Attack of the Seawolf mp-2

by Michael Dimercurio

  “Radio, Captain,” Pacino barked into his lip mike, “patch in the VHP freak to the SEAL team to the conn and line up the transmission on the Type-20.”

  “Conn, Radio, aye … Captain, you’re patched in. Type-20’s ready to transmit.” The periscope antenna was not usually a transmission device, but the radiomen had wired in the SEALs’ walkie-talkie VHF frequencies into the antenna and rigged it for transmission, thereby avoiding Pacino having to raise the huge Bigmouth antenna for transmitting.

  Pacino pulled a coiled-cord microphone from a console hanging on the aft stainless steel conn handrail, punched a toggle switch on the console, spoke into the mike:

  “Whiskey, this is Bourbon, over.” He listened while looking out the periscope at the pier. Any minute the prisoners would be moved, he thought. He had to act which meant launch the missiles. He fought for control as he called into the microphone a second time.

  “Whiskey, Whiskey, this is Bourbon, over. I say again. Whiskey, this is Bourbon, come in, over.”

  Still nothing from the SEALs. There was the off chance that they couldn’t transmit, could only listen.

  Pacino decided to send his message and hope they received it. He didn’t want to think what would happen if they didn’t.

  “Whiskey, this is Bourbon, break. I am executing Plan Juliet. I say again, I am executing Plan Juliet, break. Bourbon, out.”

  What else could he do? The satchel charges were not laid in time, the SEALs had not yet opened fire on the pier, and they didn’t answer the radio call. Plan Juliet, “J” for Javelin, was the fallback.

  Pacino snapped up the grips on the periscope and rotated the control ring, sending the pole back down into the well. He turned to stand at the railing and looked out at the assembled battle stations watch standers The time had come. The show was his now.

  “Attention in the firecontrol team. We’re executing Plan Juliet; the Chinese are getting ready to off load Tampa’s crew onto buses waiting at the pier. Firing point procedures. Javelin missiles, tube one Target Three, tube two Target Two.”

  “Ship ready,” Tim Turner said.

  “Weapons ready,” Feyley reported from the weapon-control panel.

  “Solutions ready,” Keebes said in front of Pos Two.

  “Tube one,” Pacino ordered.

  “Shoot.”

  “Fire,” Feyley barked from the WCP, pulling the trigger. From the deck below the violent blast of the tube belching the missile into the sea popped the eardrums of the men in the control room.

  “Tube two. Shoot.”

  “Fire,” Feyley said again. Again the tube ejection mechanism filled the ship with a roaring boom as the ultra-high-pressure air loaded a piston that pressurized a water tank surrounding the torpedo tube, the pressurized water pushing the Javelin’s capsule out of the tube like a schoolboy’s spit wad flying out of a straw.

  “Tubes one and two fired electrically,” Feyley reported.

  “Conn, Sonar, own-ship’s units, normal launches.”

  Pacino wondered what the Chinese on the pier were thinking at that moment.

  “Off’sa’deck,” Pacino ordered Turner, “train the thruster to two seven zero and turn the ship around to the east. Let’s get the hell away from the end of the pier.”

  “Aye, sir.”

  Somewhere above them two solid fuel rockets were igniting, sending two cruise missiles at two of the surface warships. It would not do for them to remain too long under the rocket plumes, two fingers pointing at their position.

  “Conn, Sonar, we have rocket-motor ignition, units one and two.”

  Javelin Unit One was ejected from the starboard side of the Seawolf by the water pressure of the tube. Silently it glided from the tube, accelerating as it slipped past the skin of the ship and emerged fully over sixty feet below the murky surface of the Go Hai Bay. As the stern of the encapsulated missile came out of the tube door, twin fins snapped down into place and acted as elevators, turning the missile toward the surface above. The missile was moving at thirty feet per second as it angled upward, reaching the surface three seconds after it left the tube. The nose cone of the capsule broached, sensing balmy May air on its surface, drying out two of the electronic sensors that proved it was no longer underwater. Next, the nose cone of the capsule blew off, exposing the nose cone of the Javelin missile inside.

