"Sure," Nemecek said. "In training."
"Then thank your stars this isn't training. You think this is cramped? This ain't nothin'."
There were eight other SEALs in the ASDS passenger compartment, together with their gear, and the quarters were indeed cramped. Designated as the Advanced SEAL Delivery System, the ASDS was essentially a large, blunt-nosed torpedo — sixty-five feet long, just under seven feet wide, and just over eight feet high. On-board crew-habitable spaces consisted of three compartments — the control room forward where the pilot and copilot ran the thing, a central lockout chamber, and the aft passenger-cargo space. Designed to carry up to sixteen SEALs — a full SEAL platoon — the passenger space was still claustrophobic with half that number, especially when they'd brought rucksacks and carry bags filled with weapons, ammo, and combat gear. They sat hunched over, side by side on the narrow, thinly padded bench, wearing their wetsuits against the possibility of an unscheduled swim, with their gear at their feet or piled up aft.
The best that could be said about the vehicle was that it was dry. Until the introduction of the ASDS only a few years before, SEAL underwater delivery vehicles had been wet, which meant that even in enclosed SDVs, the passengers needed to be fully suited up, and breathing either from their own scuba gear or from an onboard air supply.
Halstead had been in on some of the battles over wet versus dry SDVs early in his SEAL career, shortly after the first Gulf War. Navy departments, like all bureaucracies, tended to protect their own turfs, and ever since the 1960s, the submarine service had insisted that only they should own and operate dry submarines.
The SDV — the official acronym stood for "Swimmer Delivery Vehicle," but everyone uniformly referred to the vessel as a SEAL Delivery Vehicle — had been designed to carry up to eight SEALs silently and invisibly to their target, but their range was sharply restricted, partly by the limitations of their electric batteries, but mostly by the fatigue of the operators. Riding inside an enclosed, fiberglass hull was less tiring than swimming, but it was still uncomfortable and cold. The whole idea of the SDV was to preserve the strength and stamina of the SEALs riding it, extending their range and increasing their endurance. Wet transports simply could not protect passengers from the heat-sapping effects of the sea, or the physical stress of a long haul under water.
So the SEAL community had long been angling for a dry transport. They'd evaluated a number of possible machines; the Mark VII Mod 6 had been a dry version, but it carried only four SEALs, its endurance was limited to five hours, and it could only manage about seven knots, giving it an operational range — to the target and back — of only about fifteen miles. In any case, there'd been incredible political pressures against its adoption from the Navy Department's submarine contingent. Dry submarines belonged to the submariner service, damn it, and all SEALs should take note.
For their part, the SEALs insisted that SDVs should be operated solely by the Teams' Special Boat Squadrons. SBS crews were themselves SEALs, and so could be trusted to listen to SEAL concerns about a tricky approach to a target or a mission requiring tight timing.
Slowly, though, as the SEAL presence in the Special Warfare community had expanded during the '80s and '90s, a workable compromise had been reached, and the first ASDS had gone operational in 2000. A true minisubmarine built by Northrop-Grumman Ocean Systems in Baltimore, Maryland, it displaced fifty-five tons, could manage ten knots, and had a range of over 125 nautical miles. The political compromise turned out to be a simple one. The vessel's pilot and commander was a submarine officer, while his co-pilot and navigator — Halstead, in this case — was a SEAL officer.
The whole issue of who controlled what had first amused Halstead, then frustrated him. As long as the squad got to where it was going, he didn't much care who was driving… or which department at the Pentagon claimed the ownership, the credit, or the budget. The important thing was that the SEALs now at long last had a minisub that could get them and their gear to the target, if not in complete comfort, at least in full fighting trim.
Another sonar ping chimed through the bulkhead, louder this time. "Heads up, back there," Lieutenant Michaels called over the 1MC from the forward compartment. "We've got a lock on the Virginia. We'll be docking in five minutes."
"About freakin' time," HM1 Forrester said. "This is not my preferred means of travel."
"What is?" DiMercurio asked. "Jumping out of airplanes?"
Nemecek looked at his diver's watch. "Hell, we've been in this glorified coffin for three hours now. Right now, I'd take being wrapped up and shipped FedEx if it was faster." They'd departed at just past 0100 hours that morning from the Taiwanese naval base at Kaohsiung. Eight hours on that narrow bench was enough to drive anyone nuts.
"Hey," RM2 Pulaski said. "Is it true what they say about chow on submarines?"
"Abso-damn-lutely," DiMercurio said. "Best chow in the Navy. Best coffee, too."
"Yeah," Halstead added. "You just have to not mind if the guy next to you at the table has his elbow in your ribs."
He felt the ASDS roll slightly to the left and accelerate, moving to a rendezvous in the darkness.
"There they are. Helm… thruster control. Hold us steady." Garrett could see the approaching minisub now, a dark-slate shadow like a huge, squared-off torpedo looming out of the surrounding blackness from astern. The camera in the Photonics mast captured the approach, transmitting the image to the big screen in the control room. Floodlights on the aft edge of the sail illuminated the silent incoming shape of the ASDS, barely discernible against the black backdrop of the ocean one hundred feet down.
Like the docking of a smaller spaceship with a larger in some science-fiction epic, the minisub gentled down toward Virginia's afterdeck, aligning itself with the circular rim of the forward escape trunk hatch. A soft thump echoed through the Virginia's control room as the ASDS settled home and the docking collar sealed.
"ASDS docking complete," the dive officer said. "Docking collar secure and locked."
"Mr. Jorgensen?" Garrett said. "Perhaps you'd like to welcome our guests on board. See that they're settled in — torpedo room."
"Right, Captain."
A few moments later, Jorgensen led the SEALs in through the control room. All, Garrett saw, were big, massively muscled men — young, hard, and imbued with an almost palpable air of quiet and deadly competence.
"Welcome aboard the Virginia, gentlemen," Garrett said.
"Thank you, sir," one of the men replied. He appeared to be the leader of the group, though none wore emblems of rank. "Good to be aboard."
"I'm Captain Garrett."
"Lieutenant Michaels, sir," the man said. "This is my SEAL opposite number, Lieutenant Halstead."
"My XO will see that you're bunked in properly, show you where to stow your gear. If you need anything, see him."
"Yes, sir."
The line of SEALs filed through the control room, on their way down to the torpedo room. A close-mouthed lot, Garrett thought… though the ASDS commander, Michaels, would be a submarine officer rather than a SEAL, at least so said the protocol for those odd little hybrid beasts.
Garrett had worked with SEALs before. Submariners, he'd long ago decided, had much in common with the SEALs. SEAL training was more brutal than submariner training, while submarine school was far more technical than the SEALs' BUD/S program, but both groups were as tight-lipped as clams when it came to talking about themselves or what they did, and both groups were consummate professionals.