McKilley turned in his control chair to face Phillips.
“You don’t understand. Captain. This thing is as powerful as a small nuke. If we fire from here we’ll go up with the ridge. And the last thing we want is to have a big hunk of the icepack fall down on us when that explosion goes up.”
“Okay, okay. Helm, lower the outboard and train it to one eight zero.”
The outboard, a thruster that could lower from the bottom of the hull at the lower level of the aft compartment, was used for maneuvering in close to piers.
Phillips intended to use it to drag the ship backward.
“Outboard’s down. Skipper.”
“Very well, start the outboard.”
In the video displays the ridge ahead grew smaller as the ship backed up.
“Sir, we have room to turn around now,” Katoris said from the SHARKTOOTH panel.
“Helm, stop the outboard, train to zero zero zero and raise the outboard.”
“Aye, sir, outboard coming up. Outboard is up.”
“Ahead one third, right twenty degrees rudder, steady course north.”
Phillips watched as he withdrew along the track he came in on. He looked up to see Roger Whatney’s face staring at him.
“What is it, XO?”
“Sir, could I have a word with you?”
“Sure, XO. Officer of the Deck, keep driving us back, I’ll be in my stateroom for a few minutes.” Phillips led Whatney to his cabin and shut the door behind him. “What’s going on, XO?”
“Sir, I was going to mention this when we were in open ocean so it wouldn’t distract you. But I just found a report about the Vortex missiles in the computer systems of the ship. Sir, this missile’s bad news.
It blows up its launching tubes.”
“Yeah?”
“Well, sir, I’m not sure I’m all too enthusiastic about using a weapon that’s a suicide machine. The test submarine sank when they fired the test missile.
I saw the video, sir. The tube blew right open and the missile vaporized the forward half of the ship.”
“Roger, listen to me. All that’s true, but that’s why we’ve got these tubes on the outside of the hull. The back tube cap comes off and the missile exhaust just blows astern. There’s no pressure boundary to rupture.
Those things are more guidance cylinders than weapon tubes.”
“I thought of that. Captain, but it wasn’t just the pressure. The exhaust itself is white-hot. It could melt clear through our hull. These external tubes haven’t been tested.”
“Well, XO, they’re about to be. Now get back in that control room and put your god damned warface back on. I don’t want the men to know you’re nervous about this.”
“Yes sir.”
Phillips walked back into the control room, tried to reassure himself that Pacino had fixed the problems with the missile, or else they wouldn’t have been sent out with it.
In any case, they’d soon know.
The ship had finally put several miles between itself and the ridge. Phillips turned the ship around and again faced the ridge.
“Ready, Weps?”
“Yes sir.”
“Okay, here it is, men. Firing point procedures, Target One, the ice ridge ahead. Vortex unit one.” “Ship ready,” Katoris said.
“Weapon ready,” McKilley said.
“Solution ready,” Whatney said.
“Hit it,” Phillips said, wondering if those would be his last words.
“Excuse me, sir?”
“Oh, right, fine, shoot on generated bearing.”
McKilley hit the firing trigger and the noise from outside blasted into the ship. Phillips held his ears, realizing he had just launched a solid-fuel rocket with its engine little more than twenty feet away. The video screens at the bow went to white-out, the rocket motor exhaust blinding them.
“Dammit, the video’s probably a goner,” Phillips said, a smile coming to his lips as he found Whatney’s face in the room. The missile had worked. It had launched without killing them. Now if it could just do its work on the ridge ahead.
“I’m dropping the unit-one guidance tube,” McKilley said.
“Jettison the tube.”
“Tube one disconnected.”
A click and a slight bang and the guidance tube outside the hull for the Vortex missile disconnected from the ship and fell away.
The noise of the weapon was still loud but it was fading now.
“Impact in three, two, one…”
Phillips watched the bow video display, which had refocused on the sea ahead, no longer blinded by the missile exhaust.
