Phantom: An Alex Hawke Novel (44 page)

Fifty-nine

S
toke and
Harry had returned to their battle stations in the bow after the briefing with
Hawke, each of them manning a 30mm cannon. They were getting lashed with driving
rain, the skies having finally opened up with a vengeance. Their barrels were so
hot, they were steaming in the rain, and heavy water was coming over the
forepeak where their turret mounts were located.

Stoke heard Hawke in his earpiece.

“You’re wasting ammo at this range, Stoke.”

“I know. But we got more ammo than sense up here.
We’re pissed and we’re letting them know it.”

“Stoke, listen. We’re out of options. We’re forced
to make a dash inside the range of their big guns. It’s going to get hot in a
hurry. Time to launch our last JDAM and pray. You and Harry put your trigger
fingers in your pockets and wait for my signal. When you get it, give ’em hell.
You saw the photos of the
Alvand
. Concentrate on her
primary weapons fore and aft. Got it?”

“Got it. Good shooting with that last fish,
boss.”

“Better be. Over.”

“Ain’t over till it’s over,” Brock piped up,
earning a look from Stokely. He hoped for Harry’s sake that Hawke hadn’t heard
that dumb-ass remark.

But Alex Hawke was in the zone. Total focus. Total
determination to secure victory, whatever it took. These were the moments he
lived for, what he’d been born to do.

“All ahead full! Right full rudder!” Hawke said.
His voice had assumed a grim finality, the flat quality of emotionless decision.
You fight or you don’t fight. You go in with the bow of your ship pointed
directly at your enemy and you go well inside his range. Keeping your bow on him
gives his radar and sonar a whole lot less to look at, but if something goes
wrong and you have to get the hell out of there, you’ve got to change course.
Then you give him your broadside, setting yourself up for a devastating
counterattack on his part. That’s why starting in is the crucial decision.

“Rudder is right full, sir, coming to course
zero-two-zero!”

“Maintain course and speed.”

The big yacht surged ahead, smashing through the
oncoming waves as the twin gas turbines spooled up and delivered power to the
four enormous bronze screws churning beneath the stern. She had steadied on a
course calculated to take her right into the teeth of the Vosper MK5’s guns. It
was weird traveling at this speed on something so enormous but it was a good
weird, Stoke thought. The enemy wouldn’t have as much time to react to a sudden
incursion into their space. They were closing the distance to the destroyer
escort rapidly.

“Helm, Sonar. Target is on course bearing
three-one-zero, speed twelve.”

“Range two thousand yards, for’ard gun platform,
commence firing now,” Stoke heard Laddie say.

“Forward guns, commence firing, aye,” he
replied.

“Shit,” Harry said, opening fire.

“What?”

“We’re it. Our two puny 30s against a goddam
battlewagon like that? We’re dicked, pal.”

“Good attitude. I like that. Leadership in a
crisis.”

“Honesty in a crisis.”

“Shut up and shoot.”

“I can talk and shoot at the same time.”

“Incoming!” Stoke said as a huge shell whistled
high overhead and splashed harmlessly some five hundred yards aft of
Blackhawke
. And then a second sent a geyser of water a
hundred feet in the air fifty meters from their starboard quarter. The Iranian
gunners behind the long-range cannons were bracketing them, dialing them in.
Geysers were erupting all around them now, and small-arms fire was pinging off
their armored turrets and the superstructure behind them.

Launch the damn JDAM,
Stoke thought to himself,
and let’s get the hell out of
here before we get
—an enemy shell struck
Blackhawke
’s foredeck barely twenty feet behind them.
Boom,
a big hole with fire coming out of it. The
damage control guys were on it in an instant. It wasn’t a fatal wound, but it
was the first real wound they’d suffered and he realized that, for all its
high-tech armor,
Blackhawke
was not invulnerable.
Stoke concentrated his fire on the winking muzzles of the enemy’s big guns,
hoping to get lucky.

“What the hell are you doing now?” Stoke said,
looking at Harry.

“Taking off this fucking plastic sport coat. I’m
burning up in this thing.”

“You can’t take your body armor off up here, man.
We’re almost totally exposed.”

