And Garrett had done all he could about the oncoming torpedoes, at least for the moment. When they got closer, maybe…
He wondered if the Sea Hawk had been able to pluck the CIA "package" back from the angry sea. He didn't regret doing what he'd done; making that kind of decision was what the U.S. government paid him to do.
Yet he also had to consider what must be going through the crew's minds right now. Even knowing that Virginia's survival depended on instant response, they would be identifying with that poor son of a bitch adrift in the storm, watching his ticket home slide away into the depths. And they would be aware that standing orders had sealed off the men in the torpedo room as soon as fire was detected. That was survival.
Survival meant sacrifice.
Garrett found himself thinking about one of the great heroes of the U.S. submarine service — Commander Howard W. Gilmore. While commanding the USS Growler on her fourth combat patrol in the Pacific during World War II, he'd been on the conning tower when a Japanese gunboat attacked out of the darkness, spraying the bridge with machine-gun fire. Desperately wounded as the lookouts had scrambled below deck, he'd waved off the sailors who'd tried to come back for him. "Take her down!" had been his final command.
Growler had submerged out from under Gilmore, and for that act he'd been posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor.
Survival.
And more than survival. Striking back.
Who was it who'd just ambushed the Virginia? Occam's Razor — the premise that the simplest explanation was most often the correct one — suggested that that other sub out there in the darkness was the rogue submarine that had been torpedoing Vietnamese assets, taking American hostages…
… and blowing helpless civilian airliners out of the sky.
He wanted that other submarine, wanted it very badly indeed. Curse the damned luck that had crippled Virginia's weapons system on her very first shot fired in anger! He detected the hand of the ubiquitous Murphy here. If something can go wrong, it will go wrong.
Garrett decided that he needed to be a bit proactive with old Murph. There had to be a way to encourage things to start going wrong for the hostile sub out there.
If he could understand the enemy, understand his thinking, he could kill him.
"Don EABs!" Giangreco yelled. The compartment was swiftly filling with smoke, burning the lungs and rendering sight all but useless.
Wallace had been through the emergency drill a hundred times, first back at sub school, then later as a raw, air-breathing unqual during the trip under the ice — being forced to find EABs and overhead air source manifolds in every compartment on board— blindfolded.
Emergency Air-Breathing masks were full-face respirators with regulators that clipped to your belt, and air hoses that attached to manifolds in the overhead. Wallace pulled his mask into place, tightening the straps behind his head, and inhaled hard to draw his first breath. Submariners called wearing the damned things sucking air or, more impolitely, sucking. Partly that was because you had to suck hard to draw each breath, which was incredibly tiring after the first few minutes, and partly too, the sailors said who'd done it, it was because wearing the things sucked.
With the EAB on, however, he could breathe, and he could see better without the stinging smoke searing his watering eyes. The other Virginia men had their masks on, too. The SEALs, though, were coughing and gasping in the aft end of the compartment; there weren't enough masks for everyone.
But, then, all that was necessary was to have enough masks for the people needed to fight the fire. A CAT— an emergency Casualty Assistance Team — would be on the way by now, but if the fire could be extinguished sooner, so much the better. Giangreco had snatched a bright red CO2 fire extinguisher off the bulkhead and was approaching the fire like a warrior prepared for battle.
It was tough to see through the boiling smoke, but to Wallace's eye it appeared that a bundle of plastic tubes and plastic-coated wires had caught fire inside the opened access, and the stuff was bubbling up into a tangled, blazing mass of molten plastic.
Something exploded inside the access panel, and a glob of flaming plastic smacked against Giangreco's visor. He stumbled back, dropping the fire extinguisher and clawing at the clinging, burning goo.
"Chief!" Rodriguez yelled, turning to catch the chief torpedoman. For an instant, all was chaos in the noisy, smoky hell of the fire-lit compartment.
The explosion, Wallace saw, had also spit a mass of burning plastic the size of his head out of the panel and onto the black-and-red steel of a Mark 48 ADCAP, just ahead of the propulsor shroud. It landed right over a peroxide intake vent, blazing furiously.
Wallace didn't think; he couldn't think. Somewhere, deep inside his mind, fear gibbered… and with it the knowledge that if the fuel supply of that torpedo ignited, it would be like loosing a three-and-a-half-ton rocket inside this tiny space. Lunging forward, he scooped up the burning mass, dragged it from the torpedo, and looked wildly about for something to do with it.
His hands were burning. Christ the pain! But he managed to take three swift steps aft, drop to his knees, and plunge the plastic, the flame, and his blistering hands into the bucket of mop water he'd been using just a few minutes before to swab the linoleum tiles of the deck.
He discovered he was shrieking in white agony into his EAB mask.
"Conn, sonar! First torpedo has just gone active! Range seven hundred yards!"
"Thank you, sonar." Acoustical homing torpedoes could follow the sounds made by the target, or, if they got close enough, they could begin using active sonar to ping the target, homing on the echoed return.
Only two strategies were really open to Garrett— using decoys or outrunning the hunters. The trouble was, that other sub skipper was good. Rather than firing four torpedoes all at once, he'd staggered the firing, spreading the torpedoes out from side to side and stringing them sequentially, so that the first was now seven hundred yards away, but the last was still nearly two thousand yards away.
That meant that Garrett was going to have to defeat each torpedo in turn, that the decoy he used to trick the first one would not take out the next as well.
"Captain!" sounded over his headset, the voice muffled by an EAB face mask. "This is BM1 Johnson, CAT leader!"
"Go!"
"Sir, the fire in the torpedo room is secured! We have one man down with burns."
"Get a corpsman down there on the double."
"Already on the way, sir."
"Very well. Set a reflash watch and report back to me."
"Aye aye, sir."
With any fire on a submarine, there was always a danger that hot flammable materials would rekindle themselves. The reflash watch was a sailor detailed to just sit there and watch the smoldering rubble, and to sound the alarm if the fire flashed back into life.
He would also need to deal with ventilating the smoke.