Piranha: Firing Point mp-5

by Michael Dimercurio

  “Launch the damned thing now,” Patton roared. The crew responded sluggishly, not understanding why they would be ordered to shoot at their own submarine, but Patton obviously did not have the time or the inclination to tell them.

  It took fifty seconds for the Vortex Mod Charlie to clear the tube and ignite the solid-rocket fuel. Unlike Bruce Phillips’ Mod Bravos, which left their launching sleeves under full thrust, the Mod Charlies had a torpedo-like booster engine to get the smaller missile clear of the tube and a few ship lengths away, allowing the solid-rocket fuel to ignite only when the missile was one thousand feet away going fifty knots.

  Pacino ducked into station four to see what would happen. Would Phillips finally react?

  “Sir,” Hornick said, “why did we put friendly fire on the Piranha!”

  “Think, XO,” Patton said. “He didn’t hear our order for him to clear datum; he wanted to keep shooting. He can’t hear a Nagasaki torpedo, not even three, not while he’s lighting off solid-rocket-fueled weapons, and I doubt he’d hear them anyway. So the next sound he’ll hear is an inbound Vortex missile aimed at him. He’ll go absolutely crazy and blow to the surface and shut the ship down. The Vortex is set with ceiling mode enabled, so anything it sees that is at a depth above two hundred feet it’ll ignore. So Phillips will try to avoid the Vortex missile, and by doing that he’ll avoid the Nagasakis he can’t see. They’ll completely miss him and swim on by, deep.”

  “Now all we need is to see what happens to the last two Rising Suns and Phillips,” Pacino said on his boom mike.

  “Loss of battle control!” came over on his headset just as the system nickered out and died.

  Pacino climbed out of station four, miserable. It had crashed yet again.

  The explosion that came next was deafening.

  * * *

  “Conn, Sonar, I have an incoming Vortex missile.”

  “Looks like Devilfish wants part of the action,” Phillips said to Whatney.

  “Conn, Sonar, this missile is constant bearing, decreasing range. Conn, Sonar, recommend evade!” The master chief’s voice suddenly became distorted as he screamed into his circuit. “Captain, Sonar, the missile is targeting us! Recommend immediate emergency blow!”

  Phillips didn’t stop to wonder what was going on. He turned his head to the chief of the watch at the ballast-control panel and screamed, “Emergency blow, both groups! Helm, ahead full! Dive, thirty-degree up angle!”

  No one needed to be told twice. The emergency-blow levers, two stainless steel levers in the overhead, put ultrahigh-pressure air to the ballast tanks. The draining was as quick and violent as if an explosion had happened in the tanks. The room was engulfed in a symphony of ear-splitting noise as the air blew into the ballast tanks.

  Piranha drove to the surface at a thirty-degree angle, the full bell and the blow and the angle bringing her up from a thousand feet to the surface in less than two minutes.

  The ship was traveling at thirty-four knots when it broke the surface above. The parabolic cross-section nose cone penetrated the waves first, bringing with it tons of seawater. The cylindrical length of the ship followed, the sail emerging, then the aft cylinder, until the tail came out of the water. The giant submarine then crashed back into the ocean and vanished to a depth of two hundred fifty feet, then returned for the second time, bobbing and rolling on the surface.

  “Scram the reactor!” Phillips ordered. “Shut down the ship!” The OOD passed the word aft to maneuvering, and within seconds the lights flickered and the air conditioning shut down. All but one console of the fire-control system went dead.

  “Sonar, status of the missile?”

  “Still inbound, sir, getting closer,” the master chief said.

  Phillips tossed the soggy cigar, started to pull out a new one, but then put it back in his pocket. He tapped his feet, waiting.

  * * *

  Four hundred feet beneath the USS Piranha the Vortex Mod Charlie passed. Its detonation circuits told it to disregard targets shallower than two hundred feet, so it sailed by the Piranha and continued on until its fuel ran out forty seconds later. Then, as programmed, it shut down and sank to the bottom of the sea.

  The three Nagasaki torpedoes became confused and sailed far beyond where their target should have been.

