With only ten seconds of onboard power left, the low explosives forward and aft of the warhead detonated, starting the complex chain leading to plasma ignition, and within milliseconds the torpedo ceased to exist, a high-energy plasma taking its place.
There was no target ship in the vicinity to vaporize, just endless depths of ocean water. The target was distant at that point, some 2.2 kilometers away, but close enough that the explosion force would likely still sink it.
The shock wave traveled through the sea at sonic velocity, taking only a second and a fraction to reach the hull of what was, for a brief moment, still a submarine.
When the violence of the Nagasaki plasma detonation was over, the ship no longer met the definition of a ship, a vessel that kept water out and people in for a sea voyage, for the water had come in to join the people.
Dante didn’t know dick about the inferno, thought Captain Jonathon George S. Patton IV.
While he had been contemplating the universe at the plot table not ten seconds ago, things had comparatively been fine. But in the next second the fabric of his entire world had been ripped apart.
One moment he was surrounded by his nuclear submarine, steaming at emergency flank, deep, almost at test depth, following orders to clear datum, to get the hell out of the East China Sea and rendezvous at the Point Bravo Hold Position.
Except that now the Annapolis would never make it to Point Bravo.
From what Patton could understand, an explosion had happened aft in the engine room. He still couldn’t tell if the problem had been caused by the nuclear reactor or came from outside, from a torpedo or depth charge.
Both reactor-plant troubles were equally nasty—the reactor going supercritical and exploding in a blast of steam and radioactivity was not a pretty sight, nor was a double-ended shear of a twenty-four-inch steam header, blasting high-energy steam into the compartment so fast that the crew would be roasted lobsters in less than thirty seconds. And if a torpedo or depth charge had hit them, who knew if the ship could survive?
It was as if he had been suddenly awakened, like the time when a senior in high school when he had been struck broadside by a driver speeding through a red light. One moment he’d been behind the wheel, not a care in the world. The next, after the loud, resounding bang, passed in a whirlwind of impressions: being tossed across the seat, fighting a spinning steering wheel, tires shrieking, engine racing, until he had hit a tree, the horn sounding, engine dead, the silence until the siren sounded far in the distance. This was an identical feeling, down to the banging noise, the tremendous energy of the explosion deafening him, throwing him into a bulkhead aft of the starboard periscope, the deck careening sideways.
He felt his feet swept out from under him. On pure instinct he screamed, “Emergency blow both groups!
Blow!” He smashed into the deck on his chest, his arm folded under him, breaking his fall but bruising his forearm.
The world spun around him, black at the very edges, the blackness growing until Patton saw the world through a tunnel of light that grew dimmer every second.
He blinked, struggling to hold on to consciousness. He vaguely heard a clunking noise and a grunt, then a tremendous roar surrounding him, a white fog enveloping him. For a split second he thought he was floating in clouds, but then realized with gratefulness that the fog was the condensation boiling off the ice-cold high-pressure air piping behind the ballast-control panel. The ultrahigh-pressure air banks would pressurize the ballast tanks—if they still existed—to try to drive out the water and give them buoyancy to get to the surface.
“We going up?” he asked to no one in particular.
When there was no answer, just the tremendous roar continuing, he shouted it. “Hey! Chief! OOD! Anybody—we going up?” He struggled to get to his feet, but the room was crazy, fog everywhere, the surface beneath him hard and solid, but was it a deck, a bulkhead?
A second explosion followed, an eruption from a deck below. The ship lurched from the force, and then the roar increased. Just then Patton smelled smoke, and the lights nickered out, every one of them. In the darkness a hot, rolling, heavy cloud of a horrible chemical smell swarmed over him, the first taste of it souring Patton’s mouth, crawling down his throat and grabbing his lungs.
He felt himself begin to convulse, vomit spurting from his mouth.
It was as if a rocket had ignited under him. He fairly sailed to his feet, his hands instinctively reaching into the overhead. He missed the first time, missed the second time, the third time grasping a box nestled in with the other equipment. The latch of the metal box snapped open, and his hand scattered a dozen breathing masks down to the deck.
