Scorpion in the Sea

by P. T. Deutermann

  He keyed the bitchbox.

  “XO, what’s the status on the plant? I need to go faster if we’re gonna get on top of this gomer.”

  “XO, aye, they’ve located the problem—busted air ejector line; ETR is twenty minutes to 27 knots available, Cap’n.”

  Mike shook his head. Twenty minutes was too long; he was stuck with his slow boat. Sonar came back on the line.

  “Combat, Sonar control, contact regained, and he’s showing null doppler, Captain; we think he’s turning.”

  Turning. He knew he was running out of water, then. The chart showed less than three miles to water that was only 250 feet deep.

  “What’s the contact’s bearing right now?” he asked.

  “Sir, she bears 265,” said the surface supervisor. “Sonar is tracking him on a turn to an easterly heading. If he keeps coming, he’s gonna walk right into us.”

  Mike thought for a moment. The submarine CO had to know that Mike had depth charges; they’d undoubtedly shaken him pretty badly already. Why on earth would he turn east to avoid the rapidly shoaling water. Why not north, or south? Maybe he had reloaded? It had not been that long since the first brace of four torpedoes had been fired. But maybe the first batch had come from his stern tubes. Shit, he could be staring four, maybe six fish right in the face.

  “Range? And what’s the water depth?”

  “Sir, the range is down to 4800 yards; we’re closing pretty fast. Depth of water is about 330 feet.”

  4800 yards. He would have fired by now. Hell, he can fire off axis if he wants to. So maybe he doesn’t have torpedoes. Maybe he thinks I’m out of depth charges. Maybe he thinks I won’t roll ’em because the water is too shallow and I’ll hurt myself.

  “Range is 4200 yards, closing. Up doppler,” said the operations officer. “He’s coming right towards us. What the fuck’s he doing?”

  “Might be going to try to break contact by running under us and into our baffles,” said Mike.

  What’s he doing, what’s he doing … he hadn’t fired any more fish, so maybe he can’t fire any more fish. He has to run for it. He’s probably spotted the fact that we can’t go fast. He knows my fish can’t hurt him, but he must know I have depth charges. If he can just get by me once, he can outrun me until I get this plant fixed … if he can get out to the Stream, he’s gone. That’s what he’s doing: he’s taking his shot—the quickest way past us is head to head. But he’s forgetting the helo.

  “Ops, break off that helo and put him east of us on the 5000 yard fence; Weps, get your depth charges ready, set for 250 feet. Unless this guy’s got a nose full of torpedoes left, he’s making a big mistake.”

  Mike stood back from the plot, mindful of the building tension. They were going head and head. The submarine might be preparing for a down the throat torpedo shot. But he’d fired six fish so far, and nothing out of his stern tubes when he had a clear shot. It was like counting cards in a life and death poker game: how many aces were face up? Would he try a down the throat shot? The submarine had fired only straight runners so far; they might not have pattern fish. In that case, Goldsborough’s best aspect was straight on—if he lost his nerve and turned, he would present his whole broadside to the enemy’s torpedoes. But if he were going to fire, the guy should have fired by now. He’s tapped out. This is a run.

  “Range, Ops?”

  “Sir, the range is 2200 yards. Steady up doppler, steady track. I can’t believe this shit. He’s gonna run right into the depth charge pattern.”

  Mike called sonar.

  “Linc, what do you make of this? Are we on him for real?”

  “Yes, Sir. Unless this is a super big decoy, we’ve got the guy nailed. Sharp, metallic contact, smooth track, around eight to ten knots, steady depth, same definition against the bottom clutter, and he’s coming straight into us. I keep waiting for hydrophone effects, but he’s awfully close now. His fish couldn’t even arm—”

  “Right, that’s my take. OK, stand by your DC rack. Shoot ’em all, 250 feet, at my command.”

  “Sonar, aye; roll four, 250 feet, at your command; standing by.”

  “Range?”

  “Sir, 1400 yards.”

  Mike stared down at the plot. Something was tugging at the back of his mind. Instinct. Something wrong here.

  “Wait,” Mike said. The plotters looked up at him.

