Dangerous Grounds

by Don Keith

  Four minutes. If the torpedo ran true—and there was no reason to think it wouldn’t—then that was just about how much life anyone aboard the rogue submarine had left to live.

  y

  Jim Ward eased the rudder ever so slightly to starboard. Ordered course was zero-two-two. The seas seemed to be pushing them to port. There must be a storm blowing pretty hard up there to affect them at two hundred feet below the surface. Ward glanced over at the passive broadband sonar display. Sure enough, the now familiar chevron pattern marched down the CRT. The seas seemed to be coming in from the southeast. He did some quick calculations he had studied once in a textbook. Must be a sea-state six or better up topside.

  The sudden burst of noise over the WQC underwater communications caught everyone by surprise. Ward could see Commander Devlin start out of his near-constant stupor and rise from the chair in which he had been sitting for at least the last forty-eight hours. The terrorist called Shehab slammed the captain back down and then headed over to the WQC.

  “Corpus! Corpus! Surface immediately or be fired upon.”

  The command filled the control room, reverberating.

  Must be an A-comms buoy. The Navy was finally up there. Ward fought to keep a smile off his lips. Then the realization hit him. How could he stop the terrorists and get Corpus on the roof before the USN began shooting at them? No way would they let them get any closer to any populated land mass. Not if they still didn’t know what Corpus was up to. But especially if they had made a lucky guess.

  There had to be a way to distract the terrorists. To get the sub back and let everyone topside know it. But right now, with the message blaring, Jim Ward didn’t see that way.

  He forced himself to think as Shehab yanked out his huge 357-magnum pistol and waved it wildly.

  “We must escape!” he yelled. The muzzle swung around until it pointed directly at the bridge of Jim Ward’s nose. “You will go fast! We will run away from them in this ship.”

  Ward reached over and spun the engine order telegraph around to “Ahead Flank” and rang the bell three times, the signal that they needed to go fast, now! The order for the throttleman to open the throttles as fast as he could, cavitation be damned.

  Ward felt the surge of acceleration as the boat leapt forward at his command. The pit-log dial began to spin toward the right.

  Ten knots. Fifteen. Twenty. Twenty-five.

  The machine gun-like rattle of cavitation—millions of tiny bubbles forming on the low pressure areas of the sail and fairwater planes then collapsing behind them with a bang as Corpus raced through the shallow water—filled the control room.

  Thirty knots and still faster. The rattling noise tried to drown out everything else. Even the ability to think straight.

  Ward knew that going this fast while remaining so shallow made them very easy for anyone out there to track them. The cavitation would light up sonar screens for miles around and the massive boat would throw a huge “Bernoulli hump” on the surface as it shoved water out of its way.

  Shehab was waving his gun and shouting angrily. Then the WLR-9 acoustic intercept receiver started alarming, adding it’s warning bell to the din filling the control room.

  Master Chief DiAnaggio, sitting in front of the ballast control panel, yelled at the top of his lungs.

  “Torpedo in the water! Incoming torpedo!”

  He instinctively reached over and slapped a pair of buttons, pushing two torpedo evasion devices out of their storage tubes in the dihedrals. The five-inch-diameter, six-foot-long mechanisms were designed to create enough noise and confusion in the water behind the boat to divert an incoming torpedo away from its intended prey.

  The control room erupted in confusion. The terrorists screamed and shouted as the crew tried to do their jobs the way they had been trained to do. There was none of the calm professionalism that Ward was accustomed to.

  Through it all, Bob Devlin simply sat there quietly, seemingly oblivious to the danger, to the chaos that reigned in his control room.

  Still surprisingly calm, Jim Ward watched the tumult. He could hear the increasing urgency of the WLR-9 alarm as the incoming torpedo’s signal strength rose. He could also see the terror and confusion in the eyes of their captors.

  From some quiet place deep inside himself, he had one thought: what would his dad do in a situation like this?

  Then Ward saw his chance. It was almost as if his old man had whispered the suggestion to him. He now knew what he had to do.

  Without hesitation, he yanked the rudder control hard over to port. Two hundred feet behind where they stood, the boat’s massive rudder swung over obediently and bit hard into the water that was rushing past. Just like a high-speed jet, the boat heeled over sharply to port, almost lying over on her side. The inclinometer confirmed what the tilting deck indicated. They were wallowing over at better than forty-five degrees. Now the rudder was causing two things to happen. It pushed the bow around dramatically to port and, since the boat was now leaning over so much, it also thrust the nose downward, toward the bottom of the ocean.

  Everything and everybody aboard the vessel that was not firmly strapped down was thrown to the left and forward, hard. Bodies tumbled all around the control room.

  Manju Shehab slammed into the hydraulic manifold just aft of the ballast control panel. With a mighty leap, Bob Devlin rose from his seat and used his own floundering momentum to jump on top of the fallen pirate. With a mighty roar of pent-up anger, he clawed for the man’s throat. His face already a bloody mass from the impact with the manifold, Manju blindly fought back. The two rolled on the steeply pitched deck, sliding forward as they struggled with each other.

