“TAO, ASWE. USS Chafee was hot-pumping her helo when we called. Anticipate ten minutes before pouncer can be on station.” The squadron’s always at the ready SH-60R Seahawk dipping sonar ASW helicopter was in the midst of refueling, another note of either bad luck or excellent timing on the part of the North Koreans. Their own Firescout UAV would be up before the other destroyer’s helicopter could assist them.
“TAO, aye.” He turned back to Edwards and the Captain, the question still in the Senior Chief’s eyes. “Those subs are too damn close to us. If we shoot, they’ll shoot, and the odds are we’ll be screwed. If they let us put a little distance between us and them, and maybe even get a couple of helos in the air, the odds shift in our favor. So we turn away, keep track on them, and try to set ourselves up for a better engagement while not making ourselves into even more of a target than we already are.”
“But what if the only reason they haven’t fired yet is that they’re firming up their weapons solution? If we fire first and force them to evade, we can wreck their targeting.”
Both Nathan and Edwards pointedly refused to look at the CO, and he, just as stubbornly, said nothing, seeing how his two warfighters would hash it out. “Those subs are so close, they could put their fish on circle search without any targeting, and they’d still get us. No, Senior. We crawl away. We’ll shoot if forced and fight with helos and P-8’s if they’ll let us.” He left unsaid whether or not it was likely the North Koreans would allow them to complete their escape. Captain Jones simply nodded and squeezed both men on the shoulder in silent, unquestioning support as they turned back to their consoles.
Their enemy then rendered the argument pointless.
“All stations, Sonar! I have launch transients from both subs!”
“Bridge, TAO! Flank speed! Conduct Hargrove turn and launch countermeasures. ASWE, TAO! Counterfire! Shoot—shoot—shoot!”
The dark triangular bulk of the ship sounded a higher pitched whine as her gas turbines ramped up, and her electrically driven, twin controllable pitch screws chewed deeper and faster through the sea, churning the water astern into white foam. The Rivero began to loop around in a tight turn to cross her own wake, while noisemakers and bubble generators launched themselves from the bridge wings and disrupted the water further, all in an attempt to confuse the enemy torpedoes and hide the relatively slow moving bulk of the destroyer. From both sides of the ship, a pair of torpedoes popped out and slid into the water, coming to life and seeking out the enemy like a pod of orcas hunting a couple of whales. Astern, the men manning the miniature anti-torpedo torpedo rails kept aim on where sonar held the enemy weapons, through the blue-white rooster tail kicking up from the stern, ready to shoot when they came in range.
As bad as the situation was, the Rivero still had a chance. Their countermeasures were as good as the lopsided physics of the situation could make them, and their own Mk-54B torpedoes would ensure that there would not be more than one additional salvo coming for them. It was an accepted part of modern naval warfare that vessels rarely engaged one another directly. Instead, they lunged and parried by proxy, their smart weapons doing the lion’s share of the seeking and destroying. It was the ship’s responsibility to position those weapons and set them up for success. In this, Nathan Kelley and his combat team excelled, but the enemy could not always be counted on to play fair.
It did not seem possible, but the sonar operator grew even more shrill. “Combat, Sonar! Flying Fish! Flying Fish! Enemy torpedoes are super-cavs!”
“Shit. Bridge, TAO! Cancel Hargrove. Steady on 090 and standby for hard turn to 180.” Nathan suddenly found it hard to hear the nets over the pounding of his own heart, but the bridge heard him and he felt the ship heel over as it reversed its maneuver and settled onto its new course due east. Everything vibrated as the destroyer clawed at the water in her bid to escape.
Supercavitation. Torpedoes already had a speed advantage over nearly any kind of ship, 50 to 60 knots versus 25 to 30. The engagements still moved at a snail’s pace compared to aerial battles or duels with cruise missiles, however. Supercavitating torpedoes, super-cavs, blurred that distinction. By using a rocket motor rather than screws or propulsors, and by encasing the body of the torpedo in a drag-free layer of continuously generated steam, the torpedo left the viscous confines of the ocean and acted like an underwater missile. Now rather than a twenty or thirty knot advantage, the enemy weapons had a two hundred knot advantage. Fired from only a few miles away, there was no time for countermeasures, no time for maneuvers, and almost no time to think.
