“I don’t think so, Captain, One was a hell of a lot softer than the other.”
“Can you get a range?”
The sonarman shook his head. “I don’t think so. Let me run that through the computer.” He was interrupted by a new sound in his earphones. “Don’t go away, Captain. This is a hell of a lot more interesting. I think I got an Alfa here, same bearing, moving out like hell—sounds like a bucket of bolts.”
“Range?”
“Could be as much as fifty miles . . . let me have another minute to play with it.”
“Feed it into the fire control system.” Snow was already through the sliding door into the control room. “Mr.
Lyford, set up for an attack . . . couple of birds in the air.” He reached for the Gertrude mike. “Helena . . . Helena . . . go deep and secure prop . . . go deep and secure prop . . . you are under attack . . . you are under attack.” He handed the speaker to a sailor. “Keep repeating just what I said, son. There’s a chance they’ll hear you . . . a slight chance,” he added wistfully.
Snow wasn’t sure that Houston could have picked up the missile firing with her gear, but he knew Andy Reed would say there was no point in letting them get away. Snow wasn’t giving up his location. There would no telling the type of submarine firing back—if the Russians could hear a missile pop at that range.
In the background, Snow identified the process as the torpedo doors were opened. . . pressure equalized . . . the ordered litany of reports to the fire control coordinator until he heard, “Captain, we’re capable of firing, but our solution is still kind of hazy.”
“Put in six hundred feet. It drops off fast just ahead. I don’t think they can pump out one of these missiles from much deeper than that,” Snow answered. “How much longer?”
“We’ve got a deviation here. Fire control has a range variation of about six thousand yards from Caesar’s. Which one do I take, Captain?”
Snow reached for the phone to the computer center and pressed the buzzer.
“Petersen here,” came the response.
“Carol, we’ve got a range differential on the target. We—”
“I see it on the board, Captain. Wait one . . .” He could overhear her breathing in the background. “Okay, Caesar’s adjusted for a speed of close to twenty knots until the torpedo hits the water. Take his—”
Snow never heard her finish. He was already ordering. “Add six thousand yards to your solution . . . manual input . . . firing point procedures . . .”
“Solution!”
“Shoot.” There was no sensation in the control room as the missiles erupted from Imperator. The tubes were situated so far forward that there was nothing to indicate they were off. Snow’s gamble—that there would be open water for weapon entry—would be considered later.
“Missiles away, Captain . . . flight time should be about four and a half minutes.”
Snow called down to Carol Petersen again. “Can Caesar figure flight time of those Russian missiles to Helena!”
“That an Alfa that fired on her?”
“Sounds like it to us.”
“Caesar said they should be firing sixteens . . . just a second.”
Snow drummed his fingers against the bulkhead. In the background, he could hear the sailor still broadcasting his warning to Helena. That was a slim chance, a very slim one, but anything was worth a try.
“Sir,” the sonarman called in to him, “Helena is making a hell of a lot of noise. Sure could be a terrific target . . .” Snow lost the last of his words as Carol Petersen came back. “Seems like about another two minutes in the air, Captain. No more than that.”
We used to be able to hear a torpedo from the beginning of its run until the end, Snow thought. At least you knew when someone was after you. Now, Helena had no idea of what was headed her way—not until she heard the splash of a torpedo hitting the surface followed by the sound of its screws.
Imperator would have heard the warning if she had been the target. But voice transmissions attenuate rapidly under water and Helena did not. The lone submarine was racing off in the opposite direction in an effort to leave Imperator’s whereabouts a secret. There was no doubt in the minds of any man aboard that they were playing the rabbit, drawing attention to themselves. They also understood that the Russian’s singular response to their presence had to be a torpedo.
Heading back toward the Bering Strait in an arc away from Imperator was her only choice. To continue north would compromise the mission, and the waters to the east and west offered no safety. Yet the water would become shallower as she headed for the strait. Instead of going deeper, the most natural protection for a submarine, she would be gradually decreasing her depth. Her captain kept her keel as close to the sea floor as possible. It was a long shot, but bottom return might just confuse a homing torpedo; yet Helena’s unique noise signature, now made even that suspect.
