Seawolf End Game

by Cliff Happy

  Kristen didn’t want to hear it. She didn’t want to hear his voice. She didn’t want to think about him or the all-too-real dream she’d been enjoying a moment earlier. She had to focus. She tightened her seatbelt and grabbed the headphones as they slid off the console and donned them. She turned her energy away from his voice and toward the sound of the approaching torpedo, forcing herself to ignore her fear and exhaustion and just concentrate. The computer had already recognized the torpedo as a Russian-made, Soviet Era, USET-80 torpedo, and it was coming directly for the Seawolf.

  Brodie turned the Seawolf away and was accelerating rapidly to run from the approaching torpedo. The sonar shack momentarily lost the torpedo in their baffles. But then a far more ominous sound reached them as the torpedo went active and began lashing the Seawolf’s hull with sonar to help the torpedo guide itself to its target.

  “The fucker’s got us,” Greenberg warned.

  “Torpedo is active and homing. Range two thousand yards. Bearing one-eight-zero,” Fabrini reported, his voice again returning to a more normal pitch.

  Kristen could hear nothing any more in her headphones except the homing torpedo getting closer and the sonar pings lashing the Seawolf’s hull.

  “Sonar, this is Brodie,” she heard his voice, once again calm and controlled. “Count down the range by hundreds.”

  Fabrini did as ordered, counting down the range as the Seawolf, now at forty-one knots, raced as fast as she could to hopefully outrun the torpedo. But the torpedo continued to bore in on them remorselessly. She heard the range drop below one thousand yards, and then the collision alarm sound. Kristen removed her headphones, hanging them on the peg by her display and gripped the edge of the console.

  “Five hundred yards,” Fabrini reported as the other sonar operators prepared for the torpedo impact. Goodman literally groaned beside her as the torpedo bore in remorselessly.

  “Three hundred yards,”

  “Launch countermeasures,” she heard Brodie’s calm voice. “Hard right rudder, all stop.”

  The Seawolf turned abruptly, causing the deck to pitch wildly to one side. Kristen tensed her muscles to hold herself erect and in front of her display. She knew what Brodie was trying to do. By turning sharply at high speed, the Seawolf’s huge rudder bit into the water and created a huge knuckle of swirling water and air bubbles into which he also launched their countermeasures. The result would hopefully look like a real target to the inbound torpedo and allow the Seawolf to escape yet again. But with the inbound torpedo already locked onto them with its own sonar…

  Despite the alarms, despite the warnings, no one was ready for the blast when it came.

  The Seawolf was slammed, as if by a massive fist, and thrown sideways. Several men screamed in fear as the lights twinkled and went out. The submarine shuddered violently. For a moment, Kristen thought her seat had broken loose from the deck as she was thrown viciously to the side.

  She hit the console and barely avoided smashing her skull into the bulkhead. Emergency lighting came on immediately, and she sat up carefully. Her screens were blank, and Kristen glanced to her left to see that all of the other systems were down as well. She expected to hear the sound of the Seawolf’s ballast tanks blowing and lifting them to the surface, but instead she heard a far worse sound: water streaming in.

  Kristen removed her seatbelt automatically as men donned their EABs. She climbed over two men who’d been thrown to the deck by the blast and then went through the hatch to see a ruptured pipe spraying water in the control room. She turned forward, remembering a valve in the passageway for the fractured saltwater line and ran for it. The sound of men shouting in the control room as they struggled to seal the damaged pipe, along with more ominous sounds of alarms blaring, assaulted her senses as sparks from shorted out systems fell in the passageway.

  Kristen reached the valve and began turning it, forcing her arms to work and ignore her instincts screaming for her to run. They were sinking, and they needed to evacuate the stricken submarine. But she squelched these morbid thoughts and turned the valve as fast as she could.

  Kristen heard the spraying water stop. She turned, looking down the dimly lit passageway to the control room beyond. Regular lighting still hadn’t returned, but she worked her way back past the sonar shack and into the control room as systems started coming back on line. Brodie was soaked from spraying water and there was standing water on the deck. Plus, several men were injured from being thrown about by the blast.

