By Dawn's Early Light (25 page)

2258 GMT
SEAWOLF

Dillon got a cup of coffee and went up to the control room after he'd written his daily letter to Jill and read the poem.

This was a short one by A.E. Housman, a poet whom Jill had introduced to him just on this trip. Already he was starting to like the man's vision, especially the part when he said something to the effect that he had sweated hot and cold.

Ice and fire; he liked it because command was like that sometimes. And if truth be told he'd had to contend with a balance between fear and desire on more than one occasion.

He was smiling to himself when he reached the control room. Maybe poetry should be a required subject at the PXO and PCO schools. Vince Howe would probably have a hemorrhage, but that would make it all the more interesting.

“Good evening, gentlemen,” he said.

Bateman looked up. “Captain's on the conn,” he announced.

“What's the situation, Charlie?” Dillon asked. He glanced at the multifunction display above the periscope platform. They were stationary at a depth of six hundred feet. On his orders Bateman had moved them above the lower thermocline a few feet at a time to minimize their noise. It had taken nearly twelve hours to rise six hundred feet.

“We're on station, skipper. Tubes one and two are loaded, without presets and without flooding.”

Dillon glanced at the digital time readout on the display. Local dawn was coming up in less than sixty minutes.

“
Discovery
should be coming up on the horizon from the southwest in fifty-eight minutes,” Bateman continued. “That's four minutes before nautical dawn. Just about the same time the
Eagle Flyer
reported the laser strike on the
Jupiter
.”

“It's about time we get to work,” Dillon said. He took down a growler phone. “Sonar, this is the captain. What's sierra three up to?”

“She's been real quiet, Cap'n,” Zimenski said. “That noise I was hearing in the air-handling system suddenly stopped about three hours ago. Someone must've wised up and fixed it. At first I thought that I'd lost her, but then I heard a couple of hull pops. She's still not completely settled down.”

“Same range and bearing as before?”

“Yes, sir. I would have heard her moving off if she'd tried to sneak away.”

“How long have you been on duty, Ski?” Dillon asked.

“Not too long, Cap'n. Honest.” Zimenski said. “Are we going hunting soon, sir?”

“Real soon. You know the drill this time. You know what I'm going to try to pull off, so stay frosty back there.”

“Yes, sir,” Zimenski came back crisply.

Dillon turned to his XO. “Battle stations, torpedo,” he said. “This is not a drill.”

“Aye, Skipper,” Bateman said. He pulled down a handset and got on the IMC, which transmitted his voice throughout the boat. Under silent running the announcement was muted, impossible to detect outside
Seawolf
's hull. “All hands, all hands, this is the executive officer. Battle stations torpedo. This is not a drill. Battle stations torpedo.”

The on-duty men and officers all sharpened up. Fire details manned their stations. All watertight doors throughout the boat were closed. Even the cooks sprang into action, preparing loads of extra food for what could be a long haul.

Everybody aboard was more than ready for this one. Not only had an innocent American civilian boat been sunk with all hands presumably lost. But the Pakistanis were holding four American prisoners.

“All right,” Bateman murmured.

2330 GMT
DISCOVERY

Getting ready for their EVA to fix the satellite, Wirtanen and Conners kept their chitchat to a minimum.

Everybody aboard
Discovery
was tense. They'd all attended the military briefing at KSC, and Thoreau had told them what the president had told him. All of it was extraordinary.

As Susan Wright had put it so very well: Spaceflight is dangerous enough as it is without some wacko firing laser beams at us.

She was on the upper deck getting the remote manipulator arm ready to deploy. Wirtanen and Conners would ride the arm across to the satellite.

Conners's first job would be to latch onto the mammoth satellite at the axis of its rotation, where the relative motion was the smallest. From there he would pull himself hand-over-hand to one end of the
Jupiter
where the rotational motion was the greatest. He would position himself so that the jets on his manned maneuvering unit would point in the opposite direction. Anchoring himself, he would touch off short bursts of the nitrogen jets, which would slow and finally stop the satellite's spin, first in one axis, and then in the second.

From there Wirtanen would be brought over at the end of the RMA with the tool kit and the guidance system replacement packages.

They were on the mid-deck, across from the airlock that led out to hard space in the open payload bay.

