by Ian Slater
“What’s up, Pete?” It was Robert Brentwood, looking somewhat disheveled, eyes still blinking, adjusting hurriedly to the redded-out control.
“Under attack, sir. Torpedo on zero four seven. Speed fifty-four knots.”
Brentwood looked at the computer for distance and estimated impact time but wanted the sonar team’s independent assessment as well. “TTI, Sonar?”
“Time to impact six minutes, sir.”
“How long’s the MOSS been under way?” asked Brentwood.
“One minute, sir,” answered Zeldman. “Live ones in the tubes in case the MOSS can’t fox ‘em out of it.”
“What’ve we got in forward tubes?”
“Mark-48-Cs, sir. Wire-guided, radar-homing.”
“Very well,” said Brentwood, pulling down the fiexi-cord mike, informing the ship’s company, “This is the captain. I have the con. Commander Zeldman retains the deck.”
Zeldman saw they were at two thousand feet, just above the sub’s “crush depth,” though this was always a “safe-side” depth, a sign to discourage any recklessness or undue risk taking. The Sea Wolf, he knew, could dive deeper, but then the digital readouts would go from green to red as they entered the danger zone.
“We have a new contact,” said Emerson, and Zeldman was immediately by his side.
“Where?”
Emerson pointed to the top of the three sonar screens in series. “First contact, zero speed. New contact bearing zero four two. First contact seems dead in the water.”
“Jesus!” said Zeldman, turning to Brentwood. “Captain. First one must have been a feint — or a dud. Either way, he suckered us.”
Without a word of reproach or the merest suggestion that Zeldman should have waited a bit longer before deciding to release the MOSS, Brentwood turned his attention to the tracking vector to see if the Russian torpedo was changing course, curving away toward the simulator Zeldman had fired. Maybe the Russian fish was a “line-of-sighter,” its computer nose not radar-homing but merely compensatory, set to adjust its heading according to Sea Wolf’s speed and heading but not an electronic lock-on. But then Sonar reported a blip coming through the subsurface shrimp and ice clutter, the blip now being received aboard Roosevelt, the Russian torpedo’s active pulse shooting ahead, the torpedo homing in on the bounce-off from the target.
“TTI?” he asked Sonar again.
“Five minutes, forty seconds, sir.”
“Definitely a homer, then,” said Zeldman. It was his way of suggesting they should fire their warhead torpedoes now.
Brentwood was thinking so fast that a dozen images simultaneously jostled for attention in his brain, the most bothersome that of the Soviet captain firing at such long range. Surely the Russian must know a Sea Wolf would hear his torpedo coming and immediately change course to avoid—
“He mustn’t be homing on our hull,” said Brentwood suddenly. “SOB’s locking onto our prop signature.”
“If he’d been close enough for that, sir,” suggested Zeldman, “we would’ve been hit by now.”
Damn it, Zeldman was right. It had to be hull lock-on, the surface area of the MOSS too small, not giving off the same echo as the Sea Wolf’s larger displacement hull. The only chance was for the Sea Wolf to go to maximum speed, despite the increasing noise her pumps would make, and try to outrun the Russian torpedo. But no sooner had Brentwood given the order for burst speed than Emerson reported two other torpedoes racing for them in “fan” formation, one fired to intercept at a point forward of the Sea Wolf’s present position, the other aft of it.
Brentwood knew he could turn tail and run — and the geometric and trigonometric vectors spewing out of the computer told him that even if the Russian torpedoes were of their fastest class, with a maximum range of thirty-five miles, the Roosevelt might be able to evade the middle of the three torpedoes. At this point he still had a five-mile head start. But it would be, as they’d said at Balaclava, “a close run thing.” It would mean he couldn’t weave but would be committed to a straight-line retreat — not only directly from the approaching middle torpedo but also in front of the Russian sub. And if the Russian was faster than the Sea Wolf — though only the Alfa class was — then the Russian would outrun the Roosevelt. But then, if the Russian was an Alfa and fired another one at closer range, even the Sea Wolf’s burst speed would be unable to evade him.
