The T-80 squeaking its way noisily on the narrow road that crossed the tracks leading to the dock couldn’t see the Americans firing from beneath the high ice bank that led up sharply from the shoreline. One second there was a burst of submachine gun fire far left at the tank, then at ten yards farther right the tank gunner saw the fiery tongue of the heavy American M-19 machine gun. It was the M-19 that the T-80 driver took a precise bead on: 203.1 meters, just over two hundred yards away, but the next moment the tank’s laser sight was knocked out by a burst of the bullet-grenades from the American M-19. The T-80 emitted a cantankerous, bearlike growl, its turret slewing as it backed up a few feet for a better defilade position, lowering its bulk for a slighter silhouette, the laser sighting gone. But at two hundred yards the Siberians in the tank, manning the 12.7-millimeter and 7.62-millimeter machine guns and the main 125-millimeter cannon, knew that if they couldn’t knock out the American weapon they ought to be sent back to Novosibirsk gunnery school. The tank belched, the shell’s explosion throwing earth-rooted ice blocks high into the air, creating a wide, jagged, U-shaped gap in the ice wall. But Aussie, Choir, and David Brentwood, knowing what would happen the moment the T-80’s turret had stopped and hearing the whine of the barrel depressing, had abandoned the heavy M-19 machine gun.
They had rejoined Salvini, who was fighting by the three parked Arrows, the latter’s noses hidden by the ice bank. The other wounded Delta commando, Lawson, had dragged himself into the cockpit of one of the Arrows where Salvini was now hurriedly giving him a second shot of morphine, not realizing Aussie had already given him one a few seconds after the wire had sliced into his ankle. Lawson’s leg, elevated to help staunch the bleeding, was now sticking out of the Arrow’s open cockpit, the plastic bubble having been detached to accommodate him, the leg looking like a short log with the four layers of thermal clothing and the ankle now swollen to three times its size.
As they looked down at the gap in the ice wall, the five remaining members of the SAS/Delta team saw that the M-19 and the Arrow it had been mounted on were no more. The crash of a 125-millimeter shell from the T-80 was still smoking and remnants of the M-19 were still skittering across the ice near the frozen lake’s edge. The Arrow was completely gone, except for its skirting, which was wobbling across the ice like a drunken punctured tire from some enormous bicycle.
By now Salvini had lined up his LAW 80—light antitank launcher — and fired it, the round hitting the tank’s sloped composite armor a glancing blow. Nevertheless, the relatively slow-velocity HEAT round did damage, its molten jet of white-hot steel squirting a tadpole-shape inside the tank. They could hear one of the Siberians screaming inside, saw the slewing turret suddenly stop, and waited for the explosions from the rounds stored by the gunner even as they kept the remainder of the Port Baikal KGB border troops from raising their heads or taking too much comfort from the arrival of the T-80.
Salvini was loading another LAW round as David ordered the withdrawal, sure now that the midget sub under his brother’s command must be well and truly away under the protection of the thick ice. “Choir, you drive the first Arrow with Lawson aboard. We can’t get anyone in next to him with that leg of his. Aussie, you and Salvini in the second Arrow with me. I’ll—” They ducked, the whistle of mortars going overhead, crashing on the lake, splinters of ice shrapnel raining down on their helmets, a shard slicing through three layers of Aussie’s winter uniform, barely missing his carotid artery.
“I’ll drive,” continued David. “You ride shotgun,” he told Salvini. “Aussie, bring the Stinger.”
“Yes, ma’am,” shouted Salvini. He fired off another LAW round. This time it hit the glacis plate in front of the driver, penetrating the armor. At first there was only a short jet of flame from the hole but then, with David yelling for Salvini to “run,” David already in the cockpit starting the Arrow, the tank resounded with a cacophony of small-arms fire, its machine gun ammunition exploding like firecrackers. This time they heard murderous screams from the tank crew and saw the cupola flung open, a cloud of thick, white smoke issuing forth as a gunner, trying to escape, was engulfed in flame, the bulging earpieces of his Soviet-style leather tank helmet melting even as he struggled to get free. David fired a long burst from his HK submachine gun; the man was flung back. David dropped the HK into the Arrow’s cockpit beside him, his shoulder bruised and aching from the punishing recoil of the gun having been on full automatic; but it kept the Siberians’ heads down.
