Barracuda: Final Bearing mp-4

by Michael Dimercurio

  The periscope suddenly broke through, the horizon showing up, if still blurry, from the rotation of the platform.

  Tanaka slowed the rotation and looked out for close contacts. There were none, only the supertanker in the distance, heading away to the southeast as it made its way to Japan.

  Satisfied that there were no other ships on the surface, Tanaka studied the supertanker.

  “Sonar shows the torpedoes pinging on their target, sir.”

  Tanaka saw the supertanker explode before sonar heard it. The white mushroom cloud blossomed into an orange-and-black flame cloud as the oil hold detonated.

  Tanaka could feel the blast shaking the ship as the shock wave traveled through the water.

  Then the second torpedo hit.

  “Mr. First, you should see this,” Tanaka said, not wanting to watch anymore.

  Mazdai looked out the periscope, watching the supertanker on fire. The Second Captain displays showed the view out of the periscope, the flames rising miles into the sky, the supertanker sinking, breaking in half, the bow vanishing from view, the aft section going down by the forward section, the superstructure, when it was visible, tilting upward as the ship drove into the sea. More of the hull vanished underwater, until all that was visible was a part of the superstructure and the stern, the huge screw and rudder pointing to the sky, the structure lit by the light of the fires from the oil. Soon that was gone too, the ship sinking and taking with it most of the flames, the remaining oil slick still naming but at a fraction of the brightness of the supertanker.

  It had taken ten minutes for the supertanker to explode and disappear.

  “It’s over for us,” Mazdai said as the ship went deep again, the order given to avoid fouling the periscope optics on the oil slick. “They sank a supertanker—”

  “Don’t panic, Mr. First,” Tanaka said, his voice flat. “There are still the Russian airlifts to resupply us. It may not be enough to keep us prosperous, but with the airlifts Japan will survive.”

  NARITA AIRPORT

  TOKYO, JAPAN

  The first missile hit the Firestar fighter escorting the Russian Ilyushin transport on final approach to Narita International Airport. The transport was the first of the planes to be flown from Russian Republic airfields in support of the Japanese. The pilot of the transport. Col. Ushi Valenka, saw the runway ahead by only a halfmile, the lights of it guiding him down. He saw the missile from the Americans hit the Firestar escort. The moron flying that fighter had taken Valenka’s missile.

  Valenka looked over at the port wing, where the second Firestar fighter was escorting the flight into Narita Airport.

  As he watched, a flame trail slammed into the Firestar, which exploded in a spectacular fireball a single wingspan away, pieces of the Firestar falling into the fields below.

  Valenka concentrated on the runway ahead. He was almost there. If he could get the airplane on the ground, could he fly out, or would the Americans try to blow up the airplane when it was empty and leaving Japan? The lights of the runway threshold came toward him. He throttled up, his altitude too low, trying to keep his mind on the landing gear that would soon hit the runway, trying to keep the airplane in the center of the concrete strip.

  The missile hit the Ilyushin below the tail, blowing it off. The airplane dived for the deck, the runway coming up swiftly and smashing into the windshield. The cockpit blew apart, and Valenka’s brief luck gave out as well.

  The fuel in the wings exploded in a fireball that rained down on the runway, the missile explosion still spending itself. Nothing was left of the Iluyshin or of Valenka but smoking metal parts lying in flames on the runway.

  JDA HEADQUARTERS

  TOKYO, JAPAN

  “So may I assume we are in agreement?” Prime Minister Hosaka Kurita asked.

  Adm. Akagi Tanaka sadly realized he had no real argument to offer Kurita. History and destiny had once again led Japan to this threshold of war. Tragic, but how could he suggest they not fight? The die had been cast.

  All he could do was fight honorably and pray that his son, Toshumi, survived.