The hot black chemical smell was overwhelming him.
With his arm he tried to lift a mask, but a shooting pain exploded in the forearm. Dimly he remembered hitting the deck with the arm cushioning him. The thought was instantly discarded as his other arm reached for the mask and put it on his forehead, down to his chin, then cinched up the straps. Yet there was no air. His eyes bulged and his lungs were bursting. Chemicals! fire! no air! dying!
Desperately he struggled for control against the surge of panic. With his right hand he found the hose from the mask’s regulator, touched along to its end, the hose connection a cone of metal. By feel he reached up to the manifold, a series of pipe stations six rows across, each row a place to plug in a mask. He’d done this a thousand times in drills, blindfolded, feeling his way, but in those drills there had been one element missing—raw animal fear. Finally the hose connection clicked into the manifold, and he sucked in a huge, whooshing breath of air. His rib cage expanded to three times normal size, like some kind of cartoon character, and he breathed out his lungful of chemical smoke, the smell of it rank in the mask. He sucked in a second breath. With the air came mental clarity, his faculties returning.
He realized that he was standing in a dark room, full of noxious smoke, with a dying crew, a sinking submarine, and he had no idea what was going on. With his good arm he reached into the overhead and found a battle lantern. It was supposed to click on automatically but hadn’t. With a flick of a switch a beam of light came on, yet the smoke in the room was so thick, the beam penetrated only halfway to the deck. He then located a portable flashlight in its cradle and shined it until he found the ship-control panel. There two unconscious men lay half out of their seats. He was peering through the smoke when the deck seemed to throw him forward, into the panel this time. He shook his head feeling dizzy.
That sense of being thrown hadn’t been his equilibrium, but the deck suddenly coming level, he realized.
The depth gauge on the ship-control panel read 33, and Patton could feel the deck moving beneath his feet, rocking gently. The ship was on the surface. The chief must have heard his order and hit the “chicken switches” that had activated the emergency ballast-tank-blow system.
For a second Patton searched for the chief who’d followed his orders, thinking that the ship had emergency-blown from damned near test depth, and now they were safe on the surface.
The third explosion in sixty seconds disrupted his fleeting sense of safety. His thoughts shifted to the smoke and what could be causing it. An oxygen fire?
Burning torpedo self-oxydizing fuel? A battery fire, hydrogen lighting off in the compartment? Or was it chlorine gas generated by seawater flooding into the battery well? Or even the cyanide gas that would come from burning rocket fuel from the Vortex Mod Charlie missiles?
Or was it all of them? Did he and his ship have mere seconds left?
A fourth explosion went off, the roar of it not dying down but continuing. The darkened room was lit by glaring flames climbing up the aft door to the room. Its light diffused by the heavy smoke, the flames spread onto the overhead, making their way toward him, eating the insulation of the hull, creating more black smoke. Patton shook himself. He’d been staring transfixed into the flames, not moving.
Only seventy seconds had passed since the first exp
losion, but already he knew his ship and his crew were doomed. The flames kept growing, until the aft half of the room was engulfed in the roaring violence. No longer thinking, Patton took five steps forward to the lower bridge tunnel hatch. The tunnel led to the sail high above. Furiously he spun the hatch wheel, undogging the hatchway. With just one arm the hatch took forever to open. He pushed hard, and the hatch lifted into the darkness of the tunnel and latched open.
His crew—he had to find anyone alive and get them out the hatch. He pulled the helmsman out of his seat, but the lad slumped to the deck, unconscious. Patton could have reached into the overhead to get him an air mask, but he knew that would take precious seconds that he didn’t have. Frantically he tried to find anyone moving. The officer of the deck lay sprawled on the conn, his forehead cracked open, blood spurting out of a neck wound. Patton moved to the attack center, where he found young Karl Horburg’s head smashed into the glass of the display, his forehead buried in the television tube. By now the flames were roaring in the overhead above them, and Patton had to retreat. He tried to shout through the mask, but there was no one to hear him.
