Donchez was already gone and entering the blacked out bridge, with its expanse of windows overlooking the flight deck and the sea. Off to port the Officer of the Deck was scanning the horizon with his binoculars.
Donchez immediately demanded: “What’s the word on the Tampa?”
“She’ll be intercepting the group in another five minutes, sir. We’re standing by with a helicopter and a diver when she comes up. Her ballast tanks vents are jammed open so she can only stay on the surface when she’s steaming ahead. Our chopper will be dropping a diver to her deck. He’s going to be bolting some gasketed covers over the vents. Once that’s done she can blow the ballast tanks and stay on the surface. She’ll be pulling up alongside the Port Royal, one of our Aegis cruisers. We’re going to off load her crew and replace them with a transit crew. Once the transit team is aboard they’ll be sailing to Yokosuka for refit, and the original crew will be airlifted to the hospital ship Mercy.”
“Off’sa’deck, combat reports a surfacing submarine bearing two nine one, range five thousand yards,” the junior officer of the deck reported.
“Very well. Status of the chopper?”
“Lifting off now.”
“We’ll have her alongside the Port Royal within the hour. Admiral.”
Donchez nodded, then returned to Flag Plot. Rummel was waiting for him. Donchez could tell by his face that the news was bad.
“Nothing on the Seawolf, sir. The search continues, we’ve got till dawn before the President’s authorization expires, but the ASW guys aren’t hopeful …”
“I’m going down to get some rack,” Donchez said, knowing he wouldn’t sleep but wanting to be alone.
“Yes sir. And, Admiral, there’s this …”
“What’s that, Fred?”
“At least we got the Tampa back.”
Donchez nodded, but his thoughts were that the price was too damned high.
Lieutenant Commander Jackson Lube Oil Vaughn stood on the deck of the Tampa watching the corpsman lifting out Captain Sean Murphy. As soon as he was out of the hatch he said something to the two men carrying him and they brought him to where Vaughn stood. Beside Vaughn was Lieutenant Black Bart Bartholomay, the SEAL XO.
“Captain,” Vaughn said, “don’t fight these guys, let them take care of you, okay? I’ll be up to visit you soon as I get the crew turnover done.”
“Lube Oil,” Murphy said, his voice weak, “I just wanted to thank you and Lennox for all the fancy ship handling you did to get us out of there. I was … damned proud of you guys. I’m sorry I couldn’t help…”
“You did fine, Skipper.”
“And, Black Bart, when I get healed I want to pin a medal on every one of your SEAL team. Without you guys we’d all be dead meat by now.”
Bartholomay thanked him, and added, “I wish Jack Morris could hear you say that.”
Vaughn looked at Murphy. Either Morris had drowned at sea when he went overboard, or he was picked up by Seawolf. And God alone knew where Seawolf was. If she was anywhere…
The corpsmen took Murphy up the gangway to the weather deck of the Port Royal, the massive cruiser towering over the submarine, then put Murphy in the waiting helicopter on the cruiser’s fantail. The chopper’s blades spun into a blur and it lifted off into the darkness, disappearing except for its blinking beacons.
“Well, I’d better get my guys and their gear offloaded,” Bart said.
Vaughn stretched out his hand. Black Bart shook it, turned and walked toward the hatch.
Vaughn turned away, looking out toward the west to an empty stretch of seawater.
CHAPTER 33
The ASW officer, Lieutenant Victor Samuels, sat in the rear starboard seat of the S-3 Viking twin-jet submarine-hunting aircraft, staring at the magnetic anomaly detector display.
“Anything cooking on MAD?” his sonar technician asked.
“Maybe,” Samuels said. “I’m getting four detects in the area but the whole channel has been like this.”
“All four are weak on the sonobuoys,” the technician replied.
“Same detects we’ve been hunting all night.”
“Hey, guys. Momma’s calling. Playtime’s over,” the aircraft’s pilot said on the intercom.
“Give me one last active dipper,” Samuels replied.
“These four detects are still bugging me.”
Down below, a LAMPS III Seahawk helicopter hovered over the spot marked by the Viking, dropped its dipping sonar and sent out a series of active sonar pings. Twenty-five hundred yards to the west a second Seahawk dropped a dipper, and the two choppers pinged over the area, hoping to come up with something solid over the four MAD detects.
Samuels listened on his radio to the LAMPS choppers for a moment, then nodded somberly and called the pilot on the intercom.
“The LAMPS guys say the detects are the hulls of the destroyers and some helicopter debris. Nothing strong enough to be a nine-thousand-ton submarine. Let’s bug out.”
“Roger, concur.”
Samuels pulled off his sweaty headset and looked down one last time at the bay water south of the Lushun peninsula. Somewhere down there were the bodies of over a hundred Navy submariners. Out the window the sun had risen high over the bay, the water reflecting a deep blue. The western Korea Bay was a shimmering landscape — it would have made a beautiful painting. Samuels leaned his head against the window and shut his eyes. It had been a long night.
Below them, in the area that had been searched by the Seahawk helicopters, four hulls lay on the bay bottom, two hundred and forty-five feet deep at that point. One was the broken and burned-out remains of the Udaloy destroyer Zunyi, the second and third the forward and aft halves of the Luda destroyer Kaifing, sliced cleanly in half by the sail of the Seawolf. The fourth hull was the Seawolf, lying inert, her misshapen sail tipped over in a twenty-five-degree roll, her anechoic tiles blown off her hull, the steel of the cylindrical hull almost completely buried in the silt of the bottom from the explosions of the depth charges.
The S-3 Viking flew in on final approach to the aircraft carrier Reagan, Samuels on the radio to flight ops that all detects of the night had proved to be either outcroppings of rocks or the hulls of other ships known to be sunk in the previous day’s battle.
Inside the hull of the half-buried Seawolf all the lights were off. Only the dim beams of battle lanterns fought the darkness. The atmosphere was close, stuffy, damp.
The decks were tilted into a twenty-five-degree roll to starboard. Men lay scattered on the tilted tiles of the decks, some half-conscious, most out cold. Of those unconscious, several were out because of injuries, others because of the diminishing levels of oxygen.
In the control room Pacino tried to open an eye but couldn’t. Had he gone blind? He reached up and put a hand to his face and felt that his right eye was swollen shut. His left seemed normal. While he tried to open his good eye, he tasted copper, as though he were sucking on a penny. He stuck his tongue out in distaste, but his tongue seemed to dissolve into a ball of sparks, the feeling from his mouth turning into an odd combination of partial numbness and coppery taste. He felt something with a part of his tongue that wasn’t numb. A tooth. He spit it out, tried to raise his head but vertigo hit him so hard that he had to drop his head again.
After a moment he heard a pinging noise, a sonar ping. Only then did he fully realize where he was. He grimaced as he tried to stand, pulling himself up to a seat at the attack center’s Pos Two console. He looked around the room, his good eye blurry, and saw only dim lights. He took a headset and called into it for someone, anyone. He tried to move to the aft end of the room but immediately felt tired and dizzy. He found a cubbyhole locker and pulled out a gas mask, wrapped it on his sore face and plugged it into an air manifold in the overhead.