Attack of the Seawolf

He emerged from the forward hatch to a fiery landscape, the destroyer hulks burning, the fuel in the water of the slip burning, gunfire coming in from the pier, the helicopters overhead spraying bullets onto the ship. He had a brief impression of motion, of the destroyers and the pier moving away from him as the submarine, incredibly, moved backward, the water of the slip flowing swiftly over the bow as the ship backed up. It was true — the Americans had somehow found a way to recapture the submarine and were driving away with it in spite of the platoon of heavily armed guards Tien had stationed in the ship’s control room. How could his troops have been overcome in seconds since the explosions sounded from the pier?

Impossible or not, it was happening right before his eyes. He continued out of the hatch, his body’s momentum propelling him forward along the sloping bow of the submarine. He took a deep breath and dived into the water of the slip, closing his eyes against the scummy oil floating on the surface, came up for air, spitting out brackish bay water, and watched as the submarine backed clear of the slip, two heads visible at the top of the ship’s conning tower, one of them driving the submarine.

Tien swam to the berth that had been occupied by the frigate Nantong astern of the sub. He could only hope that it would be chasing the American submarine.

He found a maintenance ladder leading up to the pier, and climbed out of the oily bay water. In front of him were the troops of an armored unit of the P.L.A, the troops firing their weapons without effect at the retreating submarine.

Tien watched as the ship pulled out, the wake boiling around its bow as it reversed its way into the channel water of the bay.

He found the man who seemed to be in command and took his radio, calling for the Hangu airfield, where he knew there was a fleet of Hind assault helicopters.

On the third try he reached the base and convinced the duty officer to scramble the helicopter gunships.

“How long for the Hinds to get here?” Tien shouted.

“Five minutes.”

Tien waited, hoping that five minutes would be soon enough.

* * *

Lieutenant Pig Wilson lay on the deck forward of the port rack of torpedoes in the forward compartment’s lower level torpedo room, waiting for the last Chinese sniper to make a mistake. When he and Chief Python Harris had first inserted into the room there had been at least a dozen guards. The initial volley of shots had dropped four, sending the others for cover. Unfortunately, there were too many places to hide in the room, including inside the tubes themselves.

In the rush of taking the room Pig had heard a torpedo tube door slam shut. No doubt one of the guards had dived into an empty tube, hoping to pop back out unexpectedly and shoot the SEALs from behind.

But Pig knew how to lock a tube from the central console in the room. He peeked up at the torpedo room central console. The top of the console was burned out and full of holes, but the controller section for the port tube bank looked as if it had been hastily repaired and rewired, the plastic function keys ripped out with crude toggle switches installed in their place.

Hoping the repaired switches worked, he had thrown a switch and watched as the thick steel ring rotated over the dogs of the inner tube door. He could hear the faint sound of a man shouting, the sound muffled and resonant, as if the noise came from inside a metal can, which in a way it did. Pig threw a second switch to vent the tube to the torpedo room, opening a valve in a pipe on top of the tube, the pipe intended to make sure no trapped air remained in the tube when it was filled with water. The third switch was the best; the marking above it said FLOOD. Pig hit the switch, opening up the tube to the water in the tube tanks, filling the tube with seawater all the way to the vent valve, which automatically shut when the tube was full of water. There followed a rushing noise, louder shouts from the tube. By the time the vent valve shut, the tube was full of water, and all human sound was extinguished.

But they couldn’t all be that easy, Wilson knew.

The room was the most vulnerable of all the spaces they would be raiding, full of weapons and their high explosive warheads as well as the volatile fuel. A single bullet would be enough to cause a fire that could kill the whole ship … the self-oxidizing torpedo fuel, once lit, could not be extinguished by anything — it burned under water, it burned when blasted by a CO^ or PKP or foam-extinguisher, it just burned until the fuel was gone. That kind of violent fire would blow every warhead in the room, creating a chain reaction that would breach the hull, perhaps even cutting the ship to pieces. One goddamned bullet.

When the stun grenade exploded in the space, Pig held his breath, but heard only the clatter of guns dropping to the deck and the screams of the guards as the stun juice hit them. After a moment of quiet, Pig and Python began to search the space.