Liberty's Last Stand

by Stephen Coonts

  “We don’t see many black folks up this way. Wasn’t ever ver’ many in these mountains, and after the Civil War most of those few traipsed off for the big cities and bright lights.” She said that as if she could remember it. “Mr. Hall, you’re the first black man I’ve seen in years.”

  “I don’t know whether that’s good or bad,” Armanti told her. “If I stay I’ll have to find me a white girl, I suppose.”

  Angelica Price supposed so too.

  The garden didn’t have a weed in it. Rich dark earth was heaped up along several rows of plants that I thought were probably potatoes. There were several rows of tall plants tied up with strips of rag loaded with green tomatoes, and row after row of beans climbing poles, with cucumbers growing among them. A fence surrounded the whole thing, which was perhaps forty yards wide and sixty or seventy yards long. Above the fence were a couple strands of wire that raised the fence too high for a deer to jump. Just to make sure, strands of wire ran across the top of the garden festooned with strips of cloth that flapped in the breeze. Over it all was fishing line strung from pole to pole to discourage birds.

  Beyond the garden was a pasture. Up higher on the hill, right on top, I could see a few headstones sticking up inside a wooden fence, which apparently had been erected to keep cattle away from the stones. Three black cattle grazed on the hillside. To the right, almost behind the house, was a three-sided pole shed containing piles of loose hay inside a fence with an open gate. Chickens and a rooster or two wandered around inside and outside the fence.

  “If you’d like, Mrs. Price, we’ll tuck this gent under the sod for you. Say…up there on the hill in that cemetery.”

  She turned that offer over, then said, “No. I think we’ll leave him lay right there as a warnin’ to any other fool that happens by. He’s already startin’ to get ripe and I figure he’ll get riper, but I can put up with it. And I don’t want him up there on the hill with my folks and my man.”

  “He is getting a little strong,” Armanti remarked, and headed back down the hill toward his truck.

  I liked the old lady, who looked to be in her mid-seventies. She was spry and lean, so it wouldn’t have surprised me to learn she was ten years older. It’s a wonder some lonely man didn’t try to marry her years ago. Maybe some did and were refused.

  “After he gets rotted down some, I’ll put him on the compost pile,” Angelica Price said.

  It took me a moment to get my head around that. Then I asked, “So how are you getting along without electricity?”

  “Just fine. Only used it for lights. Got candles and a kerosene lantern, a wood stove and an outhouse, so life is goin’ just the way it has for years, twenty-two since my man died. I got ever’thin’ I need right here, young man. I was born in this house and hope to live out the rest of my days here, on this piece of earth. This is a good place.”

  I had to agree. Across the valley I could see clouds building. The breeze, smelling of the land as summer came to an end, was rippling the leaves of the distant trees, making the forest look like the surface of the sea. And it was quiet; the only sound was the whisper of the wind.

  “Good luck to you, Mrs. Price,” I said, and walked down the hill to where Armanti was waiting in the pickup.

  As we drove off, I told Armanti about Mrs. Price’s remark about the compost pile.

  All he said was, “I saw plenty of ’em in Afghanistan and Syria that I would have enjoyed tossing on a compost pile. Killed a few of ’em myself. God bless her.”

  TWENTY-FIVE

  A board the flagship of the Texas Navy, George Ranta, sitting at the sonar console, removed his headset. The boat was at periscope depth amid a large area of drilling and production rigs. “It’s like listening to a mechanical orchestra warm up,” he told Loren Snyder. “Machinery noises transferred into the water, drill strings going up and down, hammering, clanking, sucking, gurgling…”

  The photonics mast was out of the water and the video was on the scope. Loren rotated it slowly around the horizon, stopping every few seconds to make a note on the chart he used to back up the computer plots. Paper didn’t crash and forget things. It was a decent day up there above the ocean, with a high thin overcast and enough breeze to give the water a bit of chop.

  What Loren was looking for was a destroyer or frigate, a gray warship. He wanted to torpedo it, then leave the gulf and head around Florida for the Atlantic. First, he thought, put the fear in them. No, first you must find a target. The good news was that any submarine or surface warship amid the rigs was as acoustically deaf as he was.

