A carafe of coffee arrived, and with it Grachev's Vepr cup with its trademark boar's head, designed personally by Svyatoslov. A boar, Grachev thought. Only his Svyatoslov would name a combat submarine after a boar. He smiled to himself, realizing that every kilometer he made good away from the port of Norfolk gave him that much more confidence that they would return from this mission.
It had been a good day, he thought, sipping the scalding hot coffee, looking around the compartment in satisfaction.
He heard Svyatoslov enter, looking around.
"Mr. First," Grachev said. "What's going on?"
"Nothing much. Just seeing to the chart. I'd rather look from up here than on my remote in the stateroom."
"It is better," Grachev said. "Like the old days."
Out of nowhere came the ringing of the general alarm by the Second Captain.
"What is it?" Grachev asked the Second Captain while scanning display zero. "And silence the alarm."
The clanging of the emergency annunciator stopped.
"Captain, the system has picked up a possible torpedo in the water at bearing one zero one, bearing rate right, range distant," the sterile voice of the Second Captain said.
There was very little else on the status panel of display zero. While Grachev leaned over to think, he could hear the footsteps of the men hurrying into the control compartment.
"Deck Officer, man tactical stations," Grachev said, tapping his console display to show the surrounding spatial representation taken from the sonar sensors. Aux one showed ship and weapon status, aux two the raw sonar display, and aux three the processed sonar information. The other auxiliary displays he left to the Second Captain to use to show him information as it saw fit.
"Check," he said, hearing his own voice.
"Read you, Captain," Svyatoslov said.
"Attention control compartment," Grachev said. "Second Captain has detected a long-range torpedo sound from the east. We don't know if it is headed for our convoy. I'm waiting now to refine the data coming into the Second Captain on this leg. Once the computer has a steady bearing rate, I intend to drive the ship across the line-of-sight to the torpedo
to get a preliminary parallax range on the unit. Once we get a read on range, I will move the ship above the layer depth and analyze the sonar signals we hear in the warm water. If this torpedo is shallow, our signal-to-noise ratio will improve. If not, the torpedo will get quieter. We will also be listening to see if we can detect the firing platform, which I suspect we will when we penetrate the layer." His stomach sank. Either way this was very bad news. "Second Captain, prepare tubes one through four with Bora II torpedoes, then flood, equalize, and open outer doors on the upper bank. Apply weapon power one through four for a quick-reaction firing."
The torpedo might be targeting them—that was the first task on the frantic emergency checklist, to see which direction this torpedo was going and determine if they needed to evade it. If it wasn't headed for the Vepr, where was it going? He'd have to warn the surface force to split up, to scramble into an antisubmarine formation and disperse to avoid the incoming torpedoes.
The next thought came in a rush. If there was a torpedo in the water, then someone had launched it, and it was extremely unlikely that it was an aircraft-launched weapon, not this close to the battle fleet with all their radars and air-search abilities. No, this had been launched from a submarine. And a hostile sub meant it had to be an American, because who else would be gunning for the formation? The sub they'd shot at was the most capable sub in the fleet. He had to assume that the sub that was out there was much less capable than the
SSNX ship they had put on the bottom. But less capable or not, it had managed to sneak in here and launch a weapon, and the sub would need to be destroyed, and quickly. Grachev wondered if he looked as shaken as he felt.
"Sir, ship is answering dead slow ahead," Ten-ukha called from the ship-control enclosure, jarring him back into the present.
Grachev looked at his display zero. The torpedo was off to the east at bearing 101, drawing farther south. The line-of-sight to the torpedo connected Vepr to the weapon, and both he and the torpedo were making velocity southward along the line-of-sight, a dangerous situation, possibly leading to a collision course with the torpedo, but he wanted to give the Second Captain another second to record the bearing rate with this situation. Then he would drive them off their track to the northeast and see what the torpedo did.
"Second Captain, leg status," Grachev demanded.