“TTI five minutes,” reported Emerson.
“All right,” replied Brentwood. “Switch on our active. Let’s try to see what he is. Might as well use it — he knows where we are anyway.”
But even as Emerson pushed the button and heard the distinctive ping of the active pulse passing out from the Roosevelt, he felt guilty, that he was betraying her, so ingrained was the operator’s code of silence. It was as if a priest had been ordered to break a sacred rite, the Sea Wolf’s mission to listen only on passive — not to betray their lethal load by making their own noise. It was a catechism drilled into him from his very first days in Bledsoe Hall in Groton. But if Emerson had doubted the order, Zeldman didn’t. Brentwood’s decision to go active was the right one. With its awesome missile load, the Roosevelt couldn’t preserve America’s nuclear sea-strike capability if it couldn’t survive.
“TTI four minutes thirty seconds,” said Emerson. The MOSS was long gone, out of play, none of the Russian torpedoes curving off to go for the bait. Now the pongs — the echoes of Roosevelt’s active pulses coming back at over three thousand miles per hour — were registering in high-pointed sine waves on the computer screen that Emerson had now linked to the “Chinese library.” This was the sonar operators’ name for the library of “ping/pong” sounds that, taking into account water salinity, thermal inclines, hot vent upwelling, temperature, and currents, sought to match sound peak ratios to hull size.
“Looks like a small one to me, sir. A Hunter-Killer. Plus or minus four thousand tons.” Brentwood could now see the digitized speed readout, an estimate that the active pulse made possible. Emerson was shaking his head in disbelief. He’d never seen a sub coming in at them at over forty-three miles an hour. It was at once terrifying and awe-inspiring.
“Goddamn it,” said Zeldman. “An Alfa.”
“TTI four minutes,” said Emerson, his voice now tauter than before.
Still watching the sonar screens, Brentwood informed the firing control and tracking party, “Target designations as follows. Bravo, Charlie, Delta — three fish. Got it?”
“Target designations Bravo, Charlie, Delta.”
Brentwood shot a glance at the Russian’s incoming vector. It had changed slightly to zero four nine. “Bring the ship to zero four nine.”
“Zero four nine, sir.”
Four seconds later, Roosevelt was on the zero-four-nine heading, the new vector for target Bravo. Brentwood called for the range, then announced, “Angle on the bow — starboard one seven. Firing point procedures. Master one zero. Tube one.”
“Firing point procedure master one zero. Tube one,” came the confirmation, immediately followed by, “Solution ready, sir. Weapons ready. Ship ready.”
Brentwood was watching the bearing. “Final bearing and shoot. Master one zero.”
The bearing and speed of the target were confirmed, and Brentwood heard the firing control officer take over. “Stand by! Shoot! Fire!… One fired and running.”
“Shift to zero zero five,” Brentwood ordered as the Roosevelt was brought about onto the vector for the second torpedo.
“Zero zero five, sir.”
“Very well. Fire two.”
“Fire two… Two fired and running, sir.”
“Shift to one seven three.”
This took a little longer as the 360-foot-long Roosevelt turned through almost 180 degrees in an east-west semicircle to bring her on line with target Delta, the third torpedo fired by the Alfa, clearly meant to interdict aft of her should she try to run that way.
“Easy — don’t want to stretch the wire,” Brentwood heard the
diving officer say, referring to the wire that the Mark-48, the top of its line in the U.S. torpedo arsenal, would trail behind it via which the torpedo would receive fire control and tracking party guidance until it got close enough to the target for its radar-homing computer to take over.
“On one seven three, sir.”
“Very well. Fire three.”
“Fire three… Three fired and running, sir.”
Zeldman was now ready for the order to turn and run and go deep, but it wasn’t given.
Instead Brentwood ordered, “Diving officer, we’re going up. Take her to three hundred feet. Maximum angle thirty degrees.”
“Take her to three hundred — slowly,” said the diving officer. “Minimum incline. Don’t snap the wire.”
