She felt like closing her eyes as tight as she coulc but realized she had to look steely-eyed and brave. How the hell, she wondered, had Kelly McKee done it? Then the hull hit the bottom at sixty-four knots.
* * *
"Where is the surface force headed? And the choppers?" Grachev asked the first officer.
"Heading down the bearing line to the torpedoes, southeast," Svyatoslov said, a laugh in his voice. "We've got them all fooled, Captain."
For now, Grachev thought. "Any threats close, anything at all?" "Nothing, sir."
"Any sign of a detect of the Azov?" "No, sir. We've escaped with the crown jewels." "Can you pin down the location of the SSNX?" "See the rooster tail? I've got it circled on your display."
A circle came up on display zero on the command console. A wake rising up from the sea where there was no boat.
"Amazing," Grachev said, stunned that he was winning.
One hundred eighty kilometers north-northeast of Vepr's position the submarine Devilfish smashed into the sandy bottom at sixty-four knots. At that velocity the hard-packed sand made the hull skip like a rock, the rear of the ship rising higher than the bow. The reactor control rod mechanism spring releases opened as their inverter breakers tripped from the shock. The control rods were driven to core bottom by the powerful springs set into their mechanisms. The nuclear flux that had sustained the nuclear fissions dropped to a small fraction of its previous levels. As the plant scrammed, the electrical operator, strapped into his seat with his hands
on the breaker levers, managed to flip open three breakers before he was thrown back into his seat by the bounce.
The stern rising up higher than the bow with a forward velocity now forty-eight knots sent the ship diving for the sandy bottom again. This time the nose-cone fiberglass dome disintegrated, shearing off the spherical array of the BQQ-10 and denting and slightly rupturing the forward ballast tank and jarring the forward four vertical launch tubes off their steel foundations. The wound of the ballast tank acted as a shovel, and the rapidly approaching sand piled up into the space and began to bury the bow under a wave of sand. The accumulating sand further slowed the vessel, and within two seconds, with a negative g-force of over two gees, the submarine ground to a halt on the shallow bottom, canted slightly over in a four-degree list.
Back aft in the maneuvering room, the unconscious electrical operator had come to rest on his panel. Behind him the engineering officer of the watch and chief engineer, Todd Hendrickson, who had hung from a handhold in the overhead until the ship stopped, pulled the EO back from the electrical panel and snapped open the remaining AC and DC breakers, killing the ship. The vessel became completely inert except for the battle lanterns and the Cyclops system, which was on emergency cooling for the next twenty minutes. Beyond that, the computer system would overheat and shut itself down.
In the control room, Karen Petri let go of the overhead handhold she'd gripped, kicked almost horizontal by the deceleration of the ship. The
THREAT VECTOR 397
room was now quiet except for the moaning whine of the Cyclops system's computer.
"Sonar?" she said into her boom microphone, but it was dead. She pulled it off and opened the curtain to Chief Cook's kingdom on the forward starboard corner of control. "Chief?"
"Still inbound," Cook said, his headset nowhere to be seen. The only light in sonar was the green glow from the display panels between the virtual-reality cubicles at either corner of the room. "If we're quiet well hear it with the naked ear."
"How's sonar?"
"Lost the sphere. Hull arrays are half functional. What's above the sand we must have kicked up. We lost the wires to the Mark 5."
Petri vanished, finding Dietz. "Any flooding?"
Dietz rubbed his head, his fingers coming back bloody from a wound on the top of his scalp. "We're switching phones, reports are coming in. Pilot?"
"No flooding, OOD."
The sound of the incoming torpedo came
through the hull then. The noise was a high-pitched
squeal that started to wind down as if the weapon
I were becoming uncertain. It drove by, slowing down
by the second, but than its noise receded and
t vanished.
Petri glanced at Dietz, watching him start to I smile.
"It's not over yet, OOD. This one's confused, ) and there are three more coming."
