Barracuda: Final Bearing mp-4

by Michael Dimercurio

  Soon the Seawolf-class ship would be on the bottom, the Winged Serpent able to continue in its search of the offshore waters for any remaining Americans. When the American sank he would go to bed confident that the worst threat in the Pacific had been neutralized.

  There was even more good news here, he realized. With the most formidable ship in the American submarine force on the bottom, how willing would the Americans be to send in an inferior Los Angeles-class ship? So this was it, the concluding battle of the American blockade.

  The Second Captain took command of the submarine then, distracting Tanaka from his thought as the ship went into a violent maximum-rudder/maximum-speed maneuver to try to get the range of the incoming torpedoes.

  The deck abruptly tilted twenty degrees to the right, almost throwing Tanaka into a row of Second Captain consoles. He grabbed a handhold to steady himself, watched the computer driving the ship. The ventriloquist SCM sonar system kicked in then, which meant the Second Captain’s calculations were complete and it could begin its work of confusing the incoming torpedoes.

  Surely the system could fool two, perhaps three torpedoes — but eight? A terrible moment of doubt, but he shook it off.

  USS PIRANHA

  Bruce Phillips was back in his submarine coveralls. Scott Court was stationed as officer of the deck with an augmented section-tracking team.

  Phillips strapped on the battle-circuit headset in time to hear the sonar chief saying something about torpedo pings and” odd sonar groaning sounds coming from the southwest and more pings in a different frequency from the southeast. Phillips checked the bearing separation, realizing that he was closer to the action than he’d originally thought.

  “Man silent battlestations,” he told Court. “One last time.”

  CHAPTER 39

  USS BARRACUDA

  “Attention in the firecontrol team,” Kane said. His voice was steady, authoritative, but Pacino knew he was probably more frightened than he’d ever been in his life.

  “We’re running from two Nagasaki torpedoes fired by the Destiny II class astern of us. The torpedoes are on the edge of our port baffles. I intend to jettison the caboose array to gain some speed, then turn fifteen more degrees westward. We have countermeasures loaded in the forward and after signal ejectors and we’ll launch those at the appropriate time. Carry on.”

  Kane turned to Jeff Joseph, the skinny, odd-looking navigator and officer of the deck.

  “Make that happen, O.O.D. Cut the wires, shut the doors and jettison the caboose. Move it.”

  Pacino bent over the plot, wondering about the Piranha.

  SS-810 WINGED SERPENT

  Tanaka held onto the handhold, his knuckles white as the ship executed the second loop of the figure-eight maneuver, the computer trying to determine the range to the incoming torpedoes. Finally the maneuver was complete, the ship now heading south at maximum turns.

  The SCM sonar countermeasures were making so much noise and the pump jet propulsor was putting out so much turbulence that the rear-facing passive sonar system was unable to detect the arrival in the area of the second Seawolf ship.

  USS PIRANHA

  “Captain, Sonar,” Gambini said to Phillips, “here’s the picture. At bearing one nine eight, southsouthwest, we have Target Seven, Japanese Destiny II class. Target Seven is turning max revs getting out of town because at bearing south I’ve got multiples Mark 50 torpedoes, all of them in pursuit of the Destiny II. At bearing one seven five, south-southeast I have at least two Nagasaki torpedoes in pursuit of the contact at bearing one six zero, southeast, which I’m classifying as a US Seawolf submerged submarine, designated Friendly One.”

  “Skip the Friendly One bullshit. Master,” Phillips said. “Call it the Barracuda.”

  “Aye, sir. So what we have here is that the Destiny II and the Barracuda have fired at each other. Tough to say who shot first, but since the Barracuda got off eight shots I’m guessing she fired first.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” Phillips said, staring at pos one, the geographic plot, the God’s-eye view of the sea. The three ships, the Destiny, the Barracuda and the Piranha formed a triangle with Piranha at the top, coming in from the north. At the bottom left the Destiny was running southwest away from eight Mark 50s. At the bottom right the Barracuda was sprinting to the northeast trying to get away from two Nagasaki torpedoes. An image came into his mind of the Barracuda being chased by two sharp-teethed black muscular dogs. He had to do something.

