Plague Ship Read online

  He was dimly aware of Hali Kasim sending a radio alert to the two ships about the inbound torpedoes, not that there was anything they could do. A ship the size of the Aggie Johnston had a pathetically large turning radius, and needed five miles to stop from her current cruising speed.

  “I’m tracking two fast movers off the carrier,” Mark Murphy said from the weapons stations. “I suspect they’re S-3B Vikings, antisubmarine warfare planes armed with either Mark 46 or Mark 50 torpedoes. That Kilo is going to have a real bad day starting in about ten minutes.”

  “Which is five minutes too late for us,” Eric said.

  “Hali, what’s the range to the fish tracking us?” Cabrillo asked

  “Six thousand yards.”

  And for the Saga?”

  “Thirty-two hundred.”

  Cabrillo straightened in his chair, his decision made. It was time to roll the dice and see what happened. “Helm, increase speed to forty knots, put us between the Saga and the torpedo headed for her.”

  “Aye.”

  “Wepps, open the ports for the forward Gatling and target that fish, slave your computer to the master sonar plot, and you might need the targeting reticle from the crow’s nest camera.”

  “Just a second,” Mark said.

  “Mr. Murphy.” Juan’s tone was sharp. “We don’t have a second.” Murph wasn’t listening. He was engrossed with something taking place on a laptop computer he had jacked into his system. “Come on, baby, learn it, will you,” he said anxiously.

  “What are you doing?” Cabrillo asked, leaning over to compensate for the Oregon’s sharp curve through the water.

  “Teaching the Whopper a new trick.”

  Whopper was what he and Eric Stone called the Oregon’s supercomputer, having stolen the name from an old Matthew Broderick movie about a young computer hacker who breaks in to SAC/NORAD and almost starts a nuclear war.

  “We don’t need new tricks, Wepps. I need that Gatling online and spooled up.”

  Murph spun around in his seat to look across the room at Max Hanley, who was engrossed with his own computer. “I don’t think this is going to work.”

  “Keep at it, lad,” was all Max said.

  “You two mind telling me what’s going on?” Juan asked, looking at each man in turn.

  “Yes! Yes, yes, yes,” Mark crowed, jumping up from his chair and pumping his fists over his head. He began typing furiously, not bothering to sit again, his fingers flying over the keyboard, as dexterous as a classical pianist’s. “Logarithm’s lining up, targeting’s coming online. The onboard computer’s in sync with ours. I have full control.”

  “Of what?”

  Mark glanced at him with a fiendish grin. “We’re about to have ourselves a whale of a time.”

  Cabrillo blanched and spun to glance at Max. Hanley looked as inscrutable as a Buddha statue. “You can’t be serious,” Juan said but knew his second-in-command was. “You do know the last time the Russians tried to fire one of those things it blew a hole in the side of the Kursk and killed all one hundred and eighteen aboard? And this one’s an Iranian knockoff, for the love of God.”

  “There’s a thousand yards between the Saga and the torp,” Linda Ross said. With communications swirling among the freighters, the American battle group, and the fast-approaching ASW aircraft, she had taken over the sonar station so Hali Kasim could concentrate on the radios.

  “Just giving you an option, Chairman,” Max said broadly.

  “Don’t ‘Chairman’ me, you crafty old bastard.”

  Juan studied the tactical display again, noting the Oregon was about to slip between the incoming torpedo and its intended target. Because of the water density they needed to be directly in front of the torpedo if they were to have any realistic chance of hitting it. By the time they got into position, there would be less than five hundred yards between them and the weapon barreling in just ten feet below the surface.

  From the camera on the loading derrick, Cabrillo could see the wake line of the incoming torpedo, a faint disturbance in the otherwise tranquil water. It was approaching at better than forty knots.

  “Wepps, we need to take it before it dives for the keel.”

  “Tracking,” Murph said.

  Eric Stone slid the Oregon into position, using her athwartship thrusters and a heavy blast from the magnetohydrodynamics on full reverse, to place them directly in the path of the torpedo.