  “Sir?” asked the ops officer, looking first at Mike, and then at the weapons officer, as if to say, what the hell? The plotters had stopped plotting, and were staring at him.

  Mike tried to concentrate, but could see only the tiny red pinpoint of light on the NC2 plotting surface. Coming right at them. Just like the night of the collision, years ago. That red light. That sudden, awful silence when everyone knew that they weren’t going to make it. That the Captain had given the wrong order. Do something, a voice was saying, this isn’t right.

  “Sir?” asked the operations officer again.

  “Sonar reports depth charges are ready. Set for 250 feet.”

  “Sir, range is 1000 yards.”

  1000? That was a big jump. Mis-plot, or had the submarine increased speed?

  “Bridge, Combat, this is Sonar Control. Doppler is marked up. He’s kicked it in the ass, Captain, I think he means to run out from under the depth charges. I think he’s coming right. Captain, we need to come left to hit him!”

  Mike thought quickly.

  “Range is 800 yards.”

  Linc was right. They had to turn. Turn left!

  “Combat, Sonar Control, we need to turn with him to keep the sonar on him. Sir, we need to come left.”

  Mike stared down at the plot, at the little red light. Linc was right. Turn with him, keep the sonar pointed at him. If they went right, the target would pass behind the destroyer, through his sonar’s dead zone. The depth charges would miss. He might get away. But there was something wrong here. Something very wrong. He felt an awful sense of dread rising in his belly. His mind flashed back to the collision. He had said nothing. He had just stood there. His instincts then had been to go the other way, but he had been afraid to contradict the Captain. Only now he was the Captain. They were looking at him. Don’t go left.

  “Captain, Sir? We need to come left. Right now, Sir!”

  “Range is 600 yards.”

  Listen to your instincts, Diane had said. This will be for keeps, not for show. Don’t go left.

  “Captain?”

  Mike stood up and grabbed for the bitchbox, punching in both sonar and the bridge.

  “Sonar, check fire on the depth charges!” he shouted. “XO, right full rudder!”

  “Sir,” cried ops, “That’s the wrong way—we’ll put him through the baffles!”

  But the Exec did not hesitate. Goldsborough heeled over sharply to port, biting into a hard right turn to the north. Mike could feel her swinging, and something in his gut was urging her on. Go, ship, go. He felt her dip her nose into a wave, hesitate, and lunge back out of it, as if she was listening to him.

  “Sonar has no echoes! Last bearing 190, last range 280 yards. Contact is entering the baffles. We’ve lost—”

  A horrendous blast plunged CIC into a maelstrom of darkness, flying objects, and screaming men. Mike felt a punishing hammer blow in both his legs, and then a blinding red arc of pain in his head, before everything roared away into blackness.

  SEVENTY-SIX

  USS Goldsborough, 1732

  What saved Goldsborough from being blown completely in two was the right full rudder ordered forty seconds before the mine exploded. She was heeling to port and her keel was at an angle of about sixty degrees to the detonation point. The mine, fired from tube eight as Al Akrab passed under where she thought Goldsborough was, had not even reached the bottom when it sensed the blooming magnetic field of the destroyer and exploded its 4000 pound, gas boosted warhead.

  Goldsborough drifted to a stop as the enormous tower of gray seawater from the mine blast subsided back into the sea, having sent a
twenty five foot wave crashing down over the main deck and up the port side of the ship. In CIC, as throughout much of the ship, nearly every man who had been standing had had his legs or ankles broken by the force of the blast which had hammered the hull with a single, massive shock. Men were crawling around the deck in Combat through a toxic haze of smoke from small electrical fires, dust blown out of the overhead panels, sprays of water from the broken cooling coils of the consoles, and the cries of injured men. The ship ploughed ahead briefly, almost surfing on the receding plume of the explosion, rocking slowly from side to side as she shook off tons of water, and then subsiding into the shocked sea to a fitful stop.

  Mike came to as the ship drifted to a stop, revived by a blast of refrigerated water from a broken NC2 cooling coil spraying directly into his face. He shook his head, producing a jag of pain, and tried to extricate himself from the jumble of chairs, steel cabinets, and struggling bodies all around, only to collapse immediately with a yell of pain when he tried to stand up. It felt like both of his ankles were broken, and the stab of pain brought tears to his eyes. He realized he was not the only one so injured. He also realized that the ship was beginning to list to port.