  The first order of business was the Destiny II. “Attention in the firecontrol team. One crisis at a time. We’re going to put Vortex unit seven down the bearing line to Target Six, the Destiny bearing south-southwest. Let’s get that out of the way now. Firing point procedures. Vortex seven. Target Six, bearing one nine eight.”

  “Ship ready.”

  “Weapon ready.”

  “Solution ready.”

  “Shoot on generated bearing.”

  “Set.”

  “Standby.”

  “Shoot!”

  “Fire!”

  The roaring of the missile ignition was once again deafening. The watchstanders had all plugged their ears with their fingers as the solid-rocket-fueled underwater-missile launched and sailed off to the south.

  “Attention in the firecontrol team,” Phillips shouted over the roar of the missile. “I intend to try to do something for the Barracuda. Everyone just hold on for a second.” Phillips leaned over the weapon-control console, where round-headed Tom McKilley sat looking up at him. “Weps, is there any way we can program the Vortex to detonate at a particular bearing and range without it homing on a target?”

  “You mean disable the blue laser and have it count seconds until it’s at a certain bearing and range to own ship, then go off?”

  “Right?”

  “Skipper, I don’t know, but I’m sure as hell going to find out,” McKilley said, reaching to the overhead for the technical manual.

  “Don’t you have its tech manual on the outline software?”

  “Yes sir. One moment.” McKilley was becoming flustered, flashing through the software to the help-screens, going through one after the other.

  It had been two minutes since the missile launch and still no explosion. Phillips looked back at the geographic plot, deciding to work on the range to the Barracuda. To do it would be violating yet another hallowed submarine tactic by using active sonar. Active sonar was the practice of pinging a noise into the sea, waiting for the ping to bounce off the object of interest and return to the listening sonar set. The time delay and the sound velocity determined the two-way-trip length, which divided in two was the range to the contact. It was a tactic unused for decades. A stealthy submarine attempting to remain undetected would never ping out a noise. It defeated the purpose and besides, passive listen-only sonar could be just as effective, although it took the ship longer to determine the range to the contact. But the entire ocean knew Piranha was there — hell, he’d just launched the loudest weapon ever known to man. Another noise in the form of a ping would make no difference and would save time to getting the Barracuda’s exact location in the sea.

  The only problem was that active sonar was subject to interpretation just as passive sonar was, the human brain definitely part of the combat-control system. And the sonarmen were generally not too great at active sonar, an unpracticed art. Still, if anyone could do it, Gambini could.

  “Master Chief, I want an active range to the Barracuda. Can you do it?”

  “Yes sir. It’ll just take a moment to line up.”

  “Ping when you’re ready and step on it. Master. Weps! What’s the status of the answer? Can we put an explosion at a preplanned point in space?”

  “Still trying to find out, sir.”

  Phillips bit his tongue, knowing that yelling at the lieutenant would make him feel better but would only mess up McKilley’s efforts. Nothing like the heat of battle, Phillips thought. There was something about pressure that made most human
minds start to go to hell. The fluster factor was with them now. The simplest things could become immensely complicated under pressure. Phillips took a deep breath and waited.

  * * *

  The Vortex missile speeding toward Target Six should have had an unobstructed shot at the target, but the Mark 50 torpedoes shot by the Barracuda were sent off course by the ventriloquist sonar set of the Winged Serpent. The torpedoes were all lagging by several miles, directly astern of the Destiny II ship, their sonars convinced that the target was 4000 yards closer than it actually was because of the Destiny’s rear-facing active sonar sending false pulses that mimicked the Mark 50s’ pinging sonar sets. The Mark 50s all tried to slow down and detonate where the Destiny should have been, but when the weapon computers said the Mark 50s should be right on top of the target, they instead found only empty ocean. The sonars tried again, pinging out to the target, hearing now that it was straight ahead, then speeding up and positioning themselves where the target should have been, only to meet nothing. In spite of a Mark 50’s ability to do seventy knots, they followed the Destiny in a tail chase at fifty-five knots, a constant distance behind the Destiny as it evaded to the southwest. After a few miles down the track, the Mark 50s would run out of fuel and sink.

