Barracuda- Final Bearing

by Michael Dimercurio

  northwest pacific eighty kilometers southeast OF point muroto-zaki, shikoku island SS-810 Winged Serpent Tanaka joined the watchstanders in the control room after viewing the scenario develop on the Second Captain, the sounds of the two American submarines on the sonar sets for the last twenty minutes. Hiro Mazdai had been frantic, asking Tanaka to call battlestations immediately and fire four Nagasaki torpedoes at the contacts.

  Tanaka looked at him, knowing the Americans were nearly blind. He had insisted to the officers that they treat the Americans with caution, and caution might seem to dictate that the enemy submarines be fired at immediately upon detection ten kilometers before. But to Tanaka the height of fear was not equivalent to caution.

  Firing Nagasakis blindly was foolish and had no meaning. He wanted to sneak up on the Americans, determine their range, speed and course precisely, then put the four Nagasakis out, two per submarine, when he knew exactly where in the ocean the enemy subs were. That was caution.

  He also refused to man battlestations. That just made noise and put the crew in a trigger-happy mood. They needed to be able to fight a prolonged war from their normal steaming watch sections, he insisted. They were panicky now with the first American in their sights, but there would be more, many more, perhaps another dozen or two dozen, and Tanaka would train the officers to consider this almost routine. Precise, controlled, cautious, planned, and routine. This was a time for the mind, not the stomach, he told Mazdai.

  The conning officer. Lieutenant Commander Kami, had driven the ship slowly closer, keeping his eye open for a maneuver by the Americans. Not that he was concerned if the American submarines fired at him. Their torpedoes were of little consequence. The Destiny II class had a computer-controlled SCM sonar system in the bow and the stern. The SCM, sonar countermeasures, was an electronic ventriloquist that could confuse any American torpedo. When the torpedo pinged a sonar pulse at them the SCM ventriloquist sonar would hear it, electronically modify it and send out a return pulse precisely shifted in frequency, distorted and sent early, all arranged to arrive so as to confuse the pinging sonar system. Any incoming torpedo that encountered their SCM system would turn in circles, as confused as a blind sheepdog, or blow up in the middle of the sea.

  And even if one of their inferior torpedoes did close range in spite of the SCM system, the Two class could take a hit of that size and not sink. It would take several direct hits to put a Two class, with its double hull, down for good. A single direct hit would be an inconvenience, perhaps even shut down the Second Captain for a few scary moments, but beyond that there was little to fear from the Americans.

  Finally it was time to attack. The ship was in position, the targets’ locations and speeds and courses absolutely known to the Second Captain, the Nagasaki torpedoes warm and ready to fire. Tanaka considered giving the order to fire from his stateroom but rejected the idea.

  He put on his uniform tunic, buttoned the high collar, straightened his hair and proceeded to the control room.

  The eyes of the men met his, and to his disgust they all showed fear. Even Mazdai seemed nervous.

  “Mr. First,” Tanaka said, “launch Nagasaki torpedoes one and two at the southwestern American, torpedoes three and four at the American bearing west, presets as indicated in the Second Captain.” “Aye, Captain,” Mazdai said, looking grateful to finally be doing something.

  The torpedoes were away.

  Tanaka did not stay to monitor their progress. He walked back along the central passageway to his stateroom and sat down at the Second Captain console to watch the torpedoes as they sped to the targets. He selected the upper display to the sonar-detection system, already forgetting about these first two Americans, concentrating instead on finding the next American boats.

  USS Birmingham

  Pastor was still on the sonar console when the trace showed up on the screen. He placed the electronic cursor on it and listened. It was definitely man-made, a tremendous whooshing noise.

  “We’ve got something here,” he told Hazelton. The sonar tech put his cursor on it.

