Operation Caribe (42 page)

Nolan and Gunner were stumped. What the hell would have made Twitch stay on the sub?

“His leg,” the corpsman went on. “He left it in the sick bay, so he went back for it. The problem is, the sick bay is just one level up. He
should have
been right behind me.”

At that moment, Nolan saw Agent Harry up on the deck near the conning tower gesturing wildly at him.

He was pointing to the generator vent just in front of the tilted submarine’s sail, the one the environmental systems guy had told them about. A column of solid black smoke was now rising out of the opening.

“Is everybody out?” Harry was yelling down at them. “Because this is looking serious.…”

Nolan froze. If the environmental systems guy was right, the fumes from the burned-out generator would fill the sub with deadly toxic fumes in twenty minutes.

And Twitch was still inside.

Nolan would have throttled his wayward colleague if he were in front of him. Getting another prosthetic leg was not a problem. Yet, knowing Twitch as Nolan did, that fake leg was probably his most prized possession. It had been with him even before he’d been sprung from the hellhole of Walter Reed Hospital’s Building 18.

But if Twitch wasn’t out of the sub by now, something must be wrong.

And that meant only one thing.

Nolan had to go in and get him.

“So close,” he griped to Gunner, shedding everything he had on him except his knife, his .45 automatic and his special night-vision scope. “We were so
fucking
close.…”

*   *   *

NOLAN WADED INTO the depleted lake and made his way through the wind and rain to a point right under the torpedo muzzle door. Gunner and the two Senegals followed him in; one Senegal handed him a
dashi,
a large kerchief that Nolan tied around his nose and mouth. This would be his only protection from the creeping toxic fumes.

Gunner and the Senegals then boosted him up to the torpedo tube. It took some doing, but Nolan finally managed to squeeze inside.

He began shimmying down the greasy pipe, hoping he wouldn’t run into someone unfriendly coming the other way. The tube was awful inside. Slimy, because so many sweating and coughing sick guys had come out, and bloody, because some of them had also been bleeding.

It was also pitch black, so Nolan had no idea when he’d run out of tube. One moment he was crawling along, the next he was falling in space.

He hit the torpedo room’s deck hard, landing on his shoulder. Painfully getting to his feet, he adjusted his specially adapted night-vision scope and took a look around. The torpedo room was a mess. Overturned cots. Bloody litter and bandages everywhere. Piles of ripped and oily clothes, stripped off by the sailors before they went out the tube. The place smelled horrible.

He quickly found his way out and started moving aft. Navigating was difficult, as his night-vision scope was working at only one-third power due to the almost nonexistent lighting. The biggest problem, though, was how cramped the tilted passageway was. Trying to get through it on an angle was almost impossible in some places. Plus he was beginning to smell smoke.

He finally turned the first corner and was suddenly looking at a body. It was hanging in an equipment locker right in front of him and at first he thought it was one of the sub’s crewmen. But on closer inspection, he realized it was the SEAL named Elvis. He’d been brutally stabbed, his throat was slit, and one of his ears was stuffed in his mouth.

Nolan knew immediately whose work this was.

Twitch …

The dead man’s eyes were wide open, though. He seemed to be looking at Nolan and saying:
Why would you ever come to this horrible place?

*   *   *

NOLAN MOVED ON. He’d only been inside the sub for about three minutes and the smoke was already getting more noticeable. Up one level and past the crews’ quarters, he finally found his way to the sick bay. It, too, was dark, smelly and in disarray. He searched the place twice, but couldn’t see anything resembling Twitch’s artificial leg.

His .45 automatic out, scanning the darkness in front of him, he resumed moving aft. The sub was a mess just about everywhere he looked. Because of the tilt, anything not secured had spilled on the deck: water, coffee, oil and lots of unidentifiable fluids. It was as if the
Wyoming
had been seized weeks ago, not just a day earlier. And with each step he took, the smell of smoke got stronger.

He reached the CAAC to find it was in the worst shape of all. Smashed equipment, discarded flu masks, expended ammo clips, with blood splattered everywhere. The smoke was getting thick in here.

