Straits of Power (44 page)

Jeffrey ordered the two crewmen to stay in the tiny bridge cockpit, as lookouts of a sort for now. He and Bell slid down the vertical ladders leading below, being careful not to snag the dangling fiber-optic cable. They rushed to the control room and took their seats at the command console; the lighting was red, for battle stations. Meltzer was very busy at the ship controls, trying to keep
Challenger
from damaging herself by hitting the bulkheads in the hold.

At least floating free in the hold helps cushion us from the shaking by our host.

“Fire Control,” Jeffrey ordered, “load high-explosive Mark Eighty-eights in torpedo tubes one through seven. Load an off-board probe in tube eight.” He wanted this all done immediately, while they were more or less on an even trim.

Bell acknowledged and relayed commands to Lieutenant Torelli, standing in the aisle nearby. He acknowledged, issued more orders, and Torelli’s men went to work.

Jeffrey called up data from the helos, masked from the line of sight of the
Bunga Azul
by Shakir Island. The data remained available over the net, through satellites.

“Firing-point procedures, Mark Eighty-eights in tubes one through seven. Target is the Snow Tiger. Load firing solution using target depth and course and speed from the data link.”

Bell and then Torelli acknowledged.

This was network-centric warfare at its most extreme. Jeffrey was programming his torpedoes against a target he couldn’t detect, while inside a sinking surface ship’s hold, using information from helicopters coming to his host’s antennas via outer space.

“Make tubes one through seven ready in all respects, including opening outer doors.”

Again Jeffrey’s crew went to work.

Speaking of doors.

Jeffrey tried to call Siregar, not sure if the intercom inside the master’s ship had failed. Siregar answered.

“What’s the depth beneath your keel?”

“Six hundred feet now. The seafloor drop-off is steep.”

“What’s your status?”

“The fuel fires are out of control. We are very low in the water and very difficult to handle. I will not be able to counterflood against the port list without losing too much buoyancy. The main deck will soon be awash regardless.”

“Evacuate the covert radio room. In one minute from my mark, open your bottom doors. Then abandon ship. You’ll be picked up soon when those helos see you.”

“One minute, understood.”

“Mark.”

“Understood.”

Jeffrey grabbed an internal intercom, for
Challenger
’s bridge. “Bridge, Captain, cut the fiber-optic cable. Clear the bridge, smartly. Shut and dog both sail-trunk hatches.”

The men on the bridge acknowledged.

The data link was broken.

“Green board, sir,” COB reported.
Challenger
was ready to dive.

Jeffrey watched the chronometer on his console. Each remaining second of that minute felt like a lifetime.

Everyone in the control room cringed when they heard the groaning of protesting steel. Some crewmen feared the
Bunga Azul
was breaking up or sinking already. But that groaning had a different cause.

“Bottom doors have not opened!” Bell reported. “Bottom doors appear to be warped and jammed by torpedo hits!”

We’re trapped. The Snow Tiger will get in position and shoot at us repeatedly after the
Bunga Azul
goes down. . . . We’re defenseless. The German will keep firing until
Challenger
is smashed to pieces.

Jeffrey grabbed the 1MC. It was noisy, but that was the least of his problems. It was the best way to reach anyone, anywhere in the ship, even if they were asleep. “Lieutenant Estabo to the control room smartly.”

There was another groaning noise: Siregar trying again to open the doors.

“Doors have not opened!” Bell yelled.

Challenger
jolted. There was a different sound, a metallic scraping.

“Sail roof is hitting hold overhead.”

Jeffrey had only one choice. “Chief of the Watch, flood all main ballast-tank groups.”

“Flood main ballast, aye!”

COB flipped switches. A new noise started, the roaring of air forced out of the vents in the tops of the ballast tanks, as seawater displaced the air and flooded into the tanks from below.

“Chief of the Watch, flood the negative tank.”

“Flood negative, aye.”

This would make
Challenger
heavier, giving her negative buoyancy. Jeffrey hoped her weight pressing down on the bottom doors might make them spring open.

Challenger
bounced down onto the hold’s supporting rubber blocks, landing slightly cockeyed. The control-room deck was tilted a few degrees down and to the right.

It didn’t work. The bottom doors stayed shut.