  Ward continued to hold the rudder over hard. The compass card spun so fast he couldn’t even read the numbers. The depth gauge was a blur, too, as he struggled to hold on, yanking back with all his strength on the fairwater planes in an attempt to pull the nose up before they screamed through crush depth.

  Shehab’s pistol roared once and then again from somewhere in the midst of the two struggling bodies. The bullets ricocheted around the control room before they finally lost momentum and stopped somewhere aft.

  The struggle was over. Devlin rolled away and pulled himself erect, grasping for a handhold. The front of his poopie suit was covered with blood. He fell back to the deck, face down. The gaping exit wound in his back pumped blood from a severed artery for a moment, then it stopped. Shehab didn’t move. The top of his head had been blown away, spattering the panel behind him with blood and brains.

  Jim Ward shoved the rudder around to the right to try to stop the boat’s torturous swing. He flipped the engine order telegraph to back emergency. Maybe the main engines could back them up to a safe depth. Still the depth gauge rolled down, ignoring his maneuvering.

  They were already below test depth, deeper than the boat had ever been before. Crush depth couldn’t be much farther down.

  “Master Chief, I can’t stop it!” he yelled. “We’re too deep!”

  “Emergency blowing!” Master Chief DiAnaggio yelled back.

  The chief reached above his head and grabbed the two brass “chicken switches.” He jammed the first one up. The control room was immediately filled with the roar of high-pressure air as the emergency blow system activated to push 4500-psi air into the forward ballast tanks. Ever so slowly, the nose of the submarine began to rise. Forty down, twenty down, ten down. As the nose went through zero, Ward spun the engine order telegraph to ahead full. Time to use the mains to drive them up again. At the same instant, DiAnaggio slapped up the other emergency blow valve, pushing more air into the after ballast tanks. Garbage, equipment, and injured men now slid back toward the boat’s stern.

  The depth gages started to rapidly unwind.

  Just like that, Corpus Christi was now on the express elevator to the roof.

  43

  It was a sight not to be believed. The massive nuclear submarine leapt out of the boiling sea, rounded nose in the air.
To Mike Petranko, from his perch inside the helicopter above, the sub looked most like some gigantic black dolphin, jumping playfully in the sea. The boat splashed back down hard and then disappeared again beneath the undulating waves.

  Gunner Petranko blinked several times, questioning whether he had really seen what he thought he had seen. Or had it been a momentary apparition in the rain and wind-driven sea spray? The result of too much bouncing around in the rocky sky.

  Then the monster bobbed back to the surface again, pitching and rolling in the storm.

  “Sub! On the surface,” Petranko yelled out. “One-two-zero relative. Call it two thousand yards.”

  The wind whipped at him as he leaned out the open side door of the chopper, pointing at the shadowy, black form almost perfectly camouflaged against the gray ocean.

  Almost immediately Petranko felt the heavy helicopter heel over as it banked around and flew down the new bearing. A blast of static charged through his headset. Then he heard the command pilot speaking.

  “Echo-bravo, tango-sierra flight, have sub on surface. Definite LA class. Request instructions.”

  The reply from the controller back on Higgins was immediate.

  “Lay pattern of DICASS buoys. Attempt radio contact with target. If target goes sinker, shoot to kill. Set floor at four-hundred feet. I say again, floor of four-hundred feet. There is a friendly in your area, depth zone deep.”

  “Tango sierra flight rogers. Understand friendly in basement. If target goes sinker, shoot to kill, shallow. Be advised, tango sierra flight reports bingo fuel for return to home. Below authorized reserves for divert to Kadena. Request instructions.”

  The pilot spun the MH-60R around to fly a circle around the sub, keeping a thousand yard distance. At each of four corners, he dropped an active-passive DICASS sonobuoy. The silver metal canisters splashed into the water, immediately deploying a sonar transducer on a wire down to a depth of one-hundred feet. The canister stayed on the surface, keeping a tiny UHF antenna barely clear of the surging wave tops. With four buoys in the water, the submarine was surrounded, at least as long as it stayed hove-to and didn’t try to swim away.

  The sensor operator’s hands flew across his keyboard. His eyes were locked onto the pair of flickering flat-panel screens in front of him. Petranko knew that he was listening intently through his headset, verifying his tiny charges were working properly.

  Finally the operator looked up. The barest hint of a smile flickered across his face.

  “Four buoys hot,” he reported over the intercom. “Passive contact on all four. Command ping on all four with contact.”

  All four of the buoy’s sensitive hydrophones were listening to the sounds the sub was putting into the water. And the buoys’ active sonars were working, bouncing pings off the steel hull whenever the sensor operator ordered. The sub was in a corral that it couldn’t escape from. Not without getting shot.

  “Tango sierra flight, Higgins,” came the transmission from their home ship. “Remain on station until relieved. Vectoring Papa Three-Charlie to your posit. ETA unknown at this time.” The voice changed tone. “You gotta hold on guys. We’ll get help to you as quick as we can.”

