Seawolf End Game (35 page)

She felt his eyes upon her. She couldn’t imagine him not seeing what had to be plainly visible on her face. How many times had those eyes looked right through her? How many nights had she seen those eyes in her dreams? Fatigue and stress had combined to weaken any emotional control she had, and she was certain her feelings were evident. Was he toying with her? Was this his idea of some sort of cruel game?

“It’s nothing, sir,” she insisted. “I’m just a bit punchy,” she lied, looking away from him and then added, “I’d better get back to sonar.”

They were in the wardroom and all alone. She could tell him and be done with it. They were about to enter a minefield. She had the courage to do that, but she couldn’t summon the courage to tell him what she was feeling. Instead, she stepped past him and kept walking, terrified he might stop her and ask her what was really on her mind. At the same time, another part of her was afraid he would just let her go.

USS Seawolf, The Strait of Hormuz

“H
ere we go,” Fabrini whispered.

In the cramped sonar room, every eye was turned to the MIDAS alarm. It would be their only warning before disaster if a mine happened to be floating loose, or if the
Seawolf
drifted outside the carefully prescribed course. No one had to remind any of them that what they were attempting had never been done before. Certainly not in a submarine the size of the
Seawolf.
There was no room for error.

The crew was at general quarters with every watertight hatch sealed in the event of disaster. But no one really believed this would save them if they hit a mine. It was simply one of the few precautions they could take. Kristen stood with Fabrini behind the sonar operators who would be virtually useless during the transit through the meager lane in the minefield. Above their heads, the squawk box was turned on so they could hear every word coming in from the control room and vice versa.

“I can’t believe we’re doing this,” Greenberg whispered anxiously from his seat at the narrowband stack.

“Just stay sharp,” Kristen offered, wishing she were more confident.

Brodie was taking an awful risk. Once they entered the minefield there was no turning back. The lane they were going to try and pass through was sixteen miles long, but so narrow it would be impossible to turn around once committed. If even one mine had come loose and drifted in front of them, the
Seawolf
would be crippled at best.

Fabrini and Kristen watched the painstakingly slow progress of the
Seawolf
through the channel on the tactical display, their eyes and ears never far from the MIDAS alarm.

Fatigue, or at least the burning desire to sleep, left her as she focused on the tactical display. After nearly thirty minutes, the
Seawolf
reached the first turn, and Kristen found her left hand gripping an overhead pipe firmly, as if waiting for a sudden blast. She watched the display as the
Seawolf
turned slowly, staying in the exact center of the narrow channel. She felt something moving against her right leg and looked down to see her right hand trembling slightly. She shoved it into her pocket, tightening her hand into a fist.

Not now, damn you!

The whine of the MIDAS alarm nearly caused her to come out of her skin.

“MIDAS Alert! Mine bearing zero-one-five,” Kristen and Fabrini said almost in unison. She heard Brodie make a quick course change. The
Seawolf
turned slightly to port to avoid the mine and then, as they passed to the left of the errant mine, they resumed their base course. Everyone was now riveted to the alarm panel, expecting it to sound again at any moment. Where there was one mine out of position, there would be more.

But as the
Seawolf
continued on, the alarm stayed silent. After another eighteen minutes precisely, with everyone on board listening nervously to the sounds outside the submarine, the
Seawolf
made another turn and set up for the narrowest portion of the entire run through the minefield. The massive field was not one field at all, but dozens of smaller individual fields set seemingly at random with no rhyme or reason. In places there were gaps of nearly a mile between some mines, and in others they were almost on top of one another.

The
Seawolf
lined up to make a run between two of the random fields less than seventy yards apart. The narrow passage between them was nearly half a mile long, and at their current four knot speed they would take eight long minutes to slip through the gap.

Kristen felt sweat trickling down the small of her back, and she wiped some from her forehead as she reached up and gripped another overhead pipe. Around her, the others were holding on tight. The air in the small space—already stale—suddenly felt so thick with tension it was hard to draw a breath. The feeling that imminent death was at hand was like a great crushing weight. Kristen felt her right hand trembling in her pocket, and she closed her fist tight again, willing herself to hide her fear.

“God almighty,” Hicks whispered in prayer as the
Seawolf
approached the narrow lane between the two minefields.

“Amen, brother,” Goodman added as he gripped a handhold beside the narrowband stack.

 The sudden blaring of the collision alarm caused a petty officer from another sonar watch to start crying. The alarm startled Kristen, but she held firm, gritting her teeth. She watched the tactical display as the
Seawolf
moved toward the narrow channel like a cork entering a bottle. The channel didn’t look wide enough. If just one of the mines had come loose and was floating in their path there would be no going around it.

“This is insane,” Greenberg whispered, “I’m too short for this shit.”

“Shh,” Kristen whispered to him as the
Seawolf
squeezed between the two minefields. She bit her lip nervously and had to consciously stop herself before she drew blood.

The MIDAS alarm sounded like a train whistle.

Kristen called out the warning, “MIDAS alert, dead ahead. Zero-zero-two!”