  “COB, get me a damage report,” Brodie ordered as he made his way forward to the helm control. “Are you okay?” he asked as he reached the helm and saw her standing in the hatchway.

  She ignored any concern for herself, knowing that if the submarine was going down, her injuries were irrelevant. “How bad are we hit?” she asked instead.

  “I don’t know yet,” he admitted. “We’ve lost the reactor for certain and are currently on batteries. What does it look like in sonar?”

  Kristen shook her head. “We lost power when the reactor scrammed. I’ll check and see what’s come back on line.”

  Brodie nodded in response as he ordered the planesman to bring them down. Most men in his position, would surface, but even now, Brodie’s instincts drove him toward the depths and safety.

  Kristen returned to sonar and saw the narrowband stack and the spectrum analyzer coming back on line, but everything else was dark. “Get some technicians in here,” she ordered Fabrini and then directed the others to go through the emergency procedures while she returned to the spectrum analyzer.

  Kristen again took her seat and strapped in, automatically reaching for the headphones as she felt something she’d never felt before. The Seawolf seemed to strike something. The boat had already been going slow, but now suddenly slowed abruptly and tilted to one side as they gently struck the sandy bottom, coming to rest on the sea floor. The boat didn’t sit even though, and was tilted downward by the bow ten degrees and canted to the starboard side by nearly fifteen degrees.

  “What the fuck’s happening?” someone shouted in panic.

  “Dammit!” she barked angrily. She was as scared as anyone, but panicking would help none of them. “Settle down and get back on your system checks and damage control procedures!”

  The sonar operators returned to their duties, but were—like her—clearly shaken by the fact they were now resting on the bottom of the Persian Gulf.

  Kristen ran a systems check as soon as her equipment came back on line. “Starboard passive arrays are down, but the bow mounted sonar is still functioning,” she told Fabrini.

  Fabrini reported to the control room as technicians arrived to begin assessing the damage and repairing it. The acoustic intercept box came back on line after a few minutes, a fuse having been tripped in a junction box in the passageway. But the broadband and classification stack would be at least twenty minutes. Similar teams were already moving throughout the submarine trying to repair damaged systems.

  The hatch opened and Brodie appeared. She half expected him to rip into the sonar crew for allowing an enemy to sneak up on them, but he was far beyond recriminations. Instead, he patted a few men on the shoulder comfortingly as he made his way back to where she was seated and Fabrini was standing. “What can you still do?” he asked, speaking directly to her.

  Kristen motioned to the various stacks and other equipment. “We’re still putting things back together in here, sir,” she explained in little more than a whisper. “But the hull arrays are all off line. All we have at present is the bow mounted sonar.”

  “Okay,” he replied with exasperating calm, “then the bow mounted will have to be enough.”

  Her first thought after realizing they weren’t sinking was that they would turn and escape back out of the Gulf. But his tone of voice and mannerisms made it clear he was determined to press on. Kristen had never found cause to question him. But now she hesitated, staring. She was scared. She wanted to live. The Seawolf was potentially fat
ally wounded; they still didn’t know for certain. Yet, despite this, he was focused on the mission before them.

  Regardless of the risk.

  “Do you have any idea what shot at us?” he asked.

  “Only that it was a submarine,” Kristen replied, catching a hint of his scent and immediately remembering her dream and how he’d smelled exactly as he currently did. The dream had been so real she glanced at his neck and cheek where she had brushed against him. But he was oblivious to her thoughts.

  “That’s all right, we’ll soon have a chance to set things right,” he said confidently.

  “How so, Skipper?” Fabrini asked.

  “Unless I miss my guess, whoever shot at us is on his way right now to finish us off,” Brodie warned them. “So, we need everyone in here looking sharp. We’re all tired, but we can’t afford to let our guard down.”

  With that, Brodie departed.

