Attack Of The Seawolf

by Michael Dimercurio

  “I’ll call up the F-18s to take on the southwest force.

  Our guys will go see the south fleet,” Collins said, clicking his radio to call the other F-14s. Moments later Collins put the stick over and turned the jet to the south while Forbes armed the Mohawk air-to surface missiles … Twenty minutes later the two dozen F-14s of VF-69 streaked in formation over the burning, sinking ships of the southeast task force of the Chinese Northern Fleet, the sonic booms of the jets a farewell as they climbed and turned back to the northeast and vanished over the horizon.

  korea bay surface action group 57 USS ronald reagan

  Admiral Richard Donchez lit his cigar as the F-14s of VF-69 landed on the deck of the Reagan. As the carrier recovered the F-14s, she launched the squadron of S-3 Vikings, the twin-jet ASW aircraft detailed to search the bay for the Seawolf.

  “Any sign of seawolf?” Donchez asked, unable to wait any longer.

  Captain Fred Rummel shook his head.

  “The jets took out all the helicopters but the Seawolf never surfaced.

  The Vikings will be able to see if she’s still there, but so far, nothing.”

  “What about the LAMPS helos?”

  “They’re already on the way, sir. We’ll have active and passive sonar and MAD detectors scouring the strait in another few minutes.”

  “I want to know the instant we know anything.”

  “Yes sir,” Rummel said, wondering how long it would be before it became obvious that Seawolf was lost.

  2315 beijing time

  “Any word?” Donchez asked.

  “Maybe you’d better come up to flight ops,” Rummel told him.

  They climbed the steps and walked into the stuffy air of the flight-operations center, where the air operations boss, the ship’s captain and the SAG hovered over the radar screens listening to the distorted voices of the pilots on the UHF tactical frequency.

  Donchez stood in the back, listening as the pilots reported that there was no submarine contact at the location that the helicopters had been hovering. It took time for the news to sink in, but finally Donchez began to feel the heavy weight of the inevitable.

  Seawolf was gone, and with her. Captain Michael Pacino.

  “I’m going to the bridge,” Donchez told Rummel.

  “I’ll hang around here, sir. I’ll let you know if …”

  Donchez was already gone and entering the blacked out bridge, with its expanse of windows overlooking the flight deck and the sea. Off to port the Officer of the Deck was scanning the horizon with his binoculars.

  Donchez immediately demanded: “What’s the word on the Tampa?” “She’ll be intercepting the group in another five minutes, sir. We’re standing by with a helicopter and a diver when she comes up. Her ballast tanks vents are jammed open so she can only stay on the surface when she’s steaming ahead. Our chopper will be dropping a diver to her deck. He’s going to be bolting some gasketed covers over the vents. Once that’s done she can blow the ballast tanks and stay on the surface.

  She’ll be pulling up alongside the Port Royal, one of our Aegis cruisers. We’re going to off load her crew and replace them with a transit crew. Once the transit team is aboard they’ll be sailing to Yokosuka for refit, and the original crew will be airlifted to the hospital ship Mercy.”

  “Off’sa’deck, combat reports a surfacing submarine bearing two nine one, range five thousand yards,” the junior officer of the deck reported.

  “Very well. Status of the chopper?”

  “Lifting off now.”

  “We’ll have her alongside the Port Royal within the hour. Admiral.”

  Donchez nodded, then returned to Flag Plot. Rummel was waiting for him. Donchez could tell by his face that the news was bad.

  “Nothing on the Seawolf, sir. The search continues, we’ve got till dawn before the President’s authorization expires, but the ASW guys aren’t hopeful …”

  “I’m going down to get some rack,” Donchez said, knowing he wouldn’t sleep but wanting to be alone.

  “Yes sir. And, Admiral, there’s this …”

  “What’s that, Fred?”

  “At least we got the Tampa back.”

  Donchez nodded, but his thoughts were that the price was too damned high.

