Red Shark

Scott thumbed the hammer-drop to safe the Sig and slammed it into a ballistic nylon thigh holster. “Dubrovnik. What about it?”

“Scuttlebutt has it that you cocked up.”

“I wouldn’t believe everything you hear.”

“No? They say you had a chance to kill that bastard, Franjo Karst, but didn’t.”

Karst, the multimillionaire Croatian general with a private militia and beautiful rock star wife. Karst had bragged that to cleanse Croatia of Serbian influence, he had massacred two thousand Serbian women and children rounded up from a refugee camp in Nova Varos. Karst, the man who had cheated death time and again. Karst, the man with the merciless iron-gray eyes, the fire-scarred face, and a price on his head. Karst, the scourge of the Balkans.

“They say you had him in your sights. That true?”

Karst had stood in the open doorway of his office, eyes flaring like two laser beams, a 9mm Zastava aimed at Scott’s chest. Scott could have fired a one-handed burst from the MP5 he’d swung and aimed at Karst, blown him backward into the courtyard outside. And been blown away himself. Instead he’d hesitated. Karst’s laser eyes had flicked to the SEALs placing explosive charges, to his dead rebel compatriots sprawled on the floor, to the rifled files and computer drives. He’d spun around and, like the gray wraith he was, fled a split second before Scott had opened fire. Minutes later Karst’s headquarters, torture chamber, and armory had blown sky high over Dubrovnik’s waterfront.

Scott thought to tell Jefferson that he had had explicit orders to not kill Karst but to try and arrest him. Politics. Trying Karst at the Hague, not summary execution by Navy SEALs, would have lent legitimacy to NATO’s Balkans operation. Even so, Scott regretted that he hadn’t pulled the trigger: Karst was still at large, which meant, despite the tactical success, that the mission had been a failure. The Navy still blamed Scott for that, and for the near disaster in the Yellow Sea off North Korea. If something went wrong at Matsu Shan, he was damn sure he’d be their scapegoat again.

Jefferson sheathed the K-Bar and said, “Well, it takes a shooter to lead a shooter.”

The Reno’s 1MC hummed and Kramer announced, “Commander Scott, Colonel Jefferson… would you please come to the control room.”

Jefferson caught the urgency in Kramer’s voice and looked questioningly at Scott.

“Something’s up,” Scott said.

Deacon ordered, “Rig ship for ultra-quiet.” At the same time, the interior lighting throughout the Reno cycled from white to red, to inform the crew that conditions had changed.

“Weps, what’s your status?” Deacon said.

“Sir, all tubes loaded but not flooded, outer doors closed. Power units for all torpedoes activated and on standby.”

Deacon eyed the main console in Fire-control Alley. It displayed a wide-area geographic view of the Reno’s position, now east of Taiwan near Matsu Shan. A blue pinpoint of light on the display — the Reno — moved slowly northwest. Myriad green pinpoints represented “friendlies”—merchantmen. A blinking red light on the display indicated the position of an unidentified sound contact classified by the fire-control party as Sierra One.

Deacon saw Scott enter the red-lit control room, followed by Jefferson. “Sonar’s picked up a tonal we haven’t yet identified, but it might be a Chinese sub.”

“Diesel or nuke?” Scott asked.

“Diesel.”

“Is it that Kilo?”

Deacon nodded. “More than likely.”

“Jesus Christ,” Jefferson said. “What the fuck’s he doing around here?”

“What’s his bearing?” Scott asked.

“One-one-four,” Kramer, in fire control, said. “We’re working on the range, have it in a minute.”

“Can he hear us?” Jefferson asked, trailing Scott and Deacon into the sonar room forward and starboard of the control room.

The compartment had four positions occupied by watchstanders, including the supervisor, a master chief petty officer. Each man was seated in front of a pair of vertical sonar monitors whose eerie greenish-blue glow illuminated both the darkened sonar room and the men’s faces.

On each monitor a row of vertical lines, called a waterfall, provided a visual display of what the Reno’s spherical BSY-2 bow sonar array was hearing. Three junior sonarmen sifted through this broadband display of noise, searching for the specific tonal attributes of a Kilo-class diesel-electric submarine.

Scott, Deacon, and Jefferson looked over the chief’s shoulder as he pointed to a faint white line almost hidden among all the bright green ones in a waterfall display slowly crawling down a monitor’s screen.

“That’s him,” the chief said. “Faint, barely there.”

The white line represented a weak sound picked up by the BSY-2 array. Its lack of brightness was proportional to its intensity. Below it, on another monitor, was a graphic display of the sound’s strength and frequency.