Captain Jaime Matias, San Luis II’s commander, sat at the small fold-down desk shoehorned into a corner of his quarters. Unlike the rest of the boat’s lime-green painted metal walls, this tiny room was wood-paneled and offered a private bed. San Luis II’s other crewmen had to share bunks, with one man waking to go on duty, and the other jumping in as he came off it. Captain Matias’ bed was not quite as long as he was tall, its mattress was cracker-thin, and it was tucked against the slope of the hull. Although it felt like crawling into a coffin, it was nevertheless cool and clean. Even better, it was all his.
Matias looked to the three small, framed portraits hanging on the cabin wall. They had been affixed there in the yard, forcing the commander to bear the unblinking gazes of President Alonso, Admiral Correa, and Minister of Defense Gomez. Matias sighed, stood, and hung a towel over the portraits. He sat again and pulled a cozy off a small pot that had been delivered by the cook and poured himself a mug of yerba maté—a bitter, earthy green tea. Then he picked up the small picture of his wife and son from his desk.
Matias sipped the tea and looked closely at his boy. He, too, wore the uniform of the Argentine Navy, and had he lived, he would be an officer by now. There was a knock at the door.
“Come.”
It was First Lieutenant Santiago Ledesma, San Luis II’s executive officer.
“Pardon the interruption, sir,” Ledesma said as he peeked in.
“Enter, Santiago,” the captain invited. “Sit.” Ledesma squeezed in, sat on the bed, and accepted a mug which Matias filled with tea.
“Thank you, sir.” Ledesma blew at the steaming brew and took a sip. “Sir, we are at 13 south 17 west, the edge of our patrol sector.”
“Very well,” Matias said. San Luis II’s endurance had been pushed as she steamed some 3,000 miles from base at Mar del Plata, and now it was time for Matias to take the conn. With limited fresh water aboard and the extended duration of San Luis II’s mission, the boat’s shower had been padlocked shut, and the combined odor of sweat and diesel oil recirculated through the ventilators. Feeling ripe, Matias changed his disposable shirt and splashed water on his face from the soup bowl-sized cabin basin. He pulled the towel down to dry himself, and then replaced it over the faces of his leaders. Ledesma chuckled.
“That is all they are good for, Santiago: A towel hook,” Matias declared, and studied his executive’s face. “Does this bother you?”
“This is your cabin. And we are friends.”
“Then you can tell me how you really feel.”
“Very well. Sometimes I am afraid of you. Sometimes I do not understand you. And sometimes, I am unsure if we really are friends.”
“Oh, is that all?” Matias chuckled, but he appreciated the easy forthrightness of Ledesma. This was one of the reasons he had recommended the man as second-in-command. Ledesma sipped at his tea and peered at the captain through the wisps of steam rising from the mug.
“We are friends, Santiago. And, because of this, I will tell you something: This war is a mistake.”
Though Ledesma harbored such forbidden thoughts as well, he was not prepared to discuss them, so he changed the subject.
“That is your son?” he asked.
“Once, I went to sea with a fresh heart. That was long ago,” Matias added, studying Ledesma. Then Matias took the new path of conversation Ledesma had initiated: “Yes, that is my son. I taught him to be a good warrior: country, duty, ask no questions. Now he’s at the bottom of the sea.”
Ledesma had heard the story. When Argentina had hastily announced a nuclear submarine program and cobbled together a prototype based on a German TR-1700 hull, young submariners had paid the price. The program was abandoned when the contaminated boat and the radiation-burned bodies trapped within had been committed to the deep.
“Young and with faith... That is the way for a warrior to die, Santiago. I have lived too long.” Matias could see he had said too much. “Don’t worry, my friend. I am too well trained for such thoughts to interfere with my duty to you, our crew, and this wonderful boat.” Matias touched a cold steel pipe over his head.”
Ledesma nodded, forced a smile, and stood. “Thank you for the tea,” he said. “I shall return to my post now.”
“I am right behind you,” Matias said with a smile. He watched Ledesma leave the confines of the cabin, and as the door shut, his forced smile quickly faded.