Nathan’s and Rivero’s sole advantage was that super-cavs, or “Flying Fish”, were nearly blind and could barely maneuver even if they could see beyond their enveloping sheath of gas. Newer Flying Fish had sensors and spars that extended out of the gas bubble, allowing them to both see and turn. He bet that, surprised as he had been by the North Koreans having super-cavs at all, they probably would not have the latest model. If he could coax the torpedoes to commit to full speed on one line of bearing, it might be possible to turn the ship at the last instant to offset the blast. But he also knew that the North Koreans would be aware of their weapons’ limitations and would likely have accounted for them.
He watched the ten subsurface tracks held on sonar. Four were his, en route to the two tracks furthest out, the enemy subs. The last four formed a staggered line, showing up as question marks rather than the usual symbology since they were not behaving according to the normal kinematics of submerged contacts. The whole world paused as they began to merge with Rivero’s symbol at the center of the display.
“Bridge, TAO! Turn!”
USS Rivero tilted over toward the outside of her desperate course change to starboard. The stern of the ship nearly skipped through the water as she came about at 34 knots with a hard rudder angle. From the ASW Countermeasures compartment at her fantail, Torpedomen began to fire countertorp after countertorp down into the path of the Flying Fish.
The first torpedo streaked past Rivero, detonating 100 yards off her port side, turning the water into a globe of pure white that imploded and then erupted in a column of spray hundreds of feet high. The destroyer was rung like a bell, pushed laterally by over ten feet. Loose gear rocketed through the air, along with anyone not secured in a seat. Captain Jones, who was braced for shock but not strapped down, was thrown over a row of consoles and down to the deck. Sparks exploded from some of the panels and the lights actually brightened as the normal, dim sources in CIC went out and the emergency supplies to all the lights came on.
The second torpedo went far afield, detonating 500 yards away. The third fell victim to the swarm of anti-torpedo torpedoes, with four of the miniscule devices detonating in its path. The supercavitating torpedo’s gas bubble was ripped away and a combination of shaped charge jets and a water hammer moving at 240 knots ripped the torpedo apart. It never detonated.
The fourth torpedo slid beneath Rivero’s violently maneuvering stern as if destiny had willed it there. The underwater rocket detonated, blowing a spherical hollow in the water below the destroyer’s aft keel. The screws sped up into a blur, freed from their watery prison, followed immediately by the buckling of both shafts. Thousands of tons of mass, now unsupported by the buoyant ocean, sagged down amidships and snapped the ship’s spine.
Then, even above the sound of screeching steel and screaming men, there came the roar of water rushing back into the void. Hydrodynamics coalesced the collapsing sphere of liquid into a beautiful, terrible lance of pure, incompressible force. The lance speared the already broken back of the ship and erupted upwards through deck upon deck, emerging in a fountain of destructive energy from the middle of Rivero’s hangar.
Rivero collapsed back into the water, her after third shorn away in a blast of twisted, torn, burning metal. The stern of the ship sank in less than a minute, greedily claiming everyone stationed inside. The bodies of the flight deck crew and wrecked hulk of the autonomous Firescout-II helo were launched
several hundred yards. None of them survived intact.
The forward two thirds of the Rivero wallowed in relative peace. The hangar crew and the engineers who had faced the blast directly were no longer even recognizable as bodies. Water flooded into open spaces, past sprung doors and hatches and into the forward half of the ship, even as oil and sewage spilled back out into the sea. Throughout the ship, the few survivors who remained conscious set about organizing themselves to make it out to the life rafts and to evacuate everyone they could. They stopped any real attempt at damage control once they realized there was no way to stop the ship from going down, nor could they tell if it was going down in five minutes or fifty.