The heat of the space was growing unbearable. Flames were blazing overhead, scorching his hair. Patton disconnected his air hose, ran forward to the sonar space, found another air manifold, and plugged in. Thank God, Demeers was still alive, lying on the deck.
There was no time to rig an air mask. Patton needed to get up into the bridge trunk, where twenty feet above the upper hatch led to fresh air, where there was no fire, no smoke, no chemicals. Patton was reaching for Demeers, struggling against the constraining hose, when the next explosion came. Patton was hurled into the sonar consoles, and the deck listed, a tilt barely perceptible at first, then more and more noticeable. They were tilting aft, and there could be only one possible reason.
The stern was sinking.
The ship must be flooding from the engine room. In a burst of anger and frustration, with every ounce of strength he had left, he threw off the mask, grabbed Demeers’ shoulders, and hauled him up. Groggily the sonar chief lurched to his feet.
“Go!” Patton screamed, shoving Demeers toward the black opening of the bridge tunnel, illuminated only by the flames from the burning hell of the control room.
The next explosion blew glass and plastic at the two of them. Flames bloomed from control into the sonar room.
Patton could feel his uniform coveralls catch fire, but he kept going, shoving Demeers—now awake, panicking— up the tunnel. The flames whooshed up the hatchway, then up Patton’s legs. Frantically he unlatched the hatch and pushed hard to close it. As it clicked, the ring of flames was choked off.
“Go on, up!” he yelled at Demeers, who slowly started ascending the ladder. Patton stopped to pat out the names on his coveralls, which were flame-retardant but had finally given into the heat and the fire. It took some time before the flames went out, leaving Patton’s hands red and stinging. He looked up, the tilting tunnel black. He reached for the battle lantern and hit the switch. The light of it shone through the smoke, not as thick here. He put the handle of it in his teeth, and with his good arm he hauled himself up the ladder as fast as he could. Demeers had reached the upper hatch.
“Open it! Can you open it?”
Demeers had managed to get the hatch open, but it wasn’t enough. The heavy clamshells above the bridge cockpit that faired in the sail, making it hydrodynamic, would need to be pulled down. While Demeers fought to open the clamshells, Patton pulled a package out of a cubbyhole, a sort of backpack. Suddenly the bright light of day shone down into the slanting tunnel, just for a second, before water started rushing in.
“We’re sinking!” Demeers shouted.
“Get out!” Patton ordered.
“Come on!” Demeers’ voice was faint in the roar of water hitting Patton in the face, washing over his ears.
Its coldness was shocking after the broiling temperatures in the dying submarine.
“Get out—take the survival pack,” Patton yelled. “Go on!” The flowing water was blasting into his nostrils and mouth and ears, like having a fire hose full force in the face. He felt himself start to lose his grip. This was it.
He had watched his ship smashed with a torpedo or depth charge, and within seconds she was flooding and burning. He had tried to get her to the surface, where he could save his men, but it was not to be. Now his best friend was about to die in a futile effort to save him, and he couldn’t allow that.
“Get out!” he screamed one last time.
What happened next was nothing short of a miracle.
Byron Demeers grabbed Patton’s coveralls with one hand, the sail handhold with the other, and in one heaving motion rocketed Patton out of the sinking submarine free of the hatch, completely flooded with water. The light of day came back—waves were washing over his head, and he was spitting and retching, the deep convultions gripping into his stomach, the water he’d swallowed spurting out of him. Finally Byron’s bald head popped out of the water, and Patton could breathe again. Demeers shook his head, blinked, and said! “Look.” In his hand was the survival pack.
In three motions of Demeers’ hands a hunk of limp rubber appeared on the waves with them. Demeers pulled the COZ bottle and the life raft inflated. Patton was exhausted, giving in to shock. He barely remembered being pulled into the raft by the senior chief. Then he was lying on his back, his left forearm throbbing and swelling, nausea threatening but nothing but dry heaves shaking his body.
