And then there was no time for decision making. Garrett could hear — they all could heart — the steady thrum of the Kilo's screw ahead and above, growing closer, almost masked by the heavier pounding of the freighter's propeller. It was going to be close….
Garrett grabbed the microphone and switched it to intercom speaker. "All hands! Brace for collision! Sound collision alert!"
The klaxon sounded its shrill warning squawk, and then they struck with a thunderous impact, dimming the lights and flinging them all hard and to the right. For a horrifying nightmare of a moment it felt like Pittsburgh was about to go bellyup….
3
Garrett grabbed hold of the safety railing next to the periscope platform as the Pittsburgh heeled over to starboard. The main lights flickered out a second time, replaced by the eerie glow of the emergency lights, before coming back on full. With the deck tilted to a forty-five-degree angle, all he, all any of the men in the control room, could do was hang on, waiting, as a shrill, metallic ripping sound grated through the hull from somewhere overhead.
"Caught her with our conning tower," Stewart said, looking up at the overhead. Then the scraping, ripping sound stopped and the Pittsburgh began to right herself, the deck slipping back toward a more reasonable level plane.
They were continuing to descend, however, in obedience to Garrett's last command. "Level off at one hundred feet!" he snapped.
"Make depth one hundred feet," the diving officer replied. There was remarkably little stress evident in his voice, considering what had just happened. "Aye aye!"
Everyone in the control room continued carrying out his assigned tasks, calmly and professionally. There was a terrifying number of things that could go wrong on board a submarine, any of which could kill her and her crew: fire, explosion, exceeding crush depth, collision. Every man aboard knew how close they'd just come to disaster and knew, too, that the threat wasn't past yet.
Collision was a constant danger for a submerged boat, especially for one submerged just beneath the surface. With her awareness of the outside world limited to the less than ideal sense of sound — a sense that could passively give direction but was notoriously vague on distance — she was awkwardly blind in tight quarters.
"Leveling off at one-zero-zero feet, Captain," the diving officer announced.
"Damage control, this is the captain," Garrett called. "What's our status?"
"Still checking, sir," a harried-sounding voice came back. "We have minor flooding in the sail. No other damage that we can track yet."
"Keep on it."
"Captain," the diving officer said. "We're having some problems with the sail planes. I think we took some damage on the port plane."
"How bad?"
"We can work with it… but we're going to need to get her back to the World to fix her permanent."
That was inevitable anyway. After a collision of this magnitude, they would need to have the hull damage boys go over her from sail to keel with a toothbrush, looking for dings and dents. And there would be the inquiry as well…
Time to think about that, and the future of his Navy career, later. Right now he had a boat and crew to save… and if he managed that, there was still the mission to think about.
"Conn, Sonar!"
Now the hell what? "Sonar, Conn. Go ahead."
"Change of aspect on Sierra One-one! He's turning to starboard! I think he's—"
A second grinding, scraping noise of metal on metal sounded through the control room.
For a moment it looked as though the Kilo was going to easily slip inside of the Kuei Mei's turn to starboard, avoiding the freighter's clumsy sally. Suddenly, though, the surfaced submarine had shuddered, as though she'd run hard aground, and then her blunt prow came swing back to port, straight across the line of the Kuei Mei's charge.
"Hang on!" Morton yelled, and then the freighter's bow slammed against the hull of the Chinese submarine midway between her sail and her rounded prow, shuddering, then rising sharply as the sub's nose was pressed inexorably down into the sea. The Kuei Mei heeled over to port by ten degrees, continuing to grind slowly ahead with a shriek of tearing metal. The crane mast jerked forward, halted, then toppled to the deck in a tangle of guy wires and spars. A moment later there was a telltale crack and a thump as the deck dropped a foot or so. It felt as though the freighter may have just broken her back.
"Hey, Skipper?" Schiff called to Morton across the bridge.
"What?"
"Anyone ever tell you you're an awful driver?"
"Hey, it's my first time at the wheel. Cut me some slack."
"He's gonna lose his license for sure," Vandenberg observed.
Morton moved across the sloping deck to the starboard bridge windows and looked down at the Kilo. It didn't look as though the submarine was damaged much at all, but the forward part of the freighter's hull appeared to be buckling. Another long, drawn-out shudder confirmed it. The freighter was old, her hull rusting. The stress of the collision had done her mortal damage.
Which worked. Morton had hoped to pull off a diversion at best, perhaps buy some time. If the Kuei Mei was sinking, the question of what to do about her deadly cargo was no longer in the hands of Washington bureaucrats.
But just to make sure…
"You two get back down to the aft hold," he told them. "Plant charges on the contraband we found… especially the ammo, understand me?"
"Roger that."
"Set it for…make it ten minutes. If you can manage to punch a hole in the hull while you're at it, so much the better. It won't look completely like an accident, but it'll confuse the hell out of things. Move it!"
"Aye aye, sir!"
The gun battle seemed to be in abeyance for the moment. Several Chinese sailors were running about on the forward deck, green and yellow shapes against the shadows in the starlight optics. To the freighter's port side, the Chinese submarine was riding at a sharp list, almost beneath the bridge. Morton could look down into the cockpit, only a few feet below the weather bridge, and see several officers and crewmen scrambling out of the sail and down ladder rungs to the sloping deck.
A flare burst into starlike radiance above the entangled vessels, illuminating them both in an uneasily shifting pattern of light and dark. The Chinese submarine would be sending a distress signal by now; he wondered what the closest vessel was… Chinese?
Well, the closest vessel would be the Pittsburgh, somewhere out there, cloaked in night and ocean. Interesting question in international ethics, this: A moment ago, one of his options had been to sink the Kuei Mei,an act of deliberate aggression; now she was going down, but accidentally…or nearly so. The Pittsburgh was out there, supporting the op, yet all vessels were required to respond to a mayday. Commander Garrett was an idiot if he decided to surface and render aid, and yet if he didn't, it was possible he'd be roasted alive by a Board of Inquiry.