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cockpit. He threw a rope ladder down over the vertical steel side of the sub’s sail. The ladder just reached down to the round, slippery, rubber-coated deck of the sub. He dropped down the ladder and immediately clipped himself in to the deck traveler. No sense falling overboard. At least not just yet.
Two more SEALs, Tony Martinelli and Joe Dumkowski, followed Walker down the ladder. They clipped in as well and quickly headed aft. As the sub came dead in the water, they opened the engineroom escape trunk hatch and manhandled the two inflatable boats up onto the deck. Five minutes later, two black, six-man, inflatable assault boats sat on the deck, full of air and ready to go.
The rest of the SEAL team, Chief Johnston, Jason Hall, Mitch Cantrell, and Lew Broughton, helped by the sub’s crew, passed the team’s gear up the bridge trunk to the sail and down the rope ladder to the deck. Five minutes after the boats were ready; they were fully loaded with the black-clad SEALs sitting inside them.
The men could hear the bridge hatch clang shut. Each SEAL felt the same tinge of loneliness. They were out here on the open deck alone and the sub’s hatches were closed.
Still, they sat quietly waiting. A few seconds later, the night was pierced with the low-pitched roar of twelve foghorns close aboard. Pressurized air blew columns of mist and water high into the sky as it rushed out of the ballast tanks through the vent valves atop each ballast tank. Topeka slowly settled lower and lower into the sea until the SEALs’ boats floated free from the deck. There was no trace of the sub except for a few lingering bubbles and the tiny periscope sticking up from the water a few feet ahead of them. Slowly that, too, disappeared into the night as the sub moved silently away from them like some giant leviathan.
Chief Johnston was the first to speak.
“Okay, toads. Time to quit lollygaging. Man the paddles. I want a hundred feet between these two boats. Cantrell, you and Hill break an IR Chem-lite each and hold them up. The sub skipper is going to need something to steer by if he’s gonna snag us clean.”
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Chapman had already driven the Topeka a thousand yards from where the SEALs and their boats bobbed above them. He carefully turned her around and again looked through the periscope. He could just see the dim red glow of the Chem-lite beacons through the scope’s IR lens. He spoke calmly.
“I’m going to call the mark on bearing to the left light and then the right. XO, get them plotted and give me a course. There ain’t a whole lot of time to screw around fairing up here, so be quick about it.”
Chapman couldn’t actually see the bearing read-out through the periscope. Instead he would put the cursor he could see in the scope on the left light the SEALs were holding up, call “Mark,” and let the XO read the bearings. Then he would repeat the procedure on the other light. The XO would have his team plot the bearings and yell out the course Chapman needed to steer.
Lieutenant Commander Sam Witte looked up from the chart he had taped down on the navigation table.
“Yes, sir. We’ll split the difference, just like kicking a field goal to win the Rose Bowl in overtime.”
Chapman shook his head and smiled. The XO seemed to come up with these football similes in every conceivable situation. Chapman was willing to bet the awkward, slightly overweight man had never donned pads in his life.
“Very well, XO. Officer of the Deck, lower the outboard and shift to remote.”
The “outboard” was a small electric motor and screw that could be lowered out of the after ballast tanks. The motor, only a little over three hundred horse power, could only push the big sub along at a couple of knots. Its big advantage was that it was trainable so that it could push the boat’s stern around faster than the rudder could. That was a real advantage when Chapman needed to maneuver quickly.
“Left bearing, mark!” Chapman called out, then swung the scope a tiny bit to the right. “Right bearing, mark!” “Course three-two-four,” Witte called out.
The sub swung around slightly to follow the new course directly between the two rubber boats.