  “Captain, something’s going nuts on Corpus,” Sam Witte called out. “She went flank to evade, but stayed shallow for some reason. The ADCAP just sucked up the cavitation. The damn thing just blew right past the evasion devices she launched. Looks like they turned hard and went deep. Very deep. The ADCAP chased it down to crush depth. It looks like they did an emergency blow to the surface, right out of the ADCAP’s acquisition cone.”

  Don Chapman looked over Joe Cully’s shoulder as he listened to Witte’s report. The fire-control technician was sitting at the torpedo launch console, watching the information from the Mark 48 ADCAP torpedo, fed back through the hair thin copper wire stretching from Topeka out to the speeding weapon. The torpedo was performing one of its complicated re-attack programs, coming back around to find the lost target submarine.

  Don Chapman shook his head.

  “Whoever is driving that boat is either damn good or damn lucky. A couple of seconds either way, they would all be dead by now.”

  Chapman glanced up at Witte.

  “Where is Corpus now?” he asked. “Sonar have contact?”

  “Yes sir,” Witte answered almost immediately. “Contact on Corpus. Bearing zero- three-three. Showing no Doppler, zero bearing rate. Sonar reports her dead in the water. Best bet is she is all stop on the roof.”

  “Very well,” Chapman acknowledged. He turned to Cully and ordered, “Change tactics on the ADCAP. Set ceiling at one hundred feet. Set zero Doppler enable off.”

  Cully looked back over his shoulder at Chapman.

  “But Skipper,” he said. “The unit won’t be able to get up to the target. It’ll just circle at a hundred feet until it runs out of gas.” He looked at the stopwatch hanging from a lanyard tied to his panel. “In six minutes.”

  Chapman smiled and clapped the sailor on the shoulder.

  “That’s just what I want. A big terrier yapping below them, just in case they get any ideas about running away.”

  “Captain, sonar reports DICASS buoy pings on the bearing to Corpus,” Witte chimed in. “Looks like help has arrived.”

  Chapman nodded and smiled. It appeared the mission had been accomplished without anyone dying.

  There was none of the cheering or high-fives that usually followed a successful shot on the range, but the razor-edge tension in the control room instantly evaporated. Those were games, well played and proudly won. This was for real. They had purposely shot to kill, at friends.

  “Let’s go up and take a look,” Chapman announced. “Diving officer, make your depth six-two feet. XO, keep me outside of that ADCAP’s fence.”

  Topeka angled up toward the surface as Witte happily yelled, “Yes, sir! Best course three-two-zero.”

  The City of Corpus Christi wallowed in the heavy seas. Jim Ward looked around the disaster that was the control room. Books, coffee cups, tools—anything that wasn’t strapped down or stowed away—lay in heaps on the deck. Several people lay on the deck or were draped over equipment, moaning from their injuries. Ward could hear the crash and bang of a pitched battle below him, on the mess decks. A gunshot rang out. Then another, followed by a scream of obvious pain.

  Master Chief DiAnaggio stood beside the ballast control panel, clutching Shehab’s pistol, watching both the forward and aft control room doors.

  “What do we do now, Mister Ward?” DiAnaggio asked.

  Ward looked at the grizzled master chief questioningly. Why in hell was anyone asking him what to do? Then he realized that he was in charge. The two of them were the only people in the control room able to function.

  Ward jumped over to the periscope stand, reached up, and slapped the red control ring to raise the scope. “Number two scope, coming up,” he called. “Chief, raise number one BRA-34. Tell radio to come up on the tactical net and get voice comms with whoever they can.”

  He put his eye to the scope eyepiece and slowly walked a full circle.

  “No close contacts,” Ward yelled. “Only contact is one helicopter, out about a thousand yards off the port beam.”

  DiAnaggio asked, “Should we go to the bridge? Let them know we’re friendly?”

  Ward shook his head.

  “No. Way too rough. We’re taking green water over the sail. We’d drown anybody going up there, if they didn’t get washed overboard first.”

  “Conn, radio. In comms with CTF Seven-Four. Patching voice comms out to control.”

  Jim Ward picked up the red handset and jammed it to his ear. When he pressed the handset button, he could hear an electronic crackle as the encryption synched up, then a voice came through.

  “Corpus, this is CTF Seven-Four. Say status.”

  Ward took a deep breath and hoped he could remember proper procedure.

  “CTF Seven-Four, this is Corpus. This is Midshipman Jim Ward. I’
m in charge in the control room.”

  The voice on the other end of the radio circuit was so familiar.

  “Jim, is that you, son? Are you OK?”

  Waves of relief rolled over the younger Ward. He almost sagged to the floor, but bit his lip and stood stiff. The horrible nightmare was almost over, but he had to stay strong until everyone was safe.

  “Dad, it’s me. I’m fine. We’ve got several hurt and several dead. We were hijacked by some very bad guys. I think we’re in control again. Sounds like the fighting is dying down.”

  “Listen, Jim. Help is on the way. We’ll have surface ships there in a few hours. Topeka is fifteen thousand yards off your starboard quarter. She reports a heavy sea state, too rough for her to do any good on the surface.”

  “We can hold out, Dad. What do you want us to do?”