First Strike c-19

by Keith Douglass

  “Five seconds to CPA, sir,” the sonarman said. Coleman could see the geometries playing out on the screen in front of him, the torpedo squeaking past his ship, the hard turn the carrier was attempting — and the inevitable result.

  “ASROC, sir?” the TAO asked. The antisubmarine torpedo could be launched from a vertical launch cell on the ship, and had the range to reach any possible submarine.

  “Can’t,” Coleman said shortly. “Our locating data on the Seawolf is twelve hours old — and, at last report, she had been stalking a contact in this very area.” If the ship were to launch a torpedo into the box, there was every chance that it would find the Seawolf instead of the enemy sub. No, this was the Seawolf’s battle — and there was nothing anybody on the surface could do about it.

  USS Seawolf

  2336 local (GMT-4)

  “Got her solid,” Pencehaven said, his voice as calm as if it were a drill. “Your orders?”

  “Are we within weapons range?” Forsythe asked.

  “Yes, sir. Two tubes loaded and flooded, waiting for weapons release.”

  “Weapons free,” Forsythe said softly. “Two shots — now.”

  Even as Forsythe gave the order, Pencehaven mashed down the red button. The submarine shook slightly as compressed air forced a torpedo out of the tube. Its tiny propeller immediately began whipping the water into a froth as it came to life, checked its orders to intercept the target, and pick up speed and headed off on its mission. A second later, another torpedo followed.

  Forsythe watched the screen, desperately praying that he had done the right thing. Yes, he could ask the chief if he’d done the right thing — even the doctor, if he had wanted to. But, in the end, it was his decision to make, his responsibility to fight the submarine.

  And, until that very second, he had not realized how lonely that could be.

  Kilo One

  2338 local (GMT-4)

  Captain First Rank Sergei Andropov turned on his psychological services officer. “You said they would not fire!”

  The man beside him was pale and shaken. He had not understood initially what the hard, buzzing noise was from the speaker, but the crew had quickly filled him in. He would be lucky if he lived long enough for the torpedo to kill him.

  “Every projection said that they would not,” he said, aware of how very lame his explanation sounded. “They would not risk it — they are too conscious of their body count, too afraid to take any casualties. They would not—”

  “They did!” Andropov grabbed him by shoulders, shook him violently, then transferred his grip to the man’s neck.

  “You imbecile, you have killed us!”

  The Russians could not presume to know the American mind any more that the Americans could know the Russian psyche. For just one second, he wondered if the Americans had advisers such as this.

  USS Lake Champlain

  2339 local (GMT-4)

  Coleman saw the two new bursts of noise on the display, and watched as they resolved into the characteristic shapes of torpedoes. Cold fear clutched at his gut, followed immediately by relief as they turned away from him.

  “They’re ours, Captain. Ours!”

  Good old Seawolf. She’s pulling us out of this. Now, if I can do so well on the air battle, we may have a chance.

  Kilo One

  2339 local (GMT-4)

  “Two thousand yards, Captain!” Stark terror filled the sonarman’s voice. “Bearing constant, range decreasing. Captain, your orders? Captain?”

  “Hard left rudder, flank speed, and…” For just a moment he paused, uncertain of himself for the first time in nearly twenty years. Classic evasion tactics called for him to go deep, forcing the torpedo to follow him down, leaving hard knuckles in the water as he went and ejecting decoys and noisemakers. The theory was that the torpedo could be tricked into attacking one of the phantom targets as the submarine slipped safely below the thermocline.

  But the hard, cold knot in his gut told him it wouldn’t work this time. Couldn’t work — no, they had no chance of evading this torpedo using classical tactics. Therefore, his only option was to attempt something radical.

  “Surface the ship,” he ordered after what seemed like minutes, but in reality had been a few seconds. “Surface the ship.”

  “Captain?”