  Always look on the bright side, Loren told himself. Be optimistic. That’s one of the rules for successful people. And we are highly successful people, looking for a place to get a little more of it.

  He gave orders to Ada Fuentes on the helm. He wished he knew more about drilling rigs: he wondered if they were stabilized with underwater cables that fanned out from the surface to the seabed. Stay between them, he told himself. Don’t get near one.

  He looked again at the chart. Texas was off Louisiana’s southwestern coast and proceeding into deeper water on a course just a bit east of south. Over a thousand feet of water below the keel. If he didn’t find a surface warship by the time he reached the southern tip of the area, he thought he should swing more westerly to get into the main channel to Houston and Galveston.

  He went back to the monitor. He was looking southwest, almost on the right beam, when something airborne passed quickly from left to right. He tried to focus the image, pan out, and catch it. If it was a patrol plane, they were in trouble. But it had been so small. A chopper servicing rigs?

  Whatever it was, it was gone now. Off to the northwest.

  “What was that?” Jugs Aranado asked. She was behind him, watching over his shoulder.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Play it back and freeze-frame it.”

  “You do it. You’re better at this.”

  He got out of the chair, and she sat and began manipulating the controls. In fifteen seconds she had it on the screen.

  “Tomahawk.”

  Loren Snyder looked at the chart and gave Fuentes a new course to steer, one twenty degrees to the right of her current course. “Let’s kick it up to about twelve knots, see if we can close on this guy. I’ll keep you away from the rigs. George, those rigs should stand out like sore thumbs on the sonar.”

  “They do, but there is so much noise in the water…”

  “We’re very shallow for twelve knots,” Fuentes objected. She was worried that an aircraft or satellite scanning the surface with radar or in optical wavelengths might detect the wake.

  The problem, Snyder knew, was that the surface ship, if that was what shot the Tomahawk, could simply run away from a sub cruising slowly. Snyder wanted to put a fish into a destroyer or frigate, and to do it he was going to have to take some chances. On the other hand, if a sub had fired the missile, going in there at twelve knots was asking to be smacked, although Snyder doubted an attack sub would be shooting missiles in water this noisy.

  “Twelve knots,” he said.

  Five minutes later Snyder saw another Tomahawk fly past, just a little to the right, or west, of the sub, on a reciprocal course. It was low, no more than a hundred feet above the ocean. This one seemed to come from almost dead ahead.

  He picked up the ICS mike and keyed it. “Folks, I think we should all take our general quarters stations. We have a ship ahead, surface or subsurface, that is punching off Tomahawks heading for Texas. I intend to try and torpedo it.”

  Loren lowered the photonics mast and told Ranta to listen carefully. To give the hydrophones a little better angle, he turned another twenty degrees to the west. A half hour later, he had Fuentes go a little deeper and slow to ten knots.

  Now Ranta heard the destroyer, or thought he did. It was just a low, deep throb amid the cacophony, one of the echoes bouncing off the bottom. There it was again! Three-three-five degrees, relative. Twenty-five degrees l
eft of the bow.

  “There are two destroyers out there,” George Ranta announced. “Both at slow speed, probably launching missiles.”

  “Retract the photonics mast,” Loren Snyder said, and to Ada Fuentes on the helm he added, “Take us down to two hundred fifty feet. Maybe the acoustics are better down there.”

  The first Tomahawks from the navy’s salvo slammed into power plants in the Houston area and knocked out the grid.

  JR Hays and Elvin Gentry thought this moment might come, so they had some planes on alert, with the pilots sitting in cockpits. Four planes on alert at Lackland in San Antonio were scrambled and fanned out to the east to look for cruise missiles inbound. They stayed relatively low so their radar would be more effective against the missiles with tiny radar cross-sections, a choice that gave them a high fuel burn.

  The fighter pilots were forbidden to cross the coastline. Neither general wished to risk those precious airplanes in attacks on destroyers, which were very capable of defending themselves.