Dietz nodded, then looked above him into the overhead. Petri suddenly became aware that the i surface was eighty-five feet over her head.
"Get the nose camera up and the blue laser. Let's map out the contour."
"Driving back slowly. No Doppler on active returns. No large-field zero-Doppler return. Blue laser contour shows flat bottom. Low-low fuel-level alarm, Captain."
"How much time?"
"Twenty seconds, sir."
"What do you see?"
"Still nothing but flat sand. Rock outcropping several hundred meters south."
"Drive for it, Nav."
"Ten seconds, sir, turbine spooling down."
"Set it down on the bottom and take the unit to standby."
"Yessir, weapon slowing, slowing, bottom coming up, and unit is ... in the sand. Velocity coming down, velocity zero. Torpedo is on the bottom and stopped, going to standby mode. Okay, we're in standby on unit one, wire continuity remains green."
"What are you doing?" Novskoyy asked.
Grachev held up a finger to silence him and kept talking to Tenukha. "Pick up unit two from the Second Captain."
"Yes, sir, unit two is in my control now. I'm about a kilometer south of the rock outcropping that unit one is north of."
"Fuel status?"
"Low, sir, approaching low-fuel alarm."
"Bring unit two up to the rock outcropping to the north, bare steerageway, and light the blue laser, the visual spot, and the nose camera."
"Blue laser, visual spotlight, and nose camera up. Should be on your displays, sir."
"Got it. Now, bring two in slow and low."
Grachev and Novskoyy both leaned over display zero, watching the visual display as the sand approached the torpedo. The featureless bottom came toward the camera at ten clicks.
"There it is, I see it," Grachev said, tapping the face of the display. In the display a large ridge protruded from the sand, half covered with sand. It had a ruler-straight shape on the upper right hump, almost exactly level. "Bring us around, circle it."
"Yessir, I've overdriven slightly, low fuel level. Coming around back to the south, low-low fuel level. I'm losing it."
"How far from that hump?"
"Five hundred meters, maybe six hundred."
"Set two down on the sand."
"Bringing two in."
"Distance?"
"Four hundred fifty meters. Unit two is in standby."
"Take three. Bring it in at walking speed. Get as close as you can."
"I'm too far away to see it, sir, and I've got a low-low fuel level. This unit's out. I've got to bring her down now. Unit three on the bottom, in standby. Distance twelve hundred meters."
"Too far. Bring four in as close as you can."
"Can't, sir. Four is out, too late to take four to standby. Turbine is stopped, fuel cell is empty. No sign of four."
"Continuity?"
"No readback on four, sir."
"Keep it lined up."
Grachev pulled off his headset and ran his hands through his hair, something he did when he was out of ideas.
"What now, Captain?" Novskoyy asked.
'Tm thinking. I can either detonate these warheads now or cut the wires and shoot more torpedoes. I can't do both. Either that thing in the sand is the SSNX, or it's an old sunken hull or a big piece of concrete or construction debris hauled off and dropped offshore. I can't confirm it as the SSNX. But if it is and it's playing possum, if I cut the wires it will get away clean. If I command-detonate the weapons, I fill the water with noise and bubbles. Any torpedoes la
unched after that would be blind."
"What if you set the plasma units off on a time delay, cut the wires, and launch four more torpedoes?"
"Can't. There's no time-delay capability. It would be an easy program module, but nobody thought of that when the Bora torpedo was designed."
"What about the overhead photographs? What did the Azov show?"
"Mr. First! You heard Mr. Novskoyy. What did your eyeballs show the SSNX position to be?"
"Sir, I was following the task force, but the cameras were still tracking to the north. If you roll back the disk to where the wake was before, it should track."
"What have you got on the surface force?"
"Antisub formation rolling at about forty clicks, now about twenty kilometers to the southeast of Port Norfolk. They're following the bearing line the torpedoes came in on."
"How far from us?"
"A hundred forty-five kilometers, bearing three four nine."