  The Captain reeled around to glare at the conning officer, murder in his eyes. The body of the psychologist stretched out across the deck was ample proof that he was prepared to follow through on his threats. “I said, surface the ship.” He waited.

  The junior officer glanced down at the dead psychologist and made his decision. “Surface the ship, aye, sir.”

  “One thousand yards — bearing constant, range decreasing.”

  I may be too late, he thought, watching the torpedoes move across the time-versus-bearing display. I hesitated — I should not have done that. The other captain — he did not hesitate.

  USS Seawolf

  2341 local (GMT-4)

  “Oh, no you don’t,” Otter said. The other submarine’s acoustic signature was changing. Otter made a tiny correction with the joystick, turning the wire-guided torpedo. “You’re a bad, bad little bastard, aren’t you?”

  “What are you doing?” Forsythe asked. “You’re bringing the torpedo shallow! That sub’s not coming shallow. That would be insanity. She’s got no chance on the surface.”

  “She’s got no chance either way, Captain,” the sonarman said quietly. “And she is surfacing — she is.” He pointed at an interference pattern on the screen, tracing out the details as he spoke. “She’s shallow right now, and she’s going to surface. And,” he said with conviction, “she’s going to die.”

  She’s going to die. He called me Captain. Again, the full weight of what he’d done bore down on Forsythe.

  But when had there been time to do anything differently? There had not been time to surface and ask for instructions, not the way that things had unfolded. There had not been time to make a stealthy approach on the enemy sub and carefully set up a killing shot.

  No, this was undersea warfare the way it really was. Not some tidy game of angles and maneuvers in a classroom, the relative positions outlined in different colors of chalk on a two dimensional board. Not a trainer, where you knew that the result would be the instructor calling, “Stop the problem, stop the clock,” followed by a detailed and unforgiving debrief in front of your classmates. How he had dreaded those moments, when his errors would be exposed to everyone else, the teasing that would follow. Not that he had been anymore gentle when it was someone else under the gun, no. That’s not the way it was done.

  And this was why, he saw, watching as his torpedoes reached the end of their wires and were set free on their own. This is why it was done that way. Because real warfare was nasty, bloody stumbling around the dark, acting and reacting on insufficient information, praying to God that you hadn’t screwed up. Because, if you have, it’s not just worrying about a hard time your roommates are going to give you or the bad marks on a fitrep. It’s knowing that thirty other people will die along with you.

  “There they go,” Pencehaven said as the wires snapped. He could no longer control the torpedoes with his joystick. “Damn, they’re just like little bloodhounds — look at them go! You hear that, Captain? You hear that?” The sonarman pointed at the speaker. The series of shimmering pings from the torpedoes’ seeker heads were growing higher pitched, coming faster now. It sounded eager, certain about what it was doing—

  Stop it. Don’t anthropomorphize it. It’s a weapon, not a bloodhound.

  “Fifteen seconds until contact,” Otter said, his mood more closely matching Forsythe’s own than Pencehaven’s did. The sonarman raised his hands to his earphones, ready to peel them away from his head. He glanced over at his friend and nudged him. “Don’t forget this time. Last time, you couldn’t hear for two days.”

  “Yes, yes,” the other said, still smiling broadly.

  Hours of bored
om punctuated by seconds of sheer terror. But at least for them, not for us.

  “Five seconds,” Pencehaven said, pulling his own earphones off. “Stand by for it, folks. It’s going to be a doozy.”

  Kilo One

  2341 local (GMT-4)

  “Passing five hundred feet,” the Russian sonarman said.

  Not good enough. We’re not going to make it in time. “Emergency blow,” the Captain ordered, feeling his skin crawl. The sonar pings sounded like ball peen hammers on his hull, an incessant hammering that would drive you insane if you listened to it long enough. But he wouldn’t have to, would he? That was the whole point — he wouldn’t listen to it that long at all.