There was no hesitation in the sonarman’s voice when he called out to Helena’s control room, “I have an object that just hit the water abeam to port, sir.” There was a pause, an interminable one for each one in earshot. The man’s voice became higher as he continued, “Can’t figure out what that is . . . something breaking away maybe . . . wait . . . torpedo in the water . . . bearing two eight zero relative.”
“Right full rudder all ahead flank,” the captain bellowed automatically. He punched the button for maneuvering. “Give me everything you’ve got . . .” His voice drifted off as he listened to the continuing sonar reports.
“High-speed screw . . . it’s in a search mode . . . not a hell of a lot higher off the bottom than we are . . .” The man’s voice droned on, reporting in exactly the same manner as he’d been trained, until he broke off excitedly. “Captain, something else just hit the water . . . same sounds . . . dead ahead . . .”
There was nowhere to run! One was astern, searching. They’d turned away from it. Now there was another in front of them. “Left full rudder.” There was no choice. They had to turn in some direction!
“Both still in search mode . . . wait one—” There was another pause, no more than seconds. The sonarman strained, his eyes closed, his whole being concentrating on the sounds in his headphones. “First one’s range gating.” The torpedo had ceased circling in search of the distinctive sound it was programmed for. It was now aware of its target, “It seems to be on the same course we were before turning . . . maybe it’s after our cavitation . . . now it seems to be turning this way slightly.”
Helena’s noise level was a red flag to a listening torpedo. “All stop. Breach the ship!” The torpedoes were too close, the captain reasoned. They were coming out of their search modes at a depth of two hundred feet going after a high-speed target radiating horrendous noise. Emergency surfacing was the only chance. There was no way those homing devices would stick to the bubbles from Helena’s prop for long. His one remaining choice was to go silent—hope that the torpedoes would lose contact. He felt the deck angling upward. Noisemakers now! “Launch the after signal ejector.”
In the background, the diving officer was speaking calmly to the planesmen. “Increase your angle.” They were going up too slowly!
Helena’s captain closed his eyes momentarily, separating the sounds around him. The sonarman was reporting, “. . . second torpedo has turned in our direction . . . she’s range gating, too . . . closing . . . second torpedo is also turning. . .” For a second he was quiet, then he added, “Captain, I think the second one’s locked on the first, coming right up its tail.”
“More angle!” he shouted, but the bow refused to come up properly. They were losing speed rapidly. The engines had been stopped to silence the noisy prop. With the loss of forward motion, the diving officer was unable to maintain an up angle—soon they would start slipping backward. There would be no choice. Before they plummeted straight back down, they would have to blow all the main ballast tanks! That in itself would create almost as much noise.
The captain grabbed for t
he polished chrome bar, shouting, ‘Emergency! Blow all main ballast tanks!”
“Down angle on the planes,” the diving officer barked as the ship’s control party fought to maintain the proper up bubble. A deep rumble of high-pressure air venting water from the ballast tanks was overpowering.
“Torpedo closing . . . now at about sixteen hundred yards . . . range gate . . . second appears to be following the first . . . noisemaker seems ineffective . . .”
The depth gauge read one hundred feet. The diving officer had brought the planes to a slight up angle. Lost forward motion was regained as the ship’s positive bouyancy propelled Helena toward the surface. Now they were roaring upward on the vented tanks.
“Fire more noisemakers!”
“Captain,” the sonarman called out, “I’ve got both torpedoes in a one second ping interval . . .” The tenor of his voice was increasing as he called out the progress of the two homing weapons.
“Fifty feet,” the diving officer called out. “Prepare to surface.” No one in the control room was moving. Each was caught up in the chase. There was no time to escape. There was only time to wait, to see if the torpedoes would pass below them.
“First torpedo’s in a continuous range gate. Captain, she’s onto us for sure.” His voice was now a squeaky, high-pitched tremor, fear overpowering his training. “The other’s lost in the return from the first . . . it’s following . . .”