  For a moment the capsule bobbed in the water, the lid spinning in the night air twenty feet overhead. In the next instant the missile streaked out of the capsule, its rocket motor’s white-hot flames sinking the capsule and hurling the missile clear of the water toward the overcast sky, the moonlight glinting off the flat black of its paint. The rocket’s trail of flame extended vertically several thousand feet above the water, vanishing into a cloud.

  Seconds later the Unit Two capsule of the second Javelin penetrated the surface, the second nose cone blowing toward the sky, a prelude to the second missile’s liftoff sequence. Milliseconds later the second unit roared out of its capsule and flashed toward the sky, its flame trail illuminating the end of the supertanker pier and the water of the slip between the tanker and P.L.A piers. The second unit flew up into the night sky as if chasing the first unit, the twin missiles’ exhausts blindingly bright, their noise deafening.

  At four thousand feet the rocket motor of Unit One cut out, the missile still rising skyward from the momentum of the initial thrust. At forty-five hundred feet eight explosive bolts detonated at the ring joint between the missile and the solid rocket booster. At five thousand feet the unit’s upward velocity stopped and for a moment the unit flew horizontally, until the missile nosed over and began a dive, popping out the wings and the air-intake duct, the rudder turning, taking the weapon toward the north as it began to pull out of its dive.

  Moments later the second unit also discarded its rocket motor, came to its peak altitude and nosed down toward the ground, this unit turning south. As both weapons picked up speed in their plunge toward earth, the jet engine sustainers came on-line, propelling both units at speeds just under Mach 1, the better to avoid a sonic boom that would give the missiles away. Once their rocket trails vanished, the missiles would likewise disappear, vaporizing into the radar grass and ground clutter.

  The first unit pulled out of its dive at an altitude of forty feet, continuing to the north, flying over the P.L.A Navy compound and continuing north and inland, flying over the dingy buildings of the village of Dagu.

  The second unit pulled out and headed south, hugging the coastline of the bay.

  Both weapons had been “over-the-shoulder” shots.

  The distance from the Seawolf to the targets had been much too close for the units to perform their climb outs jet engine light-offs, pullouts and target approaches in a mere two hundred yards. The minimum firing range was four thousand yards. The weapons had to be ordered to reach their targets by first flying away from them, then when stable at low altitudes to turn and fly back.

  Unit One continued north for a mile, then wiggled the rudder and pulled three g’s in a 180-degree turn.

  Once settled on the southern course, back toward the pier, the unit turned on its radar seeker, the superstructures of the enemy surface ships memorized. It flew south at 570 knots, returning over the village of Dagu, intent on finding its surface-ship target at the P.L.A Navy piers. While Unit One flew in from the north. Unit Two made its 180-degree turn, steadying up on a course of due north, the ground of the bay’s coast streaking by beneath the fuselage.

  Now at the pier, the two missiles flew in on straight flight paths, one from the south, one from the north, radar-seekers searching, warheads arming.

  * * *

  Fighter Sai climbed out of the hatchway and stretched on the curving hull of the Tampa. He was hungry.

  Leader Tien Tse-Min was obsessed, he thought, never stopping an interrogation until he’d gotten the last possible bit of information, and confession-reading.

  The man was a pain in the ass. He put his outsized hands in
his pockets and slowly walked toward the gangway leading to the Kunming, the destroyer tied up between the American submarine and the pier. As soon as the guards on the pier were ready and the buses were started, he would begin offloading the prisoners for their all-night trek to the Shenyang Camp.

  Sai wasn’t told how long the men were to be kept there, but if they were going to Shenyang the stay would probably be permanent. Who cared? This was all a welcome diversion in the war with the White Army. As soon as the prisoners were moved he would return with Tien to Beijing and join the P.L.A forces guarding the city from the expected White Army offensive.

  He felt better as he thought of killing Taiwanese soldiers and turncoat mainland rebels.

  Abruptly, the noise of a crashing explosion sounded from behind him.

