End Game (36 page)

The feed from the rear cam showed nothing nearby. Danny reached to the back of his helmet and cued in the front view. Water lapped the top two-thirds of the screen; he couldn't see anything else.

Balling his hands into fists, he reached down and pounded the recessed handles above his stomach, blowing the top half of the pod off. He pulled himself upright, punching his visor into its low-light mode.

There was nothing nearby—including the other manpod.

“Boston?”

No answer.

“Boston?”

He was just about to switch back into the Dreamland circuit and make sure that Chu had dropped his sergeant when something broke the water a few yards away.

“Boston?” he yelled.

The figure waved. It
had
to be Boston, he decided, and reached down to his pants leg to take out the flashlight. He gave a quick flick of light to help the man find his way over, then pulled off his helmet.

“Boston?”

“Yo, Cap,” said the sergeant, grabbing onto the side of the pod. “Had a little trouble. The stabilizer raft didn't inflate right, and I guess I blew the lid too soon.”

“Where's your helmet?”

“Bottom of the sea. Lost the laughing gas too. Got my dive gear and weapons, though.” Boston hauled the waterproof sacks up to Danny.

“All right. Let me see where our submarine is,” Danny said, pulling his helmet back on.

Aboard the
Abner Read,
in the northern Arabian Sea
0555

S
TARSHIP STAYED IN AN ORBIT BETWEEN THE
S
HARKBOAT AND
his last sighting of the submarines.

“Werewolf, the Dreamland team is in the water,” said Eyes. “Approach the area and give them cover.”

“Copy that. I see them. Do you have a location on the submarine?”

“
Dreamland Fisher
is still working on that.”

Starship sped forward. He saw a dark smudge in the water at about a mile. Thinking it was the Dreamland Whiplash team, he started to slow down, then realized it was one of the commandos' empty rafts. Tracking north, he found a small missilelike raft nose down in the water—one of the manpods.

“Werewolf has Whiplash manpod in sight,” he told Eyes.

“I'm switching you over to the commander of
Sharkboat One.
You have a direct line on your channel two.”

Starship gave the commander the GPS coordinates for the manpod. One man clung to the side and the other was in the tiny vessel.

“Stand by for the location of the submarines, via
Dreamland Fisher
commander,” said Eyes, breaking in.

Northern Arabian Sea
0558

T
HE GLOBAL POSITIONING CUE IN THE SMART HELMET INDICATED
that the submarine was four hundred yards almost directly south. It appeared to have stopped moving, drifting less than twelve feet below the surface.

“Quarter mile,” Danny told Boston. “Just below the surface. Probably trying to lay low until things quiet down. Let's paddle as close we can. We'll skip the laughing gas, do everything else like we drew it up.”

Boston moved to the back of the raft and began kicking. Danny picked up a paddle. The wind was gentle, but it was in his face, and it took quite an effort to reach the spot where the submarine was. Finally, Danny grabbed the waterproof packs from the inside of the manpod and gave one to Boston. He traded the smart helmet for a dive mask with a light and breather, and pulled on flippers.

“Ready?”

“If you say so,” replied Boston.

Danny took out his survival radio and held it to his face. “Whiplash to Werewolf and Sharkboat. We're ready to go below.”

“Sharkboat is fifteen minutes away,” replied the boat's captain.

“Great. We'll meet you on the surface.”

“Whiplash, you got a fighter coming at you out of the north. He's at low altitude and slow.”

“Roger that. We're in the water,” said Danny, tossing the radio behind him and slipping over the side.

The water was much darker than he had imagined it could be. Even with the light, he couldn't see more than a few feet away.

Just when he thought he'd swum right by the sub, he spotted a black shadow looming a few yards to his right. A strong kick took him to the side of the vessel. He looked back and saw Boston's light approaching.

Fearing that any noise outside the submarine might alert the people inside, he stayed off the hull, swimming above the deck to locate the emergency blow device. The sub expert had warned that the device might have been removed, but the door covering it was exactly where he'd seen it on the diagram. He reached gingerly to the panel, running his fingers around it. There were two latches. He slipped them to the sides and pried the panel upward. The large red lever sat inside, exactly as in the brochure advertising the civilian version of the submarine's safety features.

