America (3 page)

He turned in the cramped open bridge and waved one last time at the people on the dock, especially his wife and parents, who had shared his dream all these years. He could see them and his teenage daughter waving back.

Then he turned to face the sea.

The officer of the deck, Lieutenant Ellis Johnson, seemed to read the CO's mood. “Congratulations, sir,” he murmured, just loud enough to be heard.

“Thank you,” the skipper said and smiled at the sea and sky.

*   *   *

A mile or so away, barely making steerageway, USS
John Paul Jones,
a guided-missile destroyer, kept a watchful eye on the covey of boats that had gathered to watch
America
get under way from the New London submarine base. For the last hour a small Coast Guard cutter had done most of the work of keeping the spectator boats corralled, mainly through use of a bullhorn. Overhead a helicopter belonging to a television station circled slowly, shooting footage for the evening news. One of the boats contained a delegation of antinuclear activists who had tried their best to raise a rumpus and be noticed by the camera folks in the news chopper. The Coast Guard skipper had threatened them with arrest and confiscation of their borrowed boat, so they were behaving themselves just now.

Aboard
Jones,
Captain Harvey Warfield focused his binoculars on
America.
The sail on the sub was located far forward on the hull, almost as if the attack boat were a boomer full of ballistic missiles. Well behind the sail was the squarish shape of a miniature submarine, a fifty-five-ton delivery vehicle for special-warfare commandos, SEALs. Although it was hard to judge from the portion of the submarine visible above water, to Warfield's practiced eye
America
looked slightly longer and sleeker than the navy's
Seawolf
boats. Perhaps the fact that he knew its dimensions exactly, 377 feet long and 34 feet in diameter, colored his perception.

Certainly not the fastest or the deepest-diving U.S. submarine,
America
was the quietest, without a doubt the ultimate stealth ship. Designed for shallow-water combat, the most difficult environment submarines could fight in,
America
packed more computer power inside her hull than all the other submarines of the United States Navy combined. Originally the submarine had been laid down as USS
Virginia;
the name had been changed to get a few more votes in Congress, which was the way things worked in Washington in this age of Pax Americana. These things Warfield knew from press releases and briefings—he wasn't cleared for the really juicy classified stuff, the secrets the submariners put in the I-could-tell-you-but-then-I'd-have-to-kill-you category.

Which was just as well, Warfield thought. Submarines had never interested him much—months submerged, the crew packed into the tiny ship like sardines in a can, the ever-present threat of drowning or being crushed when the hull imploded.… Just thinking about it was enough to make Warfield's skin tingle. Submarining was tough duty, obviously, and somebody had to do it. Those who did certainly earned their extra dough every month, Warfield thought, and were welcome to it.

Warfield checked his watch.
America
had cast loose her lines right on time, just what he expected from Lenny Sterrett.

Today the Coast Guard seemed on top of the small-boat situation, the navigator and senior quartermaster were on the bridge, and Warfield's officer of the deck was the best he had, so the captain reached for a pile of paperwork on the small table beside his raised bridge chair. After one last glance around, he picked up the first document in the pile and began reading.

*   *   *

Standing in the wheelhouse of the tugboat pulling
America
away from the pier, Vladimir Kolnikov lifted his binoculars and aimed them yet again at
John Paul Jones.
The destroyer was making only a couple knots, yet it was there, ready.

Ready for what?

That was the question, wasn't it? Ready for what?

How good was the skipper of the destroyer? How fast could he handle the unexpected? How quickly could the crew obey unanticipated directives?

“What do you think?” Georgi Turchak asked in Russian. He was at the helm of the tugboat. The captain of the tug lay in a corner of the small bridge, quite dead.

“You knew there would be destroyers,” Kolnikov replied without lowering his binoculars. “We are lucky there is only one.”

“What if there is another submarine out there?”

“Then we will soon be dead. Do you wish to back out now?”

“No, damn it. I wish you would tell me comforting things to make me think that we are going to pull this off, get filthy rich, and live to a ripe old age enjoying our money.”

