Change of Heart by Jack Allen Read online

  “We were sailing and we got lost. Our compass was not calibrated properly. I think it was my fault. Then our sailboat caught fire last night and here we are.” The crewmen stopped paying attention to Valeria and were quiet, listening to the conversation between their captain and the one they had rescued.

  “How do you speak Japanese so well?” Josh was tired of this interrogation. He was starving and he was sure Valeria was, too. And they were sitting on top of all the fresh fish they could eat.

  “I was in the Navy for five years,” Josh said. “I was stationed in Okinawa for three years of that time.” None of it was true, of course. Josh had never been to 138

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  Okinawa. However, he had no desire to explain how he had a fascination for languages as a boy. He never told anyone about growing up as an orphan with his brother in various foster homes, or about how he would lose himself in the complexities of different languages to forget the loneliness and fear he felt for not having a family of his own.

  The captain was apparently satisfied, although his expression was still sour. Josh worried that he might reconsider his decision to rescue them, but then, his face might always look like he was sucking on a lemon.

  “What was the name of your vessel?” the captain asked. “I will notify the harbor authorities of its loss.” Josh hesitated. He was not prepared for that question. He had not thought of it when he was going over his story. His mind raced, trying to come up with a name. He didn’t know the real name of the sailboat Finn stole and wouldn’t tell the captain even if he did. All they needed right then was to be uncovered as spies and shipped to Siberia. Finn’s own sailboat was back at his home in Virginia Beach. Josh couldn’t remember the name of it. All that kept coming to mind was Monticello and if he gave them that name he was going to be in big trouble. He opened his mouth to speak and the name of Finn’s boat rolled off his tongue.

  “Slippery Duck,” Josh said in English, then translated it in Japanese.

  The captain grunted and laughed, although to Josh his laugh was more like a snarl. He didn’t bother to mention that the Slippery Duck was tied to a dock in Virginia and had been for the last four years.

  The captain would learn nothing about the Slippery Duck from any nearby port authority, which meant he’d have to answer more questions once they returned to Japan, but by then it wouldn’t matter. They would be in the hands of the U.S. Embassy and the Japanese authorities could try to ask him all the questions they wanted.

  The captain’s snarling stopped.

  “My name is Kawamura. I am captain of this ship. You and Change of Heart

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  your wife will have to ride with us for a day or two until we reach port. I hope you like fish.”

  “Love it,” Josh said. He was so hungry he didn’t care if the fish was still moving when they put it in front of him. “What is your destination?”

  “Mombatsu,” Kawamura said.

  Josh nodded. He recognized the city. It was a small harbor town along the northern coast of Hokkaido, famous in Japan for its fresh fish, but a long way from the Embassy in Tokyo. That wouldn’t be a problem, however. All he needed was a phone.

  The Embassy would get him on a plane to the main island and he would deliver Valeria and hopefully that would be the end of this mess.

  Josh started to ask Kawamura if they could get some food and water when a young man came down the ladder from the bridge and spoke into Kawamura’s ear, pointing out to sea. Josh looked in that direction and saw a ship approaching.

  “Friends of your’s?” Kawamura said.

  It was the Russian attack ship, moving toward them. Josh saw it closely enough the night before, even in the darkness, to recognize it now.

  “Captain, I think it might be best if you got us out of here in a hurry,” Josh said.

  “I agree.”

  Kawamura turned to the young man and gave him an order.

  The young man responded and started back up the ladder to the bridge.

  Josh got to his feet and he and Kawamura watched the attack ship come toward them. Josh felt someone on his left side. It was Valeria, staring across at the Russian ship.

  “They’re coming for me again, aren’t they?” she said in Russian.

  “Yes,” Josh said.

  He hoped Kawamura didn’t speak Russian. He looked at the captain, but his eyes were fixed on the attack ship.

  It began to turn broadside to them. Josh was impressed with 140

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  the sleek lines of the bow. It was a very compact, efficient design.

