by Tom Clancy
Like most large warships, John Stennis was steam-powered. In her case two nuclear reactors generated power by boiling water directly. That steam went into a heat exchanger where other water was boiled (but not made radioactive as a result) and piped aft to a high-pressure turbine. The steam hit the turbine blades, causing them to turn much like the vanes of a windmill, which is all the turbine really was; the steam was then piped aft to a low-pressure turbine to make use of the residual energy. The turbines had efficient turning rates, far faster than the propeller could attain, however, and to lower the shaft speed to something the ship could really use, there was a set of reduction gears, essentially a shipboard version of an automobile transmission, located between them. The finely machined barrel-shaped wheels in that bit of marine hardware were the most delicate element of the ship’s drivetrain, and the blast energy from the warhead had traveled straight up the shaft, jamming the wheels in a manner that they were not designed to absorb. The added asymmetrical writhing of the unbalanced shaft rapidly completed the destruction of the entire Number Two drivetrain. Sailors were leaping from their feet with the noise even before the second warhead struck, on Number Three.
That explosion was on the outer edge of the starboard-inboard propeller, and the collateral damage took half a blade off Number Four. Damage to Number Three was identical with Number Two. Number Four was luckier. This engine-room crew threw the steam controls to reverse with the first hint of vibration. Poppet valves opened at once, hitting the astern-drive blades and stopping the shaft before the damage got as far as the reduction gears, just in time for the third torpedo to complete the destruction of the starboard-outboard prop.
The All-Stop bell sounded next, and the crewmen in all four turbine rooms initiated the same procedure undertaken moments earlier by the crew on the starboard side. Other alarms were sounding. Damage-control parties raced aft and below to check the flooding, as their carrier glided to a lengthy and crooked halt. One of her rudders was damaged as well.
“What the hell was that all about?” one engineman asked another.
“My God,” Sanchez breathed topside. Somehow the damage to Enterprise, now two miles away, seemed even worse than that to his ship. Various alarms were still sounding, and below on the navigation bridge, voices were screaming for information so loudly that the need for telephone circuits seemed superfluous. Every ship in the formation was maneuvering radically now. Fife, one of the plane-guard ’cans, had reversed course and was getting the hell out of Dodge, her skipper clearly worried about other possible fish in the water. Somehow Sanchez knew there weren’t. He’d seen three explosions aft on Johnnie Reb and three under Enterprise’s stern.
“Smithers, come with me.”
“Sir, my battle-station—”
“They can handle it without you, and there’s nothing much to look out for now. We’re not going much of anywhere for a while. You’re going to talk to the Captain.”
“Jesus, sir!” The exclamation was not so much profanity as a prayer to be spared that ordeal.
The CAG turned. “Take a deep breath and listen to me: you might be the only person on this whole goddamned ship who did their job right over the last ten minutes. Follow me, Smithers.”
“Shafts two and three are blown away, Skipper,” they heard a minute later on the bridge. The ship’s CO was standing in the middle of the compartment, looking like a man who’d been involved in a traffic accident. “Shaft four is damaged also ... shaft one appears okay at the moment.”
“Very well,” the skipper muttered, then added for himself, “What the hell ...”
“We took three ASW torps, sir,” Sanchez reported. “Seaman Smithers here saw the launch.”
“Is that a fact?” The CO looked down at the young seaperson. “Miss, you want to sit over in my chair. When I’m finished keeping my ship afloat I want to talk to you.” Then came the hard part. The Captain of USS John Stennis turned to his communications officer and started drafting a signal to CincPacFlt. It would bear the prefix NAVY BLUE.
“Conn, Sonar, torpedo in the water, bearing two-eight-zero, sounds like one of their Type 89s,” “Junior” Laval reported, not in an overly excited way. Submarines were regularly shot at by friends.
“All ahead flank!” Commander Kennedy ordered. Exercise or not, it was a torpedo, and it wasn’t something to feel comfortable about. “Make your depth six hundred feet.”
“Six hundred feet, aye,” the chief of the boat replied from his station as diving officer. “Ten degrees down-angle on the planes.” The helmsman pushed forward on the yoke, angling USS Asheville toward the bottom, taking her below the layer.
