Which was why he insisted on standing watch at his own Second Captain. He believed he couldn’t trust the officers. The Americans had probably been lost while he was on the last sleep cycle. Well, not this time. He would not sleep until he had a detection on the screen.
He stared at the console as the clock ticked into the night.
USS Piranha The third and fourth Vortex missile launches had gone off much like the first two—a faint narrowband detection on 154 Hertz on the towed array sonar, a sniff of the enemy, battlestations silently manned, the Vortex missile warmed and ready while the battlestations team was still relieving the watches, Phillips in the control room, the missile roaring away, then exploding, the shock wave and noise of the explosion deafening.
The last two Vortex missiles had blown up Destiny II hull numbers SS-807 and 814, the Godlike Snowfall and the Heavenly Mist.
Phillips proceeded to work his way south, on toward Tokyo Bay, uncertain what the hell he would do when he got there.
USS Barracuda The ship was dead quiet, the way Porter liked it. There was something special to him about the midwatch, the officers in their racks, the captain and admiral sawing logs, the enlisted men bedded down, every space deserted except for the watchstanders. Porter scanned the sonar repeater screen, able to send it through every display that Chief Omeada had forward in sonar. Nothing on the displays. The sea was deserted.
Or was it? He felt an electricity, the same he had felt before on both good and bad occasions. He’d felt it the day before he got his acceptance letter from the academy.
And the Thursday night before the Friday he met his first serious girlfriend Diane. He’d begun to think this tingle of premonition could only mean good things, but he’d also felt it the week before he and his roommate Todd had gone skydiving. He had piled into Todd’s ‘02 two-seat T-bird with the retro tailfins and they had gone out to the field, packed their chutes, saddled up and gone up in the Cessna. As usual, at 14,000 feet he and Todd had left the plane, goofing off all the way down until the altimeter buzzed at 3000 feet and he pulled the ripcord, the mattress-shaped parasail deploying above him and jerking him up by the crotch. He smiled with the sheer joy of flying without wings—until he saw Todd in trouble.
The trip down from 3000 feet under canopy took him six minutes. It took Todd seventeen seconds. Todd’s main chute had deployed automatically instead of by his ripcord, the altimeter rigged to do that at 900 feet in the event that the jumper failed to pull before 3000 feet, but it had malfunctioned, and at the time Todd was doing body barrel rolls, still goofing off, so that the main chute wrapped around his neck and extended up into the slipstream, his rolling body turning the silk of the parachute into a death shroud. He fell like that, choking on the cords of the chute wrapped around his throat, looking like a tumbling cocoon, until he impacted the ground on a patch of concrete driveway.
After that the tingle was on Porter’s black list. The next time he felt it was the October of his first class year at Annapolis. For two days he sweated, wondering what would happen this time, until the company commander had called him to his office for a phone call. Who died? was all Porter could think when he picked up the phone. The voice at the other end said his grandfather had passed on after a stroke hit him an hour before.
They buried his grandfather in his native Wyoming, in a grave yard with cactus and sagebrush, the walks made of river stones, facing a mountain ridge. It had been a beautiful ceremony, and Porter had to smile at the memory of his grandfather’s jokes. He had thought that had been the meaning of the tingle, but the feeling of premonition stayed with him even the day after the funeral, up to the moment they read the will.
Grandfather had left Porter a defunct gold mine in South Africa, a bit of a family joke, but the week before his death the old man’s mining company had found platinum in the mine. Porter’s net worth grew from a few thousand dollars—the price of his five-year-old sports car—to several million overnight. Actually, by the year before, the estimate had been found to be low, the mine potential estimated in the hundreds of millions of dollars. None of that changed Porter, none of it seemed to reach him. No one outside the family even knew about the mine. Porter didn’t really believe it until he made a trip there to see it with his own eyes. But the role of rich kid wasn’t of interest. He was, he thought, put on earth for something different, and it had nothing to do with money. The next and last time Porter had felt the odd tingle was days before, when Barracuda had been heading for the Japan’oparea.
Something was happening to the ship. Hours later the message came that the ship was to rendezvous with a helicopter to receive a visitor.
Admiral Pacino himself. Kane had been angry, his kingdom invaded, but somehow Porter felt this was the positive side of premonition. Whatever, in the admiral’s presence he felt it biting at him. And now, timed with the takeover of his watch, the old tingle was hitting him full force.
This was the day. This was the watch. If only he could tell if it was a good portent, or a bad one.
SS-810 Winged Serpent Lt. Comdr. Seiichi Kami had the section-A watch in the control room. For the last two hours, since midnight, he had stared at the same consoles, looking at the same displays, all of them empty. The hours since the sinkings of the first Americans had been filled with both boredom and tension. Boredom because the screens were empty.
Tension because the Americans still hadn’t given up.
The Americans, Kami decided, were doing this on purpose, trying to exhaust them before coming back into the area with more submarines.
