Flight of the Condor Page 7

  He had arrived here fresh out of sub school and full of expectations. What little he had read about DSRV duty had seemed interesting and most challenging.

  Designed especially to rescue the occupants of a submarine accidentally immobilized on the sea floor, the Deep Submergence Rescue Vehicle was a relatively new phenomenon. Able to be transferred by a tender, such as the Pelican, or on the back of a fullsized submarine, such a vessel had enormous value.

  The DSRV’s practicality was significantly augmented by the fact that it could fit into the cargo hold of a C5A transport plane, allowing speedy access to the far corners of the globe.

  When he had first set eyes on the Marlin, the fifty foot-long, black-hulled, cigar-shaped vessel had been sitting rather inelegantly on the back of a flatbed truck. Fresh from a touchdown at Hickam Air Force Base, the Marlin had just arrived at Pearl when Blackmore had been guided onto the sub base for his very first visit. It wasn’t long afterwards that he had been introduced to the vehicle’s present Officer-in Charge Commander Will Pierce.

  Dressed in a pair of grease-stained khakis, Pierce had appeared nothing like the dapper, nattily uniformed officers Blackmore had been exclusively exposed to in ROTC and later at New London. This disparity had been even more obvious when a crude selection of four-letter words had flowed from the commander’s mouth, after one of the hoist operators had prematurely begun lifting the Marlin. A heavy feeling had filled the newly arrived junior lieutenant’s stomach when introductions and handshakes were later exchanged.

  Completely grayhaired, yet tanned and in amazingly excellent physical shape, the forty-seven-year old commander had checked Blackmore out with a probing, blue-eyed stare. A veteran of Viet Nam, and over a dozen different surface vessels and submarines, Pierce had silently appraised his new lieutenant, and Blackmore had somehow felt that he had already failed. Inexperienced and naive to the workings of the real Navy, the all-too-recent college graduate only knew the world through books and research. Little had his hundreds of hours of classroom work prepared him to meet the commander’s stare of inspection straight on, instead of cowering like a frightened child. From that moment on, their relationship had seemed to steadily deteriorate.

  Merely contemplating this initial confrontation caused Blackmore’s already low spirits to additionally sour. Not even the magnificent scenery so readily visible around him helped alleviate this feeling of depression. This had been their second day anchored there in Maui’s Lahaina Harbor. It was one of the most visually stunning areas on the entire planet, and one couldn’t ask for a better setting. Lying to their left was Auau Channel. This glistening blue expanse of water stretched to the western horizon, where the island of Lanai was visible, its distant shoreline rising like an encroaching sentinel.

  To their right, less than a half mile distant, was Lahaina, one of Maui’s most quaint, picturesque villages. Set on the island’s northeastern sector, Lahaina was a mecca to locals and tourists alike, who were drawn to its unique boutiques and excellent restaurants. Once a bustling whaling center, the town had been restored to capture its past splendor. Walking down Lahaina’s narrow, cobblestoned streets, which were given added character by the brightly painted, wooden buildings with open verandahs that lined each side, one indeed got the impression that he had been magically conveyed back a century or two.

  Lance Blackmore knew, from the way the crew had acted the previous night during shore leave, that the Marlin’s complement could be easily mistaken for an unruly gang of decadent whalers. This lack of discipline was visible even today, with a trio of beer sipping skin divers lying on the Pelican’s bow.

  Watching them with disgust as they soaked up the morning rays, Blackmore silently cursed his bad duty draw.

  This was not the gentleman’s Navy he had dreamed of serving in since childhood. Why couldn’t he have been sent to a Trident or a 688? Such duty would certainly be more to his expectation. But no, he had to be sent to an outlaw ship, where discipline meant merely getting the job done. And who knew if they’d ever even get a real chance to show what they could do?

  Distracted by the excited cries of their potbellied chief petty officer, who had just hooked into a large fish from the Pelican’s fantail, Blackmore failed to notice that he was no longer alone on the bridge.

  “Oh, sweet Lord,” pleaded the newcomer painfully.

  “Will someone please turn off these lights!”