Unseen by any aboard, either because they were unconscious, dead, or too busy to worry about being attacked again, there was a sequence of four more explosions a couple of miles away to the north and to the west. These eruptions were followed by a pair of spreading oil slicks, some debris, and nothing more. The dark, wind tossed sea returned to a state of calm without further attacks upon the doomed destroyer.
Five minutes later, Chafee’s helicopter hovered into view to face a scene sailors had only regarded in nightmares since the end of the Second World War. Pitifully few of the Rivero’s bright orange inflatable life rafts floated around her rolling, sinking wreckage. It was another twenty minutes before USS Chafee herself arrived, with Halsey and Port Royal showing up to render aid soon thereafter.
LT Nathaniel Robert Kelley, Weapons Officer of the former USS Rivero, kept his haunted eyes upon her grave long after she slipped beneath the waves.
3: “ZINGER”
June 15, 2034; Lee Estate; Santa Cruz, California
Looking up at the redwood shrouded main house, Nathan Kelley realized this had to go down as the weirdest damned job interview in history. If he had known the process would be quite this … complicated, he doubted he would have ever responded to Windward Technologies’ invitation to that first meeting.
That initial interview had been almost painfully normal. The Windward representative had come out to Boston as part of a larger science and technology job fair along with a score of other companies like Lockheed, Raytheon, and Orbital Sciences. Nathan—like a few hundred other prospective candidates—was finishing up his Master’s degree at MIT, ready to begin the next chapter of his life. Having come from a now aborted career in the Navy, he had been older than his competition and not a perpetual student.
His Windward meet-and-greet had been utterly typical interview fodder, blending in with his dozen or so other attempts to sell himself to corporate America that day:
“What are your goals, Mr. Kelley?”
“What are your best and worst qualities, Mr. Kelley?”
“Why should Windward hire you, Mr. Kelley?”
Nathan had left the job fair less than hopeful about the possibility of Windward calling him back, so he had gone back to school and finished the final draft of his thesis. There were no nibbles from Windward Technologies, so he had moved on to other applications, other prospects, targeting résumés to every tech-firm that might remotely be hiring.
It was so different from the Navy, where your career path was often laid out in stone. That regimented military existence had proved his undoing, however, a discordant note of calm in the white noise of life following the sinking. He had simply been unable to go back to the routine of service stateside, and the war would not keep him as damaged goods. The reason they gave for medically discharging him was post traumatic stress disorder, but Nathan knew there were other reasons as well. They were the reasons that went unsaid, the reasons related to the furtive, accusatory stares of doubt other officers gave him when they thought he could not see them, stares that would continue for the rest of his career, cleared by a board of inquiry or not.
So he had given it all up, and after a brief respite in his Pennsylvania hometown, he had sought a new existence as a student and engineer, essentially rebooting his life at the not insignificant age of 30 years old. Leaving was a big change, an unanticipated change, but a welcome one. It did necessitate some adjustment. Life in the civilian sector could be so much more uncertain, precarious even.
But in the civilian world, no one shattered your whole world in a single act of cold anger and your ambiguous split-second decisions did not lead to the deaths of 103 subordinates, shipmates, and friends. In the civilian world, perhaps he would no longer wake up in a clammy sweat, shaking from half-remembered dreams of rending steel and screaming, faceless men.
Precarious. He was fine with precarious.
On the day after graduation, while packing up his small office at the university, a welcome—though unexpected—call had come, starting him upon an extremely odd journey into the world of corporate job-seeking: “Mr. Kelley, would you mind traveling to Windward’s New York office for a second interview?”
That interview, like his first, had been deceptively normal, just the corporate machine getting to know one of their potential cogs a little better. Nathan had smiled and nodded, answering their questions as best he could and trying his utmost to exude an air of professional competence. The New York office Human Resources director had smiled back, clearly impressed. “That was very good, Mr. Kelley. Would you mind taking a short written exam?”
