by Cliff Happy
“Snapshot, Weps,” Brodie ordered over the microphone. “I want them active the moment they leave the tubes, Andy.”
“Bearing now three-five-zero,” Kristen reported.
“Hold your course, helm,” Brodie ordered, still issuing commands from the sonar shack. Fabrini was standing by the active search panel, ready to initiate a powerful sonar search to quickly give them an exact range to the target. There was no doubt it was close and they were now in their opponent’s baffles. But Brodie waved Fabrini away from the active search sonar.
“All right, Andy, fire one,” he ordered smoothly.
Kristen heard the first torpedo leave the tube, its propeller turning to full speed as the torpedo’s own sonar went active. Kristen immediately got a return off the other submarine.
“Fire four!” Brodie ordered.
The second torpedo left the tube and also went active immediately. Kristen heard the torpedoes racing toward the target as well as their sonar lashing the other sub.
“Range seven hundred yards!” Fabrini reported using the return signal from the torpedo sonar to get the exact position of their antagonist.
Kristen knew what was about to happen. The other submarine had no chance. She briefly heard alarms, and then, for the first time, the submarines propeller as it began turning faster. But then the first MK-48 ADCAP torpedo hit. It was followed a few moments later by the second.
Kristen heard the detonations and felt the Seawolf shake slightly as the shock wave of the twin blasts reached the hull. There was no doubt they’d killed the other boat. The two blasts would have severely damaged the entire aft section of the submarine, and Kristen was betting the entire engineering compartment was already flooded.
“Bring us to periscope depth, standby on the diesel generator,” Brodie ordered abruptly, apparently having already put the dying submarine out of his thoughts.
Kristen continued to listen to the submarine, hearing the bow tanks blowing in a vain attempt to surface. She could clearly hear the alarms and screams in both Russian and what she thought might be Arabic coming from the submarine. Then she heard something extremely unsettling. She turned her head toward the other sonar operators, and saw their questioning looks.
“What was that?” Greenberg asked.
The sound had been a loud hissing, like cold water droplets on a hot surface.
“It’s their reactor,” she replied. “We cracked their reactor vessel. Cold seawater is rushing in.”
Chapter Twenty Eight
K-955 Borei
Captain Zuyev knew the Iranian crew was not ready for the fight ahead of them. Given a few more weeks, they might have been. But it was now quite clear to Zuyev that not only the Iranians, but his own political leaders had underestimated the American’s reaction to Iran seizing the Strait of Hormuz. All the bluster and threats of possible nuclear war—a bluff for certain—had failed to prevent the Western powers trying to regain the Strait. He was in the tiny radio room and accepted the message from his communications officer. It had just been decoded and Zuyev quickly read it.
“Captain?” Ahadi asked anxiously.
They’d received no more word about the battle outside the Strait of Hormuz and had assumed the Western powers had withdrawn to lick their wounds and reconsider their failed attempt. Zuyev had hoped that diplomacy would become the order of the day, and the crisis would end. But the message was the worst possible news. “The Gagarin is lost,” he said simply. “Her distress buoy started signaling seven hours ago.”
“But that’s impossible,” Ahadi exclaimed. “We’re perfectly silent once we’re on our fuel cell.”
“We don’t know if the Gagarin was running on her reactor when she was lost,” Zuyev reminded Ahadi.
Ahadi concluded, “This means the Americans or the British have made it through the barrier.”
Zuyev finished reading as the printer delivered another message, this one for Ahadi. “That will be our new orders.” Zuyev hoped those orders wouldn’t order the Borei into action. They were pushing the men hard, but they weren’t ready yet. If they stumbled onto an American SSN, they would be in big trouble.
Ahadi read the orders and then explained, “We’re ordered to stay hidden and take no offensive action that might threaten us; however, we are authorized to fire on any American or British warship as long as we don’t compromise our position.”
Zuyev immediately suggested what Ahadi was thinking, “All right, let’s refuel the hydrogen and oxygen tanks, then shut down the reactor and go dark. If we sit quietly, they’ll never find us.”
