“Check shut the trunk drain valve.”
“Aye, Skip, and trunk drain valve is shut.”
“Let’s get some ocean in here, people,” Fishman said, pulling down a lever that opened a hydraulically controlled ball valve that flooded the space. In just a few seconds’ time, the warm gulf water came into the trunk, the water level rising fast, over two feet per second. As the water rose, the air in the space compressed, coming close to the pressure of the water outside the skin of the ship at periscope depth. The pressure gauge read 18 psi. Fishman’s ears popped as the air pressure rose. The air above the water began to form a thick, impenetrable fog. The four SEAL commandos were gathered close together in the air bubble space, waiting for the trunk to flood all the way. Other than the air bubble space, in another minute, the trunk was fully flooded with seawater.
“Control, Lockout Trunk, trunk is flooded. Request to open the outer door.”
“Lockout Trunk, Control, open the outer door.”
“Open the outer door, aye, and outer door coming open.”
Fishman moved a second hydraulic lever, and the upper lockout trunk hatch came open. The lockout trunk was now open to the ocean above. He pulled his mask down over his face and gestured to the others with his thumb. Let’s go.
Fishman ducked down from the air bubble into the trunk’s water, then looked up at the circle of light from the world above. He pulled himself up by the ladder rungs until he and his scuba bottles rose through the open hatchway.
The water of the gulf was warm and startlingly clear, almost as clear as the waters of the Mediterranean, he thought. Aft of the ship, slightly above them, he could see the entire hull of the Panther as it moved at periscope depth, using its diesels to charge its batteries. The target submarine looked long and slender and graceful, he thought.
He pulled himself farther out of the hatchway, holding on to the hatch operating mechanism, and watched as the other three SEALs emerged. Once they were all out of the hull, he motioned to the target submarine, letting go of the hatch.
The current formed by the movement of the ship floated him backwards to the target submarine, requiring only slight thrust of the Mark 17 propulsion unit to lift him up the proper depth to the target’s deck. Fishman swam to the target’s conning tower, noticing the side of the conning tower had a large graphic of a prowling, snarling panther. He smirked, admiring it in spite of himself. As they’d practiced a dozen times, he unpacked a cable from a small container, unfurling it along both sides of the conning tower, the flow of the current pulling each end of the cable aft. Scooter Tucker-Santos held the cable at the forward end of the conning tower while Fishman floated aft along the Panther’s port side. At the trailing edge of the conning tower, he found the other half of the cable on the starboard side and fastened the two lengths of cable together with a special grip mechanism, then cinched the grip forward to the trailing edge of the conning tower. That left two cables trailing aft toward the screw. Fishman hand-over-handed himself aft with Scooter right behind him, Scooter latching on to Fishman with a safety cable, attaching them both to the conning tower cable.
Fishman was dimly aware of the massive black shape of the Vermont slowing down and fading back astern of the Panther, there in case one of the SEALs fell off the Panther hull. As the Kilo submarine’s hull angled downward toward its rudder, X-type stabilizers and screw, Fishman followed the cable aft, concentrating hard not to lose the package. The package was a special carbon fiber net that he would deploy and wrap around the Panther’s screw, fouling it so hard that no amount of horsepower or torque of the screw’s driveshaft would overcome the net.
He pulled the package out of its container and let go of the container and let the current carry it away. He found the carbon dioxide pressurized canister attached to the net, designed to blow the net up into a cloud, and pulled its pin. The net, a mere brick-sized solid, immediately blew up into a large fuzzy mass in front of him. Fishman guided it down toward the screw and watched as the screw’s flow vortex sucked the net into it. After several revolutions, the net was fully wrapped around the screw, and two seconds later, the screw stopped. The submarine was coasting to a stop. Any moment, Fishman thought, the sub would surface to see what had happened to their screw. He looked over at Scooter and gestured forward. The two commandos hand-over-handed themselves forward against the rapidly dying current of the submarine’s motion, the work getting easier by the second as the target sub slowed.
Up forward, Grip Aquatong and Swan Oneida were waiting by the forward hatch. Behind him, Scooter Tucker-Santos was grabbing the handholds to pull himself up to the top of the conning tower in case that was the hatch that opened first. As the ship glided to a halt in the warm gulf water, the commandos unsheathed their non-lethal weapons, waiting.
But something was wrong. The Panther wasn’t surfacing. Fishman looked at his diver’s watch. The screw had been immobilized for at least four minutes, maybe longer. He looked up at the surface, then at the conning tower, with the periscope extended and penetrating the surface, a second mast behind it, which must be the snorkel mast, bringing fresh air into the submarine for the diesel generator to breathe to charge the battery bank. Finally the current generated by the ship’s motion completely died. They were stationary in the sea.
He looked over at Grip and Swan, who were gesturing with “what the fuck” signs. He shrugged. Who knew what was going on inside the control room of the goddamned Panther.
In the central command post of the Iranian Navy’s submarine Panther, commanding officer Commander Resa Ahmadi looked over at his second-in-command, Lieutenant Commander Hossein Kharrazi. The two men had an uneasy relationship, since Kharrazi was older and more experienced, having come up through the Iranian Navy’s enlisted ranks, and obviously thought that command of the Panther should have gone to him, not the inexperienced, Harvard-educated upstart who had family connections in both the Revolutionary Guards and the General Staff of the Armed Forces. How many times had Kharrazi muttered under his breath things like, “It’s not what you know, it’s who you know.”
“What in the name of Allah is going on?” Ahmadi said from the periscope.
“Let me look,” Kharrazi said. Ahmadi stepped back from the number two periscope and Kharrazi grabbed the grips and put his eye to the periscope optics. On the surface, there was nothing obviously wrong. But the ship had unceremoniously come to a stop in the ocean. Yet there were no fishing trawlers in the surroundings that could account for the screw becoming fouled.
“We can’t surface,” Kharrazi said, his voice muffled by the periscope. “Our orders prohibit surfacing, no matter what.”
“I know,” Ahmadi said. “But we can hover and send out divers to see what’s wrong with the screw.”
“Excellent idea, Captain,” Kharrazi said. Ahmadi could never tell when the man was being sarcastic or genuine when he said things like that. “I’ll see to it.”
“Who are you sending to the escape trunk?”
“The engineer and chief of the boat are both diver qualified. I’ll send them out.”
“Very well,” Ahmadi said, taking the periscope from Kharrazi. “Boatswain,” Ahmadi called, “Commence hovering at present depth.”
“Hover at present depth, Boatswain aye,” the watchstander at the starboard command console acknowledged.
“What’s happening?” the heavily accented voice of Alexie Abakumov asked. Abakumov was the lead test engineer for the upcoming test of the UBK-500 fast reactor, which lay silently sleeping in the reactor compartment far aft. And as usual, Abakumov had been drinking, his stash of vodka taking up more room than the rest of his personal belongings. Ahmadi disapproved, but the Russian was a VIP rider and was owed a certain professional deference.