Barracuda- Final Bearing

by Michael Dimercurio

  “Nagasaki in tube one is away. Captain. Lining up to fire unit two.”

  “Wait one, Mr. First,” Tanaka said. “Let’s see what the American does.”

  The control room crew sat in their control chairs watching the Second Captain displays, waiting for the indication that the torpedo was detecting its target.

  “Detect and homing on the target, sir.”

  “Very well, Mr. First.” Tanaka scowled. The force should have been ordered to attack days before, not now that the aircraft-carrier force was within spitting distance of the Home Islands. As soon as the American submarine was put on the bottom, he would run at maximum speed to intercept the aircraft carrier. He wanted that carrier.

  “Any detection of our weapon by the target?” “Not yet. Captain,” Mazdai said. “He hasn’t changed speed or course.”

  “Very good.”

  The crew waited, the second Nagasaki ready for employment.

  Keebes yawned, drying off his face. It was only a little after 1900 local time but he was tired. He considered going to the wardroom to screen a movie with the off watch officers but decided to hit the rack.

  He was half-asleep when the circuit-one blasted over his head.

  “TORPEDO IN THE WATER; TORPEDO IN THE WATER! MAN BATTLESTATIONS!”

  Keebes ran to control.

  “Sir, incoming torpedo bearing north, I’ve got it in the edge of the starboard baffles, running at flank speed.”

  “Set up to counterfire down the bearing line, Mr. Becker,” Keebes said, staring hard at Becker, seeing his panic right below the surface. “Come on, line-of-sight mode on Pos Two, bearing north, set the range at five miles. That’s it.” Keebes stepped up on the periscope platform. “Attention in control, snapshot tube three, assumed target bearing north. Ready, Mr. Becker?”

  Jensen arrived in control barefoot and in boxer shorts, putting on his wire-rimmed glasses, his contact lenses obviously out for the night.

  “Ready, Captain.”

  “Snapshot tube three!”

  Becker fired the tube-three torpedo at the phantom target, the one Keebes had guessed, at least to get a torpedo out there. The torpedo launch transient didn’t seem as loud this time, perhaps because it caught Keebes by surprise.

  “Set up tube four for another snapshot!”

  Keebes intended to keep pumping them out. He could always get a reload, but if he got hit by a Japanese torpedo his own weapons would be useless on the bottom of the sea. And if he kept shooting torpedoes, the crew would be distracted by the activity, since the only thing he could do as a torpedo closed in on him was run from it, as Becker already had done.

  Either the torpedo ran out of fuel, or they died. There was nothing more he could do.

  “Snapshot tube four,” Keebes ordered. The second counterfired torpedo was fired. “XO, get a SLOT buoy loaded, put a message in the disk that we’re being fired on and get it out to Fleet command.”

  The sound of the torpedo’s sonar came through the hull then. The high pitched squeal of it was horrible to hear. And if the torpedo was so close that he could hear its pinging… He tried to keep his face impassive, but what he was thinking was that he was not ready to die.

  They had been right in the fleet briefings. There was no running from a Nagasaki torpedo.

  The sound of the torpedo sonar changed from a high pitched ping to a siren sound, no longer transmitting and listening, just transmitting. It had to be extremely close.

  Keebes glanced at his watch. It told the date as well as the time. Christmas was only four days away, his kids’ toys would be opened without him…

  “Set up for a snapshot, tube one,” he ordered.

  But the explosion came then, the deck of the Cheyenne ripping open, the lights going out, the blast wave bending Keebes, head first, into the steel of the overhead.

