Piranha Firing Point

by Michael Dimercurio

  At times over the last days he had thought the task impossible, the men not understanding, fatigue setting in, the stress and the lack of fresh air and sufficient sleep and customary food beginning to make his men lose their edge. But finally, after one of his acidic speeches, the mood had changed, and like a soccer team roaring onto the field after being shouted at by the coach at halftime, the ship had begun to function, and the team solidified. The last exercises had been dramatically different, the ship the winner of each. After a day of crew rest, they were here, positioned at the Nazeyakushima Gap, waiting for the fleet of Americans.

  The Satellite News Network had proved amazingly useful, broadcasting the positions and intentions of the Americans, leaving out only their eventual landing site.

  It was such pinpoint intelligence that Chu had wondered if it was disinformation, but the confirming Chinese satellite photos of the incoming flotilla had shown the ships’ positions exactly where the news reports claimed.

  So far the plans for the attack had been going well, with the briefing of the crews being done in parallel with Chu training his own ship’s men on the assault. A debate had raged about how the attack should be conducted, and Chu’s plan had been called into question by his own men, chief among them the engineering officer. Lieutenant Li Xinmin, who insisted that the American 688 submarines be attacked prior to the surface force, while Chu planned to simply allow the 688s to drive blindly by.

  When the debate rose to a crescendo, Chu retreated to his stateroom and programmed a simulation, playing it that evening to the men in the messroom. In the first simulation scenario, Chu programmed them shooting first at the 688 subs. In response to word that the submarine screen had sunk, the ships of the incoming American fleet broke up and retreated, making torpedo targeting nearly impossible, with only ten percent of the ships sinking. In Chu’s second scenario, with the surface ships coming under attack, the entire force was demol ished, without exception. Chu had thought that would end the debate, but then the men had begun to worry about the effect of the 688s and their revenge, with a wave of land-based patrol aircraft screaming in to sink the Rising Suns.

  That was not Chu’s private worry. Each ship had 24 weapon tubes; each tube had two weapons, a loaded weapon and a magazine weapon. That was 48 torpedoes per ship, a total of 288 large-bore antiship weapons.

  With one torpedo expended per target, his forces had 288 chances to sink surface vessels. With one fleet of 170 ships, the 288 torpedoes should hold out, provided they didn’t have duplicate targets. The only question in Chu’s mind was what would happen when the second force from the American side came, as they eventually would.

  Surface ships hunting them unsuccessfully would soon yield to submarines. The first might be more 6881’s, the antiques. But in time others would come, more capable units. They would begin to hunt down his force, and his ships had only so many weapons. The key had to be a rapid demoralizing strike, something so devastating that they wouldn’t come back for more. Whether he could achieve that, no one knew.

  With that thought Chu decided to turn to the task at hand and stop thinking about eventualities. He was a dark soul, as he’d known for years, and men like him did not drink in the champagne of victory, they waited for the pain of failure. And so, in Chu’s mind, the time for debate had ended. He resumed the mantle of the commander and made the orders that had brought them here, where his force was set up to kill the invading surface fleet Chu reclined in his control couch’ at the intricate command console, looking over its marvels. The displays could be configured in any of a thousand modes. The screens could read out computer machine language, sonar curves, sonar raw data, weapons presets, camera video displays, virtually anything. He’d read through some of the manuals, even had some of the Japanese captain’s notes translated to English, and by now he was becoming confident. The ship would function, and he would lead it and the men to victory.

  He looked at the center screen, the god’s-eye view of the sea, showing his Arctic Storm in the center. There were no sonar contacts, but he had instructed the Second Captain to show for him the approximate position of the other Rising Sun submarines. Twenty kilometers to the northeast was the Lightning Bolt, twenty kilometers to the southeast the Thundercloud, the three subs forming a triangle, but which was actually a bottle, with Chu’s ship the bottom of the bottle, the other two the sides.

