"It is. Well done, woman. How do I equalize the lockout chamber?"

"The switch labeled 'Exhaust Pump.' It has an auto-cutoff, but watch the gauge.

It's the zero line-actually one atmosphere but zero gauge."

"Aye, aye."

He pushed the rubber-coated switch and heard a compressor start. The gauge currently read 15 psi, opposite an inner ring that read 35 fsw. It began to drop, headed for the zero, but slowly.

Fraser's gasping coughs had subsided to a labored wheezing. Thomas shifted him slightly, lifted his head, and slid one of his shoes under it-a poor pillow, but better than the titanium hull. He looked around for the other shoe and realized it must've washed out with all the water.

Fraser's lip was split and the flesh on his upper left cheek was so swollen that the eye was closed. So that's the blood I tasted. I don't think he got that running into the submarine.

The gauge dropped to 12 psi.

He heard SubLorraine's engine noise increase and the pitching worsened. The intercom came back on and Patricia's voice said, "Dammit, they seem to have finished their transfer. Sycorax is revving up."

"Can you catch her?"

"I'm trying, but I'm afraid they may hear me."Thomas bent over Fraser. "How you doing there, Fraser? You sure are one lucky son of a bitch."

Fraser moaned, and Thomas couldn't tell if he was conscious or not.

The intercom came on again and Patricia's voice sounded severely strained.

"Thomas, we may have a problem."

"What?"

"I'm getting active pinging from a source separate from the Sycorax and I hear very high-speed screws in the water. I've never heard this before, but it's been described to me."

Thomas stood very still. That sounds like a- Patricia continued. "I think it's a torpedo."

Fraser's voice, hoarse and weak, said, "It is."

18.

Beenan: Pillapilla

Thomas's voice came back over the intercom. "Patricia, Fraser here says it is!"

"Oh, god!" Patricia said aloud, but without hitting the intercom's talk button.

Every instinct she had told her to run, dive deep, turn away from the active pinging.

She turned toward it, instead, and pushed the throttle all the way to the stops.

SubLorraine accelerated to twelve and a half knots, only a bit off her maximum speed. She turned her own active sonar on, cranking the power, and stabbed the talk button. "Is that a U.S. Navy torpedo?"

After a pause, Thomas's voice came back. "It's a mothballed Mark forty-six, Mod five."

She tried to remember what she knew about that model. Over the years, as the active operator of a submersible, she'd met many current and ex-navy submariners, all with stories to tell. The Mark 46 could move almost three times as fast as SubLorraine and it carried a hundred pounds of high explosive. It could home using both passive and active sonar, and had enough mono fuel to travel over four nautical miles.

The only bright side was that it was designed to target much larger craft than SubLorraine and, while SubLorraine might be relatively slow, point to point, shewas nimble.

So, Patricia turned toward the path of the torpedo to present the smallest possible target.

She had no illusions as to their survivability if that warhead exploded anywhere within a hundred yards of them. Incompressible water would transmit the pressure wave like a hammer. But she doubted it would detonate without a direct hit. It was designed for targets much tougher than SubLorraine.

She had it now on her sonar screen, less than four hundred yards away, closing at a combined speed of forty-four knots-almost twenty-five yards a second. She cursed the Sucker attachment, which was limiting her vertical maneuverability.

Behind her she heard the hatch open and she said loudly, "Don't move. I've got her trimmed." The torpedo closed to two hundred yards. Visibility was poor. The water was clear, but the storm had severely reduced the amount of sunlight. She flicked on the floodlights, the highest setting, and hoped the torpedo didn't also home on infrared. She estimated she had about a hundred feet of visibility.

She was suddenly intensely glad they'd taken the time to make love in the sub. "I love you, Thomas," she said.

"You must."

What the hell did he mean by that?

One hundred yards. They could hear the pinging through the hull now.

Seventy-five. Fifty. Thirty. There. She saw it and skewed the rudder over hard, kicking the nose to starboard, then rolled the entire sub. Behind her she heard bodies thudding around the lockout chamber like sneakers in a dryer.

Oh, god, I didn't- But large as it loomed, the torpedo did miss, flashing by, passing close enough that she could make out letters on the side, just clearing the Sucker plate. Patricia continued the roll and shut off her active sonar, dropping the throttle back to a bare five percent, enough headway to maintain stability, but quiet.

Behind her, Fraser had started coughing again and, when he wasn't, he was swearing.

She looked back. Thomas was shifting Fraser, helping the man lie down on his back again. Fraser was cradling one elbow. Thomas had a cut on his forehead that was trickling blood down across his right eye.

"It missed?" Thomas said.

"We're not out of the water yet. That thing will try to reacquire us and it can go for another three and a half minutes before it runs out of fuel." She had a horrible thought. "Fraser! Do they have more than one torpedo?" Why wouldn't they?

Fraser stopped swearing long enough to say, "They could only get one."Patricia muttered. "One might be enough."

She brought the nose up. "I'm going up. It's going to be rough, but we have a much better chance of eluding it if we're hidden against the surface-scatter zone."

She looked back, guiltily. "Uh, try not to bang around too much. That thing tracks on passive as well as active sonar."

Thomas, holding one hand to his cut forehead, raised his other eyebrow. "We'll try."

She looked back at the controls, pulling the sonar headset back over both her burning ears.

Sycorax was powering away to the northwest, over a mile away, and well out of their range. And if the torpedo did lock on to them, they could simply outrun it. The Korean freighter was moving toward the southwest, but the storm was still in its teeth and its headway was slow.

