Emerging from the thirty-inch hatch was like escaping from prison. Suddenly, the ocean yawned about him, black and empty. Don McCluskey had already locked out, along with Sergei. Randall could sense the other men as shadows above the deck forward, just behind the looming black cliff of Pittsburgh's sail.
He closed and dogged the deck hatch. Nelson and Smith would be coming through next, followed by Fitch and
Grigor. Touching Johnson lightly on the leg, he started up, kicking slowly, making sure the CIA operative was coming along.
This was the riskiest part of the procedure. Draeger re-breathers had been chosen over standard SCUBA gear for the obvious reason that they didn't make as much noise — a critical consideration in this area that might well be crisscrossed by Soviet sonar and sound detectors. But Draeger units were dangerous at depths much below thirty-five feet, and Pittsburgh's deck was that deep or deeper than that when the submarine was at periscope depth. If the sub moved any higher at all, its sail would break the surface, and instantly register on a dozen Soviet search radars blanketing the entire region.
Together, Randall and Johnson rose for the surface, visible as a kind of rippling, ultramarine movement in the darkness straight overhead, contrasted against the black, wedge-narrow cliff of the submarine's conning tower. He could sense Johnson beginning to tighten up, and moved closer. A common panic reaction to the claustrophobia of working underwater at night — not to mention the claustrophobic hell of being locked into a submarine escape trunk— was for the swimmer to hold his breath as he kicked wildly for the surface.
But at thirty-five feet, the human body was being squeezed by the pressure of all of the water piled up above him, and the air in his lungs was compressed as well. Strike out for the surface without breathing out, and that air would expand… violently….
Johnson started to kick, stroking for the surface. Randall grabbed hold, pulled him close, and drove the rigid fingers of his right hand into Johnson's side, just to the left of the small oxygen bottle riding below his Draeger chest pack.
The blow couldn't carry much force underwater, but it was hard enough to startle Johnson, who lost his mouthpiece and expelled a large belch of air bubbling toward the surface. He thrashed for a moment, until Randall placed the mouthpiece back between his teeth and he began breathing again. He nodded, and the two resumed their ascent, more slowly this time.
This, Randall thought, amused, is why they have us babysit. I hope he's better at spy stuff than he is at diving!
Moments later, their heads broke the surface. McCluskey and Sergei were nearby, illuminated by the faint green glow from a chemical light stick, and clinging to the lifelines on a beach-ball-sized float bobbing in the swell.
No words were spoken, though the chances of being overheard were remote. The sky was overcast except for a few thin patches through which a few stars and the silver glow of a setting moon in the west were just visible. A bell was ringing somewhere in the distance at irregular intervals — the bell atop a navigation buoy, most likely. The water was oily, chill, and carried a faint industrial stink with the normal smells of salt and seaweed.
And he could also hear the throb of a diesel engine to his left. Turning in the water, he could just make out a shape, slightly less dark than its surroundings, moving with the swell of the waves. A single white navigational light gleamed at one end, casting pale reflections on the water. That would be Stenki, their destination.
McCluskey was already unshipping the IBS, "Inflatable Boat, Small" in the Navy lexicon, which had been stored as a tightly wrapped package raised to the surface by the float, but which was expanding now as it inflated from its attached CO2 bottle. As the rubber boat flopped open, the two SEALs released the last of the lines keeping it folded up, then held on to it as it reached full size. They helped Johnson and Sergei roll into the raft, then clung to the safety lines on the side to keep it from drifting away. Nelson surfaced with Smith a few moments later, as the SEALs unshipped the small, 7.5-horsepower outboard motor and fastened it on the stern mount.
Working in the swell, with no anchor or safety lines, was a tricky operation. If a sudden surge caught them unprepared and the outboard motor went to the bottom, they and the mission would be screwed — an inglorious end to this exercise in daring and wet darkness. They secured it with lanyards, just in case, and worked carefully to bolt it down tight on the mounting brackets.
Nelson and Smith had surfaced with another bundle of equipment, this one a waterproof satchel holding weapons and the CIA team's special gear. This was transferred to the raft, while Randall began bundling the swim gear and re-breathers together and securing them in the bottom of the boat, then breaking out their weapons. The SEALs were packing H&K MP5 submachine guns, specially modified to operate reliably despite immersion in seawater.
Randall glanced up into the dark sky. This time out, there was no spy aircraft recording his every movement for transmission back to some Pentagon basement. He imagined the REMFs and chair-warmers would be peeking in via satellite — there were a number of military reconnaissance satellites aloft that could give fair resolution even through light cloud cover.
But whether they could see him or not, at least there would be no micromanagement this time. Randall smiled, and suppressed the wry urge to flip a middle finger at the sky. Even the best spysats couldn't resolve that much detail.
By the time Fitch and the second Russian, Grigor, surfaced, they were ready to cast off.
The whole operation had been practiced again and again before the team had been flown to Adak. Still without words, the SEALs fired up the motor, which was carefully muffled to give off only the softest of purrs, then cast off the last line securing the IBS to the float, pulled the valve on the float to collapse and sink it, and swung the tiller about until the heavily laden IBS was nosing across the waves toward the waiting trawler. The IBS was normally rated as a seven-man raft; it was jam-packed with eight and their gear.
Randall couldn't shake a certain darkness of spirit. It was an unsettling feeling, motoring into the empty night this way. When they'd practiced this maneuver at the amphibious base at Coronado, the float had been attached by a safety line to a mock-up of a submarine conning tower. This time, though, there was no lifeline, and the terrible risk that if anything went wrong, they were going to have a damned hard time finding their way back to the Pittsburgh.
More unsettling, though, were the human factors. Johnson and his comrades, so precise, so methodical, so melodramatic in a low-keyed way. They might have been playing some sort of involved and preposterous game.
He tried not to let himself think about the might-bes, concentrating instead on the mission as it had been planned out and rehearsed. The Pittsburgh would be waiting for them when—when—they returned.
At least they'd damned well better be. The four SEALs were a hell of a long way from home, in a place — the kid Benson was right about this — where they had no right to be. The submarine was their only ticket out of here, the only thing between them and death or a cell in Moscow's dread Lubyanka Prison — or a slave camp in the Siberian Gulag.
That waiting trawler up ahead could so easily be a trap for the CIA agents.
But, of course, that possibility was one reason the babysitters were here. The packages needed the extra bit of experienced help getting to the surface… and they just might need some firepower at the contact point. SEALs were very, very good at providing firepower, in large and devastating doses.