Not ready to activate the system, Danny turned and
worked his way to the rear of the vessel, looking for the stern planes. Resembling a pair of airplane wings, the planes helped hold the vessel at the proper angle in the water; blowing them would make the submarine bob forward, further disorienting the passengers and making it harder for them to get away if something went wrong. He placed the small packs of explosive, then waited for Boston to put his on the propeller shaft. They pressed the timer buttons almost simultaneously. Then Danny swam back to the rescue device while Boston went to see if there were forward fins.

 

C
APTAIN
S
ATTARI LISTENED AS THE CREAKS AND TREMORS OF
the great ocean rippled through the submarine, the sounds magnified by fear as much as acoustics.

If Allah permitted, they would stay here all day until the sun set. Then they could surface and repair whatever had caused the engine to fail. If unsuccessful, they would board the raft and head to shore.

It was possible. It would be done.

Sattari heard a loud clunk above him, so close it sounded as if someone had kicked the submarine.

“There may be patrol vessels searching for us,” said the Parvaneh's commander. “We should be prepared to scuttle.”

Even as Sattari nodded, he found himself hoping it wouldn't come to that. He wanted to stand before his father and tell him of his great victory.

 

T
HE HANDLE REFUSED TO BUDGE
. D
ANNY PUT HIS FEET AS
gingerly as he could on the deck of the submarine and pushed, but still couldn't get it to turn.

Boston swam up next to him and pointed at his watch. The charges were set to go off in another sixty seconds.

Danny motioned to him to get near the hatchway, located inside the low-slung conning tower, so he would be ready to throw the grenades inside when the sub surfaced. Glancing at the timer on his watch—forty-eight seconds—he balled
his hand into a fist, measuring his aim. As he did, he saw a long plastic knob next to the handle. It looked like a screwdriver, but turned out to be a release for the handle.

Before he could try the handle again, the charges exploded. Small as they were, they rocked the submarine upward. Danny jammed his hand against the lever as the top of the sub smacked him into his face mask. He felt himself propelled upward, as if he were sitting on an underwater volcano. He lost his grip on the handle but grabbed the device door, holding on as the submarine surfaced with a roar.

Aboard the
Wisconsin
,
over India
0610

T
HERE WERE TIMES WHEN FLYING THE
EB-52
WAS LIKE BEING
the engineer on a high-speed train riding on a dedicated rail, with relatively few decisions to make and a predictable program ahead of you.

This wasn't one of those times.

Dog was being tracked by no less than six different missile batteries. He tried to zigzag between them and still stay on course.

“SA-12s to the right, SA-10s to the left,” said Jazz. “Pick your poison.”

“Tens,” said Dog.

“Flap Lid radar,” said the copilot, telling Dog that the SA-10's engagement radar had locked onto them. “Breaking. I'm using every ECM we've got, Colonel.”

They were roughly seventy miles from the missile site, just outside its maximum reach. But their course was going to take them down to thirty miles from the battery.

“SA-12s are launching!” shouted Jazz. “I don't think they have a lock.”

Dog immediately changed his course, dodging back to the north, closer to the SA-12 battery—if they were going
to fire at him anyway, there was no sense getting too close to the SA-10s.

The Russian SA-12—known to its makers as the S-300V—was a versatile missile that came in two different versions, depending on its primary use. The SA-12A—code-named Gladiator by NATO—was a low-to-high altitude missile that could reach targets up to fifteen and a half miles in the sky, with a range of just over forty-five miles. The B version was optimized as an antiballistic missile missile, with a higher altitude and longer range. Both missiles were incredibly fast, in the league of the American Patriot, which could hit Mach 5.

“He's coming for us, Colonel. Forty miles.”

They had less than a minute to dodge the missile. Dog shoved the Megafortress hard to his left, trying to beam the Grill Pan missile radar.

“Still coming.”

“ECMs,” Dog told Jazz.

“I'm playing every song I know.”