Aussie scrambled into the front of David’s Arrow as Choir, heading for the second Arrow, tossed his last two grenades toward the Siberian trench.
“Give ‘em a good-bye shot!” David called to Salvini who, having dumped the M-60 light machine gun into the Arrow, snatched up the LAW and fired a round at the Siberian trench. It hit the far side of the trench but in doing so threw up a thunderous, exploding wall of powder snow and ice over the entire trench. The Americans used the curtain of falling debris to head for the lake, the two Arrows hitting forty-five miles an hour as they reached its shore. One skidded slightly before righting itself in their race away from Port Baikal, the two vehicles already executing a medley of zigzags, two hundred yards apart, the crack of small-arms fire and hastily ranged mortars chipping and denting the ice behind them.
The torpedo Robert Brentwood had fired had hit nothing, running its two-mile maximum range then losing speed, sinking, disappearing into the black abyss of the lake. Renowned for its clarity, the lake gave up all light after a hundred meters or so. The torpedo soon gained momentum under the accumulating PSI, the pressure on it soon so great that it was speeding, aided by its streamlined shape, deeper and deeper. Imploding at four thousand meters, it was still heading for the bottom at over eighty miles an hour, to be lost forever somewhere in the five thousand feet of accumulated silt.
Robert Brentwood had made a mistake, one that might be excused by others as an error made under stress, but a mistake nevertheless, in firing at what he now believed must have been some kind of fish or mammal — it would have to be a seal, given its speed — its curiosity aroused and coming straight for the GST like an enemy torpedo.
“Damn! It’ll mean our torpedo’s launch will have shown up on the other three GSTs’ sonar.”
“Yeah, “said Johnson, “but, sir, there’s been no voice communication in the sound channel. We would’ve seen that on sonar. At least they’re not contacting one another, whether they heard it or not. Besides, they’d have to go to the surface to trail an aerial. For all they know, it could have been an ice charge pack — you know, one of the charges we figure they must be using to expand the thin ice patches before they launch the missiles.”
“So?” asked Lopez. “They’ll still know where we are. No way their sonar could’ve missed picking up our launch.”
Robert Brentwood now had hold of a new possibility born of Johnson’s suggestion. “Could have been an ice charge, I suppose,” he said, trying to think like the other captains aboard the three enemy GSTs. “Anyway, there’s no reason to think it was aimed at them. I mean, seeing there’s been no voice communication, they probably don’t know we’re in the lake. At least not yet.”
“We’ll soon find out,” said Johnson, pointing to the sonar scope. A blip larger than the one that had been made by what Robert Brentwood was sure must have been a seal was snowing up five thousand yards off, just over two miles away.
“Might be coming to see if we need help,” said Robert Brentwood.”Firing point procedures…” But even as he gave the order he knew that should he fire this second torpedo and it hit the oncoming sub, the other two, probably much farther away in the northern sector of the lake, would pick up the explosions on their sonar, unless they were so far away that their sonar mikes were being blanketed by ice growl. What worried him was the possibility that Port Baikal might have gotten the message out on its radio about a sub being taken.
In fact, Port Baikal, even had it not been totally preoccupied with its self-defense, had been incapable of sending out any radio messages, the microwave dish on the top of the two-story library having shattered, crashing to the ground following one of Aussie’s Stinger rounds. The demolition had so alarmed Nefski that, afraid he might lose his prisoners before he had a chance to interrogate them, he’d ordered them removed quickly from the library across to the hotel. However, in the murderous fire that the Americans were pouring toward the library and hotel, as well as at the KGB border troop defenders, several guards and prisoners had been hit. Some, like Alexsandra Malof, were not injured at all, as prisoners and several guards broke and ran toward the woods to avoid the commandos’ fire.
