Sea Strike

by James H. Cobb

  A single Y-shaped helicopter symbol marked with a Cunningham ID hack hurried southward toward the zone. It would arrive in the target area ahead of the destroyer, but not by much.

  "How about the Nationalist LAMPS helo, Dix?"

  "It was apparently caught on the deck, Captain. He didn't get off."

  "Zero One's status?"

  "Air One reports he's arming up now. Arkady should be launching within the next couple of minutes."

  "Other available assets."

  ' ' JSDF Orion has been diverted south, and Task Force 7.1 will be launching a Viking as soon as they can get one turned around and refueled. Both units should become factors within the next three quarters of an hour."

  "Damn, damn, damn. That's not going to be soon enough." Amanda tapped her fingernail on the arm of the captain's chair. "Ken, before you head up to the bridge, I'd like your assessment of the situation. Yours too, Dix. Are the Reds going to hang around out there waiting for us, or are they going to beat it?"

  Her exec shrugged. "That Red wolf pack is trying as hard as it can not to be found. When that Nationalist frigate chanced across them, they killed it. Now their primary concern is going to be to get lost again.

  They'll go deep and try to clear the area running at good quiet."

  "That makes sense, ma'am," Dix Beltrain added. "But on the other hand, they could have left a rear guard behind.

  One of the two attack boats might have dropped out of the formation. He could be hanging around out there in the surface duct, covering the withdrawal of the other two guys."

  Amanda lifted an eyebrow. "Thank you both for sharing that with me, gentlemen."

  "Captain," the Aegis systems manager called. "We've just lost the skin track on the Nationalist frigate. She's gone down, ma'am."

  Instinctively, the little group of officers looked up at the monitors of the Mast Mounted Sighting System. A heavy smudge of grayish smoke was lined out along the southern horizon.

  "CIC, this is Air One. Retainer Zero One now taking departure."

  A droning roar came from overhead, and a Sea Comanche helo appeared on the television screens. Nose down and gaining speed, it pulled away toward the dissipating smoke cloud.

  "Talk to me, Gus. What do we have out here?"

  "Multiple static surface contacts, Lieutenant. They look like life-raft radar reflectors. No transitories. No moving targets.

  Nothing I'd call a periscope contact. We've also got Zero Two out there at about our nine o'clock."

  Looking to port, Arkady caught the strobe flash of the Cunningham's second LAMPS helo. He thumbed the transmitter key on the end of his collective controller. ' ' Two, this is Zero One. We are airborne and inbound to the target area. You got a copy on me, Nancy?"

  "I read you, Lieutenant," Lieutenant (j. g.) Nancy Delany replied. "How do you want to play this, sir?"

  Even with her recent promotion, the Duke's number-two pilot still couldn't manage to be casual with her Air Group Leader.

  "I want to put a four-buoy box around the area. We'll use our last fix on the sunken frigate as our central datum point.

  I want buoy placement two miles out from the CDP with a four-mile separation. Buoy coding will be clockwise relative, Alpha, Bravo, Charley, Delta. Passive search. Read back."

  As his wingwoman repeated the mission outline, Arkady looked ahead, beyond Zero One's nose. He could make out a stain on the vivid blue of the ocean, the dark shimmer of a considerable oil slick. Also, a cluster of Day-Glo specks in its center.

  "Okay, Zero Two. That's the mission package. I'll put down buoy Delta, then check out the survivors. You circle the box perimeter and set Alpha, Bravo, and Charley. Do you verify that you have a dunking sonar on board?"

  "Roger, Zero One. I verify."

  "Okay. Once you get those buoys drilled in, drop another click south and run a deep listening line. I want these suckers kicked out of the brush."

  ' '."

  "Better come right to bearing two zero zero to line up on drop point Bravo, Lieutenant," Grestovitch cut in from the rear cockpit.

  "Doin' it, Gus."

  To the airborne submarine-hunter, the sonobuoy is the equivalent of the fisherman's glass-bottomed bucket. It gives

  an ASW aircraft the ability to peer beneath the surface of the sea. A miniaturized sonar system sealed in a watertight casing, it is dropped to the surface of the ocean. There, it lowers a sound head into the depths and lifts a radio antenna into the sky, broadcasting its findings back to a mother station aboard a friendly ship or aircraft.

