by Tom Clancy
Mutsu had passed well beyond the carriers, almost reaching the trailing plane-guard destroyers before turning, and the overtake now seemed dreadfully slow. The Admiral wore his white gloves, and held his binoculars just below the rail, watching the angle to the carrier change.
"Bearing to Target One is three-five-zero. Target Two bearing now zero-one-zero. Solution light," the petty officer reported. The Isso wondered what was going on and why, most of all wondered how he might live to tell this tale someday, and thought that probably he would not.
"I'll take it now," the ops officer said, sliding into the seat. He'd taken the time to acquaint himself with the torpedo director. The order had already been given, and all he'd needed was the light. The officer turned the key in the enable-switch lock, flipped the cover off the button for the portside array, and pressed. Then he did the same for the starboard side. The three-tube mounts on both sides of the ship snapped violently out-board to an angle of about forty degrees off the centerline. The hemispherical weather covers on all six tubes popped off. Then the "fish" were launched by compressed air, diving into the water, left and right, about ten seconds apart. The propellers were already turning when they were ejected into the sea, and each trailed control wires that connected them to Mutsu's Combat Information Center. The tubes, now empty, rotated back to their standby position.
"Fuck me!" a lookout said on Johnnie Reb.
"What was that, Cindy?"
"They just launched a fuckin' fish!" she said. She was a young seaman (that term hadn't changed yet) apprentice, only eighteen years old, on her first ship, and was learning profanity to fit in with the saltier members of the crew. Her arm shot out straight. "I saw him launch—there!"
"You sure?" the other nearby lookout asked, swinging his Big Eyes around. Cindy had only hand-helds. The young woman hesitated. She'd never done anything like this before, and wondered what her chief might do if she were wrong. "Bridge, Lookout Six, the last ship in the Jap line just launched a torpedo!" The way things were set up on the carrier, her announcement was carried over the bridge speakers.
One level down, Bud Sanchez looked up. "What was that?"
"Say again, Look-Six!" the OOD ordered.
"I said I saw that Jap destroyer launch a torpedo off her starboard side!"
"This is Look-Five. I didn't see it, sir," a male voice said.
"I fucking saw it!" shouted a very excited young female voice, loudly enough that Sanchez heard this exclamation over the air, rather than on the bridge speakers. He dropped his papers, jumped to his feet, and sprinted out the door to the lookout gallery. The Captain tripped on the steel ladder, ripping his pants and bloodying one knee, and was swearing when he got to the lookouts.
"Talk to me, honey!"
"I saw it, sir, I really did!" She didn't even know who Sanchez was, and the silver eagles on his collar made him important enough to frighten her even worse than the idea of inbound weapons, but she had seen it and she was standing her ground.
"I didn't see it, sir," the senior seaman announced.
Sanchez trained his binoculars on the destroyer, now only about two thousand yards away. What…? He next shoved the older seaman off the Big Eyes and trained them in on the quarterdeck of the Japanese flagship. There was the triple-tube launcher, trained in as it should be…
…but the fronts of the tubes were black, not gray. The weather covers were off…Without looking, Captain Rafael Sanchez ripped the phones off the senior lookout.
"Bridge, this is CAG. Torpedoes in the water! Torpedoes inbound from port quarter!" He trained the glasses aft, looking for trails on the surface but seeing none. Not that it mattered. He swore violently and stood back up to look at Seaman-Apprentice Cynthia Smithers. "Right or wrong, sailor, you did just fine," he told her as alarms started sounding all over the ship. Only a second later, a blinker light started flashing at Johnnie Reb from the Japanese flagship.
"Warning, warning, we just had a malfunction, we have launched several torpedoes," Mutsu's CO said into the TBS microphone, shamed by the lie as he listened to the open talk-between-ships FM circuit.
"Enterprise, this is Fife, there are torpedoes in the water," another loud voice proclaimed even more loudly.
"Torpedoes—where?"
"They're ours. We have a flash fire in CIC," Mutsu announced next.
"They may be armed." Stennis, he saw, was turning already, the water boiling at her stern with increased power. It wouldn't matter, though with luck nobody would be killed.
"What do we do now, sir?" Smithers asked.
"A couple of Hail Marys, maybe," Sanchez replied darkly. They were ASW torpedoes, weren't they? Little warheads. They couldn't really hurt something as big as Johnnie Reb, could they? Looking down at the deck, people were up and running now, mainly carrying their sunbathing towels as they raced to their duty stations.
"Sir, I'm supposed to report to Damage Control Party Nine on the hangar deck."
"No, stay right here," Sanchez ordered. "You can leave," he told the other one.
John Stennis was heeling hard to port now. The radical turn to starboard was taking hold and the deck rumbled with the sudden increase of power to her engines. One nice thing about the nuclear-powered carriers. They had horses to burn, but the ship weighed over ninety thousand tons and took her time accelerating. Enterprise, less than two miles away, was slower on the trigger, just starting to show turn now. Oh, shit…
"Now hear this, now hear this, stream the Nixie!" the OOD's voice called over the speakers.
The three Mark 50 antisubmarine torpedoes heading toward Stennis were small, smart instruments of destruction designed to punch small, fatal holes
into submarine hulls. Their ability to harm a ship of ninety thousand tons was small indeed, but it was possible to choose which sort of damage they would inflict. They were spaced about a hundred meters apart, racing forward at sixty knots, each guided by a thin insulated wire. Their speed advantage over the target and the short range almost guaranteed a hit, and the turn-away maneuver undertaken by the American carrier merely offered the ideal overtake angle because they were all targeted on the screws. After traveling a thousand yards, the seeker head on the first "fish" went active. The sonar picture it generated was reported back to Mutsu's CIC as a violently bright target of yellow on black, and the officer on the director steered it
straight in, with the other two following automatically. The target area grew closer. Eight hundred meters, seven, six…
"I have you both," the officer said. A moment later the sonar picture showed the confused jamming from the American Nixie decoy, which mimicked the ultrasonic frequencies of the torpedo seeker-heads. Another feature built into the new ones had a powerful pulsing magnetic field to trick the under-the-keel influence-exploders the Russians had developed. But the Mark 50 was a contact weapon, and by controlling them with the wire, he could force them to ignore the acoustical interference. It wasn't fair, wasn't sporting at all, but then, who ever said war was supposed to be that way? he asked the director, who did not answer.
It was a strange disconnect of sight, sound, and feel. The ship hardly shuddered at all when the first column of water leaped skyward. The noise was unmistakably real, and, coming without warning, it made Sanchez jump on the port-after corner of the island. His initial impression was that it hadn't been all that bad a deal, that maybe the fish had exploded in Johnnie Reb's wake. He was wrong.
The Japanese version of the Mark 50 had a small warhead, only sixty kilograms, but it was a shaped charge, and the first of them exploded on the boss of number-two propeller, the inboard postside shaft. The shock immediately ripped three of the screw's five blades off, unbalancing a propeller now turning at a hundred-thirty RPM. The physical forces involved were immense, and tore open the shaft fittings and the skegs that held the entire propulsion system in place. In a moment the aftermost portion of the shaft alley was flooded, and water started entering the ship through her most vulnerable point. What happened
forward was even worse.
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 dialling 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 895," "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 noise 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, clos
ing 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 annunciator 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.