Thomas was talking, barely audible over the headphones. "So, Fraser, what did you do that caused your friends to drop you in the water? And before Saint Crispin's day, too."

The torpedo was circling now, still actively pinging. Patricia thought about her tail section, the right-angled planes of the vertical and horizontal stabilizers joined together by the circular prop shroud. Lots of nasty reflective corners. Dad had never intended SubLorraine to be sonar stealthy.

The bearing stopped changing abruptly and she shuddered. Did she dare try the chicken maneuver again? She pinged the freighter and got a return at five hundred yards. The torpedo had run away from them for a good minute before reacquiring them and, while she didn't have an exact range, it had to be over a thousand yards.

How much over would determine whether they'd live or die.

She shoved the throttle all the way forward and ran for the freighter.

Fraser was in midsentence, answering Thomas's question, but he stopped talking when the sub accelerated. "What's happening?"

Patricia asked, "What sorts are they, on the Korean freighter?"

Fraser said, "They're arms dealers. This is just a stop on their regular run to Honduras, supplying the junta."

"Did they have lifeboats?"

They were still over four hundred yards from the freighter.

"Uh, I think so. It's hard to take in every detail while you're being beaten, chained, and thrown overboard."

"Thomas, do you remember?""Yeah. They had a bright orange capsule mounted on davits. Why?"

"We've been reacquired. I think I can reach the freighter before the torpedo reaches us."

"Oh. No other options?"

"What did you mean when you said, 'You must,' when I told you I loved you?"

He sucked his lips into his mouth and released them with a slight popping sound.

"You must love me to let me put you in such danger. I love you, too, by the way.

Are you saying we're about to die-again?"

The freighter was three hundred yards away.

"Not immediately." She shrugged. "We'll know for sure in about forty seconds."

Behind them the pings from the torpedo were coming at closer intervals, indicating a lessening of the distance, but she couldn't take an active ping without turning SubLorraine around. "I'd rather be leading this thing into Sycorax, but she's keeping her distance."

She turned around to look at him. "Hey, Thomas, do you want children?"

Thomas laughed out loud and Fraser was looking at both of them like they were insane. "I would like to have your children," Thomas said.

She breathed out and turned back to the controls. "Well, that's nice to know.

Another thing that would be nice to know is, What did the Sycorax transship from the Korean boat?"

Fraser cleared his throat but didn't say anything.

Thomas said, "Why not tell us? If we're about to die, what does it matter?"

Two hundred yards. The screws were louder, behind them. Ping interval dropping.

Fraser said, "One-oh-five-millimeter armor-piercing rounds and some special acoustically controlled detonators."

Thomas said, "Why on earth? Does the Sycorax have a one-oh-five cannon?"

"They're recoilless rifle, but no, they don't. It's the second shipment we've taken. The detonators are put on the recoilless rounds, and the entire thing is waterproofed, then fitted with an inflatable collar that keeps it pointed up."

"Why? In case a plane flies over?"

"No. To penetrate three feet of seacrete."

Patricia felt soundless thunder shake her world.

"Oh, god, Thomas! They weren't after me, they were after SubLorraine. Theywere trying to stop my scheduled inspections under the Abattoir!"

One hundred yards.

"That's right," Fraser said. "Even back when you found the Open Lotus, they wanted to make sure you didn't get your submarine back to the Strand. They didn't want you to find the devices before... well, before they sank the Refugee Center."

Patricia felt numb. Some part of her kept refining her course, listening to the torpedo, its pinging again audible through the hull, and watching the instruments.

Another part of her gaped in horror. Almost half a million people. She remembered her mother talking about Bill 853. They'd rather kill them than see them brought into the U.S.

The hull of the freighter loomed out of the murk, and she drove straight for it.

Gotta remember she won't dive as fast with the Sucker. Still she almost waited too long, pushing the nose down as it loomed before her. The Sucker just missed the hull, but she heard the top of the vertical stabilizer slam into and scrape along the hull. Then they were under the keel, and she pulled up again, on the far side of the ship.

The torpedo's pinging dimmed in volume, and the acrylic nose of SubLorraine shot out of the water halfway up a large swell just as the torpedo exploded on the freighter's hull.

The water whitened around them and the entire sub, already half out of the water, went airborne. "Hang o-."

SubLorraine slammed into the trough, jarring even Patricia, strapped into the padded seat. They slewed around broadside to the wave and it folded over them, pushing them back under. The monitor bracket snapped in two and the flat panel display dropped across her lap. She killed the throttle and turned her head around, anxious about Thomas, but he had turned sideways across the lockout chamber and braced himself, legs across Fraser to the port hull, back braced against the starboard hull, and arms extended up to the ceiling.

His head was swiveling back and forth to take in the submarine, Fraser, and Patricia. "Hello," he said.

"Hello, yourself, novio." She gave him one quick heartfelt grin, then turned back to the controls.

Though the display bracket was broken, the cable was not, so the readouts were still working, though something seemed to have happened to the GPS. She tried the throttle, and SubLorraine responded relatively quickly. None of the leak indicators had turned red. Being partially out of the water saved our asses.

They were still rising and falling with the swells, so she dove, letting SubLorraine drop down until she could no longer feel the surface turbulence, then headed away from the Kim Jong. It's an arms ship. One explosion might lead to another.She tried the passive sonar but all she could pick up were rumbles, the echo of the explosion reflecting off the bottom a mile and a half below, then off the surface, and back again. She tried to locate Sycorax, but couldn't. Is the sonar broken?