The diving officer repeated the instructions, but the man on trim and one of the planesmen couldn’t believe their ears. And it got worse, though it wasn’t evident at first, because the direction in which they were going was taking them away from the Alfa toward the northern side of the Spitzbergen Trench. It was at eight hundred feet, Roosevelt’s up angle increasing beyond ten degrees in a slight upwelling current from the sea bottom, causing Zeldman and Brentwood to hang on to the scope island’s rail.
The diving officer held on to the roll bar above him, closely monitoring the planesmen. “Watch the bubble… watch the bubble… ” he advised, fatherly, calmly. “Slow her down… Don’t want to slam up against the ice. That’d be a ‘short’ to write home about.”
What the planesmen couldn’t figure out was why in hell Brentwood would take them off to the shallow waters on the north shoulder of the deep trench, the seabed sloping gently away to the top of the trench.
“Three hundred feet, sir,” reported the diving officer.
Suddenly everything was blurred — instruments, tightly secured as they were, rattling like cutlery. Then the shock wave grew in intensity, the sound of the explosion that had occurred several miles away, but not close to the Alfa sub, now shaking Roosevelt violently.
Either the Mark-48 from the Roosevelt had taken out the first torpedo fired by the Alfa or the latter had taken out the first “fish” fired by the Roosevelt. In any case, the Alfa’s first torpedo was no longer a threat to the Roosevelt, and the Roosevelt’s first fish had not sunk the Russian.
“Holy livin’—” Emerson began. He had never seen anything like it on his screen, the explosions creating a frenzy of lines that made no sense. “Overload,” he said in an understatement that was lost in Control crew’s attempts to keep the Roosevelt steady.
“Zero speed,” ordered Brentwood, and only now could Emerson see his three sonar screens returning to something like normal. The muffled sound of the pumps that never stopped could now be seen registering on the “hash” of ice grind and clacking shrimp.
* * *
“Kuda on uskol? — Where’s he gone — Petrov?” Yanov asked his sonar man. Their screen, too, was fuzzy. “Where’s the bastard—”
The sonar operator was still getting “flood-over” from the explosion of the first torpedo that the Alfa had fired at the American. Or was it sound wave residue from one of the Americans’ torpedoes? Then came a second explosion, as loud as the first, but again, it barely shook the double-bottomed titanium hull of the Alfa, the sub merely yawing slightly in the concussion waves.
“He’ll dive to near crush depth,” predicted Yanov.
Brentwood was waiting. It would be another four minutes before the last of the three torpedoes he had fired was due to make impact with target Bravo. With two fish exploded, he could only hope his third would be lucky. He was also wondering if he’d done any damage to the Alfa through concussion, though he knew that unlike the Sea Wolf, whose hull could be ruptured even if a torpedo didn’t actually hit it but exploded some meters away, an Alfa was more resilient to being punctured by the massive pressure waves, its state-of-the-art double titanium hull the envy of every other submariner.
“TTI for target Delta,” cut in Emerson, picking up a trace, “three minutes.”
“Perhaps we should have fired another one,” said Zeldman.
It wasn’t a question — more a suggestion — and the only time Brentwood had ever heard his executive officer even slightly nervous, except possibly when Zeldman had confided that Georgina Spence had proposed to him rather than he to her.
“No, Pete, we did all right with three. We fire another one now we’re in cover of ice grind, we negate us being up here. I’m banking on them thinking we’ve gone down, deep into the trench to hide, looking for somewhere to hole up. Let Ivan think we’ve gone deep under the sound smother of the explosions. He’ll be listening for us away down there, and we’re up here only three hundred feet from the roof — nice and cozy in the ice clutter and—”
He never finished. Suddenly Roosevelt yawed violently, hard left, then right, and she was sliding, the control room crisscrossed with the hissing spraying of leaks that suddenly exploded into vapor jets under the pressure of 187,000 pounds per square foot.
“Flooding in the engine room, flooding in the engine room…”
“See to it, Chief!” called Brentwood. “Where’s the Alfa, Sonar?”
“Don’t know, sir…” called Emerson, his voice rising, scared.
“Keep it down,” Brentwood counseled him. “Watch him. Find him for me, son.”