  They didn’t have a ceiling setting, and were allowed to climb all the way to the surface. But at a depth of 178 feet lay a steep thermal layer. The water above was stirred by the wind and waves, heated by the sun. Below, the water temperature hovered a tenth of a degree above freezing. The Nagasaki torpedoes were deep, searching using passive sonar — listening only. As a result, any sound from above the layer reached downward only when the source was directly overhead. Sound waves out ahead of the torpedo, to the side, or behind bounced off the thermal layer like light bouncing off a mirror.

  Waiting quietly above the layer, the Piranha confused the torpedoes. They drove back and forth and in circles before detonating in plasma explosions. But by that time they had drifted many miles away from the Piranha’s position.

  The explosions that had come after the Devilfish’s battlecontrol system had crashed had been two Rising Sun submarines, put down by Piranha’s last Vortex shots.

  The sea was empty. Almost.

  Piranha had survived. Yet there remained one last Rising Sun submarine, the Arctic Storm.

  USS DEVILFISH, SSNX-1

  “Status of Cyclops?” Patton asked.

  “Down hard,” Colleen O’Shaughnessy said on the battle circuit.

  “Can we launch Vortex missiles in manual?” Pacino asked.

  “Should be able to,” Colleen said.

  “John, let’s get fifteen of them out there in a saturation attack. And get someone on the horn to Piranha. Tell Phillips under no circumstances shall he submerge.”

  “Aye, sir.”

  Pacino leaned against the conn handrail, shutting his eyes, listening to the battle litany as they attempted to open the torpedo-tube muzzle doors to program the Vortex missiles to go out on a specific bearing line and look for contacts. A fan of fifteen Vortexes ought to do it, and if they didn’t, perhaps by then the Cyclops system would be back and they could actually target the last Rising Sun.

  The Vortex launches went on for a half hour, the solid-rocket motors igniting and flying off into space, looking for the Red sub. There was no way to tell if the missiles ever hit their target. Over the next hour, explosions started to be heard. That could just be their termination detonations, since the missiles were programmed to explode as they ran out of fuel, just in case by dumb luck they were close to a target.

  Pacino felt a heavy weight of exhaustion fall on his shoulders. He had lost five Pegasus patrol planes, twelve 688s, and perhaps even the Piranha, all in a few hours’ time.

  He looked up to see Patton walking into the room from the forward centerline passageway.

  “Colleen says she’ll be up in about two minutes,” he said.

  Pacino donned his virtual-reality helmet and climbed into the darkened station four, waiting to see what had happened since they had gone blind and deaf.

  SS-403 ARCTIC STORM

  The missiles kept on coming.

  Chu knew enough to turn tail and run, but before he did, he made sure he put out his last three highspeed Nagasakis to the bearing of the ship that had launched these miserable plasma missiles at him. Once the three weapons were away, Chu turned and ran west at maximum speed at maximum depth to try to evade the saturation attack.

  It would turn out to be too little and too late. Plasma missile number six detonated a kilometer astern of his position, a termination detonation as it ran out of fuel.

  The explosion shock wave blasted through the water at sonic speed and hammered the Arctic Storm. If Chu hadn’t been strapped into his console, he would have died, but as it was, the five-point harness held tightly, his body bruised by the G-forces, but not broken. But although Chu survived, the ship was not as lucky.

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nbsp; The reactor shut down.

  The ship began to flood through a seawater cooling system.

  The periscope no longer worked, nor would any of the masts or antennae.

  All that was an easy day compared to the worst casualty.

  When the ship took the shock wave, the Second Captain died on impact The upper functions of the processing suites, the DNA parallel processors, ceased functioning as their cabinets broke open and the soup of DNA spilled to the decks.

  When the upper functions died, the lower functions of the neural network became confused and actually began working at cross purposes, a sort of machine equivalent to the convulsions of a headless chicken.

  Although the ship was whole, the loss of the Second Captain meant they had to abandon ship.

  And Chu couldn’t abandon ship by surfacing it, because whoever had launched more than a dozen plasma missiles at him would not stop shooting because he was on the surface.

  No, he’d get the crew out the escape hatch, then scuttle the ship. With luck they’d be picked up by one of his trawlers.