“We’re on the surface.” Helena burst onto the rough Chukchi Sea like a balloon, floe ice rearing into the air before crashing down on her hull. An observer would have been overwhelmed by the sounds that echoed across the silent water—Helena breaking the surface, the roar of ice falling back on the hull, and then the deafening blast as the first torpedo detonated fifty feet forward of Helena’s stem. Seconds later, it was followed by the roar of a second, which had burst somewhere inside the hole blown by the first.
The initial blast opened the engineering spaces to the ocean. Water poured through fractured bulkheads, rolling the submarine clumsily to port. The second torpedo lifted Helena by the stern, her bow disappearing below the surface. Water rushed through engineering spaces on all decks, covering machinery, filling the reactor space, shorting out electrical wiring, ripping away successive bulkheads.
In the control room, men were tossed about like rag dolls with each blast. None were spared. Handholds vanished, dumping men on top of each other as the bow plunged under the surface. Then, the submarine slipped backward, the flooding aft hauling her stem downward. Emergency lights briefly illuminated the chaos to those still aware before they were tumbled backwards. The captain’s skull had been crushed when he was thrown into the periscope. But there was no longer any purpose for orders. The final sounds were screams of pain and fear as Helena’s bow rose quickly at a sharp angle. The control spaces filled with water as the submarine rolled to starboard, holding just for a moment on her side before she turned belly up, and slid backward out of sight.
The picture of Helena’s demise was quite accurate in Imperator’s control room. While a detached voice from sonar described the submarine’s frantic race with the torpedoes, Caesar displayed an animated projection of the entire sequence on the holographic imager. The silence that descended through the control room was all the more pronounced by the horror pictured for them. The idea of surfacing at the last moment to avoid the closing torpedoes was not entirely original—it had been theorized in the past—but it had never before been attempted by a nuclear submarine. The one argument against making this last-minute effort was simply that the noise created by high-pressure air rushing into the main ballast tanks could be as attractive to a homing warhead as that of the propeller.
Caesar was not programmed to picture how a submarine would appear as it was breaking up. For the sake of everyone in the control room, Hal Snow thanked his lucky stars. The final horror was difficult enough for those listening on the sonar.
For those in the engineering spaces of Helena, it was a quick death. Any survivors must have been killed by the second blast. It would have been longer in the forward spaces it the watertight doors to the engineering spaces held—at least for those who survived the battering as the submarine tossed about in her death throes.
Snow studied the chart, slowly circling the approximate spot where Helena had gone down—no more than three hundred feet! God—if the watertight doors held, there was a chance some of those forward could still be alive. The hull would hold at more than five times that depth. He asked his XO very quietly, so that no one would overhear them, to send a communications buoy to the surface giving Helena’s coordinates. Perhaps something could still be done.
Snow gradually became aware of a change in the atmosphere of the control room. His spirits were buoyed by the familiar words from the fire control officer . . . torpedo should be separated and in search mode now.” While he had been overcome momentarily by a part of the submarine world he’d never before experienced—the death of a boat—Imperator’s missiles had continued on their programmed track. Now it became a mission of revenge.
Quite similar to the Soviet missile in operation, the American weapons separated from the rocket and drifted by parachute to, the open water below. As soon as the protective nose cone had broken away, the torpedo went into its search mode, actively seeking the target inserted in its memory banks.
“Do you hold the torpedo?” Snow called out. “Negative, Captain. All I’ve got is a Soviet Alfa charging away from us.”
“Carol,” he called down to the computer center. “Have you got anything down there?”
“I don’t think we’re going to get anything but the Alfa on that bearing, Captain. Caesar agreed with you and sent those birds just ahead of the Russian. They should have plunked down in a lead about three thousand yards directly on his bow. The Alfa should be between the torpedo and us. No way to hear it now—”
“I got something here, Captain.” It was the sonarman shouting above the commotion in the control room. “That Russian just turned on the horses. Can’t tell yet, but I’ll bet he’s just about lying on his side trying to turn away from that fish . . . probably diving, too.”
