Once below 1,300, the sea pressure outside the hull would become greater than the ship was designed for, the enormous force built up from the weight of the water above. The submarine force had lost three nuclear subs to the crushing pressure; the first, the Thresher in 1963, went down on sea trials and made a crater when it hit the bottom. There was not much left of her intact, just a square mile of ocean bottom scattered with wreckage.
If the water was not deep enough to crush the hull, the ship would hit bottom and rupture like an egg hurled to the kitchen floor. A fleeting mental vision flashed through Kane’s mind, that when the Russian submarine Komsomolets sank a decade before, it had hit the rocky bottom of the Norwegian Sea so hard that it broke into several pieces, two of her own torpedoes detonating from the violent impact.
Kane next saw the chart as if it were suspended in front of his face, blocking his nightmare view of his submarine.
The mouth of the strait had a very rocky bottom with scattered patches of sand. And the depth was only 225 fathoms, a little over 1,300 feet. The good news was that at least the ship wouldn’t implode from sea pressure, but the bad news was it would end up worse off than the Komsomolets. These thoughts all ran through Kane’s mind in less than a few seconds, and during that time the ship dived over 210 feet deeper.
The second track of Kane’s mind was devoted entirely to action, most of it reflex. Years before at submarine school an instructor could walk by in the hallway and casually say “jam dive,” and Kane would have shouted back “all back full, emergency blow forward, full rise on the bowplanes.”
Immediate actions. All automatic. All useless here … because ordering up “back full” meant the ship needed propulsion to back down with the screw and pull the ship out of the dive, and there was no power; because ordering an emergency blow meant reaching the ballast-control panel, a mere twelve feet away, twelve feet of obstacles, piled bodies, control seats, consoles, with no walkway now that the ship was vertical; and to get full rise on the planes, the fairwater planes man might as well have been as remote as the ballast panel.
At least the ship-control panel’s stern plane control yoke was close. Kane, at that point thinking about Komsomolets, reached for the helmsman, who was still slumped against the wheel, his harness dangling toward the panel. The young man’s face was pressed up against the yoke, his nose broken, his eyes swelling shut. Kane grabbed the boy’s arm and pulled him away hard enough to tear muscle and break an arm — all those tall tales about fear-crazed mothers lifting thousand-pound tractors off their wounded children were absolutely true, Kane discovered, as the boy’s body sailed across the room from what felt like a gentle shove. With his other hand Kane grabbed the stern plane yoke and pulled it back hard enough to slam it back to the stops, his own muscles shooting sharp pains into his shoulders. He wondered if the hydraulics were still working, but the yoke had the solid feel of being connected to the hydraulic oil control manifold.
Two hundred feet aft the main hydraulic oil system accumulator, only half charged, pressurized the lines leading to the sternplane control ram. The accumulator would have been recharged by the hydraulic oil screw pump, but the loss of power had shut it down. The result was a dangerously low pressure capacity in the system. The header came up in pressure and gallantly tried to move the massive stern planes, but the loss of pressure was too much. The emergency system, having waited years with nothing to show for it but an occasional use in a drill, filled the gap, its accumulator discharging as pressure plunged in the main system, operating a redundant ram on the other side of the rudder. With the power of the emergency system, the sternplane surface rose from full-dive to full-rise in the same amount of time, as if the entire system were completely healthy.
Kane looked at the half-dead ship-control panel, seeing the internal battery-supplied instruments displaying the stenrplane angle easing, then rising. He found the ship’s angle display, the “bubble,” and watched to see if the ship would respond in time. The angle began coming off the deck, the forward bulkhead that had been a floor a moment ago now rotating so that it again became a wall, the men falling off it onto the true deck. Kane held on to the control yoke and blinked as the display reeled off the depth: 1,150, 1,200, 1,250 feet and still diving. He had succeeded in taking the steep down-angle off the ship, but not in checking its downward momentum. The depth gauge spun off 1,300 feet, crush depth, and Kane couldn’t watch it anymore.