  There wasn’t much else they could do. Except give a heads-up to Jack Hays, who had spent a long half hour with Billy Rob Smith, the Texas emergency coordinator. Billy Rob had been busy borrowing National Guard emergency generators and wiring them into nursing homes and hospitals that didn’t have their own. He had even signed a contract with a machine shop in Bryan, Texas, that normally made custom oil-field equipment. Now the fifty machinists employed there were busy manufacturing emergency generators. It would be a week or two before the first ones were ready to be installed, but as Billy Rob told Jack Hays, it was the best he could do. Every generator he could buy, borrow, or steal was being positioned and wired up.

  Jack Hays gave him a slap on the back and told him, “Good work!”

  The acoustics were indeed better at two hundred fifty feet. Ranta found a cluster of rigs ten degrees to port, and found both destroyers. One was dead ahead, the other ten degrees starboard. They were heading northwest, toward Galveston.

  To get the range to the target, Ada Fuentes turned the boat, which was trimmed up and doing about ten knots. After a few minutes, plotting the bearing change, the range was resolved at ten miles to the port target, ten and a half to the starboard one. The targets were moving from left to right, but this would be a fairly simple shot for the Mk-48 torpedoes. They had active sonar seekers and trailed a fiber optic cable behind them, which would allow the submarine crew to ensure they were heading toward the proper targets. If the cables didn’t break. If they did, the pump-jet torpedoes would continue on course at fifty-five knots searching for their targets on passive sonar based on the internal logic of their onboard computers, which were programmed by Jugs Aranado. At the very last moment the torpedoes’ sensors would go active, ping. Nineteen feet long, twenty-one inches in diameter, the weapon would run under the target and a proximity fuse would trigger its 650-pound warhead. The explosion would break the target ship’s back. Time to cover the ten nautical miles to target—eleven minutes.

  “Flood Tubes One and Two,” Snyder ordered. Jugs Aranado was on the torpedo control console, programming each torpedo. She worked her way through the checklist quickly.

  “Torpedoes ready, Captain,” Jugs sang out.

  “Fire One,” Snyder said, and Jugs checked the panel, saw that all lights were green, and pushed the fire button on Tube One. The boat bobbed slightly as the torpedo was ejected by compressed air. On the sonar, Ranta said, “It’s running.”

  “Fire Two.” Another little bob as the boat reacted to the loss of the weight of the torpedo and the rush of incoming water to replace it.

  “Close outer doors,” Snyder ordered.

  Now the data from the torpedoes began coming in. Number One was running almost straight, so the chances of the fiber optic cable breaking were small. Number Two turned to a course to intercept the second destroyer. Both were soon up to fifty-five knots, rising from the depths to just under the surface. Both were now armed, but they weren’t pinging from their seeker heads.

  Jugs Aranado was watching their track, waiting. She didn’t want to activate their seeker heads until the last possible moment, because the active pinging would be plainly audible to the destroyers’ sonar operators. Amazingly, the propulsion system, a pump jet, was very quiet, and so the targets of the torpedoes might not hear them until they were very close. Too close. Especially in these noisy waters.

  Aboard USS Harlan Jones the cry “Torpedo incoming!” from the sonarman in the Combat Control Center galvanized the watch. They knew Texas might be in the area, but had relied upon the noise from the drilling rigs to shield them from attack. Obviously they had been detected and fired upon. The sonar operator had picked up the telltale sound of the pump-jet engines in the torpedoes. He didn’t know how close the torpedo was. Actually, it was less than a mile away, approaching at fifty-five knots.

  The tactical action officer, the TAO, a lieutenant commander, ordered decoys fired and used the squawk box to notify the bridge. “Torpedo inbound starboard side.”

  On the bridge, the captain didn’t waste a second. He shouted, “All ahead flank. Full right rudder. Give me a ninety-degree turn to starboard.”

  A destroyer is a large ship, and accelerating it takes time, time the captain didn’t have. He was only making eight knots to give the Tomahawk missiles a stable platform to launch from. Now, even with full right rudder, it would take time to turn the ship, and time was what he didn’t have. Still, he could feel the four turbines answer the engine telegraph. The ship seemed to squat as the twin screws bit deep into the water and her bow slowly began to swing.

  Aboard Texas, the sound of the destroyer’s screws was a signal to George Ranta. “Port target is accelerating.”

