A voice came from the back of the room, the young SEAL lieutenant, Bartholomay, Morris’ XO.
“You heard him. Doc. Let’s go. Scrub up and get your stuff to the wardroom.”
Doc Sheffield looked at the two officers for a moment, shook his head and left the control room.
“Any word?” Kurt Lennox asked Black Bart Bartholomay, who had brought a pot of coffee to the control room.
“They’re still in there. It’s tough to say if Doc is making any progress.”
“Well, at least Murphy’s still alive or they would have quit.”
“I guess …”
“How about the crew?”
“They’ll probably be sleeping until we get to the Korea Bay. I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re still sleeping when the medevac choppers land on the hospital ship. I’ve seen hostages have a post-traumatic shock before, but never like this.”
“What did you guys find in the torpedo room?”
“A goddamned mess. Blood everywhere from gathering the Chinese bodies and loading them into the torpedo tube. I don’t think we’re going to be shooting anything.”
“Is there an intact torpedo?”
“Five or six, but they’re all locked in by broken units. From what I’ve been able to see of the hydraulic loading system, the only way to get a torpedo into a tube would be to push it in by hand.”
“What about the air rams?” Lennox asked, referring to the pistons that pressurized the torpedo-tube water-tanks.
“They look okay but I’m not familiar with the system.”
“And the tubes?”
“One and three are leaking bad. But the port tubes seem okay. The firing panel switches were rewired for them. The one on the port side is where we stuffed all the Chinese bodies. But as far as the tubes being able to fire, who am I to say?”
“Until I get a crew back, you’re it. So here’s the deal — we do this the oldfashioned way, with muscle power. Get your guys below and break some grease out of the auxiliary machinery room. We’ll fire a water slug out tube two to get rid of the bodies, then grease the racks and the weapons and shove two of the good ones into tubes two and four.”
“What about that?” Bart asked, pointing to the dead firecontrol panel.
“How are you going to shoot the fish if the computer’s broken?”
“We’ll set them manually from the torpedo room console.”
“How will you know where to shoot?”
“Manual plots. I’ll show you how.”
Lieutenant Commander Vaughn walked into the room from the forward door. His coveralls were soaked with sweat, his hair plastered to his bearded face. Dark circles rimmed his eyes. He slouched against the doorway. Bart and Lennox froze, waiting for the word.
“Well,” Vaughn said, “we’re finished. The captain’s stable, but Doc’s not sure if he’ll last more than another twenty-four hours. We need to get him to a hospital.”
“We’ll have to break radio silence to tell the fleet about what medical help we’ll need,” Lennox thought aloud.
“I want choppers standing by to get the boys off.”
“Risky,” Vaughn said.
“The bad guys could vector in on our position with direction finders.”
“We’ll send it in a buoy with a three-hour time delay They could still get a lock on our track, but it’s no secret we’re headed for the bay entrance at Lushun/Penglai Gap at maximum speed. My guess is the Chinese will be waiting in force at the Gap no matter what we do with the radio.”
“I’ll draft the message,” Vaughn said, walking aft to the radio room.
Vaughn loaded the UHF satellite message buoy, roughly the size of a baseball bat, into the aft signal ejector, a small mechanism much like a torpedo tube set into the upper level of the aft compartment. When the buoy clicked home in the ejector he armed the switch that would activate the unit, then shut the ejector door. On the way back to the control room he ducked his head into the maneuvering room.
“You guys okay?” he asked the reactor operator.
“Real beat, Eng,” the TO answered. The watch standers aft were the same who had been on watch aft for the five days of captivity. Other than Lennox, Vaughn and the SEALs, the single engineering crew seemed the only men aboard who were sane.
“Hang in. A few more hours and we’ll be out of the bay and off this boat—”
“Off the boat?”
“There’s no way we can get this ship into Yokosuka with this crew — the guys on watch now are all we have, and by the time we reach Japan we’ll be asleep on our feet. I’m calling for a replacement crew as soon as we reach international waters.”
The electrical operator asked about the crew.
Vaughn told him the truth, his stomach turning as he finished the story.
“Do us all a favor, men,” Vaughn said.
“Stay awake and keep this plant up, no matter what. If we get a shock that opens the scram breakers, do a fast recovery startup. Don’t wait for orders.”
“Aye, sir. Good luck, Eng.”
Vaughn walked into the tunnel leading through the hatch to the forward compartment, up the ladder and down the passageway into control.
“Ready to launch, XO,” he said.
“Launch the signal ejector,” Lennox ordered.
Vaughn keyed a button on a small panel by the conn.
A hundred feet aft, the outer door of the signal ejector opened, and twenty seconds later a solenoid valve in a branch pipe from the auxiliary seawater system popped open, sending highpressure seawater into the bottom of the signal ejector tube that pushed out the radio buoy. The buoy climbed the fifty-five feet to the surface and began to float, barely visible in the brown water of the bay. A timer inside the unit began a three-hour countdown … At the end of the countdown a whip antenna extended from the buoy and the UHF radio activated, transmitting the message from the Tampa to the western Pacific COMMSAT high overhead in a geosynchronous orbit. Within thirty seconds the message transmission was complete, the buoy flooded and sank to the silty bottom of the bay.
By the time the Harbin Z-9A sub-chasing helicopter flew over the square mile of water from which the buoy had transmitted, the submarine Tampa was over fifty miles further east, approaching the entrance to the Lushun/Penglai Gap.
Admiral Richard Donchez stood in Flag Plot in the carrier’s island with a wall of windows overlooking the flight deck below. The central chart table was taken up with a chart of the Lushun/Penglai area, the Bohai Haixia Strait in the center. Donchez, in working khakis, leaned over the table. After a moment his aide, Fred Rummel, brought in a satellite photo of the P.L.A Navy fleet piers at Lushun. Donchez studied it for a moment, then straightened up and looked at Rummel’s fleshy face.
“The Northern Fleet’s getting underway.”
“Yes, sir. Every ship they have.”
“Including the Shaoguan,” Donchez said, pointing to the largest ship in the outbound fleet, the aircraft carrier that looked like a battleship with half the deck lopped off for the installation of a flight deck.
“Which means they’ll be flying ASW aircraft and helos. We’ll need the air wing. Call the SAG and the Air Boss to flag plot and get me a NESTOR circuit to the White House and the SecDef.”
Rummel grabbed a phone and gave a series of orders, then replaced the handset and looked out the windows at the sea, at the formation of the surface ships surrounding the carrier.
“What do you have in mind. Admiral?”
“We’ll launch a squadron of F-14s and a squadron of F/A-18s to blow out their helos and their jet torpedo-carriers. I’m counting on Seawolf to take care of the surface ships, but she’ll be damned low on Mark 80 SLAAM missiles by the time she and Tampa get to the strait.”