The town’s lights were visible in the distance as Ripley Forte wearily boarded the Stephen F. Austin on the evening of June 20. He climbed the ladder to the bridge, feeling the weight of his forty-seven years.
“Any luck, Rip?” asked Captain Ramirez, who already knew what the answer would be.
“None.” Forte pulled off his knitted blue cap and poured a cup of coffee. He climbed into the watch officer’s high swivel chair. “What’s the Alamo’s status?”
“She’s closing in. Right now she’s seventy miles astern. They’ll reduce power in about two hours so the berg won’t keep on going and end up in Peoria. Just talked with the skipper, and he says no problems are anticipated.”
“Yeah,” said Forte glumly. “Any word on Hurricane Nadja?”
“The meteorologists say it’s a pussycat, so you can bet your ass it’s a roaring tiger.”
Forte finished his coffee, skipped dinner, and went below for a hot shower and the sack. He left a call for 0400. His crews, exhausted from fourteen days in the deep under intense pressure, weren’t going to like it, but he intended to make another sweep of the final forty miles of the trench before the Alamo got there. That would be about the time the storm was due to strike, but it wouldn’t affect the Rovers because they’d be nearly forty fathoms beneath the turbulent seas. As for the Alamo, it had weathered much worse in the Antarctic.
At 0335 he was awakened by a call from the watch officer in radar plot. “Yeah, what is it?” said Forte muzzily, squinting at the clock.
“I’m not quite sure, sir. It’s moving fast and entering restricted waters. I spotted it coming out of a cove below Jones Creek, a-shittin’ and a-gittin’.”
“Speed and distance from the trench?”
“Speed: fifty-three knots; distance from the trench– ah–forty-seven nautical miles.”
“Stay with it,” said Forte. He cut the line and called the bridge.
“Yes, sir,” responded the watch officer immediately.
“I want all SEALs to suit up immediately and every available Raynes Rover prepared to be put in the water.”
“Aye, aye, sir.”
Forte punched 11 on the phone and a moment later was talking with Admiral Hodge. “You got the word?”
“Just now, Rip. We’ve got a fix on him from shipboard
radar and airborne search-and-rescue planes. He probably thinks that we can’t see him through all that low cloud cover.”
Forte thought a moment. “Instead of intercepting him, Admiral, let’s let him think he’s undetected. Let him dump his bomb over the side and get away in the rain and darkness.”
“And then?”
“Then you can pick him up and reason with him. Or you can save everybody a lot of bother.”
Five minutes later Forte was lowering himself into the cockpit of the Mako, the Raynes Rover he had taken down off Cape Columbine with Jennifer Red Cloud– Christ! Was it six months ago already? And he’d hardly given her a thought these past two weeks. Well, there’d be time for her later, if there was a later.
At two hundred meters the Mako leveled off. Bill Makepeace, his copilot, slumped in his seat, fast asleep. The cabin was quiet except for the whirr of the exhaust fan. The only movement was of the two needles across the autonav recorder. One, marking the position of the Mako in the middle of the trench five miles from Pass Cavallo, was nearly stationary. The other, of the intruding craft, was moving fast toward the Mako. In five or six minutes, the two lines would intersect.
Enhanced radar imaging had established that the target was a “cigarette boat,” an oceangoing craft that could crash through heavy swells at ninety-five miles per hour. Infrared detectors aboard the surveillance aircraft circling in the black clouds overhead indicated that in addition to a pair of very hot engines the boat carried two warm bodies.
At 0428 Ripley Forte nudged Bill Makepeace awake, jabbing his finger toward the sonar plot on the starboard side of the cabin.
Makepeace massaged the sleep out of his eyes and recited the figures from the digital readout: “Surface target bearing 269 degrees true, speed six knots and slowing, range 420 meters.” The Mako’s position and that of the target nearly overlapped. “Maybe you’d better ease over to the port a bit,” he was saying, when suddenly the target above them became two.