  He slammed into the deck of the gangway, startled when the noise did not end but continued, an earsplitting shriek, from the direction of the supertanker-pier. For a moment he thought that a supertanker had exploded into flames. Slowly the noise receded, and by the light of the fire behind him he found the railing of the gangway and pulled himself up.

  In the sky to the south, two rockets were blasting into the atmosphere, their tails spewing white smoke that seemed to originate at the seaward tip of the empty supertanker pier. He hurried back down the gangway, turned toward the access hatch and lowered himself down the ladder to the Tampa’s upper level.

  It took several minutes to find Leader Tien Tse-Min, and when Sai reported what he had seen, Tien’s face became flushed. It was the first time Sai could remember Tien showing any emotion.

  * * *

  Commander Jack Morris thought he had heard something, a thudding sound. Almost like one of his air bottles had knocked against the other, but the bottles were covered with rubber to deaden any such noise.

  After a moment he heard the sound again, and then nothing more. The trouble with interpreting sounds in water was the sound velocity. With two ears, listening in air, sound speeds were slow enough so that one ear heard a noise before the other, giving the brain a clue to the direction of the noise. Underwater, sound velocity was so quick that both ears heard a noise at the same time, making it impossible to determine what direction the sound had come from.

  Morris decided to take another look at the pier. He tugged on his buddy-line to Black Bart and the two men slowly ascended to the surface between the bow of the seaward frigate and the stern of the neighboring destroyer. Morris was preparing to unbuckle the lanyard to Bart and climb up on the pier pilings when he saw the white plume of a rocket exhaust overhead, terminating at an orange point of light high in the sky above.

  Quickly Morris submerged, pulling on Bart’s lanyard, pulling him deep. Morris hauled in the line, putting his mask up to Bart’s. Morris directed him to the outboard destroyer while Morris headed for the inboard destroyer. Only an emergency would make Morris split from his swimming partner. This was definitely an emergency … two cruise missiles were on the way in to hit the very ships on which his men were laying explosive keel charges. The demolition operation would have to be aborted; the men would have to be extracted and prepared for boarding the Tampa.

  Morris gave hand signals to Bart in rapid Ameslan, the sign language for the deaf: “You and first platoon go to bow, attack ship immediately after missile impacts.”

  As soon as the Javelins exploded, Bart’s bow platoon would board and take the hatch forward of the sail. At the same time Morris’s second and third platoons would board and take the aft section of the ship, third platoon going in the aft hatch to the engine room second platoon in the amidships access to the aft part of the forward compartment.

  “If no impact in fifteen minutes, missiles are dead and we go back to kill the destroyers.” Bart nodded.

  “Lennox goes with me,” Morris’s hand signs added. Bart gave an okay sign. Morris slapped his head, a SEAL gesture for good luck.

  As Morris swam the length of the destroyer’s barnacle-encrusted hull, waving the men away from their demolition task, he had to consider why Seawolf had launched. What came to mind was that the Tampa crew were being moved and Pacino hadn’t had time to tell him. Morris bit angrily into the rubber of his regulator — he hated a plan that stumbled. Now the element of surprise was gone, risking his men even more, unless he could get aboard the Tampa while the crews of the surface ships and the guards were still confused over the damage from the missiles.

  He gathered with the second and third platoons under the Tampa’s huge spiral-bladed screw and checked his watch. Bart would be assembling the first platoon at Tampa’s bow. He pulled the platoon leaders close. One shone his hooded light on Morris while Morris gave the hand signals that relayed his orders for the platoon assignments, adding that he and Lennox would go into the forward compartment with the second platoon. He looked at Lennox, who seemed under control, but his eyes were just a fraction too wide, betraying his fear. Hell, Morris thought, if Lennox were to check my eyes he’d see the same thing.

  The only difference was that this was his job. And he was good at it.

  Morris checked his watch again. 0249. He pointed to the surface and pumped his fins, taking his men shallow. The missiles should be impacting in the next few moments unless they veered off course or were shot down. He reached out, felt the steel of Tampa’s tapering aft-section under her screw and followed the curvature upward to the rudder, then continued forward to the top of the hull, still submerged. He put his fins on the top of the hull and swam the remaining few feet to the surface. The pier was lit with floodlights, as were the destroyer decks. The Tampa’s deck was lit only dimly by the wash of light from the neighboring ships. He caught sight of a guard hurrying into the forward escape-trunk hatch, a surprised look on his face.

