Red Frost

Spitless.

As far as Starkey was concerned, the unheard-of incursion into U.S. territorial waters and breach of national defense systems took a backseat to more immediate and pressing problems. A little slice of America, the Olympic Peninsula mill town, stood utterly defenseless behind them. The nuke-powered vessel was on the beach and on fire. There was no way of telling what kinds of armament the ship was carrying. The commander could feel the vibrations of the rampaging engines and prop through the airstrip’s tarmac, even though the submarine was three hundred yards away.

Stepping out from under the protection of the hull, the SEALs took turns firing grappling hooks onto the deck, more than four stories above them. With the sub’s sail and escape-trunk hatches zeroed in by flanking fire, black-gloved men shouldered automatic weapons and scrambled up the knotted ropes. The first SEAL to land boot soles on the steeply slanted deck was Bradford Munsinger. Following his hand signals, the others covered the forward and aft escape hatches point-blank with their 9 mm H&K machine pistols.

“Radiation is still within acceptable limits,” Munsinger announced into his mike. “Come on up, boys, and join the party.”

ENR stayed put. He wasn’t talking to them.

Starkey and his crew watched the commandos under the bow start shinnying up the ropes. As they did so, Munsinger mounted the sail’s exterior ladder with two SEALs following hard behind him. After a rapid ascent, the trio disappeared over the rim of the bridge into the uncoiling black smoke.

A moment later the captain said, “ENR, we have position and control. The bridge hatch is closed.”

A head and shoulders appeared above the sail on the windward side, a tiny pimple on the enormous silhouette.

“The view from up here’s nice, but the air quality sucks,” Munsinger joked, his voice breaking, his breathing hard and ragged.

The man standing next to Starkey shielded his mike with his hand and said, “Cap sounds like he’s been huffing helium.” Dave Alvarez was a tall, lanky, fish-white nuclear engineer, and he spoke with a heavy New Jersey accent.

“Munsinger’s way pumped,” Chuck Howe agreed, turning his head to spit a gob of brown tobacco juice onto the tarmac.

“I know just how he feels,” Alvarez said. “That sound you hear isn’t castanets. It’s my knees knocking.”

“The smoke seems to be coming through vents in the deck plating up here,” Munsinger continued after a pause. “The sail’s hull is hot to the touch. Still no substantial radiation.”

“Initial rescue procedures are a go, then,” Starkey said into his mike.

“Roger that, ENR,” Munsinger said.

Then he addressed his men. “Okay, SEALs, let’s say howdy to these lost sons of bitches.”

The clang of gun butts on titanium plating was drowned out by the dull, sawing roar of the engines and the pounding of the three-story-high prop. SEALs crawled over the exposed deck with listening devices, monitoring any response from the sub’s crew.

The reports rattled back, all in the negative.

“What the fuck is going on!” Garwood Shambliss exclaimed.

Starkey shook his head at the black diver and pointed at the open mike under his blocklike chin, reminding him about the open channel. Shambliss could have been a SEAL himself; he was built lean and hard like one, he had the athletic skills, but his interest was in warships, not in the hands-on waging of war.

Shambliss smothered the mike in his big, scarred fist. “What…the…fuck!” he repeated, carefully enunciating each word. “Trapped inside a burning ship and nobody answers a rescue call? There should be forty sailors on that boat, minimum. And there’s nobody at the helm?”

“Commander, have we got a nuclear ghost ship on our hands?” Pete Deal asked.

Starkey said, “That makes no sense, Pete.” It wasn’t the only thing that didn’t make sense to him. The sub on the Hook didn’t conform to the established Russian fleet standards. It was clearly a design variant, an undisclosed variant, in direct violation of a long-standing treaty.

“Maybe they’re embarrassed,” Alvarez suggested. “They just beached a one-hundred-million-dollar boat on foreign soil.”

“Where the hell is HazMat?” Shambliss said, looking at the sky to the southeast. There were no aircraft in sight.

“They’ve got more gear and people to deal with,” Starkey said. Based in Bremerton, the Navy’s regional HazMat unit transported an entire mobile field hospital, operating rooms, decontamination equipment, isolation chambers, mortuary and personnel to handle catastrophic medical emergencies. Washington’s only civilian HazMat unit was part of the state patrol and stationed in Tacoma, 150 miles away.

Munsinger’s excited voice crackled in their headsets. “I’m going to try the bridge hatch,” he announced.

A second later a puff of much thicker smoke erupted from the sail, like a wet blanket lifted from a ridgetop signal fire.

“The hatch wasn’t dogged from the inside,” the captain reported. “We’ve got clear access.”

“SEAL leader, this is ENR,” Starkey barked into his mike. “Do not enter subject vessel. Repeat, do not attempt to enter the vessel. Close the hatch and pull back, get out of the smoke if you possibly can. We’re on our way.”

To his crew, he said, “Break out the Nomex….”

With or without HazMat, they had a job to do.