But it was not crush depth that claimed the Phoenix.
Thirty-five seconds after Kane first grabbed the control yoke, the ship slammed into the rocky bottom with the kinetic energy of a hundred-car freight train smashing into a cliff wall at eighty-five-miles-per.
Kane hit the ship-control panel, gashed his head open, slid to the deck and tasted blood as it spilled into his mouth.
Chapter 18
Sunday, 29 December
EASTERN ATLANTIC WEST MOUTH, STRAIT OF GIBRALTAR
“How close?” Sharef asked, leaning over Tawkidi’s seat at the sensor-control panel. The incoming airplane-launched torpedo had been following them for three minutes now.
Commander Tawkidi, combat-stations deck officer, looked up from the sensor-control section, his eyes widening in surprise, then showing triumph. His headphones had just transmitted a booming roar from the bearing to the Nagasaki torpedo and the American submarine some fifty kilometers distant to the west.
“What is it?” Sharef demanded.
“The Nagasaki torpedo just detonated!”
Sharef leaned closer. “Any indication of the American submarine?”
Tawkidi searched, putting off for a moment the monitoring of the incoming American torpedo.
“No hull breakup noises yet but there are no indications of its reactor or steam plant — wait a minute …” Tawkidi listened, his eyes shut. A second faint rumble came through the headphones. “I think the target just imploded or hit the bottom, Commodore. If he wasn’t dead before he is now.”
Sharef nodded solemnly. Sinking another submarine could never be a time of joy for him, the submarines of the enemy forces sharing more with him than any landlubber in his own nation, men who knew the deprivations of being at sea for weeks, the lack of companionship from family or friends, fighting the sea, existing in the Spartan environment of the ship, the deep-diving vessels built to accommodate the equipment, not the needs of the crew. He forced himself to remember that they were Americans, brothers of the brutal men who had blown his Sahand to the bottom of the gulf, killing so many of his shipmates — and then he felt nothing for them, neither pity nor hatred.
Out of the corner of his eye Sharef saw General Sihoud and Colonel Ahmed standing near the door to the forward passageway. He ignored them and returned to the tactical chart, then to Tawkidi’s console at the sensor panel. The American torpedo continued closing and he began to feel a sense of unreality, as if he were disconnected from the scene. He had tried to tell himself that these could be his last minutes but somehow he remained unconvinced. Every man had a time to die. Sharef still believed it was not yet his time. But then, he wondered if he would know when it was time.
Tawkidi’s enthusiasm faded as the Second Captain displays filled with the curves of dozens of sonobuoys pinging at them and the aircraft engines orbiting overhead.
“Now how close?”
“A kilometer, maybe less.”
“Enable the SCM.”
“SCM is up and enabled in automatic. It needs a few more pings before it will be able to reproduce the false echo.”
“It better start working before that torpedo gets any closer.”
The pinging of the torpedo began to sound through the hull, sharp and high-pitched. A second ping rang through, louder now, suddenly answered by a distorted-sounding pulse that was at a lower pitch but otherwise a copy of the original. The noises continued, the torpedo pinging a high pulse, the ship’s SCM sonar answering with a deeper, throatier false echo. As the minutes passed, the torpedo’s pulses became more
frequent until the pings from the weapon and the Hegira’s ventriloquist system merged into one long loud groaning sound, as if the two machines were sounding mating calls to each other. Sharef and Tawkidi glanced at each other, then over to Sihoud and Ahmed. The general seemed serene, Ahmed looked angry as they faced being hit by an American torpedo.
The moaning sonar pulses continued, lasting for one endless second after another. The sonar display above Tawkidi’s head showed the dancing broadband signatures of the orbiting Mark 50 torpedoes shot by the American 688class, the traces as yet unnoticed in the tense room, perhaps because the weapons showed no tonals, perhaps because even their breadboard sonar noises were whisper-quiet, but more likely because the men at the sensor consoles were so focused on evading the incoming weapon. It was then that one of the broadband traces jumped as one of the American Mark 50 units now ahead of them by five kilometers sensed their presence, pulled out of its circular hold pattern and sped up to meet them.