  This was the best look Josh ever had of a Russian warship, and he had no desire to get any more intimate with their naval designs.

  On the foredeck was a single turret with a long barrel, an automated gun firing a three inch shell, much like the deck gun on many U.S. Navy ships. It caught his attention as it swivelled in their direction. That was the gun they used to sink the Monticello.

  “Oh no,” Josh muttered.

  He started to warn Kawamura but was cut off by the boom of the gun firing. Valeria screamed and grabbed his arm. Josh tried to yell at Kawamura to take cover, but his voice was not loud enough to overcome the noise of the shell shooting through the air, which made a sound like a huge piece of fabric being ripped in half. The shell struck the water a few yards off the port side. The blast lifted the tiny boat clear of the water, and it dropped like a child’s toy into a bathtub. A tremendous fountain of water doused the trawler’s deck, washing one of the crewmen overboard.

  Josh, Valeria, Kawamura and the other crewmen were thrown to the deck as the boat lurched upward, then they hung in the air as the boat dropped from under them. They landed hard, bounced on the deck, and were tossed about as the water crashed over them.

  Grinch shouted for Ekstrom at the tops of his lungs. Ekstrom ran to the sonar compartment, where Grinch sat behind a console of computer screens with his headset on.

  “What? What?” Ekstrom shouted.

  “That Pauk class, it just fired on that trawler.”

  “Fired what?”

  Grinch had the right headset speaker off his ear so he could hear Ekstrom.

  “Had to be the deck gun. A missile wouldn’t explode in the water like that.”

  Carson was right behind Ekstrom.

  “What do we do, Captain? They got at least two of our people Change of Heart

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  up there and they mean to kill them.”

  “Do they know we’re down here?” Ekstrom said.

  Grinch shook his head. “If they do they’re ignoring us.”

  “Ping ’em,” Ekstrom said.

  He knew for certain when the Russian warship heard the ping sound of active sonar, it would immediately turn its attention away from the trawler to concentrate on finding the submarine. For a surface warship, any submarine contact was an enemy that had to be destroyed.

  “Ping ’em now before they have a chance to fire again. And make sure they hear it.” He turned to Carson. “Sound general quarters.”

  Josh’s ankle twisted when he tried to break his fall and bounced on the deck. He opened his mouth to scream in pain, but a wave of water hit him and it was difficult to scream anything with a mouth full of water. The narrow deck pitched and he slid, slamming his right shoulder into the hatchway. He heard a woman scream and pulled himself to a sitting position, holding the edge of the hatchway.

  As the boat rocked forward, then back, the stern dipped completely beneath the water, flooding the entire deck. A wave of water picked up Valeria and carried her over the stern. Josh struggled to his feet, wincing at the pain in his ankle and shoulder.

  He started after her and slipped on the wet deck as it sloped away.

  Valeria managed to catch the edge of the stern rail with her fingers.

  For a couple of seconds she was completely submerged with the stern.

  Josh was carried aft on his butt with the receding wave, and hit the stern as it r
ose back out of the water. Valeria’s hand was slipping. Josh wasn’t sure where the propellers were, or if she would be injured by them if she went under the boat, and he didn’t want to find out. Bracing himself with his arm and ignoring the pain that screamed in his shoulder, he grabbed her wrist just as her fingers slipped off.

  “Hold on,” he said, forgetting the Russian.

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  She stared at him with fear in her eyes. The rocking of the boat settled as he pulled her back aboard.

  Valeria clamped her arms around his waist, shivering. Josh patted her shoulder gently, afraid to touch her. He never had a woman latch on to him for protection before. He was sure it must have been a nasty scare for her, but he wasn’t sure what he should do.

  He looked for the attack ship. In the back of his mind he was waiting for the second shot that would smash the fishing boat in two and kill them all. But it wasn’t coming after them; it was turning away, leaning as it carved through the water. Was that a warning shot? If it was meant to scare them, it worked. When the gun went off, he was sure they were all dead.