Shouting through the linoleum-ripping sound of machine-gun fire, the crash of grenades, and the crack of half-a-dozen different kinds of small arms, the pilot of a Hind that had been parked behind the hotel, out of view of the S/D team, was now shouting at Nefski, asking that he be allowed to take off immediately to alert Irkutsk HQ from where, just possibly, some ad hoc underwater communication link might be rigged somewhere along the western shore of Baikal, seeing that Port Baikal’s communications had literally been shot to pieces. “Maybe they can get the message to the subs’ trailing aerials.”
The pilot could see Nefski didn’t have a clue what he meant. “The subs trail VLF — very low frequency — aerials. It’s one way to—”
“Stop them!” Nefski screamed, pointing out at the ice, his finger trembling in the direction of the escaping commandos. “Stop them, you fool, before they reach the other side of the lake!”
“It’s them or Irkutsk!” pressed the pilot resolutely, impatient with Nefski’s vengeful streak. “I can’t do both, Colonel.”
“Yes, you can!” Nefski shouted back. “It’ll only take you a few minutes to get them. Then go to Irkutsk for all I care. Get them and then break radio silence!” raged Nefski. “So what if you draw U.S. fighters to you through our AA screen.”
“Their AWACs’ll jam my message,” said the pilot angrily, seeing Nefski wouldn’t give way. “Come on then,” the pilot shouted to one of the ground crew members. “Haven’t you finished?”
“There you are, sir,” said the ground crew foreman, hastily extracting the hose and snapping the armored lid shut on the self-seal tank. “It’s full.”
“About time.”
Lifting off, he was only fifteen feet above the ground, behind the KGB troop trench. At least eleven KGB were dead or wounded, one sitting — difficult to tell whether he was actually dead or merely stunned from the concussion — not moving as the Hind passed over him, nosing higher. The pilot could now clearly see the two white triangles, twelve to fourteen miles away, heading for the other side of the lake nine miles beyond them. “Ota wnmtsy”—”They’re crafty,” he told his weapons officer below, seeing that the two Arrows — the bruised sky of the approaching blizzard racing southward — had separated well abreast of one another. There was at least a mile between them, virtually making an attack on both at precisely the same time an impossibility. “Well, we won’t play cat and mouse, Oleg,” the pilot told his weapons officer. “We’ve got lots of time. We’ll take them one by one.”
On the ice Aussie saw a fine, foglike vapor streaming behind them, but since the temperature was well below freezing he knew it couldn’t be fog. Then he got a whiff of it. “Hell! We’re leaking fuel.”
“I know,” shouted David, his eyebrows and the edges of his sunglasses caked in ice.
“What’re our chances of the Arrow reaching the other side?” called out Aussie, his voice quickly whipped away in the slipstream.
“ ‘Bout fifty-fifty,” said David. “I’ll try to take her on as straight a line as I can, use less—” There was a flapping noise, then the vapor became a cloud, the engine coughing.
“For Chrissakes!” yelled Salvini. “Gimme a break!” The Arrow’s speedometer needle quavered between fifty and forty-five, then fell to twenty, ten; then the Arrow conked out, only the air cushion sustaining it. The Arrow slid a hundred yards farther, with a snuffling noise, under the residual momentum of the now-dead fan. As they came to a stop, David Brentwood, Aussie, and Salvini saw Choir’s Arrow, with the wounded Lawson aboard, slowly pulling away from them, off to their far left. Whether or not Choir or the Delta commando looked back, they couldn’t tell, but it didn’t matter, for there was only one rule in this situation and that was that Choir had to keep going. He couldn’t break radio silence to call for help either from the Cobras or the Stallion who, as Wain had pointed out before the mission, wouldn’t take off before nightfall.
“Blizzard might help us,” said David as he saw the purplish-black sky gathering power and moving rapidly southward toward them. As they alighted from the Arrow, Salvini, out of habit, took out his foot-long, saw-edged ranger knife and did a proper job on the fuel tank so the gasoline could be dispersed away from them by the wind whipping up in front of the blizzard.