“Who says I can’t take it off? I got along without
it before they invented it and I can get along without it now.”

“On top of everything else, he’s suicidal. Great
comrade in arms I’ve got.”

“Mind your own business, okay? How about that for a
change?”

Five minutes later Harry Brock spun around like
he’d been kicked by a horse. He went down and Stoke saw the blood pumping from
his right thigh. Stoke whipped off the scarf around his neck and did a quick
tourniquet above the gunshot wound. He thumbed his radio.

“Man down. I need a medical corpsman on the bow
right this second.”

“Aye-aye, sir. On his way.”

“Great, Harry. Really, really good. You spend the
rest of this fight lying in bed down in sick bay and leave me alone up here by
myself.”

“Gimme a fuckin’ break,” Brock said through gritted
teeth. “You think I did this on purpose? Goddamn round took half my leg off. You
can see the damn bone! The femur. It hurts like a bitch.”

“Here comes the corpsman. Until then, take two
aspirin and call me in the morning, asshole.”

H
awke
grabbed the radio.

“Fire Control, Helm. Target within JDAM range?”

“Close. Give me another thousand meters and I’d
feel better. Good news is they’re a big target and they can’t turn their bow to
us and keep up this fire. Okay, we’ve got him cold now, skipper. I’ve got a shot
. . .
now!
”

“Fire torpedo,” Hawke said.

“Fire two, aye!” the FCO said.

“S
hit!” the FCO shouted, moments later.

“Talk to me,” Hawke said.

“Number two did not eject! We got a fish running
hot in the tube! Damn thing is screaming like a banshee.”

Hawke looked at Laddie. This was bad. The torpedo
should have been blasted out of the torpedo tube by the high-power ejection
system. Instead, it was somehow stuck and the forward torpedomen could hear it
running in the tube. A critical situation because the fish would be armed within
a matter of seconds and then almost anything could set it off. In addition, the
overspeeding motor could conceivably break up under the strain and vibration.
That alone might be sufficient to cause an explosion that would blow the bow
off.

“FCO, try again. Manual. Use full ejection
pressure.”

Hawke felt the seconds pass.

“Helm, FCO, fish did not eject, repeat, did
not
eject. System check indicates an outer tube door
malfunction.”

“Can you disarm?”

“Hell, no . . . I mean, no sir. We’re
trying to get the door to . . . uh, okay . . . this is
definitely not an electronic malfunction. It’s mechanical. Weapon’s hot and the
damn door is jammed. Tube’s flooded. I can hear the screw whining from here.
Pressure inside that tube now causing enormous strain. So, this is time
critical, sir.”

“How much time?”

“I’ve never had one jam before so I don’t really
know how long we’ve—”

“So how do we unjam it?”

“Not easily. We’ll need to stop the ship and put a
diver down. Pry it open from the outside. That’s the only way.”

“We stop this damn boat here in the kill zone and
we’re all bloody dead.”

“It’s the only way, sir . . . live
torpedo . . . going critical . . .”

“Stoke,” Hawke said, interrupting, “you hearing all
this?”

“Loud and clear. I’m ready to go down now. Tell the
chief bosun to get his ass up here with a mask, fins, and a crowbar so I can pry
the damn thing open.”

“I love you, Stoke. Hard aport, engines full stop.
Starboard gun crews, fire as enemy hoves into range. Laddie, smoke the boat. Put
me in fog so thick they’ll think we vanished.”

The skipper pressed a large heavy button mounted on
the bulkhead beside him. With the push of that button,
Blackhawke
discharged and completely disappeared inside a massive
fog of man-made smoke.

S
toke,
wearing goggles, fins, and a lead-weighted belt, hit the water feet first,
crowbar in hand. He swam down to the starboard tube near the keel and used two
suction cups to clamp himself onto the hull, tether his belt in position at the
jammed door. He glanced at his dive watch and the red sweep second hand was
rotating at warp speed. Less than five minutes.

Shit!

He tried to stick the sharp end of the iron bar
into the side of the door opposite the hinge. Nothing there. The door was flush
with the hull. He could see the thin outline of the edges but he couldn’t feel
them with his fingertips . . . the fit was too tight. This is what you
get when you give a builder a blank check: perfection. All he had was brute
force.

