He bolted up and stared at his bottom screen in time to catch its very faint glow trickling at the far-right side, barely visible and definitely lacking the accompanying sound of a diesel or traditional batteries.
Since leaving the area southwest of Sri Lanka more than three days before, following the Tomahawk launch on the terrorist base, Missouri had made it to the southwestern coast of Malaysia. Along the way, it had transitioned command from US Naval Forces Central Command (NAVCENT) to United States Pacific Fleet (USPACFLT), the naval component of the United States Pacific Command (USPACOM) encompassing the eastern portion of the Indian Ocean, the South China Sea, and the entire Pacific Ocean. Missouri’s orders from USPACFLT, headquarters at Naval Station Pearl Harbor in Honolulu, Hawaii, had been relayed to the Commander, Submarine Force, US Pacific Fleet (COMSUBPAC), which had directed Kelly’s boat straight toward the port of Singapore to rendezvous with Stennis as it crawled toward NS Pearl Harbor. The Mighty Mo was now tasked with providing submarine support in the wake of the tragic loss of North Dakota. The news had rattled the crew, especially those who had either friends or family aboard it, a list that included Cmdr. Frank Kelly. The skipper had taken the personal blow stoically, leaving Lt. Cmdr. Robert Giannotti in charge of the control room before retiring to his quarters.
Chappelle closed his eyes and listened again, this time picking up what sounded like a faint high-pitch whisper, like someone blowing very gently in his ears, almost imperceptible but still very real — the sound of hydrogen-oxygen fuel cells.
“Conn, Sonar! New contact! Bearing zero-seven-zero!” he finally announced, licking his lips and rubbing his eyes. “Range three-six miles. Speed one-five knots. It’s a type Two-One-Two.”
Lt. Cmdr. Giannotti appeared in a flash, his bulk hovering over him.
“Is that the bastard, Chappy?” he asked in his booming voice.
“Well, it’s not one of ours, sir. And it’s trying to sneak out of there in the middle of the night. So…”
“Nice job, kid. Stay on him,” Giannotti said before heading over to the pilot and copilot.
Chappelle closed his eyes and focused, locating it again near the far side of the orchestra playing that lone tu—
The contact suddenly vanished, both in his headset as well as on the screen. Gone. Poof.
Chappelle blinked when the alto sax dissolved within the fuller melody of two French horns and a tuba, the cavitation from the screws of two large tankers and a mega container ship steaming away from the Port of Singapore.
Son of a bitch, he thought, then shouted, “Son of a bitch!”
“What is it, Chappy?” Giannotti asked.
“Smart girl. It’s hiding in the baffle of a larger ship. It’s gotta be our guy.”
The large officer came running back, placing a hand on the back of Chappelle’s chair and leaning down. “How? Did it surface? We should hear her diesels.”
“Negative, sir. It’s running on those new batteries. Hydrogen cells. Could barely hear her and its single screw as it was. Now she’s a ghost.”
“Can you track which one?”
“There are three at the moment,” he said, pointing at the parallel contacts dripping down the left side of the bottom screen. “And it vanished behind the leftmost one… this oil tanker.” He placed his index on a vertical trace. “But the tanker’s baffle is so close to that of this second tanker and this container ship that the Type 212 could hop from one to the other and we would never know it, at least from this distance. Fortunately, all three are heading to the South China Sea.”
“For now,” Giannotti said.
“Yeah. But if we get close enough, I might be able to pick her up, even in the baffle.”
“Then let’s get you close enough,” Giannotti said before calling Cmdr. Kelly’s stateroom.
Feeling the mild acceleration of the Mighty Mo preparing for a hunt, Chappelle returned to his concert, scrubbing the outer reaches of the orchestra, searching for his tenor sax.
Cmdr. Frank Kelly worked through his seventeenth mile on one of the stationary bikes in the small gym amidships. His hands gripped the handles so hard that his knuckles were white. Drenched in sweat, he ignored the casual glances from the half dozen sailors lifting weights, just as he ignored his burning thighs and calves, his eyes fixated on the pipes running alongside the starboard side of the ship. But in his mind, he saw the torpedoes wounding Stennis and killing North Dakota.
Killing Little Charlie, he thought as everyone in the family called Lieutenant Junior Grade Charles Kelly, one of the 135 souls who had perished when the sub broke up and—
Kelly stopped pedaling when he sensed the sudden acceleration. The men working out also stopped, looking at one another in obvious confusion.
What the hell?
But just as he was about to climb off, Giannotti stepped through the bulkhead.
“What’s going on, Bobby?” he asked.
The large XO grabbed a white towel from the stack next to the water fountain, walked up to the bike, and handed it to his superior officer. “Time to get some payback, Boss.”
His heart pounding in his chest, Kelly caught his breath, wiped his face, then asked, “What are you talking about?”
“Chappy found the bastard, sir. We’re going hunting.”
A Sikorsky CH-53E Super Stallion helicopter hovered fifty feet over the flight deck after a five-hour flight from US Army Garrison Stuttgart in Germany that had included refueling over the Mediterranean. But today, the heavy-duty transport, designed to carry as many as fifty troops, hauled a very different load: US Naval Special Warfare Development Group commander Jake Russo, his team of eight operators, and more than 25,000 pounds of violence. That included a MK 8 Mod 1 SEAL Delivery Vehicle (SDV) secured to the bottom of the Super Stallion.
A fifteen-year veteran with the SEALs and on his third year as commander of DEVGRU, or SEAL Team Six, as it is more commonly known, Russo breathed in the dry desert air while he watched the helicopter crew lower the twenty-one-foot-long midget submarine just aft of the carrier’s island, out of the way of its rows of parked planes.
“Tell me, Jake,” said his right-hand man, Lieutenant Gustavo Pacheco, who stood next to his commander by one of the Super Stallion’s side windows. “Of all the damned places we could have gone to set up shop, why here? I mean, didn’t we just lose nine brothers on a carrier just like this one?”
Although Pacheco was right, of course, and the pain of losing team members — some of whom he had personally trained — was still incredibly raw, Russo ignored him. He kept his eyes on the SDV swinging slightly at the end of a thick steel cable as a sailor on the flight deck guided the pilot.
“We’re sitting fucking ducks here, amigo,” Pacheco added. “I mean, look at it. Just a big fat target ripe for a big fat missile, and that ain’t no way for a brother to die. No, sir.”
“We go where we need to go, Gus,” Russo replied as the SDV finally reached the flight deck and the crew disconnected the cable and began to secure it. “And this carrier is a step closer to getting some payback instead of sitting on our fat asses in Norfolk feeling sorry for ourselves.”
As the Super Stallion’s pilot shifted over amidships to drop them off, Russo added, “Besides, if it were easy…”
“Yeah, they would have sent the army,” Pacheco said.
“Copy that,” Russo replied.
But the commander also wasn’t happy with their current predicament. Unfortunately, arrangements had already been made for his team to use Lincoln as his staging area while waiting to get word on the whereabouts of whoever was responsible for the attacks against Truman and Stennis.