“I dunno,” said Aussie, breathing hard on his gloved fingers, swearing at the frozen zipper of the Haskins case, breathing on it, then quickly extracting the rifle, and flicking out its bipod legs. “He’s gonna get one pass over us at least.” He moved left of the Arrow, Salvini using the vehicle as a rest for the M-60 light machine gun, which he swivelled so that the Arrow would give him as much protection as possible.
David had already moved out to the right, south of the Arrow, but turned west now in the direction of the oncoming blip of the Hind, the Stinger in hand, his HK submachine gun slung across his shoulder. He prayed for a “hover” shot. If he got it, it would be the Fourth of July. The chopper, however, didn’t come at them at all. Nose down, skimming the ice like an unstoppable bird of prey, it was heading instead toward the other Arrow farther on.
“Smart fucker!” Aussie called out across the ice.”He’s leaving us for friggin’ seconds.”
David had a bead on the chopper. Anticipating the track, moving the Stinger’s barrel with the missile, he fired — missing the chopper by a good one hundred yards, the round landing farther up the lake with the sound of a brown paper bag exploding. The sudden “boomp” registered on the sonar screens of Robert Brentwood’s GST and the three other submarines, two in the far north, one closing in to investigate the first sonar blip, caused by Robert Brentwood firing at the seal minutes earlier.
The sub now closed on Brentwood’s GST, its skipper assuming that the second chrysanthemum pattern on his screen-coming from close to the surface — might mean that some American armored force had reached the eastern shore of the lake. Alarmed by such a possibility but unable to find out without going to the surface for a thin ice hole, after which he’d have to trail the long VLF aerial, the captain warned the other GSTs by reverting to one of the oldest methods of communication in the world — tapping out a Morse message through the hull, the sound racing through the sound channel.
“Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!” Johnson said in celebration, the message itself unintelligible, but the sine waves of the message and its source clearly identified on the sonar screen. When the other two subs answered, Johnson transferred the sonar blips onto the superimposed E7 ONC — operation navigation chart. Two were in the northern section of the lake in the southwestern corner of the navigation chart’s “85” grid, one of the subs at latitude 54 degrees, 11 minutes north, longitude 109 degrees, 03 minutes west, the other twenty miles farther north.
But there was still a serious problem for Brentwood. While he now knew the exact position of the two northern subs, as well as the one heading for him, the information narrowing his search area by over 70 percent, he knew that if he fired the torpedo at the oncoming GST the two northern subs could break out of their quadrant on battery power — silent running — and come looking for him. Then it was pure mathematics: one would fire and in order to protect himself he would have to fire back, and the second would immediately have the vector, its torpedo getting him in the cross fire.
“Johnson.”
“Yes, Captain?”
“We’re not going to fire the fish.”
“We aren’t, sir?” said Johnson, looking painfully confused.
“No. We wait. How far away is our Snoop?”
“Ten minutes.”
Choir waited till he saw the Hind spitting orange, then he turned hard right and hard right again and applied the brakes. A mistake — the Arrow spun uncontrollably on the skating-rink surface of the ice so fast that it threatened to throw the wounded Lawson out of the cockpit had it not been for the fact that he was strapped in. But it did throw the chopper’s aim off as the Hind swept low, a twin path of machine-gun bullets chopping up the ice to Choir’s left. The chopper went into a sharp climb, banking hard left in a tight turn to come back at Choir. It was only in semihover for two seconds, but it gave Aussie the time he needed, the chopper centered perfectly in the Haskins’ ten-power scope, its belly filling the cross hairs as Aussie squeezed off the armor-piercing, HE/incendiary bullet toward the Hind over a mile away. The noise of the sniper rifle was a there pop in Choir’s ear as he pulled the throttle wide open again, heading for the tree line growing bigger by the second.
The Haskins could hit a ten-gallon drum at over a mile with the ten-power scope, but the Hind was a much bigger target. The HE/incendiary tore into the chopper’s starboard gas tank like a poker through foil, the explosion barely visible to any of the SAS/Delta crew. The first squall of the blizzard had enveloped the southern end of the lake, completely swallowing Choir’s Arrow and, with the downed Hind, any hope of Irkutsk finding out about the American-crewed sub in the lake.
