Warriors (14 page)

C
H A P T E R
  1 8

T
he sea was in a furious mood.

Lieutenant Robert “Moose” Taylor, Annapolis and Yale Law–educated son of a legendary Denver oilman, stood outside on the starboard bridge deck. His binoculars were trained forward across the sleek bow of his ship, the guided-missile destroyer USS
Dauntless
. In his foul weather gear, the boyish officer looked even younger than his twenty-six years.

USS
Dauntless
was currently streaming through heavy seas beset with sometimes patchy but unusually dense fog, en route to her home port at Naval Station Norfolk in Virginia.

Since Taylor had assumed the watch earlier that morning at 0600 hours, the weather had continuously deteriorated. Periodic squalls of heavy rain rolled through, the sea heaved, and
Dauntless
took on a heavy roll.

Taylor paid foul weather no mind.

If anything, he reveled in it. To him, it was one of those lively atmospheric mornings tinged with brine that made a man glad as hell he’d joined the navy rather than practice corporate law in D.C. or print money down on Wall Street. The honest truth was he loved bad weather. No idea why. Had since childhood summers sailing on Nantucket. Go figure.

Standing next to the tall and slender lieutenant on the bridge wing was Ensign Stubbs Pullman, a strapping, towheaded farm boy from Prairie Flower, Texas. His aw-shucks personality was belied by his serious dark blue eyes, eyes that took in everything, eyes set within a crinkle of humor that sometimes sparkled with native plainspoken intelligence.

“Of course, all y’all know where Prairie Flower is?” Pullman liked to ask any available sailor within hearing range. Moose had learned Texan from Ensign Pullman early on. He knew that “y’all” was singular. And that “All y’all” was plural. And then, when absolutely nobody knew what the hey he was talking about, Moose’d say, “Hell, son, Prairie Flower’s only just a mile or so down the road apiece from Sweetwater, Texas! All y’all didn’t know that? Damn!”

After six months of pirate hunting on station off the coast of Somalia, and more recently near the Straits of Hormuz, Ensign Will Pullman and the crew of the fighting
Dauntless
were more than ready to get stateside again. With no serious weather forecast for the mid-Atlantic coast, Moose Taylor told Pullman he thought they’d be steaming into their home port at 0800 hours Saturday morning.

A good thing, too. Taylor’s wife, Meg, was beaming come-hither looks at him on their Friday night Skype. Their conversations were getting more and more overheated and pornographic by the week.

Saturday was the lieutenant’s twenty-sixth birthday. And he’d be cutting his birthday cake at the little kitchen table at home and sleeping in his own bed with his beautiful bride. For all the shipboard bitching, you had to admit, sometimes even the navy got it right.

This particular homeward voyage had been hugely uneventful, with one exception. Sonar had reported a faint contact with an unidentified screw signature. A large submarine had been located running a course for this particular patch of ocean forty-eight hours earlier. Contact had been lost. Navy Ops Center had reported nothing since. So, friendly or foe-wise, the faint sonar contact was a bit of a shipboard mystery.

If that sonar blip was in fact an enemy sub, which Taylor thought unlikely, the boomer had gone deep and stayed there. But in all probability, the sonar operator, bored to tears, had simply misread some visual “noise” on his scope.

Pullman grabbed Moose by the elbow.

“You hear what just happened in D.C.? I mean, just this morning, Moose?”

“Gee, let me think. It is Saturday. The president played golf. Again.”

“The president nearly got his ass dead, is what he did.”

“What? Rosow? He’s only been in office a week!”

“You will not effing believe this, son. There was a drone attack on McCloskey’s funeral at Arlington. Not two hours ago.”

“No shit? A drone at Arlington? What the hell. I mean, Jesus! Whose drone was it?”

“Beats the crap out of me. Some big-ass, batwing, stealth-type mother armed with Sidewinders, machine guns, and five-hundred-pounders. Huge. I saw video of the attack on Fox News down at the canteen not five minutes ago. Man. You talk about ‘death from above.’ “

“And the drone?”

“Vaporized by a Hellfire. But still.”

“Casualties?”

“Hell, yeah. A ton. They can’t count bodies that fast. Every ambulance within a hundred-mile radius of Arlington is en route.”

“The president is unhurt, though, right? He and my dad were classmates at Annapolis. I know the guy.”

“So far, that’s what they’re saying.”

“Anybody claim responsibility?”

