During the past year, Randall had deployed to a number of far-flung trouble spots across the globe, and he'd encountered nothing to shake his conviction that the Russians would eventually take over if they weren't confronted now, with guts and resolve.
Randall rarely talked about it. SEALs didn't discuss politics — not with those outside the SEAL community, at any rate. Besides their inborn, security-conscious reticence to discuss what they did with anyone, they knew the Teams could be hurt by any association in the public's mind with Rambo and similar Hollywood myths. The news media didn't help, not when they tended to fawn over leftist causes and celebrities while routinely presenting the right as demented, fanatical, and under the thumb of religious extremists.
He and his fellow SEALs went about their duties with a steady and consummate professionalism, confronting the Soviet threat in the best way they knew how — training hard, obeying orders, and looking within and to their own community for support, rather than to a largely ignorant and uncaring civilian culture.
Sometimes, in melodramatic moments — say, during a bull session in the barracks at Coronado — they thought of themselves aloud as guardians of Western civilization. They knew how ridiculous such a concept might seem to the newspapers or even a majority of American citizens. And yet…
Randall still remembered the sight of those mystery tracks on the beach at Adak. Some people might think this whole thing was a game, but he knew just how deadly serious it was.
The bottom was dropping sharply now, as the SEALs entered a deep, V-shaped valley. The pipeline, he saw, continued straight across the valley like a bridge, suspended in the dark and murky water. Shadows — something strangely regular, caught his attention at the valley's bottom. He tugged on the safety line and pointed; Nelson nodded, and the two began to descend.
The valley bottom was at seventy-eight feet, some fifteen feet beneath the pipeline in the darkness overhead. The silt here was firmer, less powdery… and was deeply etched by curiously regular markings which Randall had seen before.
They looked like the prints left by tank treads, pressed into the mud. They had to be newly made, too, because the current and drifting silt would swiftly cover any markings on the bottom, probably within a matter of hours. Thoughtful, Randall hovered above the track marks and pulled out his camera again, taking several pictures from different angles, while Nelson held the light to throw distinct shadows with high contrast.
A miniature crawler sub, probably the same make as the machine that had left the marks on the beach at Adak. After taking the last picture, he reached down and gently poked at the mud where it had been pressed down by the crawler's weight. The compacted mud dissolved in a flurry of silt. These tracks were fresh… perhaps less than an hour old. And — now that he thought about it — he could hear something in the distance, a kind of metallic purr made high-pitched and strange by transmission through the water.
It was difficult to tell direction under water, but he thought the sound was coming from that way, from the north. Pittsburgh lay in that direction, but he didn't think he was hearing the American submarine. This, whatever it was, was far too noisy… and closer.
He pointed again, and Nelson nodded agreement. Together, the two men began swimming along the valley floor, moving north. If there was something up there, they wanted to get a glimpse of it… and maybe even a photograph or two. And it was time to start heading back for the Pittsburgh, before they had to start paying time penalties on the decompression tables.
They swam for five minutes, the sound from ahead growing louder all the time. The valley appeared to slice cleanly through the ridge, opening on the other side onto a broad, flat plain, sensed more than seen in the cloudy murk.
Nelson stopped, pulling upright, and pointed. Ahead, Randall could make out a glow in the darkness, a misty light against which something large and black was silhouetted. Both SEALs switched off their own lights then, and the blackness of the undersea night closed in around them once more, enveloping them completely except for the eerie looking silver-white glow up ahead, like headlights in dense midnight fog.
Navigating by the light, they kept swimming. They were closer to the light source than they realized; almost immediately, the light resolved into the glare of a pair of headlamps. Though clearer here in the main current through the strait, with visibility at perhaps twenty-five feet, the water was still so silt-laden that the outlines of the thing backlit by the headlamps were blurred, as though they were looking at it through a thick fog.
Still, Randall could get a general impression of the thing. The lamps on the vehicle's bow cast a silvery nimbus of light and cast peculiar shadows, jet-black and ominous. As the SEALs swam around the left side of the thing, they could see that it was roughly cylindrical, perhaps five yards long and half that high, raised higher off the mud by the massive tracks and suspension. Oddly, it possessed twin screws aft, a cruciform rudder, and diving planes, as well as a tiny conning tower with a hatch; Randall hadn't imagined that the vehicle might swim like a conventional submarine, as well as crawl on the bottom, but it clearly possessed the means to do so.
And as a final, lethal touch, two torpedoes were mounted on the hull, up high, to either side of the conning tower. They were a lot smaller than Mark 48s, probably 406mm ASW torps, a type carried by Soviet helicopters and light patrol craft. Crawlerski subski, it seemed, packed a sting.
Randall did some fast thinking. That type of torpedo, just sixteen inches thick, packed a seventy-kilogram warhead… not enough to sink a vessel as large as the Pittsburgh, but powerful enough to do her some very serious damage. Was the crawler sub's appearance here coincidence, or something more sinister?
Pittsburgh was certainly picking up the sounds from that thing. It wasn't moving at the moment — simply sitting still, but an engine on board was idling. As the SEALs got closer, Randall saw a pipe or hose extending from the rear of the conning tower toward the surface. A snorkel, then, allowing a diesel engine to run while the submarine was submerged without swiftly poisoning the air for all on board. The upper end was probably kept at the surface by a ring bladder or flotation collar.
What the hell was the crawler doing here? Was its presence coincidence, or did it have something to do with the Pittsburgh
Consulting with hand gestures, Randall and Nelson untied the safety line that had kept them together in the heavy silt. The current, stronger now, was moving them slowly past the Russian machine, along its port side. Side by side, they started working their way closer to the hybrid monster, careful to stay out of the illumination of its headlamps.
From abeam, they could see the overall design more clearly, and Randall began taking photographs. The rounded forward end of the cylinder was glass or plastic, though it reflected light and darkness with an opaque, mirrorlike silver sheen, and they couldn't see in. A pair of manipulator arms were mounted to either side of the cockpit, each equipped with a small video camera and light. The vehicle had been designed to carry out underwater construction, repair, or maintenance. Possibly they used it for seabed construction at oilfields like Okha.
But… why the torpedoes?
An instant later, Randall was too busy for questions, as powerful hands grabbed him from behind, and a hand wielding a diving knife snaked out of the night toward his face.