The Alfa had been distant enough from Helena so that there was little she could hear during her torpedo’s attack. Seratov must have fired also, for there was no doubt that two torpedoes had detonated. Then they heard the telltale sounds of a submarine in peril . . . and finally the propeller sounds that had first attracted them were silent.
The euphoria overspreading Smolensk’s control room was short lived. A panicked sonarman, his string of words repeated constantly, was shouting, “Torpedo dead ahead . . . torpedo . . . torpedo . . .” The man echoed himself, screaming the word long after the captain had thrown his rudder hard right and called for a crash dive.
“Stop him,” the captain bellowed at the top of his lungs, jabbing his finger in the direction of the sonarman.
An officer clipped the man in the side of the head with a closed fist, knocking him to the deck. Another placed the headset over his own ears, eyes widening as he stared back at the captain. “It’s locked on,” he shouted over the commotion about him. The submarine seemed as if it would stand on end as it dived at high speed to evade. “Turning with us . . . must be same depth . . .” His eyes grew wider as he realized there was no escape. Their forward motion as the torpedo entered the water gave the weapon the advantage. By the time the Soviet submarine began evading, the torpedo was already too close. They couldn’t accelerate rapidly enough. It was a catch-up race . . . but the torpedo won.
The torpedo hit amidships with a violent blast that rocked Smolensk sideways. Bursting lights darkened the control room, then emergency lighting snapped on to reveal bodies strewn about the deck. The captain rose to his knees, shouting, “Damage reports!”
Silence was his only answer. Then the groans of the injured began, rising in volume as they comprehended their situation. Smolensk was still diving. “Up angle,” the captain shouted.
> There was no movement. An agonized scream from the other end of the room increased the frenzy, squelching any further orders from the captain. He dragged himself over to the control panel on a broken leg, yanking back on the diving planes. Still there was no movement. He jerked harder but the resistance was steady and he was too weak. He glanced up at the depth indicator. Nothing—the glass had been shattered, the dial jammed near five hundred meters. Impossible! It wasn’t that deep here.
They were still going down.
“Back engines,” the captain bellowed. He was greeted only by the sounds of agony and fear. He pushed the annunciator to “Back Full.”
He thought that there seemed to be an answer from engineering. He listened for the high-pitched whine of reversing engines . . . but there was nothing. Smolensk was plummeting toward the bottom, her angle and speed increasing. In a moment . . .
That was his last thought as he was catapulted forward into the fire control panel. The glass shattered around his face as Smolensk impaled herself on the ocean bottom, her seams tearing open to admit the icy waters . . .
Smolensk’s death throes were evident in Imperator’s sonar room, as each of the telltale sounds described in detail how the Russian sub died. The Soviets had exhibited great confidence in their Alfas. They felt they were the equal of any American submarine they came in contact with. They’d never cataloged the abilities of Imperator.
To the north, another Soviet submarine had been listening to those last fateful minutes. Abe Danilov and the men in Seratov had recorded each event that had taken place to analyze later. There was no doubt that both missiles, Seratov’s and Smolensk’s had hit their target. The noise emanating from the wounded sub’s prop had been akin to waving a red flag. But the shot that had gotten Smolensk was something else to consider, beyond the fact that finding open water was pure luck!
Imperator was more than fifty miles away, so her listening capabilities had to be fantastic if she sensed Smolensk’s location, and her missiles even more amazing if she had been able to hit an Alfa at that range, one that was running full speed in the opposite direction and diving. The evasive tactics executed by both submarines were unknown to Danilov; they had been too distant to hear anything but the final moments. For Danilov, this was his first brush with the new American submarine, and it was impressive, teaching him two things: Imperator could detect an Alfa as if they were next to each other, and it could strike at unknown ranges with an uncanny ability to locate openings in what should have been an almost impenetrable ice pack.
Silent Hunter Page 19