He finally found a possible jackpot tucked into a rack beneath a fold-down chart table, a pair of emergency breathing masks and air bottles. They were handheld — the bottles were only a foot long and four inches wide — with a trigger valve and a rubber mask at the business end. Similar devices were used on board American vessels; during a fire in an enclosed space, they could keep a man breathing long enough for him to find his way out of a smoke-filled compartment.
It wouldn't deliver air under pressure — not the pressure of the sea at a depth of eighty feet. It might not work at all… or it might kill him. But if it worked, it would give him a few minutes of air… enough, possibly, to have a chance at finding the SCUBA gear outside.
On the other hand, he would need light to find the bodies. His own underwater flashlight had been dropped somewhere along the line… probably during the hand-to-hand action when Nelson had been killed. Without light, he had little chance of finding the bodies, and the needed gear they wore.
Well, then… could he turn the Russian crawler ninety degrees? He knew about where the bodies were — fifteen or twenty feet off the port beam. If he could rotate the crawler that far, its headlamps might give him the illumination he needed.
But there was that problem of maneuvering again. Moving forward and lying once more on the couch, ignoring the spray of icy water, he studied the controls for several minutes before shaking his head with frustrated exasperation. It would take a lot of experimentation… and a wrong move while he was playing with the controls could set him in lurching charge to God knew where … or upset the delicate balance among the ballast and trim tanks and put the vessel hard over on its side.
Well… at worst, he could use the emergency air mask to make it to the surface. He would have to go slow and be sure to breathe out all the way up, but he ought to be able to make it. Eighty feet wasn't far.
But he didn't like that idea, not one bit. A SEAL never surrendered… and surfacing would be tantamount to surrender, since about all he could do once up there was cling to the snorkel float and wait for a Soviet warship to spot him and pick him up.
No. That wouldn't do at all. If he were lucky, they would put a bullet through his brain right then and there, but he knew they wouldn't waste such a valuable asset as a captured U.S. Navy SEAL. He would be interrogated. Eventually they would break him — he'd been taught that all men can be broken, given time — and there were things locked away in his brain that the KGB would be very interested in indeed.
Maybe he could swim for the Siberian coast… maybe he could make contact with the Russian resistance… maybe… maybe… maybe…
No. Too many maybes, and his wounded side would keep him from moving very far, or very quickly. Unless he found a way to communicate with the Pittsburgh, he would die here.
The question, then, was how to communicate with the Pittsburgh. Radio was out, of course, even if he knew Pittsburgh's operating frequency, even if they were monitoring equipment that usually wasn't in operation when they were submerged. Radio waves simply wouldn't penetrate that far underwater unless they were pretty low frequency and high-powered. Sonar would do the trick — sound traveled tremendous distances in the sea, and much more quickly than in air… but the Russians would hear it. Even sonar listening devices badly placed in the shadow of an oil pipe would pick up that kind of signal, delivered at close range.
Still, sound appeared to offer him his best chance. A good loud bang — say, by smacking a bare piece of the crawler's hull with that spanner wrench over there — would definitely reach the Pittsburgh.
The problem was how to convey any useful information, without being heard by the Russians. They knew Morse code as well as he did, and would be drawn like flies to shit if he started hammering out anything like a regular code. And yet it had to attract the attention of the Burgh's sonar crew.
All assuming, of course, that the Pittsburgh was still there. He looked at his watch: 2320 hours. He was way overdue. Was the ' Burgh even still in the area?
Well, there was one thing he could try….
"You gotta let us go out and look for them," Chief McCluskey said. Belatedly, he added a growled "Sir!" McCluskey was a big, barrel-chested man with a bullet head and hair trimmed down to the consistency of a light fuzz, and the scowl he wore now could have curdled milk at twenty paces.
"And where would you look, Chief?" Gordon replied, keeping his voice reasonable, conversational. "It's a big ocean and the middle of the night. What are you going to do, trace out Randall's planned recon route? You could pass five feet away from him and never know he was there."
McCluskey opened his mouth to reply, then seemed to think better of it, clamping his jaws shut. Beside him, Fitch shook his head. "Man, we can't leave 'em behind, sir."
"I don't intend to. Not if I can help it. But…" He stressed that last word hard, and let it hang there in the air of the control room for a second or two. "But we're not going to go about this in a haphazard way. It's obvious they ran into some sort of trouble out there, or they would have been back aboard by now, right?"
"Yes, sir." McCluskey's words were a most reluctant admission.
"They might have encountered a patrol, Russian swimmers. I can't imagine what else they might have run into… "
He stopped. "Actually, now that I think about it… "
"What is it, sir?" McCluskey asked.
"Sonar picked up a contact out there. Close. We think it's a Russian crawler. It's possible they ran afoul of that."
Fitch and McCluskey exchanged glances. "They might use something like that to guard or maintain their oil pipeline," Fitch said.
"Exactly. Now, if you two just go swimming out there after them, I run the risk of losing both of you as well. And I have another problem. We've got Russian ASW ships closing on us, banging away on their sonar like drivers at a tiger hunt. From the look of things, they know we're in the area. And that, gentlemen, is not good. Among other things, it means we don't have much time."
"So… so what do you intend to do, Captain?" McCluskey wanted to know.
"I intend to move south, toward the sonar contact… but very, very slowly. I'm going to have Rodriguez listening for anything that might give us a clue. If your people are in trouble, they have sense enough to make noise that we can pick up."
"Well, they might not," McCluskey said, "if they thought that making noise would put the sub at risk."
"I can appreciate that. What I suggest is that you two suit up and get in the escape trunk. And wait. If we pick up anything that sounds unusual, we'll let you know over the 31MC and send you out. But only then. We can't afford the time to have you quartering a couple square miles of seabed out there looking for them. Clear?"