Miller could have sworn he saw the feintist blip on the sonar reads for a moment, but the constantly scanning screen erased over the aberration. White took a short step forward toward the radar screen, his chin held between thumb and index knuckle as he leaned in to closely scan behind the technician. The Pennsylvania had been slowly lurking just equal to the Atlantic Coastal Shelf for the past hour, near the trench where Brunhilde should have been waitin like a trap-door spider. Nothing. No contact. It was as if the subject matter experts Miller had brought were wrong about everything. The technician at the listening post suddenly sat upright, looking concerned and off to the side.
White leaned forward, his right ear beside the sailors left headphone. They could hear a light mechanical whirr, almost like a fan’s engine wobbling from a cieling. Then a sound of bulky metal sliding and water rushing into a void. White snapped up and barked to the helmsman, “Hard to starboard, get us up and over the ridge, launch two decoys!”
The hull creaked from the sudden flood of input commands and the ship lurched upward and right, banking dangerously up and over the North Atlantic Shelf. Sailors along the hull dashed over to leaver switches and wrenched them down, crouching and covering their ears after pulling them. Outside the sleek black of the Pennsylvania two tiny cylinders popped out into the ocean and screamed into tight circles, crushing out any listening station or sonar reads.
Surging up from below, the Brunhilde rose up on its side, looking like an incoming blade with its ancient and angular design. With her torpedo bay doors opened she looked like a barracuda approaching with jaws wide. As she sailed into the cloud of crashing noise from the decoys she banked hard, blind to the cliff just below and smashed into the centuries old mud and rock. The sailor at the listening post leaned forward, trying to shrink and get into his headset to be closer as he could barely hear the sounds of steel plowing through mud over the screeching decoys. As the Pennsylvania lofted itself up and over the plateau, U-5918 righted itself and slowly nosed up, floating above the muck cloud it had kicked about. The radar technician turned and nodded to Captain White, who turned and gave a short thumbs up to Miller.
“Launch your boys, we’ve got to get top side before they get within range again.” White had clicked his stopwatch, eyeing the radar signature as it neared his own blip.
Inside the torpedo bay room the lights flipped from white to red. Without another word Strike Team piled into their torpedo sized submarines, both teams tightly packed into each tube. Crewmen looked down for the thumbs up of the team leaders and slid the hatches shut, locking the minature vessels into place and closing the enormous breach in preparations to fire. Within the tiny submersible the team leaders click on their lights, illuminating much of the cramped interior and looking down to do one final count on every head. Thumbs up were shown by every hand that wasn’t gripping a weapon and the team leaders pressed a button. Inside the bridge Miller’s small electronics clip board gave a feint vibration and a little green light blinked. The Special Operations officer nodded at White. The skipper turned to the weapons control station and spoke clearly and flatly.
“Fire tubes one and two,” he faced the helmsman, “Prepare to launch ballast and go for emergency surfacing procedures.”
Quietly in the chaos, two small submarines were spit out of the Pennsylvania and meandered out into the wide open blue. The tiny hatches slid back and a few dozen heads popped out from all around the mini-subs, visually locking eyes on the murky shape of U-5918 as it rose determinedly from the black.
Kessler nosed the small craft about, guiding his small vessel for interecpt, Hochberg guiding the second submersible on the same track. With a clatter of opening and jettisoning packages, the Pennsylvania suddenly ripped it’s way nearly straight up and away toward the light high above.
This was it, they were on their own, no ship to return to but the one filled with terrible ghosts of the past. Hochberg increased speed with a snarled grin on his harsh face.