Stewart, Shea, and the two enlisted lookouts watched the Stinger climb sharply, miss the descending flare, and arc high up over the center of the waterway. The engine burned out while it was still climbing, and the missile, now invisible, plunged harmlessly into the middle of the strait. Stewart thought he saw the splash in the dark water a mile or more off to port.
"Bridge, Comm!" a voice said over the speaker. "Sir, the Coasties say we're under attack, and want to give chase!"
"Tell 'em to go get the bastards," Stewart replied. A moment later the Edisto lunged ahead, throttling up to an all-ahead 28 knots. Stewart could see Edisto's CO on the bridge. He tossed the man a salute, and thought he saw a salute in reply.
The cabin cruiser had already put his helm over and was running for shore. He wouldn't have much luck there; the coastline west of Port Angeles was flat and straight, offering no hiding places. Maybe the guy was going to try running his boat ashore so the crew could leap out and escape across the beach on foot.
They probably wouldn't get far. The skipper of the cutter was probably on the horn to everyone from local law enforcement agencies to the U.S. Marine Corps right now, letting them know what was going down.
A military attack on a U.S. nuclear sub — inside American waters, no less — was very serious business.
At the same time, Stewart thought, the attack was abysmally stupid. He was pretty sure it was a Stinger that the bad guys had popped at the Ohio. A Stinger mounted a four-kilogram warhead of high explosives, nowhere near enough to sink or even cripple a target as big as the Ohio. Her hull was three-inch steel; an explosion that size might have breached her sail, where the steel was thinner, but the operative word was might. Or a lucky shot could have hit the sail and killed or injured her captain and exec… but luck rarely came gift-wrapped in such a large package.
And the sub was cold … barely warmer than the chilly waters around her. Definitely a low-signature target.
Still… it was conceivable that if the missile had hit them, the sub might have been damaged. Maybe all the attackers had been hoping for was to hurt the Ohio enough to make her put about and head back for port.
Was that enough, though, to warrant sacrificing a boat and crew?
The attackers, whoever they were, were not sophisticated and they weren't well-trained. They'd fired the Stinger from pretty much the maximum possible range— three miles or so. They would have been better off arranging to surprise the Ohio at a narrow chokepoint — like the exit from the Hood Canal — and pop several missiles from close range.
The Edisto passed across Ohio's bow, sounding a blast from its horn. Stewart touched the intercom button. "Maneuvering, Bridge!" he called. "Come right ten degrees, and increase speed to fifteen knots."
"Bridge, Maneuvering. Come right ten degrees, aye. Increase speed to one-five knots, aye aye!"
"Diving Officer, this is the captain. What's our bottom look like?"
"Twelve fathoms beneath the keel, Skipper. Dropping… thirteen fathoms now."
"Let me know when we have twenty fathoms under us, Lieutenant. I want to go where the sun don't shine!"
"Aye aye, Captain."
Shea was looking at Stewart with just a touch of awe. "That was mighty fast thinking, Skipper," he said, nodding at the empty Very pistol still gripped in Stewart's right hand.
He looked down at the pistol, surprised. He'd forgotten he was still holding the thing. He leaned over and clipped it back in its mount, snapping down the cover and locking it.
"Aircraft use flares to decoy IR-homing missiles," he said with a shrug. "Why not a submarine?"
"You saved us…. "
"At worst, I saved us a return trip to NIMF," he said. "That thing wouldn't have delivered more than a pinprick."
But it would have aborted the mission.
That raised several ugly thoughts in Stewart's mind. Had the attack been simply carried out against a target of opportunity? By terrorists waiting in a boat along the Washington coast for the first likely U.S. Navy target to present itself? Maybe even by domestic terrorists… Greenpeace activists gone bad, or something of the sort?
Or had the attack been a part of a deliberate military attack? One carried out by a foreign enemy?
Iran was known to have Savam agents in the United States. There was supposed to be a fairly well-organized al-Qaeda intelligence ring as well. The FBI issued regular reports on their known or suspected activities.
For that matter, Stewart had read a report lately about Stinger missiles in the hands of terrorist groups.
At the end of the Soviet-Afghan War, the CIA had tried to buy back the Stinger missiles they'd given to the Mujahideen; the effort had been a complete failure, and hundreds of the shoulder-launched missiles had passed into terrorist hands.
MANPADS — Man-Portable Air Defense Systems— were a major worry for commercial airline companies the world over. One classified Department of Defense report suggested that MANPADS of various types, including Stingers, had been the leading cause of loss of life in commercial aviation over the past several decades, with over thirty aircraft downed worldwide. There'd been no known Stinger attacks recently; it was believed that the batteries necessary to fire the things had all gone dead by now.
But that wasn't the whole story. A CIA report indicated that no fewer than sixteen Stingers had been delivered by Mujahideen guerrillas to Iran, and Iran had successfully duplicated the design.
Had the Ohio just been attacked by Iranian commandos while still in U.S. waters?
And, again… had the missile been launched at a target of opportunity? Or did Iranian military intelligence know about Ohio's mission, and had the attack been an attempt to stop that mission before it was even properly under way?
A very unpleasant thought indeed….
"What the hell's going on, man?" Dobbs wanted to know.
Caswell couldn't give him an answer. The white line on his waterfall marking Mike One — the Coastie escorting Ohio out to sea — had suddenly taken a sharp dogleg to the left and cut almost straight across the screen horizontally, as the cutter crossed Ohio's bows. "Hey, COB!" someone called from the bridge. "Sparks says we're under fire!"
"How the hell does he know?" Abruptly, O'Day turned and left the sonar room, taking his coffee with him.
"Aw, nobody ever tells us shit," Dobbs said.
"So much for being the eyes and the ears of the sub," Caswell said with grim humor. Back in sonar school, that litany had been recited almost daily; so vital was the work of the sonar department that the ST supervisor could, at any time, request a course change from the Officer of the Deck, so the sonar techs could get a better angle on a contact. "Look at that! Mike Six is really lighting out."
"And Mike One is chasing him," Chief Sommersby noted. "Maybe Greenpeace is putting in an appearance."
A sharp sound cracked in Caswell's headphones, followed by a grinding, scraping noise. "Ow! What was that?"
"Mike Six just ran aground." Sommersby had heard the same broadband noise over his headset. The white line indicating Mike-six stopped growing, indicating that the boat's screw had stopped, but now there were rapid-fire popping sounds. "That," Sommersby said, "is gunfire. Someone is in damn bad trouble over there."