Read Online Dragon Fire (The Battle for the Falklands Book 2) by Peter von Bleichert - Free Book Online Page A

his headset.   “ Draig TACCO, this
is Kingfisher 21.   PROBSUB, PROBSUB,” John
reported to Dragon ’s tactical
coordinator.   He then switched from the
radio to the intercom.   “Dropping smoke,”
he told the Merlin’s pilot.
    A small cartridge was fired from the
helicopter’s wheel-wells that splashed in, stained the water a glowing green,
and sent up a plume of red smoke.   This
marker would help Seamus maintain position over the contact, and also mark the
contact position for the destroyer.   On
the horizon, Dragon turned.
    ◊◊◊◊
    Captain Fryatt peered through
binoculars.   He found the red smoke
cloud, glanced at the compass, and ordered a heading: “Make your course
two-five-five.”   It was the captain’s
intent to keep the destroyer’s sharp bow and towering superstructure between Iron Duke and ‘Master 1,’ the tactical coordinator’s designation for the probable
submerged submarine.
    “Ahead full,” Fryatt ordered.   Dragon ’s
two Rolls-Royce gas turbines revved up and drove the ship’s electric
motors.   The bow rose, and Dragon ’s sleek, grey hull planed,
churning the dark water as white as milk.   Dragon became an 8,000 ton speedboat.   A minute later, 27,000 shaft horsepower had
shot the destroyer to over 30 knots.   She
turned to her new heading, leaned in, and threw spray up in a great fan.   Fryatt intended, once at the contact
coordinate, to use Dragon ’s powerful
bow sonar to localize Master 1.   Dragon drove a wind before her, and as
if pushed by it, the Merlin banked off.
    The Merlin was guided by Dragon ’s Op Room to her next hunting
position.   The helicopter dropped its
nose and raced off, to dip its sonar again and add a vertex angle to the
triangulation of the contact.
    ◊◊◊◊
    The sound of the dropped valve wheel
bounced its way down to the confines of Raton’s domain.   The repeating clang reverberated through the battery
deck and when the echoes subsided, Raton looked to the submarine’s cold inner
steel hull.   Despite its thickness and
strength, the hull was an ideal transmitter of sound.
    This was the reason internal machinery was
isolated from the boat’s skin wherever possible, Raton pondered as he fingered
a rubber cylinder that supported his own sled’s track.   He felt the track’s metal and recognized the
vibration from San Luis II ’s diesels.
    They, too, were dampened, mounted on big
rubber rafts that kept their reverberations from transmitting to San Luis II ’s casing.   These efforts, however, could be undone by a
hatch closed too hard, a fallen tool, or in this case, a dropped wheel valve.   All of these could provide potentially lethal
results.   That piece of iron shit , Raton postulated.   It was forged
in some old Murmansk furnace .   The
noise it made was surely heard by the clams and fish and those maldito británicos .   Raton caught his breath and held the air in
his lungs as he heard a trickle of water.
    The sound was different from that created
by the flow of water around San Luis II ’s
hull, and different from the bubbles of trapped air that occasionally escaped
the casing’s free-flood areas.   The
sound, Raton realized, had come from inside.
    The water that had escaped the Control Room
pipe valve had then found its way down the periscope well.   Tugged by gravity, it sought the most direct
path possible to the lowest point in the boat, the bilge.   However, between the Control Room and bilge
was the battery deck where, craning his neck, Raton saw the first signs of the
water.
    Held fast by surface tension, the water
clung to the steel roof and squirmed and squiggled along in a streamer that
split and merged again.   Raton watched
and kept pace.   He scooted his sled along
the compartment rails, his belly just over the tangle of leads and wire that
grew from the battery cells.   The water ran
into a small protuberance where, no longer able to defy gravity, it stretched
into a long drop over an