Ian Slater - Payback

“Turn about,” said Gomez, and all eight men unlocked their swivel bucket seats and moved them through 180 degrees as the RS sped, with a current assist, to a submerged speed of 47 knots, 53 miles per hour, faster than any attack sub now extant, Aussie shaking his head in silent admiration.

But the fear of the unknown was still upon the general. In a team as small as his it was the custom of the leader, as he’d just done, to confide any serious doubts that might affect the other members. His fear, however, was not one of those normal apprehensions that grip anyone who stands on the edge of the unknown, but a leader’s haunting dread that he might be about to attack the wrong target, an empty warehouse. But then, every commander, he reminded himself, every boss, no matter how high or low, had an equal obligation to weigh last-minute fears or intel against the demoralizing effect of repeating them.

Amid this fear that he might be risking the lives of his men, including his own, in a FUBAR, Fouled Up Beyond All Recognition, op against an empty shed, the general recalled the fiery deaths of over two hundred children and hundreds of other airline passengers. He weighed that certainty against a doubt that the North Koreans were somehow involved, unscrewed his combat compact, and began putting on his camouflage war paint. For all the electronic wizardry that surrounded him in this revolutionary war craft, he anticipated he would end up having to do what every soldier since David had faced Goliath had done: engage his enemy face-to-face. Even, perhaps, hand to hand. Which was why, for the first time since his legendary “sojourn in Siberia,” as another old soldier had so wryly described it, the general elected to carry an AK-47 rather than his Heckler & Koch MP5 submachine gun or a composite M16 with grenade launcher, as Mervyn and Gomez were carrying. The Russian designer, Mikhail Timofeevich Kalashnikov, had deliberately invented his weapon with a solid wooden stock in mind, for in tests the AK-47’s wooden butt proved to be a formidable club, unlike its Western cousins which, though much more accurate, like the latest Russian AK-74, had neither the cement-blasting hitting power of the AK-47’s big round nor the bone-crushing power of the Russian weapon’s heavy stock.

Sal, though as tense in the preattack mode as everyone else in the RS, idly asked Gomez, “How come the order to take her down is ‘submerge the boat’? I thought it was ‘dive.’ ”

“ ‘Dive’ is for emergencies,” said Gomez, his eyes watching the green waterfall, alert for any of the vertical black lines that might suddenly squiggle, which would signal an anomaly within the RS’s hundred-mile passive sonar listening range.

“Huh,” responded Sal. “How fast can we go down if we have to?”

“You wouldn’t believe,” said Gomez. “In eight seconds we can— Hello, what’s this?”

“Anomaly?” cut in Freeman.

Gomez, his combat green/sand camouflage taking on a dark bruised color in the craft’s dimly lit interior, stared at the foot-square waterfall, each of whose dozens of vertically parallel lines represented a sound print picked up by the craft’s “stingray” tail, a passive array of small microphones in series that were strung out astern from a drum reel hose in the keel, the transparent hose filled with an amber-colored oil stabilizer fluid that contained the quarter-sized microphones.

Gomez indicated the suspect sonar trace, a few-millimeters-thick black line that looked to Aussie as if it had suddenly developed delirium tremens.

“Was it our engine noise?” asked Freeman. “During the turn?”

Gomez shook his head, answering slowly, “No, sir, we played our stingray’s tail out to—”

“Three hundred feet!” cut in Eddie Mervyn impatiently. “ ’Sides, we calibrated a baseline for that.”

“The baseline,” Johnny Lee explained, unasked, to Bone Brady, who looked confused, “is like having an electrocardiogram. Pilot gets the engineer’s sine wave on the computer, punches it in as a normal parameter so sonar doesn’t mistake it for a bogey.”

“I know that!” said Brady. “You white guys think all we do is play basketball and join the fucking Army?”

Johnny Lee’s jaw dropped, appalled that his team member could even think he was racist.

Bone, one hand holding his SAW, Squad Automatic Weapon, smacked Lee on the shoulder, laughing. “Hey, man, I’m just pulling your leg!”

Johnny Lee’s face crumpled into a smile. Bone leaned closer to him. “You ain’t even white!”

The linguist was nonplussed again, and for a man who was not only multilingual but also knew how to think in a variety of languages, he was momentarily stymied as to what to say, yet felt impelled to say something. “Why do they call you ‘Bone’?”

“ ’Cause,” said Aussie, one eye on the squiggly sonar line, “he’ll bone anything that moves. Right, Bone?” Before Brady could answer, Aussie Lewis added, “That’s why he volunteered for this job. He heard the NKA have women as regulars. Use a lot of ’em on guard duty. So if we come across a Yo-bo , a honey, Brady’ll bone her while we do the Break and Enter. That right, Brade?”

“That’s right!”

By now, Gomez had transferred the suspect trace on the waterfall into the computer’s TML — Threat Memory Library — a register of thousands of ships’ sound prints, each ship’s engine or engines giving off its own distinctive “voice” print.

“Searching,” Gomez informed Freeman. An orange bar light lit up on the TML computer’s console, indicating a ship type match, the printout:

Submarine. ChiCom HAN class. 345 feet. 5,500 tons dived at 25 knots. 90 Mega Watt. Nuclear attack boat. Armament 6 × 533mm torpedoes or mines. CC 801 surface-to-surface missile. Radar-Snoop Tray surface search sonar with Trout Cheek active/passive array. Tasked by PLA for patrol in North China Sea and Chinese littoral. Modifications include baffle plates and hull extensions post-2002, making individual vessel identification uncertain.

“What are we hearing?” pressed Freeman. “His pump?”

“Not sure,” answered Mervyn, his brows knit in concentration.

The computer’s red warning box suddenly flashed

“POSSIBLE HOSTILE BY NATURE OF SOUND.”

It caused no alarm, the U.S. Navy automatically classifying all ChiCom and Russian war vessels as potential hostiles, as it did any ship that approached U.S. Navy vessels. The only exceptions to the rule were ships belonging to NATO core countries, such as the Netherlands and West Germany — but not France — and the highly trusted CAB — Canadian, Australian, and British — ships, the Australians in particular having earned a “triple A” rating with U.S. forces for having long ago decided to hold fast with the United States from World War II, Vietnam, and Korea up to and including Afghanistan and the two Iraqi wars.

Gomez separated out the Possible Hostile trace line and amplified it on the screen. “That’s its sound print.”

The RS having to stop and listen to the HAN added to the tension surrounding the general’s dilemma as to whether or not he should proceed. The delay caused by his having to stop and sort out the possible hostile’s intent meant that the Payback team’s evac time from Kosong would be perilously close to dawn. Dawn was ideal for attack, a time of indistinct shapes not yet fully delineated by the sun, but it was not a time for withdrawal, with the enemy able to see movement with or without benefit of night-vision goggles.

The TTT — Time to Target — readout was twenty-eight minutes.

“He’s closing,” Gomez advised Freeman. “Ten thousand yards.”

“Five miles plus,” intoned the general. Too damn close. He turned to Eddie Mervyn. “Pilot. Tubes ready?”