  Much farther to the east, in the Pacific Ocean, were the subs that would act as the bottle cork. The Earthquake, Volcano, and Tsunami. Chu’s Arctic Storm was positioned directly in the path of the approaching American Rapid Deployment Force convoy. If the landing was to be Shanghai, as he was hoping, the convoy would drive right toward him. However, if Tsingtao was their course, it would bring them within two kilometers of the Lightning Bolt, and his Arctic Storm would be south of their track by about twelve kilometers. Similarly, if Hong Kong was their destination, the Thundercloud would be close and he would be off track by twelve kilometers.

  Either way, his three subs would still manage to bottle up the incoming fleet. He hoped central White China was the target, so he could shoot down their throats.

  Sinking three aircraft carriers of the massive Webb class would be glorious.

  With his computer link to the radio gear, Chu had ordered the other subs to their coordinates using an ingenious encryption system—music. He had broadcast old, scratchy American and English rock’n’ roll songs, each one referred to in a code book. The Rolling Stones was the address for the Thundercloud, the Beatles selected for the Volcano, and so on, with individual songs keyed to different preplanned codebook positions. All the while he’d brought no suspicion upon himself from the listening American fleet. And that was for his initial positions.

  If he needed to maneuver the fleet as the Americans approached, he would use VHF bridge-to-bridge radios, having his Korean-speaking first officer come up on the radio as if he were a fishing boat captain speaking to other fishermen, telling them to get out of the way of the convoy, which would risk collision, scare the fish, and possibly dump them in their huge wake waves.

  Chu’s trawlers currently filled the East China Sea.

  “Admiral,” Chen Zhu, the operations officer at the weapons console said, “is it time?” “Yes,” Chu said, his eye on the chart, then on his watch. If he acted too soon, he’d have to turn off the torpedo gyros to keep them from overheating, but if he warmed up the weapons too late, he’d lose vital seconds in the attack sequence. He decided to take the risk.

  “Open all twenty-four outer doors. Apply power to all torpedoes.”

  Chen spoke into his boom mike to the Second Captain, which then reported back to Chu: “All doors coming open, sir, all torpedoes indicate power applied. All gyros are coming up to full revolutions now.”

  “Very good.”

  A tense moment of silence filled the room, only the electronic hum of the consoles and the deep bass roar of the air handlers audible. Then Lieutenant Commander Xhiu Liu, the navigator who stood watch as the sensor-console operator, reported: “Admiral, I have a strong detect on a muffled seven-bladed screw showing up on low-frequency analysis, with high broadband noise from multiple pumps, with high flow noise and several flow-induced resonances. Sir, it’s a 6881-class submerged warship, making way at high speed, headed directly toward us!”

  USS Annapolis, SSN-760

  Captain John Patton leaned over the port chart table aft of the periscope stand and frowned.

  The deck trembled with the power of the main propulsion turbines. At flank speed, the screw turbulence caused the trembling to be transmitted to the huge thrust bearing and to the main motor, from there to the motor foundation to the hull. A couple more hours of shaking like this and the crew would experience severe fatigue.

  Doing a sonar sweep at forty-one knots was like searching for a contact lens on a superhighway at eighty miles per. Every instinct he had screamed at him to slow down and clear the ship’s baffles.

  Except that Admiral Hen
ri’s op order prohibited him even from coming to periscope depth, since that would dramatically slow him down. And the restriction on periscope-depth maneuvers meant that he was driving blind, having no idea what was going on topside. Patton walked his dividers across the big chart display, the electronic points measured to twenty nautical miles. They were now officially in the East China Sea. If USUBCOM’s odd message had any validity at all, anyone waiting for them would be here, inside the protection of the Ryukyu Island chain. Why? Because everyone with a satellite television set knew where the American task force was. No one knew where it would go, but it had to make the turn at the southern island of Japan, south of Yakushima Island, and head on in. This would be the place to find anyone set up for an ambush.

  He had to slow. But he also had to “sweep the sea” for the safety of the task force.

  “Fuck this,” Patton said out loud, raising the eyebrow of tall, skinny Lieutenant Karl Horburg, the young officer of the deck standing on the conn, “Oftsa’deck, slow to ten knots and turn off reactor recirc pumps. Notify Sonar that we’re doing a baffle-clear maneuver. I want a good hard search at ten knots until I say to speed up again.”

