Piranha: Firing Point mp-5

by Michael Dimercurio

  “Gear up,” he said. The copilot hit the lever with the round handle, and the P-5’s wheels retracted into the fuselage. “Raps up,” and the whine behind him indicated the wings fairing in the flap surfaces. The Pegasus was fully airborne.

  Toscano dialed in the navigation chart to the forward display. As the number one Yo-Yo drop zone began flashing, the coastline of the Home Islands faded to the north of the blinking dot representing their aircraft.

  Transit time to the drop zone at jet speed was about fifteen minutes. Toscano concentrated on his navigation and his instruments, the P-5 known to be temperamental.

  At the drop time, Toscano broke his silence. “Start the turboprops.” His copilot hit the auto-start button on the starboard turboprop, the engine with its huge diameter prop feathered during takeoff. The prop windmilled in the airstream, and the engine came up to speed, the copilot monitoring as fuel injection began and the prop came up to idling revs.

  “Number one turboprop is up.” He started the port prop and soon reported it running at idle.

  Toscano pulled back on the jet throttles, their howl dying to a whimper. Quieter than the jets, the grinding turboprops would keep the massive jet hanging above the water at ultraslow speed. Toscano descended to the water. He checked the nav display. They were one mile from the drop of the number one Mark 12 Yo-Yo.

  “Mark 12 forward door open,” he commanded on his boom mike. The copilot hit the lever, and the fuselage opened up beneath them.

  “Eight hundred yards to drop number one,” Toscano said. “Arm the drop mechanism, Yo-Yo unit one power on.”

  “Power on, unit one and engaged, drop mechanism enabled. Ready for Mark 12 release.”

  “Four hundred yards, stand by.”

  SS-403 ARCTIC STORM

  Chu looked out the periscope and commanded, “Darkwing unit two liftoff in three, two, one, mark! And laser guidance, I have the aircraft in the crosshairs.”

  “Darkwing missile two away, sir,” Lo Sun said from the command console. The huge maritime patrol plane was dipping so close to the water that the bomb-bay doors were almost skimming the waves.

  Chu had gotten the ship to periscope depth, manning battle stations, just seconds before. It was as if the airplane knew where they were. He hadn’t circled or done a search; he’d come right in from nowhere. The Second Captain had given them only about seven seconds’ warning of the aircraft, but in that time Chu had bolted from his stateroom table, shouted at the ship-control officer to take the vessel up, and grabbed the periscope.

  He felt a sudden chill. The Americans were coming for him. This was something he hadn’t anticipated, that the Japanese would have cooperated and told the Americans about the Rising Suns.

  His thoughts were interrupted as the trail of the missile flashed into his view in the periscope.

  * * *

  Toscano watched the navigation display with one eye, the instruments with the other. It was time.

  “Drop unit one.”

  The copilot pulled up on the console Yo-Yo drop lever, and the plane lifted slightly as the two-ton weight left the plane.

  There was a brief flash of light from something out the window of the cockpit before the airplane exploded.

  The airframe disintegrated. Toscano’s body was ripped in half at the seat belt, the father of two dead before he even realized he’d been hit.

  Tens of thousands of pieces of debris rained down on the water. A jet engine, nearly intact, splashed into the water not far from the Yo-Yo as the unit sank into the water of the East China Sea, its surface transmitter being barely missed by several pieces of what had been the plane’s tail section.

  Deep underwater, the Yo-Yo unit began transmitting up the cable line to the surface transmitter, seeing the deep water around it with the acoustic daylight imaging.

  The sea around it was full of medium-sized chunks of debris sinking on their way to the bottom. What was left of the cockpit sailed by a few minutes after. Soon the sea calmed, and there was only the ocean and the solitary shape of the submarine, lurking above at periscope depth, some twelve hundred yards away.

  * * *

  Five P-5 Pegasus patrol planes had taken off from Kagoshima.

  Five of them took missile hits as they flew near or over the Arctic Storm’s position. Five of them disintegrated and hit the water, their crews all dead.

