"I think, gentlemen, that we've made it." This time, he let them cheer. When Shea started to say something, he touched his exec's shoulder. "Let them."
"Yes, sir."
For almost an hour they'd crept southward, hugging the sea bottom as Hawking and his infernal device— the nickname had caught hold and spread among Ohio's crew — had zigzagged back and forth between Ohio and her pursuers, blasting away with M.C. Hammer's nineties hit at full volume. Ohio's sonar department could no longer pick out individual Iranian ships… but if that was so, the Iranians could no longer pick up the Ohio.
You can't touch this!
For the past thirty minutes the Manta had been moving more and more sluggishly, its power almost completely depleted. Hawking had managed to switch off most of the alarms — there was nothing more he could do about any of them — and reconciled himself to the fact that he was not going to be able to get back on board the Ohio. He did not have the power, nor did he have the control. It would be like trying to bring an F/A-18 Hornet in for a trap on a carrier, engine gone and hydraulics frozen — a sure recipe for disaster on the flight deck.
God he was sick of that song! His ears were ringing, and he was beginning to think that if he got out of this, he was going to have permanent hearing damage. But he would keep it going, cranked up to full, for as long as he could.
It seemed to be working. The Iranians hadn't closed with them, apparently hadn't been able to fire at them. The blaring noise from "You Can't Touch This" had created a huge dead zone within which Iranian sonar simply couldn't get a lock.
With a dwindling whine behind the thumping beat of the music, the Manta's engine dead, the fighter sub began drifting toward the sea floor.
It was time to punch out. Lifting a safety cap, he pressed the button beneath, arming the cockpit jettison.
Then he grabbed the red-and-white-striped ejection lever on the deck between his feet — a fair analogue for the eject handle in a fighter cockpit, and pulled. Nothing happened.
He pulled again, worried now. And still no response.
Hawking checked the constellation of warning lights on his console, hit a reset, and checked again. Damn it, what was the problem with this thing?
There it was. He hadn't noticed it with all the other damage and malfunction warnings. The cockpit jettison failure light was lit. Somehow — probably during that first near-miss north of Forur Island — the mechanism had been jammed.
He was stuck.
He settled to the sea bed relatively gently. It was dark — the depth here was 135 feet — but he could make out mud swirling up from the bottom.
For a long moment Hawking tried to control the pounding in his chest, the rasp of his breathing. Panic hammered at him from some dark corner of his mind— terror of close spaces, of being helpless, of being in the dark.
The last thing to go was electrical power for his cockpit. The lights faded away and M.C. Hammer's voice drawled to an uncertain halt. In silence and in darkness, the Manta rested on the sea bottom, its pilot now encased in a water-shrouded tomb.
Trapped.
Over the past five minutes three more Shahab-2 ballistic missiles had roared into the early morning skies above Iran, rising to a height of several miles, then pitching over on trajectories ranging from south to almost due west, depending on their launch point. There were now five missiles in the air, and more were nearing readiness on the ground.
Target analyses conducted both in Washington and in the Gulf all drew conclusions based on the evidence of the contrails now scratching their way across the sky over the Gulf. The incoming missiles all were targeting a relatively small area within the Gulf of Bahrain.
The local missile defenses were already on full alert.
For some time now the United States and Israel had worked on joint exercises against just this sort of attack. Code-named Juniper Arrow, they were designed to train personnel and test equipment in antimissile defenses against an adversary to the east that, though identified only as "Red," just happened to speak Farsi. Those exercises had linked Israel's Arrow-2 system, which was designed to intercept incoming missiles at high altitudes in order to reduce the fallout danger from nuclear warheads, and U.S. Patriot missile batteries, designed to intercept missiles at lower altitudes, a second line of defense. Coordination was handled by a U.S. Aegis missile cruiser in the Gulf, which also possessed antimissile systems.
Juniper Arrow had also served as a political weapon, a means of announcing to other nations in the region the fact that America and Israel possessed antiballistic missile capability, and that attacks using such weapons, even missiles carrying nuclear warheads, were by no means assured of success.
That uncertainty was, itself, an important weapon in modern warfare; if the other fellow might be able to survive the initial attack, that fact in itself was a strong deterrent.
And in warfare nothing is certain.
Unfortunately, people being people, deterrence at times breaks down. As the missiles streaked toward Bahrain, members of Iran's religious leadership were on live television, announcing the fact that America's unwanted presence was now being cleansed from the Persian Gulf, that Iran was standing against the Great Satan, that Shi'ite Iran was prepared to carry the green banner of Islam in the name of all who honored the Prophet.
"We've lost all contact with Commander Hawking, sir," Caswell reported. "He's stopped transmitting, and we're not getting anything on active."
"Can you pinpoint where you lost him?"
"Approximately, sir. But only very approximately."
"Keep on it. I want him found."
"Aye, sir."
"What do you think happened?" Shea asked.
"I don't know. We're clear of Iranian ASW activity. But I suppose a helicopter or something could have spotted him."
"No explosions."
"No." Stewart thought for a moment. "He might have suffered damage earlier. Or just pushed the sub-fighter beyond its limits. This was its first use in combat. Combat, real combat, always pushes new systems to their absolute limits… and beyond."
"People, too."
"Yes. People, too."
"Doesn't that thing have an escape pod, or something?"
"It's designed to release the cockpit module and let it float to the surface. It has an automatic distress beacon. We'll find it. Diving Officer! Bring us to periscope depth."
"Come to periscope depth, aye aye."
Stewart walked to the periscope dais. "We'll stick our mast up for a quick listen, see if we can pick up his beacon. He can't be more than a mile or so away."
During the first Gulf War, Iraq, under Saddam Hussein, fired seventy-seven ballistic missiles at Saudi Arabia and at Israel during the space of fifty-six days. The weapon he used was a modification of the Russian Scud, renamed the al-Hussein, which despite design changes remained a primitive device little changed from the V-2 terror weapons launched by the Nazis against Great Britain during WWII.