The explosion was so violent it threw Phillips against the chart table, gashing his forearm. The lights flickered. Phillips’s ears rang. The video display had whited-out again, only now coming back to normal.
“Well, XO, let’s go back and see if there’s a Piranha-sized hole up ahead, or if we made it worse.”
“You think it could be worse?”
“Sure. This is a cave. We might have caused a cavein. No way to tell until we see it.”
It seemed to take forever for the ship to move back to where they had been. When they got to the ridge Phillips stared at the video screen, amazed at what he saw. The ridge was gone, and there was a half-milewide patch of open water above. The heat of the fireball had vaporized ice two hundred feet thick.
“Bring us under the open water, Katoris. I want to grab our radio traffic and tell Pacino what’s up.”
Katoris gave the orders. Piranha came slowly up to periscope depth while hovering, the periscope mast able to receive the satellite transmissions. Phillips looked out the scope, saw the water around the ship begin to freeze in the arctic cold. It was only a few minutes before Katoris was ready to go deep, and already the water had skinned over to ice a quarter-inch thick.
Back deep, Phillips watched the video and sonar screens as Katoris drove them on. He was afraid that there would be another ridge, or that the missile had blown up prematurely and the original ridge would be waiting for him, but the ice overhead seemed thinner.
And then the ocean floor below got deeper, falling away under him to form an arctic trench. Phillips looked at the fathometer and the SHARKTOOTH and realized he could make twenty knots for the next few hours. He gave the orders, the ship accelerating.
Soon he’d be out in the Pacific, with a chance to hit the Japanese Maritime Self Defense Force. Or so he thought until he saw the message the ship had received while at periscope depth. A bead of sweat ran down his forehead, and suddenly Phillips realized he was out of uniform.
Slowly he walked to his stateroom, handing the Writepad to Whatney just before he shut the door.
He took off the construction worker’s duds and slowly put his poopysuit back on.
He could not believe it. The entire USS Reagan carrier-action group.
Sunk. Down. Every god damned ship blown away except for one mid-sized radio command and control ship, the Mount Whitney, which had picked up survivors. No one knew why the Japanese had let the Mount Whitney go, except perhaps because it had no weapons, no gun-mounts or torpedoes or missiles, just radio antennae. Maybe that last was the point—they wanted Washington to listen to what had happened from their own people.
Wm 25 northwest pacific USS Mount Whitney
“Admiral? Sir? Can you hear me?”
Pacino’s head was swimming. He tried to open his eyes but saw nothing. He put his hand to his head and felt the gauze wrapping around his face.
“Where?”
“Sir—” It was Paully’s voice. He sounded okay.
“We’re on the Mount Whitney, the command and control ship. For some reason the Japanese spared it and let the helicopters drop us here.”
“What—my face?”
“A little glass in the eyes. Your right eye is actually okay but the left got surgery this morning. Also a bad concussion. You’ve been in a coma.”
“How long?”
“Day and a half.
”
“Jesus, we’ve got to get moving! What’s the deal with the battle group?”
“Sit back down there. Admiral. I’m afraid the blockade is history.”
“Any orders from Warner?”
“She made a statement that the Japanese sank our surface ships but she said that the force commander in the Pacific had a fleet of American submarines headed for Japanese waters to neutralize the threat.”
“Donner. Where is he?”
“Admiral, you’re the Pacforcecom now. Donner never made it out of the Reagan. In fact, everyone in ASW Control bought it. One of the torpedoes detonated right against the hull there. We were just damned lucky we made it out.”
“How did we do that?”
“Just lucky I guess.”
“Don’t listen to him, sir,” a female voice said.
“That’s Eileen, your nurse.” “Admiral,” the nurse said, “Commander White pulled you out of the bridge, down four levels to the flight deck and out to the port side, then flagged down one of the helicopters that was waiting to get survivors.”
“Sir, I just did it because you were the only other guy on the stinking carrier wearing submarine dolphins. I couldn’t let you go down.”
“We lost Donner. What else?”
