George Wallace - Hunter Killer [Movie Tie-In]

Ward whistled. “Wow! We need to get the DSRV rolling pronto. I’ve got Joe Glass and Toledo exercising with the Brits over in the Irish Sea. That has to be the closest mother sub.”

“That’s what we figured, too. The DSRV will be airborne out of North Island within six hours. The C-5 should touch down in Prestwick, Scotland, ten hours later. Have Toledo alongside the pier in Faslane, ready to take it on board. I want her under way inside of twelve hours.”

Ward glanced at the chart of the Atlantic and Europe hanging on the wall across from his desk. “Tom, it’s over twelve hundred nautical miles from Faslane to the Barents. With the twenty-knot speed limit because of the DSRV, it’ll take Toledo three days just to get there. Wouldn’t the Russians be able to get there a hell of a lot quicker?”

Donnegan cleared his throat. “Jon, the Russians maintain that they don’t have any boats missing. They are now, for some damn reason, resurrecting their old bullshit claim that the Barents is an inland sea—that it is their sovereignty and that we are to stay out.”

“So, okay, they are embarrassed and don’t want help. Same thing happened when the Kursk went down. We didn’t butt in then. Why now on this one?”

Donnegan paused a beat. Ward felt a sudden chill crawl up his spine. On one of the brochures on his desk, a happy couple waved from the railing of a cruise ship.

“There’s one more thing, Jon. Miami said she would be back in communications twelve hours after the original message. She is now twenty-four hours overdue. Tell Joe Glass he had best keep his eyes open up there.”

The giant trailer eased out of the brightly lit hangar, making its way toward the waiting open cargo door on the C-5B Galaxy. This entire end of North Island Naval Air Station, near San Diego, hummed with sudden activity. Men raced about carrying boxes or directing forklifts loaded with pallets into the Galaxy aircraft’s after cargo door.

The trailer’s suspension groaned under the massive weight of the huge khaki-green-and-white cylinder that sat strapped to its bed as the tractor tugged it toward the waiting plane. Large black letters painted across the side proclaimed this to be DSRV-1, the Mystic .

A warm wind blew in off the dark Pacific, tousling Lieutenant Dan Perkins’s blond hair as he watched his baby slide out of the hangar. Perkins never ceased to be amazed that he was now the officer in charge of Mystic . Amazed but proud. How had the Navy known to pick a mustang diver for the perfect job? Coming up through the ranks as a working diver, Perkins had always dreamed of this. Now it was true. He smiled every time he thought about it.

“Hey, Lieutenant,” Chief Gary Nichols called out. “Better move or you’ll get your toes run over.”

Perkins jumped backward as the trailer rolled past. As usual, Nichols was doing his best to keep him out of trouble. Best damn chief he had ever worked with.

Perkins walked over to stand next to him and watch the process together. “Chief, you get any skinny on where we’re headed?”

Perkins had learned a long time ago that the old Navy axiom was true: A chief always knew what was going down long before it came through official channels.

This time Nichols shook his head and frowned. “Not a word. Just the order for a full load-out. I suspect it’s just another drill. You know. Fly us off to some godforsaken air base and back again, just to prove we can do it.”

“Yep, I suspect you’re right.”

Perkins’s reply didn’t sound so certain. Something felt different about this one.

The DSRV with its trailer was moving up the ramp now and sliding into the gaping maw of the C-5 aircraft. It filled the giant bird’s massive cargo hold with mere inches to spare all around.

The front cargo door hissed down and locked closed. The DSRV crew jumped into the aircraft through the diminutive crew hatch.

Minutes later, the four giant General Electric TF-39 turbofan engines dragged the bird upward and into the night sky. Within minutes the cheerful lights of San Diego disappeared behind them.

“Dimitriy, how is the crew holding up?” Captain Second Rank Sergei Andropoyov asked.

He had just looked up from the manual over which he had been poring for the past half hour.

“We’ve lost two more of the injured,” Pishkovski answered sadly. “I expect we will lose Ludmila in the next few hours. He was burned badly by the steam pipes. There is nothing we can do but keep him drugged.” He slammed his fist into a sheet-metal locker door in frustration. “Where is that damned American? What happened?” Tears spilled from his eyes and down his face. “Captain, why did he leave us down here to die?”

Andropoyov put a firm hand on his first officer’s shoulder. “Easy, Dimitriy. I need you to be in control of yourself. The crew needs to see us both as strong and confident.” He bent closer and, in a whisper, he added, “I suspect the explosions we heard may be why we haven’t had more contact from the American. I’m beginning to suspect he may be suffering the same fate as we are.”

Pishkovski looked at his captain, his eyes wide with fear. “That means what happened to us was not an accident!” Andropoyov nodded. “What of the Volk , Captain? He should have been here by now anyway.”

“I don’t know. I don’t have all the pieces yet. Now we have more pressing concerns. Help me here. We need to get power back to the reactor before the battery is too depleted. If we can start it, we can last until we are rescued.” He leaned over the reactor control panel and pulled the handle for a switch marked LATCH CONTROL RODS.

Nothing happened. Andropoyov tried again. Still nothing.

He looked at Pishkovski and said, “I don’t understand it. Even when I’ve bypassed all the safety circuits, I can’t get the control rods latched. I’ve checked every inch of the circuits. There must be a fault in the reactor compartment.” He stared at the pages of the manual a moment, then shook his head. “I don’t think we will have the reactor, Dimitriy. How much time do we have left on the battery?”

Pishkovski checked the meters on the electrical panel and did some rapid calculations. “Captain, if we turn off everything but the heaters and lights here in the control room, we have three more days.” He checked his figures once again. He looked up at his captain with a desperate expression frozen on his face. “And then, it will get very dark and very, very cold.”

Joe Glass eased down into his chair at the head of the wardroom table. He would be able to devour a quick bite of lunch. The exercises they were conducting with HMS Turbulent were still going on, even as the Toledo ’s captain paused for his first real meal in over eight hours. Glass was in much better spirits now than he was earlier, after the Brits had “sunk” his submarine in the drills.

They had just finished an approach on Turbulent and successfully “shot” her with an ADCAP torpedo. The retriever boat was up there now, picking up the exercise fish while the two subs repositioned for the next go-around. It was a good time to grab a hurried lunch with half his officers. They would wolf down their sandwiches and rush to relieve the other half so they could eat before the excitement started up all over again.

Brian Edwards was up in the control room, supervising the operation, so things aboard Toledo were in good hands while her captain took his dinner break.

Joe Glass was more than happy to be down here at six hundred feet and not up there on the surface. He could feel sympathy for the sailors working on the retriever boats, trying to wrestle four thousand pounds of wet, slippery torpedo onto a hundred-foot-long boat while being tossed around all the time by the angry wintertime North Atlantic Ocean.