Conners strapped on his urine collection unit and bag, and then awkwardly pulled on his spandex mesh suit of long johns. Plastic tubing, which carried cooling water, interlaced the suit.

Wirtanen was just ahead of him, sliding into the lower suit and adjusting the thick-soled boots.

When he was finished he helped Conners into his lower suit, and then drifted over to where his upper hard shell aluminum torso was attached to a bulkhead. He ducked under it and slithered into place.

Conners helped him make the electrical and liquid connections mating the two halves of the space suit, and then locked the airtight rings.

Wirtanen in turn helped Conners to this stage.

“How's it going down there, guys?” Ellis called from the upper deck access hatch.

“I'm glad that we're not in a hurry,” Conners replied.

They donned their gloves, and then checked each other to make sure that their communication carrier assembly and Snoopy cap were on correctly, and that their display and control module, primary life support subsystems, and secondary oxygen pack all were properly attached and showing normal indicators.

“
Discovery
, EVA one, how do you copy?” Wirtanen said.

“You sound good here, Don,” Susan Wright's voice came through his headset. “Rod, do you copy?”

“Five by,” Conners said.

“Roger,” Susan Wright acknowleged. “Ready to rumble when you guys are.”

They donned their helmets, and sealed them. The suits pressured up, all indicators again in the green.

Wirtanen entered the airlock first, and when the inner hatch was confirmed sealed, the air inside was pumped out. He opened the outer door into the payload bay and pulled himself out into space.

He closed and resealed the hatch and gave Conners the okay to repressurize.

The pressure inside the suits was kept at 4.2 pounds per square inch compared to a normal earth sea level pressure of 14.7 psi. For the past twenty-four hours the pressure inside
Discovery
had been lowered to 10.2 psi to help acclimatize Wirtanen and Conners for their EVA. The hour before they locked outside, they had been on pure oxygen. All of that was designed to counteract the possibility of suffering the bends because of the decreased pressure they would be working under.

Except for the fact that the air seemed a bit cool and dry, Wirtanen had never been able to tell any real difference. At least not enough of a difference to affect an astronaut's performance.

A couple of minutes later the outer hatch opened and Conners slid out to join him.

“Ready to get it on?” he asked.

“Let's do it,” Wirtanen said,

They looked up at the dark expanse of the earth. They were on the nightside now, just approaching the east coast of South Africa. There were not a lot of city lights, but there was a big lightning storm to the north that was spectacular. Within a half hour they would be coming up on dawn over the Bay of Bengal when the real danger would begin.

“Space,” Conners said. “The final frontier—”

“
Discovery
, this is mission control Houston, say again?”

2335 GMT
KILO 2606

Captain Mohammed Zahedi stepped forward to the sonar compartment. He'd been in this situation with this crew and this boat three times before. This time would be better. No complications.

They had rested on the seamount for thirty-six hours to make sure that they were in the clear; that no warships, especially no American warships, were lurking within passive sonar range. So far they'd detected nothing but commercial traffic on the surface.

Zahedi was an Iranian naval officer, though 2606 was not an Iranian submarine. He had been on loan for the past three months. The Iranian Supreme Naval Command Authority had agreed to the transfer because the host nation was a friendly government that had helped with military equipment in the past, and Zahedi needed operational experience. No submariner in Iran's small fleet of four Kilo boats had gone into combat conditions yet. What he had learned in the past ninety days, and what he would learn in the coming months, would be priceless.

“Are we in the clear?” he asked. The tiny sonar compartment contained only two display units: One for the passive/active low frequency sonar unit mounted in the bow, and the second for the array of passive hydrophones mounted along the hull.

Chief Sonar Operator Lt. Lee Samsong looked up and nodded seriously. “I have five targets, Captain, all of which are commercial. The nearest is fifteen thousand meters, bearing zero-eight-zero. The range is increasing.”

“No surprises this time, Lieutenant?” Zahedi asked. Samsong had been on duty when they were spotted by the American research vessel. He had not evaluated the target properly. Which could have been a disaster.

“No, sir. Four of the targets are almost certainly longline fishing boats. But we are well outside of their fishing grounds. The fifth is another very large crude carrier, east of us, and on an easterly heading.”

When Zahedi had first come aboard 2606 some of the men, including young Lieutenant Samsong, had displayed open arrogance. Iranians were ragheads. The only reason they weren't still driving camels as in the sixteenth century was because of the oil deposits under their deserts and the American and British help they got to retrieve the wealth.

