Everyone in the crew had seemed tense, ill at ease, while Pittsburgh had lurked within the shallows off the Russian east coast. Now, their mood was beginning to lighten as the submarine nosed her way north once more, and into deeper water. It was as though a palpable weight had been lifted from the shoulders of every man on board.
"So… do you think that's it?" O'Brien asked. "Are we going home?"
"Once we're in deep water, son, we are home."
"Amen to that," Randall said from his rack. "SEALs always think of the water as a friend. A place to hide, where the enemy can't find you."
"I've heard about drownproofing in SEAL training," Benson said. "That's where they tie your hands and feet and toss you into the deep end, right?"
"That's right, man," Fitch said. "You got to go all the way to the bottom — twenty feet, I think it is. Then push off and come to the surface again. Then let yourself sink. And they work you up to the fancy stuff, like finding a face mask on the bottom. You have to push your face into it, and clear it by blowing out through your nose while pressing it tight against your face, and all while your hands are tied behind your back! Yeah, by the time you're done with that, either you ain't afraid of the water anymore, or… "
"Or what?" O'Brien asked.
"Or else you're dead, man!"
"Kind of like sink or swim, is that it?" Allison said, laughing.
"That's the idea."
"So… how do I become a SEAL?" O'Brien asked.
"Why?" Randall asked. "You want to join the Teams?"
"I don't know. I'd like to explore the options, though."
"I thought you wanted to earn your dolphins, nub," Allison said. He sounded mock-hurt. "Not that goddamn piece of junk SEALs wear all the time."
"That's our Budweiser," McCluskey said. " 'Cause it looks like the Bud logo. And I'll thank you not to call it a goddamn piece of junk."
"Don't join the SEALs, son," Allison said, grinning. "You wade around in the mud all day. You jump out of a perfectly good airplane, hike forty miles, sit around in one position all day so your legs hurt bad enough to keep you from falling asleep, then do your SEAL thing and hike forty miles back. Man, that's a drag!"
"Yeah?" Fitch said. "It's better'n what you guys do, sit-
ting around all the time in a sewer pipe so small it makes a closet look like the great outdoors. Man, I wouldn't trade my mud for your sewer pipe for any money in the world!"
"To each his own," Randall said. "Go easy on them, Fitch. Remember, we need the truck drivers sometimes."
"I guess they're okay, sir," Fitch said, nodding. "But you still couldn't pay me to live in one of these things permanent, like …"
"Tell you what you do, son," Randall told O'Brien. "Soon as we get back to the world, you talk to your CO, and ask—"
"Fuck you, sir," Allison said. "The boy's a born submariner. And he goddamn is gonna finish his goddamn quals and win his dolphins before he thinks about crazy shit like being a SEAL!"
"Behold," Scobey said. "The battle of the marine mammals, SEALs versus dolphins!"
"Fuck you too," Allison said. "I have a half a mind to—"
"All hands! All hands!" snapped from the 1MC speaker on the bulkhead. "Torpedo in the water! Rig for collision!"
And then the deck tilted sharply to starboard.
23
"Torpedo is arming itself!" Rodriguez's voice called over the intercom. "I repeat, torpedo is running hot! Range one-three-five-zero yards and closing!"
"Helm!" Gordon called. "Maintain turn to starboard!"
"Maintaining turn to starboard, aye, sir."
The kid at the helm control sounded as cool as the water outside Pittsburgh's hull.
"Torpedo has gone active!" Rodriguez reported. "Active pinging." A pause. "Torpedo has acquired target. Bearing now two-three-five, almost directly astern!"
"Maneuvering!" Gordon snapped. "Ahead full! Let's race this thing!"
"Conn, Maneuvering. Ahead full, aye, sir."
"Depth beneath keel?"
"Eight-five feet beneath keel, Captain," Lieutenant Carver announced.
"Damn, this beach is barely damp," Gordon said, keeping his voice light. "Let's find us some open water, shall we?"
"Aye aye, sir!" Carver replied.
Faster… faster … Gordon bounced lightly on the balls of his feet, willing the huge boat to move faster.
The torpedo had suddenly appeared on the sonar screens, fired from about a mile away and almost dead abeam off the port side. Gordon had immediately ordered the sub into a hard turn to port, away from the torpedo. His guess was that it had been launched either from another helicopter or from one of Randall's crawler subs… most likely the latter. Had it been launched that close from another sub — a real sub, not one of those tracked toys — he might have tried turning into the torpedo to get inside its arming range, but this fish would have a short arming range, making that a dangerous tactic indeed. And he'd guessed right; the torpedo had armed itself long before Pittsburgh could have closed the range.
If it was a 406mm torpedo, it meant a battery-driven motor and a relatively short range. His only hope was to outrun the thing, and that meant speed….
"Conn, Maneuvering. Now making turns for three-five knots."
"Give us all you can, Chief."
"Will do, sir." Pittsburgh's stated top speed was thirty-plus knots submerged. In fact, she could manage thirty-five and, for short spurts only, could stretch that to something just shy of forty.
"Sonar, Conn! Give us a countdown on the torp."
"Aye, sir. Torpedo now at seven-zero-zero yards, and closing. Estimate speed at six-five knots!"
As a kid, Gordon had always hated word problems in math class, the sort of imbecilic nonsense that had trains leaving from different stations so many miles apart at different times and traveling at such and such a speed, and at what time would they pass one another? Several times, he'd rewritten the problem so that the trains wouldn't pass, but collide in a satisfactorily fiery explosion… which hadn't exactly endeared him to the teacher.
Here at long last was a practical application of those problems. The Russian torpedo was following the Pittsburgh, coming right up her ass. If the 'Burgh was moving at thirty-five knots and the torpedo at sixty-five knots, the torpedo obviously was closing the range at thirty knots… about thirty-four and a half miles per hour.
Didn't seem like much… a slow cruise through town in a car. But at that speed it would cover seven hundred yards in a bit over…
"Forty seconds to impact," Rodriguez warned.
"Stand by the CM dispenser, COB."
"Ready to release countermeasures," Warren replied.
"Five hundred yards. Thirty seconds to impact."
Gordon closed his eyes, picturing the moving sub, the faster-moving torpedo homing now on active sonar. Countermeasures gave them a chance.
In World War II, the German U-boat skippers had perfected the use of bubble decoys. Pillenwerfer, they'd called it, the "pill-thrower," firing a capsule that released a dense cloud of bubbles that shielded the submarine from a surface ship's sonar or ASDIC.