He thought about his newborn son Kosaku waiting for him at home. He had never spent much time thinking about his MSDF duty, but now that Kosaku was here he found himself jealous of every moment away from him. He was thinking that MSDF duty was no longer for him; the other men seemed somehow different from who he was, they no longer had much in common.
Kami stared now at the sonar data screens, the data filtered by the computer, and seeing nothing, sat down in the deep cushioning of the control seat to continue to watch and to wait.
USS Barracuda Lieutenant Porter stood on the conn and snapped his fingers at the chief of the watch, calling for coffee. The sonar display was selected to the thin wire narrowband towed array sonar, the beam looking forward as the ship continued to sail northeast. The sonar repeater was selected to the time-integration feature of the narrowband sonar, the graph of 152 to 155 Hertz in screen center.
Chief Omeada had just zeroed the frequency bucket, wiping out all previous data. Now the computer was going to wait and collect sound in that specific tonal range, display noise that it received at a higher level vertically. The graph was almost like the bottom of an hourglass, the sand representing each piece of sound at a particular frequency. If the graph line rose horizontally with time, the line flat, then there was no one out there.
If the graph line became a spike with a narrow peak at a particular frequency, there was a pure tone out in the sea constant with time. And the sea did not generate pure bell tones that lingered as time passed. Only machines did.
Porter received his coffee and slurped it, the tingle running through him as he stared at the sonar screens.
If only he could detect the Destiny and beat out Omeada he would never let the chief forget it.
He flipped through the sonar displays, but seemed to feel a resonance of the tingle at the time-frequency display.
He watched the six frequency buckets on the screen, barely blinking, until his scalding hot coffee was gone and the frequency at 154 cycles per second had spiked into a narrow finger of sound.
The Destiny was out there and by God he had found it. He put down the coffee mug and ran toward the door to sonar, colliding with Omeada, who was running out of sonar into control.
“We’ve got him,” they said at once, rubbing their foreheads from the collision.
USS Barracuda
Admiral Pacino woke up from a sound sleep at the prodding of Paully White.
&
nbsp; “Sir, it’s two a.m. Kane’s manning battlestations.
We’ve got a Destiny.”
“About time,” Pacino muttered, slipping into coveralls and leather deck shoes. He rubbed the sleep from his eyes, feeling the gauze of his injured eye, wondering when if ever the eye would heal. He pulled on the eyepatch as he left the stateroom, careful to avoid the rushing watchstanders.
The large control room was packed. Kane stood on the conn with his officer of the deck, Scott Court. XO Roger Whatney stood below between the conn platform and the attack center. The consoles of the attack center were filled with officers, adjusting their solutions, trying to find one that fit the data to the Destiny.
Kane nodded curtly at Pacino and Paully, then addressed the watchsection. Pacino strapped on a battle headset so he could listen to the conversations in the room.
Again he felt he was watching from the sidelines, and with it the thought that this action should be his. He shook his head to concentrate on the battle in front of him.
“Attention in the firecontrol team,” Kane announced from the conn. “We have designated the sonar contact as Target One, Destiny-class submerged submarine. We now hold Target One weakly on the thin wire towed array forward-looking beam, his 154 Hertz tonal coming in clearly. We hold him at bearing west, approximately two six five. There’s no broadband from this bearing.
This isn’t much to go on but we will be putting out multiple salvos of Mark 50 torpedoes on the bearing to the target. That’s all, carry on.”
SS-810 Winged Serpent Tanaka looked at his watch. It was after two in the morning and he had been staring at the Second Captain screen for what seemed forever. He was tired and frustrated.
He told himself he would watch the screen for one more hour, then go to bed in spite of the Americans out there, the pounding of his heart from the uppers, the shaking of his hands, and the acid in his stomach.
The mission had gone on too long. The Americans and their waiting game had finally gained them an advantage.
He swept the heavy green-shaded lamp to the deck, brought his hands to his face, his hands shaking.
He desperately needed sleep but there was too much of the amphetamines in his system. He was feeling closed in by the ship, by the mission, by the lack of contact with an enemy.
When would it end? And how?
USS Barracuda
“Firing point procedures. Target One, horizontal salvo, tubes one through six, one quarter degree offset, twenty-second firing interval,” Kane announced to the control room. There was no sound in the room except the whining of the gyro and the low rush of air from the air handlers.
“Ship ready,” Jeff Joseph, the battlestations officer of the deck, reported.
“Weapons ready,” from the weapons officer.
“Solution ready,” the XO finished.
“Tube one, shoot on generated bearing,” Kane commanded.
“Set,” pos-two operator Lieutenant Porter said.
“Standby,” the weapons officer called and rotated the stainless steel trigger to nine o’clock.
“Shoot,” Kane said.
“Fire!” weapons said, pulling the trigger to the right.
The launch sound blasted into the control room, highpressure air venting from the downstream side of the ram that pressurized the torpedo tanks. Pacino felt his hearing was half gone.
“Tube one fired electrically, sir,” the weapons officer called.
“Conn, sonar,” Chief Omeada said. “First fired unit, normal launch.”
