"Clear, sir. But, if I might say—"
"Conn! Sonar!"
"A moment. Sonar, Conn. Whatcha got?"
"Sir, can you come up?" Rodriguez said. "We're picking up something weird."
"On my way." He glanced at the SEALs. "Suit up. This might be it. XO! You've got the conn!" Turning away, he hurried forward toward the sonar shack.
21
Clang… clang-clang… clang…
Randall's arm ached with the effort, but he continued wielding the spanner, striking a bare patch of cold, green-painted metal that communicated directly with the ocean outside. He'd been hitting the bulkhead for almost an hour. Trying to maintain the same rhythm, a regular one-two-one pattern, but broken in such a way that Russian listeners wouldn't realize what it was.
Clang… clang-clang… clang…
E… I… E…
The same Morse call the SEALs had used to summon the Pittsburgh on the surface last night.
Old MacDonald had a farm. E… I… E… I… Oh….
He shook his head, trying to clear it. The pain in his side was a little better, so long as he didn't move around or exert himself, but he was still feeling a bit muzzy.
Water continued to enter the crawler. It was almost three feet deep, black and oily and icy cold, lapping around the mattress of the lower bunk. With a sharp, rasping crackle, the main light in the cabin flared and went out, accompanied by a stink of chemicals as the seawater drowned the batteries. It wasn't completely dark. An emergency light aft continued to cast a wavering, fitful glow over the rising black water.
The diesel engine was still turning over, sealed behind a watertight door aft, just past the airlock. The main lights outside were still on, but he didn't know how much longer he could rely on them. If anybody aboard the 'Burgh heard his hammering, they would need the crawler's lights to find him.
How much longer did he have?
Clang… clang-clang… clang…
Funny. It was just now occurring to Randall that he'd single-handedly boarded and stormed an enemy military vessel at sea. The Navy had boarded plenty of civilian ships in the drug war, so they didn't count. The last time that had happened had been… when? The capture of the U-505 during
World War II?
No, the Marine boarding of the Mayaguez in '75 must count, even though the freighter was both a civilian vessel and deserted. Everyone had thought it was occupied by well-armed Cambodians at the time.
Well, his capture of Crawlerski Subski was the first capture of an enemy submarine since World War II, that was for damned sure. And there wasn't a single damned way he could think of to turn that interesting bit of trivia to his advantage.
Clang… clang-clang… clang…
And, now that he thought about it, the U-505 had already surfaced and surrendered when sailors had gone aboard to disarm the explosive charges the German crew had set to scuttle her. He'd had to take this boat in hand-to-hand combat, board and storm, knife clenched in the teeth … yahrrrrrr!
That hadn't been seen on — or beneath — the high seas since… when? The Civil War? The War of 1812?
He wished his knowledge of naval history was a bit better. He wanted to know.
Clang… clang-clang… clang…
If he ever got out of here …
Thoughts of home… of Carolyn. Was he ready to get married yet? He'd put that decision off and put it off, figuring it was too early to drop anchor and settle down yet. And the wife of a SEAL had no kind of life … her husband called away at any time of day or night, sent hopscotching across the globe to God knew where, and he wasn't even allowed to tell her about it so she could properly worry.
And his motorcycle. His was a beaut, a BMW K75. The feeling he had out on the road, feeling that thunder answer to the flick of a wrist… power. Freedom.
He'd always figured he would die young and spectacularly… either in a firefight somewhere, or a training accident — those happened regularly enough that every SEAL considered the possibility — or blazing down the highway pushing a hundred on his Beemer.
Not sitting in a freezing steel pipe as it slowly flooded, pounding out his last-gasp message with a ten-pound wrench.
Clang-clang… clang-clang… clang-clang…
Pittsburgh must have gone by now. It was almost midnight, and Captain Gordon wouldn't want to hang around these shallow, inshore waters longer than he had to. The Russian sailor's body bumped against his legs, and he absently shoved it aside. So why was he even still trying?
Clang… clang-clang… clang…
Hell, he should have tried to figure out how to run the damned submarine. He could have sailed it south through the Tatar Straits and come ashore in Japan, and wouldn't that have been a wild, ninety-day wonder?
Ahh, who was he kidding? She was flooding, and wouldn't have made it half a mile. He'd captured his very own submarine, and she was going down fast.
No… he. Russian ships were he….
Clang-clang… clang-clang… clang-clang…
What the hell? That wasn't right. He stopped banging on the hull. Had he gotten so fuzzy-headed he'd started banging the wrong code?
Clang-clang-clang… clang-clang-clang… clang-clang-clang…
He stared at the spanner still gripped in his right hand. No, goddammit, he hadn't imagined that. Someone was outside, pounding on the hull!
The forward canopy was half-submerged. He couldn't tell if water was still coming in; it was possible that the pressures had equalized, trapping the boat's remaining air in a bubble in the upper half of the compartment. He couldn't see out, though… and didn't know if the unseen hammerers outside were Fitch and McCluskey, or Spetsnaz divers come to see what all the racket was about.
By God, if they were Russians they weren't going to take him alive. And he wasn't going to wait to die inside this cold, wet steel coffin, either. He touched the knife sheathed at his hip. He would go out and meet them in the sea. Hell, that was where a SEAL ought to die, in the open ocean, not locked away inside a box….
He felt a momentary panic. The air tank and mask he'd found… he'd left them on the lower bunk, he thought, but it was underwater now and he couldn't see it. Desperately, he felt around on the mattress pad, which was trying to float but held down by something heavy… and then his hand closed on the cylinder.
He made his way aft. The airlock's inner door was still open. It was probably set up so that you couldn't open the outer door if the inner one was open; no wonder his guests hadn't come aboard. He stepped inside, ducking his head into the cold water to get through the low door opening. Dragging the watertight door shut and dogging it, he stood in the escape lock, head and shoulders only above water now.
Randall puzzled over the control valves for a minute. How did you flood an airlock already partly flooded? He opened the WRT flood valve, and the water began coming in faster.
He pressed the rubber mask against his face, almost panicked when he couldn't draw a breath… then remembered to crack the valve. As the water flooded up past his mouth, he could breathe.