“Put that damn switch off!” It was Llamos’s voice shouting at the starboard lookout, Llamos hunched, hanging onto the steering console in the middle of the bridge.
“We’re hit, aren’t we?” the lookout yelled defiantly.
“You don’t have to make it easier for them,” Llamos shouted. “Keep the damn light off.” Sandra could see him dimly against the shattered bridge glass as he flicked on the intercom to the radio room, ordering the operator to send an SOS. There was no reply. He gave the order again. Still no reply.”Thompson?” he called out. “Sandra?”
“Yes, sir, I’m here.”
“Go do it.”
“Yes, sir.” Pushing herself off the wet latticed decking she grabbed a flashlight from the port lookout’s rack, making her way downhill to the radio room. Within seconds she was drenched, the sprinkler system going full bore. In the gossamer spray, cut cleanly by the beam of her flashlight, she saw blood streaming down her arms, only now realizing that her face had been lacerated by glass shards from the bridge. There was another flash of light; momentarily night became day. The second tanker was hit, one of her tanks immediately catching fire, an overwhelming explosion of crimson flame curling in the blackest smoke she’d ever seen, the flames now spiralling and joining. In the corner of the radio room she saw the operator trying to get up, holding his head. Instinctively moving to help, she checked herself and instead issued the SOS. As she went into the third repeat, giving the tanker’s approximate position from the last fix, the computer readout dead, there was another sound like an enormous door creaking. The radio room began to move as if disembodied from the ship proper, and she knew that the Sitka was breaking, its spine snapped by either torpedoes or acoustic mines.
One of the Russian sub’s torpedoes hadn’t exploded. Valery entered it in the Saratov’s log as a possible dud, though he noted that given the sea’s condition it might have gone off course because of a sudden thermocline. In any case, all Valery was concerned with now was that he had sunk two tankers — the first, though not on fire, was doomed, its funnel and aft crew sections, each half a quarter-mile long, drifting apart and in toward the wild coastline of British Columbia. Meanwhile the inferno on the second tanker was spreading over the sea in huge, fiery fingers, riding up and down the swells in the fast current. Because of the lack of surf between the protective offshore islands, the fiery spill, fed by its enormous tar balls and mousse blankets of crude, was already washing up on the pristine shoreline. Fanned by the gale-force winds, the huge flames were licking the dense shoreline forests, setting the timber here in the dry cold several hundred feet below the coastal range’s snow line afire in what would be the biggest single blaze and ecological disaster since the oil spills and fires of the Iraqi war.
In the search scope Valery could easily identify the stricken tankers illuminated by the flames as ultrA-1arge carriers of the Globtik Tokyo class, both in excess of three hundred thousand dead weight tons. “Even better than I had hoped,” he informed the officer of the deck. “But I don’t understand why the first tanker isn’t burning.”
“The fires were probably doused by the flooding,” commented the OOD.
“Even so,” rejoined Valery, “the tanker’s own engine oil should—”
Suddenly Valery snapped the grips hard against the scope’s stainless steel column. “Down scope. Dive to five hundred.”
“Down scope… dive to five hundred!” repeated the OOD. The diving officer stood directly behind the two planesmen, hands gripping their two bucket seats, knuckles white as he watched the gauge of the sub. If they dove at too steep an angle, the sub’s stern would come clear out of the water before they were fully submerged.
“Podgotovit’ k vypusku torpedo — simyulatorpodvodnoy lodki. Zadnyaya truba. “—”Prepare to fire submarine simulator torpedo. Stern tube.”
As the torpedo officer confirmed the order, Valery explained the rush to the OOD. “A helicopter’s coming off the second tanker. Most likely for crew rescue but could be ASW.”
For a second Valery chastised himself for not having fired the submarine simulator before the attack, but it was an enormously expensive piece of equipment. Besides shooting out millions of rubles with each fish, its noise, while a decoy for any ASW aircraft or ship in the area, would have been picked up by the SOSUS, the underwater microphone arrays of the sound surveillance system, giving the sub’s general “area position” away. With the depth needle approaching five hundred meters, Valery decided he’d made the right decision, saving the simulator till now. True, he’d glimpsed the helicopter on the tanker’s deck for only a split second, but he was sure its rotors had been spinning, ready for takeoff, possibly with ASW munitions.
“Level at five hundred, sir.”
“Fire decoy!”
“Decoy fired, sir.”
“Silent running,” ordered Valery.
“Silent running, sir.”
From now on if any crew member made a mistake — dropped anything on the metal deck that might be picked up in the sound channel — it would cost the man three months’ pay plus a “zebra”—a black-striped demotion entry on his blue service sheet.
But Valery himself had made a serious error. The Bell 212 twin-turboshaft chopper rising aft off the second tanker’s stern housing pad was interested only in trying to rescue two crew members whose salt-activated vest lights were orange pinpoints in the raging cauldron about the stricken tankers. The spray-roiling beam that was the chopper’s searchlight turned rust-red above the blankets of burning oil. In the beam’s circle that was moving up and down the chaotic sea like an undulating sheet of blood, the two crewmen lay limp in the helo’s harness, having suffocated in the oil after having been concussed by the explosions of the torpedoes. Likewise, scores of seabirds were already smothered in the bunker “C” crude.
Sandra Thompson, Llamos, and the starboard lookout struggled on the slippery incline of the stern deck of the first tanker. The ship’s two halves continued drifting apart as the three survivors tossed over a white, drum-size Beaufort canister, its tether flying free of the ship like some long snake. The canister hit the water, instantly shedding its fiberglass shell and blossoming into a tent raft of vivid Day-Glo magenta highlighted by the fire on the second tanker aboard which small, toylike figures could be seen vainly manning a crisscross of hoses.
“Inflate your vest,” Llamos shouted to the starboard lookout. “Hold your breath as long as you can and—” Llamos’s voice was whipped away by the gale-force winds as he pointed toward the treacle-moated raft now about thirty feet away from the badly listing stern section. The lookout jumped.
Sandra pulled the C02 string on her life vest, heard the sudden hiss of air, felt the Mae West swelling above her bosom as she tightened the waist straps and bent down to inflate the vest of the injured radio man whom she and Llamos had dragged precariously from the bridge. Llamos had taken a turn about the operator’s waist with a painter from one of the lifeboats to prevent the injured man from sliding down the deck that was now dangerously slick with the oil which had been blown skyward in towering black spumes before falling back on the tankers, drenching the four and fuelling the fires with a driving black rain. The radio man was so quiet, Sandra thought he was dead, but putting her finger on his carotid artery she thought she felt a faint pulse.