“Is it just me,” he croaked, “or were we, just four minutes ago, aboard the Annapolis steaming southeast at emergency flank?”
“We were. Skipper. And now we’re all that’s left.”
Demeers’ face took on a grim look. He frowned deeper as be pulled the pin on the emergency satellite radio, a device resembling a grenade, that would broadcast their distress signal to the overhead Comstar satellite.
“There were 134 men aboard. Senior. One hundred thirty-two of them just died. And so did my ship. What the hell happened?” “Had to be a torpedo,” Demeers said.
“Well, hello,” Patton said, sitting bolt upright. He’d noticed a periscope close enough to swim to in ten strokes. “I think you’re right, Byron. Look.”
Demeers’ eyes bulged out, his face turning red.
Patton glared at the periscope, the design of it strange-looking, and without thinking, he nipped it his middle finger. “Fuck you,” he muttered.
As quickly as it had come, the periscope vanished, sinking vertically into the water.
“Did I imagine that?” he said, dizziness starting to overtake him.
“No, sir. I saw it too. I’d like to kill that murdering bastard with my own two hands.”
Patton didn’t hear him. Darkness had come to claim him at last.
The crew of the American submarine named Santa Fe heard the torpedo coming and turned to run. The ship’s superior speed slowly opened the distance, but the vessel was unable to overcome the effects of the plasma detonation within five kilometers, and the ship’s hull ruptured.
The Santa Fe’s men, all 138 of them, died not from fires or smoke inhalation, but from a hull fracture that opened up the entire forward compartment at test depth. The water poured in with such force that it separated flesh from bone, turning muscle and organs to liquid that mixed instantly with the seawater, and they were no more.
The hull of the Santa Fe came to rest eleven kilometers from the position of what had once been the Annapolis, and when it did, what had once been the most powerful naval force in the history of the planet ceased to exist with barely a sign left on the surface of its passing.
Not far from the ocean bottom that had become a field of debris. Admiral Chu Hua-Feng, PLA Navy, climbed out of his cramped command-console cockpit and limped to his bunk in the captain’s stateroom. His muscles were aching and tired as he lay down to sleep.
When he closed his eyes, the faces of the doomed men in the life raft were staring back at him, the a
ngry black-haired man raising his middle finger again and again.
MONDAY NOVEMBER 4 barbers point naval air station oahu, hawaii The SS-12 cabin was heavily soundproofed, yet the sounds of the flaps and slats could be heard whining as their mechanisms lowered them into the slipstream of the airflow around the supersonic jet, making its final approach to runway zero four, illuminated by bright white lights in the predawn darkness. None of this registered with the admiral, sunk in deep concentration.
“Time’s our enemy,” Pacino said. “If the backup rapid deployment force leaves now, it’ll take them five days and six hours to get to the East China Sea. That’s dawn on Sunday the tenth, local time. The Pacific Submarine Force we sent yesterday, at emergency flank, arrives late Friday the eighth. That leaves thirty hours to try to scour the East China Sea before the BU-RDF arrives. It’s not enough.”
“We’ve got to think long and hard about the 688s,” White said. “Still no word.”
“How long has it been since the second ELF call to periscope depth?”
“Ninety minutes, sir. We should have heard an hour ago one way or the other. I think we may have to presume the Annapolis and the Santa Fe are unable to hear our radio call.”
Pacino felt a black feeling. He knew that the 688’s radio receivers or transmitters weren’t the problem. He wasn’t sure how he knew, but he did. Annapolis and Santa Fe were gone. And with them at the bottom of the ocean were his two handpicked, personally trained commanding officers, Chris Carnage and John Patton.
He bit his lip. The war had suddenly become personal.
With those officers almost three hundred highly trained crewmen of Pacino’s Unified Submarine Command were gone. He felt an anger rise in him like none he’d experienced in years, perhaps exceeded only by the day Dick Donchez had told him his father had been murdered. And now these men, his sons, had died at the hands of a rogue submarine commander, and that commander and his men were still lurking in the East China Sea, mocking him.
Piranha Firing Point Page 25
