“We must make the attempt.”
“Are you ready to lead a boarding team onto a ship that may be unwilling to carry our crew to safety?”
A sardonic smile spread across Gao’s face.
“I am, sir. By force, if necessary.”
“Excellent,” Chan said.
He bent over the plotting table to review the myriad merchant vessels strewn over the chart.
“We don’t know which vessels belong to which nation,” he said. “I’m unsure if any would willingly help us, or if verbal radio threats would compel one to stop for us.”
“If one defies us and we must sink it with a torpedo,” Gao said, “its distress calls would be heard by the next ship we threaten to board.”
Chan shifted his gaze to the Reagan, and he accepted that the ghostly carrier had steamed into his past.
“I agree,” he said. “We can afford to make noise now. Reload tubes one and two.”
Gao acknowledged the order and walked forward toward the torpedo room, leaving Chan in a silent room filled with men consumed in private thought.
He exhaled and let his head droop between his arms. Ascertaining the challenges of commandeering a nearby vessel, he visualized the dossiers of the men he had recruited to his crew.
In varied degrees of aptitude, they knew the languages to communicate with most passing ships. They covered the foreign tongues he expected to encounter — English, Japanese, and Korean — and he would identify those on his team with the strongest skills to translate.
Turning his thoughts to small arms combat, he recalled that one sailor had survived three months of commando training prior to suffering a career-altering foot injury, and another sailor had military police preparation. They would lead two, four-person small arm teams.
He decided that once he had weapons in his tubes, he would ascend to snorkel depth, give the fleet a final chance to assign him a rescue option, and then set his escape plan into action.
CHAPTER 33
“Who is the other?”
Dun Lu surveyed the scullery to assure himself nobody had heard his whispered question.
The failed commando considered his submarine compatriots a lesser species versus the warriors with whom he had trained in the special forces pipeline. An excellent specimen of strength, agility, and resilience, Lu had thrived as a leader among China’s best, until an accident had ended his career.
During a small boat exercise, the surf had capsized his Zodiac. He remembered his foot becoming wedged between rocks and the water pounding him against stone. He had swallowed the ocean, inhaled fluid, and died.
Revived, he remembered coughing water aboard a powerboat. When he had realized that he had drowned, the searing pain in his pulverized foot had verified that he lived again. The quick action of his instructors had allowed him to cheat death — but not pain.
When Lieutenant Commander Dao Chan had approached him at his hospital bedside with an offer to join a submarine crew with a covert mission, he grabbed hold of the opportunity to do something — anything to distract himself from the nothingness of his empty future.
While learning basic submarine training and minimal culinary skills to serve as the ship’s cook, Lu realized that his promised adventure would pale in comparison to the life he deserved as an elite warrior. He had nothing but agony with each step that he placed weight on his reconstructed bones.
Two months before setting after the ill-fated North Korean Romeo, two senior officers in uniform had approached him at his quarters. His wife had answered the door, and he recalled feeling the premonition that starting a family had been a vulnerability and that having widowed his pregnant wife in the surf would have been his kinder fate.
The officers had been blunt in recruiting him for a covert mission within a covert mission. Lieutenant Commander Chan would remain ignorant of it, but another member of the crew would work in parallel with Lu to assure the mission’s completion. The two-operative approach would serve as a redoubling of commitment in case Lu decided that his family’s welfare fell short of proper motivation.
Promised financial security for his wife, his parents, and even his siblings, Lu accepted death as his calling.
With the escape from the torpedo that Kilo three-six-six had never launched, Lu buzzed with energy. The Romeo’s survival transformed him from an insurance policy into an operative. He tucked the largest blades from the cutlery set into his overalls’ pockets and marched to the engineering spaces where he expected to meet the other operative.
As he turned the corner to the electric control panel, the pressure on his foot ached. For the first time, he welcomed the pain. Anticipating death, he welcomed all sensations.
Two sailors glanced up at him from their panels, and he uttered his memorized phrase.
“Communism succeeds as a form of government when paired with capitalistic economic practices.”
One man frowned while the other scowled at Lu.
“Are you well, Lu?” he asked. “You must be in a worse state of shock than the rest of us.”
“Never mind,” Lu said. “I was just seeking a conversation to get my mind off our fate.”
He slipped deeper into the spaces and found Park tapping at keyboards among a sea of laptops. Chan’s hand-picked cryptologist had failed in uncovering anything useful that Lu knew about, and he, like most of the crew, considered the hacker extra baggage. As he uttered his phrase, he prayed that Park would ignore him.
The spooky hacker kept his face buried in his screen.
“Go away, Lu.”
Lu obliged and sought the final man in the engineering spaces as he hunched over bearing temperature gauges on the ship’s electric drive motor.
“Communism succeeds as a form of government when paired with capitalistic economic practices.”
As the man scanned the room to assure their solitude, Lu recognized his partner.
“We are the first nation to achieve this,” he said. “And we must protect the nation at all costs.”
Lu formed a desperate and instant bond with his accomplice.
“We should already be dead, but we are not,” he said. “We have work to do. Are you committed?”
The man’s eyes became steel.
“Of course, I am. They threatened me. They threatened my family. They promised wealth to my family. In fact, they’ve already paid. I only need assure that this submarine finds its way to the bottom of the sea to see to the future of my loved ones.”
“Why do you accept death so readily?”
“I’m already dead.”
The man pointed to his lungs.
“Cancer?”
“Yes. I could possibly live with radiation therapy and endless surgeries, but why subject myself to such torture for a miniscule chance of survival?”
“Then let’s get to business,” Lu said. “You start the air compressor. Let me know when we’ve reached low enough pressure in the space to assure that the door remains shut.”
The man darted around a corner and Lu followed him to a silvery rectangular obelisk. He checked the position of a few small valves, opened an intake, and depressed a button. A plate on the end of the pump started rotating, driving cyclic cylinders.
“That’s it,” the man said. “The cylinders will suck air from the compartment and compress it into our high-pressure air tanks.”
“The ventilation lines to the forward spaces are closed?” Lu asked.
“Correct. They are controlled from the engineering spaces and will remain closed.”
“How long until the compartment is inaccessible?”
“About five minutes.”
Lu felt a sick impatience, knowing his ensuing task.