"That… won't be necessary." He obviously knew he would lose that encounter.
"Wise choice. Doc told me you might want to go swimming again, and threatened to have your hide off if you did. You need a full twenty-four hours out of decompression before you go in again."
"This is a shallow swim, sir. I wouldn't need decompress time…. "
"The answer is still negative. You want to call your people up here?"
"Aye aye. Sir."
Gordon returned to the periscope. It didn't look like there was any activity around the beached wreck of the trawler, but he wasn't going to bet money on the possibility of it being unguarded. "Down scope."
He met with McCluskey, Fitch, and Randall ten minutes later in front of the inner hatch for the forward escape trunk. "You both understand," Randall was telling them, "that the skipper can't hang around more than two hours. You get back before then, or you might need to hitchhike home."
"I'll hold the boat here as long as I can," Gordon added. "But there's a hell of a lot of ASW activity north and east of us, and we cannot afford to be in water this shallow when the sun comes up. Understood?"
"Yes, sir."
"Sure do, sir."
"Okay. Good luck."
"Thank you, sir," McCluskey said, opening the hatch. He grinned at Randall. "Don't you worry, sir. We'll be back in two shakes."
"You'd better be, Chief. I don't want you guys leaving me alone on this tub with all these submariners."
"They seem like a pretty decent group," McCluskey said. "I don't think you'll have a problem."
When the hatch clanged shut, and they could hear the hiss of the blow and flood valves filling the chamber, Gordon lightly touched Randall on the shoulder. "It's hard sending others out to do your bidding, isn't it?"
"Yes, sir. I didn't quite realize how hard."
"Been there," Gordon said simply. "Done that. And bought the damned T-shirt."
"At least you were able to look over my shoulder, sir," Randall replied. "When I was in Lebanon? It's hell just watching them go, and not knowing if you'll see them again."
"I know how you feel. C'mon. The coffee's on me."
McCluskey swam the last hundred yards.
The two SEALs had locked out of the sub without incident, retrieving their rubber duck from a storage compartment atop the sail. With the IBS inflated, and an extra set of semi-closed-circuit SCUBA gear stowed aboard, they set off toward the coast, two miles distant.
With the outboard muffled, they were able to come in fairly close to the wreck without being heard, but McCluskey didn't want to give any sentries aboard a chance of seeing them, especially if they were equipped with low-light optics or IR. He left Fitch in the raft and rolled silently over the side, scarcely raising a ripple as he hit the water.
Swimming just beneath the surface, he kept kicking through the darkness, relying on his wrist compass to maintain his course. After covering an estimated sixty yards, he poked his head above the surface long enough to get his bearings. The night was clear, the waning moon not yet risen, but there was light enough from the sky and stars to dimly illuminate the wrecked trawler's silhouette. The offshore current had swept him a bit to the east; he adjusted his heading and kept swimming.
When he surfaced next, the bottom was shoaling rapidly, and the wreck of the trawler lay just ahead, the hull heeled over at a twenty-degree angle, and most of the superstructure charred and blasted. Carefully, he swam around the stern. His name, in Cyrillic lettering across the transom, was Katarina. It was Stenki, beyond a doubt.
It was also clear that he'd died fighting. Up close, his wooden freeboard was stitched with bullet holes and splintered gouges. It looked as though larger-caliber weapons had been used as well… 20mm cannon shells, or larger, had slammed into the deck housing and exploded.
Carefully, he pulled himself up out of the water and rolled over the gunwale.
The stink of smoke still clung to the wreck, and some of the blackened timbers forward were still smoldering, hot enough to light up the IR scope aboard the Pittsburgh. The afterdeck was completely trashed, a tangle of torn and partly burned netting, wreckage from a collapsed mast, smashed-open crates, and even some dead fish, adding considerably to the aroma of the wreck. He broke out a flashlight to give the deck a closer inspection… and to keep from stumbling over wreckage in the dark.
There was no sign of the occupants, save, possibly, one. All the way astern, just inboard of the transom, the sharply tilted deck was marred by two black stains the size of dinner plates. Under the light, the black residue turned rusty; it was almost certainly blood.
Johnson and Smith might be alive yet… but they would not be making their rendezvous. Switching off the light, McCluskey pulled his mask down and slipped once more into the cold, black water.
"We've done all we can do," Gordon said. "I'm declaring this op a wash and heading back for the barn."
Gordon, Randall, and Latham were in the control room, standing at one of the two chart tables aft of the periscopes. The current chart showed the bowl-shaped curve of the Sakhalinskiy Zaliv, and Pittsburgh's current position.
The Hollywood image of a nuclear submarine's combat center/control room tended to stress electronics, computers, and high-tech gadgetry. Gordon had seen at least one recent movie which showed a submarine's computer-display chart table, complete with blinking lights marking the vessel's course.
The truth was a lot less dramatic, more practical, and less failure-prone. A standard navigational chart had been spread out and clipped down to the glass-topped light table, and the Quartermaster of the Watch had then spread a sheet of tracing paper over the chart and used grease pens of various colors to mark the current estimated plots for the sonar contacts, as well as Pittsburgh's position and course. Decidedly low-tech… but it got the job done.
"It would be nice to know exactly what happened," Randall said, thoughtful.
"Nice, yes. But not nice enough to further jeopardize this vessel." He pointed to the blue, time-noted line curving west, then northwest along the Russian coast, leaving Vlasjevo to the southeast. "I intend to hug the coast until we're clear of this party down here at the mouth of the Tatar Strait. They don't know we've left, yet, but they're going to figure that out soon enough, and then they'll be baying at our heels. I want to get far enough away quietly that we can risk opening up on the throttle and making a bit of speed."
"That means creeping along at five knots or so for quite a while," Latham said.
"Exactly. I want quiet routine throughout the boat. The Russians probably have at least some seabed sonar pickups in this area, and there could also be submarines — maybe those tracked minisubs — just sitting and waiting for tourist season. I don't want any unnecessary noise to give us away."
"Yes, sir. The crew has been on quiet routine since we entered this area."
"I know. I just don't want anyone thinking that they can sneeze, now that we're moving again. We have a long way to go before we're out of the woods."
"Or the Sea of Okhotsk," Latham added. "I'll pass the word, sir."
"Good." He continued to study the chart and its overlay for several moments, trying to think ahead. He had to take the initiative, and be at least three jumps of the Russians at each step along the way. If he simply reacted to their actions, pretty soon they would have the 'Burgh dancing around like a puppet, going exactly where they wanted her to go.