  Horburg held up the standing order message from the fleet commander, not saying a word.

  “Yeah, I know,” Patton said, grimacing. “Baffle clear, OOD! Let’s go!”

  Horburg in turn barked to his subordinate. “Helm, all ahead one-third, turns for ten knots, maneuvering stop all reactor recirc pumps! Sonar, Conn, slowing to ten knots, baffle clear!”

  “One-third, Helm, aye, turns for ten, downshift recirc pumps to stop, maneuvering answers, one-third, turns for ten. Recirc pumps will be downshifted as reactor power permits.”

  “Very well. Helm.” Horburg plucked a microphone from the overhead, the mike suspended by a coiled cord.

  “Sonar, Conn, supervisor to control.”

  “Conn, Sonar, aye,” a voice from the overhead speaker announced.

  The helmsman called over his shoulder from his aircraft-style console, “Maneuvering reports all reactor circulation pumps at stop, all pumps coasting down, reactor in natural circulation.”

  “Very well. Helm,” Horburg called.

  Senior Chief Byron Demeers appeared behind Horburg on the conn, a bemused expression on his face.

  “You notice the speed indicator?” Patton said, nodding to the ship-control panel.

  “Yeah! This is great,” Demeers said, a rare smile cracking his features. The chief paused to take a swig of his omnipresent Coke bottle. “A real sonar search. How many minutes are you giving me when we steady on course? And where you turning first?”

  “Take two minutes heading north, then two south,” Patton said in his don’t-argue-with-me voice.

  “Come on. Skipper, give me three minutes each leg,” Demeers said. “Who knows? It could be the difference between finding someone and getting a medal or finding a torpedo in our hull and getting a posthumous medal.”

  “Screw you. Senior Chief. Three minutes. No more.

  Now, get back in your hole and find me a bad guy.”

  Patton’s voice sounded irritated, but Horburg smiled, knowing the captain always sounded like that when he was amused.

  The Annapolis coasted slowly down from forty-one knots to ten. She turned to the north, her BSY-4 sonar system straining to pick up a submerged contact. The nose-cone sonar spherical array, the wide-aperture hull array, and the thin-wire towed narrowband array were all tuned to the slightest noise of the ocean. These in turn fed the onboard supercomputer, the processors displaying, filtering, and analyzing the massive data gathered by the arrays, searching for the manmade noise— the needle in the haystack of nature’s acoustical background.

  For 180 seconds, Byron Demeers added his own ears to the search, listening to each narrowband tonal bearing.

  One was a group of clicking shrimp, the other a lonely whale, one a trawler in the distance, a fourth a fishing boat even farther away. The screen glowed brightly to the east, where one hundred ten ships of the convoy were bearing down on them at thirty-five knots.

  They were putting so much noise in the water that the entire screen from bearing 085 to 095 was blued out with high-intensity broadband noise from the thrashing screws and plowing hulls.

  At the clicking of the third minute on Demeers’ stopwatch, he spoke into his microphone. “Conn, Sonar, ready for leg two.” Dumping his processor buckets in the narrowband sector, he waited for the ship to come around, concentrating on the broadband contacts as the ship turned. His noises remained constant at their bearings, the approaching convoy, if possible, getting even louder as they approached.

  “Sonar, Conn, steady course south.”

  “Conn, Sonar, aye.”

  Another three minutes, another search.

  On 155 hertz, the spike of a narrowband frequency tonal kept growing. The bell tonal could only be manmade, a frequency put into the water by rotating machinery.

  It was a turbine generator perhaps, spinning like a top blown by high-pressure steam, converting thermal energy to mechanical and mechanical to electrical, the high note as pure as an opera singer’s final note.

  “Sonar, Captain, you ready to resume speed and base course?”

  “Captain, Sonar, no,” Demeers said calmly into the microphone, dropping the bombshell. “Conn, Sonar, new narrowband contact, designate sierra two four, 155 hertz bearing zero seven five or two five five, low signal-to-noise ratio, possible submerged warship.”