  Shading his bloodshot eyes from the morning sun, Ensign Louis Marvin leaned up against the bridge’s railing. Blackmore couldn’t help but find his mood lightening upon examining the pitiful sailor who stood beside him, naked except for his skivvies.

  To a detached observer, the two officers appeared as a study in contrasts. Though both were twenty four years old, they had nothing else physically in common. The most obvious difference was their height. Blackmore stood a solid six feet tall, while his skinny coworker barely reached Lance’s broad shoulders.

  Whereas Blackmore sported a thick head of close-cropped blond hair. Ensign Marvin was almost completely bald, except for two unruly strands of frizzy black wool that lay behind each of his rather large, pointed ears. In need of a shave, the Ensign massaged his creased forehead.

  “Never again will these lips sample another sip of rum. Oh my poor aching head!”

  Lance found it hard not to have compassion for his hungover shipmate.

  “Those pineapple coconut drinks start out innocent, but look out.”

  “Now he tells me,” replied the Ensign mockingly.

  “Of course, you could have stopped after six drinks,” continued the taller of the two men.

  Marvin gently rubbed the back of his neck.

  “Who in the hell was counting? Boy, was that some party! Did everyone make it back to the ship all right?”

  Nodding that they had, Blackmore found his mood darkening as the Ensign began a blow-by-blow description of the previous night’s shore leave. It had all started out well, when a group of them had had dinner at an excellent outdoor seafood restaurant. By dessert, it had gotten completely out of hand.

  To begin with, one of the barmaids had taken an immediate interest in their senior diver. The big Californian was far from the shy type and had been quick to take advantage of the situation. After consuming his share of chi-chis, the diver had playfully pulled the longhaired Hawaiian onto his lap. Unknown to everyone present, however, the girl’s insanely jealous boyfriend had been watching from across the street. With a trio of good-sized locals at his side, the boyfriend had crashed into the restaurant and immediately started swinging. Seconds later, a fullsized brawl had begun taking shape. Only the arrival of a single individual had kept the situation from getting completely out of hand.

  Commander Pierce had been in the process of taking an innocent stroll along the streets of Lahaina, when he had passed the seafood restaurant just as the first punches were being thrown. Quickly realizing that it was his own crew that was involved, Pierce had jumped over the verandah and headed straight into the action. Oblivious to the greater sizes and younger ages of the combatants, he had picked out the troublemakers and cold-cocked two of the locals with a flurry of expertly thrown punches. With the battle now diffused, Pierce had herded the lot of them hastily outdoors. With a promise to behave themselves, the group had sworn to continue its drinking in more friendly environs. Not doubting their word, the commander turned to continue his stroll, whistling a tune from South Pacific and appearing as innocent as a newborn lamb in his starched Navy whites.

  Needless to say, Pierce’s heroics had been the talk of the rest of the evening. Since he was already a larger-than-life figure to the majority of the crew, the commander’s past service record had been rehashed in intricate detail. This had been the first time that Blackmore had been privileged to hear these stories.

  But though Pierce had certainly had his share of colorful close calls, the Lieutenant still held fast to his belief that this wasn’t the type of man they should be emulating. A
brute, coarse individual, prone to overindulgence in both drink and women, Will Pierce was an anachronism. He had no place in today’s modern, high-tech Navy.

  Still thinking about the previous evening. Blackmore failed to notice when Ensign Marvin halted his rambling. Certain that he knew just what was on Blackmore’s mind, the ensign spoke out directly.

  “Jesus, Lieutenant, will you please lighten up!

  That prudish look on your face reminds me of my headmaster at military school. I know we can’t ask you to condone all of the unorthodox behavior you’ve seen aboard the Pelican this past week, but please keep an open mind. Duty aboard the Marlin is special. Though your first impressions might tell you otherwise, one thing that you can be certain of is that, when the Marlin is called into action, you can count on us to get the job done.

  “As to what came down last night, you should just forget it. Command’s been pushing us awfully hard these past few months. Believe it or not, this has been our first real R and R in over sixty days. Guys will be guys, and they deserve to be able to let their hair down on occasion. We’re just lucky to have the commander around to save our scalps for us when things get out of hand.”

