by Robert Gandt
Finney ran to the sonar console. “What the fuck is going on?”
“Three torpedoes!” yelled the sonarman. “No, Goddammit, we got four now! Four torpedoes in the water, Mr. Finney. Looks like two hundred down, bearing 305, four thousand yards inbound.”
Finney felt the hair stand up on his arms and neck. He knew the information on the sonar screen was being repeated on a similar screen in flag plot in the Reagan.
This is a drill, he thought. It had to be some kind of stupid damned exercise to see if all this gee-whiz shit really worked. No one had fired a real torpedo at an American ship for over fifty years.
“Bearings 300, 290, 280, range three thousand to five thousand yards,” called out the sonarman. “All tracking on Reagan.”
Finney could see it now on the screen. The computer-enhanced display made the sonar returns look like pulsing yellow worms. They were in trail, diverging in about a five degree spread.
All moving at forty knots toward USS Ronald Reagan.
Finney turned to the tactical display, checking the disposition of the battle group. The Reagan was nestled in the middle of the formation like a mother hen surrounded by her chicks. On her starboard beam were the two screening destroyers, O’Hara and Royal. On the far side, cruising off the carrier’s port beam, was the ammunition ship Baywater. Two miles in trail was Finney’s own ship, the Aegis cruiser Arkansas.
The torpedoes were on a path that would take them between the lead destroyer, USS Royal, and the trailing vessel, USS O’Hara. Every ship in the battle group was maneuvering now, responding to the torpedo alerts.
“The decoys are deploying,” reported the sonar operator. He pressed his finger against the display, leaving an oily print. Finney could see the sonar echoes of the decoys as they spilled into the wake of each warship.
This is no goddamn drill, he thought. With morbid fascination he stared at the pulses on the display. Real ships, real torpedoes. It didn’t make sense. Who the hell would be firing torpedoes?
Reagan was in a hard turn to starboard. Both O’Hara and Royal were making their own tight turns to starboard inside the massive ship’s radius. On the screen the decoys were casting a large acoustic clutter behind each ship.
The torpedoes were ignoring the decoys.
“Two thousand yards and closing,” called out the sonar operator.
<>
Rear Admiral Langhorne Fletcher kept his eyes riveted on Claire. As she told him what she had heard in Sana’a, his eyes steadily narrowed. The features of his lean face seemed to harden.
The four of them—Fletcher and Claire, Boyce and Maxwell—sat at the small table in the admiral’s stateroom, directly below the flag bridge.
“Ms. Phillips, you’re quite sure that your contact, Mr.—”
“Maloney.”
“You’re sure he mentioned Mr. Babcock by name?”
“Yes, sir. Several times.”
“And you are certain that he—”
Fletcher stopped. A drink skittered across the glass table. The ship was leaning hard to the port side.
Fletcher’s telephone was ringing. While the others at his table watched, he snatched the phone up, listened for a moment, then said, “I’m on my way.”
Heading for the door, he grabbed his float coat survival vest. “Thank you, Ms. Phillips. Your story has cleared up several issues for me. Now all of you get to your stations. The Reagan is about to go to general quarters.”
He dashed out of the compartment, feet pounding on the steps as he ascended the ladder to the flag bridge.
The voice of the Bosun’s Mate boomed over the public address system: “General quarters! General quarters! All hands man your battle stations. This is not a drill.”
<>
As Fletcher stormed into the flag bridge, he saw that everyone in the space—Vitale, Morse, the enlisted flag chief yeoman—was staring at the tactical display on the bulkhead.
He looked at the display and said, “Oh, shit.”
The torpedo tracks were pulsing yellow on the screen. They were close, diverging at separate angles toward the Reagan in a fan-shaped pattern. The fist two were sliding off behind the carrier’s stern. The second two torpedoes were aimed amidships.
Fletcher realized again that a hundred-thousand-ton aircraft carrier didn’t dodge and weave like a destroyer. Not even a cruiser, which was the largest vessel he had commanded, could elude forty-knot homing torpedoes.