“Hard a-port, flank speed!” he shouted, and, not waiting for Forte to react, himself seized and firewalled the twin throttles. The craft shot forward, slamming them back in their seats, and slewed around as Forte swung the helm all the way over.
A deep boom reverberated through the little cabin. At the same instant the submersible careened over on its side, almost capsizing before Forte applied rudder and helm to right it.
Forte and Makepeace looked at each other numbly. Forte could feel a vein throbbing in his forehead. Well, he guessed, when nothing happened, they had a right to panic: They must have been the first people ever to be hit by an A-bomb–and live. With a shaking hand, he pulled the throttles back to idle, wishing it were that easy to slow down his racing heart. He sat still for a moment, taking slow and measured breaths.
After a time he switched on the intercom with the lockout in the rear. “Everything okay back there?”
“We thought you’d never ask. Was that what we think it was?”
“Affirmative,” said Forte. “Also, yes. And you’re the boys who are going to bring it back alive. All set?”
“As all set as we’ll ever be. Permission to lock out.”
“Granted.”
Five submersibles had clustered around the black cyclinder resting on the bottom of the trench, 222 meters down. Each cast high-intensity beams on the bomb from a different angle. The bomb had settled in the silt, nose first. Sheared rivets showed where vanes had been removed, presumably to save space. It was small–no more than 70 centimeters in diameter by about 170 long. It could have served as the coffin for a moderate-sized man–or half the population of Texas.
Although the SDCs carried a total of ten SEALs between them, only two would work at a time. More could not comfortably maneuver around the small nose cone.
The first two out, Lieutenant Commander Mahosky and Lieutenant Peloquin from the Mako, inspected the
bomb with slow deliberation, relaying their findings over voice circuits to the eighteen men in the SDCs.
An esoteric discussion about the use of electromagnetic devices to contravene a possible booby trap ensued, during the course of which Forte, utterly exhausted, fell asleep.
It was 0740 when he awoke with a jolt.
“What’s happening?” he said. Two men were floating languidly in the water less than three meters away. “What are Mahosky and Peloquin doing, anyway?”
“I guess they’re asleep aft.” Makepeace laughed. “Those guys you see out there are O’Sullivan and Hartline. And they may be sleeping, too, for all I know.”
Forte shook his head and rubbed his eyes. “What the hell’s going on?”
“They had a committee meeting and decided the only really safe way to handle the bomb was to immobilize the whole damned inner assembly.”
“Gel?”
“Right. They’ve drilled something like seventy holes in the body and around the nose cone so far in order to inject their gunk.”
“It’s taken them long enough.”
“Well, Mr. Forte, the problem has been to remove the drill bit and insert the gel nozzle before any seawater could seep in and complete a circuit.”
Forte nodded. “I’d forgotten about that. How much longer?”
“Another ten injections should take care of it.”
At 8:15 John O’Sullivan pronounced the bomb temporarily disarmed and ready to travel. “We’ve neutralized the fuse, probably a gravimetric device to be triggered by the passage overhead of the Alamo. Then we enveloped the bomb in polystyrene foam against knocks and shocks. On top of that we’ve sheathed it in heavy lead foil to prevent accidental detonation by ultra-low-frequency radio waves.”
A team of six wrapped the lead-shielded bomb in a heavy nylon harness and strapped it by a sling to the Mako’s skids. The SEAL leader gave Forte the thumbs-up sign and returned with his men to their respective SDCs.
It was about 175 nautical miles to Houston via the Houston Ship Channel, a trip that would take ten hours at the eighteen knots Forte considered the fastest prudent speed, considering the cargo he was carrying. Only two other SDCs would be needed–one to lead, the other to follow in case of problems. He ordered the others to report to the Stephen F. Austin and called up Admiral Hodge on the scrambler.
“Admiral, we’re ready to move.”
“So are we. You’ll have killer-sub escorts fore and aft all the way up the ship channel, submerged. I’m detaching four tin cans to give you surface cover. Overhead we’ll have the usual combat air patrol. Think that’ll do it?”
“If it doesn’t,” said Forte fervently, “we’re in real trouble. Out.”