"Leg quality five four percent," the system's dead voice said.
Good enough, Grachev thought. Anything over 30 percent was gravy. Grachev looked over at Ten-ukha in the ship-control console and called, "Ahead fifty percent, left full rudder, steer course zero three zero!" This course would put Vepr across the line-of-sight, giving them an almost instant passive range to the distant torpedo.
"Coming around left, Captain, zero five zero, zero four zero."
"Ahead thirty percent, make your speed twenty-five clicks."
"Steady zero four zero, throttling down, speed twenty-six clicks coming to two five."
"Second Captain, report range to torpedo," Grachev said. His order was superfluous—the computer would tell whether he'd ordered it or not— but making a biting order made him feel better. For the next sixty seconds he waited while the Second Captain's computations came into focus. The error confidence interval shrank from 200 down to 80 percent, further down to 50, finally after a second minute to 30 percent, where it was good enough to report. Grachev's display zero showed the torpedo range at twenty kilometers, with a weapon speed of twenty-two kilometers per hour. The Second Captain system announced aloud the torpedo's speed and range. Slow for a torpedo, Grachev thought. The weapon's course was reported as 165, which was very odd.
"Crew, prepare to penetrate the layer," Grachev said. "Ship Control Officer, change ship's depth to thirty meters."
"Rising to thirty meters, Captain," Tenukha said.
"Very good." Grachev waited, the aux four display showing the ship's depth. The chin sonar rose through the layer depth at sixty-two meters. The aux three display of signal-to-noise ratio immediately sank to zero—the torpedo had vanished the second they had gone above-layer.
"Deep!" Grachev shouted. "Take it back down to three hundred meters! Steep angle!"
Tenukha reversed his stick, pushing it to the for-
ward bulkhead, the deck plunging downward as the ship dived back into the colder deeper water. The signal-to-noise ratio came back up, the torpedo back where the Second Captain expected it.
"Second Captain, any indication at all of the damn launching platform?"
"None, Captain."
"Follow the course vector of the torpedo backward into the sea. What's the reciprocal course of one six five? Three four five! Follow that back and see what you have!"
"Still nothing, Captain."
"Other torpedoes?"
"No, sir."
"Where is this torpedo going?" he asked himself with a lower voice. "It's headed southeast. The convoy is twenty-three kilometers southwest of it. So, if it's attacking the convoy, why is it going southeast?"
Svyatoslov stared down at display zero, standing next to Grachev.
"Sir, it's not headed for us, and it's not headed for the convoy."
"Wait a minute. I smell a rat. Second Captain, compute the possibilities of this torpedo intercepting the task force at a future point."
Grachev waited. "Well?" he bellowed.
"Zero point zero, Captain."
"Can't get much lower than that," Novskoyy added.
"Compute intercept point with task force at farthest east point of diamond pattern, and report torpedo speed and course."
"Sir," the electronics replied, "Course one seven eight, speed ninety-seven point five clicks."
"So why would this torpedo be putt-putting along southeast when it should be going all-out headed due south?"
"It's not going southeast
. It's going east," Svya-toslov said. "Now east-northeast."
"What?"
"It's circling."
"Dammit," Grachev spat. A circling torpedo meant he couldn't expect to see the launch platform approaching from the line drawn through the torpedo's course. The launching sub could be anywhere.
"Second Captain, any classification on this torpedo? Could it be helicopter-launched?"
"No classification, sir."
"Depth of the unit?"
"Below layer, Captain."
"Sir, we'd better open range to that torpedo," Svyatoslov said. "If it's circling, it could come back around and hear us."
"Are we closing the circle?"
"No. But you're still heading zero three zero, away from the convoy."
"Ship control, right full rudder steady course two one zero, ahead forty percent."
"Forty percent, ship is coming around to the right, sir, passing zero four zero to the left."
"Belay reports."
