Brooke was watching the feed along with everybody else aboard the ‘fishing boat.’ “Commander, that’s a bomb right?”
“Yes, it definitely could be.”
She turned to the seaman watching the radiation monitor. “Sailor, could the small trace of radiation you’re getting be from that device?”
The commander turned, “Agent Burrell, are you suggesting that that’s a tactical nuke?”
“It makes sense. Small yield, immediate obliteration of the evidence plus a hot debris field for years to come, thwarting anyone from picking through the rubble.”
“I better get our guys out of there…”
“Hold it, Commander, not so fast,” Brooke said in a voice usually reserved for “Freeze.”
The commander’s first instinct was to tell her in no uncertain terms that he didn’t take orders from her. But Brooke had anticipated his objections.
“Commander, I am responsible to the President of the United States for the ultimate outcome of this mission. So far, events have taken us off our game plan, which was how you charted your course. Now we are in uncharted waters and nuclear weapons are in play. I am going to do you a favor and relieve you of responsibility for what happens next.”
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning under the authority granted me by the Commander-in-Chief, I order you to do nothing and let the Russians plant the device.”
“You want what now? A minute ago you were all, ‘let’s abort,’ and now you are all gung ho. With all due respect ma’am, you want to rethink what you are suggesting here?” the commander said, with a slight tinge of patronage.
“Stop the attack.” Brooke was dead serious.
“Henhouse, have Little Chick immediately break off the attack and hold for further orders.” He turned to Brooke with an expression that asked, “What now?”
The crew was riveted; this woman had balls.
“Okay, here’s how I see it. If the Russians are on a suicide mission then our guys are already dead. They’ll never get away in time. But either those guys in the Russian craft don’t know their sub is dead, or they plan to surface and make it to the trawler.”
“Once they are on the surface, they could cell phone the trawler,” the sonar man said, then quickly pulled back when his commander glared at him.
“Exactly, sailor, so I am going to bet that they are going to plant the bomb and then either trigger it remotely or set a timer to get them clear. Either way, that’s our chance to tie this up and cover all our tracks.” Brooke said.
The commander kept an open mind and said, “Go on, I’m listening.”
“You want us to what?” was the Little Chick’s response to Henhouse. Then they proceeded to watch from the inky black as the Russian unit planted the bomb atop the hull of the Vera Cruz, then turned and began the long, slow ascent to the surface, presumably to alert the trawler of its fallen mother ship and the success of its mission.
As the machine was swallowed up in the jet-black cold, Little Chick moved in. Making for the bomb, they gingerly closed their own articulated arms around it turned in the direction of the Akula. Six minutes later they were back at the Vera Cruz. They used their beacon locator to find a prepositioned tool locker. The GPS Auto Nav took them right to it, some fifty yards from the hull. They retrieved the diamond-tipped self-powered cutting saw.
The huge thirty-six-inch saw blade sliced through the hull of the ship at exactly the spot along the hull where the forward hold was. They made a ten-by-ten-foot square hole in the steel plate between the steel ribs of the hull. The metal started to bend as they made the last cut. They stopped just short of freeing the piece for fear it would fall onto the crucibles. Just as in the rehearsals on the shipwreck off of Puerto Rico, the weight of the newly cut plate hinged down under its own weight like a trap door. They freed the saw, let it fall to the ocean floor, and then headed for locker two. There they retrieved a grappling-hook-like device into which they slid the machine’s arms, then headed back to the Vera Cruz.
“How much longer, Commander?”
“So far they are on track for our best time trial off Vieques, so just ten more minutes to ascend back to Henhouse.”
“It’s amazing, Commander, after all that’s happened and all that the crew has been through, they are still so focused and so on schedule.”
“Good men, good training, and good luck, ma’am.”
“I don’t know if you could call colliding into an Akula luck, but I’ll give you the other two.”
Their first try to snare a crate with the grapple claw almost killed the mission. Like a carnival midway claw machine, the crate “kewpie doll” dangling on the end of the claw broke free and wedged itself between the load and the bulkhead. The DSRV bounced up and down on the crooked crate to dislodge it.
On the second try, the grapple hit pay dirt and they worked the controls and retrieved a crate, which fit the same size and shape outline as a crucible shipping crate. They rested it atop the hull, maneuvered around and turned their craft’s Halogen lights on the stenciled crate.
“We are getting a feed now, ma’am,” the video operator announced.
Brooke opened her iPad, pressed her right thumb onto a green square on the screen which scanned her fingerprint, and typed in the file name for the Vera Cruz manifest.
The Vid-Op read the numbers. “One, four, five, two, nine, Cyrillic E, C, P.
Brooke read down the list, “Roger that. We got one.”
A cheer went up in the compartment as the commander ordered, “Henhouse, get Little Chick and her Egg back to the barn on the double.”
“Aye aye, sir,” was the response.
Thirty minutes later, Little Chick was nestled safely in the Henhouse hanger as she sailed as fast and as far from Chicken Coop One as the flooded bow would allow.
Aboard the faux fishing boat, Brooke reported to Hiccock on the mission over secure satellite link. Bill had patched in Kronos, his high tech ace-in-the-hole, who asked the commander if the trawler was still emanating Electromagnetic Emissions. He then informed Brooke and the commander that the trawler would have all electronic equipment switched off right before the blast. He recommended that Brooke’s vessel also shut off everything at the breakers, everything that could be unplugged, unplugged, and all power switches off. Otherwise, the electromagnetic pulse that a small yield nuke might emit would fry everything plugged in. With that, all agreed to shut down their link and all non-essential equipment on the boat, the last being the EE monitor.
Twelve minutes later the sailor monitoring the Russian trawler’s EE reported, “Target Lana’s gone dark, sir.”
The commander immediately barked, “Kill the electronics at the breakers. Everybody brace yourselves.” Less than a minute later, they felt a crescendoing rumble that rose in seconds to full-blast shock wave, followed by the low, raspy sound of the blast.
The commander turned to Brooke and said, “Smart play, Agent Burrell.”
“Nicely executed, Commander.”
“Archie.”
“Archie.”
Brooke’s gambit killed two birds with one nuclear blast — provided by the Russians. The Akula — and any clue that the U.S. was now holding the evidence — was vaporized. The world would believe, and the Russians would not deny, that the Akula suffered a nuclear event, exploded, and went down with all hands. Even the Russian DSRV ops could only report that they heard a bang and the Akula went dark, well before they finished their mission. Brooke guessed they would, of course, be summarily executed to contain the story, then awarded the Hero of the Russian Federation medal posthumously.