  The hull came completely open, the torpedoes two decks below went up in sympathetic detonation with the Nagasaki warhead explosion. The hull of the Cheyenne came apart in two pieces, though there was little left of the bow section, and the middle where the sail had once been was blown into fragments by the huge torpedo warhead and the other warheads* explosive charges. The aft section of the ship dived for the bottom, going down in a thousand fathoms of water, the aft-section hull imploding at crush depth of slightly more than 2000 feet. When Cheyenne hit the sandy bottom it was little more than twisted high tensile steel sheeting. The sail landed intact a halfmile to the south of the stern section. The bow, the sonar sphere and the tunnel that led to it went into the sand six feet. The bottom between the bow and stern section was littered with wires, valves, computer cards, glass, books, severed body parts and boots. A small piece of debris the size of a baseball bat, pinned under a heavy technical manual, was hit by another falling piece of debris. The debris, a sheet of glass, knocked the manual aside, and a cylinder began to rise, to float to the surface. It had been the SLOT buoy, the one-way transmission unit that Jensen had been coding the message into when the torpedo hit the ship. Forty feet to the north, a body was pinned below a section of jaggedly ripped steel. The torso had a set of gold submariner’s dolphins pinned to it and an embroidered patch below the pin. The letters on the patch spelled the word keebes.

  SS-810 Winged Serpent

  “Sir, the enemy submarine is down. We’ve confirmed the breakup of the hull.” Mazdai made the report from the sensor consoles at the aft port corner of the room.

  “Status of the weapons he counterfired?” Tanaka asked, standing on the periscope platform.

  “Both far off to the west, Captain. One is shutting down now, probably out of fuel. The other is circling, confused.”

  With the Destiny’s double-hull design, Tanaka thought, he could probably take a direct hit from one of the small American torpedoes and keep going. His ship systems would be hurt but he would not have a hole in the inner hull.

  “Let me know when the second unit shuts down, and keep the Second Captain looking for other American submarines. Have a track calculated for the trip to the east side of the islands.”

  “Yes, Captain. Sir, second torpedo unit has shutdown.

  It looks like it is breaking up, imploding as it sinks.”

  “Make your course 250 degrees true and take ship speed to full ahead.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Tanaka stared at the electronic chart table, adjusting the scale to show the entire Home Islands, the location of the American aircraft-carrier battle group pulsing in blue about sixty miles from Tokyo Bay. That was where he had to get. But at least his orders were different now.

  He had permission to do his job—unrestricted submarine warfare against the American fleet.

  Because after the supertanker exploded, no supply ship would dare cross into the exclusion zone until every last ship in the American task force was on the bottom.

  japan oparea fifty nautical miles east OF point nojimazaki USS Ronald Reagan

  “Admiral?” Paully White was at Pacino’s stateroom’s open door.

  “Come on in, Paully.”

  “Intel photos, sir.” White put the photos down on the small table in the center of the stateroom. “Supertanker went down hard. Two hits. Look at this. The oil slick is washing toward Japan now.”

  “Not pretty,” Pacino said heavily. “What about survivors?”

  “No lifeboats ever came down. No one got out of the ship alive.”

  “Did we get a situation report from the Cheyennet’ “No, sir. We should have heard an hour ago, but if I know Keebes, he probably just wanted to get out of the area before he transmitted anything about the sinking.”

  “Any word from President Warner?”

  “White House has been informed. No new orders.”

  Pacino thought about Wadsworth. The C.N.O was probably blaming him for the supertanker. Of course, stateside, its sinking was probably seen as a sign that the US meant business, but to Pacino the blockade had failed if the first ship tried to break through. He told himself th
at no other ships would try that, at least not for a while.

  “Admiral?” The enlisted messenger stood at the doorway.

  “Yes, what is it?”

  “Flash message for you, sir, downloaded to your Writepad.”

  “I’ll get it.”

  Pacino had turned off the unit to recharge the battery.

  Now he turned it on and heard its urgent alarm calling him to get his E-mail. There on the screen he saw a fragmented message: 202037 Z DEC FLASH FLASH FLASH FLASH FLASH FLASH FLASH FLASH FM USS CHEYENNE SSN-773 TO C.N.O WASHINGTON, DC // COMPACFORCE // COMUSUBCOM SUBJ NAVY BLUE OPERATION ENLIGHTENED CURTAIN SECRET /BT// 1. UNDER ATTACK FROM SUBMARINE UNIT OF JMSDF. 2. POSITION APPROXIMATE AT

  “That’s it?” Pacino said.

  Paully White scanned it, looking at his watch.

