By the time the Seawolfs sail emerged from the far side of the Kaifing, the submarine had slowed to two knots, her kinetic energy almost expended in ripping open the hull of the Kaifing. The Seawolfs screw continued to turn, eventually accelerating her back to flank speed, but Kaifing’s screw would never turn again. The destroyer settled in the water, her lower compartments flooding as she sank to the silty bottom of the strait.
bohai haixia strait
“I told you it was a damned trick,” Chu said into Lo’s intercom.
Below them the Udaloy destroyer was in flames and dead in the water, starting to sink by the bow while listing to port, crippled and near death. A half-kilometer to the southeast the Luda destroyer was closing the position of the submarine, but the sub was developing a bow wave and sinking into the water. Chu had to believe his eyes. The American submarine was not hurt at all but speeding eastward, not toward open water but directly toward the Ludaclass destroyer. As he watched, the submarine’s hull vanished, leaving only its conning tower behind. The Luda’s stern boiled in foam as the ship tried to accelerate out of the way-too late.
The conning tower of the American submarine hit the Luda destroyer’s hull amidships, slicing into it.
Smoke rose from the collision, and Chu brought his jet closer to observe. The conning tower of the sub had vanished, not emerging from the other side. The Luda destroyer began to slow down, coasting to a
halt, the hole in her hull now invisible as the ship settled into the water and began to list starboard, now completely stopped. Chu no longer wanted to wait to see what would happen to the second destroyer. A glance over his shoulder revealed that the Udaloy was gone, sunk, nothing left but a foamy oil slick, a few boats, and men floating in the water.
“It’s up to us, now,” he told Lo.
“I’m flying over the continuation of the submarine’s course. Do you have a detection?”
“Yes, four hundred meters ahead. Depth shallow but getting deeper.”
“Drop the Type-12 on my mark.”
Chu cut in the lift-jets and throttled back on the cruise engine, finally matching the submerged submarine’s speed.
“Call it,” Chu said.
“Directly overhead now.”
“Drop!”
“Type-12 away, clear the area.”
Chu throttled up the cruise engine and sped away, waiting for the results of the depth charge.
CHAPTER 32
MONDAY, 13 MAY
1204 GREENWICH MEAN TIME
bohai haixia strait USS seawolf 2004 beijing time
Lieutenant Tim Turner was able to grab a rung of the ladder on the way down, preventing himself from falling the distance down to the deck below, but breaking his fall sprained an ankle and dislocated his shoulder.
The pain shot through his body and he winced, certain he had broken something. He reached for the next rung up in the tunnel ladder, and as he looked up he could see water beginning to trickle down the hatchway.
Below him the hatch to the upper level of the forward compartment shut as the petty officer sent to warn him to come down shut the lower hatch.
Which left Turner alone in the sealed-off trunk with an open hatch overhead, the water ready to drown him. With all his remaining strength he moved up the ladder to the hatch and reached for the hatch ring, feeling the gusher of water in his face as he tried to reach to the hatch and pull it down.
He was only able to pull it a few inches, the roar of water down the hatch threatening to wash him down the tunnel, but the water flow beat against the closing hatch and slammed it into the hatch seat. The flooding stopped, but left Turner hanging over a fifteen-foot-deep hole by one hand. He reached up with his right hand, engaged the hatch dogs, and felt for the ladder rung with his foot, then lowered himself
down the tunnel to the deck and found himself in water up to his waist.
He banged on the hull with his flashlight, and after a moment the water began to drain slowly out of the tunnel as the man below opened a drain valve. After another few minutes the hatch opened and Turner could climb down the ladder to the deck. He dogged the lower hatch over his head, and had turned to the petty officer who had abandoned him, ready to say something, when he was thrown to the deck by a violent force, barely conscious as he slid over the wet deck to the door of the galley. The deck tilted, and looking aft, it seemed the hundred-foot-long passageway was a stairwell, a ramp, inclined toward him, the lights no longer illuminating it, just some automatically activated battle lanterns. Turner wondered if it was his head injury that caused the illusion, but then a flashlight loosened from its cradle fell to the deck and rolled down to his position at the galley door. No illusion, he realized, the ship was diving. And with no lights.
