Dark Transit by Michael DiMercurio

Author:Michael DiMercurio [DiMercurio, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: submarine fiction, military thriller
Publisher: Crossroad Press
Published: 2021-08-29T16:00:00+00:00

Gulf of Oman, entrance to the Arabian Sea

70 Nautical miles north-northeast of Sur, Oman

B-902 Panther

Friday June 3; 1101 UTC, 3:01 pm local time

Grip Aquatong pulled the upper hatch of the Panther’s escape trunk shut and spun the hatch-wheel to dog the hatch, then opened the vent and drain valves. The water in the tight space drained, and as the level sank below Pacino’s chest, he dropped his regulator, put his mask on the top of his head and pulled off his flippers. Dankleff was staring at him. Pacino grinned.

“I’m okay, Skipper,” he said.

“Better to be dry, eh, AOIC?”

Pacino nodded. Aquatong opened the lower hatch, the last drops of water falling down to the space below. He climbed into the hull, then Onur, Dankleff, then Pacino. Pacino emerged into a space crowded with weapon racks and torpedoes, lit by weak overhead fluorescent lamps. Valves and piping and panels choked the walls of the space, interspersed with a thousand runs of cable. At least one question he had was answered—they did have torpedoes, but what kind?

“Jesus, look at this,” Dankleff said, looking around. “It’s like 1950 in here.”

“Come on,” Aquatong said, “Hurry up.”

The four of them took off their diving equipment and put them into four separate piles—who knew if they’d have to use them again, so no sense mixing them up into a chaotic stack.

“Follow me,” Aquatong said, and walked quickly aft, where a circular hatch was set into the thick steel of the watertight bulkhead. They emerged into a narrow passageway, the walls of it done in a light birch paneling. The passageway extended far aft, but Aquatong only went thirty feet down it before arriving at an alcove where a steep stairway extended up in one direction and down in the other. Aquatong vaulted up a steep staircase to an upper level. Pacino followed Dankleff and pulled himself up by the stair’s stainless steel railing into a narrow area, boxed in in three directions, each wall of it filled with junction boxes, cables and piping, with an open space amidships of the stairway, the opposite area filled with what looked thousands of valves in piping, most with large, red, circular handles, a few of the larger ones high up in the overhead with bar-type handles, these valve handles engraved with large letters in Farsi.

Pacino stared at the valve manifold wall. “You weren’t kidding about it being 1950 in here. Maybe 1940. Look—there’s got to be a million valves in that rats’ nest of piping—it’s ‘The Million Valve Manifold.’”

“More like a World War I sub with that jumble of valves. No way we’re going to figure out how to operate this with just a translator.”

“With any luck, the Iranians are still alive,” Pacino said.

Aquatong kept going forward through a narrow space past the Million Valve Manifold into what had to be the control room, but it was barely twenty feet square. Unlike the U.S. Navy’s submarines with their drab gray paint, the predominant color of the room was a bright corn-on-the-cob yellow.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.