Kolnikov turned the binoculars, focused them on the captain of the submarine. He could see the features of his face plainly, see him talking to the officer of the deck, the OOD, and the lookouts, who were looking all over the horizon with their binoculars and paying no attention to the tugboat.

“He's going to want to release the line any moment now,” Kolnikov said, more to himself than anyone else. He walked to the head of the ladder leading down.

“Are you ready, Heydrich?”

The man below looked about him at other men hidden from Kolnikov's view. “Eck? Boldt? Steeckt?” There were fourteen men belowdecks, one on the fantail, and of course here on the bridge Kolnikov and Turchak, for a total of seventeen.

Now the man below looked up the ladderway at Kolnikov. His face was one of large cheekbones and tiny eyes. “We are ready, Russki. Give the word.”

“Very soon, I think.”

*   *   *

The band was playing “America, the Beautiful” when the OOD used a bullhorn to call the tugboat. He could still hear the music plainly even though the sub and tug were about seven hundred yards from the pier. “We are ready to release the tow,” he called.

Releasing the tow was a relatively simple maneuver. When the tugboat reduced power, the towline would go slack so the submarine's deck crew could release it from the towing cleat. Then the tug would accelerate away and the sub would proceed under its own power.

Kolnikov signaled to the man on the fantail of the tug, who began winding the towline tighter around a power winch as Turchak at the helm gently reduced power on the tug's engines.

The distance between tug and submarine began to decrease, while the men on the sub's deck waited in vain for slack to develop in the line.

It took several seconds for Captain Lenny Sterrett and the OOD, Ellis Johnson, to comprehend what was happening. Sterrett spoke sharply to Johnson, who barked into the bullhorn, “Get off the winch and give me some slack.”

The white foam coming from the tug's fantail ceased as the distance between the two vessels closed. Kolnikov shouted at the man on the winch, waved his arms excitedly, and the distance continued to close until only a few feet of water remained between the two hulls.

Then smoke erupted from the fantail of the tug. Three seconds later, a minor explosion along the tug's waterline blew water into the air. The man on the fantail went over the side. Kolnikov rushed down the ladder from the tug's bridge and raced for the afterdeck.

Two more crewmen appeared on the tug's deck and ran aft.

“Man overboard, civilian from the tug!” The OOD shouted this message into the intercom, and in seconds it blared on the boat's loudspeakers.

In the control room the chief of the boat pronounced a curse word. “Oh, man!” he said. “First
Greenville,
then this!” Everyone in the control room knew what he meant—if the civilian in the water drowned before the sub crew could pull him out, the media would savage the navy and Captain Lenny Sterrett, which would probably sink his naval career.

Meanwhile the two vessels drifted without power. No slack developed in the towline, which continued to pull the vessels together until the tug's stern gently contacted the anechoic skin of the submarine below the waterline.

In the sub's tiny cockpit, Lenny Sterrett was trying to sort it all out. The men on the line-handling party on the submarine's deck threw the man in the water a line. He came clambering up it hand over hand with surprising agility.

“Cut that tow line,” Lenny Sterrett roared at the senior petty officer on the sub's deck, who turned to grab an ax that had been thoughtfully carried on deck, just in case.

Too late. The man coming up the line pulled a weapon from beneath his loose-fitting wet shirt and shot the six unarmed men in the line-handling party as fast as he could pull the trigger. Then he scrambled for the open deck hatch.

All Lenny Sterrett heard were pops from the silenced reports, but the sight of falling men galvanized him, cleared away the cobwebs. He keyed the intercom and roared, “General quarters. Close all watertight doors. Prepare to repel unauthorized boarders.”

Those were his last words, because even as he said them, a man with a sniper rifle standing on the wing of the tug's bridge shot him.

When the skipper went down, bleeding profusely, the OOD stood for a second, too stunned to move. The sight of two men crossing the line that held the sub to the tug hand over hand galvanized him. He jumped down the hatch into the sail. “You two, clear the bridge!” he shouted back up at the lookouts.