  “Permission to fire,” Juan said.

  Mark tapped a few keys.

  Outside, along the Oregon’s flank, the armored plate over the Gatling redoubt slammed open and the six-barrel gun shrieked, a string of foot-long empty shell casings arcing from the mechanism in a continuous blur. A plume of smoke and flame erupted from the ship as a second’s-long burst from the 20mm machine cannon arrowed across the water. Just ahead of the onrushing torpedo the sea came alive, shredded by hundreds of depleted uranium shells. Gouts of water flew in the air as the slugs bored a hole in the ocean amid a cloud of steam.

  The Russian-made TEST-71 torpedo, packed with over four hundred pounds of explosives, roared into the path of the Gatling gun. With enough water forced out of the way by the continuous stream of fire, four of the kinetic rounds hit the weapon dead center. The warhead exploded, sending a series of concussion waves racing across the sea, while, at the epicenter of the blast, a column of water rose eighty feet into the sky before gravity overcame inertia and the entire plume crashed back into the chasm.

  Though located in the heart of the ship and well insulated from the outside, the crew heard the detonation as though it was thunder crashing directly overhead.

  Juan immediately turned to Max. “That bought us about thirty seconds. Convince me.”

  “Their torpedoes are all wire guided. If we can cut them loose, they should go inert. Not even the Iranians would let fish run around in these waters without some sort of control.”

  “What do you propose?”

  “Isn’t it obvious? Sink the damned Kilo.”

  Juan looked at the tactical display again. He saw the red flashing lights indicating the two inbound American S-3B Vikings, as well as the track lines for the three remaining torpedoes. The reserve fish was beginning to accelerate toward the Oregon, while the primary weapon targeting her had altered course for interception.

  “You sure it’ll work?” he asked without looking back.

  " ’Course not,” Max told him. “It’s an Iranian copy of an already-flawed Russian weapon. But my crew worked through the night adapting the number one tube so we can fire it, and Murph seems to have the software worked out, so I say go for it. If it works as advertised, it’ll take out the three torpedoes long before they reach their targets.”

  "Murph?”

  “Whopper has it pegged, Chairman. I can control it as best as it can be controlled, but it’s mostly an aim-and-hope kind of weapon. At two hundred knots, it’s pretty damned hard to steer anything.”

  Cabrillo would either kiss Max and Murph in a few seconds or curse them in hell. “Helm, turn us bow on to the Kilo. Wepps, open outer door for tube one. Match bearings and shoot.”

  Foam creamed off the Oregon’s bow as Eric Stone brought the ship around, digging her deep into the waves, to give Murph his shot.

  “Stoney, another two points to starboard,” Mark asked, and Eric goosed the thrusters to maneuver the ship so she was pointed directly at where the Kilo had fired the spread of torpedoes. “Linda, she hasn’t moved, right?”

  “No. She’s just sitting there paying out wires to guide her school of fish.” Ross replied and took off the passive sonar headphones she’d been wearing.

  That was the last piece of information Mark needed. He keyed the launch control. With a blast of compressed air powerful enough to make the freighter shudder, the modified tube shot the rocket torpedo out through the hull door at nearly fifty knots, fast enough for its specially designed nose cone to create a high-pressure bubble of air around the whole weapon. Just
as its onboard computer detected the torpedo was slowing, its rocket kicked on with a deafening roar and its stabilizer fins flicked open.

  The Hoot, or Whale, rocket torpedo sliced through the ocean in an envelope of supercavitated bubbles that eliminated the deadly drag of having to bull its way through the water. In essence, it was flying, and quickly accelerated to two hundred and thirty knots. Its wake was a boiling cauldron of steam.

  The image from the topside camera showed that the sea was being ripped apart by a perfectly straight fault line that began at the Oregon’s bow and grew at four hundred and twenty feet per second.

  “Look at that mother go!” someone exclaimed.

  “Range to target?” Juan called.

  “Three thousand yards,” Linda said. “Make that twenty-six hundred. Twenty-two hundred. Two thousand yards.”