  He looked at Kawamura and the crewmen, who were picking themselves up off the deck. The younger man from the bridge was pointing to the other crewman who went overboard. Josh tried to go help, but Valeria wouldn’t release him.

  Something bothered him about the attack ship. He looked back at it. Along the side of the ship’s superstructure were a pair of torpedo tubes, one in front of the other on short pedestals that swivelled to turn the tubes out to sea. The rear tube was turned out and a pair of sailors were operating it. While Josh struggled to release himself from Valeria’s tight grip, one of the sailors pulled a lever on the side of the tube. A fat, gray torpedo leapt from the tube and flopped into the water. Josh stared in horror. Now they were firing torpedoes at them.

  The nose of the Dallas was pointed to the sea floor at a steep angle.

  The sub was accelerating with a live torpedo charging after it.

  Ekstrom held the railing with one hand, leaning back against the steep decline like he was being blown over by a stiff Chicago wind. The rudderman and the others were strapped down in their seats.

  “Where’s the fish?” Ekstrom said calmly over the loud, rising whine of the nuclear powered steam turbines.

  “Dead astern, two thousand feet.”

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  Ekstrom looked at Carson. There was no expression on his Commander’s face, but he could read the tension in Carson’s eyes.

  He knew from experience that what his Commander felt was what his crew felt. This crew had been together for a long time and had been on many dangerous missions, but they’d never been fired on. This was more than just a test of their battle preparedness.

  He had to figure out a way to get them out of this alive.

  “That torpedo’s gone active, sir,” Grinch shouted.

  Ekstrom could hear the faint pinging noise through the hull.

  He imagined the torpedo homing in on the reflection of the high pitched noise off their hull. He glanced at the depth gauge. They were passing through seven hundred feet. Their speed was already twenty five knots, yet the torpedo was gaining at nearly twice their speed.

  He knew they were in shallow water. The sea bottom was well above their twelve hundred foot maximum depth. He had an idea he hoped would work, but he only had seconds to make the decision.

  “Where’s the bottom?” Ekstrom said.

  “Nine hundred forty eight feet, sir.” He didn’t have the time to do what he wanted. He would have to improvise on an old tactic.

  “Bring us up, crash surface!” Ekstrom shouted.

  He and Carson grabbed the railing with both hands. The rudderman pulled back on the dive plane control, which was similar to the lift controls of a jet airliner. Ekstrom’s stomach sank as the sub leveled and began a steep incline.

  “Launch a decoy.”

  The firing control officer punched a palm button on a console in front of him.

  “Decoy launched,” he said.

  “Come about to two-seven-oh. Make for one hundred fifty feet,” Ekstrom said.

  The sub surged as it changed direction and he held on tight.

  It was a textbook maneuver that worked more often than 144

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  not. The sharp turn created an “elbow” in the water like a ninety degree bend in a tube. In that bend was a mass of tiny bubbles, cavitation created by the propeller, that would reflect some of the sound of the torpedo’s active sonar. If they dropped a decoy, which generated an artificial reproduction of the noises made by the sub’s engines and propeller, into that mass of bubbles, Ekstrom hoped they might improve the chances that the torpedo would ignore them. They could only wait for the impact to find out.

  “It went for the decoy,” Grinch shouted.

  Ekstrom saw the tension ease from Carson’s face. He knew better, however. The worst was not over and they were as visible to that ship above as a neon sign on a dark street.

  “I’ve got another fish in the water,” Grinch shouted.

  And there it was.

  Josh squeezed the rail along the gunwale, his knuckles white. He waited for the impact of the torpedo and the explosion that would blow the tiny fishing boat out of the water and scatter their bodies over the sea like fish food with the splintered wood. No one would ever know he was on this boat with the girl. He waited and waited and nothing happened. Then the Russian sailors scrambled to the next tube and fired a second torpedo. This puzzled Josh. Either the first one was a dud, which he doubted, or it missed, which was even more unlikely. He was certain the second one wouldn’t miss.