The detonation of the depth charge made the deck jump more than Pacino would ever have expected for a ship of nine thousand tons, and he was thrown into the periscope pole, banging his forehead. The lights went out, the room lit only by battle lanterns. The firecontrol console displays went blank for a second time. The sonar repeater stayed blank, never having come back up from its initial injury.
A dim voice came over the emergency communications network:
“Flooding in auxiliary machinery, flooding in—” Pacino shouted over the announcement: “Chief, make the phone announcement and send the casualty assistance team to the torpedo room.”
Before the chief could do it a speaker in the overhead “REACTOR SCRAM, REACTOR SCRAM,” Engineer Linden reported.
Pacino turned to the ship control console and the Diving Officer.
“Flood depth-control tanks and put her on the bottom.” He reached for a phone to the aft compartment.
“Maneuvering, Captain, report cause of scram.”
“Sir,” Engineer Linden’s voice said over the connection, “I think it was just shock to the scram breakers, or a rod jump that caused a flux spike that tripped the protection systems. We’re setting up for recovery—” “Don’t,” Pacino ordered.
“Shut down the engine room Shut the main steam bulkhead valves and shut down all your pumps. Shift the reactor to natural circulation and keep that compartment quiet. Have your guys take off their shoes if you have to.”
“Aye, sir.”
“Chief of the Watch, have you got a report from the torpedo room?”
“Nothing, sir.”
“XO, go to the torpedo room and take over. Get that flooding stopped and do it quietly.”
Keebes took off his headset and dumped it on the Pos Two console, then quickly headed for the aft stairway.
“Attention in the firecontrol team,” Pacino called.
“We’re out of weapons, we’re surrounded by aircraft, we’ve shut down the engineering spaces and we’re sitting on the bottom. Within minutes I expect that the aircraft will be turning around and coming for us with more depth charges, and the surface forces will soon be here with their own weapons. Meanwhile, we’re not going anywhere until the flooding in the lower level is stopped, particularly since the flooding is too close to our only power source, the battery. In any case I’m hoping that with the reactor shut down we won’t be detected by passive sonar. And that since we’re on the bottom, active sonar won’t be much good either. The only thing we have to worry about is magnetic detectors, and there’s nothing we can do about that. Carry on.”
“That’s it?” Morris said.
“You’re just going to play dead and hope they don’t shoot?”
Pacino nodded.
“Conn, Sonar,” his headset intoned, “sonar is back.”
Pacino stared at the screen, the digital images of the broadband sonar suite now forming on the chart, the screen taking a few moments to generate history as the sounds fell down the waterfall display.
“What have you got out there. Chief?”
“Bad news. Helicopters every point of the compass.
One real close, must have a magnetic anomaly detector.
Closer now, sir. Definite helicopter h
overing directly overhead, and he isn’t moving.”
“Talk about worst case scenario,” Pacino muttered.
“Conn, Sonar, the other aircraft are closing.”
Pacino shook his head. Morris watched him, seemed to be studying him.
“Conn, Sonar, we have approximately thirty helicopters and one jet aircraft on our screens, not counting anyone in the baffles, and they’re all hovering within a thousand yards … Sir, I’ve just gotten two splashes directly overhead. We’re getting depth charged
The depth charge detonated, and Pacino’s only impression was that Jack Morris’s face vanished, to be replaced by the deck, and when the darkness came he couldn’t tell whether it was because the lights went out or that he was no longer alive.
bohai haixia strait
The explosion from the depth charge lifted ten thousand liters of water skyward in an angry fan of phosphorescent foam. Chu pulled his stick to his thigh, circling the Yak in a tight circle to port, trying to find evidence of the submarine’s presence. To the east and west several dozen helicopters were inbound. The other Yaks of his squadron
had already gone back to Lushun, their fuel low. Chu’s tanks were going dry but he didn’t care. He would orbit the position of the submarine until his turbines sucked fumes if he could just see the American ship sink. It would be worth ditching the jet in the bay as long as he could have a piece of the damned Americans.