"They're opening range, then," Grachev mumbled to himself. "And not much of a threat anyway. Unless we give ourselves away."
"How would you do that?" Novskoyy asked.
"By lighting off four plasma warheads."
"You already have—the four torpedoes you shot But nothing you do with those warheads gives away your position here."
"Hell with it. Second Captain, take the Azov ir telligence on the SSNX and show the position tracking from moment of submergence to present time."
"Yes, Captain," the electronic voice acknowledgec
"Now watch."
Grachev and Novskoyy leaned over the main dis play and watched the hull of the SSNX as it sai into the water at its maximum speed. Soon nothing but the fin showed, and after a few more minutes just a rooster tail wake was showing. The wake continued, turning out of the bay and to the nortl east, then subsided completely, the water calming to its previous state.
"There," Grachev said. "Right there the SSNX vanishes. It could have slowed down and turned or bottomed or changed direction."
"Which means it could be anywhere."
"No. The torpedoes were following it. First, let's take the visual data. Second Captain, bring up a chart and, based on SSNX maximum detected speed, from the position of visual loss, show the SSNX location circle growth with time, up to the present."
A chart appeared on display zero. The Second Captain pinpointed the location of the SSNX at the moment it was lost from the visual overhead view. A circle anchored on that location grew rapidly with time, soon spreading out all the way to the entrance to the Chesapeake Bay.
"Well, that's no help. Second Captain, based on the fact that the SSNX was running from four torpedoes, chart the probability distribution on the chart." Grachev turned to Novskoyy. "This should show the circle growth to be biased in the northern directions."
An ellipse appeared on the chart, the lower point of it anchored at the point where the SSNX went invisible and continued northeastward.
"Now, Second Captain, integrate the probability distribution with Bora torpedo intelligence to show where the SSNX track went after it went invisible." To Novskoyy: "Those torpedoes tracked the SSNX long after it and it's wake vanished from the surface."
The chart's probability ellipse narrowed, the point of invisibility no longer anchoring it. The ellipse collapsed and moved to the northeast, then vanished to a point that moved at almost 130 clicks in a line that was the continuation of the SSNX wake's previous track. The point continued north-
west, then suddenly stopped. A new ellipse started and grew steadily northeast, but this time it was a fatter ellipse, as the starting point was now in open ocean, or at least closer to it.
"It could still be anywhere," Novskoyy complained.
"We don't have to worry about this segment from when it dropped off the Azov screen to here, where the torpedoes lost it. But it could be anywhere in here. And since the probability ellipse is going northeast, it's farther outside of our weapons range. If this submerged ridge isn't the SSNX lying and hiding on the bottom, then the SSNX is long gone."
"Which would mean we'd have to get closer and launch more torpedoes," Novskoyy said.
"Hold on a minute," Grachev said. "We've got the Azov airborne, and it's got another ten hours or so of endurance—"
"Ten hours and forty minutes, Captain," Svya-toslov interjected.
"So we can keep an eye on the bay with Mr. First's eyes. At least until it runs out of power. How long to sunset, Mr. First?"
"Another six hours. But I'll see the hull on infrared if it comes back after dark."
"We've got the rock outcropping or whatever it is surrounded with plasma warheads," Grachev said to himself, leaning over the command console, thinking hard. "I could shoot a Shchuka acoustic daylight sensor and confirm that ridge."
"You'd have to come off the bottom and get closer," Novskoyy said.
"That's no good. There's only one Shchuka sensor left. Watching the near ocean space here is useless. So we wait and let Mr. First scout for the return of the SSNX."
"What's your gut feeling on the rock outcropping? Is that the SSNX?"
"I don't know, Al. If I want to I can wake up three of the Bora torpedoes and command-detonate the plasma units, and I can synchronize the explosion to within a few milliseconds. I've got two to the north and one to the south. If that thing is the SSNX, I can rip it apart."
"And if you do that, with the plasma warheads lat far away, will you kill the sub, or just hurt it?"