  Using his hands, he dragged himself backwards across the jumbled deckplates, his useless feet dangling out of his trouser legs like dead chickens being dragged on a string. He tried to move towards the front door of CIC. He was having trouble seeing and wiped his eyes, and realized that he was bleeding from a head wound. He could not feel any pain in his scalp, but there was enough blood streaming down over his forehead to obscure the vision in one eye completely. Through the light of the battery operated battle lanterns, he saw the operations officer bent over on the deck, retching next to the remains of the NC2 plotter, the weapons officer next to him, also bent double with pain, his forehead cut open to the bone and his feet sticking out at unnatural angles to his legs.

  Mike continued to drag himself towards the door until he ran up against a tangle created by an overturned file cabinet and the surface search radar repeater. Above the sounds of moaning men and spraying water lines, he could hear a rush of steam from the forward stack, which was just behind CIC. The radar operator lay unconscious or dead across his path, his head lolling at an unnatural angle.

  “Hey,” he yelled into the gloom. “This is the Captain. I’ve got to get out to the bridge. Can anyone walk?”

  The sonar contact plotter emerged on all fours from the smoke and noise. He had been sitting on a padded stool, and thus his feet had survived the bonecracking blast. He was bruised and had cut his hand on something, but was ambulatory.

  “Lemme help you up, Cap’n,” the sailor said.

  He was obviously very frightened, his face ashen and his bleeding hand shaking as he reached for Mike.

  “Can’t walk, son. I think my ankles are broken; get this guy out of the way; clear a channel for me so I can drag myself out to the bridge. Then help your buddies.”

  Mike’s own hands had begun to shake from the shock and pain; he saw the sailor staring aghast at the bleeding cut on his head.

  “No big deal, sailor,” Mike said with a confidence he did not feel. “All head wounds bleed like stuck pigs. I’ll get it dressed on the bridge, but I gotta get out there right now, OK? Gimme a pull.”

  The sailor cleared a path through the debris, coughing as the smoke began to thicken, and wincing at the inert form of his shipmate lying at the base of the radar repeater. He put his hands under Mike’s arms and pulled him over the hatch coaming and into the afternoon sunlight flooding the pilothouse. Mike nearly passed out when his broken ankles dropped off the hatch coaming. The sudden blaze of sunlight hurt his eyes.

  The bridge was also in chaos, but not so badly damaged as CIC. The people, however, had suffered the same fate as their mates in CIC. There were a dozen men lying around the pilot-house, some bleeding from head and face cuts, and most of them down with broken limbs. The deck in CIC was a false deck, to allow cables and cooling lines to be routed to the equipment; it had absorbed some of the shock wave from the mine. The deck under the pilothouse was solid aluminum, and had transmitted the full force of the explosion. Several of the men were weeping; one was hysterical with the pain of compound fractures of both legs just above his feet. The pilothouse deck was awash in seawater and was covered in shards of glass; all of the windows had been blown out when the ship’s structure deformed under the force of the undersea blast.

  The sailor who had carried him out had reappeared with a large, green medical dressing, and was applying it to Mike’s head, even as Mike tried to look around. The Exec appeared beside him, miraculously walking.

  “Been sitting in the Captain’s chair again, XO?” asked Mike in a shaky voice.

  “’Fraid so, Cap’n. Only this time it saved my ass,” he said, his face trying to disguise his own shock at the carnage around them.

  “More importantly, it saved your legs,” said Mike. “Now I need to get to the chair, and you need to do some mighty fancy damage control. I sense a list to port.”

  “Yes, Sir, we’re still getting reports over the sound powered phones; all power is out, and I’ve lost comms with the engineers.”

  He nodded back in the direction of the stacks, from which low pressure steam was still escaping.

  “We have smoke and steam out of both stacks, and I don’t hear the blowers anymore, so I suspect the boilers are off the line. My guess is we have a zillion small leaks instead of one big hole—the explosion was off on the port quarter about 250 to 400 yards. All this water here, it came in when the plume fell back into the sea. I thought we were going to turn right over from that wave. Lemme get you up into this chair.”

