Eyeball to Eyeball (Final Failure)

by Douglas Niles

  He pulled back on the stick, and the Phantom shot almost straight upward at dizzying speed, finally leveling off at the assigned CAP cruising altitude of 30,000 feet. From there, he banked and turned the Phantom into a lazy arc to the east, gradually bringing it back around in a wide circle.

  “Tango Three, assuming patrol position.” Behind him, Ensign King reported their status over the radio, then switched to the private channel to read data on their airspeed and altitude to the pilot.

  “I’ve got the other three Tangos on the scope,” he went on to report from the back seat. “One and two are twenty miles to the west; four is taking up station off our wing,” King explained, noting the locations of the rest of the combat air patrol. “And the Stoof with a Roof is on station down below.”

  Widener chuckled at the ridiculous name and pictured the ludicrous looking—but very capable—aircraft it described. Based on the S2F, or “Stoof” Tracker, which was a Grumman aircraft used to search for submarines, the E1 Tracer had a large, ungainly looking radar dome atop a stubby fuselage, with twin wing-mounted engines and a broad tail. Once the radome had been recognized for its resemblance to a “roof,” the name was virtually inevitable. He was glad it was down there—even though the piston-engine plane couldn’t reach the altitude of a modern jet, having radar capabilities perched 15,000 feet in the air gave the fleet and its aircraft a powerful “eye in the sky.”

  A full circle completed, Widener once again brought his plane onto an easterly bearing. The aqua sea of the shallow waters northeast of the Windward Passage sparkled below. He could see Grand Caicos Island to the east. Beyond lay the deeper blue of the Atlantic. He found himself remembering the plotting map he’d seen yesterday and wondered if, somewhere over there, the United States Navy was in fact tracking a Soviet sub. He was tempted to go over and have a look, but duty would keep him flying these lazy circles over Enterprise—just in case some Russian or Cuban fighter jet came roaring into the sky, intent on giving the world’s first nuclear-powered aircraft carrier a trial by fire.

  1710 hours (Saturday afternoon)

  Submarine B-59, submerged

  350 miles NE of Cuba

  The sounds of the chasing warships grew louder again as the destroyers closed in on the submarine’s location. Now the staccato explosions blasted and crumped, apparently right up against the hull. Each report came as a sharp, violent assault against Captain Savitsky’s nerves. Echoes rang back and forth through the metallic tube of the B-59. The pressure came so fast, with such crunching force, that it seemed like someone physically pounded on the submarine with a hammer. And they wouldn’t let up the relentless pummeling.

  The pinging rose to a nightmarish level—surely the Americans closed in for the kill! Savitsky could imagine no other explanation. The emergency lighting flickered and faded, plunging the submarine into complete darkness for several seconds. The captain held his breath, certain that this was the end, that the hull would rupture and the sea rush in to kill them all.

  “How do we know what’s going on up there?” Savitsky demanded aloud, finding his voice. “We could already be at war! We could be killed, sunk, without even striking a blow in the name of the rodina!”

  “No—we would know!” cried Arkhipov, the executive officer placing his hand on the captain’s arm.

  Savitsky turned on him, his face twisted in fury. “We would know how, exactly? We’ve been out of radio contact for thirty-six hours! Don’t be a fool—they are attacking! If you’d open your ears, you could hear that!”

  Another series of booms rattled against the hull, almost like pellets cast against the metallic shell, starting at one end and moving toward the other. The captain realized that Arkhipov was a fool—how could he not see the awful, deadly truth? Was it because he was afraid? Afraid of war, afraid to do his duty? That was the only explanation that made any sense to Savitsky. He looked at the man, his loyal fellow officer and friend, with obvious contempt.

  “Wait!” the exec pleaded. “You must steady your nerves—you don’t have enough air. You’re worn out—we’re all worn out! Sit down and rest. We can ride this out.”

  “To rest is to die—can’t you see that? The time for that is past. We’re worn out, and we’re doomed! This is the end, don’t you understand? You are witnessing how a submarine dies!” He croaked out the words, his mind railing against their fate, to die like meek victims of a powerful, merciless foe. He had seen proof on the sonar screen: no less than three ships pounded them, no doubt with air support as well. The Americans had the most powerful navy in the world, and B-59 was alone, isolated, terribly far from home.

  Only then did his mind focus on an important truth, one that had slipped into the background amid the tumult of his anger and fear. The Foxtrot had a powerful weapon of its own, a means to strike back at the tormenting enemy. They did not need to die a passive death. They could unleash a terrible blow for themselves, for the Soviet navy, for the motherland!

  He snatched the speaking tube. “This is the captain to the forward torpedo room. Feklisov—I want you to arm your weapon! Prepare it for loading! Do you hear me? Confirm!”

  “Captain,” Arkhipov said, eyes widening in panic. “Think about it! We don’t know that war has begun—but you could start it! We must learn what is happening in the world beyond our hull!”

  Angrily, Savitsky turned his back on the man, his contempt rising like bile in his throat. At that moment a dry voice emerged from the speaking tube—Feklisov! That loyal young officer was alert, and ready to follow orders. “Aye, Captain. Proceeding to arm weapon.”