"Let me put it this way. If our hull were there, ve'd expect to have three or more compartments ipture. It might even break the hull in half. That
swer your question?"
Novskoyy rubbed his eyes. "How could the 5SNX be there one minute and disappear the lext?"
"By hitting the bottom," Grachev said. "That
lg down there is probably it."
'But we don't know, and if you command-deto-late the plasma warheads, all you might end up loing is blowing up a coral reef."
There was silence for several minutes.
"I'm going to my stateroom to shut my eyes," Jovskoyy said.
'See you." Grachev leaned back over the com-land console and tried to think.
Petri's eyes roved the poorly lit and listing control room. "Chief Cook, what do you have on the torpedoes?"
"Two shut down to the north, one to the south, and—wait a minute—that's it, number four has shut down. We're all alone, at least as far as I can tell."
"Good. OOD, get the word to maneuvering to restart the reactor and place the electric plant in a full-power lineup." She pulled up the handset of a sound-powered phone and selected the radio room.
"Radio, Captain."
"Radio, ma'am," Senior Chief Henry's baritone replied.
"Bring a slot buoy and the coder."
"Right away."
"How long on the restart, Off'sa'deck?"
"Normal full in ten."
"Slot buoy," the radio chief said, plopping a baseball-bat-sized object on the aft chart table. The buoy was designed to be shot out of a signal ejector—a small torpedo tube—and float to the surface to transmit a radio message to the overhead satellite. "Coder," he said, producing something resembling an old-fashioned notebook computer.
Petri typed, "Devilfish evaded torpedoes by bottoming, location as follows—"
"Nav, report inertial nav's latitude and longitude."
Judison read it off while Petri continued typing: "Four incoming weapons shut down after Devilfish hit bottom. Devilfish damage from bottoming includes BQQ-10 spherical array. Widescan acoustic
daylight arrays remain nominal. Currently restarting reactor to continue search. Will call for P-5 units with Mark 12 Yo-Yo pods at 1730 ZULU."
"Load it and shoot it, Senior," Petri ordered. "Off'sa'deck, status of the reactor?"
She was starting to feel herself again. Some measure of control had returned to her now that the incoming weapons had shut down.
"Ma'am, reactor's critical, warming up primar
y coolant loops, steaming the headers in one minute."
"Very well. Radio, Captain, status of the slot buoy launch?"
"We're loading it now."
Petri paced the conn platform, impatient to begin the search.
"Which unit has the most power remaining?" Nov-skoyy asked.
"Number three, but it's at extreme range," Grachev replied.
"If we awaken the sensors long enough to peek at the target, we'll be able to see if they're lying low."
"If we turn them back on, we'll burn power. We may not have the juice to command-detonate."
"Keep the two close-in units off, and use them for the command detonation. You can listen with number three."
"It might come up with nothing, and all we've done is lose a plasma warhead."
"Then you might as well just detonate them now.
You've got a microphone with a long wire right where the hull of the target is. You should use it."
"Navigator, bring up unit three in passive listen mode."
"Aye, Captain."
"Main engines are warm, ready to answer all bells."
"Attention in the fire-control team," Petri said. Her voice had climbed from its normal deep, authoritative timbre into a higher, scratchier tone. The sound of it gave her an anxious, heavy feeling in her abdomen. She clenched her jaw, commanding herself to control her fear. She coughed, hoping it would bring her voice back. "We're going to try to back out of the sand. My concern is making too much noise on the way out, so we'll go easy at first. Officer of the Deck, watch the inertial readout and call velocity. I want to know the instant we're moving." Her command voice had returned, at least for the moment. "Pilot, I have the conn. All back two thirds."
The deck began to tremble.
"Velocity zero," Dietz said. "Still stuck."
"Give it a second."
"Captain, backing at sixty RPM."
"Very well. Pilot, blow depth control one."
"Blowing one, ma'am."
"Ten-degree dive on the bowplanes, Pilot."
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