“Chaff. Hang on, tight.” Dog veered down, trying to stay at a right angle to the radar and get the missile to bite on the tinsel.

“We're clear! We're clear!” said Jazz.

The missile's warhead exploded a few thousand feet above them, two miles away. Dog kept the Megafortress level as he tried to sort out where he was relative to his original course. He'd strayed farther south than he wanted; as soon as he corrected, Jazz called out a fresh warning.

“We're spiked! More SA-12s. The whole battery, looks like. This time they have a lock.”

Northern Arabian Sea
0612

T
HE
P
ARVANEH SUBMARINE SHOOK WITH THE SHARP THUD OF
multiple explosions. Captain Sattari ripped the seat belt from around his waist and grabbed his AK-47 from the
floor. He started to run toward the ladder to the deck above—the charges for the explosives that were sealed in the vessel's hull were set off from the panel there.

After his third step he heard a loud roar, the sound of an old-fashioned locomotive letting off steam. Then he flew forward, knocked off his feet by the submarine's sudden and unexpected rise toward the surface.

 

D
ANNY WAS THROWN OFF THE SIDE AS THE SUBMARINE POPPED
up. His foot grabbed in the side rail and he slammed against the hull, caught on the deck. He pushed himself back toward the conning tower, half swimming, half stumbling, in the direction of Boston, who was already at the hatch. The submarine twisted, whirling as the waves frothed and steamed. Danny lurched to his knees and slid into Boston's back just as the sergeant dropped his tear gas canisters down into the vessel. Catching his balance, Danny gripped the edge of the conning tower. He tossed off his knapsack and unzipped the outer and then the inner skins, exposing the CQWS shotgun.

The close-quarters weapon—developed by Dreamland's weapons lab, the letters stood for Close Quarters Whiplash Shotgun—looked like a Pancor jackhammer shotgun that had been sawed off just fore of the trigger. It held twelve rounds of plastic pellet-filled shells, designed to incapacitate but not kill a person. The shells were expelled with enough force to knock down a 250-pound man.

Danny grabbed the gun and leapt down into the submarine. He saw only smoke in front of him, but immediately fired two rounds. Something fell at his feet—a man. Danny sidestepped him, then raised his gun as something moved a few feet away. He fired point-blank and it went down.

Boston was right behind him. Danny pushed through the thick haze, still using his dive pack to breathe. The submarine had an aisle down the middle, with a seat to each side. He saw a station with a wheel at the front, a shadow moving next to it. He put two shells into the shadow.

Someone grabbed at his side. A sharp elbow got rid of his
assailant, but as he brought his gun up, a bullet ricocheted nearby. Before Danny could react, he felt a burning sensation in his calf. He fired toward the front of the submarine, heard another bullet, and found himself falling.

Aboard the
Wisconsin
,
over India
0613

D
OG VEERED TO THE SOUTH AS SOON AS
J
AZZ GAVE HIM THE
warning about the SA-12s. The Megafortress groaned with the strain, pulling nearly eight g's. Engines at max power, he pushed his nose down, increasing his speed.

“Colonel—you're heading straight for the SA-10 site.”

“Turn off the ECMs.”

“Colonel?”

“Jazz.”

“ECMs off. Clam Shell acquisition ra—They have us! They have us! They're launching—two, four missiles.”

Three behind them, four in their face. Dog continued on a beeline for the Indian site that had launched the SA-10s for another twenty seconds.

“Give it everything you got, Jazz,” he said. “Chaff, ECMs, the kitchen sink. Crew—stand by, this one's going to be close.”

 

T
HOUGH THE
F
LIGHTHAWK WAS SEVERAL TIMES MORE MANEUVERABLE
than the EB-52, Mack had trouble keeping
Hawk One
close to the
Wisconsin
as she jinked and jived toward the ground, rolling on her wing and then heading almost straight down. It wouldn't have been half bad if he hadn't actually been in the plane—the hard maneuvers while he was flying in a different direction threatened to tear his head from his body. His stomach felt like it was where his legs should be, and the g forces tried to jerk his arms out of their sockets.