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

he’s within twenty miles.” Riley rattled off his report. Then, his voice quavering just a bit, he added, “Ain’t supposed to be any warships down here. Intel was we’d see only a couple of research types.”

Ward smiled. He remembered his first contact with someone who might want to shoot at him.

“He’s not likely to know we’re anywhere in the neighborhood. Let’s just get our job done and get our asses back to the ship for some hot chow.”

Ward cut power to the SWCS’s screw and allowed the small craft to settle slowly onto the bottom. The boat ride was over for now. Time to go to work.

The team slid back the steel canopies that covered them, switched to their SCUBA air tanks, and swam out of the SWCS. Jason Hall and Tony Garcia, two longtime members of Ward’s team, each grabbed a sensor package and swam away, headed up the reef to the north. Bill Ross and Sean Horton, only slightly less veteran to the team, flippered off to the south. Ward and Riley got busy connecting up the comms and control module for the main device they were delivering.

Ward was just finishing burying the module out of sight beneath a convenient coral head when Hall called him over the comms link.

“Skipper, think you’d better see this.” The miniature acoustic communication system made Hall’s normally deep, gravelly voice sound tinny, but it allowed the divers to communicate clearly out to a couple of hundred yards. Optionally, they could shift to text messaging and go even further.

Ward kicked over to where Hall was hovering over something located on the bottom, half covered with sand. The dull-gray metal tube was about six feet long and a foot in diameter. But there was no marine growth on it. Whatever it was, it had not been down there very long.

Ward dropped closer to the bottom and closely inspected the tube. The fiber-optic line coming out of the tube was almost invisible. Ward followed it for a couple of hundred yards until it ended in an anchored buoy that floated, tethered, just below the surface. He could just make out a dozen or so other fiber-optic lines heading out in various directions from the anchor.

A light flicked on for the SEAL. This was a sensor net, very similar to the one he and his team were in the process of planting. Besides the United States, only one other country had the technology to do this. Now the question became what were the Chinese looking for, and, even more importantly, had Ward and his guys already been detected?

Ward grabbed the buoy and its anchor, snapped the thin fiber-optic cables, and headed back toward the SWCS. As he passed Jason Hall and Tony Garcia, he ordered the pair to take the mystery sensor back to their mini-sub. Some geeks in some labs would love getting a look at this thing.

Without the purloined sensor and buoy, Ward could now swim hurriedly back to the SWCS and get ready to drive as far away from this spot as he could. He climbed into the pilot’s seat and quickly scanned the gauges. Tad Riley was a half-second behind him, sliding down into the co-pilot/navigator seat.

As Ward powered up the craft, the rest of the team piled in.

“Please raise your seatbacks and tray tables. We hope you enjoy the flight.”

The men grumbled, as much over the accommodations as their leader’s joke. It was a tight fit, even without now carrying the Chinese sensor and comms node. Ward ignored the grousing as he deftly lifted the sub off the bottom and headed upward, toward the surface.

“Tad, get a message off to Hawaii. Tell them that we found a bottom-mounted Chinese sensor network out here in the same area where we were placing our own sensors. Let ’em know we’re heading back to home base ASAP.”

Ward saw it as soon as the sensor mast cleared the water. The Chicom helicopter. And it was coming in out of the north, low and fast. The bird was headed straight at them, too, and it was already too damn close!

“Skipper, that’s a sixty-R,” Riley called out. “It’s one of ours.”

“Nope. Not likely. That’s one of the new Z-20 ASW birds. Almost for sure off that Chinese destroyer we were hearing.” Ward was already lowering the sensor mast and angling the boat back toward the bottom again. “I’m betting he’s here to find out what happened to his sensor system. He finds us, he’ll put two and two together. And he ain’t gonna be happy.”

Even with a couple feet of water separating them from the sunshine, they still felt and heard the Chinese helicopter flying directly overhead. Ward moved the boat even lower, trying to snuggle up against the bottom, but the depth gauge only read ten feet. That meant only about four feet of water separated them from a very angry Chinese ASW helicopter. The trick would be to stay as deep as possible without kicking up a telltale cloud of sand and silt from the big screw that drove their submersible.

Riley nudged Ward.

“Skipper, I’m picking up heavy screws on the sonar, off to the north. SNR is going up.”

Ward grunted. That would be their buddy, the Chinese destroyer. The neighborhood was suddenly getting very crowded with people who would not be at all hospitable to Ward and his SEALs. Best to slink out as quietly and unobtrusively as possible, let the chopper chase sharks and the destroyer dodge coral outcroppings.

“It makes sense,” Ward said, mostly to himself. “That Z-20 can’t do anything to us except hold us down. She doesn’t carry much in the way of ordnance. But the destroyer…we need to get really, really lost before that tin can shows up.”

That’s when the first grenade exploded in the water nearby. The concussion rocked the SWCS and had each man’s ears ringing. Jim Ward had a momentary flashback to another mission. He had endured a near-death experience in the Bahamas when a Russian