  “Gentlemen, your attention, please,” he said. “Leave your posts and assemble at the forward escape trunk. We are abandoning ship without surfacing. Any questions? Now!”

  At the escape trunk, Chu found a dozen air hoods and surface survival kits, and he sent Xhiu for their own emergency radio transmitters and beacons. Once Chu opened the lower hatch, they climbed up into the chamber.

  The deck of the ship was starting to list slightly to port, taking on a more pronounced down angle. With his crew in the escape trunk, Chu shut the lower hatch, ordered the men into their hoods, and flooded the trunk.

  A hydraulic lever opened the upper hatch, leaving the men in a protected section separated from the upper hatch by an air pocket on the other side of a wall. Chu found the hose manifold, filled each man’s hood with pressurized air, then shoved him out the open upper-escape trunk hatch. Last to go, he filled his own hood, ducked under the air barrier into the cold water, and climbed up out of the hatch.

  For a passing second he regretted leaving the ship to die. He tapped twice on the hull in a gesture of farewell, and pulled himself out of the hatch. The buoyancy of the hood pulled him up to the surface, and Chu was careful to blow out all the way up. The air pressurized to one hundred twenty meters’ depth would blow up his lungs if he didn’t exhale hard.

  In twenty seconds he broke the surface. The initial members of his crew had already inflated two rafts and were clicking the radios, trying to find help.

  “Any luck, Lo?” he asked.

  “I got through to Tianjin. They should be sending a seaplane for us. They’ll be here in about two hours.”

  “Good.”

  “Admiral? Do you think we won?”

  Chu considered the question. It had seemed so obvious to him that they had lost that the question almost seemed academic.

  “We sank their first task force, then twelve of their submarines, five of their maritime-patrol planes, and they killed five of our subs and paralyzed our ship, forcing us to abandon her.”

  A booming roar sounded from beneath them, the sound muffled by the depth.

  “That was either the ship imploding from the deep or someone finishing her off with a torpedo,” Chu said.

  “Anyway, our success is to be measured by how well and how long we held off the American landing force. If the Americans decide this sea is still too risky to cross, then we will have won a huge victory. If they decide they have vanquished us and proceed to White China to fight our forces, then we will have suffered a tremendous defeat. My opinion? We did our best, and I owe each one of you a debt of thanks for your work, for risking your lives.”

  “Hear, hear,” Lo Sun said.

  USS PIRANHA, SSN-23

  “Things are pretty quiet out here now,” Master Chief Henry said.

  “No missiles, no torpedoes, no Rising Suns.”

  “Correct.”

  “Let’s restart the reactor, submerge, and get out of here,” Bruce Phillips said.

  USS DEVILFISH, SSNX-1

  “Cyclops will be starting up in three, two, one—”

  It would be a relief, Pacino thought, to be able to see the world around them. He was wrong.

  The screens flickered to life again. Pacino strapped on his helmet.

  “Goddamn it,” one voice.

  “Shit,” a second.

  “Torpedo in the water!” a third.

  “Emergency flank!” Patton said. “Course one six zero!”

  Pacino’s display showed the Piranha on the surface, no one nearby, no Rising Suns, but one lonely incoming Nagasaki torpedo, less than one thousand feet from their position and targeted at the Devilfish.

  The deck began to shake as the ship sped up to emergency flank. Pacino sincerely hoped that they could outrun it. He was thinking that thought when Patton made some odd orders.

  “OOD, get on the circuit one and order all hands into emergency breathing masks.”

  “Aye, sir.”

  The circuit one announcing system blared out, “Torpedo in the water! All hands don EABS.”

  “OOD, arm the fire-suppression system.”

  “Aye, sir, um, Captain, won’t that kill the Cyclops and all the other electronics aboard if we use that?”

  “Better than dying in a fire,” Patton said.

  Pacino looked at him but decided not to interfere. Maybe it was just a quirk he had come upon after the Annapolis sinking.

  Pacino strapped on his gas mask and plugged it into a receptacle. The air he found was dry and canned and hot.