The torpedoes must have been fired at close range. And they weren’t going for the decoys, which meant they were still in an inactive guidance mode.
Not much longer, he knew.
Instinctively he looked out at the white-capped sea for the distinguishing white wakes. He knew that they didn’t really look like that. These fish were almost surely running deep, invisible from the surface. Not until the last few seconds of their run would they arc upward to explode into the hull of their target.
A blur of impressions sped across Fletcher’s mind. Something had gone horribly wrong, and it was just coming to him what it was. The traditional military chain of command have been severed. Instead of reporting directly to his superiors—Fifth Fleet, CincLant, the Chief of Naval Operations—Fletcher had been receiving orders from a civilian official. Worse, he had not reported the circumstances to the officers above him.
It was a classic mistake—one that had been committed before with tragic consequences.
Torpedoes were homing on the USS Reagan, and the dismal thought occurred to Fletcher that it was his fault. In his great vanity and hubris, he had taken leave of his judgment. He had allowed his command authority to be suborned by—
The door to the flag bridge burst open. A white-faced Whitney Babcock entered the compartment as the first torpedo struck the Reagan.
Chapter Nineteen
The Hunters
Gulf of Aden
1003, Thursday June 20
The dull whump rumbled up from somewhere in the bowels of the ship. Five seconds later, another whump, this one closer, more pronounced. It came from the starboard side, somewhere amidships. The Reagan shuddered from the muffled explosion.
Fletcher gripped the handhold on the bulkhead and stared at the display. “That’s two. Where are—”
“Missed,” said Vitale, pointing at the display. “The last two just missed the rudder.”
Klaxons blared. Over the public address came the Bosun’s voice again, “Torpedo impact, fourth deck aft and amidships! Away all damage control teams. Set condition Zebra.”
Fletcher slid into his tall padded chair and picked up his sound powered telephone. “CIC, flag. Do you have a lock on the sub?”
“Yes, sir,” came the voice of the Combat Information Center duty officer. “O’Hara has a contact and is on the way with Royal backing up. We’re launching Seahawks, and they’re getting a sonobuoy screen down.”
“I want that sonofabitch blown out of the water.”
“We’re doing our best, Admiral.”
Fletcher put down the microphone. He saw Babcock staring at him.
“This is crazy,” said Babcock. “Who. . . who would torpedo the Reagan?” All trace of color was gone from his face.
“You tell me.”
“What do you mean?”
“While you were playing geopolitics with a terrorist, he was setting us up for a torpedo shot. It was a sucker play, Mr. Babcock.” Fletcher spat the words out.
“That’s absurd.”
“Is it? Why else has he been yanking us around, holding off an air strike to rescue our marines?”
“Watch your tongue, Admiral. I’m the one who put you in this job and I’ll—”
He stopped when he saw the look on Fletcher’s face. Fletcher was staring at something over his shoulder, out the port side of the flag bridge.
An orange fireball was mushrooming skyward. Above the fireball rose an oily dark cloud. Flaming debris spurted like roman candles from the inferno.
It took six seconds for
the concussion to reach the Reagan.
The blast hammered the storm-proof windows of the flag bridge. Down below, men and equipment were swept across the open flight deck, tumbling over the fantail, into the catwalks, over the side. Masts ripped from their moorings on the island, crashing down to the deck below. A Seahawk helicopter, just lifting from the fantail, flipped into a vertical bank and plummeted into the water.
“Jesus,” said Guido Vitale, looking up in shock. “What the hell was that?”
“The Baywater,” said Fletcher. “The ammunition ship. It took one of the torpedoes that was meant for us.”
Horrified, Fletcher stared at the carnage one and a half miles off the Reagan’s aft port quarter. The stricken ship was blown in half. The severed stern of the Baywater was already sliding into the sea, flames leaping from the shattered structure. The forward half was low in the water, burning fiercely. As Fletcher watched, an explosion boiled up from the hull. Another black mushroom belched into the sky.
Guido Vitale made a sign of the cross. “God help them.”