  From the viewpoint of Vortex Seven’s blue-laser sonar, eight Mark 50 torpedoes and their combined turbulent wakes met the target parameters for a valid submerged target. The Vortex got within twenty yards of the aftmost torpedo before exploding into white-hot plasma, destroying every single torpedo. Still, the Destiny II-class submarine did not escape undamaged. The blast effect and underwater shock wave hit it hard.

  SS-810 WINGED SERPENT

  The explosion from the stern took Tanaka by complete surprise. The detonation extinguished the lights and killed the Second Captain, and the ship went into a dive since the computer no longer controlled the ship’s attitude.

  “Override in manual!” Tanaka ordered the ship-control officer. “Bring us back up, two hundred meters. Kami, get down to the lower level and reinitialize the Second Captain. Mazdai, help him while I try to see what else is damaged.”

  There was no questioning Tanaka’s frantic orders. Kami and Mazdai rushed out of the room. Emergency battle lanterns flickered in the space, then came alive, lighting the compartment in a ghostly incandescent glow, patches of light and darkness spreading throughout the ship.

  Tanaka cursed, wondering how one of the torpedoes had managed to get in. Without the Second Captain he was blind, deaf and dumb. And defenseless.

  Computers? They were as unreliable as humans.

  USS PIRANHA

  “Captain, I think I can do this!” McKilley nearly shouted in triumph. The only problem, Phillips thought, was that by now it was probably too late. The torpedoes in pursuit of the Barracuda were catching up — the detonation of the first-fired Vortex came then, the noise rumbling through the hull, marking the death of the Destiny submarine.

  “XO,” Phillips ordered Whatney, “get ready to recommend a detonation point for the next Vortex so we can put a blast zone around the Nagasaki torpedoes homing on the Barracuda. And bear in mind it would be nice if we could avoid putting a friendly submarine on the bottom.”

  “Aye, Captain.”

  “Attention in the firecontrol team, we’re taking an active bearing and range to the Barracuda so we can put a Vortex out there that can screw up the Nagasakis following her. Carry on.”

  “Captain, Sonar,” from Gambini. “We’re ready.”

  “Go active, Master Chief.”

  “Active, aye sir.”

  The BSY-2 sonar suite was configured so that the spherical array in the nose cone could transmit an active pulse out into the water. The array was capable of putting out so much sonic power that water would actually boil on the surface of the fiberglass nose cone when the pulse went out. Gambini hit the cover of the active key, the switch configured so that no one could just accidentally hit the key, then punched the key. The pulse went out, not as deafening as a torpedo launch or a Vortex ignition, but loud, the sound reverberating throughout the ship. The pulse traveled through the water, going south and reaching out to the USS Barracuda, still running from two Nagasaki torpedoes. The pulse hit the hull of the Seawolf-class submarine, which was wrapped in tiles, anechoic coating especially designed to avoid returning an active sonar pulse. But like any kind of shielding it did not make a return pulse impossible, it simply lowered the intensity of the return pulse.

  The listening spherical array of the BSY-2, quiet since the pulse, strained to listen for the return. Unfortunately the sea around her returned the sound, some from the waves overhead, some from bubbles in the water, a pulse coming back from the Nagasakis, one from the Barracuda, many from the biological content of the water.

  In sonar, Gambini tried to correlate the active return signals the BSY-2 had collected to the passive listening set and the towed array’s narrowband detect of the Seawolf-class ship. There were all three indications at the bearing he knew to be the Barracuda. The range cursor on that one ping return, just a blob on the video screen, read a distance of 7.8 nautical miles.

  “Conn, Sonar, range to Barracuda is sixteen thousand yards.”