  “Emergency blow, aye,” the officer of the deck said. A loud whooshing filled the submarine and his ears popped, as every bit of available compressed air was dumped into the ballast tanks, forcing out seawater, and jerking the submarine toward the surface. The captain felt heavier as the submarine surged up under him. Then, the submarine tilted hard to the right, and loose gear went flying, cascading down from the elevated front parts of the submarine. It could not fall all the way to the stern, of course. Watertight hatches stopped the debris’s progress, and piled up at the rear of every compartment.

  “Five seconds!” someone shouted. There was no need for silence now, no advantage at all. A blind man could follow their progress through the ocean.

  USS Seawolf

  2342 local (GMT-4)

  “Will you look at that?” Otter said, pointing at the screen. “Man, she’s one noisy bitch on emergency blow, isn’t she?”

  “Is that what that is?” Forsythe said, a terrible certainty starting in his heart. “Emergency blow?”

  Both sonarman nodded. “No doubt about it, sir. She’s scared and running for daylight.”

  “Can she make it to the surface?

  Neither sonarman answered.

  Kilo One

  2343 local (GMT-4)

  “One hundred feet,” the Russian sonarman said, the relief plain in his voice. Depth was measured from the keel of the submarine, and if the keel was at one hundred feet, the conning tower was just twenty-five feet below the surface. They were near enough to get out if they had to. If they could.

  “Captain, are we going to—?” The officer of the day never had a chance to finish his question.

  The torpedo struck the ship in the aft one-third of the hull, about twenty feet forward of the propeller shaft. As its nose dented the steel hull, the force shoved the igniter back into the warhead. The torpedo detonated, instantly vaporizing the seawater around it and producing a massive pressure gradient along the hull of the submarine.

  The force of the explosion, coupled by the sudden change in pressure, popped rivets along the junction between two plates. The sea took advantage of the submarine’s weakness immediately, pouring in, as though trying to demonstrate the principle that nature abhors a vacuum.

  The sea acted like a giant wedge, forcing the two steel plates farther apart. Incredible forces brought to bear on buckled steel, mangled with nature’s force everything man had so carefully machined.

  Inside the submarine, the effect was devastating. The original split in the hull filled the space with water, and the force twisted the inner hull out of shape. Given the submarine’s steep angle of climb, and the forces already in play on her, it didn’t take much to breach her hull completely.

  The original leak — if such torrential force can be called by such an innocuous name — was located in a machinery space. The stream of water hit with the force of a fire hose, immediately enlarging the hole. The watertight bulkhead to the passageway held for five seconds, then, under the stress of the hull deformity, the rubber seal pulled away from the coming. Again, the water followed.

  The submarine was divided, like a surface ship would be, into a series of watertight compartments designed to withstand considerable pressure. But every engineering design works on the assumption that the hull would remain intact.

  The passageway running the length of the sub was empty. The submariners were in watertight compartments on either side, at the battle stations, torn between the duty and the compulsion to race forward or aft to one of the escape hatches. Everyone knew what the steep angle on the deck meant — they were surfacing, surfacing hard, and there was only one reason to do that with a torpedo in pursuit. Each one vowed silently that when he heard the submarine break the surface he would abandon his post and head to the escape hatch, protocol and duty be damned.

  The ocean, however, had other plans.

  The next to the last segment of the passageway flooded first and the watertight hatches on either side of it collapsed almost immediately. As the ancillary equipment room filled with water, it became heavier, deepening the submarine’s already steep angle of ascent, and severely slowing her forward progress. The submarine had enough inertia built up, however, that even the fatal breech of the hull could not stop her from reaching the surface. Still, she broke the surface at a sharper angle than her designers ever intended.

  As she breached the surface of the ocean, the sea broke through the aft watertight door. Now, with the full force of the sea behind it, it smashed into engineering, cold seawater surging over the hot main propulsion engines. The engines flashed the first cascade of water into steam, then shattered, metal torn apart by the sudden change in temperature as more water followed.