Fletcher stared at Babcock. “God help us all.”
<>
“Fast contact, Captain. 150 degrees, three thousand meters. A destroyer, by the screw noise.”
“Course and speed?”
“Twenty knots, accelerating, turning to an intercept bearing.”
One of the escort destroyers, thought Manilov. No surprise. After a possible periscope echo, then a salvo of torpedoes, they were coming with all their knives drawn. They would never stop hunting the submarine that torpedoed their battle group.
“Forward five knots, descend to eighty meters.”
“Aye, Captain.”
Manilov had always wondered how it would feel at this moment. Never in his years of naval service had he actually fired a shot in anger. Now, not one but four shots. Three had found targets.
It was as sweet as he could have hoped.
At least two torpedoes had impacted the Reagan. No secondary explosions, which was unfortunate. He could only hope now that the two-hundred-kilogram warheads had sufficiently ruptured the carrier’s hull, destroying its watertight integrity. Even sweeter would be an explosion in one of the ship’s reactor spaces, setting off a nuclear calamity that would force them to scuttle the ship.
But the sweetest moment—the kind that submarine skippers enjoyed in their wildest fantasies—was the explosion of the escort vessel. The magnitude of the blast was enough to nearly rupture the ears of the sonar operator. The hull of the Mourmetz had trembled from the blast, causing the crew in the control room to break their silence and cheer at the top of their lungs.
“More screw noise, Captain. Another destroyer. And something else. . . I think an aircraft. A helicopter. . . yes, definitely a helicopter.”
Manilov made a quick calculation. With the destroyer’s fast closing speed, they would merge in four minutes, presuming the destroyer had a reasonable fix on the submarine’s last position. The helo would be overhead in approximately the same time. Each, he knew, carried Mark 46 or Mark 50 anti-submarine torpedoes.
The Mourmetz had only minutes left to live.
“Ready tubes five and six. Reload the first four.”
He saw Popov and Borodin look at each other and nod. Good, thought Manilov. Let them know how Russian submariners fight.
“Tubes five and six ready, Captain.”
“Stand by,” He leaned over the combat computer operator’s console. “Do we have a firing solution on the destroyer?”
“Almost. It will be difficult with the target head on.”
“Compute a solution for the trailing destroyer. We’ll put one up both their snouts.”
“Aye, Captain. It is not precise, just the passive return.”
“I understand. It’s our only option.”
Manilov studied the display for another ten seconds, choosing his moment. “Fire five.
“Fire five,” Popov responded.
The Mourmetz shuddered as the 2,220 kilogram weapon burst from the number five tube.
Manilov did another quick check of the display. “Fire six.”
“Aye, fire six.”
Another shudder. The sound of the exiting torpedo filled the interior of the Mourmetz.
“The aircraft, Captain. Coming closer. It will fly directly over us.”
“How many?”
“Just one is all I am detecting.”
“Ready the missile battery.”
“Ready with Igla one, sir.”
Manilov had no idea whether the Igla missiles even worked. The SAM battery had been a retrofit on the Kilo class submarines and was never tested before the Mourmetz was sold to the Iranians. No matter. If fate allowed the missiles to function today, then they would.
He waited until he was sure the helicopter was within the killing envelope of the short range Igla. The trick was not to wait too long. The helicopter would launch its torpedo.
“Stand by. . . Fire!”
He heard a rumbling noise, the sound of the compressed air blowing the weapon free of its battery in the sail. Then the gurgling sound of the missile ascending to the surface.
“Ahead five knots, course 165 degrees, maintain eighty meters.”
The warrant officer looked up at him. “Captain, that course will take us directly beneath the enemy aircraft carrier.”
“Precisely.”
<>
The first SH-60B Seahawk—call sign Blister Eleven—was on a mission of vengeance. The pilot and his crew had barely escaped the blast from the exploding Baywater. His squadron mates in Blister Ten—the second SH-60B that launched ten seconds behind them—had been smashed like a cheap toy into the sea behind the Reagan.