Once in the cover of the taiga, Choir immediately reduced speed; even so he almost wiped out the Arrow against a snow-covered stump. Driving more slowly now, the noise much decreased, absorbed by the snow-thick forest, he stopped the engine and listened for the other Arrow. There was no sound but the mounting fury of the blizzard. This was where, Choir knew, their SAS/Delta training paid off, a regular soldier’s forced march merely a morning run for them.
Choir took off his sunglasses and looked at his compass. “ Six miles to the choppers,” he said. “How you holdin’ up, boyo?”
Lawson didn’t answer.
“Hey,” said Choir, “you all right?” There was still no answer. Choir unbuckled, leaned forward over the driver’s column, and felt for the Delta man’s carotid artery. It was beating, slowly but steadily. Lawson had a babylike expression on his face.
“You bastard!” said the normally polite Choir. With Aussie’s second morphine shot in him, Lawson had been blissfully out of it all the way across the ice.
It didn’t take him long, but by the time Robert Brentwood got into the SCUBA suit that was the fold-down bunk’s mattress, his face was glistening with perspiration and the approaching blip of the other sub was much larger on the screen, now being only nine hundred yards — a half mile — away. Brentwood spat into the SCUBA helmet’s face mask, rubbing the spittle around on it so as to prevent condensation.
“Nice shooting!” David told Aussie, watching the faint glimmer of the Hind’s debris burning as he helped Salvini lift the M-60 from the Arrow’s nose.
“Thanks, mate,” Aussie told David. “Wasn’t a bad shot at that. Now all we have to do is walk to the choppers.”
“What d’you say?” asked Salvini. “Must be eleven to twelve miles?”
“Nearer eleven,” said Aussie, “as the crow flies. Everybody up to it?”
“No worries, mate,” said Salvini, borrowing the Aussie’s accent.
“ ‘Sat a fact, mate? A dozen Foster’s you’re the first to beg— beg for tiffin.”
“Is she any good?”
“Tea break!” responded Aussie. “Tiffin’s a tea break. Fuck a duck! Don’t you Yanks know anything?” Aussie zipped up the Haskins case and gave his boot to the Stinger’s sight, rendering it virtually useless. They could carry only so much.
“Hey,” said Salvini, “you’re travelin’ light. This M-60 weighs a ton, man. Plus I’ve got the two oh three,” he added, slapping the grenade-launcher barrel on his personnel M-16.
“Oh, tell the about it, Salvini,” said Aussie, shouldering the sniper rifle case.
“Knock it off, you two,” said David Brentwood. “We’re not into the woods yet and We’ve got—”
“Shush!” It was Aussie. “You hear that?”
All Brentwood and Salvini could hear was the blizzard, its cold dropping the temperature another ten degrees to minus forty, turning their perspiration to ice — a major danger, even to the Arctic-trained commandos. You had to keep moving, cool off gradually, otherwise the perspiration could encase you, despite the layers, in a sheath of ice. Hypothermia could set in without you knowing it. You’d start to feel peculiarly warm, slow, and comfortable, the agony of frost nip passing through frostbite and then — to nothingness.
“Can’t be anything,” said David to Aussie’s inquiry, though he was conscious his ears were still ringing from the battle.
“A motor?” proffered Salvini, still hearing only the blizzard.
“Nah,” said Aussie. “ ‘S gone now.” They started off, Aussie pulling back his parka’s Velcro mouth guard then ripping the wrapper from a Hershey bar. As far as he was concerned, it was the only good part of the rations. “Thought I heard a dog.”
“Sure you didn’t fart?” asked Salvini.
“Oh, very droll. Very fucking—”
“Shut up!” ordered David. “Save your energy.” They had a minimum of eleven miles with heavy pack. They should make it in less than two hours, providing they kept a strict east-northeast heading. David slipped the compass string about his neck, not standard marching procedure but he didn’t want to veer off the 22.5-degree heading by even a few yards. He would need to glance at the compass often without having to dig into his pockets, letting in the frigid air.
