“Flood the tubes and open the outer doors, but do not fire the missiles,” Graham ordered.
“Aye, Captain,” Ziyax responded mechanically. He reached up to a control panel and flipped two switches. A few seconds later, two lights blinked green. “The tubes are flooded and the outer doors are open.”
Something was wrong. Flooding a torpedo tube and opening its door to the sea was a fairly noisy operation. “I didn’t hear a thing,” Graham said.
“Captain, my indicators show open doors.”
Graham snatched the growler phone. “Forward torpedo room, this is the captain. I want a visual on tubes one and two.”
A few seconds later one of Ziyax’s people came back. “Captain, tubes one and two are flooded and the outer doors appear to be open.”
“Very well,” Graham said, and he hung up the phone.
“When will we fire the missiles?” Ziyax asked.
“Soon,” Graham said. “First I need to see if our ride is topside and in a safe position. Wouldn’t do to hit them with our missiles.”
“Isomil, are there any contacts on the surface?” Ziyax called to his sonar man.
“There might have been one briefly off our port stern quarter, but it’s gone now, sir,” the Libyan junior officer responded.
“Get your crew ready to abandon the boat as soon as I return,” Graham said. “We’ll set the missiles to launch on a countdown clock. Thirty minutes should give us plenty of time.”
“It’s already been done, Captain,” Ziyax said. He stepped aside from the weapons panel so that they could all see the launch controls for tubes one and two. They were in countdown mode at twenty-nine minutes and eighteen seconds.
Graham shrugged. “Very inventive of you, Captain.”
Ziyax pulled out a pistol. “This won’t be another Distal Volente in which my entire crew is killed,” he said. “This time it will be you and your men who die.”
Al-Hari fired two shots from Graham’s left, both catching Ziyax in the chest and shoving him backwards, his pistol firing once into the chart table.
Graham pulled his Steyr and shot the young Libyan at the diving planes and steering yoke, at the same time al-Hari stepped forward and put bullets into the heads of both sonar operators.
“Best you leave now, Captain,” he told Graham. “I fixed the firing circuits so that the timer cannot be shut off.”
“I don’t think the outer doors are open. You’ll have to find a way to get to them.”
“I’ll do it,” al-Hari promised. He was weak, but still able to function.
Graham looked into his eyes. “I don’t understand.”
“No, and you never will,” al-Hari said. “Not until you have come to know God, which I think is too great a leap for you to make.”
Someone from forward fired a pistol shot that ricocheted off the deck between them. He and Graham fell back out of the line of fire.
“Get out of here while you still can,” al-Hari said. “And may Allah go with you.”
Graham shrugged indifferently, and ducked through the aft hatch, to get his things from his cabin and make his way to the escape trunk. “I need three men to lock out with me!” he shouted. It was the only way he figured he’d get off this boat now. He couldn’t shoot his way out, so he needed the cooperation of three crewmen who were not so willing to die for the cause after all. He would take care of them once they reached the surface.
“Holy shit, it’s gunfire,” Dillon said, looking up from the side-scan sonar.
“Sounds like the bad guys are getting cranky,” Terri said.
She and the others were donning their black wet suits, equipment packs, and rebreather units. They’d lowered an anchor just aft of the submarine, which was sitting on the bottom in about seventy feet of water, its sail just a few feet beneath the surface.
The two welding sets were on the afterdeck, ready to go into the water. The job of making sure that as many of the forward torpedo tubes as possible would not open had fallen to them.
McGarvey was going to stay topside with the boat in case the others needed help, but the sounds of gunfire changed everything. “You’re going to need all the help you can get,” he said, pulling on a black wet suit and the rebreather that Terri had to help him with.
“You ever do this before?” she asked.
“Shoot bad guys, or go for a swim in the middle of the night?”
“Both at the same time.”
“Once, a long time ago,” McGarvey said, thinking about the flooded tunnel beneath a castle in Portugal where he had very nearly lost his life. He shuddered inwardly. It wasn’t his most pleasant memory.
His pistol and spare magazine of ammunition went into a waterproof pocket in his suit. Terri handed him an underwater pistol that used CO2 to fire five-inch steel bolts that were tipped with spring-loaded razor-sharp arrowheads. On impact four blades opened and could do a considerable amount of damage to a human body. Spring-loaded racks held five bolts. He was given two racks, plus the one loaded into the triangular frame of the eighteen-inch-long weapon.
“We dive the buddy system, Kirk,” she said. “For this dive my husband pairs with Frank, and you’re mine.” She grinned. “Just don’t think it means we’re going steady or anything.”
“Treat him nice, honey,” FX said from the stern rail. “He’s a VIP.”
“I’ll keep that in mind, dear,” she said. “Ready?” she asked McGarvey, who’d pulled on his dive mask.
“Let’s do it,” he told her.
“Right,” she said. MacKeever and Ercoli went down first with the welding equipment, followed by FX and Dillon, and finally Terri and McGarvey.
The water was pitch-black, though within a few feet the massive sail loomed below and ahead of them like a gigantic black beast. Two small pinpricks of light moved forward toward the bow of the submarine that was completely lost in the darkness, while Jackson and Dillon headed aft toward the escape trunk hatch. McGarvey and Terri followed the lights moving aft.
McGarvey liked diving on the reefs in the Florida Keys, in crystal-clear water, but this was different. The darkness was disorienting, and already a chill was seeping into his bones, though he was sweating with the exertion of fighting the river current.
All of a sudden the bulk of the submarine loomed out of the darkness directly below them. Dillon and Jackson had just reached the aft deck, when a huge stream of air bubbles suddenly escaped from the escape trunk hatch.
Someone was locking out.
McGarvey and the others switched off their dive lights, plunging them into nearly absolute darkness. He pulled out his CO2 pistol, making sure by feel that the safety catch was in the off position, and swam down a few more feet to a position he thought should be just above and just aft of the hatch, with Dillon and Jackson out of his line of fire.
Terri was behind him. She touched his ankle, and then swam down to him so that their face masks were inches apart. She held up her weapon so that he could see it, and he did the same. She nodded and gave him the thumbs-up, then turned in the direction of the escape hatch.
A very large bubble of air rose past McGarvey and Terri, the current carrying it right over them. All of a sudden he saw a circle of dull red light where he thought the hatch should be. Moments later three ghostly figures, wearing what appeared to be emergency escape hoods, rose one by one from inside the submarine.
Dillon and Jackson switched on their dive lights, illuminating the three figures in harsh white light, and fired their CO2 guns, taking out the first two men, who flopped backwards, dark, black blood streaming from the massive wounds in their chests where the razor-sharp arrowheads had punctured lungs and severed major arteries.