Stephen Coonts - Combat

“Take Peter and get out of here,” he ordered urgently.

Hanrahan grabbed the floundering Shizong. “What about Tom?”

“He’s dead. Go!”

Hanrahan wanted to stay, but he started away from the deflated raft with Shizong in tow.

The gunfire stopped. McGarvey found Preston a few yards away, facedown in the water. He turned him over, but the man was dead as expected. Preston had taken a round in the middle of the back, which had mushroomed through his body, tearing a hole six inches wide in his chest. The bastards were using dumdums or explosive bullets.

He cocked an ear to listen. He could hear what sounded like a small outboard motor coming toward him. Off to his left a broad section of water for as far as he could see was boiling, as if someone had put it on the heat. It was the Seawolf on the way up.

Hanrahan and Shizong were gone in the darkness, and the motor was very close now. They were PRC, and they had been waiting out here for Shizong. How that could possibly happen didn’t matter now. They had probably scoped the raft with night-vision equipment, identified Shizong out of the four men, and had targeted him specifically. They were coming in to make sure he was dead.

McGarvey passed his hand over Preston’s chest wound, smeared the blood and gore over his face, and floated loosely on his back, his arms spread, his eyes open and fixed as if he were dead.

The motor was practically on top of him, and he had to let himself sink under the water for a second or two without blinking, without closing his mouth.

A black-rubber inflatable, almost the twin of the one they had brought up from the Seawolf, appeared out of the mist and came directly over to where Preston’s body had drifted. They slowed and circled, shining a narrow beam of light on his face. They said something that McGarvey couldn’t make out, then came over to where he was floating. They shined the light in his face, and he had to fight not to blink or move a muscle.

There were three of them, dressed in black night fighters’ uniform, their faces blackened. It came to him all of a sudden that they had gotten there the same way that he and Hanrahan had. They were off a submarine. Possibly a PRC boat that had been lying in wait just off shore for the Chinese attack on Taiwan to begin. The Seawolf coming in had missed it.

Something very large and black rose up out of the water to McGarvey’s left. One of the Chinese sailors said something urgently, and he gunned the outboard motor. As the inflatable started to pass him, McGarvey reached up, grabbed the gunwale line with his left hand, pulled himself half out of the water, and grabbed a handful of the tunic of the sailor running the outboard motor and yanked him overboard.

The inflatable immediately veered sharply to the left. McGarvey had taken a deep breath at the last moment. He dragged the surprised sailor underwater, the man taking a very large reflexive breath as his head submerged.

The sailor got very still within seconds and as McGarvey surfaced with the body the outboard was circling back.

He took the weapon, which he recognized by feel as a Sterling, from the dead man’s hands, reared up out of the water to keep the holes in the silencer casing free, and unloaded the weapon point-blank at the inflatable as it was practically on top of him.

The raft swerved widly to the right, flipping over as it collapsed from the explosive release of air from its chambers. McGarvey dropped the empty weapon and backpedaled, trying to put as much distance between himself and whoever was left alive as possible. But it wasn’t necessary. Except for the roiled water behind him, the night was utterly silent.

“Hank,” he called.

“Here,” Hanrahan replied from somewhere to the left.

“Do you have Peter?”

“Here,” Shizong called back, his voice surprisingly steady for a man who could not swim and found himself in the middle of the ocean.

A few seconds later a beam of light from the deck of the Seawolf caught McGarvey, and he turned and swam toward it as fast as he could manage. They still weren’t out of the woods. Not with a PRC submarine lurking around somewhere nearby.

“Sierra Eighteen is on the surface,” Zenzhong told the captain nervously.

“Open doors one and two,” Heishui ordered “Prepare to fire.”

“Captain, what about our men on the surface?” Lagao asked at his side.

Heishui turned and gave him a bland look. “It’s a moot point, Commander. Either their mission is already a success or they have failed. They can’t fight the crew of an entire submarine.”

“At least give them five minutes,” Lagao pleaded. “Some sign that they are alive and trying to make it back aboard.”

The Hekou had risen to thirty meters in order to lock them out, and then had settled back to one hundred meters behind and below the American submarine. There was no way that even an experienced diver could make that depth, nor was he going to put his boat and crew at risk by heading back up to rescue them. They knew what they were facing when they had volunteered.

“Three minutes,” Heishui said. “It will take us that long to get ready to fire.” He turned away.

“We have three people aboard, and the hatch is sealed,” Paradise called to the captain.

“Get up here on the double, Rod, we have work to do,” Harding said. He switched channels. “Sonar, this is the captain. What’s the target doing?”

“He’s about two thousand yards out, skipper, just lying there. Bearing one-seven-five, and below us at three hundred feet,” Fisher reported. “I think he might have opened at least two of his outer doors when we were on the way up.”

“If there’s any change, let me know on the double,” Harding said. He hung up the phone. “Get us out of here,” he told the Chief of the Boat.

“Aye, sir.”

“Emergency dive to three hundred feet, come right to new course zero-six-zero, and give me turns for forty knots as soon as possible.” The submarine had to be at least one hundred feet beneath the surface before she could begin to develop her top speed submerged.

Trela relayed the orders and within seconds the Seawolf surged forward, her decks canted sharply downward and to the right.

“Don’t lose the solution,” Harding warned the weapons-control officer.

“No, sir.”

“He’s on the move, Captain,” Zenzhong shouted. “Sierra Eighteen is diving, and his aspect is definitely changing left to right.”

“He’s leaving in a big hurry; do you think that he knows we’re back here?” Lagao asked Heishui.

“Perhaps,” the captain replied. A million conflicting thoughts were running through his head with the speed of light, his family among them. But his blood was up. Serving on a Han-class submarine for any length of time meant certain death in any event from leukemia or some other form of cancer because the reactors leaked. Only the officers understood that for a fact, but most of the crews knew it, too. Love of country and the special privileges for their families were the incentives to serve. “No word from our crew on the surface?”

“No, sir.”

Heishuo gave his XO a look of sympathy, then turned to his fire-control officer. “Do we have a positive solution on the enemy?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Fire one, fire two.”

“Torpedoes in the water!” Fisher called out. “Two of them, bearing onenine-five, and definitely gaining.”