“What about training?” Ahadi asked.
“Battle drills,” Zuyev responded curtly. “We haven’t much time left.”
Chapter Twenty Nine
Sound Room, USS Seawolf
Graves was worried as he watched Kristen seated in front of the spectrum analyzer. It had been nearly twenty-four hours since their duel with what they assumed had been the Gagarin. The Seawolf was now searching for the Borei somewhere in the Persian Gulf. Over the past twenty-four hours, much of the crew—including himself—had been able to get a few hours of sleep. But, to his knowledge, Kristen hadn’t.
“How long has she been going at it?” he whispered to Fabrini.
“At least twelve hours,” Fabrini replied in a whisper. “The fact is no one else can hear what she’s hearing, sir.”
“She’s not going to be hearing much if she doesn’t get some sleep,” Graves replied as Brodie entered.
Graves was equally worried about Brodie, who was all but mainlining coffee to stay functioning. The National Command Authority wanted the Borei found before the Western Allies determined they could wait no longer to take out the Islamic Republic’s nuclear threat, and their window for finding the Borei was shrinking.
“Anything?” Brodie asked as he entered the shack.
Fabrini glanced at Kristen. Graves saw that she looked to be on her last leg. Her normally perfectly ordered hair had slowly scattered into a mess, her usually immaculate uniform was crumpled like an unmade bed and showed the stains from brief cat naps on the floor of the sonar shack.
“Nothing yet, Skipper,” Fabrini shook his head in apology.
“She’s been on the stack for over twelve hours now, Skipper,” Graves pointed out. “I doubt she’d hear a tractor-trailer drive by.”
Brodie exhaled tiredly and rubbed his blood-shot eyes. “Pull her off, Mister Fabrini,” he ordered and stepped back out into the passageway.
Graves followed Brodie and held the door open for Kristen, who worked her way through the cramped space. Stepping into the passageway, she offered Graves a weak smile.
“Yes, sir?” she asked Brodie.
“Anything yet?”
She could only shake her head.
Brodie leaned against the far bulkhead and closed his eyes. Graves knew his old friend was racking his brains trying to come up with any idea where the Borei might be hiding. But lack of sleep was affecting all of them, reducing their mental capacity.
“What do you think, Jason?” he asked. “If you were a Boomer skipper, where would you hide?”
Graves thought for a moment, considering the oceanographic characteristics of the Persian Gulf. Compared to the open ocean, the Gulf was a very narrow waterway with only one exit, so the Borei’s potential hiding spots were equally limited.
“Are we absolutely certain it was the Gagarin we destroyed and not the Borei, Captain?” Kristen asked.
She had a good point. Both subs were supposedly using identical power plants, so their noise signature would be near identical. But Brodie shook his shaggy head. “It was the Gagarin,” he said as if there could be no doubt. “If it had been the Borei, then their skipper never would have fired on us. He would’ve stayed hidden and let us go on about our business. Boomer skippers are all about finding a nice quiet piece of ocean and disappearing. The guy who shot at us was an attack boat skipper,” Brodie concluded, confident in his conclusion.
&
nbsp; Graves knew Brodie was probably right. No one knew submarines and tactics as well as his friend, and Graves trusted his judgment.
“So, you’re now captain of the Borei,” Brodie posed his query again. “Where would you hide?”
“In Iranian waters,” Graves said but couldn’t be certain. “I’d be in close where land-based planes could keep sub-hunting aircraft away from me, and where foreign attack subs would hesitate to go. Plus, there are all kinds of background noises along the coast to help mask my acoustic signature.”
Brodie nodded, apparently pleased with his line of thought. Then he looked at Kristen. “Lieutenant, what would you do?”
She looked to be far beyond the capacity for rational thought. Sheer exhaustion didn’t come close to describing the way she appeared. She was all but dead on her feet. “I think the XO might be right, sir,” she agreed. “But that’s still a lot of water to search.”
“So where?” Brodie asked.