  “Go, XO,” Phillips ordered. “Come on, come on!”

  “Aye, sir, recommended Vortex detonation at bearing one seven five, range twelve thousand yards.”

  “Weps, one seven five, twelve thousand yards.”

  “That’s too close. Captain,” McKilley objected. “The blast zone will kill the Barracuda.”

  “So will the Nagasakis. Enter the god damned bearing and range.”

  “Aye, aye, sir.”

  “Firing point procedures, phantom target. Vortex unit eight.”

  Phillips collected his reports and ordered the Vortex to fire. The ignition again blasted his ears, and as the missile left the ship, he said a silent prayer for the Barracuda.

  SS-810 WINGED SERPENT

  “Second Captain is reinitialized, sir.”

  “Open tube doors thirteen and fourteen, programmed to the bearing of the launch of that weapon. Get them out on the bearing now, immediate enable, safety interlocks off.”

  “Yes sir,” Mazdai said, flashing through the software displays of the weapon-control consoles of the Second Captain. “Ready to fire.”

  “Tube thirteen, fire.”

  “Thirteen away.”

  “Tube fourteen, fire.”

  “Fourteen away.”

  “Excellent.”

  USS BARRACUDA

  The ship continued on its run from the Nagasaki torpedoes.

  Pacino and Paully looked at each other. It was grim, the same scenario that Pacino had put Bruce Phillips through.

  There had to be something they could do. Shut down the ship, scram the reactor, emergency blow to the surface, ping active sonar at the Nagasakis, anything. But there was nothing he could do without being in command, and Kane was too intense to reach without shaking him by the shoulders. Besides, if Pacino thought he had a clear course of action that would save the ship, he would be happy to dress down Kane in front of his men, but Pacino knew his guesses were no different than Kane’s. On second thought, all they could do was wait—

  The detonation erupted into control, throwing bodies forward into the equipment like dice against the border of a crap table. Pacino went into the pole of the number one periscope, shoulder first, ribcage next, knees last. He slipped down to the deck, but the deck had become a bulkhead as the ship rolled far to the left, so far that the decks had become vertical. He slipped down the deckplates, conscious enough to see the blood pooling beneath him, hearing the screams of the wounded and dying, feeling the ship try to right itself, the deck coming back to being a deck, but when it was done with the recovery, he realized that it was not level at all. The ship had taken on a steep down angle, the lights off, the blood running downhill. Barracuda was busy dying.

  SS-810 WINGED SERPENT

  The detonation from the nort
heast — the Nagasaki torpedoes hitting the first Seawolf-class ship — blew the Winged Serpent into a tailspin as the Second Captain lost control of the X-tail aft. The computer then regained control, but Captain Tanaka had been thrown to the deck. He picked himself up and looked up at the sonar console. The Nagasakis launched against the intruder to the north were still tracking. The first target was now gone, its sonar signature lost in the fireball of the Nagasakis. Tanaka smiled. Winged Serpent was winning.

  USS PIRANHA

  Phillips learned almost immediately that his prayer should have been said for his own ship, the Piranha.

  “Conn, Sonar, two torpedoes in the water, bearing two zero zero! Both of them Nagasakis.”

  “Shit,” he said. “Attention in the firecontrol team, apparently Target Six isn’t as dead as we thought he was. And I’m not running, I’m shooting.” He paused, noting the eyes of the crew on him. “Firing point procedures, Target Seven, Vortex unit nine.”

  The combat litany rolled through the room again until the Vortex roared off into the darkness of the sea, its destination the Destiny that had caused all the hell.

  SS-810 WINGED SERPENT

  “Sir,” Mazdai reported from the sonar panel, now that he was back from recovering the Second Captain, “we’ve got another strong broadband contact. This is some kind of torpedo, sir. We’d better evade it.”

  “No, First. The SCM will take care of it. Prepare to engage the Second Captain in ship-control mode. We’ve evaded eight torpedoes before, we’ll evade one more now—”