* * *
Less than two shiplengths astern, the SCM’s deception pulses had convinced the American Mark 52 torpedo that the ship was immediately ahead. The outgoing pulses were transmitted, immediately answered by a downshifted echo return, the lower pitch the result of the target running away and lowering the pitch of the return. The torpedo looked for a sign of iron with its hull-proximity sensor but there was no hull present where the sonar signals expected it. It searched its mind for the answer to such a puzzle — a strong sonar pulse echo with no sensation of an iron hull — and the computer realized the problem. Obviously the iron-hull sensor was not functioning, but the closeness of the target’s hull could be deduced from the sonar pulses. And there was no sense allowing a valid target to escape merely because the hull sensor had open-circuited.
The torpedo, satisfied with its built-in logic, exploded, 480 meters astern of the Hegira.
* * *
By the time the Destiny-class submarine exited the western mouth of the Strait of Gibraltar, seven of the torpedoes launched earlier by the Phoenix had run out of fuel. Spent, the units flooded with seawater and sank to the bottom, some imploding from the deeper depths of the Atlantic, a few breaking apart on the rocks of the sea floor. Every few minutes thereafter another one or two torpedoes became exhausted and executed their self-destruction sinkings. The Destiny’s track leading from the strait passed through a wide gap between still-active torpedoes, six of the weapons too far from her to pick up her acoustic emissions. Her track brought her within acoustic range of four remaining torpedoes.
Three heard her — or perhaps thought they heard the Mark 52 torpedo in pursuit of her — but the fourth experienced a mechanical problem and continued circling until it too ran out of fuel.
The first of the three Mark 50s to detect the Destiny was six nautical miles northwest at the time of detection. The second and third were slightly closer, one to the south at five and a half miles, the other to the northeast at just under five miles. The unit to the south confirmed the target by wiggling and sensing the shift in the bearing to the sounds, then accelerated to its fifty-knot attack speed, computing a lead angle to position itself to a point in the sea where the target would be thirty minutes in the future, the calculated time of interception.
The unit to the northeast did the same, its interception time slightly less with the Destiny’s approach vector.
The torpedo to the northeast of the Destiny also sped up, its calculated contact time shorter.
There was little time and much to do for the closest Mark 50. It hurried through its arming sequence, sensitized the hull proximity detector, made a few course corrections and depth corrections, and watched as the target zoomed in.
CNFS HEGIRA
The explosion of the aircraft-launched torpedo shook the ship, the impact smashing into the stern. The force of the hammer blow jarred every compartment and deck. The men aboard experienced the impact as a booming roar and a trembling sensation, a shaking of the deck. Sharef, standing at the tactical plot table, waited for the explosion to smash him into the glass-topped table or hurl him into the overhead.
He waited for the water to come roaring in to take his life, and likewise he waited for the panicked thoughts and fears and visions to fill him as they had long ago on the Sahand when he had thought he was dying. But the roar of the explosion died out and left only quiet. Sharef remained standing, his knuckles white where he had tightened his grip on the table’s handholds. The trembling of the deck calmed almost as soon as it had come, its violence concentrated in its first quarter-second. The ship was dry, and the slight tremble in the deck suggested they were still moving at emergency-ahead speed.
They had survived.
Sharef did a quick inventory of the control room. The Second Captain consoles were still alight with displays, only a half-dozen dark and disabled. The Japanese designers had been worried about this moment, because the ship was completely controlled by the Second Captain’s supercomputer process-control modules in the lower level with their operator-control consoles in the control room. They were not shockproof, in fact were highly vulnerable to the slightest accelerations. This ship was so different from the old Victor III he’d last commanded. The ex-Russian ship, re named the Tabarzin, had been almost entirely hardwired.