“Estimated range to the fish?” the Captain asked the tracking party.
“Three thousand yards.”
“Conn, Sonar, lost him when we went under the layer. Still pinging in search mode, estimate the torpedo is doing forty or forty-five knots.”
“Turn the augmenter off, sir?” the XO asked.
Kennedy was tempted to say yes, the better to get a feel for how good the Japanese torpedo really was. To the best of his knowledge no American sub had yet played against one. It was supposedly the Japanese version of the American Mark 48.
“There it is,” Sonar called. “It just came under the layer. Torpedo bearing steady at two-eight-zero, signal strength is approaching acquisition values.”
“Right twenty degrees rudder,” Kennedy ordered. “Stand by the five-inch room.”
“Speed going through thirty knots,” a crewman reported as Asheville accelerated.
“Right twenty-degrees rudder, aye, no new course given.”
“Very well,” Kennedy acknowledged. “Five-inch room, launch decoy now-now-now! Cob, take her up to two hundred!”
“Aye,” the chief of the boat replied. “Up ten on the planes!”
“Making it hard?” the executive officer asked.
“No freebies.”
A canister was ejected from the decoy-launcher compartment, called the five-inch room for the diameter of the launcher. It immediately started giving off bubbles like an Alka-Seltzer tablet, creating a new, if immobile, sonar target for the torpedo’s tracking sonar. The submarine’s fast turn created a “knuckle” in the water, the better to confuse the Type 89 fish.
“Through the layer,” the technician on the bathythermograph reported.
“Mark your head!” Kennedy said next.
“Coming right through one-nine-zero, my rudder is twenty-right.”
“Rudder amidships, steady up on two-zero-zero.”
“Rudder amidships, aye, steady up on two-zero-zero.”
“All ahead one-third.”
“All ahead one-third, aye.” The enunciator changed positions, and the submarine slowed down, now back at two hundred feet, over the layer, having left a lovely if false target behind.
“Okay.” Kennedy smiled. “Now let’s see how smart that fish is.”
“Conn, Sonar, the torpedo just went right through the knuckle.” The tone of the report was just a little off, Kennedy thought.
“Oh?” the CO went forward a few steps, entering sonar. “Problem?”
“Sir, that fish just went right through the knuckle like it didn’t see it.”
“Supposed to be a pretty smart unit. You suppose it just ignores decoys like the ADCAP does?”
“Up-Doppler,” another sonarman said. “Ping-rate just changed ... frequency change, it might have us, sir.”
“Through the layer? That is clever.” It was going a little fast, Kennedy thought, like real combat, even. Was the new Japanese torpedo really that good, had it really just ignored the decoy and the knuckle? “We recording all this?”
“You bet, sir,” Sonarman 1/c Laval said, reaching up to tap the tape machine. A new cassette was taking all this in, and another video system was recording the display on the waterfall screens. “There go the motors, just increased speed. Aspect change ... it’s got us, zero aspect on the fish, screw noises just faded.” Meaning that the engine noi
se of the torpedo was now somewhat blocked by the body of the weapon. It was headed straight in.
Kennedy turned his head to the tracking party. “Range to fish?”
“Under two thousand, sir, closing fast now, estimate torpedo speed sixty knots.”
“Two minutes to overtake at this speed.”
“Look at this, sir.” Laval tapped the waterfall display. It showed the track of the torpedo, and also showed the lingering noise of the decoy, still generating bubbles. The Type 89 had drilled right through the center of it.
“What was that?” Laval asked the screen. A large low-frequency noise had just registered on the screen, bearing three-zero-five. “Sounded like an explosion, way off, that was a CZ signal, not direct path.” A convergence-zone signal meant that it was a long way away, more than thirty miles.
Kennedy’s blood turned a little cold at that piece of news. He stuck his head back into the attack center. “Where are Charlotte and the other Japanese sub?”
“Northwest, sir, sixty or seventy miles ”
“All ahead flank!” That order just happened automatically. Not even Kennedy knew why he’d given it.
“All ahead flank, aye,” the helmsman acknowledged, turning the enunciator dial. These exercises sure were exciting stuff. Before the engine order was acknowledged, the skipper was on his command phone again:
“Five-inch room, launch two, now-now-now!”