  Pastor noted that the trace diverged into two, then three, finally four. Two of the traces moved across the screen as they were going quickly across Birmingham’s bow. The other remained at a constant bearing. Hazelton clicked his boom microphone to the control speaker circuit. “Conn, Sonar, torpedo in the water, bearing zero seven zero! I say again, torpedo in the water—” Pastor threw his headset down and ran through the door to control, where he found the officer of the deck standing on the conn with his hand in his pocket and his mouth open, paralyzed by what the instructors at Prospective Commanding Officer school referred to as the “aw shit factor.” It wasn’t that Strait was panicking, his mind was simply overwhelmed, overloaded with data. He had to take in the notion of the incoming torpedo before he could react to it, and this was so far outside his experience level that it could take up to three seconds for him to process the information. Pastor had no such time lag. He was full of adrenaline as he went to the conn. “All ahead flank! Maneuvering cavitate! Right fifteen degrees rudder, steady course two five zero!

  Dive, make your depth one thousand feet! Ready the Mark 21 countermeasure in the aft signal ejector! Load the forward signal ejector with SLOT buoy marked’code 3.” For the next thirty seconds Pastor kicked his crew, getting them over the shock, getting them moving. Thirty seconds after that there was no more to do. He had bumped reactor power to 100 percent at flank speed, he had dived deeper to 1000 feet to keep the screw from boiling up sheets of bubbles that would add to their noise signature, he had launched a countermeasure that simulated the sounds of the ship and he had turned and run from the torpedo. All that was left was to launch the signal ejector’s radio buoy that would notify Admiral Pacino they were under attack. He hesitated, knowing that to launch the radio buoy was an admission of defeat, that that could be the last thing anyone would ever hear from the USS Birmingham. “Launch the SLOT buoy in the forward signal ejector.”

  “Launch forward signal ejector, aye, sir,” Strait said, punching the red mushroom button, the radio buoy now away. Pastor leaned over the pos-two display; the junior officer of the deck was trying to rig a solution to the firing submarine, assuming it had fired from the bearing that the torpedo was first detected. But when that assumed solution was compared to the bearing to the Jacksonville set up on pos three, any torpedo Birmingham fired at the enemy would pass right by Jacksonville first.

  Pastor was not about to give up trying. Just because the firing Destiny submarine was on the other side of Jacksonville did not mean that he couldn’t fire. It just meant that the torpedo would need to remain in transit mode until it was on the other side of the friendly submarine.

  There was a problem—his knowledge of the position of the Jacksonville was based on her preattack position. Just as he had maneuvered Birmingham in response to the torpedo, he knew Jack Stolz would be maneuvering Jacksonville to get away from the torpedoes launched at her from the Destiny. That was what those other two contacts had been.

  Still, he might be able to get a solution on the Jacksonville and avoid putting a torpedo in her. He set up pos three in dot-stacked mode, all the while dimly aware of his crew filing into the room for battlestations, the immediate action they took when a torpedo in the water was called. Someone handed Pastor a headset. He put it on, still adjusting the knobs on pos three, anchoring Jacksonville’s position at the time it zigged, maneuvered away from the torpedo. There was a minute or two of data that was garbage since that was during the time that Birmingham was also maneuvering. Sweat poured off Pastor’s face and dripped onto the console. He wiped it away, concentrating as hard as he ever had in his life on the firecontrol display in front of him, trying to visualize the sea above, the location of the hostile sub, its position relative to the Jacksonville, where Jacksonville would turn after the torpedo was fired at her. The tactical problem was turning into a nightmare, and suddenly it began to matter less when the sounds of the torpedo so
nar pulse cut into the control room, the sonar noise as loud as a referee’s whistle blown a foot from his ear, the sound piercing and painful. It kept up, a short blast every fifteen seconds, each one closer. Pastor sweated over the solution to the Jacksonville, finally felt comfortable with it. He glanced down at the pos two screen, the assumed solution to the firing ship based on the bearing to the incoming torpedo, then compared that with the solution to the Jacksonville.

  “Snapshot tube one,” Pastor called. “Alter presets to set in a ten-thousand-yard run to avoid homing on the Jacksonville.” Pastor waited. At least he was going to get a shot off at this bastard. The pinging of the torpedo blasted into the room, getting closer with each ping, until he could hear the screw noise of the incoming torpedo.

  “Weapon ready, sir,” the weapons officer shouted over the latest ping.