  SEA OF JAPAN

  SS-810 WINGED SERPENT

  Tanaka had kept the American submarine under surveillance since the sinking of the supertanker. He had been called to mast-broach depth by an emergency transmission on the extremely low-frequency radio, the set able to receive radio signals even though the antenna was deep, the radio waves generated by a powerful set of huge antennae on Japan’s northern coastline. The ELF radio waves, since they were such low frequency, took a long time to send a signal, one alphanumeric symbol taking three minutes to be received. The two-number signal was received into the Second Captain, which called Tanaka in his stateroom.

  Tanaka walked into the control room and ordered Mazdai to bring the ship to mast-broach depth. He waited until the ship’s UHF antenna in the periscope received the emergency transmission from the director of the JDA.

  Unrestricted warfare against the Americans. Tanaka would start with the sub that sank the supertanker.

  “Battlestations, Mr. First.”

  SEA OF JAPAN

  USS CHEYENNE

  “Secure battlestations, XO. Station normal underway watches. I want a section-tracking team stationed in control at all times, though, for the rest of the time we’re in the Oparea.”

  “Aye, sir.”

  Keebes returned to his stateroom, shut the door behind him and dropped the portable sink behind the door.

  He ran water in the basin and splashed it on his face.

  He thought he would throw up.

  How many men had he just killed? The images of the sinking supertanker would not fade. He shut his eyes for a moment, never aware that if he had opened them, if he had been able to see through the bulkhead of his stateroom, through the hull of the ship and through seven miles of ocean, he would be staring at an incoming Nagasaki torpedo bearing down on him.

  * * *

  “Nagasaki in tube one is away. Captain. Lining up to fire unit two.”

  “Wait one, Mr. First,” Tanaka said. “Let’s see what the American does.”

  The control room crew sat in their control chairs watching the Second Captain displays, waiting for the indication that the torpedo was detecting its target.

  “Detect and homing on the target, sir.”

  “Very well, Mr. First.” Tanaka scowled. The force should have been ordered to attack days before, not now that the aircraft-carrier force was within spitting distance of the Home Islands. As soon as the American submarine was put on the bottom, he would run at maximum speed to intercept the aircraft carrier. He wanted that carrier.

  “Any detection of our weapon by the target?”

  “Not yet. Captain,” Mazdai said. “He hasn’t changed speed or course.”

  “Very good.”

  The crew waited, the second Nagasaki ready for employment.

  * * *

  Keebes yawned, drying off his face. It was only a little after 1900 local time but he was tired. He considered going to the wardroom to screen a movie with the off watch officers but decided to hit the rack.

  He was half-asleep when the circuit-one blasted over his head.

  “TORPEDO IN THE WATER; TORPEDO IN THE WATER! MAN BATTLESTATIONS!”

  Keebes ran to control.

  “Sir, incoming torpedo bearing north, I’ve got it in the edge of the starboard baffles, running at flank speed.”

  “Set up to counterfire down the bearing line, Mr. Becker,” Keebes said, staring hard at Becker, seeing his panic right below the surface. “Come on, line-of-sight mode on Pos Two, bearing north, set the range at five miles. That’s it.”

  Keebes stepped up on the periscope platform. “Attention in control, snapshot tube three, assumed target bearing north. Ready, Mr. Becker?”

  Jensen arrived in control barefoot and in boxer shorts, putting on his wire-rimmed glasses, his contact lenses obviously out for the night.

  “Ready, Captain.”


  “Snapshot tube three!”

  Becker fired the tube-three torpedo at the phantom target, the one Keebes had guessed, at least to get a torpedo out there. The torpedo launch transient didn’t seem as loud this time, perhaps because it caught Keebes by surprise.

  “Set up tube four for another snapshot!”

  Keebes intended to keep pumping them out. He could always get a reload, but if he got hit by a Japanese torpedo his own weapons would be useless on the bottom of the sea. And if he kept shooting torpedoes, the crew would be distracted by the activity, since the only thing he could do as a torpedo closed in on him was run from it, as Becker already had done.

  Either the torpedo ran out of fuel, or they died. There was nothing more he could do.

  “Snapshot tube four,” Keebes ordered. The second counterfired torpedo was fired. “XO, get a SLOT buoy loaded, put a message in the disk that we’re being fired on and get it out to Fleet command.”