  Failing to see the humor in this, Blackmore stood there impassively, his serious gaze locked on the mist shrouded island of Maui visible on his right. Conscious that he had failed to change the newcomer’s mind. Ensign Marvin was in the process of pivoting to return to his cabin to pick up some more aspirin when a strange surging noise came from the surrounding waters. Turning back to the bridge, he hastily scanned the nearby seas for the source of this commotion, and his eyes caught sight of a bubbling expanse of white water visible two hundred yards west of the Pelican. Before he could even call out to inform Lieutenant Blackmore of his find, the characteristic black tower of a submarine’s sail broke from the ocean’s depths. By this time, the lieutenant had also sighted it. The two men stood there speechless, as the vessel surfaced completely. From its massive size, almost twice that of the Pelican, and its rounded hull, both officers identified it as a nuclear attack boat.

  The silence that they shared was suddenly broken by the harsh, ringing tone of the tender’s underwater telephone. It was Ensign Marvin who picked up the receiver. Blackmore was close by his side as the captain of the submarine briefed them of an accident that had just taken place beneath the waters surrounding Kauai, Hawaii’s northernmost island.

  There, a 688class attack sub had been in the process of utilizing an experimental vertical-launch missile system when something had gone wrong. An explosion had followed, and the huge 360-foot vessel had become immobilized on the sea floor, some 800 feet below the pounding Pacific. The Marlin was being called on to immediately initiate a rescue operation of its trapped crew.

  Quickly sobered by a rush of adrenalin, Ensign Marvin went to awaken Commander Pierce. This left Blackmore alone on the bridge once again. With his eyes glued to the submarine, Blackmore knew the time had come when he’d see for himself just what kind of stuff the crew of the Marlin was really made of.

  The Barking Sands Pacific Missile Range facility occupied an eight-mile-long strip of prime beach property on Kauai’s western shore. Run by the U.S.

  Navy, the site included some 700 square miles of surrounding ocean. There over 900 missile launches a year were monitored.

  To assist in the research and development of new weapons systems, and to insure the reliability of old ones, the Barking Sands Tactical Underwater Range (BARSTUR) was littered with bottom-mounted hydrophones and three-dimensional tracking sensors.

  These systems allowed the technicians to know just what was going on below the ocean as well as above it. This ability was especially important in the testing of submarine weaponry.

  It was to the facility’s central engineering station that this data was channeled. Displayed visually in the form of a massive, opaque, 3-D bathymetric chart, the sea floor appeared visible without its covering of water.

  On this particular morning, the technicians huddled around this lucite chart were monitoring no mere test. Instead, their attentions were ri voted on a life and-death struggle taking place right before their startled eyes. Each of them knew that somewhere beneath the Kaulakahi Channel, between Kauai and Niihau, the crew of the 688class submarine Providence was fighting to survive.

  None of these technicians were more aware of their predicament than Dr. Richard Fuller. As project manager of the launch that the Providence had been in the midst of when the accident had occurred, Fuller was responsible for determining the vessel’s exact location. This was of vital importance if a successful rescue attempt was to be initiated. By utilizing the range’s unique underwater sensor grid, the Naval Oceans System Command (Nose) scientist had been able to determine that the sub had settled on the sea floor 845 feet beneath the water’s surface. Fortunately, this was well within the incapacitated vessel’s depth threshold. Otherwise, the loss of life would have been significantly greater. Most cognizant of this fact, Fuller knew that they had been lucky so far. Now, if the Navy could only complete the rescue of the remaining crew members, they could all breath a sigh of relief.

  Only minutes before he had personally relayed the sub’s precise coordinates to the vessel the Navy had assigned to effect this rescue. It was presently on its way from Maui. The lives of over 100 men were now in the hands of the DSRV Marlin.

  Fuller had worked with such craft on several occasions, though this would be the first time that he would get to see it perform the function for which it had been originally designed. Thankful that the Marlin had only been a couple of hundred miles away when the Providence went down. Fuller anxiously awaited its arrival.