Shambliss, Deal, Howe and Alvarez ripped into the ballistic nylon duffels and started yanking out gear on the double. Commander Starkey did the same. He kicked off his shoes and slipped stocking feet into the legs of his fire suit. He stepped into the attached lug boots, rammed his arms through the sleeves, then zipped up the front closure to his chin. After pulling the drawstring hood tight around his weather-seamed face and unshaved cheeks, he donned a super-high-intensity headlamp. He hung the full-face air mask from the Nomex suit’s left shoulder tab and, after checking the pressure gauge, strapped the attached miniair tank to his left hip. The suit’s heavy gauntlets, also fire-retardant Nomex, were securely Velcroed to the insides of the sleeves.

In their fire armor, the team finished transferring the backpack extinguishers, the cases of electronic gear and hand- and battery-operated power tools to the carts. The much more restrictive antiradiation suits were loaded on, too, in case things suddenly went even further south. With five strong men pushing, the heavily laden hand trucks moved easily along the runway. When they reached the end of the asphalt and the wheels bumped onto the loose gravel path that led to the end of the Hook, the going got difficult. Three SEALs shouldered their weapons and ran over to give them a hand. With four to a cart, they were able to half carry the trucks and gear.

“Looks like the smoke’s starting to get thinner,” Alvarez said as they neared the sub’s bow. His lean face bulged from the pressure of the tight-fitting Nomex hood. “Maybe the crew put it out or it burned itself out.”

When no one responded to the speculation, he took the hint and kept quiet. It was nervous talk. And pointless. Whatever was happening inside, they were going to be in the middle of it shortly.

When they were in the lee of the ship, the enormous raised black bow blocked out most of the sky. Crush damage to the forward keel was considerable. It was impossible to tell whether the interior hull had been damaged. As they stepped up beside the hull, the ground trembled underfoot.

Reuben Starkey had learned Russian at the military language school in Monterrey, California. He had visited the Severodvinsk shipyard as an official observer, and had guzzled vodka with Russian submariners, designers and builders. As the ENR’s expert in Russian technology, he knew what had to be on board, and what might be on board. His wife, Sandy, and their three kids were in Silverdale, one hundred miles away, on the far side of the Olympics and the Hood Canal. Whatever happened here, even if it was thermonuclear, they would be safe. He took comfort from that, and he was thankful he’d made the time to kiss them all and say goodbye.

The SEALs on deck deployed rope ladders, and Starkey and the others began to climb them. Commandos on the ground hooked up other dangling lines to the assortment of ENR gear, and the men above hoisted it up, hand over hand.

The deck angle seemed even steeper when Starkey was actually standing on it. SEALs had already rigged safety cables to the sail. The vibration was tremendous, as was the noise. Starkey found it disorienting to look downward aft and see the wash deck half-submerged.

He tore his gaze from the white water roaring behind. He proceeded with one hand on the safety line to the sail’s fixed ladder, then started up. The Coast Guard helicopter hovered above him at about one thousand feet. As he swung a leg over the sail’s rim, he looked back, across the air strip at the cop cars and fire trucks. Seven stories high, he could see the camera flashes going off along the line of backed-up civilian traffic. Rubbernecking idiots, he thought.

The smoke had definitely thinned out some by the time Starkey hopped down to the bridge deck. He wasn’t just sweating inside the fire suit. He was lubed, head to foot.

Munsinger’s round, tanned face was speckled with soot; it was on his teeth when he smiled and nodded a greeting. In a gloved hand he held his machine pistol pointed in the air, the ejector port resting against his meaty shoulder. Two other SEALs stood on the bridge like statues, aiming their stubby weapons at the closed hatch.

“Still no response?” Starkey asked into the mike so he could be heard over the ambient roar. The smoke had a definite electrical tang to it.

Munsinger shook his head and said, “Maybe they’re playing possum.”

One by one, in rapid order, the other ENR guys piled over the sail’s rim. Then Starkey ordered lines dropped to the wash deck so they could haul up their dry chemical fire extinguishers and other gear. With five of them pulling, it took no more than three minutes to raise the cylinders and gear bags to the bridge. When Starkey put on his air mask, the rest of his team followed suit. They turned on their compressed-air tanks, switched on the headlamps and pulled on gauntlets. That done, they helped one another shrug into the straps of the backpack fire extinguishers. They then armed one another’s extinguishers by pulling the safety pins and cranking down the levers that punctured the CO2 propellant cartridges.

“Open it,” Starkey told the SEALs.

When the hatch cover fell back to the deck, it released another puff of smoke, only much less black. With the hatch open, a warning klaxon could be heard belowdecks, its shrill pulsation barely audible over the engine and prop roar. The SEALs retreated a yard or so, still covering the entrance.

As the smoke continued to rise, Starkey lifted his mask, leaned over the hatch and shouted down in Russian through a cupped hand, “You are about to be boarded by the U.S. Navy. This is a rescue operation. Do not resist. We’re here to help you.”

If anybody heard him, they didn’t answer.