◊◊◊◊
Captain Matias ducked into the submarine’s cramped Control Room. Like the rest of the sub, the Control Room was a tangle of analog dials, computers, electrical panels, levers, pipes, valves, and wire conduit covered by too many layers of paint. Red light illuminated the room, because except for clocks, interior lighting was the only indication of the time of day. Red lighting meant it was nighttime topside. Despite the dimness, Matias knew the location of every head-knocking low pipe and maneuvered accordingly. He passed dive control with its bank of valves and glowing control panels.
“Good evening, men,” Matias said to the shadows hunched all along the compartment’s wall. He quickly surveyed various analog and digital instruments arrayed around the Control Room. “Batteries?”
“Are at 100 percent, sir,” Ledesma reported. They had been on diesel power for some time, charging the submarine’s two banks of 120-cell lead-acid batteries.
“Excellent,” Matias said. “Shut down the generators, stow the snorkel, and engage the electric motor.”
“Si, señor,” Ledesma responded, and then repeated the order to the chief-of-the-boat. The slightly overweight chief made it all happen. The racket that had filled their ears for days went quiet, replaced by the sound of water in pipes, the occasional cough or sniffle, the manipulation of switches, and the gentle hum of electric propulsion. As Matias watched his crew at work, he hoped an aircraft, satellite, or surface vessel had not spotted the wake of San Luis II’s snorkel. He rationalized that the rough sea-state topside had likely obscured the snorkel’s telltale signature. He found comfort in the fact that, on batteries again, San Luis II was nearly silent and invisible.
“Make your depth 125 meters,” Matias announced. Ledesma, and then the chief-of-the-boat, repeated the order. Valves were opened, panel indicators changed colors, and there was the sound of rushing water. The Control Room deck pitched forward as the submarine angled nose down, piercing the deep, dark depths.
The hull groaned and popped as its high-tensile steel adjusted to increased pressure. The greener submariners looked about nervously as this happened, while Matias and the Control Room’s other experienced crew paid the sounds no mind. A drawn out creak made one man wriggle. Matias smiled at Ledesma who turned away to check a display. A loud bang announced the hull’s adjustment to the squeeze of the Atlantic.
“You know...” Matias said to Ledesma, though he was really addressing all those present. “These boats are better than the old S-boats we used to ride to sea.” Matias spoke of the dated Type 209’s, the diesel submarines on which he had cut his teeth. “Those boats, like the first San Luis, made a racket like the whole ocean was rushing in. These are better.” Though he knew Russian welders were known to cut corners, and that quality control on exported hulls was scant at best, he suppressed his own lingering doubts about the machine that had, so far, kept them alive. Matias put on a brave face and rocked on his heels.
“One hundred twenty-five meters, sir,” Ledesma reported.
“Planes to zero degrees. Level us off.”
In a small alcove off the Control Room, a band appeared on a monitor’s sonar waterfall.
“Contact,” the sonar technician announced. “Distant. On the surface. It’s closing.”
“Classify,” Matias ordered in response.
“Range: four miles. Bearing: one-nine-zero degrees. Speed: 20 knots. I hear two propellers. High speed shafts. Not a merchantman. Computer is working on--” The clatter of a printer interrupted as it began to spit out a report. The sonar supervisor ripped off the paper it produced
and read it aloud:
“Type 23 frigate. United Kingdom. Duke-class.”
“Good. Our first catch of the day,” Matias said with a greedy smile. Reassured by his captain’s lust for the hunt, Ledesma grinned back. Then he opened a binder and began to read:
“Type 23. Thirty-six hundred tons. A top speed of 28 knots. Thales Type 2050NE bow-mounted sonar operating in the 4.5-7.5 kilohertz range, and a Dowty Type 2087 very low frequency towed array.”
“Anti-submarine armaments?”
“Stingray torpedoes and a Merlin helicopter. Depending on her hull number, she could be carrying the SSTD torpedo countermeasures system.” Ledesma scanned the rest of the binder’s page. “The type is decommissioning; being replaced with a new class, the Global Combat Ship.”