“Not yet. And if the Feds know who did it, they sure ain’t talking about it. Man. Somebody assassinates our damn president and then tries to take out the new one at the dead one’s funeral! Are things getting really weird in this country, Moose, or is it just me?”

“It’s not you, brother. Things are definitely getting weird. Believe me.”

“And speaking of weird . . . what the living hell is that?”

“What?”

“Swing them glasses around to port side, sir. Ten points off our port bow. Little hole in the fog, see it? Some kind of mound over there . . . rising up out of the water, you know . . . almost like a sub . . . whale, maybe . . . only . . . Holy shit!”

“A whale? Gotta be,” Moose said.

“Way too big for a whale . . . wait . . . hell, no, it’s gotta be some kind of a sub! But—what the hell—look at the surface angle! I mean, a submarine surfacing vertically? I don’t . . . I don’t . . .”

“That ain’t no whale, sir,” Taylor said.

An impossibly huge mushroom of water suddenly exploded upward as something grotesque and threatening rose out of the sea, shining black and silver, seeming to come endlessly out of the water, unbelievable as its length and bulk climbed into the air and seemed to hang there . . . until it fell with a power that drove the water up high and white into the sky.

This was something the likes of which neither man had ever seen before, the sheer mass of it, how it broke the surface at an impossible speed and shot straight up, actually gaining momentum, like the old Jupiter rockets at Kennedy Space Center.

“Cap’n?” Moose Taylor said into his mouthpiece. “I know visibility sucks . . . but . . . is the bridge seeing what we’re seeing out there to port?”

“Hell yes, we’re seeing it. But what in God’s sweet name is it? All engines dead astern! Stop this goddamn boat and let’s have us a little lookie-loo . . .”

Pullman grabbed the lieutenant’s arm, his expression shock colored with fear.

“I’ll tell you one thing, Moose, if that damn thing is some kind of new intercontinental nuke . . . hell, we’re all dead, podnuh. Imagine the size of that warhead. Take out Nebraska.”

THE MEN ON THE BRIDGE
of
Dauntless
were witness to a historic sight that morning. Though they didn’t know it at the time, they were present at the dawn of an entirely new era in the annals of naval warfare. What they were observing was an undersea weapon the likes of which would change everything.

Literally.

Wherever they were on the ship, fore or aft, whatever they were doing at that moment, sailors stood stock-still, staring openmouthed in incredulous wonder, as a behemoth sheathed in black steel rose up majestically before them. What it was, they had no earthly idea. The patchy fog, thick as cotton, shielded large segments of the silhouette from view.

But somehow the monstrosity kept rising, reaching ever higher, water pouring off its black flanks in sheets, until every last foot of it had emerged from the depths.

It paused then, for a nanosecond, seemed to lean a few fractions of a degree slightly to port. And then it fell to earth like tall timber, crashing full-length into the sea with the mighty force of towering redwood in the forest.

The result of this freakish giant’s epic crash on the ocean’s surface produced a minitsunami. The huge wave rocked the navy destroyer like a toy boat, rolling her over on her beam ends before she could right herself.

“Lieutenant Taylor, this is the captain. You’re an ex-submariner. You ever see a submarine looked anything like this one before? Because I sure as hell haven’t. I mean, forgetting about the sheer length of the damn thing . . . look at the size of her superstructure! And standing on her tail like that? What the hell?”

“No, sir. This thing is big. Only thing I know of that’s even remotely this size was Russian. NATO called her ‘Typhoon.’ ‘Shark,’ or ‘Akula,’ as the Russians called it. She was 515 feet long with 70 feet of beam. Carried twenty long-range ballistic nuclear missiles, sir. Largest submarine in history. Only six ever built. Deployed in the eighties to launch SLBMs from under the Arctic ice cap. Mothballed a couple of years ago, I think.”

“But, damn it, Lieutenant, maybe one of those goddamn Typhoons was never mothballed. Russians kept her out of sight but still in service? Sitting on the bottom almost in sight of our coastline? What else could it be? You got a better explanation?”

“No, sir, I do not.”

“Unless, of course, that thing is a goddamn spaceship from Mars.”

“Yes, sir. I mean, no, sir.”

