George Wallace - Hunter Killer [Movie Tie-In]

Andy Gerson, Miami ’s executive officer, jumped to his commander’s rescue. “Skipper, it’s time for the nineteen-fifteen satellite downlink. Remember? You were going to observe Lieutenant Wittstrom going to periscope depth.”

Crawford smiled. The doctor was a nice guy and could even be quite interesting to talk with once you got past all the gobbledygook. When he got wound up on the subject of his favorite whales, the conversations could be interminable. Crawford figured it was much like a submariner talking to civilians. They, too, tended to get verbose, speaking a language not understood by normal folk.

“Yeah, sorry, Doc. I better get up there. Mr. Wittstrom is coming along nicely. He’ll make a good officer of the deck when he qualifies. Tonight will be a special challenge for him, though. You better make sure everything is stowed for sea, XO. We’re going to get knocked around a lot while we’re up there.”

Crawford pointed to the overhead as he rose. He stepped out of the wardroom and into the centerline passageway. Barely shoulder-width wide and running from the chief’s quarters in the bow to the crew’s mess, this hallway was the major artery for the ship. On the port side were the corpsman’s diminutive office and the crew’s berthing spaces. To the starboard were the wardroom and officers’ staterooms. Ladders led from the passageway down to the torpedo room and up to the control room.

Commander Crawford bounded up a ladder and entered the control room. He stepped to the forward starboard corner and watched the sonar repeater for several minutes. The furious storm above them created a din that drowned out most noises a surface ship might make. Miami ’s sophisticated BQQ-10 sonar system computer enhanced the signals to counteract some of the storm’s racket, but it couldn’t be one hundred percent effective. Crawford saw no trace of another ship anywhere nearby, nor did he expect one in this lonely stretch of ocean on such a blustery night.

“Okay, Mr. Wittstrom, you ready to go to periscope depth?”

The young junior officer gulped, but his voice seemed assured when he replied, “Yes, sir. I think so. I’m coming up to one-five-zero feet to clear baffles.”

Crawford nodded. “All right. Let’s go.”

As Miami rose from the calm depths, the churning of the sea became more obvious, and the submarine’s pitching and rolling increased. By the time she leveled off at one hundred fifty feet below the roiling surface, the sub was rolling more than twenty degrees to either side. The bow rose and fell at least fifteen degrees. By then, everyone had to hold on to something solid just to keep from being thrown off balance onto the deck or down a ladder.

Wittstrom turned the sub to make sure that no ship was approaching them from astern. The sonar was blanked in that direction by the sub’s bulk. Its screen still showed only the noise of the storm.

“Captain, no sonar contacts,” the junior officer reported. “Request permission to come to periscope depth to copy the broadcast.”

Crawford looked hard at the sonar repeater. “Mr. Wittstrom, what is the sea state?”

“Captain, sonar reports a sea state ‘eight,’ maybe ‘nine.’”

Crawford looked up at Wittstrom. “That’s what I figure, too. That means wave heights somewhere between thirty and sixty feet. I’d suggest we come around to course ‘north’ to face into the seas. That will limit the rolls a little.”

As Miami swung around to her new course, the rolls calmed a little, but the pitching worsened.

Wittstrom braced himself and shouted, “Number-two scope coming up!”

He reached above his head and rotated the large red ring there. The periscope slid smoothly out of its well. As the eyepiece cleared the well, he snapped down the two black handles and stuck one eye to the eyepiece. He started to walk a slow circle, rotating the scope and looking out at the empty blackness.

That’s all there was. Ominous, complete darkness. Not even a hint of light.

Without removing his eye from the scope, he shouted, “Dive, make your depth six-two feet.”

Wittstrom continued the slow rotation. Submariners had long since dubbed the waltz he was doing “dancing with the fat lady.” He was looking to see if there was any obstacle, like a ship’s bottom or an unexpected ice keel, that he could see in time to avoid it when they surfaced. There was not much chance of that in this pitch-black, storm-tossed sea, but it was still necessary to make certain. Rescue was a long, cold ride away.

With Wittstrom satisfied the way was clear, Miami slid up toward the surface. The pitching and rolling worsened until she was bucking like a frenzied bronco, rearing wildly in some very cold, wet rodeo. The diving officer and his two planesmen were working with every bit of skill and strength they had to keep Miami on depth, but they were no match for the sea. She was quickly broached, bobbing like a cork on the surface of the seething ocean.

A horrendous crash came from the galley, below the control room. Dish stowage was not equal to the sea’s might. Clipboards, books, coffee cups, anything not tied down, fell to the deck and slid noisily fore and aft, port and starboard, as the sub heaved and pitched. Crawford grabbed the stainless steel railing surrounding the periscope stand and held on with both hands.

They couldn’t waste much time up here. Someone could get hurt. Mercifully, the radioman soon announced over the 21MC circuit, “All traffic aboard and accounted for.”

Crawford was just opening his mouth to order the boat back down when Wittstrom beat him to the punch, shouting, “Diving Officer, make your depth three hundred feet. Lowering number-two scope.”

He reached up and snapped the red ring clockwise. The scope slid back into the well as Miami once more headed to the peaceful calm of the depths.

There, it promised to be much safer on this particular night.

“Dmitri, how is the testing going?”

Alan Smythe stepped into the elevator just ahead of the man who ran his company’s testing department. He pushed the button for the twenty-seventh floor while the door hissed shut, and then he leaned back against the rail as the car whooshed upward.

Dmitri Ustinov glanced over at the slightly built Englishman as if he might not have heard the question. Although a mere twenty-two years old, Ustinov possessed a keenly trained intellect hidden in a bear’s body. Despite his heavy, continuous brow, droopy eyelids, and a stooped stature that made him appear on first glance a bit dense, the man possessed a unique skill set well suited for his present project. His knowledge of complicated computer systems along with his familiarity with the inane, convoluted rules for trading stocks and other securities was already well celebrated. Even at his young age, he was the chief engineer for testing the revolutionary new OptiMarx equities trading system.

“Problems with the integration to the National Market System,” he answered as they glided past the fifteenth floor. His accent still carried a hint of his native Russian though he had been in the United States for a decade. “The Securities and Exchange Commission is looking at how we are doing that. It will be several weeks until we get a ruling out of them.”

Smythe grunted acknowledgment. Damn government bureaus worked on their own timetables. He was accustomed to such roadblocks, but they were still hard to stomach. “What does Chuck Gruver over at the NYSE say?”

“Not a lot of help. He is so damned head up and ass down in the changes to the Intermarket Trading System that he does not have time to help us on this side.”

“Not surprised. About time they fixed ITS. That ticker tape should have been donated to the Smithsonian a long time ago.” The elevator door parted and they walked out into the large open office space of OptiMarx, Inc. The big room was divided into a myriad of cubicles. Alan stepped to the left, toward the hallway that led to his office, while Dmitri headed to the right. Smythe stepped into his corner office. Opposite the door, the room’s glass wall looked out from the New Jersey shore, across New York Harbor, past the Statue of Liberty toward Lower Manhattan. Ferries scurried across the Hudson River to the north as helicopters buzzed back and forth between the heliports on either shore. Smythe slid into the modern black leather chair behind the smoked-glass desk, the panoramic view now at his back. He had hardly begun riffling through his morning e-mail before the intercom on his desk buzzed its annoying interruption.