“Very well, Pilot.”
Another 1MC announcement, Dankleff saying, “Placing the low-pressure blower on all main ballast tanks!”
A dim roaring sound vibrated the deck from below and aft. The LP blower was a positive displacement unit, much like the supercharger on Pacino’s hotrod, moving air into the ballast tanks. Slowly the hull came fully out of the water.
“Securing the LP blow,” Dankleff said, and the blower’s noise quieted and stopped.
On the hull of the target, the SEALs continued to wait in their crouch, hugging the conning tower. Pacino glanced at the chronometer. It had been a full twelve minutes since he’d surfaced, and still no sign of anyone emerging topside.
“Sonar,” Seagraves called to Albanese. “Any transients from Master One?”
Albanese turned from his console, his hand pressing his right headphone to his ear, as if that would help him detect transients better. He shook his head. “Master One is dead quiet, Skipper.”
Suddenly a speaker crackled in the overhead above the command console. “Victor Three Papa, this is Sierra Four Alpha, over.” Fishman’s voice.
Romanov grabbed a microphone from an overhead cradle, the coiled cord of it extending into a small red unit the size of a shoebox, the VHF Nestor secure voice circuit. She glanced at Seagraves. “Request to answer, Captain?”
Seagraves put out his hand and Romanov handed him the mike.
“Sierra Four Alpha, Victor Three Papa, go ahead.” Seagraves voice echoed back in a strange bubbly burbling tone as his voice was encrypted for transmission.
“Stand by to recover the team.”
The SEALs wanted to come back in, Pacino thought. Something must be very wrong.
“Prepare to return, Victor Three Papa, out,” Seagraves said, handing the mike back to Romanov. “XO, get to the lockout trunk and find out what the hell is going on,” Seagraves ordered. Quinnivan handed his headset to Varney and half-ran out the room.
Romanov nudged Pacino. “Get the upper lockout trunk door open, now.”
“Captain, request to open the lockout trunk hatch?”
“Open the lockout trunk hatch,” Seagraves said, his face a scowl.
“Pilot, open the lockout trunk hatch and drain the lockout trunk.”
Dankleff acknowledged.
Below, on the deck, one of the SEALs had climbed up on the hull, then a second. They’d taken off their gear but for weapons and left the equipment on the target’s deck. Soon all four had vanished down the hatch and the hatch started shutting behind them.
“Lockout trunk hatch indicates shut,” Dankleff said.
It seemed to take another ten minutes before Fishman and Aquatong came into the control room, Quinnivan behind them, the commandos holding white towels around their necks, their wetsuits glistening wet, dripping slightly.
Fishman addressed Seagraves. “We think there may be a self-destruct protocol going on. There could be a big bang coming from that thing.” Fishman crossed his arms over his chest and stared at the deck. Lieutenant junior grade Elias Aquatong stood beside Fishman, running his fingers through his soaked hair.
Pacino kept his eyes on the periscope display, wondering if the target submarine would scuttle itself, or worse, explode with a self-destruct charge. It came to him that they might be too close to his hull.
“What do you want to do?” Seagraves asked Fishman.
“We’re going to break in, Captain, but before we do, you’d better get Vermont to a safe distance. And submerge it. At this point, anything is possible.”
Fifteen minutes later, the SEALs had locked out again and climbed up on the deck of the Bigfoot with several tool bags. Pacino watched them on the periscope display of the command console, having submerged Vermont and driven her out a thousand yards, now hovering half a mile from the narco-sub, his view trained on the conning tower of the target. Two of the commandos were on the foredeck and two were atop the conning tower, attaching the equipment bags to lines tossed down by the crew up high, who lifted them up and stowed them in the conning tower’s cockpit.
The Nestor satellite secure voice radio circuit crackled with static and blooped with the distorted, decrypted voice of Fishman. “Victor Three Papa, odd situation up here. There’s no hatch opening mechanism on the upper hatch and no ISO salvage connection, just smooth steel. As I stepped close to it to try it with a crowbar, the hatch came open by itself. The hatch is fully open now.”
Captain Seagraves took the red microphone from the overhead. “Sierra Four Alpha, were there lights on inside the submarine when the hatch opened?”
What was he getting at, Pacino wondered.
“It’s bright out here, so it would look dark even if it were lit by floodlights in there, but I’m fairly sure it was dark and some lights flashed on when the hatch came fully open.”
“This day just keeps getting better and better,” Romanov muttered.
“Curiouser and curiouser,” Pacino replied, still staring at his display.
“You can say that again,” Romanov said to him.
“You mentioned a North Korean submarine to the captain,” Pacino said. Romanov looked at him blankly. “Well. What did you mean?”
“I forget the specifics,” she said. “It was a while ago. A North Korean submarine got snarled in a trawler net inside the territorial waters of South Korea and the sub surfaced. The fishermen alerted the South Korean Navy. A South Korean destroyer grabbed the sub and started towing it to a South Korean naval base, but it sank on the way. So the South Koreans salvage it, and inside? Entire crew was dead, some with a bullet in the forehead, a few with throats slit. There were four cases of suspected suicide, the senior officers in command. The rest of the crew were executed by the senior guys. The conclusion being, none of the officers wanted it known they were captured submerged by their blood enemies, and you know, death before dishonor. They were also probably terrified of what an interrogation would be like. In any case, suicide made more tactical sense to them than surrender.”
“You think that could be happening here?”
Romanov shrugged. “Maybe, but it’s hard to imagine smugglers turning to murder and suicide when caught. Every other narco-sub detained, they took the crews for questioning. At first, they had to let them go, because there were no laws on the books prohibiting sailing a submarine full of coke on the no-man’s land of the high seas. So a year later, there were brand new international laws making smuggling coke in the open ocean a felony, and the crews apprehended after that, well, they won’t be seeing the outside of a high security prison for a long time. They were all hired guns, though, making ten or twenty grand to move the product. A pittance, really, considering the street value of the cargo. And the risks of the trip.”
“Victor, this is Sierra,” the Nestor radio speaker blared with Fishman’s voice. “My XO and I are going inside the hull. I’m leaving a relay unit on top of the conning tower to relay my helmet cam to your displays. Testing it now.”
“Select the tactical freq for your console display,” Romanov said.
“I don’t know how to do that,” Pacino admitted. Romanov moved him over with her hip and showed him how to manipulate the software to change the display readout to receive and display the SEAL commander’s helmet camera. For just a tenth of a second he became aware of the feeling of the touch of the attractive older woman, and he had to blink back his hardwired male response.
The display winked out, then showed the view of Fishman’s head-mounted tactical camera as he looked down at the open hatch. “Am I patched into the Nestor circuit?” he asked someone out of the camera view, his voice coming out of the Nestor speaker in the overhead.