“Just watch those barrel rolls over the runway,” Murdock’s voice came back. “Listen, Skeeter. How’s it look up at your end? You think you can find the thing without going active?”
“Hey, just sit back and relax,” Johnson quipped, shifting metaphors by mimicking an old bus commercial, “and leave the driving to us.”
His heart was hammering, his hands inside the gloves covering them were sweating. He’d never been this keyed up in his life, and he wasn’t sure whether the emotion was from excitement or stark terror.
Navigation — naviguessing, as Murdock had called it before they’d embarked — was an almost mystical blend of sixthsense awareness and pure luck. Since it was assumed that terrorists sophisticated enough to own an atomic bomb would also be sophisticated enough to rig some sort of simple hydrophone arrangement so that they could listen for the ping of an approaching sonar, the SEALs would be restricted to passive sonar for their approach.
Active sonar, using bursts of sound, “pinging,” like underwater radar to pinpoint objects such as ships or oil-rig platforms, was far better for undersea navigation, but it carried the risk of being detected by the target and alerting the enemy that a submarine was in the area. Passive sonar was strictly listening and therefore safely covert; hydrophones aboard the SDV could pick up the sounds other vessels in the water made. The problem was there was a lot of traffic in the North Sea, and the surrounding water was filled with eerie clanks, thumps, whirrs, and the churning throb of engines and screws.
In particular, the nearby screw sounds made by the Horizon just ahead drowned out nearly every other sound in the area, and Johnson had to listen hard over his headset to try to pick out the more distant noises. A small screen on the console in front of Johnson’s face gave a graphic representation of those sounds, what submariners referred to as the “waterfall” because of its appearance, like falling sheets of colored water. Most of the display was the jagged pulse of the Horizon’s powerful twin screws… but there was another element beyond the screw noise, a rhythmic clanking, that probably was coming either from the Bouddica complex or from the tanker moored nearby.
The current flowed southwest to northeast, coming up out of the English Channel at about three knots, and Johnson welcomed the added boost it gave him from astern, just like a tail wind for an aircraft.
At five knots, however, even adding in the assist from the following current, it would take the SEAL SDV well over half an hour to traverse five miles — longer when you added in the extra time required for maneuvering.
It gave Johnson a lot of time to think about what could go wrong.
All things considered, he thought, it was miraculous how fast things had come together when the plan depended on the cooperation of the men on the front lines instead of the REMFs who normally made the decisions. The way Johnson had heard it, the British SAS colonel had cleared the whole thing with his superiors, right down to arranging for the tow from the oil-field supply tug. The plan called for him to take the SDV up close to the pilings supporting Bouddica Bravo and park it there. While Horizon—with a hidden contingent of SAS commandos — moved in close and opened negotiations with the terrorists, the SEALs would climb the pilings, taking advantage of the distraction offered by the Horizon to make their move without being seen. Normally, such an operation would have been carried out under the cover of darkness, but Murdock had made the decision to go in during the daytime for two important reasons.
First and foremost was the time… or the lack of it. According to their intelligence briefing, the bad guys had set a deadline of 1200 hours Saturday for the last of their demands to be met. The sooner the SEALs could get aboard and find a convenient perch for an OP, the better. Horizon’s presence was important too, if for no other reason than that the tug was needed to tow the SDV close enough to the objective to make this operation possible. Having the tug approach at night, however, would definitely make the opposition twitchy, and more alert to the possibility of approaching combat swimmers.
And finally there was the simple and quite practical matter of finding the place. Right now, at a depth of forty feet, there was just barely enough light to see out to a range of perhaps ten or twenty meters. The Bouddica complex was enormous, almost a thousand feet long from one end to the other, counting both platforms and the bridge between them… but the sea transformed even the largest oil platform into a speck lost in emptiness. At night, the speck became harder still to find, especially if the SDV couldn’t use lights for fear of being spotted from the surface. Since they didn’t dare go active with their sonar to spot the thing, while passive sonar was notoriously imprecise, it was possible that they could spend hours aimlessly circling about, passing within a few yards of the objective and unable to see it in the darkness.
Not that it was a piece of cake pulling this stunt off in daylight. The murk ahead played tricks on the eyes, with the wavering shafts of sunlight from the surface creating the illusion of large and solid structures. As Johnson increased the angle of separation between the SDV and the Horizon, he began trying to pick up that rhythmic clanking he’d heard earlier. He was also keeping his eye glued to the compass bubble on his console. The Horizon had been lined up perfectly with Bouddica before the sub’s release. By watching his compass heading, his clock, and his speed, he could hold a mental image of the platform’s direction as the SDV changed course. Bouddica was — should be—that way.
He hoped. He glanced at his console clock. Though the exact timing was the subject of considerable guesswork — their speed through the water couldn’t take into account the speed of the water itself, and that could vary quite a bit with depth or position — it had been almost fifty minutes since their release from the Horizon… enough time, perhaps, to have missed the objective entirely.
He continued to listen for that intermittent clanking sound that had been, if not a certain guide, then at least a reassuring confirmation. It still seemed to be coming from more or less dead ahead. There were other sounds to contend with as welclass="underline" the whirr and chug of some sort of equipment, probably a generator; the sharp, sudden, and unrepeated bursts of sound known to sonar operators as transients… caused by such unpredictable events as someone jumping off a ladder onto a steel deck, or dropping a heavy tool; and finally, the welcome throb of Horizon’s engines, backed down now to a gentle purr and interspersed with occasional blasts that sounded like steam hissing from a vent. That meant that the tug had come as close to Bouddica as the tangos allowed; her engines were running, and the sharp hisses were bursts from her fore- and aftmaneuvering thrusters. She was station-keeping and, in the process, providing a rough beacon for the SDV while SAS Captain Croft negotiated with the tangos.
Horizon’s engine sounds were well off to the right now and starting to pass astern. That suggested that he might not have passed the oil platform yet, but it must be getting damned close.
The operation was like a colossal, high-tech game of blind-man’s buff. And the stakes of this game…
Johnson didn’t want to even think about that.
And just when he’d begun assuming that the SDV must have missed the objective, that he would have to circle around and try another pass, the gray-lit backdrop of the water ahead seemed to take on a faintly more solid feel, a tenuous something that gradually formed a spiderweb of wavering shadows against shadows that was nonetheless more substantial than the light-shaft phantoms he’d been watching earlier. Banking slightly to the left, Johnson slowed the SDV’s forward motion to a crawl and steered for the apparition, which slowly solidified into a dark framework of struts and pilings, descending out of the silvery light of the surface and plunging into the black emptiness below. The bus was scant yards from the nearest of the pilings before any detail at all was visible, a dark and muddy-looking encrustation of algae, barnacles, and muck adhering to the surface of a vertical post four feet thick.