Matias looked to the weapons status board. San Luis II had wire-guided torpedoes in the two outer tubes, and wake-followers—53-65KEs—in the other four.
“What do you think, Santiago?” Matias asked Ledesma in a near whisper.
“The British would never expect us to be this far north.”
Matias nodded agreement. When Admiral Correa had assembled his top naval officers to review plans, it was Matias who had argued against deploying Argentina’s best submarines in the waters surrounding Las Islas Malvinas. Instead, he pressed, they should be used to take the fight to the British, and not wait for them to come to the fight. Furthermore, he argued, the highly-capable and deeply-feared British nuclear submarines would likely deploy to and roam the war zone, making it the last place where the Argentine Navy should concentrate their valuable boats.
“That frigate is running too fast to have her towed array in the water. I would say she is sprinting south, and her captain is not expecting any interference just yet,” Ledesma added. Matias smiled.
“Yes, Santiago. I concur. Creep us abeam of her. And bring us to battle stations.”
3: DUKES UP
“The art of war is simple enough: Find out where the enemy is; Get at him as soon as you can; Strike at him as hard as you can and as often as you can, and keep moving on.”—Ulysses S. Grant
The storm pushed the sea into tall wind-whipped peaks, cliffs of water that dropped off sharply into deep troughs. The water was dark, a deep purple, and rafts of froth rose and fell with the sloshing surface. A torrent of rain pelted HMS Iron Duke as her long, thin, grey hull rose and slammed back down, her stern corkscrewing and exposing her red underbelly and the tips of her shiny propellers. As the water piled up and folded over, the frigate’s bridge crew stabbed the warship’s bow through the waves’ white crowns at the proper angle, thereby allowing maintenance of a decent speed.
“Five degrees starboard,” the officer-of-the-watch yelled above the screaming wind and splashing water. Iron Duke turned to the right a bit more, rose steeply, rolled some, and then slammed back down in a surge of water and sea spray, momentarily submerging the bridge. The windshield’s clear view screens—small round discs that spun to rapidly shed water—threw the water away as the ship’s bow came back up and the cold seawater rushed away in a mass of green foam. The bow, supplemented by the buoyancy of the bulbous stem that contained the sonar, climbed again and scaled the next oceanic hill. Though Iron Duke’s Artisan 3D radar swept the area, the screens in the Operations Room were so full of clutter from wave crests that the radar operator could not discern the black pipe peeking from the depths.
San Luis II’s periscope pierced the surface. Its lens surveyed the area before it disappeared again, swallowed by the rhythmic rise and fall of waves. Twenty feet below this protuberance, the black shadow of the Argentine submarine hovered steadily below the squall-battered surface. In the red glow of San Luis II’s Control Room’s nighttime lighting, Captain Matias looked through the periscope’s monocular eyepiece.
Matias spotted the green glow of Iron Duke’s bank of bridge windows and the powerful flashlight of a deckhand scurrying along the rail, checking for storm damage. Matias waited for the next wave to pass. Bubbles cleared from the periscope lens and he turned and fixed the apparatus on these lights. He centered them in the reticle, increased magnification, and then swept his view toward the ship’s prow.
“I see the pennant number: Foxtrot two-three-four,” Matias read.
Ledesma flipped pages in his binder, repeated: “F234,” and then declared: “Iron Duke. That is the frigate that departed Las Islas Malvinas right before operations commenced. They must have turned her right around.”
Matias leaned into the periscope again and squinted into its eyepiece. “Update: target now at two-six-three degrees. Speed, 11 knots. Bearing, one-seven-zero. Ready tubes two and five. Warm up the weapons.”
Ledesma passed the order to the chief-of-the-boat. The chief went to the weapons technician, ordered the fire control system to be updated, and sent orders to the torpedo room.
In the boat’s forward-most compartments, two sweating men ducked under racks full of reload torpedoes. They spun valves and checked indicators. One submariner then clicked a switch to talk to the Control Center. He informed the chief that power was flowing to the two telephone pole-sized weapons nestled in the tubes. The chief, in turn, informed the executive officer, who passed confirmation to the captain.