  “Mr. Murphy, be ready with the autodestruct,” Juan ordered.

  “You don’t want to sink the Kilo?”

  “And cause a bigger international incident than we’re already looking at? No, thank you. I just want to ring their bell a little bit and cut the guide wires spooling out of the sub’s bow.”

  “How close?”

  Juan checked the tactical display, gauging distances between the torpedoes targeting the Aggie Johnston and the Oregon and the ships themselves. The Johnston was less than thirty seconds from having her hull split open by a direct hit. He watched the line of the rocket torpedo cutting across the flat panel, moving so fast that the computer needed to recycle the image every second. He had to make sure to damage the Kilo enough so she couldn’t fire another spread but not to so cripple her that she sank.

  “One thousand yards, Chairman,” Linda called out, although Juan could see the numbers on the screen blurring backward for himself.

  There was less than two hundred yards now separating the Johnston from the torpedo hunting her. The vectors and speeds involved were complex, but Juan had a handle on it all.

  “Wait for it,” he said. If he detonated the rocket too early, there was a chance it wouldn’t cut all the wire. Too late and the Kilo’s crew of fifty-three were going to die.

  “Wait for it,” he repeated, watching the Hoot arrow through the sea and a faint line of disturbed water approaching the supertanker’s exposed flank.

  One torpedo was fifty yards from its target, the other, three hundred, but their relative speeds were so vastly different that they would reach their objectives at precisely the same instant.

  “Now!”

  Mark hit the button that sent an autodestruct signal to the torpedo’s onboard computer. The warhead and remaining solid rocket fuel blew a fraction of a second later, sending an erupting geyser of water into the air and opening a hole in the sea that was fifty feet deep and equally as wide. A stunning concussion wave radiated from explosion. It hit the Oregon bow on, but hammered the side of the Aggie Johnston so that the massive ship heeled slightly to port.

  With the explosion’s acoustical onslaught reverberating through the sea, it made passive sonar signals impossible to detect. Cabrillo focused his attention on the topside camera shot of the Petromax supertanker. She rolled ponderously back to an even keel. He continued to watch her for a moment before a smile crossed his lips. There was no explosion from a torpedo slamming into her hull. Max’s plan had worked. The wires coiling out from the Kilo to guide her fish had been cut, and the weapons immediately shut down.

  “Linda, tell me the instant you hear anything,” he ordered.

  “Computer is compensating now. Give me another few seconds.”

  Hali turned in his seat. “Chairman, the pilot of one of the S-3B Vikings wants to know what just happened.”

  “Stall him,” Juan said, his focus still on Linda, who sat as still as a statue, her right hand clamping the sonar headphones tightly to her head while in front of her tendrils of light floated down the sonar system’s waterfall display.

  She finally looked over at him. “No high-speed props sounds, so the three remaining torpedoes are dead and most likely on their way to the bottom. I hear machinery noises from the Kilo and alarms coming from inside the hull. Wait . . . Okay, it’s pumps and . . . they’re blowing ballast.” A bright smile bloomed on her impish face. “We did it! They’re on their way to the surface.”

  A round of cheers and applause reverberated through the Op Center, and even Max’s bulldog face cracked into a grin.

  “Nice job, everybody. Especially you, Mr. Murphy, and you, too, Max. Tell the team who installed the rocket torpedo and modified the tube to expect a little something extra in their next paychecks.”

  Although each member of the crew shared in the Corporation’s profits on a sliding scale, Cabrillo delighted in handing out bonuses for work above and beyond. It was part of the reason he engendered so much loyalty, though mainly that came because he was the best natural leader any of the people under him had ever worked for.

  “Look at that!” Eric Stone gasped.

  On the main display, he had shifted the camera view to show the spot of ocean where the Kilo had launched its ambush. The water boiled like a maelstrom, and, in the center of the disturbance, a blunt object rose from the sea. As the bow of the Iranian sub emerged, they could see her hull plates were buckled, as if she had run full speed into a seamount. The normally convex nose was dimpled in the center, the result of the rocket torpedo exploding sixty yards in front of her.