  “Fire,” Pastor ordered. He realized that he hadn’t heard a ping in the last few seconds, only the sound of the torpedo’s screw noise. He watched as the weapons officer rotated the trigger to the standby position.

  Still no ping from the torpedo. A moment of hope. It would be too good to be true, he thought, getting to counterfire at the Destiny and having the Destiny’s torpedo be a dud.

  As the weapons officer pulled the trigger to the fire position. Pastor abruptly realized it was Christmas Day and his children on the other side of the world would be awake, opening their presents. The sound of the torpedoejection mechanism blasted into his eardrums as the torpedo in tube one was launched, the Birmingham’s answer to the Destiny’s Nagasaki weapon.

  “Merry Christmas, Destiny,” Pastor said, as another booming crash hit his eardrums.

  The second noise was the sound of the first Nagasaki torpedo detonating on the top surface of the hull, the explosion ripping down from aft of the sail, blowing a hole in the hull big enough to drive an eighteen-wheel truck into the ship. The hull rupture was located just aft of control, and the ripping metal and wave of water, the pressure of it enough to cut a man in half at that depth, slammed into Pastor and sent his body hurtling forward to the bulkhead at the ship-control panel, ripping his flesh and bone. The force of the water blasting into the hull at a thousand feet beneath the surface was enough to bend the hull to a thirty-degree angle, not quite enough to break it in half.

  The second, redundant Nagasaki hit them, and this explosion did fracture the hull already weakened by the first detonation, the aft end of the ship separating, both hull fragments drifting to the ocean bottom 2000 feet farther down. The hulls hit the rocky bottom, groaning and creaking and breaking apart still further, littering the bottom with broken pipes and tanks and pieces of equipment. There were no recognizable bodies.

  Seven miles to the northeast another hull hit the rocky bottom and disintegrated, two of its weapons detonating as it hit the bottom. The USS Jacksonville had arrived at its final resting place.

  Three thousand feet above the remains of the Birmingham, the SLOT buoy reached the surface, extended a whip antenna and transmitted Birmingham’s last message to the US Navy Comstar satellite, then flooded and sank, coming to rest near the screw of the ship. Several hours later, when the bubbles had died down and the reactor metal had cooled, the ocean bottom was, once again, quiet.

  northwest pacific 120 kilometers southeast of point muroto-zaki, shikoku island SS-810 Winged Serpent

  The buzz of the phone rang in Tanaka’s stateroom. It was Mazdai in the control room.

  “Sir, the torpedo fired from the first target went far off course and just shut down. It seems to be sinking and imploding now. The threat is gone.”

  There never had been a real threat, Tanaka thought, concentrating on his sonar screen, looking for the next contact.

  He had put the phone down and continued looking at the display, his aggression seeming to fuel him. He wasn’t hungry or thirsty. He wanted blood, the Americans’ blood. He stared at the console a full five hours before the next contacts came, another two American ships, both of them 688class ships as the first two had been.

  An hour after that Tanaka had made a second quick trip to the control room, four more Nagasakis had been launched and two more hulls were wreckage at the bottom of the sea. Tanaka then called one of his officers to paint small American flags on the bulkhead in the control room to show the sinkings they had made. With the sinking of the first ship in the Sea of Japan, this now made five flags for the officer to paint. Five ships. Perhaps another two dozen to go before Tanaka could rest.

  The ship carried only twenty-one weapons. He had launched ten. It was time to stop doubling up. He had been launching two weapons at each target to insure that if one failed, the other would score a kill. But now with the success rate this high, and the use of torpedoes this swift, he would only launch one per target. Which gave him eleven more targets.

  The Winged Serpent continued northwest, hunting.

  northwest pacific USS Barracuda The afternoon watch on Christmas Day passed without incident. The ship had been at periscope depth for most of the day. The men were happy; they had received their familygrams, transmitted by USUBCOM headquarters, each man aboard allowed one short transmission from his wife or kids or girlfriend or parents.