"So now what do we do, Captain?" Svyatoslov had pulled his boom mike up and held it with his
hand, speaking quietly in Grachev's ear so the whole crew wouldn't hear.
"We'll pace back and forth until we hear something more."
"Sir, shouldn't you warn the convoy? And you're out of the safety lane."
"If I come to mast broach depth and transmit, we'll go above layer and lose the torpedo. I can't risk that."
"But the convoy is still orbiting. In ten minutes they'll turn to course zero four zero. They'll be driving right into the search cone of that torpedo. Look, right now they are twenty-three kilometers from the torpedo circle's closest point of approach. Once they make the turn to the northeast, they'll close the torpedo orbit to thirteen kilometers. That's almost half the distance. The torpedo will see a huge signal-to-noise-level increase. I mean huge, sir."
"You're right. Attention, crew. We're going to go upstairs and warn the task force. We'll go up quick, get out our warning, and pull the plug and go deep. Everyone got that? Tenukha, prepare the radio circuits. Mr. First, write out and insert the emergency message into the UHF, HF, EHF, and VHF frequencies and code it per the operation plan. Tell them we have a torpedo threat from the northeast, immediate fleet formation break, escape vector to the southeast or off the track of the threat axis. Got it?"
Svyatoslov was scribbling furiously on a computer clipboard, nodding. "Here, sir."
Grachev read it quickly. "Good." He shouted to the room: "Ready?" He saw Novskoyy standing
next to him, still icy-calm. "Al, grab a handhold, this will be hairy." Novskoyy held on to a horizontal bar mounted on Grachev's command console. Grachev took a last look at display zero, then shouted into the boom microphone, "Second Captain, emergency mast broach with the multifre-quency antenna ready now!"
The deck almost immediately began to rise. One second Grachev was standing on a level surface, the next on a tilted incline steeper than a staircase. The deck rumbled with power as the propulsor shot ahead to 100 percent reactor power. The ship's turbines wound up, at full throttle, and the noise in the engineering spaces almost immediately tripled as the turbines roared, then howled.
Grachev, Svyatoslov, and Novskoyy hung by the handholds of the command console as the vessel rose 250 meters, making the ascent in less than a minute. The ship's acceleration, so radical a few seconds before, was reversed as the Second Captain inserted progressively larger shunting resistors into the propulsion turbine electrical output, then reversed the polarity of the DC current feeds to the massive propulsion motor, then took the shunting resistors back out of the circuit, the maneuver causing the propulsor to go from full revolutions ahead to full revolutions astern in the space of four seconds. The hull shook violently from the backing turns. The shaking calmed after several seconds as the Second Captain throttled back, and the deck suddenly came back down level. Grachev was able to feel the slight rolling of the hull in the waves above as the Second Captain kept the vessel at
walking speed at mast broach depth, to avoid sheering off an antenna.
The moment the ship reached the shallows, the telephone pole of the multifrequency antenna pushed up out of the fin and upward out of the water. The surface of the mast felt moist sea air and began to transmit immediately.
"How long are you staying up, Captain?" Svya-toslov asked.
"Let's see. It would be nice to get a reply from the task force. I'd also like to see what we hear up here above the layer. Transmission status, Second?"
"Message transmitting on all frequencies, Captain."
"Sonar contact above the layer?"
"Nothing above the threshold signal-to-noise ratio, Captain."
"Attention, crew. We'll remain here until we get a reply from the task force or for ten minutes of transmitting." If the surface group didn't get the hint in six hundred seconds of panic transmissions, it would have to take the consequences. "After that, we're going deep to drive a circle around the orbit of this circling torpedo at a safe radius to see if we can find the launching platform."
Chances were, he thought, things would develop while they were up here, deaf, and that when they did eventually get back below the layer, things would be . . . different.
In the control room of the submarine thirty-two nautical miles northeast of the Vepr, the executive officer, Kiethan Judison, checked his watch at the forward chart table and looked up at the captain.
"About time to strap our cleats on, Skipper."
