His opponent lunged again; Randall responded by deliberately dragging his flippers through the silt on the bottom, creating an inky cloud as effective as a squid's defensive jet of black ink. Instead of ducking, he twisted to the side, grabbed the Spetsnaz swimmer's outthrust arm, and pulled himself in close, using his free hand to drag his own Mark I SEAL knife from its scabbard.
The other swimmer twisted, breaking Randall's hold, and slashed backhanded with the knife. Only the fact that the two men were moving more slowly in the dense medium of the water gave Randall the time to roll clear.
Hands grabbed him from behind, one around the chest and upper arms, the other coming down on his head, the hand grabbing for his mask. A third Russian diver…
Again, he tucked and rolled, this time catapulting himself and this new foe over in a tight, hard somersault that threw the man on his back into the first diver in a tangle of legs and arms.
Randall had trained long and deeply in several martial arts. His official SEAL training had emphasized a Korean martial form called Hwrang-do, but he'd studied jujitsu and aikido as well.
Though the moves and countermoves couldn't apply underwater — the medium was too dense, and there was no way to gain leverage from the floor — certain principles did, among them the fact that a man actually had an advantage over two opponents that he lacked when facing only one. Being better off fighting one-against-two seemed counterintuitive, but made sense. His two opponents couldn't communicate with one another, would have trouble synchronizing their moves and attacks, and might even get in one another's way.
And that was exactly what he'd just done to them, dropping the one Spets diver on top of the other. For a critical second or two, they thrashed, trying to right themselves, get untangled from one another, and launch another attack. And that second was all that Randall required.
Before the two could separate, Randall lunged with his knife at a barely visible target, aiming the point of the blade at the second diver, at the angle of his jaw and his throat. Razor-honed steel sliced through wet-suit rubber and foam… and a black cloud flowered, adding to the murk. Grabbing the man's head, he used the added leverage to slice deeper, harder, finishing the job. Pulling the blade free, he pivoted to face the first swimmer, almost invisible now in mud, blood, and night black gloom.
The first diver had taken advantage of the second or so while Randall was killing his partner to reorient himself, and prepare his own thrust. His knife hand flashed close beside Randall's mask, and he felt the blade catch and pull on his equipment.
He slashed a parry, cutting rubber and flesh. The knife hand withdrew, and in that moment Randall closed, grasping the other diver's face mask and air hose, pulling them off and away.
Bubbles chirped and warbled, exploding into the silent near darkness. Randall actually heard the other man bellow, the sound muffled by the water as the Spets diver thrashed and churned, trying to find his air hose and mask. Randall lunged again at the man, now completely distracted from the fighting and, a moment later, the diver was drifting toward the mud, faceup, with bubbles and a stream of black blood issuing from his mouth.
Spinning, knife at the ready, Randall searched for Nelson and his opponent, but could see almost nothing in the gloom save the glare of the Russian submarine's lights. He could see shadows struggling, a few feet away, and began swimming toward them, knife ready.
He drew breath… and nearly choked on the seawater that filled his mouth and began filling his mask. He could hear the ringing of bubbles on his left, and, reaching up, felt the severed air hose on his own equipment.
He was about to drown, unless he could think of an alternative … and damned quickly….
20
Randall jerked upright, groping for a mask rapidly filling with salt water. He tried to clear his mask, and failed.
The right air hose on his mask was the intake, with a valve that opened when he breathed in. The left hose was exhaust, and was supposed to open when he exhaled. The Spets diver had cut the left hose, and the exhaust valve had jammed open with the inrush of water.
He couldn't worry about that now, however. He could sense the struggle in the silt-laden water ahead, where Nelson and the third Spetsnaz diver were rolling over and over in a desperate struggle. Clinging to the air already in his lungs, he kicked hard, lunging forward, emerging from the cloud just in time to see the Russian diver bury his knife up to the hilt in the side of Nelson's skull.
Nelson's legs kicked spastically, then stilled. Randall screamed into his water-filled mask and slashed out, cutting the Russian's arm, then thrusting and stabbing, trying for his air hose, his mask, for any vulnerable target.
The Russian lost a valuable second trying to pull the knife free from Nelson's head, then turned to face Randall's wildly slashing attack. Randall's blade caught him under the chin, biting deep. The man's head went up, his mask filling suddenly with dark blood, as he reached for his throat; more blood flowered into the sea around his throat and hands.
Randall delivered a killing thrust between the diver's fourth and fifth ribs, then, sheathing his blade, he turned to examine Nelson. The SEAL was sinking slowly, arms limply extended in front of his body, the knife still buried in his skull.
Shit, shit, shit! …
Reaching out, he pulled Nelson's mask off, removed his own, then pressed the other SEAL's mask to his own face and cleared it, taking in several deep breaths. He began unbuckling the harness for his own diving rig. He would use Nelson's instead; his swim partner wasn't going to need it.
Before he could begin removing Nelson's gear, however, he heard a metallic clank. Rotating in the water, he could just make out the shadow of yet another diver emerging from the conning-tower hatch of the Russian crawler sub. Light spilled upward into the silty water, stage-lighting the swimmer's torso and masked head. The other man raised something bulky in his hand… and then a needle-sharp contrail stabbed through the water with a sound like ripping cloth.
The projectile shrilled within inches of Randall's head, and he felt the slap of concussion as it passed.
Reacting without thinking, Randall dropped Nelson's mask and swam as hard as he could toward the Russian sub, now a vaguely lit blur against a vaster blur of dim light. Salt stung his eyes, but he ignored it, racing for the cover of the crawler's track assembly. Again came the tearing-cloth sound, and something skimmed just above Randall's back.
The Russian diver, he thought, was using some sort of projectile weapon designed for underwater combat … and his best guess was that it was something like the old Gyrojet.
The U.S. military had experimented with pistols firing rocket-propelled bullets back in the 1960s, but given up on them because of one serious design flaw. A regular bullet emerged from the gun with a muzzle velocity that could only drop as it encountered air resistance or — in the case of a bullet fired under water — water resistance. Gyrojets worked just the opposite. It took time for a miniature rocket, once ignited, to accelerate to a velocity that could kill the target, which meant they were less than lethal at point-blank range. The Navy had worked with several designs for covert underwater work, however; Randall had worked with one of them himself on a test range. Whatever its other flaws, a Gyrojet's projectile could travel a lot farther in water than a bullet, and several top-secret spin-offs had been employed over the years in an attempt to arm SEALs and other elite commandos for underwater combat.