As Robert Brentwood sat in the pitch darkness of the five-foot-diameter, six-foot-high escape hatch, the luminescent glow of the pressure gauge became visible only when the escape chamber was already half full of water. The surge was less violent now than the initial rush of water, but he was still uncomfortable. Compared to his last semiannual “submarine survival” update course in the Norfolk, Virginia, water tank, the claustrophobia he was suffering now was markedly more severe. He hadn’t suffered from it when he first joined the navy — it had crept up on him over the years, the fear kept at bay in the much larger nuclear subs. But even there it had become exacerbated after he had lost the USS Roosevelt off Iceland. Now, six hundred feet below the two-to-four-feet-thick ice roof, the sense of claustrophobia was pressing in on him.
The temperature of the water swirling about his neck was only two degrees or so above freezing, shocking his system until the microslim water layer between the Arctic SCUBA suit and his skin could steady the heat exchange ratio. His body’s thermostat adjusted as he kept clenching and unclenching his fingers in the tight yet spongy rubber gloves. He told himself, forced himself, to be calm, feeling only an inch or so away from sheer terror as the water level reached the base of the SCUBA helmet and began creeping up, covering the visor. He counted slowly, as he had habitually done during the yearly prostate examination, the naval doctor impatiently ordering otherwise imperturbably calm officers not to stiffen up. “Relax the sphincter, man. Relax, damn it!”
Then the gauge, as well as the cessation of the rushing water, told him he could now open the top hatch. The moment he’d done so he felt his body rising effortlessly, the flippers grazing the hatch edge, his breathing still too fast — the visor, despite the spittle precaution, suddenly misting at the shock of seeing the other GST only sixty feet away. While stilled in neutral buoyancy, its bow had a slight up angle, its fat teardrop shape outlined in the blackness by beads of phosphorescent freshwater plankton, first cousins of the kind that gave sea waves their luminescence even on the darkest night. Unhesitatingly looping the basket he’d made from his T-shirt under the knife scabbard so as to prevent its sinking should he be buffeted by an upwelling, he swam, arms by his side, straight for the GST, struck by the irony that, though he would show up on the enemy’s sonar as a very discernible blip, his shape like the seal he’d fired upon, they would be as confused as he had been.
It was only then that he saw what could only be a raft, its outline, for some inexplicable reason, only partially delineated here and there by phytoplankton. It looked to be about thirty feet square, half as long as the GST itself, its neutral buoyancy assured by what must obviously be depth-sensitive floats.
Exhilarated by the discovery of how it was that the midget subs were in effect hauling their own torpedo and cruise missile resupply, the raft probably holding eight missiles at least — two salvos’ worth, in addition to the four already on the GST — it took him only a minute to swim to the raft.
About to place a lump of C-4 plastique from the T-shirt basket, he felt a U shackle, about five-eighths inch in diameter, he guessed, connecting the cables between the enemy GST and its raft. Using the handle spike on the end of his knife he unscrewed it and immediately felt the raft moving away from him. Now it could not act as a flotation platform for the GST. Next Brentwood turned his attention to the GST.
Within ten feet of the sub, he noticed the curved phosphorescent outline of the GST break, as if a string of pearls had been cut, most of the microscopic creatures disappearing as quickly as they must have alighted on the midget submarine. Without their guiding light he slowed, not wanting to bump into the hull but rather stand off it. Feeling the long, horizontal, stovepipe shape of one of the cruise missiles, he looped the T-shirt basket about its twenty-one-inch-diameter mouth, tying the basket tightly. Next, he pushed the basket’s “goodies,” as Johnson had referred to the centrex plastique, hard between the mouth of the cruise and the algae-slicked metal of the V-weld that connected the cruise tube to the pressure hull.
Making sure, purely by feel, that the six-inch-long detonator was firmly embedded in the plastique, he turned the timer knob sharply counterclockwise, feeling the soft click. Glancing back, he saw his own sub clearly outlined by the phosphorescent phytoplankton. He turned and, kicking hard, started back to the sub, then felt a vibration behind him to his right. He turned to see a spume of luminescent bubbles erupting behind him from the hatch of the enemy GST. The trail of bubbles then abruptly changed from the vertical to the horizontal as the attacker, his knife trailing a secondary stream of bubbles, came straight at him.
