“Been down here long Dad?”
“Long enough, son. Long enough.”
Looking at his father, Tom could see the strength and suffering in his face. Tom was overwhelmed with compassion and pride for this man, commander of the most advanced undersea weapon in the history of the world, his mentor. A man reduced to an emaciated state in the pursuit of his duty and never for a moment wavering in his resolve to serve — at any cost.
“It’s really good to see you, Sir,” Tom paused. “What happened?” he asked.
“It was a double-cross. My XO, James Halifax. Whoever he was working for is well-funded and highly organized. They had a dummy sunken hull the size of a Seawolf, and from it, transmitted the secret distress code.”
“There’s a secret distress code?” Tom asked.
“Yes, there is. Detectable by sonar, there’s a U.S. Navy captain-to-captain, coded distress message sent over a particular bandwidth. It’s Commander Security clearance and above, intended for use only in the case of a stricken submarine,” The captain hung his head, shaking it morosely. “I’ll be damned if I know how he got a hold of it.”
“What about the rest of your crew?” Sam asked.
“Halifax disabled the CO2 scrubbers and flooded the ventilation with smoke grenades. He set off the alarms and ordered the evacuation. Combined with our loss of power, once the wheels were set in motion — the crew couldn’t get off fast enough. They were squeezing twenty at a time into the escape trunks.”
“What happened to them at the surface?” Tom asked.
“God only knows. I fear the worst.”
“Where were you?”
“I remained behind to change the main computer’s codes and stop them from stealing the Omega Deep.”
“Good thinking,” Sam grinned. “Why didn’t you send an emergency locator buoy to the surface?”
Tom knew the device used a satellite phone to send an encrypted message back to the head of the Navy in Wisconsin…
“I did,” Commander Bower said. “Multiple times. My only guess is that they’ve covered the top of the submarine where the buoy is deployed from.”
“What about trying to get to the surface?”
“You mean taking an escape suit and trying to reach the surface?” Commander Bower asked.
“Sure. You’re only in fifty feet of water. It wouldn’t have been difficult.”
“Yeah, but what was I supposed to do then?” the commander asked. “Look where we are. We’re a hundred and eighty miles off shore here. I’m an old man Tom — I wouldn’t last three days.”
“So, you stayed here and starved.”
Commander Bower nodded. “I’ve hung in as long as I could.”
“Like you said Dad, long enough.”
“Sir, do you think we can get this submarine underway again?”
“We’ll need more than the three of us, but I don’t see why not. Halifax’s efforts were more subterfuge than actual sabotage. Over the past six weeks, I’ve rectified faults and restored power to the propulsion intakes, the ventilation circuits, and ballast pumps. As far as I can tell, she should be good to go, all I need is a crew.”
“How many do we need?” Sam asked
“Bare minimum five for basic operations, seven if we want to fire anything from the ship.”
Sam ran his eyes over the sophisticated system.
Commander Bower said, “Where possible, every system has been fully automated, which has reduced crew numbers. Even so, we’re going to be limping into Pearl Harbor with a crew of seven.”
Sam said, “We have aircraft carriers from Russia, China, and the USA all about to converge on our location. I’ve been ordered to destroy your submarine if I can’t make it disappear before they get here, so it’s your call, can it be done?”
Commander Bower grinned through a thick beard. “You’re damned right it can be done.”
A crisp, audible ping, came from the passive sonar station — once the confines of the lower decks distant from the Command Center — and Sam glanced at the monitor. It showed a submarine approaching from nearly 800 feet away, making no attempt to cover up the sound of its propulsion as it raced ahead.
The passive sonar made another sweep, revealing only two possibly enemy targets. One was a surface vessel, which Sam knew was the Maria Helena, while the second one was the unidentified submarine, which appeared to be making a straight line toward the Maria Helena.
Sam swore.
To Commander Bower, he asked, “How long before one of your torpedoes are available to fire?”
The thick creases of the commander’s face appeared to deepen and harden with concern. “Five or six minutes at least. They’re not armed.”
Sam said, “You and Tom get onto it, now!”
He watched Tom and his father disappear to the main torpedo room at the speed of much younger men.
Sam picked up the VHF radio, depressed the mike and said, “Maria Helena, you’ve got an incoming submarine!”
Chapter Fifty-One
Svetlana heard the radio and raced to the active sonar monitor.
The outline of a large predator submarine lit up the screen. At a glance, she knew it was too short to be an American, French, or British nuclear attack submarine. Its hull was too wide to be a nuclear bomber, too. It looked similar to one of Russia’s new Yasen class nuclear-guided submarines, but even that seemed unlikely. The outline was similar, but it was making far too much noise. In fact, that’s what hit her as wrong about the submarine — it was making too much noise to be any submarine built in the past three decades!
Unless it wanted to be heard?
But why?
So it definitely wasn’t one of ours.
Matthew seemed to spot the conflict twisting in her face. His voice was confronting, and he asked, “Is that one of yours?”
“Afraid not,” she replied. “It looks like one of our old Typhoon class nuclear submarines, but I can promise you it’s not.”
“Why not?”
“Because you can hear that thing from a mile away.” She made a thin-lipped smile. “Let me assure you — we didn’t spend billions of dollars to produce a submarine that can be spotted by a salvage vessel. Besides, we sold the lot of them in the early nineties.”
“Touché.” Matthew grimaced. “But that doesn’t reveal what it is doing here!”
Svetlana studied the shape a little more closely. “You know what. I do believe this is an old Typhoon class nuclear submarine, that has been heavily modified.”
“How so?”
She pointed to the bow, where a sphere rose like a strange wart. “That doesn’t belong there. If anything, it adds more noise and increases the size of the submarine’s natural wake. My guess is that it’s been retrofitted, but I couldn’t even guess what purpose it serves.”
That slowed him. His face pale and disturbed by her reference to the sphere, Matthew said, “I can.”
“Really?” she asked, now curious. “What?”
“You’ll see soon enough,” he said, his eyes fixing on the sonar monitor. “The submarine appears to be surfacing.”
Her eyes darted from the monitor across to the calm surface of the sea, half a mile off the port bow.
The submarine rose fast, disappearing from the view of the Maria Helena’s array of active sonar transducers.
Nearly two minutes later, the submarine still hadn’t surfaced. She turned to Matthew and Elise who were searching the bathymetric and sonar monitors. “Where did it go?”