in on their starboard quarter. She cleared her mind of the delightful dream and moved toward the spectrum analyzer where Greenberg only too happily gave up his seat.

“Torpedo bearing one-three-five!” Goodman shouted a bit louder than necessary. “Range four thousand yards.”

Kristen felt the submarine accelerating and begin turning. “What is it?” she asked. “Where did it come from?”

“Out of fucking nowhere!” Greenberg cursed. “We had nothing from that direction.”

“Con, sonar,” Fabrini shouted into the microphone. “Inbound torpedo bearing one-three-five, range four thousand, speed fifty knots!”

Kristen slipped into her seat and strapped in as the deck beneath her tilted at a bizarre angle. She felt herself pressed forward by the growing acceleration as the entire boat shuddered. The boat’s own noise monitoring system sounded, alerting them to the cavitating pump-jet propulsor. Over the squawk box, she heard Brodie’s voice order the submarine to emergency flank speed.

Kristen didn’t want to hear it. She didn’t want to hear his voice. She didn’t want to think about him or the all-too-real dream she’d been enjoying a moment earlier. She had to focus. She tightened her seatbelt and grabbed the headphones as they slid off the console and donned them. She turned her energy away from his voice and toward the sound of the approaching torpedo, forcing herself to ignore her fear and exhaustion and just concentrate. The computer had already recognized the torpedo as a Russian-made, Soviet Era,
USET-80
torpedo, and it was coming directly for the
Seawolf
.

Brodie turned the
Seawolf
away and was accelerating rapidly to run from the approaching torpedo. The sonar shack momentarily lost the torpedo in their baffles. But then a far more ominous sound reached them as the torpedo went active and began lashing the
Seawolf’s
hull with sonar to help the torpedo guide itself to its target.

“The fucker’s got us,” Greenberg warned.

“Torpedo is active and homing. Range two thousand yards. Bearing one-eight-zero,” Fabrini reported, his voice again returning to a more normal pitch.

Kristen could hear nothing any more in her headphones except the homing torpedo getting closer and the sonar pings lashing the
Seawolf’s
hull.

“
Sonar, this is Brodie,”
she heard his voice, once again calm and controlled.
“Count down the range by hundreds.”

Fabrini did as ordered, counting down the range as the
Seawolf
, now at forty-one knots, raced as fast as she could to hopefully outrun the torpedo. But the torpedo continued to bore in on them remorselessly. She heard the range drop below one thousand yards, and then the collision alarm sound. Kristen removed her headphones, hanging them on the peg by her display and gripped the edge of the console.

“Five hundred yards,” Fabrini reported as the other sonar operators prepared for the torpedo impact. Goodman literally groaned beside her as the torpedo bore in remorselessly.

“Three hundred yards,”

“Launch countermeasures,”
she heard Brodie’s calm voice.
“Hard right rudder, all stop.”

The
Seawolf
turned abruptly, causing the deck to pitch wildly to one side. Kristen tensed her muscles to hold herself erect and in front of her display. She knew what Brodie was trying to do. By turning sharply at high speed, the
Seawolf’s
huge rudder bit into the water and created a huge knuckle of swirling water and air bubbles into which he also launched their countermeasures. The result would hopefully look like a real target to the inbound torpedo and allow the
Seawolf
to escape yet again. But with the inbound torpedo already locked onto them with its own sonar…

Despite the alarms, despite the warnings, no one was ready for the blast when it came.

 The
Seawolf
was slammed, as if by a massive fist, and thrown sideways. Several men screamed in fear as the lights twinkled and went out. The submarine shuddered violently. For a moment, Kristen thought her seat had broken loose from the deck as she was thrown viciously to the side.

She hit the console and barely avoided smashing her skull into the bulkhead. Emergency lighting came on immediately, and she sat up carefully. Her screens were blank, and Kristen glanced to her left to see that all of the other systems were down as well. She expected to hear the sound of the
Seawolf’s
ballast tanks blowing and lifting them to the surface, but instead she heard a far worse sound: water streaming in.

Kristen removed her seatbelt automatically as men donned their EABs. She climbed over two men who’d been thrown to the deck by the blast and then went through the hatch to see a ruptured pipe spraying water in the control room. She turned forward, remembering a valve in the passageway for the fractured saltwater line and ran for it. The sound of men shouting in the control room as they struggled to seal the damaged pipe, along with more ominous sounds of alarms blaring, assaulted her senses as sparks from shorted out systems fell in the passageway.

Kristen reached the valve and began turning it, forcing her arms to work and ignore her instincts screaming for her to run. They were sinking, and they needed to evacuate the stricken submarine. But she squelched these morbid thoughts and turned the valve as fast as she could.

Kristen heard the spraying water stop. She turned, looking down the dimly lit passageway to the control room beyond. Regular lighting still hadn’t returned, but she worked her way back past the sonar shack and into the control room as systems started coming back on line. Brodie was soaked from spraying water and there was standing water on the deck. Plus, several men were injured from being thrown about by the blast.

“COB, get me a damage report,” Brodie ordered as he made his way forward to the helm control. “Are you okay?” he asked as he reached the helm and saw her standing in the hatchway.

She ignored any concern for herself, knowing that if the submarine was going down, her injuries were irrelevant. “How bad are we hit?” she asked instead.

“I don’t know yet,” he admitted. “We’ve lost the reactor for certain and are currently on batteries. What does it look like in sonar?”

Kristen shook her head. “We lost power when the reactor scrammed. I’ll check and see what’s come back on line.”

Brodie nodded in response as he ordered the planesman to bring them down. Most men in his position, would surface, but even now, Brodie’s instincts drove him toward the depths and safety.

Kristen returned to sonar and saw the narrowband stack and the spectrum analyzer coming back on line, but everything else was dark. “Get some technicians in here,” she ordered Fabrini and then directed the others to go through the emergency procedures while she returned to the spectrum analyzer.

Kristen again took her seat and strapped in, automatically reaching for the headphones as she felt something she’d never felt before. The
Seawolf
seemed to strike something. The boat had already been going slow, but now suddenly slowed abruptly and tilted to one side as they gently struck the sandy bottom, coming to rest on the sea floor. The boat didn’t sit even though, and was tilted downward by the bow ten degrees and canted to the starboard side by nearly fifteen degrees.

“What the fuck’s happening?” someone shouted in panic.

“Dammit!” she barked angrily. She was as scared as anyone, but panicking would help none of them. “Settle down and get back on your system checks and damage control procedures!”

The sonar operators returned to their duties, but were—like her—clearly shaken by the fact they were now resting on the bottom of the Persian Gulf.

Kristen ran a systems check as soon as her equipment came back on line. “Starboard passive arrays are down, but the bow mounted sonar is still functioning,” she told Fabrini.

 Fabrini reported to the control room as technicians arrived to begin assessing the damage and repairing it. The acoustic intercept box came back on line after a few minutes, a fuse having been tripped in a junction box in the passageway. But the broadband and classification stack would be at least twenty minutes. Similar teams were already moving throughout the submarine trying to repair damaged systems.