  The sound of the torpedo’s sonar came through the hull then. The high pitched squeal of it was horrible to hear. And if the torpedo was so close that he could hear its pinging… He tried to keep his face impassive, but what he was thinking was that he was not ready to die.

  They had been right in the fleet briefings. There was no running from a Nagasaki torpedo.

  The sound of the torpedo sonar changed from a high pitched ping to a siren sound, no longer transmitting and listening, just transmitting. It had to be extremely close.

  Keebes glanced at his watch. It told the date as well as the time. Christmas was only four days away, his kids’ toys would be opened without him…

  “Set up for a snapshot, tube one,” he ordered.

  But the explosion came then, the deck of the Cheyenne ripping open, the lights going out, the blast wave bending Keebes, head first, into the steel of the overhead.

  The hull came completely open, the torpedoes two decks below went up in sympathetic detonation with the Nagasaki warhead explosion. The hull of the Cheyenne came apart in two pieces, though there was little left of the bow section, and the middle where the sail had once been was blown into fragments by the huge torpedo warhead and the other warheads’ explosive charges. The aft section of the ship dived for the bottom, going down in a thousand fathoms of water, the aft-section hull imploding at crush depth of slightly more than 2000 feet. When Cheyenne hit the sandy bottom it was little more than twisted high tensile steel sheeting. The sail landed intact a halfmile to the south of the stern section. The bow, the sonar sphere and the tunnel that led to it went into the sand six feet. The bottom between the bow and stern section was littered with wires, valves, computer cards, glass, books, severed body parts and boots.

  A small piece of debris the size of a baseball bat, pinned under a heavy technical manual, was hit by another falling piece of debris. The debris, a sheet of glass, knocked the manual aside, and a cylinder began to rise, to float to the surface. It had been the SLOT buoy, the one-way transmission unit that Jensen had been coding the message into when the torpedo hit the ship. Forty feet to the north, a body was pinned below a section of jaggedly ripped steel. The torso had a set of gold submariner’s dolphins pinned to it and an embroidered patch below the pin. The letters on the patch spelled the word KEEBES.

  SS-810 WINGED SERPENT

  “Sir, the enemy submarine is down. We’ve confirmed the breakup of the hull.” Mazdai made the report from the sensor consoles at the aft port corner of the room.

  “Status of the weapons he counterfired?” Tanaka asked, standing on the periscope platform.

  “Both far off to the west, Captain. One is shutting down now, probably out of fuel. The other is circling, confused.”

  With the Destiny’s double-hull design, Tanaka thought, he could probably take a direct hit from one of the small American torpedoes and keep going. His ship systems would be hurt but he would not have a hole in the inner hull.

  “Let me know when the second unit shuts down, and keep the Second Captain looking for other American submarines. Have a track calculated for the trip to the east side of the islands.”

  “Yes, Captain. Sir, second torpedo unit has shutdown. It looks like it is breaking up, imploding as it sinks.”

  “Make your course 250 degrees true and take ship speed to full ahead.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Tanaka stared at the electronic chart table, adjusting the scale to show the entire Home Islands, the location of the American aircraft-carrier battle group pulsing in blue about sixty miles from Tokyo Bay. That was where he had to get. But at least his orders were different now. He had permission to do his job — unrestricted submarine warfare against the American fleet.

  Because after the supertanker exploded, no supply ship would dare cross into the exclusion zone until every last ship in the American task force was on the bottom.

  JAPAN OPAREA

  FIFTY NAUTICAL MILES EAST OF POINT NOJIMAZAKI

  USS RONALD REAGAN

  “Admiral?” Paully White was at Pacino’s stateroom’s open door.

  “Come on in, Paully.”

  “Intel photos, sir.” White put the photos down on the small table in the center of the stateroom. “Supertanker went down hard. Two hits. Look at this. The oil slick is washing toward Japan now.”

  “Not pretty,” Pacino said heavily. “What about survivors?”

  “No lifeboats ever came down. No one got out of the ship alive.”