Felix Estabo arrived.

“I’ll make this short,” Jeffrey told him. “The bottom doors are jammed and we need to break them open with explosive charges planted on each hinge. Take your men and enough equipment, suit up with compressed-air tanks, lock out of
Challenger,
and get it done.”

“Are we sinking?”

“We will be very soon.”

Felix nodded grimly and ran below.

Jeffrey knew he’d probably just given Felix and Chief Costa and their men death sentences. Once the
Bunga Azul
left the surface, her depth would increase quickly. Men working in scuba would be exposed to ever-greater pressure. At some point, their compressed-air supply would start to become poisonous.

But we don’t have mixed-gas rigs that could let them cope at deeper depth. Nobody thought we’d need them.

Then there was decompression sickness, when the men came back into the ship—the bends, agonizing, and fatal if severe enough.

Jeffrey had no choice. All he could do was wait.

COB reported when the SEALs were locking out of
Challenger.
Jeffrey ordered the on-hull photonic sensors activated, in laser line-scan mode for illumination. Control-room monitors let him and his crew observe as the SEALs went to work with practiced skill. From his own SEAL training years before, Jeffrey assumed they’d use as a time delay—to let them get back into his ship—a proper length of fuse cord that would burn slowly even deep underwater, lit by a tiny explosive charge set off manually by a trigger and percussion cap. But the details were up to Felix.

Jeffrey watched in anguish as the men moved in slow motion through the water outside the hull, using small portable floodlights to see in the dark around Jeffrey’s blue-green lasers. If they didn’t finish fast enough and succeed in blowing open the doors, the
Bunga Azul
would hit the bottom. Then
Challenger
would never escape.

“Hold is fully flooded,” Bell reported.

“Very well, Fire Control. . . . Helm, call out your depth as indicated by sea pressure in the hold.”

“Fifty-five feet, sir.”

Allowing for her deep draft and her freeboard, the
Bunga Azul
would go under any moment.

An explosion from somewhere rocked the ship. Jeffrey thought it was another torpedo hit. He realized it was too soon for that, given the distance and speed of the Snow Tiger and her weapons. He suspected that a hot auxiliary boiler on the host ship, already weakened by mechanical stress, had burst from thermal shock when suddenly covered by much colder water.

The vibrations stopped; the
Bunga Azul
’s engines had gone dead. The sensation was replaced by heavy shuddering, with more metallic groans and eerie crying sounds as the
Bunga Azul
left the surface.

“Depth eighty feet,” Meltzer called out.

“Very well, Helm.” The deck began to tilt backward. The host ship was sinking by the stern.

Too much angle that way and we’ll never get out of this alive.

“One hundred feet amidships,” Meltzer said. “One hundred twenty at our stern.”
Challenger
’s stern was deeper than her bow because of the way the
Bunga Azul
was going down; the water pressure aft would be higher. The monitors showed that Felix and his men were still working as best they could.

“One hundred fifty amidships.”

Here’s where breathing compressed air starts getting toxic.

“Depth two hundred feet amidships, two-thirty at our stern.”

The ship kept sinking, her rate of descent slowed only by pockets of air in compartments that wouldn’t stay unflooded for long. She was also tilting more steeply backward—and so was
Challenger.
Jeffrey watched as Felix and his SEALs frantically laid a main and a backup detcord line, to connect all the charges at the hinges to one central detonator. They moved out of sight of any of the hull’s photonic sensors.

“Three hundred feet amidships!” From the nautical charts and Jeffrey’s mental estimates, with the forward progress the host ship had made since he’d last spoken to Master Siregar, the bottom at their position should be nearly one thousand feet deep. The carcass of the
Bunga Azul
continued in its death throes. Steel plates tore with screaming noises, bulkheads collapsed with sudden loud booms, air pockets hissed and bubbled away, and major welds failed with thunderclaps.
Challenger
slipped on the blocks and rolled, and was thrown about like a toy weighing thousands of tons.

Jeffrey saw a SEAL float past one photonics sensor, his chest and abdomen squashed, surrounded by a spreading dark cloud that Jeffrey knew had to be blood. A lanyard tangled in what was once his waist trailed off camera. His dive buddy’s corpse drifted into view, with a mangled pancake where the man’s head should be. They’d been crushed between
Challenger
’s hull and the side of the hold. In the control room, crewmen gasped.