  “We can’t take the chance of firing without some confirmation!” Arkhipov pleaded.

  “How would we find out?” snarled the captain. “Should we rise to radio depth? You think the Americans would not notice our antenna poking through the waves? Or perhaps you’d like us to surface, and shoot at them with our sidearms,” he sneered caustically.

  More booms sounded, rattling noises right against the command center. For too long the submarine had sat still, unmoving. Surely the Americans had a fix on the boat’s location by now! He looked at the battery meters; they had less than twenty-five percent power remaining, but enough remained to alter the terrible stasis that seemed certain to lead them all to doom. A sudden maneuver might just take the enemy by surprise.

  “We won’t just sit here and let them sink us!” The captain declared, to everyone in the comm center—and to himself, as well. He had reached a decision. Now Savitksy snatched a different speaking tube and barked another order, directed to the engineer and his mates in their stinking hellish compartment just to the rear.

  “Captain to engine room. Give me maximum speed on battery power—course dead ahead!”

  In the engine room, the chief engineer blinked in surprise. It took his fogged brain a moment to process the order—but then his instincts took over. He pulled the lever of the battery power control arm, pouring a sudden jolt of electric power into the motor, causing all three propeller shafts to instantly start to turn at high speed. He continued the movement, pressing the power control all the way down, pushing the stress of sudden acceleration to the maximum.

  At the same moment, another round of explosives popped and thudded at the stern of the boat. The propeller shafts flexed and spun under the instant application of power. The screws bit into the water, churning hard, forcing the submarine forward.

  And the worn housing on shaft number three, the collar with the slowly growing crack that had been expanding for five days now, snapped in half. One sharp piece of metal jammed, causing the propeller shaft to bend and twist in place, warping the once-watertight tunnel housing it. The rest of the collar broke away and fell into the depths—leaving a small space, a channel only a couple of centimeters wide, where the interior of the boat lay suddenly open to the sea.

  Water—under incredibly high pressure at the depth of 200 meters—immediately shot along the bent propeller shaft, following that twisted steel rod throu
gh the gap that had been twisted into the outer and inner hull sections, gushing directly into the engine room. It surged against the heavy block of diesel number three and caromed to the side, so forcefully that the rush of salty brine knocked the engineer to the deck. His skull cracked painfully against the diesel housing.

  The sailors on the other side of the compartment stared in horror as the rush of foaming liquid churned through the engine room, up from the well, spewing over the catwalk and rising quickly. Two of the engineer’s mates fled to the rear, tumbling through the open hatch into the after torpedo room, while the other two lunged forward, toward the other open hatch leading to the command center.

  The engineer officer scrambled to his knees, struggling to follow the sailors into the torpedo room—but, weakened by oxygen deprivation, stunned by the blow to the head, he collapsed in the hatchway, his body blocking the passage as one of the torpedo men tried to push the metal barrier shut.

  Another of the torpedo men saw it happen. He lunged for the speaking tube. “Emergency!” he croaked. “We have a breach in the hull—water coming in to the engine room!”

  Even as he spoke, the thin stream of water expanded to a gush, as the twisted shaft and the monstrous pressure widened the crack it had made around the hull gasket. Within seconds, the seawater was a foot deep on the deck, and rising fast, filling both of the large compartments in the rear of submarine B-59.

  An alarm sounded automatically, and Savitsky turned in fury to Arkhipov, who again placed his hand on the captain’s shoulder, trying to calm, to placate the senior officer. Angrily the captain shook off the gesture. At the same time, the two engineer mates hurtled themselves into the comm center from the engine room hatch.

  “We’re flooding!” one of them croaked. “The hull is breached!”

  “You see!” the captain cried. “They’re trying to sink us! We’ve been hit! The hull is ruptured!”

  Arkhipov put both hands on Savitsky’s shoulders, his grip clutching hard, his eyes wild. “No—think what—“

  Before the executive officer could say another word the captain punched him in the face and Arkhipov went down, stunned and bleeding. At the same time, an incongruously calm voice came through the speaking tube, addressing the officers in the command center from the forward torpedo room.

  “The special weapon is armed, Comrade Captain,” the young lieutenant commander reported formally.

  “Feklisov! Men of the forward torpedo room,” Savitsky barked into the speaking tube. “This is the captain. Load the special weapon into the tube. I’ll have targeting information by the time you’re done.” He dropped the speaking tube and turned to the officers and men in the comm center. All of them except the stunned Arkhiopov stared at him, ready to do his bidding. “The Americans are sinking us—but not before we hit them back.”

  Most of the crew in the command center had rushed to secure the hatch to the after torpedo room, where water was already sloshing waist deep on the men who struggled toward the center of the boat. The closing hatch doomed them to certain death, but it bought a little time for the rest of the boat.

  “We’re going down by the stern, Sir,” reported the diving officer, even as the deck canted under foot. The bow of the boat seemed to rise, but this was an illusion as the stern settled toward the bottom of the ocean.