“Sir, they got every single ship. Every one in the battle group except Mount Whitney, and we’re hightailing it out of here at flank. No one knows when they’ll hit us but everyone is wearing lifejackets.”
“How many survivors?”
“Couple hundred.”
“Paully, there were six, seven thousand men in the battle group.”
“I know, sir.”
Pacino’s mind tumbled with the news. He had been right, but he hadn’t thought they’d try to sink the whole battle group.
“It’s worse, sir.”
“Worse?”
“The two other carrier groups that sailed out of Pearl last week. Abraham Lincoln and United States. The two Nimitz-class carriers. They sent Destiny III’s out into a Pacific deep penetration. The robot subs had the carrier groups targeted—”
“Wait, slow down. Where are the Abe Lincoln and US battle groups?”
“Same place the Reagan battle group is. Admiral.”
“What about their submarine escorts?”
“That’s the only silver lining. And also the reason Warner hasn’t thrown her hands up yet. The two subs, the Tucson and the Santa Fe, did well. Tucson was as signed to the Lincoln. When the fighting started her captain vectored in on the source of the torpedo shots and determined that there were four submarines sent in to get the battle group. Not one of them seemed to care, they just fired away, oblivious to the Tucson.”
“Her captain, John Patton, right?”
“Right. Patton unloaded a torpedo bank into the first Destiny sub and blew it to the bottom. Then he had to drive fifteen miles to get to the next, and four torpedoes later the next sub was down. By then the Lincoln was dead in the water, listing, internal explosions going off, not a pretty picture. The third took an hour to find and put down, and by the time he zeroed in on the fourth it was out of torpedoes.”
“How did we know those were Destiny III robot subs?”
“The fourth Destiny just hung out at periscope depth watching the show. Patton and the Tucson fired a single Mark 50 at it and it came to the surface. By this time Patton was pissed. He wanted some prisoners. The whole force was sinking, and the Lincoln went down right then. Patton surfaced and took a Zodiac boat to the Destiny. He and ten guys went over there with MAC-1 Is and 9-millimeter automatics and some acetylene torches and he cut into the hull, fired a magazine into the ship and went inside. By now you’ve figured out what he found—a computer. The forward space was all of ten or twelve feet long, three decks tall. The space was just a place for the computer consoles. There wasn’t a human aboard. He checked out the other compartments, all but the reactor compartment. The core was still at power, so no one in there would have made it anyway. The robo-sub apparently works shooting at surface ships, but not so good against other submarines. I think we can count on the Oparea having only Destiny IIs, which might be good news since there are fewer of them.”
“Maybe. Or maybe bad news since the Destiny IIs will be much more capable against our subs than the Destiny Ills.”
“Anyway, Patton radioed Pearl and had an oceangoing tug get underway to meet him to pick it up. He went and picked up survivors, about seventy-five men, and had to meet the tug halfway to drop them and the Destiny off, so he’ll be late getting to the Oparea.”
“I take it the same thing happened to the United States and the Santa Fe?”
“Joe Cosworth, the skipper, did okay. He actually sniffed out one of the Destinys before it started firing. He engaged it, shot at it and it put a torpedo in the water, but aimed in the opposite direction. Joe fired at the Destiny, but the Destiny just fired at the United States.
The Destiny didn’t even know he was there. Or if it did, it didn’t care.
Joe put it down with one torpedo. But there were four more ships he had to find and sink. By the time the fifth Destiny was destroyed, the United States had exploded and gone down. Joe got more survivors, though. His boat was filled with them. He’s surfaced now, he’s got a couple hundred men on the deck and a couple hundred more below. He’s trying to keep them alive and meet the rescue ship from Pearl. I think he’ll be even later to the Oparea.”
