There are several ways to egress a submarine. Simplest would have been for Halleck to bring the Santa Fe up until just the top of her sail was above water, with the SEALs going out through the sail cockpit. Yuduki Maru had radar, however, and it was possible that even so small a target as that would be picked up at a range of less than ten miles, so the platoon egressed, as planned, through the after lockout compartment.
Because of the positioning of their water intakes, modern submarines cannot rest on the bottom as their World War II predecessors could. Besides, the ocean here was deep; they were over the Somali Basin, which plunged to better than five thousand meters over three miles straight down. The Santa Fe, now traveling north some eight miles ahead of the Yuduki Maru and about ten miles ahead of the Hormuz, slowed to a crawl, maintaining just speed enough to maintain way, her conning tower scraping along just beneath the surface.
Two by two, because the chamber was too small for more, the men of SEAL Seven, Third Platoon, began locking out of the escape trunk. Murdock was last out, giving each man's gear a final check before he climbed the ladder into the narrow cylinder that was a floodable extension of the sub's pressure hull. He went out with MacKenzie, squeezing into the chamber opposite the big Texan and using the intercom, called a 31-MC, to alert the sub's crew that they were ready to go. Turning a valve flooded the chamber; when the water was above the side door, they pushed it open, emerging in a recess in the Santa Fe's afterdeck. The other twelve men had already broken out the gear that had been stored there after their paradrop; four Combat Rubber Raiding Craft from the C-130's pallet canister had been rolled up, lashed together, and stowed in the deck compartment between the sub's outer and pressure hulls, along with the boat's engines and other necessary gear.
They worked swiftly and surely, in an almost total, inky darkness penetrated only incompletely by the small lights the men carried. Both the Santa Fe and the SEALs were still moving slowly forward, and the water pressure as the current boiled aft past the sail was like a stiff wind. Air bubbles tinkled and burbled in the darkness as they rose from SCUBA regulators. SCUBA gear was being used for this mission rather than rebreathers because the final approach would be on the surface, rather than underwater, and there would be no danger of the bubbles giving away the divers' positions.
In moments, the CRRCs were freed and inflated from pressure bottles, rising to the surface accompanied by their retinue of frogmen. Their lights were extinguished as they rode the rubber rafts toward the surface. In minutes, the four rafts were bobbing on a gentle swell on the surface. Stars peeped from among scattered clouds overhead. The horizon, visible only where the stars ended, was empty.
The SEALs rolled aboard their CRRCs and began unshipping the engines and securing their gear. SCUBA tanks, masks, and flippers were removed and stowed. Flak jackets and combat harnesses went on over wet-suit tops; radio headsets were slipped into place and plugged into belt Motorola units. They wore the SEALs' usual mix of headgear: floppy boonie hats, woolen balaclavas, or a dark green scarf folded into a triangle and worn over the head like a bandana. Under their swim fins, they wore thick-soled, rubber-cleated boots, specially designed footwear for climbing slippery steel. No words were spoken during the entire process, and radio silence was strictly observed save for the brief clicks of the necessary radio checks; each movement, each act had been practiced countless times by every man in the team. A hand signal, barely visible in the night, a thumbs-up, and the two sets of rafts began drawing apart, propelled by silenced engines that gave off little noise above a soft purr. The plan called for them to split into two groups of two, Murdock's group heading due South to intercept the Yuduki Maru, DeWitt's squad bearing to the southeast to close with the more distant Hormuz.
The Blue Squad rafts traveled side by side at twelve knots, meeting and breasting each swell. Murdock cradled a hand-held radar unit, intermittently sending out a pulse to check on the Yuduki Maru's position. The signal, deliberately tailored to mimic that put out by aircraft search radars, would probably not be picked up at all by the freighter; if it was, it would be dismissed as another of the aircraft that had been prowling the skies around the hijacked plutonium ship for the past several days.
For the next fifteen minutes, Yuduki Maru remained steadily on course. Soon, the SEALs could actually see her, bow-on, her bridge brilliantly illuminated and with running lights to port and starboard, at her prow and at her masthead. Evidently, the hijackers were doing nothing to hide her presence. It was almost as though they were daring the SEALs to attack.
The lights provided the SEALs with one tremendous advantage, however. Guards on her deck would ruin their night vision every time they looked inboard; the SEALS, black-faced, in black garb, aboard black CRRCs, were all but invisible on the black water. The chances that shipboard guards would notice the approach of the SEAL boats were sharply reduced.
Three hundred yards from the Yuduki Maru's bow, the two CRRCs began to separate. MacKenzie, Garcia, and Higgins in one boat steered for the freighter's starboard side. Murdock, Roselli, Brown, and Ellsworth made for the port. Stretched between the two rafts was a two-football-field length of light-weight, slender, but very strong wire rope; the CRRCs drew apart until they were two hundred yards apart and the cable was stretched taut between them. The range to the plutonium ship closed, more gradually now as the cable's drag slowed the CRRCs. The swell was growing worse, sending the rubber boats up each gentle but irresistibly passing mound of water, then sending them sliding man-deep into the trough that followed.
The Yuduki Maru loomed out of the night, her bow wake a ghostly white mustache shining in the darkness, her hull a black cliff towering over the rafts, her superstructure a bulky white castle riding the sky above the aft third of the ship. The freighter passed squarely between the two CRRCs, the throb of its engines booming out of the silence of the night.
Murdock killed the CRRC's engine as the wire rope snagged against the huge ship's bow. With a jerk, the rubber boat's course was reversed; the SEALs clung to handholds set into the gunwales as the Yuduki Maru began dragging them relentlessly forward at eighteen knots, a sleigh ride that carried them up and down the ocean swell with enough velocity to send a cascade of spray over the CRRC's bow. Inexorably, the raft was swung toward the freighter's side. The SEALs were ready as the rubber side thumped heavily against the ship's massive steel cliff, fending off the big ship with gloved hands. Brown secured the raft in place with a limpet magnet and a length of strong line. Wake and ocean swell combined to send the CRRC bobbing up and down at the Yuduki Maru's side. Swiftly, Ellsworth dropped a hydrophone cable over the side; Roselli was already extending a long, telescoping aluminum pole with a hook on the end.
Fully extended, the climbing pole reached thirty feet, high enough that Roselli, supported upright by the others in the boat, was able to snag a deck stanchion with the rubberized tip.
"Solid," Roselli said, giving the pole a hard, downward tug. The rise and fall of the raft at the ship's side threatened to knock both SEAL and extension pole into the sea, but he hung on, riding the motion with practiced skill. The Yuduki Maru's stern was only twenty yards astern, and the turning of her twin screws filled the air with a deep-throated throbbing.
Murdock nodded, then reached for the trigger for the hydrophone. This was a compact, battery-powered device designed to transmit data via a burst of high-frequency sound. Swiftly, he punched in a code group, three numbers that, transmitted through the water to the submerged Santa Fe, indicated that the SEALs had made contact with the Yuduki Maru and were going aboard.