It was all confusion, but instinctively Brentwood’s left arm shot for the thinner trail to grab the knife arm. Somehow he missed and felt a warm sensation deep in his left shoulder where the blade had sliced open his SCUBA suit, cutting him deeply. Quickly he thrust his left hand forward again, felt something solid, and drove his knife forward, feeling it go into something soft then hard, the blade rebounding on bone. He gripped his knife’s handle harder, ripping hard left, opening the attacker’s stomach.
Brentwood felt himself being dragged down, the attacker’s body limp, jerking spasmodically now and then. The grasp on Brentwood’s left arm was like steel. With nine minutes left on the ten-minute detonator, his mind’s eye filled with a vision of being pulled down into the countless layers of diarrheA-1ike mud. He pulled his knife back and thrust forward again. But there was no need; as suddenly as it had taken hold, the Siberian’s grip relaxed, the life drained out of him.
Breaststroking and kicking with all his might, Brentwood made his way back to his GST’s hatch and three minutes later was inside the escape chamber, rapping the top of the bottom hatch with his right hand as he began turning the wheel of the top hatch with his left. But now his left hand cramped as he squatted there, his body crouched monkeylike. He switched to the right hand to close the top hatch, his left arm simply refusing to obey his brain, the nerves of the shoulder numb.
He heard and felt the quiet whirr of the GST’s battery going for “burst” speed of seventeen knots which, in the next five minutes, would have them just over a mile and a half away. Brentwood had to stay cramped in the water-filled cubbyhole of the conning tower, as any siphoning of power from the battery to pump out the water would be power taken from the prop. He would have to wait until Johnson figured they were far enough away from the impending explosion before he could start the pump to vent the water in the escape hatch. In severe pain now, Brentwood remained crouched, sincerely hoping that neither Lopez nor Johnson would accidentally bump the “up scope” switch.
As the GST slowed and the venting of the escape chamber began, the water level dropped rapidly, and Brentwood almost drowned, knocked unconscious for a moment, his head lolling dangerously as the midget sub itself trembled violently from he shock wave of the detonation over a mile away.
The explosion, as Brentwood hoped it would, had set off a cruise warhead on the enemy sub, the resulting “Varoomph!” heard for miles, sending an enormous spume of ice shards skyward above the broken surface of the lake, as well as shattering the Siberian GST into thousands of pieces, the noise reaching Brentwood’s GST two seconds later. It stunned the three men; Lopez, though he’d plugged his ears, was unable to hear Johnson’s order for him to disengage battery power and go to diesel, heading at 15.9 knots for the northern quadrant a hundred and ninety miles away, their ETA depending on the currents and the time taken to intercept the loose raft — the latter, clearly visible on the sonar screen, having deflected some of the explosion’s sound waves.
“Why do we need it, sir?” asked Johnson, who believed, correctly, that now his skipper was wounded he, Johnson, would have to be the one to go out through the hole and attach the raft to them.
“We can reload our empty torpedo tubes,” explained Brentwood, his voice heavy, slow — still groggy from his ordeal, now and men grimacing from Lopez’s inexpert dressing of his wound. “Easy enough to do with two of you,” continued Brentwood. Lopez looked alarmed. “Subsurface float buoy’s,” added Brentwood, “on the raft. Just push her over to our sub and shackle her to the ring bolt.”
At one point Brentwood almost passed out from the pain and only then, albeit reluctantly, agreed to lie down on the lower bunk.
“You think the other two GSTs up north’ll still be there?” asked Johnson.
“No reason why they shouldn’t be,” answered Brentwood. “All they’ve seen is an explosion on their sonar screen,” he explained. “They’ll figure one of their GSTs has fallen victim to a malfunction — internally caused explosion. There’ll be no sign of an external attack. Anyway, even if they suspect there was and come looking for us, all the better for us. Either way, we’ll find one another.”