She ran her hands through her disheveled hair and answered, “If I were driving the Borei, I would hide near one of the oil rigs. The transients coming off the rigs, especially any drilling rig, would mask a submarine from underwater detection. Plus, any aircraft we have looking for them would have to stay clear of the oil rigs as a flight hazard. Even if an aircraft did overfly the area, it is doubtful their magnetic anomaly detectors would pick up a submarine with all the metal on the oil rigs.”
She stifled a yawn while Brodie and Graves exchanged looks. Graves could see Brodie agreed with her. It was the perfect place to hide in the shallow Persian Gulf, and Graves thought her reasoning was logical despite her lack of rest.
“All right, Jason,” Brodie ordered, “let’s start with the platforms in Iranian waters. Have Ryan prepare a search pattern. If necessary, we’ll go from rig to rig until we find them.”
Graves concurred and then spoke to Kristen, “Why don’t you get some sleep, Lieutenant? You’re no use to us fumbling and bumbling. Go get some rest and then come back fresh.”
She shook her head and jerked her hand back toward the sonar shack. “I’m okay,” she lied. “I just needed to stretch my legs and get some fresh air.”
Charles Horner appeared in the hatchway carrying a message in his hand. “Captain?” he called out to get Brodie’s attention.
“Whatcha got, Charlie?”
“We just received this on the VLF net. It’s from CENTCOM.”
Brodie looked it over. Graves could see his friend’s exhaustion turn to disgust.
“What now?” Graves asked. “More prodding to find the Borei?”
“Worse,” Brodie admitted. “The National Command Authority has decided they can’t wait any longer. H-Hour for the start of the air campaign is in just under twenty-three hours.”
“What if we haven’t found the Borei yet?” Kristen asked. “If she’s equipped with even one nuclear missile, she’ll fire as soon as we begin taking out the Republic’s nuclear arsenal.”
“Get me Weps,” Brodie said to Horner and then turned back to Kristen. “Then we’d better find them,” he said, as if it were as simple as that.
“They want us to launch our Tomahawks as part of the opening attack,” Graves read out loud as he studied the Seawolf’s target package. Because the Seawolf was in so close to the Islamic Republic, CENTCOM believed they could hit their assigned cruise missile targets before the Iranian defenses would have a chance to react.
“You need to see me, Captain?” Andy Stahl asked as he arrived.
“Target package for our TLAMs,” Brodie explained as Graves handed Stahl the message.
“You’re kidding!” Stahl replied as he studied the message. “What if we haven’t found the Borei by then?” Clearly Stahl understood the need to remove this significant threat, which begged the question: why didn’t CENTCOM?
“H-Hour for the attack is set; the JCS, the NCA, and NATO have all signed off on it,” Brodie answered tiredly.
Firing Tomahawk cruise missiles at the start of an air offensive wasn’t unusual for American submarines. It was the fact that CENTCOM wanted the Seawolf to participate when the sub was in the middle of a completely incompatible mission to find the Borei that irked them. The hunt for the Borei required stealth, whereas launching a series of Tomahawk missiles would be like shooting up a flare. Wherever the Borei was lurking in the Persian Gulf, they would detect the launch and know precisely where the Seawolf was seconds after firing the first cruise missile.
Chapter Thirty
Sound Room, USS Seawolf
The Seawolf moved northward through the Persian Gulf, staying in shallow water. Their course took them through a seeming endless maze of oil platforms as they searched for any hint of another submarine. Fabrini stayed in the sonar shack, monitoring his sleepy sonar operators. He’d been able to get Martinez, Hicks, Greenberg, and Goldman some sleep, but Kristen had stayed. How she stayed awake he wasn’t sure. The mental exhaustion created by maintaining complete concentration for hours on end was the reason they had multiple teams of sonar operators and why the teams rotated frequently.
Fabrini had kept a close eye on her ever since her brief break seven hours earlier when she’d met with Graves and Brodie in the passageway. Following that short meeting, she’d been relatively alert initially, but soon her head had begun to bob every few minutes, and he knew he had to force her to come off the analyzer and get some real sleep.