  One other man on the bridge, the bosun’s mate, had legs and feet intact. He had been sitting on his usual roost on the chart table, which had collapsible front legs. The table legs had buckled, absorbing the force of the blast. Everyone else standing in the pilothouse had been disabled.

  “XO,” said Mike, weakly, once they had heaved and hoisted him into his chair, “in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is King. You’ve got legs. You’re gonna have to take charge of the damage survey, send info up here, and I’ll try to run damage control from here. Get me somebody who can function as a phone talker, and the damage control diagrams. Get yourself some walking help from Combat—there’s a coupla guys in there who can walk, but not many. The objective is to plug as many leaks as we can: flooding control, then we’ll deal with any fires; see if we can keep her afloat. We need an emergency radio on the air as soon as the snipes get a diesel running; we’re going to need a tow—after that blast I suspect the shafts are broken. And we need lots of medical help; God only knows if the Doc and his gang can walk or not. But, first, stop the flooding. As soon as you can get some power back in the ship, get me the 1MC. I’ll direct anyone who can walk to gather amidships so you’ll have a working pool. OK?”

  “Yes, Sir, got it. Cap’n? What the hell happened out there? We had that guy dead to rights! And then we turned away—and thank God we did. But what was it?”

  “I don’t know, XO. He let something go, I guess. Fucked us up pretty good, too. Probably took him off the boards as well, but right now, we’ve got to get going on DC. Go, man.”

  “Aye, aye, Sir.”

  The Exec grabbed the bosun, and they went out of the pilothouse through the door back into CIC. Mike shifted in his chair, and realized the list to port was getting worse. He craned his head around, and felt a wash of nausea. He studied the inclinometer, blinking his eyes until he could see it clearly, and read a four degree port list. Not too bad. Goldsborough could stand about forty degrees in a damaged condition before capsizing.

  He looked around at the injured men on the deck. The OOD gave him a weak, gray-faced nod; both his legs were broken, and he was slipping into shock. Mike suddenly felt a profound sense of guilt. His ship had been badly damaged, and many of his people, most of them from the looks of things, shattered along with th
e ship. What the hell had he done wrong? What the hell had blown up next to them? It hadn’t been a torpedo—they would have heard it coming. He felt a deep chill as he realized what would have happened if he had turned left. At least he called that one right.

  He heard a noise and looked out the gaping windows. The helicopter was approaching, its nose high and its big blades whipping up a cloud of spray and noise on the surface as it transitioned into a hover. It came within 100 feet of Goldsborough while the pilots took in the scene: the old destroyer listing to port, oily clouds of black smoke interlaced with bright, white steam rolling out of the funnels and down onto the water, injured men lying everywhere topside while those who could crawl tried to provide first aid. The noise of the helicopter overwhelmed all the noises in the pilothouse.

  There was his radio, Mike thought. Those guys would take one look and yell for help, lots of help. They had to have seen the explosion from five miles away, and their sonar operator was probably bleeding from the ears because of it. They would have already called the carrier for help. Good. That took some of the pressure off. And the Spruances were coming. Maybe.

  The helo edged closer, the noise of the rotor blades and the engines drowning out everything and throwing a wash of salt spray over the forward part of the ship. The pilot hovered on the port side, and then walked the big, white helicopter around the bow. Mike could see the bug eyes of the pilots’ helmet visors, saw them pointing. They drifted around to the starboard side, blowing the black smoke aft in whipping sheets. They were high enough to look into the bridge wing hatch, where they must have been able to see all the injured lying around on the deck of the pilothouse. Then they banked away, backing off. The silence in the pilothouse was loud once the noise from the helicopter died out.

  We must really be a sight, Mike thought. They won’t know what to do next. Hell, I don’t know what to do next, especially if the XO can’t find enough guys with feet. They had to find all the leaks, the split seams, the broken fire mains and water lines, the cracked seachests, and patch and plug very quickly. Otherwise, Goldy was going to go down, with most of the crew unable to swim. At least they had their lifejackets. If they could get topside.