The ultrasonic targeting sonar on a homing torpedo is too high in frequency to be heard by the human ear. Kennedy knew that the energy was hitting his submarine, reflecting off the emptiness within, because the sonar waves stopped at the steel-air boundary, bouncing backward to the emitter that generated them.
It couldn’t be happening. If it were, others would have noted it, wouldn’t they? He looked around. The crew was at battle stations. All watertight doors were closed and dogged down as they would be in combat. Kurushio had launched an exercise torpedo, identical to a warshot in everything but the warhead, for which an instrument package was substituted. They were also designed not to hit their targets, but to turn away from them, because a metal-to-metal strike could break things, and fixing those things could be expensive.
“It’s still got us, sir.”
But the fish had run straight through the knuckle ...
“Take her down fast!” Kennedy ordered, knowing it was too late for that.
USS Asheville dropped her nose, taking a twenty-degree down-angle, back over thirty knots with the renewed acceleration. The decoy room launched yet another bubble canister. The increased speed degraded sonar performance, but it was clear from the display that the Type 89 had again run straight through the false image of a target and just kept coming.
“Range under five hundred,” the tracking part said. One of its members noticed that the Captain was pale and wondered why. Well, nobody likes losing, even in an exercise.
Kennedy thought about maneuvering more as Asheville ducked under the layer yet again. It was too close to outrun. It could outturn him, and every attempt to confuse it had failed. He was just out of ideas. He’d had no time to think it all through.
“Jesus!” Laval took his headphones off. The Type 89 was now alongside the submarine’s towed-array sonar, and the noise was well off the scale. “Should turn away any second now ...”
The Captain just stood there, looking around. Was he crazy? Was he the only one who thought—
At the last second, Sonarman 1/c Laval looked aft to his commanding officer. “Sir, it didn’t turn!”
21
Navy Blue
Air Force One lifted off a few minutes sooner than expected, speeded on her way by the early hour. Reporters were already up and moving before the VC-25B reached her cruising altitude, coming forward to ask the President for a statement explaining the premature departure. Cutting short a state trip was something of a panic reaction, wasn’t it? Tish Brown handled the journalists, explaining that the unfortunate developments on Wall Street commanded a quick return so that the President could reassure the American people ... and so forth. For the moment, she went on, it might be a good idea for everyone to catch up on sleep. It was, after all, a fourteen-hour flight back to Washington, with the headwinds that blew across the Atlantic at this time of year, and Roger Durling needed his sleep, too. The ploy worked for several reasons, not the least of which was that the reporters were suffering from too much alcohol and not enough sleep, like everyone else aboard—except the flight crew, all hoped. Besides, there were Secret Service agents and armed Air Force personnel between them and the President’s accommodations. Common sense broke out, and everyone returned back to the seating area. Soon things were quieted down, and nearly every passenger aboard was either asleep or feigning it. Those who weren’t asleep wished they were.
Johnnie Reb’s commanding officer was, by federal law, an aviator. The statute went back to the 1930s, and had been drafted to prevent battleship sailors from taking over the new and bumptious branch of the Old Navy. As such, he had more experience flying airplanes than in driving ships, and since he’d never had a command afloat, his knowledge of shipboard systems consisted mainly of things he’d picked up along the way rather than from a matter of systematic study and experience. Fortunately, his chief engineer was a black-shoe destroyer sailor with a command under his belt. The skipper did know, however, that water was supposed to be outside the hull, not inside.
“How bad, ChEng?”
“Bad, sir.” The Commander gestured to the deck plates, still covered with an inch of water that the pumps was gradually sending over the side. At least the holes were sealed now. That had taken three hours. “Shafts two and three are well and truly trashed. Bearings shot, tail shafts twisted and split, reduction gears ground up to junk—no way anybody can fix them. The turbines are okay. The reduction gears took all the shock. Number One shaft’s okay. Some shock damage to the aft bearings. That I can fix myself. Number Four screw is damaged, not sure how bad, but we can’t turn it without risking the shaft bearings. Starboard rudder is jammed over, but 1 can deal with that, another hour, maybe, and it’ll be ’midships. May have to replace it, depending on how bad it looks. We’re down to one shaft. We can make ten, eleven knots, and we can steer, badly.”