  There were three sailors in that compartment, each with his own general quarters station. The first was assigned to monitor the oil pressure and temperature over the main engines. The second was the damage control petty officer, standing by to coordinate any repairs or actions in an emergency. The third was a very junior member of the crew, whose only job in life was to watch the bilges and make sure that the seepage never rose above two inches.

  They had approximately four seconds warning before the ship began to break apart, long enough for a prayer or a curse, depending on each one’s temperament. Long enough for the senior rating to scrabble up the ladder to the escape hatch and begin desperately twisting the heavy wheel, hoping against hope that he could somehow manage to get it opened, get inside, and get out before he was trapped. The other tried to follow what he was doing, but got in the way. While the senior rating might have had time to get the inner hatch open, it was almost certain he would not have had time to climb inside the escape chamber, shut the hatch behind him, and reseal it. Even if he had time, the pressure and forces acting on the hull would probably have warped the chamber itself, either preventing the hatch from securing or keeping the outer hatch from opening.

  In any event, the others had forgotten to grab emergency egress breathing devices and would have drowned as the chamber filled.

  As it was, the sea broke through suddenly, slamming into the compartment and flooding it instantly. The youngest seaman was slammed into a bulkhead and his neck snapped. He had a few seconds of fading consciousness, but not enough time to feel the cold, clear panic and fear flooding the other two.

  The senior petty officer, the one who had climbed the ladder, was knocked off his perch. He took a deep breath, held it, and moved through the compartment, hoping to find an air bubble trapped there. The man in the middle panicked. He became completely disoriented. In trying to emulate the other in the complete pitch darkness and cold water, he swam for the stern of the ship. By the time oxygen starvation forced his mouth open in an instinctive insistence that he could indeed breathe seawater if he just tried hard enough, he had realized his mistake.

  The third man lived — at least for a few more minutes. He had time to realize what was happening, to watch the water rising around him, to hear the sudden crack as the hull gave way. He was completely conscious as the water quickly rose, the cold leeching the heat almost immediately, the water filled with oily debris. He could not see the water rise, but followed its progress as it crept up his body, the heavy pressure on his chest, the icy oil against his skin, seeping into his tightly closed mouth and invading
his nostrils.

  He knew the submarine better than his own house and he tried to make his way forward. He pounded against the first door he encountered, but the man on the other side rightfully refused to doom the rest of the ship by opening the hatch. Finally, as he verged on unconsciousness from oxygen starvation, his mouth opened and he breathed in seawater.

  Those in the forward compartments who were strong and acted quickly survived. As they heard the torpedo hit, they ignored their standing orders, opened their hatches and streamed forward. They secured the hatches behind them as the went, moving forward against the flood, struggling against the ever deepening inclination on the deck. Eventually, they reached the control room.

  Inside the control room, utter chaos prevailed. The captain had roared out a hasty abandon-ship order that was not necessary. Every one of them instinctively knew that to stay in the submarine would be to die. No damage control effort could begin to staunch the flood.

  At the bottom of every watertight hatch is a port, known as the telltale. Because there are no windows between the watertight compartments, the telltale provides a way of determining whether the other side is flooded or not.

  The control room crew heard the frantic pounding of the others on the hatch, and, in an act of superhuman courage, one of them stayed behind and popped open the telltale. When he saw no water, he opened the hatch and helped drag the rest of the crew through it. After the last one was in, as he saw water seeping into the compartment they’d just vacated, he slammed the hatch shut and twisted the wheel. Except for the captain, he was the last man to leave the dying submarine.

  USS Jefferson

  CVIC

  0308 local (GMT-4)

  “Come on, Jeff,” Coyote said softly. He wasn’t sure if it was an order or a prayer.

  Beneath his feet, the deck was now tilted as hard over as he’d ever felt it. He had to give her credit, the old girl was strong, but she just couldn’t maneuver like the smaller boys could.