  “That message is a half-hour old yet it’s marked flash.

  And it’s partial. The time on the date-time group is just about an hour after Cheyenne sank the supertanker. You don’t think—”

  “It’s right there. In black and white. The Cheyenne been attacked and it’s on the bottom.” The phone rang. Pacino answered it, listened and stood. “Aye, sir.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “Bridge. Admiral Donner wants answers.”

  “Good luck, sir.” And added, “You’ll need it.” The Destiny I’ll-class submarine Curtain of Flames was, on the outside, identical to the sister ships of the Destiny II class. The difference was the interior, forward of the high fin. On the Destiny II-class vessels the inner hull extended fifteen meters forward of the fin, housing the command module, a three-deck-tall compartment that accommodated the crew. The upper deck was laid out to contain the control room, the radio room and the senior officer’s staterooms. The middle deck contained the mess room and galley and the remainder of the staterooms, while the lower deck contained electrical equipment and the computer modules of the Second Captain, with an emergency diesel generator on the aft part of the lower deck. The Destiny I’ll-class command module, by comparison was only five meters long, allowing for a doubling of the weapon loading, since the empty space opened up by abbreviating the command module allowed the insertion of the additional weapons. The command module of the Destiny III class remained three decks tall but all the space was devoted to a new computer system. The middle and lower decks housed the conventional part of the unit, including the power supplies and the lower tiers of the processing, the distributed control system serving as a kind of brain stem for the upper functions residing in the layered neural network and the DNA soup processors, which were contained in the upper deck in large shock-proof environmentally controlled cabinets. The DNA, cellular material removed from the brains of dogs, resided in special vats, the networking of the vats allowing the DNA processor to act in parallel at much greater speeds than the electronic tiers of the unit. The integration of the computer system resulted in what had come to be called a “mental processing suite,” the term computer no longer sophisticated or accurate enough to describe the functions of the system. The mental processing suite of the Curtain of Flames had driven the ship from Yokosuka, from which it had been towed by the Destiny II-class ship Winged Serpent, to its dive point, where it submerged after a self-check of all ship systems, into the Pacific. Its mission had been coded into the processors and double-checked. The mental processing suite routinely recorded its memories of the mission into a history-module bubble memory. In the event of the loss of the ship during combat, it would physically jettison the memory from the ship for the use of the Maritime Self Defense Force’s later evaluation.

  In order for the history-module bubble memory to receive the mental processing suite’s memories, the suite would dictate relevant observations into the history module. As important events occurred during a mission the suite would think into the history module, recording formal observations into what the system called a Deck Log.

  Informal observations, such as the unit’s estimates of mission completion, estimates of unit survival, opinions of the mission, were considered just as relevant, and were also recorded into the Deck Log, differentiated somewhat from the official entries. The formal observations were recorded in machine language, other observations were written in more conventional if contracted Japanese. The dual memory traces comprised a complete record of the mission, and in the event of the loss of the ship could be useful in further development of the submarine-cybernetic system.

  northwest pacific The computer-driven, unmanned Destiny I’ll-class Curtain of Flames rolled in the swells at mast-broach depth, watching the American task forces’ highest value target, the USS Ronald Reagan.

  The mission: sink the aircraft carrier. The programming was simple—twelve Nagasaki torpedoes were to be targeted for the carrier. When they were launched, the Curtain of Flames was to ensure that the carrier sank; if it remained floating another six torpedoes would be launched, and would continue to be until the American ship was dead. The probability of the submarine’s mission being successful depended on the presence or absence of American submarines in the area, since the computer-driven submarine was not able to fight other submarines. The subroutines for sub versus sub actions were too complex to be uploaded into the mental processing suites of the Destiny III class. The programs were being worked on, but as yet Destiny Ills had continued to lose in exercises to Destiny II manned submarines. If the carrier were unescorted by American attack subs, the Curtain of Flames counted on surviving. If it were accompanied by a sub escort, all the Curtain of Flames could hope to do was get out all its torpedoes at the carrier prior to being attacked. Once engaged by an American submarine, it would be totally vulnerable. SUV-m-987 Curtain of Flames official deck log of underway mission number 118, commencing 20 december Mission 118 Official Deck Log Entry 27: Current position—thirty kilometers west of island Onaharajima, forty kilometers south of the mouth of Tokyo Bay. This unit is at mast-broach depth observing American aircraft carrier, hull number CVN-76, as it steams eastward. Task force now reduced to ships needed to protect carrier.

