“Up search scope!” ordered Eddie Mervyn, and Gomez complied, the sleek column rising up, Eddie busy punching in DACS, the decoy torpedo’s attack codes, and, as possible backup, the TACS, or the torpedo’s attack codes.
“Scope on-screen,” said Gomez, adding with deliberate emphasis, “It is a junk we’re seeing.”
“Where are the RIBs?” Eddie asked Gomez.
Aussie, in the reverie that more often than not fills one after such a mission, whether it be crossing dangerous borders in a cold war or a live-fire incursion, couldn’t suppress a grin at Eddie Mervyn’s question. He thought “Where are the RIBs?” was the funniest question he’d heard in months.
“Where are the damn ribs?” Eddie again asked sharply.
“On the barbie!” said Aussie.
“What?”
No one laughed, especially not the general, who was making a mental note to upbraid Lewis as soon as they were safely back aboard McCain — if they got back to McCain.
“One RIB zero two five approaching. Second one — behind us — on two seven zero.”
“Drums!” yelled Gomez. “They’re rolling drums!”
“Go deep!” shouted Mervyn.
They felt more than heard the gurgle of water as Mervyn opened the torpedo tubes’ lids during the graceful descent, the meter needle in the fathometer spinning backward. They were going down like a stone. At three hundred feet there was a rush of compressed air.
“Decoy away,” said Gomez. “Tube one.”
“Decoy away,” confirmed Eddie. “Tube one.”
“Tubes two and three ready,” Gomez told him, the SpecFor warriors all watching the search scope’s screen. They were at 350 feet, approaching their crush depth at 450, Mervyn slowing the rate of descent now, the pictures of the storm-tossed surface being relayed to them via the long fiber-optic thread whose buoyant eye, no larger than a human one, surveyed the heaving surface. Because of the profusion of storm-tossed waves, however, the “rolling visibility” pictures were hit and miss, in that one moment they’d have a glimpse of the junk, the next a wall of foam, the next nothing but angry gray sea.
“Aircraft!” shouted Lee.
“It’s a seagull, for fuck’s sake,” said Aussie.
“Oh.”
The general’s voice conveyed the kind of quiet authority that everyone knew would brook no interference. “I want everyone here to calm down. Messieurs Mervyn and Gomez are in charge. Now, shut up!”
A series of sonar tones like a player piano surged into the RS’s vomit-stinking interior. Part of being a good leader, Freeman knew, was the ability to delegate authority, and right now, countermeasures against what seemed to be an impending enemy “drum” or “depth charge” attack were in the hands of the two men in the team best trained to deal with it, pilot Eddie Mervyn and copilot Gomez. The best thing his team could do was be quiet and pass the freezer bag of Arm & Hammer baking soda that the general had taken from the red fiberglass first-aid kit affixed to the RS’s midships rack, Salvini, Lee, Choir, and Aussie dutifully passing along the Ziploc, pouring liberal amounts of the baking soda on what Aussie softly called Choir’s “generous contribution” to the mission, the odor-eating molecules of baking soda absorbing the smell of sick, at least enough to make the atmosphere more tolerable.
The musical tones increased in pitch and volume as the RS decoy, a pack of miniaturized state-of-the-art electronics crammed into a six-foot-long, fifteen-inch-wide steel “fish,” or torpedo casing, flashed through the sea. Already it was drawing hostile fire, as witnessed by the Payback team via the plethora of red data lights flashing and alarm bells ringing on the main computer’s console.
“Son of a bitch!” said Gomez. “Look at this!” He was watching the luminescent trace that snaked quickly through the superimposed grids of the seabed, the decoy giving off what the RS’s designers referred to as “one-man band” signals, the “band” not referring to a one-frequency band but to the kind of one-man circus ensemble so popular in Europe, where one person behind a curtain simultaneously operates kettle drum, base drum, saxophone, cymbals, et cetera, creating the impression for the listener that there are many more players involved. The RS’s decoy was emitting a cluster of pulses that would, it was hoped, convince the junk and its two rigid inflatables that the decoy was the RS.
It seemed to be working, the voluminous thumps of depth charges, which momentarily caused the RS’s screen to shudder and grid lines to meet, coming not from directly overhead but at some distance from the RS, which was now in ultraquiet mode, all but immobile at 580 feet, and over a mile away from the decoy. Still, Eddie Mervyn expressed surprise, pointing out to Gomez an apparent discrepancy between the distance to the depth-charge detonations as registered by the RS’s passive mikes astern and the “bang index,” the informal name given by RS operators to the data block on-screen, which registered concussion waves of enemy mines, torpedoes, and other weaponry. “Should be louder trace than that,” Eddie told Gomez.
“Yeah,” agreed Gomez. “But our stern mikes must’ve been damaged too. Meaning our bang index is probably way off too.”
“What do you think, Aussie?” asked the general, less interested in the answer than in reestablishing morale.
“I don’t give a rat’s ass,” said Aussie, “long as those friggin’ drums aren’t rolling on us. Decoy’s doing its job, that’s all that matters.”
“You’re right there, boyo,” said Choir. It was the first time he’d spoken since he’d been sick, the RS’s smooth running underwater allowing him to regain his sense of equilibrium. There was another depth boomp farther off, and Freeman could sense the lessening of tension among his battle-fatigued team. The computer screen shuddered again, but this time they could see the blossom of light on the radar, the explosion the size of a silver dollar on the screen.
“They got the decoy,” said Gomez, but the question on everyone’s mind was would the junk and the RIBs give up now, convinced they’d got the Migook raiding party?
Quietly, yet distinctly, as if the enemy above might hear him if he spoke too loudly, the general told Eddie Mervyn to release “wreckage.” Slowly Mervyn opened the vent to allow a mix of prepacked hydraulic oil, rags, and lumps of PVC insulation foam, the first kind of debris you’d see on the surface after a sub was hit, to drift up.
“Won’t that go straight up?” asked Johnny Lee. Lee knew a lot about SpecFor warfare on land, and at least seven foreign languages, but on matters of oceanography he was, as Aussie not so gently reminded him, “a dumb ass,” Aussie explaining how because of currents, salinity layers, upwelling, and the storm’s crosswinds, the flotsam they were jettisoning to fool the junk would probably surface at least a mile away — maybe more.
“Yeah,” Johnny Lee told him. “I know that, you convict. But will they buy it?”
“We’ll see,” said Freeman. “We’ll wait, see if they move off.”
“Better pray,” said Salvini, “they don’t see our eye.”
“Nah,” said Gomez. “Shit, it’s only yea big.” He made a circle with his forefinger and thumb. “No bigger’n a golf ball.”