  The first Yo-Yo made it into the water, but the others blew up with their aircraft.

  No other P-5s were operational at Kagoshima, and if there had been, it didn’t matter, since all the Yo-Yo remote pods were expended. There were no spares.

  * * *

  Five aircraft down. Admiral Chu Hua-Feng pulled off his sweaty headset, there at the periscope station, and wiped his forehead.

  Though he did not know it, he had won the first round.

  POINT ECHO HOLD POSITION

  USS DEVILFISH, SSNX-1

  “The AWACS radar plane over Kagoshima reported it lost all five P-5 aircraft,” Paully White reported from the radio repeater console.

  “What do you mean, lost them?” Patton asked.

  “They dropped off the radar. The AWACS watch the aircraft with a look-down radar, since the P-5s fly too low for land-based radar to see them, and they reported that all five Pegasus planes hit the drink.”

  “I’m getting a Yo-Yo display,” Porter said from battlecontrol position one. “And a confirmed target, designate submerged warship.”

  Pacino bolted upright from his leaning position at the plot table. This was serious. The P-5s most likely had come under attack from the Rising Sun’s sub-to-air heat-seeking missiles. Pacino blinked, then looked over at Patton. The Yo-Yos were scrubbed. The damned Rising Sun commander had blown Pacino’s patrol aircraft out of the sky, and now he was forced into Plan B. Fortunately, he’d seen the need to put the Sharkeye remote sensors aboard Javelin cruise-missile airframes. Without them this mission would already be over.

  “Conn, Sonar,” a voice said over Pacino’s headset! “we have a detect on Mark 12 Yo-Yo unit one thirty miles southwest of Yakushima Island. Detect is confirmed submerged submarine.”

  “Designate the contact Target One,” Patton commanded.

  He walked across the room to the battlecontrol station zero, the first in line on the starboard side, and climbed in. Pacino followed suit, climbing into station four, the aft-most station. Lowering the canopy over his head down to waist level, he then pulled the helmet over his headset. A yellow screen came up, and the bluish orb of a contact, about a half mile away, appeared.

  “Switch to battlecontrol virtual display on Yo-Yo one.”

  The amber background with its floating specs of red and blue vanished, replaced with the viewing point of the Yo-Yo: a cool blue world, the surface of the ocean overhead, the submarine a three-dimensional shape, not far away. “Switch to geographic plot, calibrated scale.” The display changed to a god’s eye view of the Nazeyakushima Gap, the Yo-Yo’s target on the upper section, their own ship on the lower right, the land appearing in detailed relief. Pacino whistled to himself. After seeing this, it would be impossible to go back to the old-fashioned two-dimensional consoles.

  “Captain Patton, we need to launch the Mark 4s.”

  “Admiral, we’re all set.”

  Within two minutes the first four Mark 4 missiles were away. The vertical-launching-system tubes in the forward ballast tank opened their upper doors, and a gas generator blew the missiles to the surface in a bubble of steam.

  The rocket motors lit and took the missiles skyward a half mile, then detached and fell back to earth. In the meantime, the onboard air-breathing jet engines had fired up and the missiles dived for the safety of low altitude. They skimmed the surface, barely twenty feet above the waves, until they arrived at their preordained splash-down positions. Abruptly, the missiles popped up toward the sky, rising by a thousand feet, then diving straight for the water. On the way down, the nose cones popped open in a flower-petal sequence, the miss
ile airframes breaking apart. From each missile a package detached, a streamer trailing behind it for stability, a drogue parachute coming next, followed by the main parachute, deploying just a few hundred feet over the water. The Mark 4 payload, the Sharkeye sensor, drifted gently to the water and splashed down. The parachute was ditched as the main body of the sensor sank, leaving on the surface a transmitter connected by a cable.

  Two minutes later, the second four missiles were away, and two minutes after that the final two Mark 4s were fired. All ten Mark 4 Sharkeye acoustic-daylight-imaging remote sensors survived their trips, sank to best listening depth, and began transmitting to satellites overhead.

