"High noon. And you're certain daylight won't be a problem?"
"Negative, sir." The SEAL gave him a wintry grin. "Unlike your vessel, Captain, the ASDS doesn't have much of a footprint."
"They've got sixty nautical miles to cover, Captain," Lieutenant Wolfe explained. "At eight knots, that's seven and a half hours. They'll be hitting the beach at just about an hour before dark. That last bit of daylight will give them some recon time, and let them pick where they'll be coming ashore."
Stewart nodded. This was the SEALs' show, and they knew what they were doing. Ohio had gotten them to their drop-off point. Now the ASDS would take them the rest of the way in.
Actually, the minisub would only be carrying sixteen SEALs, under the command of Drake's exec, Mayhew. Drake would remain on board Ohio with the remaining fifty SEALs, ready to take them in as a reserve, or for what was euphemistically referred to as "special action," if needed. Lieutenant Wolfe would also remain aboard. He'd already been ashore on that barren coastline; he was along now strictly as an advisor.
The question, though, was whether any advice, experience, or preparation would be enough to get the SEALs through what was coming.
Or, for that matter, the Ohio herself.
Caswell lay in the narrow confines of his rack, trying to sleep, yearning for sleep, and unable to find it. He was so tired… exhausted physically, but more, exhausted emotionally, wrung out, drained, and limp.
Some part of his mind kept telling him that it was mid-morning, not the middle of the night. With his curtain drawn, the inside of his rack area was dark, but enough of a glow spilled through from the fluorescents outside; and men, as always, kept moving back and forth, getting up for their watch, going or coming from the head, getting dressed, quietly talking or bantering….
He wanted to scream at them all to shut the fuck up and let him sleep.
But he knew that even in perfect silence and darkness, sleep would still elude him.
He'd made it through the last several watches, but ever since Ohio had entered the Gulf of Oman, played her cat-and-mouse games with Iranian submarines in the Straits of Hormuz, and was now quietly entering the Persian Gulf itself, he'd been stretched to the very limit of emotional endurance, and, he thought, well beyond. He'd almost gotten the entire crew killed by missing those Iranian subs on sonar. He'd been following his training since, but, like the old joke about the rabbit from that battery commercial, the crises simply kept coming and coming and coming.
He felt stretched so thin. Nina. He missed her so much. Why hadn't she stood by him? Why had she sided with… them?
Hospitalman Chief Tangretti clambered up the steel ladder within the long, narrow, and vertical cylinder, squeezed up through the double hatch above, and emerged inside a dark spherical chamber. It had four hatches — the one in the deck he'd just climbed through, another overhead, leading up onto the upper deck, and two more, one going forward, one aft. Squatting, he called down to Hutchinson, who was peering up along the ladder at him, his square face framed by the hatchway.
"Okay, Hutch. Pass 'em up."
"Here y'go, Doc."
A bundle squeezed its way up through the deck hatch — a backpack and gear satchel. Pulling it the rest of the way, he turned and pushed it through the afterhatch, into the cargo deck of the ASDS, where TM1 Avery was waiting to receive it.
"Weapon coming up. Safe is on," Hutchinson called.
"Got it."
An M-4 rifle with collapsible stock and M-2 Aim-point laser targeting scope came up through the hatch. He took it, checked the safety, and passed it through to Avery.
More gear came up and he passed it on, before finally joining Avery on the cargo deck. Hutchinson replaced him in the lockout chamber and began accepting his gear from Lambardini.
It was going to be a close fit, and the ASDS had to be loaded step by step, both with men and with their equipment, in a precise order. The routine had been practiced many times before, until it was all but automatic for them, but they still proceeded with meticulous attention to each step.
The idea was to make it work the first time, with no false starts, no retries, no delays.
At last they all were on board — fifteen SEALs and all of their gear for an anticipated two nights and one day ashore — food, water, ammo, targeting gear, communications equipment, all of the materiel, high-tech and low-tech both, necessary for the modern covert op deployment.
It took the better part of an hour to load it all. The only way on board was through the lockout chamber. With Ohio's refitting as an SSGN rigged for covert operations, her first two ICBM tubes had been transformed into lockouts for divers, or, as they were configured now, as access ways to either Dry Deck Shelters or the ASDS minisub mounted on the submarine's aft deck.
The Advanced SEAL Delivery System — ASDS — was a blunt torpedo sixty-five feet long, divided into three sections. Aft was the cargo deck, with Tangretti and his fourteen teammates, designated Delta One and Two. Forward was the spherical lockout chamber, an airlock, actually, that currently was sealed with the special DDS-adaptor on the hatchway, which had once been the outer hatch on one of Ohio's ballistic missile tubes. Forward of that was the cockpit, just big enough for two men — the SEAL detachment commander and the ASDS commander.
Lieutenant Mayhew was the last SEAL to come aboard, just ahead of Lieutenant Commander Jason Taggart, the minisub's skipper. He stuck his head in through the cargo deck hatch. "Everything secure?"
"Everything secure, sir," Tangretti told him. "We're squared away and set to roll."
"Yeah!" MN2 Hobarth called out. "Let's do it, man!"
"Let's go kill us some Eye-ranian tangos, Wheel!" That was RM1 Gresham's booming voice.
"Fuckin' A, Wheel!" BM1 Olivetti added, and several other SEALs chorused their agreement.
"Outstanding," Mayhew said, grinning. "Chief, looks like you have your hands full."
"If they give me any trouble, sir, I'll have 'em running laps."
That raised some laughs. With fifteen men and all of their gear crammed into a tube not quite big enough to stand up in, the SEALs were wedged in side by side so tightly they could barely move. The thought of breathing in these sardine-can confines for the next seven-plus hours was daunting, to say nothing of calisthenics.
"Good man."
Mayhew turned and vanished, moving into the cockpit forward. Taggart came on board a few minutes later; by ancient nautical custom, the commander of a vessel was always the last on board a small boat or launch, and the first off. The ASDS, serving purely as transport from the Ohio to the beach, qualified.
The deck hatch in the lockout chamber clanged shut, and the SEALs could hear other thumps and clangs from below as Ohio's crew sealed their side of the hatches.
"Delta Sierra Delta ready to detach," sounded over the intercom. Delta Sierra Delta was the designation for the ASDS. A moment later a final thump echoed through the cargo deck, the SEALs felt the cylinder roll slightly to port, then stabilize.
They were under way.
Tangretti looked at his watch. It was five past noon. The journey — about sixty nautical miles — was expected to take between seven and a half and eight hours. The ASDS could make better than eight knots; how much better was classified. However, they wouldn't be able to run the little vessel full throttle continuously. The silver-zinc battery array that drove the minisub's sixty-seven-horsepower electric motor needed to be nursed carefully on this long a haul. According to the manuals, the ASDS had a total range of over 125 miles — again, how much more was secret — but the run, sixty miles in and sixty out, was pushing the vessel's envelope pretty ruthlessly.