  "Buoy Alpha is down. Buoy Bravo is down. We've got positive datalinks."

  "Good enough, Gus. Start working '. I'm moving in on the survivors."

  Arkady had flown a good number of search-and-rescue missions in his time, but he had never before orbited over the grave of a newly killed warship.

  Heavy oil and air bubbled steadily to the surface, the black blood of the fallen vessel. The smell of it flooded the cockpit.

  Wreckage drifted within the slick. Human forms as well, some that moved and some that didn't. Survivors clustered around a scattering of life rafts, staring up at the hovering helicopter as the inmates of hell might stare at an angel.

  Arkady sidled his aircraft near a group of weakly struggling men at the edge of the debris drift and dropped the raft pod he carried. It was the only aid he could give. With its narrow fuselage and two-place fore-and-aft cockpit, the Sea Comanche was incapable of doing conventional rescue and recovery work.

  "Gray Lady, this is Retainer Zero One. I am holding over sinking site now. It looks like we may have about a hundred and fifty men in the water. Maybe a few more. A lot of wounded."

  "Acknowledged, Zero One," Amanda Garrett's filtered voice replied.

  "We're ten minutes out."

  Arkady lifted his eyes and scanned the horizon. The Cunningham's camouflage paint rendered the ship invisible against the distant haze, but her bow wave flashed white against the blue of the sea.

  In Sea Comanche's rear cockpit, Gus Grestovitch plied his trade. Of all the skills of the maritime warrior, sub hunting is still infused with the largest share of black magic. The systems operator was now focusing past the cascade display

  in front of his eyes and the audio input in his earphones and was feeling for the submarine with his soul.

  He wasn't having much luck. The sea itself was damaged here. The wreck, trailing away beneath them, was scrambling the local acoustic environment. Escaping air churned upward.

  Fire-heated metals sizzled and cracked. Fittings tore loose from the hulk and tumbled away into the deepwater night.

  Maybe there was even life left inside that hull. Someone who hadn't been able to get clear before the water closed over the decks. Someone whose last seconds of existence were flickering away in the blackness of some lost air pocket.

  Grestovitch closed his eyes and shook the image out of his head. He sure as shit didn't need that just now. He tried to refocus on his instrumentation. As he did so, he noticed something on a secondary readout. He shifted the displays on his multimode telepanel, then shifted them again.

  "Hey, Lieutenant?"

  Arkady glanced back over his shoulder. "Yeah, Gus?"

  ' ' should have a couple of thousand feet of water under us here, right?"

  "Yeah?"

  "Then how come the wreck of the frigate is still sitting just under the surface?"

  "What are you talking about?"

  "Check the Magnetic Abnormality Detector. We've got a big hunk of metal right underneath us."

  Arkady goggled over the cockpit rail for an instant and then called up the MAD board onto his own screen.

  "Ah, shit! Gray Lady! This is Zero One! We've got a Red sub station keeping right under the survivors! It's an ambush!"

  "Helm, hard about one hundred and eighty degrees!"

  Amanda's voice rang in the Combat Information Center.

  "All engines ahead emergency!"

  The duty helmsw
oman spun her rudder controller and fire walled the throttles and power levers. The engine song rose into a keen and the hull framing groaned. The deck tilted beneath their feet as the Duke began to fight her way into the commanded turn.

  "Sonar, how the hell did we miss this guy?" Dix Beltrain demanded from the tactical officer's console.

  "His plant noise was masked by the audio clutter from the wreck," Foster called back from Sonar Alley. "Getting transitories on the bearing now.

  Sounds like he's flooding tubes."

  "Shit, he's taking a shot! Captain, we have a firing solution.

  Ready for a snap shot with the V-ROCs."

  "Negative! Check fire!" Amanda shook her head vehemently. "He's holding right under the survivors. We drop a torpedo on him and we could kill dozens of those men in the water."

  "Then what do we do, Captain?"

  "We run!"