  SS-403 ARCTIC STORM

  “Sir, we have a splash in the water, bearing zero nine five.” Lo Sun sounded extremely nervous.

  Chu stiffened in his command-console seat. He had taken the ship back deep to a depth of three hundred meters, the temperature profile indicating that to be the best listening depth.

  “That’s not all. We’ve got faint turbojet engines.”

  “Jets and splashes. What is that?”

  “Sir,” Lo Sun said, “we might have some incoming cruise missiles.”

  “Cruise missiles? What could a cruise missile do to us at three hundred meters?”

  “For one thing, drop a plasma depth charge. Splash number two, sir. Now three. I’ve got a total of four now, all points of the compass.”

  Was that a coincidence, Chu thought, that the splashes were north, south, east, and west? Were they bracketing him, putting plasma depth charges around him? Or could they be sonobuoys, listening for his ship? Or were they cruise missile-delivered torpedoes?

  He had the deepest feeling of unease he’d had during the operation. The Americans weren’t afraid of him.

  They were marching in with aircraft and now missiles, undeterred that he’d shot down their planes. What would be next? And with the destructive power of plasma weapons, would he even know what happened?

  Hurry, my little warrior, for they are coming for you, and they are strong. Finish quickly.

  In his hour of uncertainty the dream returned to him, and he knew now what it meant. It had not been his father mysteriously speaking to him from the beyond, but his own mind putting the solution together for him, sounding a warning in the voice of the one man on earth he had always listened to. Except this time. He had not finished quickly. He had put the first convoy on the bottom, but it had not been enough. Perhaps he should have let one ship survive to tell the horrible tale — perhaps that would have made his power more real to the Americans. But there was no going back now.

  The Americans were coming. They were coming without fear, with certainty and death. And they were strong.

  And he was going to die. Today was the day. And there would be no headstone, no bones to bury.

  Chu had to admit to himself that he was deeply frightened.

  His father’s words came back to him yet again: Courage is not the absence of fear, but actions taken from the heart while under the terrible grip of fear, actions taken for your men, your ship, your fleet, your country. Someday, my son, you will show your courage. For now just know that it is in you, that courage will come from your heart when it is time. Never doubt that.

  * * *

  Pacino climbed into the position four battlecontrol station as soon as he heard that the first Sharkeye had detected a submerged contact.

  He had to switch his display to the ship-centered virtual reality, to see the relative positions of the contacts as the onboard Cyclops computer analyzed the data rolling in. He allowed himself a smile as he looked at the sea and the contacts around them, even the land modeled in three-dimensional relief. He counted, not believing his eyes — four, five, six. They were all present and accounted for. He wanted to jump out and give Patton and White a high-five, but then he cautioned himself.

  The Cyclops system could cease functioning at any moment. Colleen had called it corrupt, ready to crash.

  Also, was it possible that it was misinterpreting the data?

  Did the computer see six when it should see only one?

  He left the eggshell canopy and climbed to the elevated periscope platform. A look at the computerized chart display, which was linked to the Cyclops, displayed their position, the 688s’ positions, and the position of the Piranha. There was good news here — they had in fact detected all six Rising Suns.

  But there was bad news too. The six Rising Suns were outside weapons range. Attacking with aircraft was impossible with the P-5s shot down, and the Blackbeard squadrons and Seahawk helicopters were too far away onboard the carriers and destroyers of the backup Rapid Deployment Force. His sub force would have to take them down, but they were outside his Vortex Mod Charlie’s range and outside of Piranha’s Mod Bravo’s range.

  They were also outside the Mark 52 range of the 688s’ weapons as well. Everyone would need to close range, which would bring them into range of the Rising Suns.

  He dictated a message to the 688s and the Piranha and gave it to Patton to transmit. He’d given the subs the grid coordinates of the locations of the Rising Suns.

  The force would go in. Piranha and the 688s deep at moderate speeds. Piranha at seventeen knots, the 688s at ten, fast enough that they could make speed over ground, slow enough that their sonars would be able to strain for the enemy’s noise over their own noise, and slow enough that they wouldn’t rumble through the ocean like rattling old cars.