“And so, God help ’em, since it is a sub, there’s got to be crew aboard. Not that many men could have survived a vertical surfacing at that speed. Sonar watched her entire ascent. He says she was nestled on the sandy bottom when something went haywire. Suddenly, she stood on her tail and she shot straight up from the bottom like a goddamn rocket. And even if those boys over there made it through that, hell, a hard landing like that one . . . I just don’t know. We could be looking at a tremendous loss of life.”

“Yes, sir. But maybe some of them were strapped in? I dunno, sir. I just can’t make any sense of what I’m seeing.”

“Nobody can. But I’ll tell you what. I want you to lead a rescue party over there. Now. Take as many men and as much equipment as you need, son. And don’t waste any time; there’s a damn good chance boys are dying over there inside that big tin can.”

“Aye-aye, sir.”

Taylor looked at Pullman and said, “You heard the captain. Let’s move. Give the order to lower away the starboard thirty-two-foot patrol boat, Stubbie. Now!”

The lieutenant moved his binocs along what he could see of the mysterious sub’s hull, calculating her overall length in his head.

By his reckoning, this thing was nearly a thousand feet long.

BY THE TIME TAYLOR, PULLMAN,
and the rescue crew approached the surfaced submarine in a high-speed patrol craft, a two-man team of swimmers had already managed to secure a line over from
Dauntless
on the thing. That feat was a lot harder than it looked because there were no handholds on the exterior of the hull.

And in the thick, swirling fog bank, her deck loomed about thirty to forty feet above their heads. And when the two swimmers finally got up on the sub’s deck? They’d had a hell of a time finding anything to secure a line to until they discovered cleats that popped up out of the hull when they stepped on them.

The sub finally secure, the two sailors hung a rope ladder over the side of the hull to make life easier for the rescue boat now approaching dead slow from astern.

Since the seas were rolling, but relatively calm, the giant was riding easily on her waterline. Which, for Taylor and the boys from
Dauntless,
would make scrambling up the dangling ladder a whole lot easier. At the last minute, since he had no clue what he would find aboard this thing, Lieutenant Robert Taylor had ordered all the men to wear sidearms. And two of them were carrying MP9 machine guns and packing smoke and flash-bang grenades to disorient any unfriendlies they might encounter.

Because of the thick fog, Taylor and his men were getting the first real close-up look at the strange vessel.

“No flag painted on her flank,” Moose said quietly, putting the patrol boat’s helm hard a’port on an angle to pull alongside the sub.

“Yeah. No flag. No ID anywhere, Skipper. I noticed that. “

“No anything anywhere, Stubbie. A sub without a country.”

“Yeah.”

“I’m thinkin’ . . . no, I’m almost thinking . . . UFO.”

“Stubbs. Come on.”

“Well, okay, then what the hell is it? Is it a Russian Akula class?”

“Hell, no. This thing dwarfs the Akula.”

“So what the hell is it?”

“Let’s go find out. I’m going up the ladder first. Secure this vessel any way you can, then get the men started up and bring up the rear.”

“Aye, sir.”

“And, Stubbs? Keep that machine gun of yours on full auto, okay? Something I really don’t like about this. Doesn’t feel right.”

“Yeah. Remember on the bridge when I said I thought things were getting a little weird?”

“Yep.”

“Well, right now this thing is really creeping me out, sir.”

“Yeah. See you up on deck.”

“Aye-aye, sir.”

Taylor started up the ladder, mumbling to himself.

. . . The fucking Mount Everest of submarines . . .

C
H A P T E R
  1 9

S
tokely Jones and his business partner Luis Gonzales-Gonzales were huddled over a small table in the rear of the joint, a notorious Miami waterfront dive called Marker 9. This was one week after the attack on Arlington, and they were waiting for Harry Brock. Brock, like every other CIA operative on the planet, had been called back to Langley for briefings on the ongoing search to identify the perpetrators.

He’d arrived back in Miami two days ago but was mum on the subject of the drone attack whenever Stoke asked him about it. Just gave him a look of
Don’t go there, man.

Stoke didn’t take that as a sign of progress. He glanced at his watch. Harry was CIA, yeah, okay, but his track record for promptness, Stoke had long believed, was sketchy.

At one point in its shady history, Marker 9 had been a wildly popular mob bar. Capo di tutti capo fatti Santo Trafficante out of Tampa ruled his South Florida roost from a bar stool there for nearly a decade. Then in the 1950s it was a cop joint. Crooked cops mostly. A big corruption scandal had resulted in the grisly revenge murder of two dirty vice squad detectives on the premises in the summer of 1959.