The best he could hope for was to stay out of the way and try to be useful.
He watched Queensly, who was sitting at his console, eyes closed, an almost beatific expression on his features as he reached out with his mind, with his very soul, into the surrounding darkness. His life, Neimeyer realized, depended on the keenness of Queensly's hearing at least as much as it did on the ability of the skipper to make good tactical decisions… perhaps more so at this point.
"Conn, Sonar," Toynbee said after a long pause. "Estimated range to Master Four-one, now twenty thousand yards."
"Sonar, Conn, stand by… "
Neimeyer closed his eyes, his knuckles whitening against the edge of the spectrum analysis console.
All his life, he had been very much in control — of his emotions, of his life, of his decisions.
Not being in control was a decidedly uncomfortable proposition.
"Firing point procedures," Garrett said at last. "Master Four-one." The whole boat was silently waiting on him, on his orders, and it felt now as though a vast weight had been lifted.
"TMA complete," Ward said sharply, referring to the target-motion analysis conducted by the BSY-2 operators and the fire-control coordinator. It sounded like he'd been counting the seconds until he could say his piece. "Target now bearing three-five-five, range twenty thousand. Target course two-seven-one, speed ten knots."
"Very well," Garrett said. He drew a deep breath. This is it. "Match sonar bearings and shoot, Tube One."
"Match sonar bearings and shoot, Tube One."
There was a silent pause. In the old days, aboard diesel fleet boats, they would have heard the hiss of the torpedo exiting the tube in a burst of compressed air, have felt the bow-upward lurch as the submarine lost the torpedo's weight. Seawolf was big enough, was massive enough, that there was no sensation of having fired at all.
"Tube One fired electrically," Ward announced, reading the arcane shift of lighted panels on his combat systems board.
"Conn, Sonar. Torpedo running hot, straight, and normal."
"Sonar, Conn, aye. Fire Control. Set unit one off-course twenty degrees to the right."
"Set unit one off-course twenty degrees to the right, aye, sir," one of the ratings at Ward's combat systems panel said. He was a young third class, steering the ADCAP torpedo at the end of its unspooling wire through a joystick on his console. He looked for all the world like a teenage kid playing a video game.
And in a sense, that was exactly what he was. Most of the men on board the Seawolf were kids; the average age was twenty-one.
"Running time to target," he said.
"Running time to target, nine minutes, thirty seconds," Ward replied.
And this was the toughest time in an attack run. Up until the point where the torpedoes were actually fired, the captain of a submarine was insanely busy, coordinating data coming in from the TMA board, the sonar shack, and the torpedo room. Now, though, there was nothing to do but wait for an agony of unholy minutes…wait, knowing that at any moment the enemy might hear the approaching torpedo and realize they were under attack, knowing that the ghost out there— or other, unheard enemy submarines — might have heard the launch and be closing now to firing positions… knowing that he could not turn or maneuver the Seawolf at all, or even close the outer doors and reload the torpedo tubes, because doing so would cut the slender wire that was fire control's link to the speeding fish. Break that electrical link, and the torpedo would be lost, too distant, as yet, from the target to find it on its own.
And Garrett was mindful that his primary mission at the moment was not the sinking of that Kilo out there, but the rescue of a team of SEALs on the Chinese beach somewhere ahead beyond Kinmen Island.
But the Kilo was standing squarely in Seawolf's path, and that, Garrett thought, was the Kilo's very bad luck.
Nothing was going to block Seawolf from her rendezvous.
Jack Morton was tired of waiting. One of the Chinese commandos was in a bad way, his belly torn open by a finger-sized scrap of shrapnel, and Doc McCluskey didn't think he would last out here another twelve hours.
More than that, however, the PRC attack on Kinmen had thoroughly screwed things for the SEALs. Even without wounded men in tow, swimming back to Kin-men beneath the keels of enemy frigates, amphibious ships, and patrol boats was not exactly his idea of a good time.
"We've been trying to dispatch a Mark V package to your area," Captain Randall had told him over the satellite link. "But the fighting off Kinmen makes deployment a problem. You're going to need to get offshore a ways."
"Copy that," Morton had replied. "We have a couple of options there. Then what?"
"A submarine is operating in your area. They have orders to pick you up, if you can get far enough offshore to make contact."
"And how far is far enough?"
"The bottom's pretty shallow between Kinmen and the mainland," Randall had replied. "But if you can make it into the Xiamen shipping channel… "
Morton had led First Platoon down a wooded, brush-covered slope to see about doing just that. He'd left them at a temporary camp, well hidden from the air and the water, and with Sergeant Zhu Fengbao, the senior Taiwanese commando remaining with the SEALs after Tse's departure, worked his way down the slope to a vantage point overlooking the shore.
West of Kinmen, and within sight of that island, was another island, almost perfectly round and connected to the mainland in the north by a causeway bearing a road and a railway line. Once called Amoy, Xiamen Island had been designated a special economic zone, and in the past few years it had gone through something of a building boom. The Beijing government had been trying to lure foreign investment there, especially from the "rebel province" of Taiwan. The hope had been to attract overseas Chinese to live out their retirement on the island; in fact, wealthy Chinese investors had been buying up property at a rate guaranteed to send housing prices soaring.
From the spur of mainland northeast of Xiamen and within sight of the causeway, Morton and Zhu had a clear view across several kilometers of water of the low, gray sprawl of Xiamen Island, dotted with new high rises and construction. A steady stream of military vehicles was moving across the causeway bridge from the north, and Morton could see several large artillery pieces being set up in a clearing on the island.
The city of Xiamen itself was invisible on the far side of the island, on the west coast, and the shipping channel ran south to the open sea, its location clearly marked at the moment by a pair of freighters and a PLA frigate.
This side of the strait was thickly forested, with channels and inlets beneath the heavily drooping branches of mangrove and thick stands of bamboo. The water was shallow and muddy, more like a tropical river in appearance than a seacoast, with steep banks and very little surf. An armed trawler idled in the channel, perhaps thirty yards offshore.
From the cover of the heavy foliage above the shore, Morton studied the craft through his binoculars. It was typical of the trawlers used along the mainland coast by militia, police, and customs agents, with a six-meter hull, a displacement of perhaps two hundred tons, and mounting two 12.7mm machine guns, one forward of the squared-off, midships superstructure, one aft. He counted about ten men on board, then passed the binoculars to the man beside him, who studied the crew's uniforms for a moment.