Chu climbed for a better view as the helicopters of the task forces, the squadrons from the Shaoguan and the land-based Hinds jockeyed for position along the channel as they searched for the sub, preparing to drop their ordnance. Chu half-expected the air commander to order indiscriminate depth-charging if for no other reason than to relieve their frustration over the submarine so far evading them. Finally he did order that, the helicopters with depth charges forming up into a line of aircraft, each to drop a depth charge in the channel midpoint with horizontal longitudinal separation of a hundred meters. The air commander then ordered that once the depth charges were gone, all torpedoes would be shot, going from west to east.
No submerged vessel should last long with that kind of weapon saturation.
For the first time in his flight Chu smiled in satisfaction as the helicopters moved into their depth-charging positions. Even if his Yak only had another ten minutes of fuel, he would still be airborne when the submarine sank, and he would have a grandstand seat.
“Razor Blade, this is Shaving Cream, over.”
Commander Jim Collins heard his squadron’s call sign on the UHF tactical control frequency and lined up his radio to transmit. This was probably the order to abort the mission, he thought. The F-14s of VF-69 were only a minute from their hold points, and he had expected only one radio exchange, either go or no-go.
“Shaving Cream, this is Razor Blade, read you five by over.”
“Roger, Razor Blade, break, you are authorized to proceed to the store and purchase all groceries on the list, I say again, you are authorized
to proceed to the store and purchase all groceries on the list, break, over.”
“Roger, Shaving Cream, Razor Blade out.” Collins cut out the transmitting circuit-breaker on the radio console, annoyed that he had been asked to transmit.
But what the hell, he thought, the Chinese would soon know they were there.
“You hear that, Bugsy?”
“Yeah, Mugsy. We’re going in.”
“Arm everything and track everything.”
Collins put the stick down and dived for the deck, pulling up at an altitude of only twenty-five feet, the waves of the Korea Bay coming at the plane at Mach 2, the shock wave astern sending up twin rooster tails in the sea. A few minutes later the firecontrol radar was locked on to multiple airborne targets, all of them orbiting a single point in the sea.
“Mugsy, we’re in range, I’m tracking thirty-seven helicopters and a fixed wing aircraft all within a couple miles of each other. No surface contacts, all airborne.
The Mockingbird missiles are all armed, all locked on, I’m calling Juliet.”
“Roger, releasing now.”
Collins hit his stick button a dozen times, launching the supersonic air-to-air Mockingbird missiles, the sky lighting up with each launch, the plane’s inventory quickly gone.
“Missiles away.”
To the north and south other flashes of light shone briefly as the other planes of the squadron of F-14s also fired their missiles, the squadron still on approach at supersonic speed.
Aircraft Commander Chu HuaFeng had looked away from the scene of the helicopters dropping their depth charges just long enough to check his fuel gages and note with dismay that both read empty. He wondered whether he would be airborne long enough to confirm the kill of the submarine. As he looked up from the panel he felt a small jolt, looked out the canopy to starboard and saw his right wing disintegrate and
explode into flames—for no apparent reason. It seemed to take a long time for the plane to start falling to the sea below, but after a moment frozen in mid-air, it began to spin toward earth.
Chu’s hands were already grabbing his crotch, where the ejection seat’s D-ring was located, the position of the D-ring designed to keep his arms tight to his body in case of ejection, high-speed ejections tending to cause amputations from the high-speed airstream. He pulled the D-ring nearly up to his waist, felt the ring pulling the pin that would blow off the canopy and ignite the ejection seat’s rocket motors.