  "Fish swim out!" Foster's voice had risen an octave.

  "Captain, we've got torpedoes coming our way!"

  Two decks down, in Main Engine Control, the state of the world was gauged by two parameters. One was the all pervasive, steady-state howl of the power-room turbogenerator sets. The other was the faint but equally pervasive vibration that radiated up the support pylons from the huge, radial-gap electric motors in the propulsor pods.

  The howl was now a scream, and the vibration was beginning to make the coffee mugs dance on the console tops.

  Chief Engineer Carl Thomson paced his set path behind the chair backs of his systems operators--thirty feet to port, then thirty feet back to starboard--his eyes flowing from one telepanel to the next.

  "Main Engine Control, this is the CIC." Thomson paused his pacing and lifted one hand to his headset, pressing the earphone tight to cut out the outside sound. "Main Engine, aye."

  "Chief, this is the Captain. We have hostile torpedoes inbound and we're trying to outrun them. I need everything you've got. Right now!"

  "You'll get it, Captain." There was nothing more to be said on that front.

  Thomson lifted his voice. "Heads up! We've got a couple of wake chasers coming up behind us. Stand by to put her to the wall!"

  "Chief, all mains and auxiliaries are already at one hundred percent output," one of the Motor Macs called back over her shoulder, fear dawning in her eyes. "We're at redline limits all across the board!"

  "That's the problem with this modern generation of marine engineers,"

  Thomson replied, leaning in between two of the operators' seats. "Some damn fool paints a red line on a dial and you kids think it means something. Smith, kill the anticavitation programs. Set blade trim to manual. Swensen, you call up your IPS flow charts. Let's see where we can scavenge some extra juice."

  "We got fish in the water! Lieutenant, they've fired at the ship ... Son of a bitch!"

  Gus Grestovitch snatched for the cockpit grab bar as Retainer Zero One's nose dipped toward the ocean. The Sea Comanche's engines shrieked and she accelerated out of her hover with all of the thrust and lift her rotors could produce.

  "Lieutenant! Where the hell are we going?" Gus asked.

  "Back!" Arkady replied grimly.

  "Dix, what about our own torpedoes? Could we try an intercept shot with a Mark 50?"

  The TACCO glanced across at his commanding officer.

  Amanda sat erect in the captain's chair, her fine-boned features set, her eyes level and controlled.

  "No good, ma'am," he replied. "To use the Barracuda's antitorpedo program, we'd need to use wire guidance and the main-hull sonar arrays.

  We'd have to slow way down and turn in to target to acquire it. I don't think we have the sea room."

  The tactical situation was being sketched out on the Alpha screen before them. The Cunningham's own sonars had been deafened by the flow noise of her own passage through the water. However, the data flow from the sonobuoy pattern was being used by the Aegis battle-management system to build a display of the tactical situation.

  The Duke's position hack was fleeing back down its course line. Closely pursuing it were two overlapping dot centered-in-cross icons, glowing in red, the mark of an active, hostile torpedo threat. The separation between the ship and weapon symbols was perceptibly shrinking.

  "It looks like we'll have to run them out of fuel, then," Amanda said determinedly.

  Beltrain didn't reply. The Duke's senior weaponeer was deep into assembling a critical equation on his console repeaters.

  Calling up time of launch, range estimations, and performance statistics from the torpedo data annex, he was trying to dispel an ominous gut feeling.

  "Oh, Jesus, sweet Jesus!"

  "Dix, what is it?"

  "The Red fish have a range overlap. They got us, Captain!

  Impact in four minutes!"

  Twenty feet off the deck, Retainer Zero One blazed back along the bearing line toward the Cunningham.

  Unbidden, the story of the Japanese Zero pilot who had dived into the path of a torpedo to save his carrier came to Vince Arkady's mind.

  Futilely, he scanned the wave tops for some sign of the passage of the hostile weapons. Nothing. Old-model fish would leave a telltale stream of steam bubbles behind. Modern units left no more wake than a passing shark.

  Beyond having Gus's life to consider, he was denied even the Zero pilot's option. They were targeting the ship commanded by his Lady and there was absolutely nothing on God's green earth he could do about it.