“What do you make of all this, Paully?” Pacino was thinking Paully White was the best deputy he’d ever had. Sean Murphy was good but could he brief like this? Which reminded Pacino he’d have to get some messages off to Sean. “Well, Admiral, I think the Destiny III was designed as an antisurface-ship killer. It’s not much on antisubmarine warfare. I’ll tell you why, too. Fighting in a sub-versus-sub environment must be too tough to program. They can teach this computer how to attack a surface battle group, because when you get right to it, that’s easy as bowling. You put out some weapons and the pins go down. Killing another sub, one that knows you’re there, is damned hard. Maybe they just haven’t been able to program that. Or maybe these boats were only loaded with antisurface-ship torpedoes. Maybe they just don’t have an ASW torpedo. But I think it’s the first reason. The Destiny Ills are too dumb to go up against another sub. A Destiny III is something to be afraid of if you’re standing on the deck of a surface ship. Underway submerged, no problem. Now the Destiny II class, that’s something to stay awake over. The Japanese are good, damned good, and with their Two-class ships up there in the Oparea, we’ve got our work cut out for us. The Two class, I think, has an acoustic advantage against the 688 boats.”
“How do you know?”
“We got more data from the loss of the Cheyenne. The Pasadena was nearby. She tried to get in close and target the Destiny but the Destiny just faded away, disappeared. Too damned silent.”
“At least she was quiet enough that the Destiny didn’t hear her.”
“I guess.”
“But now we’ve pretty much put the Three-class ships on the bottom, so the Oparea should be safe for a battle group if we have sufficient submarine escorts, is that right?”
“Technically, yes.
Politically, no.”
“Go on.”
“From an operational point of view, sir, you’re right. The Oparea is trouble for a battle group, but a looser exclusion zone wouldn’t be a problem as long as you have an escort submarine. But we don’t have any more carrier battle groups in the Pacific. The others are all in the Atlantic for that African flap. We’re missing about five carriers and seven amphib helo carriers. They all had gone through the canal on the way to Africa, and when they were on the way home the Japanese thing hit us. They’re on the way now but they’re about three weeks away.”
“Why so long?”
“Panama Canal problems. An oil tanker exploded in the western mouth of the entering locks. Sank in shallow water. They’ll need to pull it out of the way and that’ll
take a salvage crew a few weeks.”
“How did that happen?”
“Some say a Japanese commando unit blew it up. It was positioned perfectly to block the canal. And it’s prevented all but two of our Atlantic coast subs from getting through. They’re all going around the horn now with our missing carrier forces.”
“What about the French and British. The Ark Royal and the De Gaulle? They were in Guam.”
“They told us the blockade was our decision, they weren’t consulted on it, and they won’t support it with their hardware.”
“Not the real reason, I assume.”
“Hell, no, sir. They’re scared shitless that their carriers will be blown to the bottom. A great way to lose votes at home.”
“Looks like the aircraft carrier is as obsolete now as the battleship was at the start of World War II.”
“I think the carrier has some good years ahead of it still. It just needs some help from guys wearing dolphins, guys like us.”
“Okay, so tell me about President Warner. What did I miss?”
“Well, for one thing, she wants a videolink with you as soon as she gets up. It’s three in the morning her time, so by seven tonight our time we’ll need to brief her. She’s still saying the blockade will be enforced by units of your submarine force.”
“Where are the units of my submarine force?”
“I’ve called them all up to periscope depth and asked them that question. We’ve got about eight Los Angeles-class ships in close to the Oparea, one Seawolf class, and the rest, the other twenty-one 688s, are still on their way, more than two days’ steaming out of the Oparea. Like I said, the other carrier groups and the Atlantic subs won’t be here for three weeks. Oh, and your Brucey Phillips called in from the Arctic. He had to blow a hole in the ice with a Vortex missile to get through. So he’s down one Vortex. But otherwise he’s okay. Damned lucky he came over the pole, because if he’d taken the Panama Canal we’d be waiting for him till mid-January. As it stands, he should be here in another two days.”
“So we wait until we have all thirty of the Pacific units, plus Bruce’s Piranha, then coordinate them, then stage them so we all penetrate the Oparea at once. Anything submerged that isn’t American goes down.”
Barracuda- Final Bearing Page 26