  Pacino’s familygram had come in from Tony on the Writepad. The youngster was almost a teenager, twelve years old, missing his father, but then, Pacino being away had been almost normal. All the sea duty had kept him away from the boy for too long. And now, nearing the end of his naval career, Janice had left him and taken Tony with her. The familygram from Tony was brief and gut-wrenching. Pacino put it down on the fold-out desk, staring off into space, missing his son, missing his old life, wanting to toss the football with Tony, race against him in the Go Karts, hang out with him at the amusement park, cruise the beach with him in the sports car.

  All the things they’d done in the past, but hadn’t realized would vanish into the past. It had seemed that Tony would always be there, and now he was living somewhere in New Jersey, over 300 miles away from Virginia Beach, which was over 13,000 miles from this Japan Oparea.

  The Writepad’s annunciator alarm went off, beeping into the quiet of the stateroom. Pacino silenced it before it could wake up Paully, who was asleep in the upper rack, having been awake for more than twenty hours and only agreeing to go to bed when Pacino had ordered him. Pacino knew he should hit the rack himself but couldn’t seem to slow down his mind. He stroked the software keys of the Writepad, going deeper into the software until it displayed the E-mail he’d just been beeped for, and realized it was a second familygram, this one from Eileen Constance—

  MICHAEL, JUST WANTED TO WISH YOU LUCK. I CAN’T WAIT TO SEE YOU AGAIN. MERRY CHRISTMAS.

  I.OVE, EILEEN.

  He wasn’t sure how he felt about it. It seemed like Eileen was going too fast. But so was he. He’d found himself thinking about her, missing her, then trying to dismiss it. It was, he told himself, a physical attraction that had pretended to more in the thick of impending combat. And even if it did build into a relationship, she was so much younger and would be going to medical school in Florida while his HQ was in Norfolk. And what if she wanted children? Wasn’t he too old for that?

  And then he had to laugh at himself for crossing so many bridges before the road was even built.

  A knock at the door, a radioman offering Pacino the ship’s secure Writepad. He signed for the messages, which were then automatically transferred to his own Writepad. He punched the surface of the notepad’s display, read through the first four messages, and his heart sank. From the Birmingham in the southwest Oparea, code 3—I’m under attack. From the Jacksonville, also in the southwest Oparea, code 3. From Charleston and Atlanta, both farther north in the southwest Oparea, code 3. The southern forces, all four boats, had been attacked. And in all probability were down. Another knock at the door. The radioman again. Again Pacino signed for the messages, transferred the electronic messages to his own Writepad, then waited for the radioman to leave. The three messages were
from the northern task force, the Buffalo, Boston and the Albany. All code 3s.

  Pacino rubbed his eyes, knowing what he needed to do, at least in the short term.

  A half-hour later he and Paully White were in David Kane’s stateroom.

  “We need to get the Pearl Harbor ELF facility to call all the Oparea submarines to periscope depth,” Pacino said. “I’ll write the subs a message for their broadcast, ask them to transmit that they’re okay. I’ll need your permission to transmit, Captain.”

  Kane nodded. “Absolutely, Admiral. Need any help with the messages?”

  “No. It’ll only take a few moments, I’ll take them to radio when I’m ready.”

  A half-hour later the Pearl low-frequency radio facility had transmitted each of the seven submarines’ ELF call signs, the powerful but slow radio waves penetrating deep into the Pacific, calling the subs to periscope depth, where Pacino’s message waited for them.

  Pacino waited an unbearable hour. He had gotten one message back, from the Piranha, which was almost at the boundary of the northern Oparea. Pacino stared at that, wondering how the hell Bruce Phillips had gotten south that fast. He reread the latitude and longitude, which correlated with the alphanumeric grid coordinate Phillips transmitted. Phillips said he was definitely close to the northern Oparea. But looking gift horses in the mouth was not Pacino’s style.

  He showed the results to Paully and Kane, and it was Kane who suggested they call the deep-Pacific boats, still on the way in from Hawaii, to periscope depth and see how they were doing. It took an investment of another ninety minutes, but as midnight neared, Pacino’s electronic chart had plotted the positions of the Pacific submarines, the other twenty-one of them. The early wave would be there in another thirty hours. The later wave, the lagging ten boats, would take an additional twenty-five to thirty. Warner’s time constraints, however justified, had resulted in the loss of the ships Pacino had sent in as a stopgap.