  “Take her down to a thousand feet,” Loren Snyder ordered. Ada Fuentes repeated the order and pushed the control yoke forward to use the planes to help drive her down as Jugs was busy on the panel flooding tanks. “Give me twenty knots.” Fuentes pushed the throttle forward.

  “Twenty knots, aye.”

  “Launch the decoys,” Snyder ordered. Jugs pushed the buttons and the sound of the decoys being launched could be faintly heard; the panel showed four were launched. Decoys were noise-and bubble-makers, which hopefully would attract any ASROC missiles the destroyer might launch. ASROC, an antisubmarine rocket-propelled torpedo, was launched from a vertical tube. The rocket engine carried the Mk-46 torpedo well away from the ship, where it would plunge into the sea and begin searching for a submarine. The noise of the decoys would attract an acoustic seeker, and the bubbles would create a return for an active, pinging sonar.

  “The fiber optic wires are going to break,” Snyder told Jugs. “Go active on the torpedoes.”

  In Harlan Jones’ Combat Control Center, the TAO plotted the probable launching position of the submarine and instructed the man on the ASROC panel where to put the missiles. The TAO decided to launch four. One would hit six miles up the bearing of the torpedo, another at eight, another at ten, and the last one at twelve. Once they were in the water, they would circle and search with active sonar for the submarine.

  Then the TAO remembered the oil-production platforms. There was a cluster of them, six or seven, ten degrees right of the bearing line. Would they attract the ASROCs? She shrugged the possibility away and ordered four missiles fired.

  But time was up! The torpedo ran under the hull of Harlan Jones in front of the bridge and exploded. Water being essentially incompressible, the explosion blew a large hole in the bottom of the ship, breaking the keel, and water began rushing in. The ship shook from the hammer blow.

  “All stop,” the captain ordered, which was merely a term that meant the adjustable-pitch screws were to be brought to fine pitch so the ship wouldn’t drive headlong into the ocean and increase the possibility of bulkheads giving way. She began drifting to a stop, which would take a while.

  Meanwhile the ASROC launchers spit out four missiles, which roared along the bearing the torpedo had followed.

>   The crew of Harlan Jones began trying to save their ship. Fifteen Harlan Jones crewmen were dead. Others would probably die if the watertight bulkheads inside the ship weren’t shored up against the sea fighting to invade the vessel. Harlan Jones had fired thirty-three of the fifty Tomahawks she had been ordered to launch.

  The second destroyer, USS O’Hare, also heard the pinging of the incoming Mk-48 torpedo, and like her sister ship, turned into it so as to present as narrow a profile as possible. She fired her ASROCs up the bearing line of the incoming ship-killer. She had fired off two when the Mk-48 from Texas went under her bow and exploded. The explosion literally cut the ship in half, severed the bow from the ship twenty feet aft of the sonar dome. She wasn’t going at flank speed, or the sea would have blown out every internal bulkhead and doomed her. As it was, she lost speed as several watertight bulkheads buckled under the pressure and she began going down at the head. The captain let her drift to a halt.

  Both destroyers had been at General Quarters when torpedoed, with all watertight hatches dogged down, so the damage was not as extensive as it could have been. Aboard O’Hare, as in Jones, the fight to save the ship began immediately. O’Hare had launched thirty of the fifty Tomahawks she had been ordered to launch.

  Aboard Texas, George Ranta and the control room crew heard the whumps of the torpedoes exploding. Snyder had the sound on the loudspeaker. A moment later, they heard the splashes of the antisubmarine torpedoes launched from O’Hare, followed by the sound of the ASROCs fired by Harlan Jones hitting the water.

  Loren Snyder looked at the computerized plot. The cluster of oil platforms were to his port side, perhaps two miles away, so he told Ada Fuentes to turn in that direction. Perhaps the sound of the platforms, at least one of which was drilling a well, would attract the torpedoes searching for his boat.

  He glanced at the depth meter, which read seven hundred feet. They were still going down.

  He had hoped the torpedoes he had fired would catch the destroyers flat-footed, but apparently the crews were well-trained and alert, just in case. Snyder and his small band of fools might well have run flat out of luck.