He scanned the control panel, looking for anything that might shut down the balky generators. But most of the controls had been either smashed or damaged by liquids, including blood.

That was the condition of the missile launch console. It had been ripped apart, as if someone had clumsily tried to cross the wires inside to make it work. But two of the keys needed to launch the missiles were in their respective locks and they’d been engaged. That could only mean the SEALs had attempted to launch at least one of the Trident missiles, maybe more.

“These guys
are
nuts,” Nolan whispered.

He moved to the center of the CAAC, stopped and just listened. He prayed that he’d hear Twitch shuffling down the passageway nearby, like some old haunted soul, looking for his lost leg. Then they could get the hell out of here.

But no such luck.

*   *   *

NOLAN FOUND HIS way to the sub’s missile bay. He’d been inside the
Wyoming
for about ten minutes at this point, halfway to when the seeping smoke would become overwhelmingly toxic.

He moved very cautiously in here, scanning everything around him before taking a step. There was no mystery why they called this place the Forest. It was a vast hall with twenty-four vertical tubes, each resembling a thick metal tree covered with control boxes, wires, cables, and assorted switches and buttons. They were all painted gray and festooned with radioactivity warning signs. Viewed through his night-vision scope, the place looked like the set of a science-fiction movie. The smoke was even thicker down here, though, rising up from the deck like a lethal fog.

Ten steps in, he stopped and just listened again. Amid the sounds of machinery struggling to stay alive and a cacophony of electronic beeps and burps, he heard three odd things: a voice alternately whispering and cursing somewhere among the missile tubes, someone snoring loudly and the sound of metal tapping on metal. It made for an eerie combination.

He crept to the center of the Forest, cranking his night-vision scope to its highest possible power. He followed the trio of strange noises for about ten more steps—and that’s how he found Twitch.

His missing colleague was sitting on the deck, tucked between two missile tubes. His weapons were nowhere in sight. He was swearing softly as he tried to reattach a broken strap to his prosthetic leg. But his face was covered in blood; both his eyes were closed and swollen. His hands were so cut up, he was having trouble just holding the leg brace, never mind trying to fix it. Clearly, he’d been severely beaten.

Nolan’s first instinct was to grab him and carry him out of this place—but he stopped himself, a wise choice.

First, he noticed a thin wire wrapped around Twitch’s neck. Then he saw a shadowy figure was sitting beside him, propped up against the missile tube wall. It was one of the three remaining SEALs, the one nicknamed Monkey. He was sound asleep and snoring.

The wire around Twitch’s neck was attached to the trigger of Monkey’s M4 assault rifle, which the SEAL was cradling in his arms. If Twitch moved too far in any direction while Monkey dozed, the M4 would blow his head off.

In the background, near another pair of missile tubes, maybe twenty feet away, Nolan saw the last two SEALs, Beaux and Smash. Both had M4s slung over their shoulders. They were also holding a cigarette lighter over a manual of sorts and were jabbing buttons attached to one of the launch cylinders.

Still in the shadows, Nolan studied them closely. What were they doing exactly? The rescued sailor had told him in the dugout that there were several different places on board from which to fire a nuclear-tipped missile. Did that mean they could be launched from down here, just by pushing the right button?

The smoke was getting thicker now, as was its sickening smell. Nolan couldn’t tell whether the SEALs even knew the burnt-out generator was filling the sub with deadly fumes. As it was, all three of them already looked like zombies. Yet they’d managed to catch Twitch somehow—and with all the sub’s crew now gone, he was their last remaining hostage.

Nolan steeled himself. There was no way he could sneak back out and return with reinforcements, not with only a few minutes of breathable air left in the sub.

He had to free Twitch now.

He finally stepped out of the murk, holding his .45 automatic out in front of him. Monkey woke up and saw him right away. The SEAL looked very nasty up close. Gaunt, sunken eyes, pasty white skin; the sores around his mouth and nose were obvious even through the night-vision goggles. He was either suffering from the acute flu, or being slowly poisoned by the fumes. Or maybe both.

He was also slow in reacting. He just stared up at Nolan, puzzling over him in the dark. Nolan must have looked like a monster to him, the dashi wrapped around the bottom half of his face, his patch and the night-vision scope covering his eyes, his clothes stained with grease and blood, surrounded by the smoky gloom.

