“We hear something seaward,” Murdock told the next man on the line. “Pass it along. We go down again when all have the word, and watch for this bastard, but we don’t move unless somebody knows for sure which direction.” Murdock pulled his cap back on and adjusted his mask. When he saw through the gloom of the waning moon the last man take the message, Murdock dropped under the surface and moved down to fifteen feet. He kept that depth and stared hard toward where the Pacific Ocean had to be. He couldn’t see a damn thing but water. Now he couldn’t hear what he had before. He slid his face mask down from his eyes, pulled the wet-suit cap off from his ears, and put his mask back on.
Now, at least he should be able to hear anything coming.
He soon heard something, but it was the steady diesel drone of the Chief far toward the shore. He blocked it out and tried to listen to anything from the other direction.
Nothing. He swam up to Lam, who also had his cap off. They both shook their heads and waited.
A moment later Murdock heard it. An engine. Then, slowly materializing almost directly in front of him, the ugly black snout of a submarine.
Chinese? He didn’t know? He had studied the Chinese Naval forces a year ago, but he didn’t remember much of it. He functioned on a garbage-can-type principle. Gather up everything you need on a topic, sort out the important stuff you must remember, and dump out the rest of it with the garbage.
He knew the Chinese had subs, five fleet and one that carried cruise missiles. Those would be the dangerous kind. The subs all had nuclear power, so they could roam worldwide. From somewhere he remembered a black conical nose on some of the Chinese subs.
He jerked the line twice. At once Lam saw the sub as well. It was thirty feet below them and moving at maybe five knots. Crawling along, worried about the bottom.
Lam looked at him and motioned toward the big black vessel. “Follow it?” he signed. Murdock nodded. There was no time to call down more of the SEALs. They could lose the sub in the dark waters. The side of the sub was under them. They swam down to it, felt the smooth surface of the metal as it slid past them. They needed somewhere to grab and hang on.
The conning tower came toward them. They swam faster and caught it as it went by, moved upward to where they could find fittings and a rail to hold on to. When Murdock saw that Lam had caught a good hold, he sorted his memory for subs. Most had two diving planes, one set fixed on or near the sail structure and one on the bow. He hoped on the sail. He began looking around, feeling. There were six pipes or antennas sticking up from the top of the sail. None of those. Lower. He slid down the front of the sail, letting the forward motion pin him to the metal. Halfway down he found a wide wing-like device. Looked like a stabilizer on an airplane. He’d seen them on subs before. Did they move? Yes. Hinged, with an effect on the level movement of the sub.
At last he found where the movable hinging area was. He packed a stick of TNAZ on each side of the sail on the hinging area, then signaled to Lam. They swam down from the sail to the deck and let the ship move under them as they made their way to the stern. There should be another set of diving planes back there.
The turbulence at the back of the sub made it harder and there was little to hold on to. At last they found a handhold and looked over the sleek end of the vessel.
The submarine slowed. It glided through the water, moving slower and slower, until it nearly stopped. Murdock and Lam swam to the extreme end and checked where there might be exterior diving planes. They found what could be them. Nothing else looked possible. Both men pasted one-quarter-pound sticks of TNAZ explosive on the planes and inserted the detonators. They set them for fifteen minutes with hand signals, then swam for the sail and the other set of explosives.
The sub began to move again and the swim was harder. Lam beat Murdock there, and grabbed him when he almost slanted past the sail.
Murdock went down the front of the sail to the diving plane, pushed a timer/detonator into the TNAZ, and set it for ten minutes. Then the two SEALs swam hard for the surface only thirty feet above them. They hit the surface and Murdock bellowed.
“SEALs, get on dry land. Keep your head above water. Explosives planted. Go, go, go.” Far ahead he heard faint calls that they understood.
He and Lam began a fast crawl toward the point of land they could barely make out. They should have left the Hummer with parking lights on or a glow stick.
He heard some sounds in front of him, and decided it must be the rest of the platoon heading for shore.
The first explosion went off just as a small wave caught Murdock and propelled him toward the shore. The vibrations in the water made his legs tingle, and a shock wave hit him with a gentle nudge.
He stumbled ashore and found Lam and the other SEALs waiting for him.
“You found that fucker?” Bradford yelped.
“Did indeed. I heard one charge go off. Should be three more.”
As he spoke they heard a low rumble, then a second and a third.
“Four out of four, Skipper,” DeWitt said. “Did you get her in a vital spot?”
“Hope so. We worked the diving planes. Wasn’t time to get any of the rest of you on the shoot or we’d have lost the sucker. Holt, get out that SATCOM, let’s wake up some folks.”
Five minutes later the plan was set. CINCPAC had ordered the minesweeper out of the bay and two miles offshore. The more experienced sub-hunters from the Jefferson were called in to find the Chinese sub.
“If you damaged her diving planes, she won’t be able to surface or submerge any more than her ballast tanks will let her,” the spokesman at CINCPAC said. “Good work. The antisub guys should have easy pickings if the boat is still in the bay.”
The SEALs cleared their weapons of water, cleaned and oiled them as usual, and then some of the SEALs took off their wet cammies and let them dry. Murdock figured the nighttime temperature was near seventy degrees.
Ten minutes after the first call, two choppers came in from the north and east. They cruised the bay, then set up a picket fence of sonobuoys down the near end of the wide mouth of Kaneohe Bay. The other chopper laid out a line of sonobuoys at right angles to the first drop heading toward shore.
Holt had the SATCOM set for TAC Two, and they listened to the sub-hunters talking in their helicopters.
“So what can he do?” one voice asked. “He can only blow his tanks and surface so he can repair the diving planes. If that’s what his problem is.”
“Yeah, I’ll give that bastard another problem if we find him. I have no contacts on my line.”
“None here either. Let’s move the box down the bay. He can maneuver left or right. My bet is he’s moving down-bay to the slightly deeper water.”
“In a hundred feet we could see him in the daylight, couldn’t we?”
“Probably. Dropping a new line southeast continuing my line.”
“I’ll box that in on the end. Think he’ll surface and try to get away in the night?”
“He can do maybe twelve knots surfaced. He’d do better to stay down and get about twenty-five.”
“Hey, contact on number two and three. He’s moving south. Range, four hundred yards. Dropping one Mark 46. It’s in the wet.”
“Home in on him, you motherfucker!”
“Yeah, go, go.”
The SEALs gathered around the radio.
“Twenty-nine, thirty, thirty-one. You missed, Cowboy.”
“It’s circled around and taking another reading on all that metal mass. It won’t miss. Oh, Lordy, look at that eruption of water and metal and Chinese body parts soaring into the air.”
“Home Base, this is Birdgame Two. I have a kill. I repeat, I have a kill on one Chinese submarine.”