Captain Kelly McKee nodded and pulled on his control glove, then picked up his helmet. He shut his eyes so that he could get contact with the rubber eyepieces. He opened his eyes once inside.
In his helmet view he saw the room almost as he would with it off, except for the odd effect when he turned his head. His eyes saw reality around him with a visual separation between his "eyes" of twelve inches instead of the usual two. He saw Jud-ison vanish into one of the VR cubicles. Now alone in the open part of the room, he switched his vision to be part of the Cyclops system's output.
Once again he found himself back on the toy submarine under the clear water of the battlespace, below the layer depth. To the south he could see the orange marks of the trails of the torpedoes, nine of them circling in their orbits as the tenth drew alongside. As the tenth torpedo "flew" southwest, the other torpedoes broke out of their orbits and set off toward the surface fleet.
McKee raised his hand and immediately rose out of the water. The surface fleet appeared at the limits of his vision, far to the south, in the middle of its leg on the diamond-shaped path. He blinked, and the previous path of the surface group became inscribed in red on the surface of the virtual sea below him. From this view, a mile was represented as about ten feet. It was as if he hung from the scoreboard of a basketball arena, the floor below him cluttered with models.
The torpedoes were approaching in a fan about five miles wide, all of them now headed roughly
southwest toward the surface convoy. The attack was progressing routinely. He had a thought that it was going well, but then became annoyed. This was the warm-up show. The headliner act, the submarine, was still nowhere to be seen. McKee had ordered that the Mark 23 Bloodhound underwater surveillance vehicle climb cautiously above the layer for thirty seconds every ten-minute interval. Even that was something of a waste of time. The surface ships stirred up the warm Atlantic with their loud cavitating screws, making an entire sector of the battlespace useless.
As the Mark 23 Bloodhound peeked above the layer this time, though, it heard the tonals of heavy rotating machinery, and the flow of something through waves. The processor onboard became flooded with information, displayed a few seconds later in McKee's battlespace representation. In it was a pulsing red ray emanating from the position of the Mark 23, only the bearing of the noise apparent. Whatever it was, it could be anywhere along that line from the Bloodhound, which was southwest of Hammerhead but north of the tracks of the southwest-headed torpedoes.
"Attention in the fire-c
ontrol team, we have a detect above the layer heard from the Bloodhound. I have an apparent bearing going northwest from the Bloodhound's position. Immediate action will be to do target-motion analysis with the Bloodhound—and keep it above layer for the moment—and get our own ship above layer now. Carry on. Pilot, left full rudder, ahead standard, steady course west. Make your depth one two zero feet, sharp angle!"
The response came back from the pilot at the two-man ship-control console, and the deck tilted upward to a twenty-degree angle as the ship ascended to the shallow layer, then pitched back level.
"Sir, depth one two zero feet, steady course west, answering ahead standard."
"Pilot, all stop, mark speed four knots."
"All stop, Pilot aye."
Hammerhead had screamed for the layer, and now had turned west from the previous course of southeast.
"Sonar, Captain, we're above layer. Are you getting an acoustic daylight image of the Bloodhound and a contact farther northwest of it?"
"Captain, Sonar, yes, we have a detect on a submerged contact, bearing two six eight, distant contact. Should be coming into your battlespace display now," Senior Chief Cook said in McKee's headset.
Below him, from the toy Hammerhead's position, a thin ray of red light burst out from the sub going almost due west. The intersection of the red ray from the Bloodhound southwest of them and the ray from own ship pulsed into a purple diamond, the triangulated position of the submerged contact.
"Sonar, Captain, designate the submerged contact target twenty-six. Classify target twenty-six."
"Captain, Sonar aye. Twenty-six is making way on one forty-two impeller propulsor jet doing three zero RPM. Unit is not a U.S. or allied submarine class, possible Russian Republic generation four hull. Contact is shallow, above layer. Possible transients indicate unit is at periscope depth—"
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