He had only hesitated this long because he’d hoped she might detect something. The other operators had shown themselves incapable of hearing what she could, and so he’d believed she was their best chance for success. But her task was made significantly harder by the amount of manmade noise in the Persian Gulf. Thousands of oil rigs were emanating sound into the water, and the Seawolf’s sensors vacuumed it all up. This cacophony of sound had to be filtered out before she could have any chance of finding the Borei.
Fabrini stepped up beside her, seeing her head droop. He thought she was asleep. Her eyes were closed and her glasses far down on her nose. He was about to shake her awake when he saw the slightest movement of her right hand on the joystick. Her eyes opened, and she turned toward him. She looked awful.
“I’ve got something,” she whispered. “Plant noises, I think. Very faint.”
Fabrini snapped his fingers toward the other operators and checked the bearing she was listening to, but he saw absolutely no hint of anything on her waterfall display. “Bearing two-nine-eight,” Fabrini told the others as he grabbed the microphone.
“Conn, sonar. We have a possible submerged contact bearing two-nine-eight. Very faint, but it could be a nuclear submarine.”
Fabrini ordered the other operators to focus on the bearing in hopes of finding whatever it was and classifying it. Greenberg heard nothing, but beside him on the classification stack, Hicks suddenly nodded his head. “It isn’t much, but it is definitely manmade.” Unfortunately, there were thousands of manmade noises around them at the moment.
“What is it?” Fabrini heard the captain ask as he entered the shack. Brodie looked even worse than Kristen.
“Possible submerged submarine, Skipper,” Fabrini reported promptly.
“Who picked it up?” Brodie asked, not looking very impressed. There’d been well over two dozen false alarms in the last two hours. There was just too much clutter in the water for the operators to separate the important sounds from all the background chaff.
Fabrini nodded toward Kristen. “Hicks thinks he heard it too, sir.”
Brodie shook his head in exhaustion and possible annoyance. “All this equipment doesn’t seem to be doing us much good, Mister Fabrini.” He slipped behind Kristen and leaned down over her slightly. “Whatcha got, Lieutenant?”
“It’s faint and intermittent. But I would have sworn it was plant noise, sir,” she replied without looking up.
“When was the last time you slept?”
She shook her head in reply, removed her glasses and rubbed her tired eyes. “I’m not sur
e any more.”
Brodie glanced at Fabrini with a questioning eye, but Fabrini could only shrug, not certain when she’d last slept.
“Well, that’s good enough for me,” Brodie concluded, willing to accept that she’d heard what she claimed. He patted her shoulder then grabbed the microphone to speak with the control room.
“Con, this is Brodie. New course bearing three-one-five and bring the boat to general quarters.”
The Seawolf turned slowly while Kristen and the other sonar operators continued listening. Meanwhile the rest of the crew manned their battle stations, something they were now taking as routine instead of unusual. Fabrini stood by Brodie, and they each watched Kristen, knowing that if anyone would find the noise, it would be her. But after fifteen minutes of patiently waiting and watching the other sonar operators come up empty, they finally saw her lean back tiredly in her seat and remove her headphones. “It’s not there,” she reported in a tone of voice that hinted at more than just exhaustion affecting her. She sounded frustrated and, perhaps, a little embarrassed.
“Lieutenant?” Brodie asked calmly.
“I…I lost him,” she admitted but didn’t look up. She kept her eyes focused on the display in front of her. “I’m sorry, sir.”
Fabrini felt bad for her. She’d been killing herself hoping to find the elusive Borei, but she was clearly beyond being effective. She needed to come off the sonar and get some decent rest.
“Nothing to apologize for, Lieutenant,” Brodie replied as he patted her slender shoulder. “Take a break, get cleaned up, and I want you to hit the rack for at least six hours,” he ordered. “Killing yourself won’t help us.”
She stood slowly. Fabrini could see that her entire body was stiff from having been seated in the same position hovering over the spectrum analyzer for so long. He knew the feeling, but he’d never been at it nearly as long as she had. He couldn’t imagine how sore she had to be. The look on her face was testament enough that she’d done her best, but she was now dead on her feet. Slowly, as if already dreaming, she stumbled out of the shack.