The second torpedo was fired, the control-room crew reading from the same script, then again for unit three, until six torpedoes were fired. Kane powered up the weapons in tubes seven and eight and opened their outer doors while having the torpedo-room crew reload one through six. It took a few minutes, but seven and eight came up to speed and were ready to fire.
Kane shot them, a total of eight torpedoes traveling through the sea, intent on hitting the Destiny that he had estimated to be twenty nautical miles away. Impact would be at a point somewhat closer than the Destiny was now, since he was getting closer with time. The impact point was about seventeen miles to the west, with calculated time for the torpedoes to reach impact point eighteen minutes from now. If they had fired a Vortex missile, Pacino thought, impact time would be more likely only four minutes. Anything could happen in eighteen minutes.
“Attention in the firecontrol team,” Kane said. “With eight fish on the way, we wait to see what Target One is going to do. He may counterfire, and if he does I intend to cut the wires in all tubes and run east. Otherwise, we’ll sit and listen.”
SS-810 Winged Serpent
Tanaka craved sleep but he knew if he went to bed all he’d do would be to listen to the complaints of his body.
He grabbed the water carafe and drank out of it, the water running over his chin—and when he put it down he saw that the Second Captain display was full of broadband noise, pulsing broadband noise.
He sat back down and scanned through the screens, his jaw falling open as he realized what was happening.
A half-dozen American torpedoes were screaming in toward them. How long had they been in the water?
Why hadn’t anyone detected the American who fired them? What happened to his officers in the control room?
And how the hell did six—no, seven—no, now it was eight!—torpedoes get launched at them?
He grabbed his uniform tunic and ran out of the room to control and found his first officer Hiro Mazdai crouched over the Second Captain display being run by the mechanical officer. Lieutenant Commander Kami.
“What’s going on? What are you doing? Man full battlestations and get the weapons in tubes eleven and twelve warmed up. Open the outer doors! Why didn’t you detect the Americans?”
Tanaka came up closer to first officer Mazdai, who had stood at attention. Tanaka slapped him hard; a red welt appeared on his cheek.
“You have brought dishonor on my ship, Mr. First.
One more mistake and I will relieve you. Permanently.
Is that clear?”
“Very clear. Captain.”
“Now get those tubes ready to fire!”
“Yes sir.”
USS Barracuda
“Any activity from the target yet?” Kane asked Omeada in sonar.
“Nothing yet. Captain. I don’t think he can hear us yet.”
“He sure as hell should hear our torpedoes—”
A low rumble could be heard through the hull, just barely audible. Kane looked up at the sonar screen, which had been selected to the broadband waterfall display ever since battlestations were manned. A large white patch appeared at bearing north, the sound intense from its reading on the screen, the white patch of sound spread out over ten degrees of azimuth.
“What the hell was that. Chief?”
“Something blew up from the north. Skipper. Could be a nuclear blast from what I can see.” “Good God,” Kane said to Pacino. “You don’t think they have nuclear torpedoes, do you?”
“No. They don’t need to. The Nagasaki is the most destructive torpedo in the world right now. If our Mark 50s could do what it does, we’d have no problems.”
“So what was that noise?”
“That, Captain Kane, was one of ours.”
“But we don’t—”
“Just fight the ship against the threat at hand.” Kane didn’t need to worry about the explosion from the north.
It was Bruce Phillips shooting a Vortex missile, putting down another Destiny II.
Paully White looked up at Pacino from the control room deck and mouthed the word, “Brucey.” Pacino just nodded.
SS-810 Winged Serpent
“What was that?” Tanaka yelled at Mazdai. “What was that sound? What does the Second Captain show?”
He received no answers from the man or the machine.
Perhaps it had been the detonation of a Nagasaki torpedo against a distant American, perhaps one of the northern deplo
yed units.
“Status of the tubes?”
“Weapons are warm. We still have no sonar data on the launching ship.”
“You still have no contact?”
“Nothing, sir. The sea is empty. Look for yourself.”
“The sea is not empty, Mr. First. We are looking for the wrong thing. The computer is filtering out the noise we seek.”
“No, sir, it is correct. The American Los Angeles-class ships—”
“This is obviously not an LA-class vessel. It is something else, British or French.”
“No, the computer was looking for them also.”
“Then maybe the American Seawolf class. We’re not filtering for that.” Tanaka knew time was ticking but he had to solve this problem and solve it now.
“Seawolf class had three ships. One sank from a flooding or torpedo accident. The other is on the US east coast being built. The third was in Hawaii but it never got underway. The Galaxy satellite photos showed it pulled into a maintenance barn. It never emerged.”
“It might have sneaked out during a storm or with a cold reactor submerged or any of a hundred ways a sub can be sneaked to sea.”
“We would have known—”
“Obviously, First, we didn’t know! Now reset the filters for the Seawolf class and find this submarine. I want torpedoes in the water in two minutes.”
Barracuda- Final Bearing Page 36