“Power is flowing to tubes two and five. Fire control updates are being transferred,” Ledesma reported.
“Flood tubes two and five,” Matias ordered.
In the torpedo room, a lever was lowered, and the respective tubes were pumped full of seawater, air was vented, and pressure equalized with that outside the submarine.
“Open outer doors.”
Two muzzle doors opened on San Luis II’s rounded bow.
Standing behind the Control Room’s weapon station, Ledesma confirmed the doors were open.
Matias sighed, breaking the anticipatory silence of the compartment. Then he ordered: “Fire.”
The weapons technician pushed a button on his panel.
In the torpedo tubes, a valve slid open and the water ram operated. This plug of high-pressure water pushed both torpedoes from their tubes. Power cables severed, and with safeties now disengaged, both torpedoes activated their onboard kerosene-oxygen turbines. Batteries that powered the torpedoes’ guidance systems and warhead fuses came on. Both of San Luis II’s weapons began their run. Following their programmed course, the heavy torpedoes turned toward Iron Duke’s stern.
The torpedo room technicians immediately went about closing the muzzle doors and draining the tubes of water. When empty and equalized with the submarine’s interior, the breeches were reopened and the reloading procedure began.
“Take us down to 500, put us on a parallel course with the target, and drop back 4,000 meters,” Matias ordered.
When on electric motors, the submarine was incapable of keeping pace with Iron Duke’s current speed, and running the diesels was certain to expose San Luis II to counter-attack. Matias told Ledesma that, should the first volley of torpedoes fail to hit, he would then fire a wire-guided weapon and use its high speed to close with and strike the British frigate.
“Very well, sir,” Ledesma said as he looked to a light on the weapons console. “Torpedo room reports tubes two and five reloaded.” Matias checked his watch.
“Excellent,” Matias said, impressed. The captain had sweated the crew in countless drills. Although he heard whispers and grumbling each time, he had reminded his submariners: ‘Better to sweat in peacetime than bleed in wartime.’ Thousands of yards away, San Luis II’s torpedoes began to snake back and forth within the vee of Iron Duke’s wake.
The Royal Navy frigate slowed and changed course to take a large wave. As she rode up and over the building-tall upsurge, her stern came up. One torpedo lost track of the frigate’s wake and went wide. However, as the stern again displaced water, the second weapon detected its steel and turned toward it. The torpedo struck the bottom of the rolling ship and detonated its 678-pound warhead beneath Iron Duke’s main engine room.
The
ship shook from stem to stern as it was lifted by the blast and dropped again into the bubble jet created by the explosion.
The keel snapped and superhot gases punched a hole through the hull, cracking and curling its steel. A fireball rose through the ship, venting through the ship’s stack and ripping the decking surrounding it. The shockwave from the blast was amplified underwater.
A mile behind and 500 feet below Iron Duke, San Luis II felt the rumble. A cheer went up, but it was quickly stifled by the officers and the more disciplined. Matias closed his eyes for a moment, knowing that aboard Iron Duke, sailors were confronting a hell of twisted metal, smashed machinery, flame, and water.
On Iron Duke’s bridge, the shouts of men and the noise of equipment being dragged from repair lockers and hose racks could be heard in nearby areas. Temperature readings from the gas turbines shot up.
“Fire in the main engine room,” someone shouted.
The Halon flame-suppression system was started just as the ship’s electrical power began to brownout. Generators began to shut down from damage, and the sole remaining one could not handle the demand. It would soon shut down as well. Iron Duke’s captain believed he had struck a mine. Certain the Argentinians were incapable of operating this far north, he disagreed with an officer’s contention that they had been stalked and attacked by a submarine. Despite this contrary conclusion, the captain ordered that the active sonar be powered up.
“Negative availability, sir,” his second-in-command informed him. There was no power for a sonar pulse, let alone weapons.
Iron Duke stopped and bobbed. The warship rolled in the storm and shuddered as she took wave after wave to her broadside. The damaged ship let out an unearthly metallic groan. The sailors did all they could to save her.
Dragon Fire (The Battle for the Falklands Book 2) Page 3