“Time to fix?”
“Months—four or five is my best guess right now, sir.” All of which, the Commander knew, would require him to be here, overseeing the yard crews, essentially rebuilding half the ship’s power plant—maybe three quarters. He hadn’t fully evaluated the damage to Number Four yet. That was when the Captain really lost his temper. It was about time, the ChEng thought.
“If I could launch an air strike, I’d sink those sunzabitches!” But launching anything on the speed generated by a single shaft was an iffy proposition. Besides, it had been an accident, and the skipper really didn’t mean it.
“You have my vote on that one, sir,” ChEng assured him, not really meaning it either, because he added: “Maybe they’ll be nice enough to pay for the repairs.” His reward was a nod.
“We can start moving again?”
“Number One shaft is a little out from shock damage, but I can live with it, yes, sir.”
“Okay, get ready to answer bells. I’m taking this overpriced barge back to Pearl.”
“Aye aye, sir.”
Admiral Mancuso was back in his office, reviewing preliminary data on the exercise when his yeoman came in with a signal sheet.
“Sir, looks like two carriers are in trouble.”
“What did they do, collide?” Jones asked, sitting in the corner and reviewing other data.
“Worse,” the yeoman told the civilian.
ComSubPac read the dispatch. “Oh, that’s just great.” Then his phone rang; it was the secure line that came directly from PacFltOps. “This is Admiral Mancuso.”
“Sir, this is Lieutenant Copps at Fleet Communications. I have a submarine emergency beacon, located approximately 31-North, 175-East. We’re refining that p
osition now. Code number is for Asheville, sir. There is no voice transmission, just the beacon. I am initiating a SUB-MISS /SUBSUNK. The nearest naval aircraft are on the two carriers—”
“Dear God.” Not since Scorpion had the U.S. Navy lost a sub, and he’d been in high school then. Mancuso shook his head clear. There was work to be done. “Those two carriers are probably out of business, mister.”
“Oh?” Oddly enough, Lieutenant Copps hadn’t heard that yet.
“Call the P-3s. I have work to do.”
“Aye aye, sir.”
Mancuso didn’t have to look at anything. The water in that part of the Pacific Ocean was three miles deep, and no fleet submarine ever made could survive at a third of that depth. If there were an emergency, and if there were any survivors, any rescue would have to happen within hours, else the cold surface water would kill them.
“Ron, we just got a signal. Asheville might be down.”
“Down?” That word was not one any submariner wanted to hear, even if it was a gentler expression than sunk. “Frenchy’s kid ...”
“And a hundred twenty others.”
“What can I do, Skipper?”
“Head over to SOSUS and look at the data.”
“Aye aye, sir.” Jones hustled out the door while SubPac lifted his phone and started punching buttons. He already knew that it was an exercise in futility. All PacFlt submarines now carried the AN/BST-3 emergency transmitters aboard, set to detach from their ships if they passed through crush depth or if the quartermaster of the watch neglected to wind the unit’s clockwork mechanism. The latter possibility, however, was unlikely. Before the explosive bolts went, the BST made the most godawful noise to chide the neglectful enlisted man ... Asheville was almost certainly dead, and yet he had to follow through in the hope of a miracle. Maybe a few crewmen had gotten off.
Despite Mancuso’s advice, the carrier group did get the call. A frigate, USS Gary, went at once to maximum sustainable speed and sprinted north toward the area of the beacon, responding as required by the laws of man and the sea. In ninety minutes she’d be able to launch her own helicopter for a surface search and further serve as a base for other helos to continue the rescue operation if necessary. John Stennis turned slowly into the wind and managed to launch a single S-3 Viking ASW aircraft, whose onboard instruments were likely to be useful for a surface search. The Viking was overhead in less than an hour. There was nothing to be seen on radar except for a Japanese coast-guard cutter, heading in for the beacon, about ten miles out. Contact was established, and the white cutter verified its notice of the emergency radio and intentions to search for survivors. The Viking circled the transmitter. There was a slick of diesel oil to mark the ship’s grave, and a few bits of floating debris, but repeated low passes and four sets of eyes failed to spot anything to be rescued.