Warshot (The Hunter Killer Series Book 6) by Don Keith (top ten ebook reader TXT) 📗

for this one last sweep through the area. Fortunately, the bottom of the Tonga Trench was always pitch black, so it did not matter if it was day or night up here on the surface.

Mitch O’Donnell swung open the hatch and stuck his head out. “Doc, we need you in Mission Control. The Sea Raptor is acting up again.”

O’Donnell pulled back to make room for Smith to charge through the hatch and down the ladder to the next deck. The ladder opened into a brightly lit room that stretched the width of the deckhouse and nearly the length of the structure. The large space was filled with workstations and computers. Flat-panel displays hung from every available surface. The space hummed with activity.

Four of the technicians huddled around Dr. Sandy McDougal’s station, locked into an intense but quiet conversation. It was of immediate concern to Dr. Smith that the factory technician for their very expensive UUV appeared to be frantically defending his equipment.

As Smith stepped over to McDougal’s workstation, they all fell quiet and looked up at the chief scientist.

“Sandy, what is so concerning that you sent Mitch to fetch me?” Smith asked, glancing at the face of each member of the group.

“Just like that Irishman to gloat!” the fiery research scientist shot back. “Not often he gets the chance to say, ‘I told you so.’”

“Maybe so,” Smith snapped back. “But what’s our problem?”

McDougal blinked hard. “That damn Sea Raptor is acting up again. Not responding to orders and the data link on the acoustic modem is sending up garbage. Two of her primary jobs and she’s determined not to satisfactorily do either.”

The Sea Raptor, an autonomous underwater vehicle, was on a research mission to the very bottom of the Tonga Trench. At a depth of over six miles, the vehicle communicated by using an acoustic modem. A cable that worked at that depth and of that length was out of the question. And acoustic communications had proven tenuous at best.

“Now, just a cotton-pickin' minute,” the tech rep responded as he jumped in to protect his company’s reputation. “You’re asking the system to navigate along an unknown sea bottom and to report real-time data back over an acoustic data path that takes over eight seconds to make the trip each way. It just ain’t reasonable.”

Smith held up his hand for silence. “Sandy, we can’t afford to lose the Sea Raptor. Give it the emergency recall signal. And keep sending that signal until you get a response.”

With that order, Rex Smith knew that he had just signed the death warrant for this research venture. And very probably for his career.

Ψ

The sun was low, about to dip below the shallow rise of Garden Island and the broad Indian Ocean that stretched out like a sparkling plain to the west. Vehicles and people bustled about Her Majesty’s Australian Navy Station Stirling, winding up another busy day at Australia’s largest and busiest submarine base. But all was quiet at the moment down by the submarine jetty. The only people moving about were groups of sailors topside on the lone boat tied up alongside and a few other sailors standing by the bollards on the jetty. A curl of diesel smoke rose from the submarine’s sail and was quickly dispersed in the warm breeze.

The only evidence that anything was out of the ordinary was the platoon of heavily armed Special Air Service operators cordoning off access to the jetty. For those in the know, it was obvious that something serious was happening if these elite Special Forces soldiers were being detailed to guard duty on a submarine pier.

As the sun was finally obscured by the western horizon, the submarine HMAS Audacious cast off her lines and motored out into the broad bay that separated Garden Island from Kwinana Beach on the mainland. The Audacious was Australia’s newest Shortfin Barracuda submarine, a diesel derivative of the French Barracuda-class nuclear attack submarine. Equipped with a fuel-cell air-independent power system and all of the most modern electronics, the Australian sub was even quieter than her French nuclear cousin. And every bit as deadly. The only things she lacked were the speed and endurance afforded by a nuclear power plant.

Standing on his sub’s bridge and watching his crew maneuver the big diesel boat, Commander Geoffrey Smythe reviewed his orders in the last of the day’s light. Essentially, go north, up into the South China Sea, blunder about a bit, and do his best to see what the Chinese were up to. All seemed relatively simple and routine, but the preparations had been anything but mundane. Only a week had passed since he had been summoned to Naval Headquarters in Canberra, where Commander, Australian Fleet himself, delivered Smythe his instructions. From there it had been a mad rush to get Audacious fully ready for a deployment on very short notice, almost a month before she was scheduled to complete overhaul and return to service.

The lights of Freemantle were just blinking on as the submarine sailed past, then turned to the northwest, out into the open Indian Ocean. The officer of the deck reported the course change and crossing the one-hundred-fathom curve.

Smythe nodded to the other men on the bridge and headed below. As he passed through the hatch, he ordered the OOD to dive the sub. It was time to wring the boat out and make sure the dockworkers had done their jobs without leaving any unintentional surprises. Smythe had been in service to his country and commanding a submarine long enough to know something was up. Something serious. His crew and his vessel would have to be ready for anything.

Ψ

The USS Boise, SSN 764, was an anomaly. Although she was an older Improved Los Angeles-class submarine, commissioned in 1992, she actually had considerably less time submerged and fewer miles steamed than several of the Virginia-class submarines built to replace her and her sisters. The incongruity came about as the result of a foul-up in scheduling shipyard maintenance. That snafu