Terminal Run

Zhou’s face flushed with anger, but there was nothing he could do. Either Dou fixed the electrical panel and the other fifty things that had exploded into flames when the American torpedo had hit, or they would remain dead in the water, easy prey for an American torpedo from another of their lurking submarines, or even from an over-the-horizon cruise missile.

“I’m going forward,” Zhou announced, the chief engineer snorting. The captain should have reprimanded the engineer, the spoiled technician, but he placed as much trust in the bastard as he did Zhou.

Zhou found his way to the stuffy command post, its battery casualty lights making the space irregularly and dimly lit. They couldn’t even submerge to hide from the American satellites until Dou completed his work in the engineering spaces. A feeling of impending doom filled Zhou, and for a moment he contemplated writing his mother a farewell letter, but then realized that if he did, it would either end up on the bottom or burned to cinders by the next weapon impact.

The submersible Narragansett approached the third location, which the topside side scan sonar had indicated was promising. The first contact had turned out to be a rock ridge and the second an uncharted sunken steamship, rusted and forlornly listing to port, her three stacks reaching for the surface at a depth of 2,479 feet. The steamer had a hole in the hull, probably from a German U-boat. The bottom of the shipping lanes on either side of the Cape of Good Hope was a ship graveyard, the storms and fortunes of war taking their toll on the ships of every generation since man had first gone to sea.

Lieutenant Evan Thompson pulled up on his thruster levers as the third object grew closer in the haze. The approaching object lay on its side against a rock outcropping. It was the sail of a submarine, but amputated from the main hull. A debris field surrounded the sail. Thompson radioed up the find, the video feed from his cameras traveling up the tether to the salvage ship Emerald on the calm seas on the surface. He followed the trail of debris, the seafloor changing from rock to sediment, until he arrived at a sloping section of sand. In the bright light of the submersible, the sandy slope looked different from the surroundings. The sand there had waves in it at regular one-meter intervals. The sand on this ridge looked smooth, bulging at one end. He was getting an annunciator flashing alarm on his console. It was from the audible sonar system. He flipped a toggle switch and patched the sonar into the overhead speaker. The sound was unmistakable, a hammering on a steel object. The hammering came regularly, one second between hammer blows.

“Emerald, Narragansett, ” he called.

“Go ahead, over.”

“I’ve got a hammering at one second intervals from a large ridge in the sediment. I’m approaching to see if I can detect a hull.”

“Roger. Is the hammering by hand?”

“Negative. It sounds extremely regular. Probably an emergency percussion beacon. Hammering just stopped, over. Mark the time.”

“Roger. Zero six forty-three.”

Unfortunately the Narragansett’s manipulator arms were primitive. But Thompson should be able to attempt to penetrate the sediment ridge and see if he struck metal.

He approached cautiously and speared the manipulator arm into the muck. The arm stopped. He could not tell if the resistance were from hitting a glancing blow and the viscous sediment stopped the arm or if he had hit metal. He tried again, more at a right angle to the surface of the sediment. There was no doubt — he had just hit something solid. There was no bell tone ring from the steel, since the sediment would just muffle the sound of the arm striking the object. He retracted the arm to drive the DSV around the lump in the seafloor and map it out.

“Emerald, Narragansett. We have a manmade hull down here.” Thompson said emotionlessly, knowing his radio and video call would be repeated for the brass. “I’ve detected several more hammer blows. I’m going to attempt to rig up an acoustic detector on the surface and locate the hammering more accurately.”

Over the next hour Thompson worked to place hydrophones on the surface of the sloping ridge. The hydrophones listened to the hammering and triangulated it to a single location. The Emerald would soon be sending down an underwater telephone device on a cable. The unit consisted of a transmission hydrophone connected to an amplifier to a cable to the surface ship. The hydrophone would broadcast the voice of someone talking on the connection into the hull. If someone trapped inside shouted, the reception hydrophone would pick it up and amplify it for the listeners on the surface ship. It was crude and often was too indistinct to communicate effectively, but if it worked they could tell the survivors to hold on.