He’d just have to jam the damn bar into the
hairline crack using every ounce of his considerable strength. He figured he
could get the thing open but he was worried about one thing: getting the hell
out of the way of that damn JDAM when that door finally popped open
. . . he slammed the crowbar’s thin edge right into the seam. Nothing.
Once more. Twice more. On the third try, the bar went right through the
hull.

Oh, yeah.

He torqued that bar hard toward the hinge and the
little mother popped right open. He heard the whine of the engine and saw the
thing coming barreling straight at him. The round red dome of the torpedo’s
warhead was right in his face He was seconds away from instant death, either
decapitation or vaporization if the warhead blew emerging from the tube.
Instinctively, he ripped the cups off the hull, ducked, and the messenger of
doom screamed out of the tube, missing the top of his head by maybe an inch.

Stoke clawed his way to the surface. He’d be damned
if he’d miss this action. This was some serious Class-A wartime shit he was into
now. This was living, baby, living large.

“T
orpedo is away,” the FCO said, exultation and relief evident in his
voice. “It is on track and I calculate thirty seconds to impact.”

All eyes on the bridge strained to see the dim grey
outline of the
Alvand
through the thinning
smoke.

“It’s going to be a hit,” Laddie said, grinning ear
to ear. “A bloody, ruddy, beautiful damn hit!”

There was a loud
WHAM
when the warhead went off, almost instantaneously followed by a much louder and
more prolonged
WHRROOOOM,
so close it sounded like
one explosion.

“Must have hit the ammunition magazines,” Laddie
said. “Looks like she was carrying an extraheavy load, probably intended for
Taliban forces in Afghanistan. That’s why she’s riding so low in the water.”

“I’d like to see her riding a whole lot lower,”
Hawke said. “Let’s go in and give those bastards a fast ride to the bottom. All
ahead flank, maintain course.”

“Aye-aye, skipper,” Laddie said grinning. “All
ahead flank, maintain bloody course.”

Blackhawke,
now on a
collision course with the Iranian destroyer, went storming in, under the enemy’s
lee. She must have been a sight to the Iranian skipper as she advanced, her gun
ports flung open, rolling her starboard cannon out as she came. The enemy vessel
had been grievously wounded by the torpedo, but she was not out of the fight.
Her big guns had not been damaged by the fire from the bow, and Hawke’s yacht
was sustaining damage despite the high-tech Kevlar and ceramic armor. What the
enemy skipper had not experienced was the unsettling scenario of ten Bushmaster
44s, each firing high-explosive shells at the rate of two hundred rounds per
minute.

That was two thousand high-explosive projectiles
being hurled at the enemy every minute.
Withering
fire
was an understatement.

Alvand
was now just
over a thousand yards distant. You could feel the tension grow around the helm
as the silhouette of the big destroyer hove into plain view out of the fog. The
drumbeat of heavy rain from above. Below deck, scores of gunners, anxious
sailors waiting for the signal to open fire.

“Closing fast,” someone muttered.

“Steady, lads, steady,” Hawke said quietly, as they
drew near. There was no indecision in that voice now, only steely determination.
He was taking the fight right to them, right down their bloody throats, his bow
pointed dead amidships of the enemy. Laddie glanced over at him. Surely he
wasn’t thinking of
ramming
?

He held his breath and waited for Hawke to signal a
tack to port, bringing their starboard guns to bear once more on the enemy. The
seconds turned into hours. Enemy rounds were shooting great columns of water
into the air all around them. Some of them were striking home and the beautiful
ship was sustaining significant damage. All they had to fight back with were the
two bow cannons, doing what they could, but it was not enough. This was insane!
But he knew Hawke’s reputation. The man had absolutely no qualms about ordering
a tactic with even the slimmest margin of success if he felt it would ultimately
serve the cause of victory.

“Sir, would you like the conn?” the skipper asked
Hawke, seeing the closing distance dangerously diminishing and mopping
perspiration from his brow. The silence at the helm was roaring inside his
head.

“I would, thank you for offering,” Hawke said.
Laddie stepped aside and Hawke took the wheel.