  Other ships of task force split off to enforce blockade further around perimeter of Home Islands, the line the Americans have called exclusion zone boundary. This unit steaming at bare steerage way, five kilometers per hour, the periscope using low light enhancement to view the night steaming of carrier. Ships visible are carrier at bearing one one five, cruiser at bearing one two one, destroyer at bearing one zero eight.

  Range to central ship, carrier based on periscope range marks at four kilometers. Carrier approach angle negative. The carrier is steaming away from this unit. Range can be made more accurate with use of laser periscope range. Will be done before launch of Nagasaki torpedoes nominated for carrier. To determine range now using laser range finder could give this unit away, and a destroyer would come and attack this unit. Not a satisfactory way to begin attack. Orders received by this unit on the UHF antenna. JDA has ordered this unit attack task force with primary target identified as aircraft carrier. If aircraft carrier sinks, this unit authorized to use remaining torpedoes on the other ships of carrier task force. Other Destiny I’ll-class submarines have been assigned those targets, so this unit will wait to see reaction of task group when coordinated attack begins. Coordinated attack to begin at time twenty-one thirty hours Tokyo time. Event clock being reset for coordinated attack, now reading episode time minus four minutes. Time to apply power to torpedoes. Nagasaki large bore torpedoes in tubes one through twelve are warmed up, power applied to computer power supplies now. All twelve computers have satisfactorily turned on and now executing self checks. While self checks are in progress this unit is lowering periscope. Tubes being flooded so that outer doors can be opened. All twelve torpedoes report water in tubes is not causing power supply or signal feed shorts. All tubes report flooded. This unit now risks noisiest maneuver, opening of outer doors of torpedo tubes. Outer tube doors coming open. Unit risks look at task force. The periscope comes out of water. Water washes off le
ns. Unit sees task force, which continues steaming east away from this unit, range approximate at six kilometers. Not a problem. Nagasakis can run at 100 clicks, can pursue a wake for an hour putting effective range at 100 kilometers. This unit able to shoot using over the horizon targeting data from overhead Galaxy satellite. Odd thing that Americans have not shot down satellites. The carrier looks different. It is turning to its right. It is coming around, to try to attack this unit? This unit watches, puts torpedo attack on hold as new course and speed of carrier are predicted. No torpedoes to be launched if target is wiggling or zig zagging, according to tactics files. This unit lowers the periscope and checks status of torpedo tube outer doors. All now open, all torpedo units reading back nominal, self checks all back showing satisfactory units, gyros on all twelve units spinning at full revolutions. At event time minus two minutes all torpedo fuel tanks are pressurized. At minus one minute fifty seconds gas generators on all tubes are armed, mechanical interlocks removed to allow tubes to fire torpedoes as soon as this unit’s software decides to shoot. Torpedoes now fully ready to fire. All that remains is to wait for event clock to come down to time zero and to ensure that carrier, the target, is on its new course so its position at future time can be calculated. The point is that torpedoes are not aimed at target. They are aimed at point in space where carrier will be in future when torpedoes and target occupy same space at same time. Episode elapsed time minus one minute. This unit extends periscope and finds target steadied up on course southwest. Approach angle shows carrier approaching this unit. This unit watches and determines that carrier’s course remains steady. Weapon control unit is calculating torpedo launch courses and speeds and presenting to this unit’s upper functions for check This unit reviews calculations. They are acceptable. Episode elapsed time minus thirty seconds and this unit decides to confirm the range to the carrier with brief pulse of laser light. Light bounces back and shows carrier to be 6756 meters away. Light confirms weapon controller’s estimate of target speed. Episode elapsed time minus ten seconds. Calculations to target are sent to each torpedo and locked in.