  The deck continued to vibrate beneath their feet as they ran. Pacino wondered if this torpedo was programmed to execute a termination-run detonation. His next thought was of Colleen, whether she was wearing her gas mask, and what she was doing. He stood up and reached for his hose connection at the manifold, planning to unplug it and walk forward to check on Colleen.

  He never made it.

  The termination detonation of the Nagasaki torpedo knocked him to the deck. Then there was only darkness.

  The first few seconds after the torpedo impact seemed almost calm, due to the temporary deafness experienced by the crew.

  Pacino found himself on the deck, lying on top of someone groaning in pain. He untangled his emergency-air-mask hose and pushed himself up. Seeing a handrail of the periscope stand above his head, he grabbed it and hauled himself to his feet. The lights overhead were flickering, but electrical bus fluctuations were normal after loss of the reactor. As the electrical turbines dropped off the grid, the battery’s motor-generators picked up, dumping the nonvital buses and carrying the vital loads.

  He looked over at the ship-control panel. The ship was maintaining depth. That meant the helmsman was still able to control the ship’s angle and the planes.

  There didn’t seem to be any immediate danger. They’d have to restart the reactor — that was strange, he thought, that the officer in maneuvering hadn’t reported the reactor scram. The engine-order telegraph was set at all stop. Pacino craned his neck to find Patton, who was pulling himself up from the other side of the commander’s panel. He seemed okay, as did the officer of the deck. Each of them set about adjusting the rubber masks on their faces, then the hoses and regulators clipped to their belts.

  Battle control was down again, but after a shock like they’d just experienced, Pacino expected it to be in trouble.

  All told, they’d been able to outrun the Nagasaki torpedo, and they had come out whole. Pacino found Patton’s eyes, and pointed at his gas mask. The masks were now unnecessary with the ship relatively safe. He was reaching for the straps when a booming voice stopped him dead.

  The word came into the control room on the circuit four emergency voice line, which amplified a voice in any of the ship’s phone circuits and broadcasted it over the shipwide PA system. The man on the phone shouted: “Fire in the torpedo room! Fire in the torpedo room, weapon-fuel fire!”

  Pacin
o felt a surge of adrenaline slam him in the gut.

  A weapon-fuel fire was the death certificate of any nuclear submarine, because peroxide torpedo fuel, in the booster stages of the Vortex missiles and the main fuel for the two room-stowed Mark 52 torpedoes, burned without a source of oxygen, the oxidizer chemically contained in the fuel itself. While this made for ideal torpedo propellant, it meant disaster if a weapon broke open and began to burn, because there was no way to put the fire out. The peroxide would burn until it burned all the fuel, and the fumes from it were so toxic that a single breath would drop a two hundred fifty-pound man in his tracks. Pacino had been faced with this issue during the design phase of the SSNX, and had met the challenge two ways. He had installed a liquid nitrogen fire-suppression system in the room, a liquid nitrogen hose forward and one aft, and had stiffened the bulkheads of the torpedo room. With the hatches to the room shut, the room could be flooded by opening it up to sea and pumping seawater through the compartment. The water wouldn’t stop the fuel fire, because it would simply keep burning underwater, but the water flowing through the flooded space could possibly cool the burning fuel enough to keep the hull from rupturing until the fire was burned out.

  He had run simulations of a weapon-fuel fire, and every one had showed the ship sinking, the fuel fire too catastrophic to recover from. He had made a modification, ejecting the torpedoes that weren’t on fire, and by doing that the nitrogen and flooding systems could handle the casualty, with skillful ship and depth control.

  His thoughts flashed to Colleen. Her computer room was located just above the weapons. An image came to mind, of her struggling in a toxic-fuel fire, dropping to her knees and collapsing. Before he realized what he was doing, he took a deep breath and disconnected his hose and dashed through the aft door. Since he was not a member of ship’s company, he had no assignment at battle stations or during a casualty, although U.S. Navy regulations were conflicted about his role at a time like this.

  He didn’t give a damn right now. He had to put out that fire. He dashed to the ladder outside the executive officer’s stateroom. He slid down the slick stainless steel handrails, his feet dangling, until his shoes hit the lower-level deckplates. He raced through the berthing room to the forward door, the door to the torpedo room.