  It seemed too easy, Pacino thought. What was he missing?

  The answer came to him when the officer of the deck cursed.

  “Loss of battle control,” he called, picking up a microphone to the circuit one shipwide announcing system, shouting into it — despite it being a loudspeaker PA circuit — his voice mirroring the frustration of everyone aboard, “Loss of battle control.”

  The chart display table winked out, the surface black and featureless. The five eggshell screens at the positions of the battlecontrol system rolled up, their officers emerging like disoriented movie patrons coming out into bright sunshine. The door to sonar opened, and Senior Chief Byron Demeers came in. The men gathered forlornly in the open space on the port side of the periscope stand.

  Pacino debated with himself, then made a decision.

  He hurried forward down the centerline passageway to the computer room, punched the buttons to get inside.

  There at the console sat Colleen O’Shaughnessy, the executive vice president of Cyclops Computer Systems, subsidiary of mighty Dynacorp Defense International, the chief architect of the Cyclops Mark 72 NSSN Battlecontrol System, with her head in her hands, tears silently running down her cheeks.

  SS-403 ARCTIC STORM

  Admiral Chu Hua-Feng stared at the sonar display in confusion and suspicion.

  Twelve submarine contacts.

  Twelve 688 submarines.

  Sailing right into the Naze-Yakushima Gap as if he weren’t there.

  But that wasn’t so odd, was it? They didn’t know his position — he was being positively paranoid.

  Still, twelve subs, all 688s, all clustered together at the entrance? What was going on?

  “Sir,” the navigator, Xhiu Liu, said from the sensor panel, urgency lacing his voice, “ten of the 688s are or have already opened bowcap torpedo-tube doors. Eleven, now twelve. Now we’re getting second bowcap door noises from each ship.”

  What the hell was going on? He wondered. All twelve coming in at once, directly toward him, all opening bowcap doors. Did they sense him here or not? They had to know he was here; he was the easternmost submarine.

  Could this be some kind of deception? After all, didn’t he have false periscopes being towed right now behind the sterns of his fleet of fishing trawlers? And weren’t two dozen of those trawlers, to the west and southwest, pulling behind them noisemakers that attempted to simulate a nuclear submarine noise? Deception was an ancient Chinese tool of war.

  But if it was an illusion, what was the purpose? To d
raw his fire? There was simply no way to know.

  He made a decision. If they wanted to draw fire, by the heavens he would give them fire, and he’d do it decisively.

  “Open bowcap doors to tubes 13 to 24. Ann gas generators 13 to 24. Set torpedoes in tubes 13 to 24 to highspeed transit, shallow trajectory.”

  “Aye, sir,” Chen Zhu, the weapons officer said.

  It took no time at all for the weapons to warm up.

  “Set 13 for target ST-3, 14 for ST-4. and so on,” Chu ordered.

  “Thirteen and 14 ready, sir. Fifteen and 16 coming up now.”

  “Shoot 13 and 14,” Chu ordered.

  * * *

  The difference between a high-impulse gas-generator torpedo launch and an ultraquiet slow swimout was dramatic.

  Under the action of a solid-rocket motor impinging a reservoir of water that instantly vaporized to high-pressure steam, the tube spat out the weapon like a cannon.

  The torpedo’s engine lit off, and it soared into the sea at full throttle, the water jet pumping at maximum thrust, all provisions for stealth discarded. Within mere minutes Chu launched the torpedo battery at the twelve submarines of the American submarine wave, settling down to wait the fourteen minutes until torpedo impact.

  It would be interesting to see if the target vessels took flight, or it they kept coming. Chu watched tensely from his command seat, wishing he could have a cup of tea, but there had been no time to fill the thermos since the aircraft contact had approached. Impatiently Chu waited.

  “ST-3 through 14 remain inbound,” the navigator reported.

  They hadn’t heard the torpedoes. Excellent Chu waited, flipping through his displays, trying to think ahead to the next move. If this worked, perhaps there would be no next move required, because the Americans would give up and go home, as they should have since the beginning.