  SS-403 arctic storm

  “Sir.” Xhiu’s voice from the sensor panel grew more urgent. “The enemy submarine contact is inbound at eighty clicks, distance unknown, but the bearing rate is steady. He’s barreling in at us, sir, distance to track is zero!”

  Chu knew the tone for the entire battle would be determined by his initial response—would he put the crew on edge or reassure them?

  “Very good. Navigator. Continue to track contact, tag number ST-1, and report speed, solution, and distance to track.” ST-1 stood for submarine target number one, Chu’s shorthand in case several contacts cropped up.

  “Ship Control Officer, bring us around to the left, left ten effective degrees rudder, course north, speed twenty-two clicks, depth three hundred meters, and keep the angle gentle.”

  “Aye sir, left ten degrees rudder, course zero zero zero, speed increasing to twenty-two clicks, diving to three hundred meters, flat angle.”

  “Very good. Nav, get a Second Captain target solution.”

  Chu was driving off the track of the target, getting a parallax computer solution to the target using only listening sonar, as the Second Captain’s on-line tactical manual recommended.

  “Aye, sir, solution is crude but shows target ST-1 inbound, seventy-seven clicks, distance thirty-five kilometers.

  Our distance to track is six hundred meters and opening very slowly. He’s going to pass very close, sir.”

  “Very good, Nav. Ship Control, slow to five clicks.”

  “Five clicks, aye. Admiral.” “But, sir,” Xhiu said, “he’ll be coming just a few ship lengths from us. We need to open distance.”

  Be cool, Chu thought. “No, ship silence is more important than distance,” he said.

  “Sir, are you still committed to letting the American submarines go? We never thought they’d come this close. This one may detect us. Maybe we should shoot at him now.” “No,” Chu said. “We’ll let them both go. Otherwise the torpedo noise and explosions will alert the fleet.

  Now, listen up in the control room. Target ST-1 is coming at us like a freight train going full out, and he’s making just as much noise. I sincerely doubt he’ll ever look up to take notice of us. Everyone calm the hell down. Be alert for the second 6881. The fleet’s order of battle showed two escort subs. Also, watch the first one for any sign of a counter-detection.” Please let me know, he thought, if the 688 hears me.

  For the next few minutes Chu waited. His lower left panel remained tuned to the face of Lieut
enant Commander Xhiu Liu, the sensor-panel operator’s face as much an instrument as any Second Captain display. The excitable navigator’s eyes grew wide, one hand to his headset earphone, alarm growing on his face. Chu waited for what seemed an eternity for the man to speak.

  “Nav, what is it?”

  “Admiral, contact ST-1 signal is suddenly growing dim. He’s slowing down. Coasting down, screw turn count coming way down. Sir, I don’t—I don’t know what he’s doing. He’s—” The navigator had begun to sputter.

  Odd, he had such a cool head when doing commando operations, but put a nuclear submarine under him with orders to fight and he grew as fidgety as a six-year-old.

  Perhaps it was his frustration level—during a commando raid a man had control, but up against an enemy sub, only the captain had control.

  “Just watch him,” Chu said calmly, trying to reassure Xhiu.

  “Yessir, still slowing, still slowing.”

  Seconds clicked by like molasses. Chu watched the raw sonar data appearing on the upper right console.

  The processed data—crowded curves and graphs and broadband waterfalls—were crammed into the center right display. He found the 6881, where a pulsing computer cursor outlined it, the narrowband three-dimensional graphs surrounded by thin lines of boxes as the computer outlined the noise to process, looking outward, seeking transients, nailing down the bearing to the vessel. The central god’s-eye view showed his own ship in the center, a blinking diamond symbol marking the estimated position of the enemy submarine.

  “He’s much slower now, sir. The bearing rate is high left—he’s turning. Another sonar contact coming up also, sir. Contact WT-1, multiple contacts, surface warships, bearing 088, bearings very diffuse, a whole range of bearings to the east. On my mother’s blood, they’re everywhere. I’m tracking, must be, no, sir, over a hundred ships! I can’t—”

  “Congratulations, you found the convoy, but what is ST-1 doing?”