  With his arms cocked behind his back, the six-foot, three-inch researcher nervously paced the engineering station’s floor. Except for his white lab jacket, Fuller didn’t appear to be the type of individual one would expect to find indoors very often. With his skin tanned a deep bronze and his curly brown hair bleached with streaks of blond, it was evident that the middle-aged scientist spent his fair share of time in the sun. More at home on the exposed bridge of a destroyer, or the sail of a submarine, he surrendered to inside duty only when absolutely necessary. This morning was one of those occasions.

  They had been in the midst of a test of a new submarine-borne launch system when disaster had struck. The Providence had been one of the first 688class attack subs to be fitted with a dozen vertical launch tubes built into the bow section of its outside pressure hull. Specifically designed to hold a Tomahawk cruise missile, the 688’s with this capability would have an entirely new offensive weapon at their disposal, allowing them to hit surface targets well inland.

  Three previous launches had taken place without a hint of trouble. Then this morning, only seconds after the captain of the Providence had been given permission to fire the fourth prototype weapon, a searing explosive blast had decimated the cruise missile while it was in the process of exiting its launch tube. Fuller could only assume that this explosion had originated in the Tomahawk’s mid-body fuel tank. Regardless of the cause, the resulting blast concussion had been focused downward, directly at the sub’s hull. As a result, three seamen had been instantly killed, with six others severely burnt. Quick action on the part of the surviving crew members had allowed the ruptured compartment to be subsequently sealed, yet not before the vessel’s hydraulic system had been severely damaged. Unable to control its trim, the sub had spiraled downward to its present location on the sea floor deep below the Kaulakahi Channel.

  Though he was a civilian who never wore a Navy uniform, Richard Fuller had a deep respect for the brave men who lay trapped inside the hull of the Providence. Living constantly in a dangerous, alien environment, such individuals went about their daily work far from the notice of the general public. No strangers to either personal sacrifice or risk, these young men were the country’s true heroes. Knowing this, he had to do everything within his capability to insure their survival. Certain that the coordinates
that he had relayed to the Marlin were precise ones, Fuller could only count the minutes left until the DSRV would arrive.

  The trip up from Maui took the Pelican the better part of the day. With the Sturgeon-class submarine Sea Devil at its side, the tender immediately pulled up anchor only minutes after receiving its new call to duty. Monitoring each advancing nautical mile of their progress northward was the weathered, grayhaired figure of Commander Will Pierce. The Marlin’s Officer-in-Charge had positioned himself on the tender’s bridge soon after being awakened by Ensign Marvin. Only after being satisfied that their navigator had chosen the quickest route to the Kaulakahi Channel did Pierce allow himself a cup of coffee and a hasty bite of breakfast. Beard-stub bled and dressed in a wrinkled pair of khakis, Pierce then proceeded to the Pelican’s stern, where the Marlin was nestled, secure in its elevated carrying blocks. With his men around him, he briefed them of their situation, and then made absolutely certain that the Marlin would be ready to go once they reached the waters west of Kauai.

  It was shortly after Pierce completed his inspection of the DSRV that he called together his officers in the Pelican’s corrugated-steel storage compartment, located amidships. With probing blue eyes, he studied all those present and emphasized the utter importance of their mission. Then, almost nonchalantly, he made the following assignments. Pierce would pilot the Marlin himself. Seated to his right would be Lieutenant Lance Blackmore. This newest member of their complement would serve as copilot and be responsible for all of the vessel’s various navigation, communication, and mating systems. This would leave Ensign Louis Marvin as the DSRV’s third and final crew member. As the sphere operator, Marvin would operate all the life-support systems and manipulator controls and assist those rescued as they transferred themselves into the Marlin itself. After conveying this information, the commander excused himself, to return to the Pelican’s bridge.

  Needless to say. Lance Blackmore found himself shocked to have been picked as the copilot. Though he was somewhat familiar with the systems he’d be in charge of, he had only acted as copilot on a single previous descent. Surely Pierce had more experienced individuals available, who were better qualified to carry out this allimportant mission. Somewhat dumbfounded, he positioned himself beside the ship’s starboard railing and watched the island of Molokai’s western shoreline disappear in a veil of haze.