Computers were unavoidable, but the late-1980s vintage ship had been designed with a stark distrust of microprocessors and process controllers. As a result the old sub had been bulletproof, a bucket of bolts that could be taken into combat with confidence. But this ship, so automated and filled with electronics, seemed unprotected. To Sharef, who had seen what damage a ship could experience before dying, the idea of losing computer control in the first few seconds of taking hostile fire was unacceptable. He had voiced his concerns to the shipbuilders, and surprising him, the Japanese had listened, stopping production for a week to interview him and then conduct shock testing. The results of the shock tests were not good — a minor explosion from a torpedo distant enough to spare the hull would still take out the entire Second Captain, requiring wholesale replacement of bubble memories and microprocessor cards. The Japanese, though, had recovered quickly, replacing the computer-process controller cabinets with larger units that had layers of thick gel to cushion against shock. The tests were redone with mixed results. With the gel filling, the Second Captain computers could take a mild shock, but more intense impacts would be gin causing damage. In the time left to them the computer designers added redundant components to the circuits, standby boards and cards and microprocessors, kept warm and on-line and ready to be switched into the process train in the same instant as the loss of the primary component.
The dual-pressure hull of the ship could take a huge torpedo before flooding, but without ship-control computers the ship could only surface and surrender if the Second Captain died.
Sharef watched the consoles, waited for the remaining displays to wink out. None did. He turned aft to the weapons-control area and put his hand on Lt. At Ishak’s shoulder.
Ishak was the computer-systems officer, a bright young man who understood electronic entities far better than he understood people.
“What’s the damage?”
Ishak had already rolled his seat to the Second Captain master console in the aft port corner of the room. The master console could review the health of the entire system and reprogram it if required. Ishak interacted with the console, and watching the electronics engineer talk to his system— his face took on the intensity of a man talking to his loved one. He spun in his chair, his face bright, ready to report the system still healthy, when he was interrupted by Tawkidi at the sensor-control area.
“Commodore, multiple torpedoes in the water! Bearing abeam to port to abeam to starboard!”
* * *
The midchannel P-3 Orion patrol turboprop that had launched the Mark 52 torpedo continued following it as it pursued the Destiny submarine. The Mark 52 was easily tracked, its broadband noise signature loud and steady. The Destiny faded in and ou
t. The P-3 had used up three-fourths of its load of sonobuoys tracking the UIF sub, and it would not be long before it would need to be relieved onstation.
The west mouth P-3 had been notified of the attack but could not help out from its position sixty nautical miles farther west, where it orbited as it tried to find the Phoenix.
And from the position of the explosion of the Nagasaki torpedo there was no sign of Phoenix, not even the sound of her reactor cooling on the ocean floor. It was as if she had buried herself in the earth’s crust and vanished. The western P-3 continued the search, standing by in case the eastern aircraft needed help.
Meanwhile, a flash message had been transmitted to CINCNAVFORCEMED detailed the situation with the exchange of torpedoes, the apparent loss of the Phoenix, the pursuit of the escaping Destiny, and the need for further ASW assets at the entrance to the Atlantic to prosecute the target. Soon after the cinc’s receipt of the signal, the Burke-class destroyers searching the Med’s western basin were vectored to Gibraltar and ordered to outchop into the Atlantic. Several S-3 Viking ASW jets lifted off the deck of the USS Reagan deeper in the Med, the jets banking hard in their turns to the west as they deployed to help the P-3s. At Sigonella Naval Air Station, three more P-3s, all fueled and loaded out with Mark 52 torpedoes and sonobuoys, rolled out onto the runway and lumbered off into the night, but it would be some hours before they would reach the strait.
Within the next fifteen minutes the Mark 52 torpedo caught up with the Destiny submarine and exploded. The sonar techs and the ASW officer in the P-3 above got their hopes up, but when the bubbles and turbulence finally stopped, there had been no sign of a hull breaking up. Two sonobuoys placed farther west radioed their signals, the screen display on the techs console showing that the Destiny submarine continued on its path heading west. By the time the P-3 had throttled up, banked hard and overflown the positions of the reporting sonobuoys, the Destiny was gone.
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