  Kristen quickly questioned everyone who’d been on duty when the surprise attack occurred. But they could give her very little information. The attack had come at them from their baffles, which meant someone had either sneaked in behind them, or more likely, someone had been lying quietly in ambush as the Seawolf sailed by.

  The Seawolf had come to rest facing back toward where the torpedo had come from, which was good since they could now only hear with the powerful bow mounted array covering the area in front of the submarine. Kristen settled back down, feeling the pressure upon her and the others to find their attacker before the reverse happened. She hated herself for having been asleep when they’d probably cruised right past the hidden submarine. Her logical self knew she’d been dead on her feet. In fact, she couldn’t actually remember sitting down to sleep. But she’d been so tired after exiting the minefield nothing had seemed real.

  Kristen pushed the self-recriminations aside and returned to listening. The sea around them was completely devoid of anything but the normal background noises in the Persian Gulf. She could hear the manmade racket from oil platforms, normal biological sounds, and distant patrol craft, but there were almost no ships around. She spent a solid hour listening and growing accustomed to every audible noise in the sea, hoping to pick up something different.

  Meanwhile, Seawolf’s damage control parties were busy sealing leaks, rerouting power systems, repairing equipment, and attending to the wounded. They were still resting on the bottom and running on the sub’s finite battery capacity. The reactor, although undamaged, had scrammed automatically when the shock wave from the explosion hit and was currently dormant. This was good since it made the Seawolf even quieter than usual. But the reactor couldn't be restarted off battery power; the batteries weren’t strong enough to provide the power necessary to reactivate it, only the diesel engine could do this. But the only way to use the diesel was to rise back up off the bottom and raise the snorkel above the surface. Even then the diesel would be noisy and alert any lurking predators to the Seawolf’s position. So they waited on the bottom, their batteries slowly draining.

  Kristen methodically moved her search back and forth, identifying every sound she could find, cataloguing it by bearing and its identity. It was slow and tedious work, but necessary since whatever had surprised them was exceptionally quiet. As two hours of patient listening turned to three and it became clear their antagonist was not rushing in to finish them off, she began to worry they might be waiting for the Seawolf to make the next move. But, on her battery power alone, the Seawolf was almost crippled. The submarine’s speed would be significantly reduced, and, more importantly, they couldn’t wait forever.

  She swept through the arc covered by the bow array for what felt like the thousandth time in the last few hours. At first she heard nothing new, but then she picked up something she didn’t remember hearing during previous sweeps. It was faint, so faint it was hardly a sound at all. It was more like the sensation of a sound instead of anything concrete. What’s more, it was an unexpected sound; something that didn’t belong here. But over the past few hours, Kristen had memorized every sound on every bearing, and this new sound hadn’t been there a few minutes earlier.

  Kristen raised her hand to get Fabrini’s attention as she homed in on the sound. She ran it through several filters and washed it through the computer, only to have the computer tell her she was listening to a natural sound.

  “The computer says it’s a biological,” Fabrini whispered.

  “It isn’t a biological,” she replied as she closed her eyes and listened intently. She was sweating profusely and struggling to concentrate. With the reactor off line, the air conditioning system had been shut down to conserve power. So, over the last three hours, the sonar shack had slowly become a sauna.

  To help alleviate some of the heat emanating from the equipment, Fabrini had left the door opened and through it, Brodie appeared. “What is it?” Brodie whispered after making his way back to Kristen.

  “Lieutenant Whitaker picked up something she thought might be a submerged contact,” Fabrini replied. Kristen noted his hint of skepticism. “But the computer says it’s a biological; crabs probably.”

  Kristen ignored him and instead focused all of her energy on the bearing she’d heard the sound come from. She then felt a gentle hand on her shoulder. She glanced up and saw Brodie leaning over her. “What is it, Lieutenant?”

  “It’s them,” Kristen replied softly.

  “The computer said it’s a biological, Miss.” Fabrini offered again. “Snow Crabs to be exact.”

  “That might be possible, Mister Fabrini,” she replied as she glanced back over her shoulder. “Except Snow Crabs aren’t found in the Persian Gulf.”