“Yes — yes, sir.”
Behind him, Brentwood could hear the damage reports coming in on the intercom as Zeldman tried to steady the motion of the sub via trim and rudder control. Amid the chaos Emerson realized that the Roosevelt’s third torpedo hadn’t knocked out the last of the fish fired by the Alfa but must have been thrown off course, its thin control wire to Roosevelt inadvertently severed in the sub’s turn as they’d headed up. The result was that the Roosevelt’s third torpedo, away and running, its radar-homing head now uninhibited by wire control, had probably overshot the oncoming Russian torpedo and zeroed in on the Alfa instead. Either this, or the Russian torpedo homing in on Roosevelt had exploded against subsurface ice, creating the concussion now causing the leaks which were not only flooding the engine room but which were making it impossible to see in Control.
Emerson heard a tentative cracking sound, and in a sudden, gut-wrenching moment, was sure they were breaking up until the sensors, at least those that were still in operation, told him it was the ice above that was fracturing and breaking up from the thwacks of the explosions. But then he felt the sub sliding— backward down the slope.
For a split second Brentwood was tempted to order the engines near full power but resisted creating a giveaway vibration that would give the Alfa, if the explosions had not got her, the Roosevelt’s precise position on the shelf. Hopefully, though, the Alfa was well away by now, hunting for him somewhere in the deep of the Spitzbergen Trench.
Watching his men running fast but each man clearly knowing what he was doing, he took a momentary pride in how well they had been trained, as within minutes the fierce spray of water that had seemed like an ice-cold steam shower in Control was subsiding. But then he felt the sub still sliding, almost imperceptibly to start with, but gathering speed like a heavy trunk on an incline of gravel. It stopped, slid a little more, and halted again. It was difficult to tell exactly just how far they were from the edge of the slope where it plunged away in the sudden drop into Molloy Deep that was fifteen thousand feet straight down.
Emerson, switching to earphones because of the noise of the hissing water, tried to gauge how far they were from the edge by the sound of what seemed like rock debris tumbling down the slope, scraping the hull, then suddenly disappearing on the sound curve. He figured they were less than four hundred feet from the drop-off.
Brentwood was already getting the good news that the leaks had been stopped in the engine room and that now everything seemed secure — the reactor seemed fine — when a damage report told him that a number of hydraulic lines had been severed so that ballast tanks couldn’t be blown — to evict t
he water with air and thus make them lighter. It meant the sub couldn’t rise. “And the integrity of the safety hatches,” as the video display informed him, had been breached.
No one spoke for several minutes as the full implications of their situation sunk it. They had evaded the Hunter/Killer only to—
“Sir!” It was Emerson, excitement jolting him out of the sudden gloom.
“Who do you mean?” said Brentwood sharply, injecting a shot of discipline after the chaotic moments occasioned by the blast of the explosion. “Do you want me or the officer of the deck?”
“Sorry, sir. OOD.”
“Very well.”
“Mr. Zeldman, sir. She’s breaking up.”
“You sure?” said Brentwood.
“Yes, Captain — it’s—”
“Amplify,” ordered Brentwood. There was the most awful sound Brentwood had ever heard coming in from the hydrophones and filling the Roosevelt—a sound like a great whale groaning in agony.
“Her bulkheads,” said Zeldman. “They’re giving way.”
“We got her, sir,” said Emerson, exultant, looking around at the faces clustering anxiously around him.
“Or is it a feint?” asked Brentwood.
“Emerson?” Brentwood repeated. “What do you think?”
“I…” They could see the doubt taking over his face. “I–I’m not sure, sir.”
“Keep listening.”
“Don’t think it’s a feint, sir. That groan — I mean, the amplitude is too—”
Brentwood felt someone bump him and looked sharply at the men gathered around the sonar. “What the hell is this — the county fair? Everyone back to his post.”
“They’re going down, sir,” said Emerson, more confidently now. “Think they’re goners.”
“Like us,” said someone in Control. Brentwood looked about, ready to tear a strip off the sailor, but said nothing. Naval officers were supposed to be able to handle the truth with aplomb.