“Depth four hundred feet! . . . Four hundred fifty!”

“SEALs are in escape trunk with upper hatch shut,” COB finally said. “Green board, draining escape trunk’s water now.”

Felix’s voice came over the intercom circuit from the lock-out trunk. “Fire in the hole in one minute.”

“Fire in the hole, one minute, aye,” Jeffrey said with immense relief; Felix had at least survived the ordeal so far.

The charges would detonate soon. If they failed,
Challenger
was doomed.

Felix’s words had been slurred, more than just from grief at losing two more men. Slurred speech was one of the first signs of decompression sickness.

Jeffrey grabbed the 1MC mike. “Corpsman and all assistants to forward escape trunk. Prepare to receive three decompression-sickness casualties plus two dead. Bring casualties into minisub and use as a recompression chamber.”

“Captain,” the phone talker said, “corpsman acknowledges, is headed for escape trunk.”

The best immediate treatment for the bends was to return the men to a pressurized environment. Then, standard tables told how to decompress in gradual stages so their bodies could adjust with minimum lasting ill effects.

On the monitors Jeffrey saw bright flashes, and through the hull he heard dull thuds and felt new shocks. The SEALs’ explosive charges had detonated.

“Bottom doors falling away!” Bell reported.

“Chief of the Watch, shift all variable ballast to forward tanks smartly.” COB acknowledged.
Challenger
began to right herself, still half inside the sinking host ship’s hold.

“Helm, make your down-angle thirty degrees by the stern planes. Maximum down angle on the fore planes. Ahead one third.”

From tilting backward,
Challenger
quickly went to nosing down by the bow. Her pump-jet propulsor kicked in, and drove her out from under the
Bunga Azul.
Jeffrey gave orders and Meltzer made
Challenger
level off. COB’s fingers danced on his console, restoring neutral buoyancy and trim.
Challenger
was free, a working warship again—and a powerful enemy was rushing to deliver more killing blows. Jeffrey had to engage his opponent as soon as possible, but Shakir Island still sat between them.

“Fire Control, tubes one through seven, target remains Snow Tiger. Program dogleg course past intervening terrain. Launch on generated bearings, at ten-second intervals,
shoot.”

Generated bearings meant the weapon-system computer’s best estimate of an updated firing solution, projecting ahead in time from the last stream of data the
Bunga Azul
’s antennas could feed. Bell and Torelli did as ordered; it took a full minute from shooting the first fish until the last weapon was launched.

“All tubes fired electrically!” Torelli said. “Good wires!”

“All units running normally,” Milgrom confirmed.

“Helm, put us behind the
Bunga Azul,
follow her down, be careful of our weapon wires.” Meltzer acknowledged. This would be a very tricky maneuver. Jeffrey had seven wide-body Mark 88 torpedoes dashing through the sea. Their attack speed was seventy knots, and their crush depth was the same as
Challenger
’s—fifteen thousand feet. Jeffrey had fired at a target he couldn’t detect, even on active sonar, because of where he and the Snow Tiger were, the island’s underwater mass in the way.

Given
Challenger
’s torpedo-tube design, if he reloaded, the control wires to the weapons already fired would be cut.
They’ll have to search and home on their own. I need to saturate the Snow Tiger’s defenses, to exploit the element of surprise.

The
Bunga Azul
hit the bottom with a loud thud, and a final screech of tortured metal.

“Fire Control,” Jeffrey ordered, “program all units to go to autonomous active search as soon as past Shakir Island.” The gravimeter showed that the seafloor a few miles ahead was wide open, and the slope down to past three thousand feet was smooth. Outside the Shadwan Channel, beyond the mouth of the Jubal Strait, there was nowhere for the Snow Tiger to hide. Bell and then Torelli acknowledged Jeffrey’s order.

“Fire Control,” Jeffrey snapped, “launch the off-board probe in fiber-optic tether mode. Send it around and past the
Bunga Azul
’s hulk on a course due east at its maximum speed.” Twenty knots for short sprints on its batteries. “Reload tubes one through seven, high-explosive Mark Eighty-eights,
smartly.”
A rapid second salvo was everything now.