Neither man made it down the hatch. The sharpshooter on the tug didn't miss.

When he realized what had happened, the OOD closed the hatch and feverishly worked to dog it down. This evolution could not be done quickly. Unlike World War II submarines that patrolled on the surface and crash-dived to evade enemies,
America
was designed to submerge when leaving port and stay submerged for months.

Meanwhile, in the control room, the radioman punched a button to allow him to transmit on the ship-to-ship plain-voice frequency, Navy Blue. He was wearing a headset. “Mayday,
America,
” he said. “Unauthorized armed personnel attempting to board
America.
Request assistance ASAP. Mayday.”

The chief of the boat, who had been standing behind the helmsman, for in this new class of submarine there was only one, reached above his head for the safety cover that shielded the SCRAM button, which would drop the rods into the reactor, stopping the nuclear reaction. He broke the safety wire on the cover and lifted it.

*   *   *

Valuable seconds were wasted as the OOD wrestled with the hatch dogs. Finally he got them secured to his satisfaction, then he dropped down the ladder to the first deck, where he rushed below to the control room.

“Boarders,” he roared. “SCRAM the reactor. Close all the hatches. Don't let them—”

At that moment two men carrying silenced submachine guns rushed in and shot Ellis Johnson. They each fired one aimed shot; the bullets struck the lieutenant square in the back. The chief of the boat already had his hands up, reaching for the SCRAM button, so they ignored him. He jabbed in the red button.

And nothing happened! Warning lights should have lit up like a Christmas tree, the power in the boat should have switched to battery backup.…

“Hands up,” the intruders roared, and one man stood with his weapon on the sailors as his companion dashed aft toward the engine and reactor spaces. The radioman was listening to excited voices from
John Paul Jones.

He keyed the mike with his foot control. “Intruders in
America
—” he began, then they shot him.

The American sailors stood stunned, shocked, speechless. Unsure of what they should do to resist, most of them simply raised their hands and remained frozen. Those who had other ideas were mercilessly shot by the gun-toting men who came pouring through the main deck hatch in front of the sail and ran through the submarine.

Kolnikov was the last of the intruders to board. He paused on the deck, watched one of the Germans chop the towline through with an ax. The fantail of the tug was already awash. The demolition charges had produced noise and smoke and blown a nice hole in the side of the tug below the waterline, all of which was calculated to cause confusion on the American sub, where the sailors' innate caution would be overridden by the obvious peril of the man in the water and those aboard the tug. And it worked.

The downwash of the helicopter buzzing overhead made it difficult to stand on the open deck. Kolnikov lifted his submachine gun and squeezed off a burst. He was so close to the chopper that he saw holes popping in the Plexiglas. The machine veered away rapidly.

The destroyer was still a mile or so away, barely moving.

Good.

Kolnikov lowered himself into the open hatch.

*   *   *

“Captain, we have received a radio message from
America.
Armed intruders are boarding.”

Aboard
John Paul Jones,
Captain Harvey Warfield took about two seconds to process that information.

“Verify,” he barked at the OOD, a short, heavily built female lieutenant who used a telephone to call the radio room.

After listening a moment, the OOD said, “Put it on the loudspeaker on the bridge.”

*   *   *

At the bottom of the ladder, Kolnikov found himself in a tight compartment above the control room. One of Kolnikov's men held a submachine gun on four Americans, who had their hands raised.

“Out,” Kolnikov said to the American sailors, gesturing toward the ladder. “Up, into the water.”

When the last of them was out, Kolnikov and the gunman went forward, opening the hatch to the space in the forwardmost part of the boat, which housed the sonar computers. One man was there. He was unceremoniously rushed aft at the point of a gun and pushed toward the ladder leading to the open air.

Kolnikov went aft, through the crew spaces and mast housings that protruded down from the sail. “Get them out,” he told the two men there holding weapons on the Americans.