Again, not too unusual. Nathan supposed that many companies wanted to test their candidates to find out if their degrees were more than just sheets of paper. The test had covered a gamut of topics: physics, biology, math, chemistry, systems engineering, politics, sociology, and finance. It was not terribly difficult, but it had stretched his limited academic background. He figured it might have been a great deal harder for someone else, someone whose life experience before MIT had not been so diverse.
“Excellent job, Mr. Kelley! How about flying down to our Dallas offices for another interview?” They also put up the offer of per diem compensation for all his time, so Nathan shrugged and agreed, still happy to have gotten past the first interview, the second interview, and then the test. And now another interview in another city, for what was for all intents and purposes a relatively entry-level position in Windward Technologies engineering management program. It was then that the first pangs of doubt and anxious bewilderment hit him.
Did everyone go through such a rigorous process?
The meeting in Dallas had been more than odd. There, he met Windward’s Dallas VP, and the interview had gone far afield in both scope and location. They met in the VP’s corner office downtown and covered much of the same interview territory that had been asked in the first and second interviews. Then they had gone for lunch in the West End and the interview shifted to Nathan’s personal life: Thirty-two, small town boy, single, never married, no kids, but wants the full package later, looking for the right girl, in no hurry, love to fish, love baseball, love movies, love reading, love science fiction.
“Science fiction?” Nathan’s inadvertent admission had led to a literary discussion that lasted throughout the afternoon as they walked around downtown Dallas, down past the JFK memorial, and back up into the financial district. At times, it seemed as if the poor executive was simply starved for attention, keeping Nathan talking just so he would not have to go back to his dreary office. It ended in a somewhat awkward silence, almost like the end of a blind date, and Nathan was unsure what to do or say as the sun began to set. The VP finally turned to him and broke the silence with, “What would you think of going down to Pensacola for some physical exams?”
As long as Windward footed the bill, Nathan was game. Thus he had gone to Pensacola to be poked and prodded, but it did not end there. Then it was back to Dallas for a series of much more in depth written and oral exams, then back to New York for a polygraph, a psychological battery, and a security screening which made his Naval background investigation appear narrow in comparison. Then there was yet another interview, this time in Washington DC and mainly concerned with his military background. That one had made him the most uncomfortable, but, thankfully,
they had largely avoided any discussion of the Rivero or the war with North Korea.
And now this. If this was not the final interview, Nathan knew he was done. He was either hired today, or he would finally walk away from the whole process. Of course, this was probably the last step regardless. How many more hurdles could there be after an interview at the CEO’s own home?
Gordon Elliot Lee, the founder and Chief Executive Officer of Windward Technologies Incorporated, lived in a large two-story home of cedar, stone, and glass. It was bigger than a house, but too small for a mansion, fitting into its own category as the perfect size for a single California billionaire entrepreneur. The main house led a phalanx of other buildings: a pair of guest houses on either side of the main house, barns, garages, greenhouses, and what appeared to be a large domed observatory, all of which cut into a rocky hillside of coastal redwoods and seemingly natural drifts of yellow, purple, and white flowers. At the very edge of perception, identified by the smells of salt and sea in the air, Nathan could hear the crash of waves upon rocks, from a beach no doubt beyond the house and estate.
He parked the rental hybrid next to a battered truck that he doubted could ever pass California’s emission and fuel efficiency standards. The gravel of the drive gave way to a landscaped walk lined with manicured plots of floral excess and a slate-walled porch. Taking a deep breath to settle nerves that had once again been set afire with anxiety, Nathan knocked loudly upon the front door. A blurred image soon appeared beyond the door’s translucent stained glass and it opened to reveal a smiling Gordon Lee, wiping his hands on a faded, threadbare apron.
Lee was wiry, and fit in a way that seemed to have come from work rather than working out. His features gave a hint of his Asian heritage, making it hard to discern his exact age, while his balding head and graying hair belied his nearly sixty years—a lifetime which had seen Lee’s sharp business and technical acumen turn Windward from a garage sideline into a Fortune 100 corporation.
A Sword Into Darkness Page 3