Wind shrieked and shuddered beyond the door, though it was impossible to tell how much of that was the helicopter's rotor wash, and how much the storm. The rain, whirled by the prop wash into a fine mist, wet his face, and glowed a bright blue-white in the glare of the helicopter's external lights. Leaning against the side of the door and looking out and down, he was appalled at first to see nothing but glare and darkness. Only after several wind-blasted moments could he make out the vague shape of something in the water below — a long, lean shadow rolling in the swell.
Another helo crewman stood by the door, loading a weapon that looked like one of the old, Nam-era thumpers, a stubby shotgun with a barrel as long and as thick as his forearm. Instead of inserting a round at the breach, however, he was adjusting the fit of a blunt harpoon secured to the other end of the safety line attached to Stevens's harness.
The crew chief tapped his shoulder. "Your vest will inflate when you hit the water!" the man shouted into his ear. "Just relax and let them do the work, okay?"
He nodded, not trusting himself to speak. It had been way too long since he'd done this sort of thing.
As a Green Beret, he'd trained for helocast missions, launching himself out of a low-flying helicopter into the ocean, sometimes at night. It was a fast, slick way to insert a squad into a coastal area.
It was also dangerous.
The SH-60 was easing its cumbersome bulk closer to the water, and Stevens could see the submarine more clearly now, a black rectangle erect in a wind- and spray-blasted sea. He thought he could see figures on the deck in front of the sail, made visible by bright orange life jackets, but he couldn't be sure.
The man with the thump gun took aim and fired, sending the harpoon arcing down through the darkness, the white safety line unraveling behind it. In more traditional maneuvers at sea, in a technique that went back six hundred years at least, a rope could be passed from one vessel to another by attaching it to a "monkey's fist," a length of heavy cable knotted into a ball that could easily be thrown from one ship across the deck of the other. The thump gun and harpoon served the same purpose here, sending the line falling through the night and across the deck of the submarine below. Closer now, Stevens could see the crewmen on deck scrambling to grab the line and begin reeling it in.
The crew chief unfastened the clips on the coil of line and tossed it into the night. Stevens now stood on the SH-60's cargo deck with the other end of the safety line in the hands of the sailors below. "Good to go!" he shouted, clapping Stevens on the back.
Stevens took a final, quick mental inventory, then launched himself into the dark.
The prop wash from the SH-60 pressed him down like a giant hand, and, despite his best efforts, he felt himself begin to tumble. If he became tangled in his safety line, he might easily drown. Training asserted itself, however. He crossed his legs, folded his arms across his chest, and tilted his head as far forward as possible, a posture designed to keep the water from blasting up his nose with explosive force when he hit. For a dizzying moment, he was suspended between glare and darkness….
He hit the ocean, plunging deep, the jar of the impact hammering his body. For a moment, he thought he'd been driven too deep… but his life jacket, a model designed for aviators to inflate automatically in case the wearer was unconscious, popped into reassuring fullness, first slowing, then halting his descent. The impact had blasted the breath from his lungs, but only a few seconds passed before his head broke above the waves again, and he pulled down a deep and satisfying chestful of wet, salt-laden air.
Above him, the helicopter was all but invisible, a dim shadow masked by the twin suns of its landing lights illuminating the ocean below. Its prop wash actually flattened the waves around him, creating a vast circle of wind-blasted relative calm. Turning in the water, he could see the black wall of the submarine's sail perhaps thirty yards away, towering against the night. He felt a hard tug at his harness; sailors on the submarine's forward deck were pulling in the safety line now, dragging him toward the sub. He remembered the crew chief's injunction and relaxed, letting them do the work.
He guessed it would take them five or ten minutes to drag him on board.
"Up periscope!"
The gleaming tube of the main periscope rose in front of Captain Jian; he snapped down the handles and rode them to the full up position, pressing his eye to the eyepiece and walking the scope in a full-360 as it cleared the water.
Nothing. Darkness and rain, with waves periodically surging over the periscope like dark blankets. The range was still fairly long — estimated now at 6,100 meters. On a clear, sunlit day with a flat sea, he might have been able to see the target at that range, but on a night such as this — not a chance.
He wanted to confirm the sea state, however, and check for nearby ships or aircraft that sonar might have missed.
"Down scope. Weapon status."
"Tubes one, two, three, and four loaded, Captain. Tubes dry. Outer doors are closed."
"Very well. Prepare to fire tubes one, three, two, and four, in that order. Target is Ch'ien Nine-five. Set for acoustical homing."
"Torpedos one, three, two and four set for acoustical homing, Captain."
Jian took a deep breath. He was gambling everything here… but opportunities such as this one rarely presented themselves.
If the sonar evidence was to be believed, Ch'ien Nine-five was now on the surface six kilometers away. There were numerous unidentifiable sounds out there as well, but the sounds of waves breaking over a hull riding on the surface, the clatter of cables or ropes on a deck, and the hiss and rumble of a ship's propeller straining to keep the vessel on-station in a rough sea were unmistakable. Jian's best guess was that the target had either surfaced to rendezvous with a helicopter — possibly to take on supplies — or because of some problem on board, fire or reactor failure. It seemed madness to perform a supply operation in this weather, but Yinbi's sonar had not picked up any of the characteristic sounds of an emergency, and he could think of no other reasonable explanation for the target's behavior. American attack submarines did not surface unless they had to.
In any case, Yinbi's luck was holding. They'd followed Ch'ien Nine-five's projected course and thirty minutes ago had picked up sounds of a submarine blowing ballast. Cautiously, Jian had closed the distance, creeping forward to close to attack range. His orders to destroy an American supercarrier be damned. The American submarine was almost certainly one of the new Seawolf vessels, an incredibly valuable U.S. naval asset. Sinking that submarine would quite nicely strike the blow intended by Operation Yangshandian, a multibillion-dollar target the Americans simply could not afford to lose.
And if a supercarrier showed up, there would be time to sink her as well.
Another deep breath. This begins it.
"Flood tubes and open outer doors…."
Sonar Technician First Class Ken Queensly leaned far back in the chair at his sonar console, ears encased in headphones, his eyes closed. To the untrained ear, the noise hissing and rumbling through his headset would have been just that — noise. And, in fact, most of it was noise that could be ignored — the sounds of water breaking over Virginia's bow, of booted feet on the forward deck, the stuttering clatter of the helicopter hovering above the water off the port side.