  Brodie immediately rewarded her with a slight smile and a sudden glow in his eyes. “That a’girl,” Brodie said to her as his hand patted her shoulder. “Where’s the sneaky bugger?”

  Kristen pointed to an intermittent thin line on her waterfall display. “Three-five-one, sir.”

  He nodded, still leaning over her as the other operators began listening, trying to gain anything from the distant sound. “Any idea on the classification and range?”

  “It’s not another Akula,” she explained. “And it’s no diesel electric boat I’ve ever heard.” She then added, “There are no plant noises at all, no cooling pumps… just this…”

  She turned on the speaker at her station and Fabrini and Brodie listened closely. “Damn, that’s nothing but a shadow,” Fabrini said in disbelief. “How did you hear it?”

  Brodie however reached up and pulled down a microphone. “Con, this is Brodie.”

  A moment later Kristen heard Ryan Walcott’s voice, “Yes, Captain?”

  “Have tubes one and four made ready in all respects. We may have a snapshot coming in a few minutes.”

  “Aye, Captain.”

  Meanwhile, Kristen was once more focused entirely on the noise. Her hands were on her headphones, her eyes closed, and motionless as if frozen in place. Around her she could almost feel every eye staring at her, but she did her best to tune all of them out as well. “New bearing,” she whispered, “three-four-eight.”

  Her eyes didn’t open, nor did she hear the information transferred to the tracking parties who began working up a possible firing solution. Instead, Kristen continued to listen. The other sonar operators were on it now as well, but the computer had still not registered anything but a biological sound.

  “Transients!” Hicks whispered as Kristen nodded her head, having heard the same thing.

  “What was it?” Brodie asked, his voice still perfectly calm.

  “It sounded like someone slamming a hatch, sir,” Hicks reported softly.

  Kristen felt Brodie’s hand upon her shoulder. “Lieutenant?” he asked, wanting her opinion.

  She shrugged her shoulder slightly. “It could’ve been a hatch,” she replied seeing no reason to argue over it, even though she thought it sounded more like someone jumping off a ladder and landing on a deck while wearing boots. “New bearing, three-four-zero
,” she whispered and then added, “He’s very close, Captain.”

  Kristen heard the contact clearly now, and she was certain it was either the Borei or the Gagarin operating on a fuel cell. All the sonar operators were picking up more transients now, including what sounded like someone speaking.

  “New bearing, three-zero-five, Captain,” Kristen reported, knowing the submarine was on a course to within a few hundred yards of them. The temptation for Brodie to fire had to be enormous, but he maintained his cool despite the grueling pace of the previous few days.

  “He’s passing astern of us,” she reported in a barely audible whisper. “I lost him on our port side.”

  Brodie nodded but said nothing in reply. Instead, he issued orders to the control room via the microphone. “Bring her up off the bottom slowly, Spike.” Brodie then ordered the officer of the deck to prepare to bring the Seawolf around.

  “Mister Fabrini, prepare for a Yankee search,” he said softly.

  Kristen knew they would have little choice but an active sonar search. The contact had been nearly impossible to find and would be hard to reacquire as they came around. Kristen felt the canted deck begin to level off as the Seawolf slowly rose up off the sandy bottom. She heard Brodie whisper commands to engage the pump-jet, ordering the Seawolf around slowly.

  Kristen turned her attention back to listening for the strange sound. She focused on the area to the rear of the Seawolf as they turned to port. Sweat dripped from her forehead and chin; her coveralls were drenched. But she noticed nothing, not even the stale air around her or the expectant stares of men on her as they waited for her to find their antagonist.

  Through her headphones, she heard numerous other sounds cluttering up the water, making it difficult to isolate the particular sound she was searching for. Slowly, she dismissed each superfluous sound, filtering out the clutter, forcing her exhausted brain to work. Then she heard it. “Bearing three-four-seven and coming around fast,” she reported. “He’s still close. I can hear voices in engineering.”