  “Depth now 240 meters.” The diving officer read his gauge and intoned the words in a remarkably calm voice

  Arkhipov, bleeding from the mouth, moaned on the deck. Savitsky looked at him in contempt—the coward! He’d almost prevented the doomed submarine from striking a glorious blow for the rodina.

  The captain stepped to the sonar table and looked at the blips on the screen, standing unsteadily as the angle of the ship steadily increased. He had to hold on to an overhead railing, or he would have fallen to the after end of the command compartment. He pointed to the largest blip on the screen. “There—is that an aircraft carrier?”

  “Yes, Sir—I believe so,” replied the sonar man. “It has stayed several kilometers outside the ring of destroyers.”

  Savitsky read the targeting data and was back to the speaking tube in fifteen seconds. “Feklisov?”

  “Yes, Captain. The weapon is armed and loaded. I await your order.”

  “Set it to a range of six kilometers. Target is thirty degrees to starboard of our bearing. Fire to destroy.”

  “Aye, Captain.” There was a brief pause. “I have the fire solution!”

  “Fire! Fire now, at once!”

  The boat shuddered slightly as the torpedo shot out of the tube that was now angled sharply upward. The onboard gyroscope quickly adjusted the device, steadying it onto its target as it churned through the water.

  At the same time, the incredible water pressure completely flooded the engine room and the after torpedo room. The stern dropped even more sharply, and the submarine sank faster, passing 280 meters, 300 meters of depth with no way to reverse the plunge. The men who survived—for now—could no longer stand on the decks, but instead tumbled downward until they smashed into the bulkheads at the rear of each compartment.

  And Foxtrot B-59 continued her final dive, plunging into the crushing depths, surrounded by the dark and lethal sea.

  1718 hours (Saturday afternoon)

  USS DDG 507 Conning,

  350 miles NE of Cuba

  This business of tossing explosive charges off the stern of the destroyer had been going on for so long that Seaman Duncan was starting to find the once-exciting activity to be rather monotonous. His arm was sore, and the relentless noise of the helicopters, the growling of the ship’s engines, the occasional pop he heard when a charge went off near the surface had started to seem like a permanent backdrop to his life.

  How long would they go on doing this? Was there even a sub down there? He certainly hadn’t seen anything that would suggest that there was. He was down to the last grenade on his belt, having gone through God-only-knew how many over the last hour. He raised it up and grasped the pin, ready to pull.

  But something caused him to hesitate. He didn’t register it at once: It was kind of like a flicker in the whole world. The air itself seemed to shudder.

  And then the ocean turned to light, a great flash of brilliance that illuminated the aircraft carrier Randolph from below, like a giant flashbulb had popped in the water underneath the venerable warship. In the next instant—or perhaps it happened instantaneously—the huge vessel vanished as the sea erupted all around her. Steam and spray shot into the sky, and just kept going up. Craning his neck, staring in awe, the sailor saw fire churning inside the column of ocean that still exploded upward.

  He saw a furious, angry cloud swelling with unthinkable speed, clearly the result of some powerful blast. Fingers of spuming brine shot out in a blossom of incredible force and sudden violence. The consuming explosion expanded immensely, instantly, as if hungry for victims, clutching and devouring anything in its path. That destruction began with Randolph—the carrier simply vanished, despite Duncan’s efforts to spot some trace of the huge ship in the midst of that chaotic force.

  Conning’s fellow destroyer, Viscount, was closer to the carrier, just completing a sharp turn toward her sister ship as it curled around the imagined location of the submarine. A blast of invisible force hit Viscount, and she broke in half as the blast took her broadside. The stern of the stricken destroyer vanished, while the bow tumbled to the side, rolling across the ocean’s surface, scattering debris and men as it broke into pieces. The blast wave ripped outward from the carrier’s location, impossibly fast, sweeping toward Conning like a force of nature.

  Tiny objects tumbled through the sky, blowing toward, and past, Duncan’s ship. He realized they were pieces of the helicopters, and crews, that had been circling around the Soviet sub. One of the twin-engine Tracker aircraft smashed into the water a quarter mile away, breaking into pieces that bounced and skipped over the waves.

  And then that blast swept over the young sailo
r, tearing at his body and everything around him. Somehow, without thinking of it, he’d grabbed the ship’s rail, and now he held on frantically as the force lifted his feet from the deck, tried to rip him away. The ship rocked crazily beneath him, and he sensed her going over, capsizing. His world turned sideways, and he wondered if he was plunging straight into Hell.

  He gawked upward at a mountain of water, a swelling and solid-looking bulge in the ocean’s surface looming higher than any earthen massif he had ever imagined. The ocean continued to rise, a vast, steep slope of liquid bearing Conning up, turning her sideways, then tumbling past. Duncan felt that water slam him in the face with enough force to pull his hands from their grip on the rail. He was floating, flying, tumbling all at once—with no connection at all to the ship.

  There was only water, moving, smashing ocean, all around. It swallowed him, lifting him up, crushing him down, finally enveloping him in blackness.