Ted Bell - Tsar

“So, ten standing watch over the hostages, ten off duty, maybe sleeping. That’s a big help.”

“Thanks.”

“How long till you get down to the bridge, baby?”

“Ten minutes, if I’m lucky.”

“Don’t be lucky, be careful. I love you. See you soon.”

The submarine lay at a depth of 600 feet below the surface, maintaining neutral buoyancy.

In the middle of her control room were two periscopes on a raised platform. One of the periscopes had a surface video camera that sent pictures to monitors throughout the control room and to the captain’s quarters. Each monitor now displayed an image of the giant zeppelin hovering five hundred feet above the ocean’s surface. Except for the flashing red running lights along her hull and a few lit windows along the center of the fuselage, she was mostly dark, darker even than the black sky behind her.

Directly in front of the two periscopes was the duty station-or the “con”-which is the watch station of the officer of the deck. Tonight, Lieutenant Commander Lawrence Robins had the con. To his right was the fire-control station. Forward, the three bucket seats of the control station, now manned by two enlisted men who operated the diving planes and the rudder, the planesman and the helmsman. In the middle sat the diving officer. To the left of the planesman was the ballast-control panel with two emergency blow handles.

Robins looked aft at the assault party waiting impatiently at the base of the conning tower. He caught the eye of Commander Hawke, who nodded his head once and gave Robins a thumbs-up. The SEAL teams were more than ready. It was go time.

“Blow emergency main ballast tanks,” Robins said quietly.

The diving officer reached over and pushed in the two valves simultaneously, then pulled up, triggering the sub’s emergency surfacing maneuver. The two valves sent high-pressure air from the air banks flooding into the EMBT, the emergency main ballast tank.

The submarine instantly rocketed straight to the surface like a 6,000-ton torpedo.

Her bow came out, flew out of the water, almost vertically, the hull rising at an impossible angle, before falling back into the dark sea and settling directly beneath the hovering airship.

Two enlisted men, Ensigns Blair and Mansfield, raced up the ladder first. It was their job to open the main hatch in the sub’s “sail” or conning tower. As the SEALs crowded forward to begin their rapid ascent up the ladder, the two crewmen up top now mounted a compressed CO 2gas-powered harpoon gun atop a swivel base. The base contained an enormously powerful high-speed electric winch. The harpoon gun, used normally in emergency rescue operations, was capable of firing a rubber-coated grapnel hook trailing a thousand feet of steel mesh cable with astounding accuracy.

“Only get one shot at this,” Blair said to Mansfield.

“Yeah, I know. I need a frozen rope.”

That’s what you needed when a foundering vessel was sinking fast in twenty-foot seas, a frozen rope. You needed to put one right on the money, hook a steel bulkhead or something solid, before she slipped under the icy waves with all hands.

Mansfield put his eye to the high-powered scope and looked up the barrel of the harpoon gun. He got the center of the pod’s superstructure in his crosshairs. Twin steel beams ran fore and aft on either side of an emergency hatch in the belly of the pod. These perforated steel brackets secured the bridge pod to the fuselage above. He’d be firing directly at the one nearer the hatch. If they were lucky, the thick rubber coating on the grapnel hook would be sufficiently noise-deadening so as not to alert anyone inside the pod.

That was the theory come up with by the genius brigade in the wardroom, anyway. The two ensigns had their doubts, but it wasn’t their job to offer suggestions. It was their job to hook up to the airship and start winching this big four-hundred-foot-long mother right down to the sub.

The terrorists were threatening to throw live hostages out the door if anyone messed with them. Mansfield’s mission was to get the airship down to sea level fast enough to take that option off the table.

“Okay,” Mansfield said, peering through the scope crosshairs at his target. “Fire!”

Blair yanked the lanyard that fired the harpoon. There was a whoosh of expelled gas, and the grapnel hook shot upward toward the underside of the zeppelin, a trail of steel cable beneath. Mansfield kept his right eye glued to the scope.

“Oh, baby,” he said, raising his head and smiling at Blair.

“Frozen rope?”

“Fuckin’ A, podnuh. Nailed it. Hooked the damn cross beam a foot from the hatch.”

Blair pushed the red lever that operated the big winch inside the base of the harpoon. The cable snapped taut as the slack disappeared in a heartbeat, and slowly but surely, the winch began to reel the massive airship down toward the sub’s conning tower.

“Outta the way!” one of the first SEALs to emerge through the hatch yelled. The big black guy, a veteran named Stokely Jones who’d come aboard at Bermuda, was on that steel cable and climbing hand over hand up toward the ship faster than either Blair or Mansfield had ever seen a human being move before. Especially one his size and carrying forty pounds of weapons, equipment, and ammunition on his back.

“SOMETHING’S VERY WRONG here,” Pushkin’s first officer said to his captain, Dimitri Boroskov. He was staring in disbelief at the instruments arrayed on the ship’s master control panel.

“What is it?”

“We’re losing altitude, sir.”

“Don’t be absurd. That’s impossible,” the captain said, his eyes rapidly scanning the console, looking primarily at the internal gas-pressure gauges. The Vortex I had been designed with twin hulls. An outer hull of thin, rip-stop material and a rigid inner hull of microthin titanium, this lightweight metal hull strong enough to survive all but the most catastrophic disasters. Sandwiched between the two hulls was ninety million cubic feet of helium.

The only things that could possibly cause a loss of altitude would be wind shear from a thunderhead or a loss of gas from inside the outer hull. There was no storm activity within fifty miles. And every one of his gauges showed no signs of leakage. The exterior hull pressure readings in all compartments were pegged safely inside the normal range, just where they were supposed to be. No leaks. No wind. It made no sense at all.

“All pressure readings normal,” Boroskov said. “Slight wind out of the northeast, two knots gusting to five.”

“That may well be, Captain. But look at the altimeter, will you? And the variometer. We are definitely descending.”

“I don’t believe it. Must be something wrong with the altimeter gauge. It’s giving a false reading.”

The captain leaned forward and stared out at the black sky and the few stars scattered near the horizon. “We certainly appear to be stationary, at any rate.”

“Only because the descent rate is minimal, sir. Look! Four hundred ninety feet above sea level and dropping. We’ve lost ten feet according to the altimeter! And the rate seems to be increasing!”

“Impossible.”

“Should I notify Commander Yurin? He demands to be kept abreast of anything unusual, sir.”

“Not yet. We don’t want to look foolish, and there might still be a simple explanation. Call engineering first. There must be a leak somewhere. Perhaps the computer systems monitoring the internal pressure gauges are malfunctioning. This could be the problem. Still, we take no chances. Get engineering teams to go over every square inch of this ship’s interior. Find that leak, if it exists, and fix it!”