But then Monkey’s eyes fell on Nolan’s .45 automatic.

“Don’t go shooting that thing off in here,” he told Nolan in a weirdly passive voice. “We got twenty-two live missiles, and just one bullet could—”

But Nolan didn’t let him finish. He squeezed his trigger and shot the SEAL right between the eyes. His head came apart and splattered on the deck.

“So much for The Plan,” Nolan thought grimly.

Nolan saw Beaux and Smash, alerted by the gunshot, spin around and look toward him; both appeared dazed and confused. Again, they were armed with M4s, but they didn’t have night-vision goggles, meaning they couldn’t see Nolan as well as he could see them. But they could certainly detect his shadow in the faint glow of the green emergency lights.

Nolan had to move fast. He grabbed Twitch, tore the wire from his neck and retrieved Monkey’s M4. Then he started dragging his badly beaten friend away.

But which way to go? Between the smoke, the dark, and the tightly packed missile tubes, Nolan wasn’t sure where he was. Every direction looked the same. He wasn’t even sure which way he came in. When Nolan was a kid his favorite attraction at the amusement park had been the House of Horrors. Now he was in one for real.

By pure luck, he stumbled onto an aisle that was slightly wider than the rest; it also had a red line running down the middle. Nolan began dragging Twitch along this aisle, even as he could see the ghostly shadows of Beaux and Smash moving through the Forest parallel to him. And through it all, Twitch was
still
trying to reattach his artificial leg.

The two SEALs began taunting Nolan.

“Throw us your weapon and we can talk about this,” came Beaux’s distinctive twang. “Nothing is so bad that we can’t hash it out.…”

Nolan responded by firing his .45 twice in the direction of the SEALs. The bullets ricocheted wildly around the missile compartment, causing an earsplitting racket.

“You’re
fucking crazy,
man!” Smash yelled, ducking behind a tube. “One bullet in the wrong place and this boat will go up and take half the East Coast with it.”

Nolan fired two more shots at the disembodied voices. Again, the bullets crashed loudly around the missile tubes, throwing sparks everywhere.

“You’re going to kill us all!” Beaux yelled. “Be reasonable! We can
all
get out of here in one piece.”

But Nolan wasn’t really listening. He was desperately looking for some way out of the missile hall. He still couldn’t tell forward from aft. Not that it made much difference. Considering how intense the smoke was getting, returning to the front of the sub, to the conning tower or the torpedo room, would be suicidal.

So what could he do?

There was only one option left. Nolan knew the Forest contained two lockout chambers, one of which the SEALs had used to come aboard in the first place. If Nolan could find them, maybe he could use one to escape.

Perhaps attuned to his thinking, the SEALs opened up on him with their assault rifles. Nolan hit the deck, shoving Twitch behind him as the barrage went overhead. He raised his pistol and squeezed off a shot, only to hear his clip pop out.

Damn … His pistol was out of ammo.

Nolan threw the .45 away and raised the M4 he’d taken from Monkey. He squeezed the trigger; the weapon bucked once, firing a single round—and then
its
ammo clip popped out.

“Son of a bitch,” he cursed.

The rifle was
also
out of ammo. It’d had just one bullet in it all along.

It was at that odd moment, with them pinned down and defenseless, that Twitch came out of his fog. Suddenly he seemed aware of what was happening around him. Or so Nolan thought.

Because at that point, Twitch looked up at him and asked, “Are we still in Shanghai?”

Dozens of bullets were zinging off everything around them, lighting up the near darkness. Nolan could only imagine this was how the SEALs felt when Whiskey had them pinned down atop the conning tower earlier. He just hoped the missile compartments could take a bullet or at least deflect one. If not, they could all be turned into radioactive dust at any moment.

Nolan knew the lockout chambers were located among the forward tubes—he just didn’t know which ones. Using the light created by the SEALs firing at him, he finally regained his bearings and spotted the forward part of the Forest. He started dragging Twitch in that direction, trying to keep both SEALs in sight as they continued firing in his direction, with no idea that he was now without a weapon.