  The craft continued to surface, bobbing on waves of her own creation. As it steadied, Stone zoomed the camera in on the damaged hull plates, the Oregon’s computer automatically compensating for the ship’s motion so the image remained rock steady. Air bubbled up from around the torn metal—not much, but enough to indicate the Kilo was taking on water. Hatches on her conning tower and her fore and aft decks were thrown open and a stream of men poured out of the crippled sub.

  “You getting anything from them, Hali?” Juan asked.

  “General distress calls, sir. Their pumps are barely keeping pace with the flooding. They are requesting assistance from the naval base at Chāh Bahār. Her captain hasn’t ordered them to abandon ship, but he wants all unnecessary personnel on deck in case they founder.”

  “Are they asking for help from any ships in the area?”

  “Negative, and I doubt they will.”

  “Agreed. Firing at civilian freighters without warning violates about fifty international treaties.”

  “And what do you call what we did back at Bandar Abbas?” Max asked, just to tease.

  “Petty larceny,” Cabrillo dismissed, “punishable by a fine and a couple hours of community service.”

  Just then, the pair of S-3Bs off the American aircraft carrier streaked over the Oregon and flew less than a hundred feet off the surface of the ocean as they roared down the Kilo’s length. Sailors dove flat on the decks as the jet wash ripped across their uniforms.

  “Chairman, the pilot of the lead Viking still wants to talk to you,” Hali said. “And I’m getting an official request from the carrier that we remain in position. It’s a Commander Charles Martin, aboard the George Washington.”

  “Pipe it over,” Juan said, and settled earphones over his head and adjusted the integrated microphone. “This is Juan Cabrillo, master of the MV Oregon. What can I do for you, Commander?”

  “Captain Cabrillo, we would like to send over a contingent of men to debrief your crew about what just occurred. The captains of the Saga and Aggie Johnston have already agreed. A helicopter can reach you in twenty minutes. The guided missile cruiser Port Royal will be there in two hours if you don’t have facilities for landing a chopper.”

  “With all due respect, Commander Martin, none of my crew saw anything. I myself was asleep, and the watch stander on duty is blind in one eye and can’t see out of the other.”

  Martin’s voice sharpened. “Captain, I needn’t remind you that coalition forces operating in these waters reserve the right to inspect all shipping entering or leaving the Persian Gulf. I cal
l this a request out of courtesy, but it is an order. You will remain where you are and prepare to be boarded.”

  Juan understood the pressure the Navy was under to interdict potential terrorists from using the Gulf as a highway for weapons and fighters, but there was no way he was going to let them inspect the Oregon. Corrupt officials in foreign ports could be easily dissuaded from searching the scabrous freighter, but this was not the case with the U.S. military.

  “Could you please stand by?” Juan requested. He covered the mike with his hand and called over to Hali Kasim. “Get Overholt on the horn. Tell him what’s going on, and have him get these guys off our back. Eric, set a course bearing one hundred and five degrees, and make our speed eighteen knots.” He took his hand away from the microphone. “Sorry about that, Commander. We can’t land a chopper on the Oregon, so you’ll have to send a boarding party from the Port Royal.”

  “Very well, Captain. Plan on our arrival at about eleven hundred hours.”

  “We’ll leave the light on for ya,” Juan drawled, and ended the call. He glanced around the Op Center. “Anyone want to bet? Twenty bucks to the person who guesses the closest.”

  The crew knew immediately what he was referring to.

  “They’ll call back in ten minutes,” Hali opined.

  “Five,” Linda said.

  “They’re going to have their hands full for a while.” This from Mark Murphy. “He won’t notice we’re under way for at least a half hour.”

  “I’m with Linda,” Eric said. “Five minutes. We’ll split the twenty.”

  Juan looked over at Max Hanley. “Care to venture a guess?”

  Max studied the acoustic tile ceiling for a moment, then leveled his eyes on the Chairman. “Right about now.”

  “Holy crap,” Hali cried. “He’s right. Martin’s hailing us again.”