  “Did we get a situation report from the Cheyenne?”

  “No, sir. We should have heard an hour ago, but if I know Keebes, he probably just wanted to get out of the area before he transmitted anything about the sinking.”

  “Any word from President Warner?”

  “White House has been informed. No new orders.”

  Pacino thought about Wadsworth. The C.N.O was probably blaming him for the supertanker. Of course, stateside, its sinking was probably seen as a sign that the US meant business, but to Pacino the blockade had failed if the first ship tried to break through. He told himself that no other ships would try that, at least not for a while.

  “Admiral?” The enlisted messenger stood at the doorway.

  “Yes, what is it?”

  “Flash message for you, sir, downloaded to your Writepad.”

  “I’ll get it.”

  Pacino had turned off the unit to recharge the battery. Now he turned it on and heard its urgent alarm calling him to get his E-mail. There on the screen he saw a fragmented message:

  202037 Z DEC

  FLASH FLASH FLASH FLASH FLASH FLASH FLASH FLASH

  FM USS CHEYENNE SSN-773

  TO C.N.O WASHINGTON, DC // COMPACFORCE // COMUSUBCOM

  SUBJ NAVY BLUE OPERATION ENLIGHTENED CURTAIN SECRET

  /BT//

  1. UNDER ATTACK FROM SUBMARINE UNIT OF JMSDF.

  2. POSITION APPROXIMATE AT

  “That’s it?” Pacino said.

  Paully White scanned it, looking at his watch.

  “That message is a half-hour old yet it’s marked flash. And it’s partial. The time on the date-time group is just about an hour after Cheyenne sank the supertanker. You don’t think—”

  “It’s right there. In black and white. The Cheyenne been attacked and it’s on the bottom.”

  The phone rang. Pacino answered it, listened and stood. “Aye, sir.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “Bridge. Admiral Donner wants answers.”

  “Good luck, sir.” And added, “You’ll need it.”

  * * *

  The Destiny III-class submarine Curtain of Flames was, on the outside, identical to the sister ships of the Destiny II class. The difference was the interior, forward of the high fin.

  On the Destiny II-class vessels the inner hull extended fifteen meters forward of the fin, housing the command module, a three-deck-tall compartment that accommodated the crew. The upper deck was laid out to contain the control room, the radio room and the senior officer’s staterooms. The middle deck
contained the mess room and galley and the remainder of the staterooms, while the lower deck contained electrical equipment and the computer modules of the Second Captain, with an emergency diesel generator on the aft part of the lower deck.

  The Destiny III-class command module, by comparison was only five meters long, allowing for a doubling of the weapon loading, since the empty space opened up by abbreviating the command module allowed the insertion of the additional weapons. The command module of the Destiny III class remained three decks tall but all the space was devoted to a new computer system. The middle and lower decks housed the conventional part of the unit, including the power supplies and the lower tiers of the processing, the distributed control system serving as a kind of brain stem for the upper functions residing in the layered neural network and the DNA soup processors, which were contained in the upper deck in large shock-proof environmentally controlled cabinets. The DNA, cellular material removed from the brains of dogs, resided in special vats, the networking of the vats allowing the DNA processor to act in parallel at much greater speeds than the electronic tiers of the unit. The integration of the computer system resulted in what had come to be called a “mental processing suite,” the term computer no longer sophisticated or accurate enough to describe the functions of the system.

  The mental processing suite of the Curtain of Flames had driven the ship from Yokosuka, from which it had been towed by the Destiny II-class ship Winged Serpent, to its dive point, where it submerged after a self-check of all ship systems, into the Pacific. Its mission had been coded into the processors and double-checked. The mental processing suite routinely recorded its memories of the mission into a history-module bubble memory. In the event of the loss of the ship during combat, it would physically jettison the memory from the ship for the use of the Maritime Self Defense Force’s later evaluation.

  In order for the history-module bubble memory to receive the mental processing suite’s memories, the suite would dictate relevant observations into the history module. As important events occurred during a mission the suite would think into the history module, recording formal observations into what the system called a Deck Log.