Samsong had been well trained, as were the other fifty-eight officers and men aboard. But none of them had been trained by Dr. Usama Hussain Hassan.

Zahedi smiled inwardly thinking about the absolute hell that man had put him through. There were no failures in Dr. Hassan's elite submariner officer classes. The pool of qualified Iranian naval officers wasn't large enough to allow dropouts. Everyone passed, even if the grueling eleven-month course killed them. Which it nearly had on more than one occasion.

But Dr. Hassan was the only Iranian ever to be trained at the British Royal Navy submarine commander's Perisher school. Every bit as tough as the American PXO and PCO courses, Perisher turned out some of the best submarine drivers in the world. And Dr. Hassan had passed the course third in his class. A fact he never let any of his students forget.

“You may be going head-to-head with the very best submarine officers in the world, aboard the very best boats ever built. American or British, you will consider yourself extraordinarily lucky merely to survive a hostile encouter, unless you know a few skills of your own. Skills that I will teach you.”

Hassan's words were etched in the soul of every Iranian submarine officer he taught.

“Learn your lessons well, gentlemen. What you learn here may very well save your life, and the lives of your crew someday.”

This operation,
Mission al'gamar,
the moon, was putting those instructions to the test. Zahedi did not mean to lose this crew, even if they weren't his own countrymen, or this boat, even though it wasn't Iranian.

“You have detected no other submarine?” Zahedi asked.

“No, sir,” Samsong replied. “Not within the limits of my equipment,” he added, to cover himself.

“Very well. Keep a very close watch. We will begin now.”

“Yes, sir.”

Zahedi stepped back to the control room. His crew was ready. He wished that he had his own people aboard. But it could not be helped. And they were out here helping brothers and friends in a righteous battle.

He glanced at the boat's chronometer and the mission clock on the bulkhead beside it. They were approaching local dawn. The American shuttle would be in orbit beside the damaged
Jupiter
spy satellite. Why he had been ordered to cause even more damage to the satellite before it was repaired and at the same time that
Discovery
and her crew were in such dangerous proximity was completely beyond his comprehension. He was certain that it was a political decision. One that he could not or would not question.

He turned to his short, stocky, flat-faced XO, Lieutenant Commander Yong Ki, and nodded. “It is time to commence operations.”

“Yes, Captain,” Ki responded crisply. He pulled down a growler phone. “Sonar, conn, are we clear to surface?”

“We are clear,” Samsong responded.

Ki switched to the 1MC. “All hands, all hands, man your battle stations, laser. All hands, all hands, man your battle stations, laser. Close all watertight comparments.”

A muted bell sounded throughout the boat as the watertight doors were closed and dogged.

Ki switched channels. “Engineering, conn. What is the status of our laser power unit?”

“Eighty percent and climbing,” Viktor Stalnov, their chief engineer, replied. “Are we headed up?”

“Momentarily,” Ki said. They spoke English aboard.

“You will have one hundred percent by the time we reach transmission depth.”

Ki replaced the phone with precision, like everything he did. He considered himself a battle-seasoned submarine veteran by now. It was an illusion that Zahedi meant to disabuse his XO of once they got back to port.

“Diving officer, make your depth one-five meters,” Ki ordered.

“Aye, aye, XO, make my depth fifteen meters,” the diving officer responded. He began issuing the necessary orders.

“Make your speed all ahead slow, course one-two-five,” Ki ordered.

The diving officer repeated the order, and Ki turned next to the weapons officer, Lt. Kim Nam, who happened to be his brother-in-law. “Report when you are at one hundred percent power, and have acquired your target.”

“Aye, aye, XO,” Nam replied.

Not bad, Zahedi thought, watching and listening from his position beside the periscopes. It was from here that he fought his battles. Maybe this mission
would
go without a hitch, unlike the previous one. He hoped so. Killing innocent civilians or dealing with survivors was distasteful to him. Battles were supposed to be pure. Even if the civilians were American.

The flash traffic they received last week was thankfully wrong. No American warships had shown up, especially not the American submarine that military intelligence had warned him about.

Zahedi smiled. Even the eggheads made mistakes sometime. But then they never had to come out here to do battle in the real world.