  "Set LEAD decoys for ten-second activation delay. Stand by to drop."

  "LEADs set, Captain."

  "Drop LEAD decoys. Helm, ten degrees right rudder."

  The Launched Expendable Acoustic Devices rolled off the Cunningham's stern and into her boiling wake. Upon activation, they would produce the simulated sound signature of their launching ship, literally screaming

  "Hey, I'm a destroyer!"

  into the face of the oncoming homing torpedoes.

  Hopefully, their mimicry would be sufficiently convincing.

  The LEADs were the last technological trick left in the Cunningham's bag.

  "Man, I sure hope that'll do it," Beltrain said fervently.

  "Even if it doesn't, we're still going to be okay." Christine Rendino had left the intelligence bay and was now standing behind and between the command and tactical officer's stations. Squeezing in beside Beltrain, she was studying the performance graphs on Beltrain's flatscreens.

  "What are you talking about, Chris--" Amanda's demand was cut off by a heavy thudding concussion. On the aft-view television monitors, a towering column of white water leaped into the air half a mile astern.

  "We got one!" the sonar chief yelled from the sound bay.

  "The lead fish just killed the decoys. The second torpedo is ... shit!

  The second fish is still running hot and tracking.

  It's still on us, Captain!"

  "Stand by, second LEAD set!" Amanda twisted around to face her intelligence officer. "Now, what are you saying?"

  "That fish won't reach us." Christine's finger stabbed at the torpedo stats on the flatscreen. "We're right at the edge of the range envelope for a Type 53."

  "Yeah, but there is still overlap," Beltrain insisted.

  "Not for real, Dix. The analysts frequently dial a fudge plus factor into the opforce stats listed in our data annexes.

  The logic is that it's better to overrate enemy weapons performance than it is to underrate it."

  "I can't count on that, Chris," Amanda snapped. "Drop LEAD decoy set two! Zero time activation! Helm, ten degrees left rudder!"

  The single scarlet cross-dot symbol of the remaining torpedo still crawled up the Cunningham's course line like a spider on a thread.

  Now the blue square-dot of a decoy marker appeared in the Duke's wake, a barrier between the fleeing ship and its lethal pursuer. Would it hold?

  All hands in the CIC gave up on breathing until they learned the answer.

  Cross-dot and square-dot merged ... and passed through each
other.

  "Captain, torpedo has not decoyed! Continuing to close the range! Ninety seconds to impact!"

  "Damn, damn, damn!"

  "Then here's something you can count on!" Christine continued relentlessly, grabbing for Amanda's shoulder.

  "The listed range we have for the Type 53 torpedo is for the original weapons design as used by the Russian Navy.

  The fish that's been fired at us will be a Chinese copy of the simplified export model--what they call a monkey-version weapon. There will be a performance degradation! It's not gonna reach us!"

  "I hope you're right." Amanda's hand struck the interphone key. "All decks, this is the Captain! Evacuate all compartments below the waterline and all frames aft of amidships! Rig for torpedo impact!

  Expedite!"

  "That's it!" Chief Thomson yelled. "Lock down your breaker boards and get out of here. Move!"

  The temperature in Main Engine Control was climbing fast and the atmosphere stank of ozone and burning insulation.

  The air conditioners had been powered down to divert every last critical amp into the drive train. A growing constellation of red and yellow indicator lights glowed on the consoles as system after system climbed into overload.

  The watchstanders yanked off their headsets and scrambled for the hatchway and the ladder beyond it that led upward to sunlight and safety. The last Motor Mac out paused for a second and looked back. The Chief hadn't moved; he was still leaning in over the master panels.

  "Hey, Chief?"

  "Get going, son. I'll be along in a second."

  He wouldn't be. They both knew it.

  The hatch thumped shut on its gaskets and Thomson slid back into the center seat. An arc warning alarm sounded in the starboard propulsor pod, and he hit the key sequence that killed it with a jet of nitrogen gas.

  You don't walk out on your watch when things are looking a little rough.

  Not if you read out of Carl Thomson's book.