  But what if they weren’t shooting those torpedoes at them?

  That attack ship was equipped to deal with submarines. What if there was a-He heard a deep rumbling and knew he had his answer. Half a mile to the southwest, on the opposite side of the attack ship, a huge geyser of water erupted from the gently rolling surface of the sea, spewing high in the air.

  “What was that?” Kawamura said.

  “More trouble,” Josh replied, as the attack ship looped back toward them.

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  The bridge of the Dallas was plunged into darkness for a few seconds until the emergency lighting came on, casting an eerie red glow on the bridge.

  “Get me damage control,” Ekstrom ordered, but saw Carson was already on the sub’s phone.

  The impact and explosion of the torpedo blew out dozens of gauges on the bridge and many of the sub’s systems were down.

  They were a blind, sitting duck and that attack ship could blow them away at their leisure. Crewmen scrambled through the bridge with equipment and Ekstrom stayed out of their way.

  Carson put the phone down and came across the bridge to Ekstrom, who stood with his hands on his hips, watching the dead gauges for signs of life in his sub.

  “The torpedo hit us on the starboard side, forward of the galley. The storage compartment is flooding, but it’s sealed off.

  We lost two men in there.”

  “Damn it. Are we still floating?”

  Ekstrom tried not to think of the dead crewmen. They would be a distraction if he did, and that might cost all of them their lives.

  “Yes, sir. Forward torpedo tubes are down. Forward sonar array is down. The hull is stable. We’re not sinking.”

  “Missile tubes?” Ekstrom said.

  “Fully functional.”

  “Arm the harpoons.” Carson nodded and headed forward.

  Ekstrom turned to the fire control officer. “Fire Control, get me a solution on that Pauk, now!”

  The Fire Control Officer looked up from his plotting map.

  “Solution ready, sir.”

  “Feed it in and fire missiles one and two. Take out that damned ship!”

  Valeria was at Josh’s side, clinging to his waist. Kawamura was a few feet away. They and Kawamura’s crewmen
stared across the water at the attack ship like it was a sea monster coming to eat them alive.

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  Josh spoke to Kawamura without looking away.

  “Captain, I think you’d better radio for help.” Kawamura began inching sideways, unable to tear his eyes from the ship.

  “I think you are right.”

  With a splash and a loud roar of smoke and flame, something that looked like an enormous white fish leapt from the water behind the attack ship. Everyone on the deck of the trawler crouched for cover, except Josh, who watched with fascination, finally understanding what the attack ship had been hunting.

  It wasn’t a fish, Josh knew, but a missile. It was built in two sections: a slender front half and a fat rear half. Once it cleared the water, the rear half dropped away and the rocket motor at the tail of the front half fired. As it rose into the air on a billowing tail of white smoke, a second missile popped out of the water from the identical spot. Following the first missile, it rose to about a hundred feet, then gracefully turned over and swooped down, skimming only a few feet above the surface of the water. The roar of their rocket motors died to a low hiss.

  The attack ship continued toward the trawler as if oblivious to the threat bearing down on it. The Harpoon missiles ran a course parallel with the attack ship for several seconds, then simultaneously made a left turn, as if flown by a precision flying team, and headed straight for the side of the attack ship. Josh knew the radar in the nose cones of the missiles had acquired the target and there was very little the attack ship could do about it at that point, especially from such a short distance.

  Finally the attack ship reacted to the missiles and began to veer away. The missiles corrected their course. Echoing over the water, Josh heard what sounded like a loud snare drum in a marching band. A thin wisp of black smoke rose from the rear portion of the attack ship and realized it was the ship’s automatic gatling gun trying to shoot down the missiles. The Harpoons, however, were not deterred.

  They plunged into the side of the attack ship’s hull like a pair of daggers. The first went off with a low thump and a cloud of Change of Heart