He waited … nothing happened. He was about to let go of the ring and pull the canopy off manually when he noticed the view out the window had frozen—a helicopter was engulfed in a ball of fire but the ball was static, unmoving, and the chopper was not falling.
Moreover, Chu’s own jet was no longer tumbling out of control but lazily floating toward the water. As he watched, another piece of the wing detached and flew off into the slipstream, but it looked more like a feather floating in a breeze than shrapnel whipping into a six-hundred-click airflow.
Chu vaguely realized he had gotten such a huge dose of adrenaline that his time-sense had crazily accelerated, nearly stopping time. Now, as he watched, the canopy overhead blew off, leisurely flying upward and away, tumbling gracefully off out of view. Beneath him the ejection seat rockets cut in, and the cockpit of the airplane began to move, the instrument panel slowly moving downward and away as the rockets flew him out of the plane—except to Chu it seemed he was only going at walking speed as his seat left the aircraft.
As soon as his legs cleared the cockpit the airstream hit him and the aircraft faded away in front of him, shrinking slowly as it moved off. Chu stared at his crippled tumbling plane, still spinning gracefully and slowly when it exploded in a violent blooming fireball.
The explosion seemed to kick Chu into normal time, the seat jostling,
the sound of the air a roar in his ears, his parachute deploying overhead, the seat falling away, the sea coming up from below while his chute canopy blossomed overhead. He floated toward the water, dimly aware of the fireballs surrounding him as the helicopters of the northern fleet exploded in flames just as his Yak had. It occurred to him that he and Lo might be the only survivors of the attack, since only they had ejection seats. He looked briefly for Lo but saw no other parachute or ejection seat. He was calling his friend’s name as the water came up and smashed into his back. He sank in the lukewarm water, but managed to detach his parachute and swim away from it.
He finally got his head above the water and saw a huge Hind helicopter flying overhead, flying low and fast toward the north as if trying to escape. He pulled a cord, inflating his life vest, took off his flight helmet, and let it sink into the bay. He kept watching as the Hind flew over, and a supersonic missile flew by in hot pursuit.
Leader Tien Tse-Min looked out the windows of the Hind helicopter at the formation of choppers about to drop their loads of depth charges. He looked south southwest to see if the ships of the surface task forces were nearby; none was vis
ible in the dim moonlight.
He looked back to the sea below and watched as the first helicopter dropped its two depth charges, then flew off. He waited for the explosion from the water, but before it came the helicopter that had dropped the charges vanished in a violent white-and-red ball of flame, the rotor spinning off into the sky, the misshapen airframe spinning down to the water. Its remains hit the water at the same time the depth charges exploded, throwing spray and foam and water into the air, the fan of water from the explosion swallowing the burning helicopter. When the water calmed, there was no trace of the chopper. As Tien watched, stupefied, the other helicopters exploded and crashed to the sea. The lone VTOL jet remaining, the Yak-36A, blew
apart, its canopy opening and belching an ejection seat that popped a parachute, the airplane blowing apart and raining shrapnel on the water below. Tien felt the jolt as the pilot of the Hind turned and headed north away from the battle zone.
Only when the Hind settled on its northern course did Tien begin to realize what had happened … The Americans had launched some kind of air-to-air missile attack on the helicopters. He blamed Fleet Commander Chu for losing the carrier that would have made impossible Americans flying over Chinese territory and launching their missiles.
Tien’s thought was disrupted as the Mockingbird heatseeking missile flew into the Hind’s port engine exhaust duct and exploded. Tien’s body was blown apart, the blood from his dismembered body boiling into vapor as the fireball grew. And within seconds there was no trace left of the Hind except pieces of fuselage floating in the bay water below.
“We’re out of air targets,” Bugsy Forbes called on the intercom as the last of the fireballs flamed out into the bay.
“What about surface ships?” Mugsy Collins responded.
“Whole lot of folks to the south, another task force to the southwest.”
Attack Of The Seawolf Page 34