Minutes later, the cabin dipped and steadied as the helicopter hovered.
“We’re above the first submarine.” The Omani extended his arm. “Have the first crew form a single line.”
Jake watched Volkov’s team stand and disappear out the aircraft. The Lynx then climbed and veered towards his ship.
Hovering above his Specter, Jake stood first and met the Omani crew chief at the door. Below, his submarine carved solid blackness in the water’s reflection of the shimmering moonlight. He noticed a thin wake aside his vessel.
Unsure if he trusted the rope, he leapt. Judging the distance tolerable if he entered freefall, he took the risk, but the harness performed as promised and allowed him a controlled descent.
His shoes hit hard steel, and a lone sentry greeted him with a thick French accent. “I help you.”
As the guard freed him of the rope, Jake remembered that Renard staffed his security teams from former French fighters. He responded in the sentry’s native language. “We all speak French except one of us. Let’s speak French.”
“Good. I’m the only one who speaks English.”
Jake walked to the open hatch and descended the ladder. As the submarine’s interior became his new but familiar universe, he walked to the control room’s elevated conning platform.
The mechanic, Henri, joined him, followed by his sonar ace, Antoine Remy. He’d assigned his engineer, Claude LaFontaine, and the Australian to the propulsion spaces.
Henri joined a commando by the ship’s control station and examined the status of the Specter’s hydraulics, pneumatic, water, and air systems. Remy sat at a console of the Subtics tactical system and turned his toad-like head. “It’s all turned off. I need a few minutes to warm it up.”
Jake gave his first order of the crisis. “Get it up and running so you can start listening. I want you to split your time between listening to the Goliath and listening towards the sea for submerged threats.”
From his control station, the French mechanic protested. “I’ll need at least fifteen minutes to verify we’re rigged to submerge. I need to walk the ship.”
Jake knew the silver-haired veteran could verify the location of each air, water, and hydraulic valve in half that time. “Get it done in ten. Go!”
The loudspeaker above Jake’s head squawked with LaFontaine’s voice. “The engine room is ready to answer all bells on the surface.”
Jake angled his jaw upward to aim his response at a microphone. “Already?”
“The sentries followed an abridged procedure to warm up the propulsion machinery. Everything’s online and running fine at three knots. Terry and a couple of sentries are helping me latch the anchor into its stowed position and prepare the lubrication oil cooling water for high-speed running.”
“Very well. Make turns for five knots.”
Pausing for a moment of reflection, he tried to let the shock of a celebration-turned-crisis settle. He placed his hands on a polished rail that circled his conning platform, and he lowered his head between his shoulders.
Turning his toad-head, his sonar ace interrupted him. “What do you think’s going on?”
“We’re being ambushed. And I think it’s someone doing a damned good impersonation of us.”
“You’ll have to be more specific. We do a lot of things well. We fight, we cripple, we destroy, we steal.”
“Good point. I think someone’s trying to steal the Goliath to do something only the Goliath can do.”
“So, it’s a theft?”
“Why not? It’s as good a guess as any. If they wanted to sink the Goliath, they’d have done it already. This is something more elaborate.”
The tactical system flittered to life in front of the sonar guru, and the toad-head rotated towards a monitor. Remy lifted a headset over his ears, curled forward, and listened. “You’re right, Jake.”
“About what?”
“About this being a theft.”
“How can you tell?”
“I hear the steam ring of one of the Goliath’s MESMA systems. It’s up and running.”
“Shit. That means our thieves have a MESMA technician, and they intend to operate submerged.”
“Do you want to tag them with limpets?”
“Yeah, I do.”
“Or you could use a slow-kill weapon.”
Jake pondered the modified torpedo that used magnetic submunitions to blow holes in a target’s hull. He considered the weapon humane, as it had proven effective in giving time for submarines to surface before sinking. “No. Not yet. My second shot will be a slow-kill.” Resolved to prevent the flagship’s escape, Jake looked to the room’s solitary commando. “Do you have Pierre Renard’s phone number?”
“Yes.”
“Head topside and call him. Tell him we hear a MESMA system running and that I’m going to shoot a limpet torpedo at the Goliath. Got it?”
“MESMA system running. Limpet torpedo. Got it.”
Jake reached into his pocket for his key to unlock the use of torpedoes, stepped forward to a command console, and slid the metallic teeth into a keyhole. “Antoine, assign tube five to the Goliath, and get ready to support my first command decision in this mess.”
CHAPTER 3
The colonel hovered behind his engine room expert, who craned his neck and aimed a flashlight through a maze of piping. Since the stocky man knew the Scorpène-class equipment that inspired the Goliath’s design, he found the expert’s animation unsettling.
“What’s wrong?”
“I can’t find the inlet valve to the main cooling water pump.”
“What the hell?”
“The gas turbine on this ship isn’t an exact three-dimensional replacement of the diesel generator on Scorpène submarines. So, many components are moved from their proper place.”
“What if you can’t find it?”
“Then I can’t check if it’s open, which means I can’t use the cooling water pump. and everything in the engine room that creates heat will eventually overheat and break down.”
“How do you know that it’s not already open?”
The stocky man paused before answering. “I don’t.”
“If you can’t run the pump, how long until something overheats and breaks?”
“I don’t know. It would depend on how fast we’re going.”
“Five knots.”
“That’s with just one engine room, though. One propeller. So it’s a strain of more like seven knots.”
“Fine. How long, then?”
“Maybe ten, fifteen minutes. But I’m just guessing.”
“Get us moving, whether the valve’s open or not. If you need to open it, find it while we’re running. I won’t have us sitting here as cannon fodder due to an accursed valve.”
“I’ll get on it, sir.”
Following the stocky engineer, the colonel walked aft to the oversized electric motor. Sunken into a recess, it wielded a hidden mass that impressed him with its potential power output.
Two combat swimmers stood around the machinery, appearing unsure of their responsibilities, and the colonel attempted to reassure them. “Don’t worry, gentlemen. It’s an imposing machine, but you understand its basics.”
One commando swimmer shrugged. “The basics, sure. If a temperature gauge gets near the red band, I make sure the cooling water valve is open all the way. But other than that, I can only yell for help. We could learn only so much without access to the real machines.”
The second commando pointed to a cradled sound-powered phone. “No, you don’t yell. You talk into this. Or I talk into this. Whatever it takes.”