“It’s right in front of us,” Fabrini added as he grabbed the back of a seat and tensed his whole body in anticipation of the metal-shredding blast.

There was nowhere for the
Seawolf
to go. They were in too narrow a channel to maneuver around the mine. Like Fabrini who literally cringed beside her, Kristen tensed her whole body. She shut her eyes reflexively, expecting disaster.

But instead of a terrible explosion, Kristen heard Brodie’s calm voice over the squawk box ordering a thirty degree down angle on both the fore and aft dive planes. Immediately the
Seawolf
dove deeper. With both sets of dive planes at the same angle, the submarine settled gently, lowering on an even keel while still moving forward. The result was the
Seawolf
didn’t go around the mine; it went under it.

Kristen heard someone whispering. She opened her eyes to see Hicks praying at his seat and beside him the irreverent Greenberg joining in. Meanwhile, Fabrini was white knuckling a couple of handholds. Everyone fully expected disaster. But the
Seawolf
moved on and passed the errant mine floating in the middle of the channel before Brodie brought the submarine back up.

Kristen turned her head slowly, her neck muscles so tight from nervous tension it hurt to turn her head. She watched as they cleared the narrow channel and commenced another slight turn, still at four knots, toward the next narrow section. Kristen closed her eyes, forcing herself to relax her muscles. Her left arm was cramping from holding on, and she willed her stiff fingers to release the pipe.

But the transit of the channel continued, every turn as harrowing as the last, and with each tick of the clock seeming like an eternity. The strain was too much for some, as two more men from another sonar watch slid to the floor and began trembling with fear in the rear of the shack. Throughout the four-hour transit, the only thing providing any relief from the terror of knowing they were in a minefield and could be killed at any second was the tranquil and steady voice they heard over the squawk box as Brodie issued orders to the helm. His voice never sounded excited or nervous. Even when the MIDAS alarm went off, his orders were direct, deliberate, and always unruffled.

Passing through the last of the minefield with a tremendous sigh of relief, Kristen heard her men welcome the relatively narrow Persian Gulf. For herself, she felt as if she’d just finished a marathon. She was a mental and physical wreck. Kristen, along with everyone one on board, had been awake now for the better part of two days. Much of the time they’d all been under great stress, magnifying everyone’s exhaustion tenfold.

But now that they were in the Persian Gulf, she liked to think the worst was behind them. Of course, somewhere, perhaps lurking close by, the
Borei
and—quite probably—the
Gagarin
were waiting, and Kristen had no idea how they were going to find them.

USS Seawolf

T
he desire to just sit down on the cramped floor and get a few minutes of sleep was tempting. At the same time, the need to strip off her filthy, sweat-soaked uniform and take a shower proved stronger. Kristen stepped from the sonar shack and headed for her cabin. Brodie had relaxed their readiness posture to allow the crew to eat and move about the submarine, so Kristen was determined to at least wash up a bit before returning to the caveman-like existence of the sonar shack.

After a brief shower that did little to remove her bone-numbing fatigue, she dressed into a clean uniform. Then, with her hygiene needs satisfied, she was anxious to crawl into her bunk for any sleep that might come. She slipped from the head and paused, looking about the spartan cabin the captain maintained for himself.

Kristen again considered the barren walls. She closed her eyes momentarily, envisioning how they should have looked, with pictures of family framed and mounted to help him remember there was a purpose behind everything he did. But his walls were bleak, without so much as a fingerprint marring them. It occurred to her how lonely the life of any ship’s captain must be, and especially his. He had nothing. No family. No one waiting for him. Nothing.

There’d been a time when she’d envied such an existence. She’d actively pursued the life of a submariner despite firsthand knowledge of how hard it was on families. She’d foolishly dismissed the thoughts of how difficult it might be. But as she leaned back against the door to the head, staring at the empty cabin, the reality hit her, and she felt not only tired but utterly alone herself.

Chief Miller and Gibbs were dead, and she grieved, but they at least had someone back home who would miss them and mourn their passing. Kristen realized, like Brodie, she had no one. Her father’s parents were still alive and she was close with them, recalling their modest home in the San Diego area not far from the naval base where her grandfather had retired. They would mourn her loss, but they also understood the risks associated with being a submariner. Her mother—if sober enough—might shed a tear, but there would be no real grief from the woman whose only concern would likely be Kristen’s life insurance.

She realized wallowing in self-pity was due partly to her lack of sleep, but the recognition of her own loneliness was only exacerbated by the epiphany that all of the sacrifice and hard work hadn’t been worth it. She’d forfeited too much, given up far more than she should have. She could very well have been killed in the minefield, never having experienced any of the joys life had to offer. The fact that it had taken such a near death experience for her to understand this was sobering.

At that moment, the door to the passageway opened.

She turned and saw Brodie enter.

Whatever fatigue, whatever loneliness, whatever weight she felt pressing down upon her was echoed and multiplied in the captain’s shockingly fragile expression he revealed only when alone. She must have startled him, and he stiffened a bit and paused in the doorway. “Excuse me, Lieutenant,” he said automatically as the door lingered open behind him.