  Morris brought his watch up. 0250. He would have to wait another ten minutes before hitting the submarine’s deck. That or the missiles would have to arrive.

  He ducked his head back below the surface and checked his men. All signaled okay.

  For the next few moments Morris worked on a plan to hijack one of the smaller vessels, the seaward parked frigate, and drive it out of the bay, or at least to a point that he could meet Seawolf. But that would be putting a few SEALs in an unfamiliar Chinese frigate against the whole P.L.A Navy. Well, at least he could try his hand at driving a ship. He checked his watch one last time. In four minutes they would be committed.

  Morris rose the four feet to the surface to take another look. As the water cleared from his mask, he took in a scene beyond his imaginings.

  * * *

  Javelin cruise missile Unit Two approached the piers of Xingang from the south, the water of the Go Hai Bay flashing by beneath the fuselage. The missile’s navigation system updated from a star fix and confirmed the reading with a radar look at the coastline ahead. The unit adjusted the course for the final leg of the run before detonation. The warhead was armed, waiting only for the four-g’s of deceleration required prior to receiving the signal to explode.

  The radar-seeker scanned the pie-shaped wedge of earth in front of the missile, the high-frequency waves able to make out the difference between the structure of a crane and the mast of a ship. The unit flew on, nearing the supertanker-pier at the seaward end of the terminal. As the missile approached the pier, the point of its launch, its radar-seeker saw the ships of the People’s Liberation Army at the pier. The seeker distinguished the frigates at either end and discarded the targets as too small. The middle radar-return was the correct size. The central processor compared the radar return with the programmed silhouette of the Luda-class and checked off the similarities—

  Double funnel. Check.

  Double mast, forward mast higher. Check.

  Topside missile batteries and surface gun. Check.

  Boxy superstructure forward, ahead of the mainmast. Check.

  Smaller structure aft of the second mast. Check.

  The ship was confirmed as the target. The missile lowered its nose just slightly so as to
strike the hull of the ship just below the deck line.

  At six hundred and fifty miles per hour the nose cone of the missile smashed through the steel of the hull, destroying the radar seeker and the navigation equipment. The central processor survived, its detached thought-process recording the four-g deceleration as the steel of the hull slowed the weapon down.

  In the next ten milliseconds the weapon continued another eight feet into the ship, the tail of the missile disappearing into the small hole it had made in the hull above the waterline.

  By that time the warhead received its signal to detonate and the fuse flashed into incandescence, lighting off an intermediate explosive set in the center of the main explosive, which erupted into a white-hot segment that detonated the high-explosive cylinder of the unit in the nose cone aft of the seeker and navigation modules forward of the central processor. The explosive burst into a sphere of energy, blowing the aft superstructure of the destroyer into the sky, vaporizing much of the aluminum framing and bulkheads above. The fireball also blew the aft stack apart, and with it the number-two boiler, which caused a steam explosion from the idling highpressure steam drum.

  The explosion of the Javelin blew downward, breaking the back of the ship, blowing the number-two boiler off its foundation, rupturing a fuel-oil tank. The force of the explosion carried away the main structure of the amidships-mounted HY-2 missile-launcher, blowing the remnants of the missiles into the forward superstructure. The units crashed through the gaping black wreckage of the superstructure, the remains of the officers’ quarters and the ship’s bridge. The missiles’ explosives came to rest against an interior bulkhead in what was once a passageway and ladder way to the upper decks, bleeding jet fuel on the tile of the deck.

  The fire caused by the missile engulfed the ship from the fire room of the number-one boiler to the number-one turbine-room. Men ran out of their bunks in an attempt to bring the fire under control but the fire pumps were destroyed, as was much of the firewater piping. None of the battle-communication lines functioned as the ship rapidly filled with toxic smoke from the fire. Within ten minutes all of the crewmen who had not been able to jump overboard were killed by the smoke, the fire or the secondary explosion.