The ATO—the airborne tactical officer in the helicopter—had already loaded the fix from the disappeared periscope sighting into his mission computer, then correlated the information with the recorded tracks of the four torpedoes, datalinked from the Arkansas.
While the helicopter accelerated low over the water, he saw it—Yes!—the sub tracking solution on his situational display. He knew where the sonofabitch was. Computers were really pretty cool gadgets.
For the pilot of the Seahawk, it was coming down to a race between him and the destroyer. He could see O’Hara leaving a wake like a speedboat as it sliced through the water. Somebody was going to kill the submarine and he was damned well going to make sure it was Blister Eleven.
Making a good 120 knots, the helicopter skimmed over the top of the O’Hara on the same course—330 degrees—headed for the sub’s position. According to the ATO’s inertial navigation computer, the sub was exactly one mile straight ahead.
The ATO wanted to pin him first with a pattern of sonobuoys. They’d make a high speed pass, drop the sonobuoys, then swing around while the ATO tightened the noose on the sub. Then they’d put the Mark 50 in the water.
The sub was dead meat.
Then he saw something peculiar. It lasted for only a second—while he was looking straight down. It was deep, maybe a hundred feet down, leaving a thin bubbly stream behind it. Shit! Not another fucking torpedo—
His thoughts were cut short by the warning from the O”Hara. “Blister Eleven, SAM in the air! You’re targeted, Blister!”
For an instant the Seahawk pilot was confused. SAM? No way. He had just seen a freaking torpedo in the water. What the hell was this about a SAM?
Because he had already overflown the submarine’s last position, the pilot didn’t see the geyser that erupted from the sea behind him. Nor did he see the trail of fire from the missile as its rocket motor ignited and propelled it toward its target.
“Flares! Flares!” yelled the ATO over the intercom, aware of the danger.
It was the right call—but too late. The decoy illuminators had just begun streaming behind the Seahawk as the heat-seeking Igla missile boresighted the helicopter’s left turbine exhaust pipe.
The Sensor Operator, seated at his console behind the ATO, was the first t
o know. He felt the lurch, heard the shriek of tortured machinery. He looked up in time to see the left turbine engine of the Sikorsky explode, taking away the overhead cabin section. To his horror, the whole structure was ripping upward through the big whirling rotor blades.
The mortally wounded helicopter rolled over in a sickening death dive. Tumbling end over end, the Sikorsky plunged 150 feet into the Arabian Sea, barely making a splash before it disappeared beneath the waves.
Alerted by sonar to the torpedoes, both destroyers were spewing out acoustic decoys in a trail behind them. On the bridge of the O’Hara, the captain ordered a violent evasive turn, then swinging the narrow bow of the destroyer back toward the oncoming torpedo. He glimpsed the thin white wake as the torpedo sped twenty yards past his port beam.
Farther behind and with more time to evade, the captain of the Royal simply took a thirty degree offset course, putting several hundred yards between his destroyer and the path of the enemy torpedo.
The Royal churned directly to the spot where the Seahawk had crashed, checking for any sign of survivors. The O’Hara continued at flank speed toward the presumed position of the enemy submarine. Loaded in her tubes and ready to fire were two Mark 50 lightweight anti-submarine torpedoes.
But the O’Hara’s sonar operator no longer had an active contact. Nor did the anti-submarine warfare technicians on the Royal. Or the cruiser Arkansas. Without a positive sonar ID on the Kilo Class, it was too dangerous to launch a homing torpedo. The same torpedo could home on a friendly vessel.
Within minutes three more destroyers had joined the search. Two additional Seahawks arrived with MAD gear and sonobuoys dispensers. A forest of sonobuoys was soon bobbing on the water, providing acoustic cross bearings for the sub hunters.
But the contact was lost. The submarine had vanished.
<>
The damage reports, relayed from the Reagan’s captain, were coming in faster than Fletcher and his staff could process them. Four enlisted sailors and five officers, including the Group Operations Officer, were busy on the sound-powered telephones.
