Читать книгу Damage Control - Gordon Kent, Gordon Kent - Страница 8

The communications officer coughed into his fist for the second time and read the message again. He couldn’t control his thoughts, which twisted and turned through his convictions and his fears faster than he could clutch at them.

The day.

Around him, the enlisted men on the comms station reacted to his all too visible nerves. Ram Vatek, his most senior technician, raised an eyebrow.

He knew Vatek as one of the faithful. He leaned back and coughed into his fist again, focusing on Vatek’s loyalty, using the man’s face as an anchor to reality. He took a deep breath and exhaled slowly.

“It’s a new day,” he murmured and watched Vatek’s usually confident expression turn to apprehension.

The comms shack became still. Every man on duty knew what the words meant. Many of them knew parts of the overall plan. Knowing the plan and facing the grim reality of the message were different beasts.

No one in the comm shack flinched, however. They opened an arms locker that should not have been there behind the central computer processor and took out pistols, Tokarevs loaded with special low-power ammunition.

He pressed the push-to-talk button on the main comms console and spoke to the whole ship.

“Today is a new day,” he said, his voice unsteady as he spoke.

On the bridge, the navigator reached under his chart table and drew a Makarov pistol from its holster, turned, and shot the captain in the face. Under the pressure of the moment, he shot him repeatedly, pulling the trigger until the slide clicked open and the noise and smoke filled the bridge.

In the engine room, the second engineer drove a screwdriver into the abdomen of the engineer and stood appalled at the amount of blood that pooled on the smooth gray deck as his superior writhed. A rating shot the dying man in the head and seemed to enjoy the act. The engineer had not been a popular officer.

The second engineer looked at the blood on his hands and uniform and wanted to scream. And he looked at the wild eyes of the rating with the smoking gun and wondered what they had unleashed.

In the weapons space forward, two of the faithful shot their way through with smuggled Uzi Combat Commanders, killing every crewman in the space and inadvertently wrecking one of the operational weapons stations. A lot of the weapons techs were Sikhs and other unrecruitable sectarians, so they had to be killed.

In ninety seconds, the mutineers had control of the ship. Every man they believed might not be loyal to their cause, including a few who had received the indoctrination, was herded into the mess deck and locked down. Many others were killed because the mutineers, once blooded, were vicious. On the bridge, the navigator settled into the newly cleaned command chair and tried to ignore the smell of blood and feces.

“Make revolutions for five knots. Dive to one hundred fifty meters. Helmsman, make the course zero eight nine.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

The Kilo-class submarine turned to port and headed away from the exercise area and back toward the west coast of India.

In the comms shack, the communications officer sent a coded message using the small golden egg he wore around his neck. The message went out through the VLF antenna and was received at West Fleet Headquarters, Mahe, where it was routed with other exercise traffic to its addressee at a small naval test facility in southern India—and to the Indian exercise-control officer at exercise headquarters, where Alan Craik waited.