  USS tampa ALLONGSIDE cruiser USS port royal 2345 beijing time

  Lieutenant Commander Jackson Lube Oil Vaughn stood on the deck of the Tampa watching the corpsman lifting out Captain Sean Murphy. As soon as he was out of the hatch he said something to the two men carrying him and they brought him to where Vaughn stood. Beside Vaughn was Lieutenant Black Bart Bartholomay, the SEAL XO.

  “Captain,” Vaughn said, “don’t fight these guys, let them take care of you, okay? I’ll be up to visit you soon as I get the crew turnover done.”

  “Lube Oil,” Murphy said, his voice weak, “I just wanted to thank you and Lennox for all the fancy ship handling you did to get us out of there. I was … damned proud of you guys. I’m sorry I couldn’t help…”

  “You did fine, Skipper.”

  “And, Black Bart, when I get healed I want to pin a medal on every one of your SEAL team. Without you guys we’d all be dead meat by now.”

  Bartholomay thanked him, and added, “I wish Jack Morris could hear you say that.”

  Vaughn looked at Murphy. Either Morris had drowned at sea when he went overboard, or he was picked up by Seawolf. And God alone knew where Seawolf was. If she was anywhere … The corpsmen took Murphy up the gangway to the weather deck of the Port Royal, the massive cruiser towering over the submarine, then put Murphy in the waiting helicopter on the cruiser’s fantail. The chopper’s blades spun into a blur and it lifted off into the darkness, disappearing except for its blinking beacons.

  “Well, I’d better get my guys and their gear offloaded,” Bart said.

  Vaughn stretched out his hand. Black Bart shook it, turned and walked toward the hatch.

  Vaughn turned away, looking out toward the west to an empty stretch of seawater.

  CHAPTER 33

  TUESDAY, 14 MAY

  0004 GREENWICH MEAN TIME

  bohai haixia strait 0804 Beijing time

  The ASW officer, Lieutenant Victor Samuels, sat in the rear starboard seat of the S-3 Viking twin-jet submarine-hunting aircraft, staring at the magnetic anomaly detector display.

  “Anything cooking on MAD?” his sonar technician asked.

  “Maybe,” Samuels said.

  “I’m getting four detects in the area but the whole channel has been like this.”

  “All four are weak on the sonobuoys,” the technician replied.

  “Same detects we’ve been hunting all night.”

  “Hey, guys. Momma’s calling. Playtime’s over,” the aircraft’s pilot said on the intercom.

  “Give me one last active dipper,” Samuels replied.

  “These four detects are still bugging me.”

  Down below, a LAMPS III Seahawk helicopter hovered over the spot marked by the Viking, dropped its dipping sonar and sent out a series of active sonar pings. Twenty-five hundred yards to the west a second Seahawk dropped a dipper, and the two choppers pinged over the area, hoping to come up with something solid over the four MAD detects.

  Samuels listened on his radio to the LAMPS choppers for a moment, then nodded somberly and called the pilot on the intercom.

  “The LAMPS guys say the detects are the hulls of the destroyers and some helicopter debris. Nothing strong enough to be a nine-thousand-ton submarine.

  Let’s bug out.”

  “Roger, concur.”

  Samuels pulled off his sweaty headset and looked down one last time at the bay water south of the Lushun peninsula. Somewhere down there were the bodies of over a hundred Navy submariners. Out the window the sun had risen high over the bay, the water reflecting a deep blue. The western Korea Bay was a shimmering landscape—it would have made a beautiful painting. Samuels leaned his head against the window and shut his eyes. It had been a long nigh
t.

  Below them, in the area that had been searched by the Seahawk helicopters, four hulls lay on the bay bottom, two hundred and forty-five feet deep at that point. One was the broken and burned-out remains of the Udaloy destroyer Zunyi, the second and third the forward and aft halves of the Luda destroyer Kaifing, sliced cleanly in half by the sail of the Seawolf. The fourth hull was the Seawolf, lying inert, her misshapen sail tipped over in a twenty-five-degree roll, her anechoic tiles blown off her hull, the steel of the cylindrical hull almost completely buried in the silt of the bottom from the explosions of the depth charges.

  The S-3 Viking flew in on final approach to the aircraft carrier Reagan, Samuels on the radio to flight ops that all detects of the night had proved to be either outcroppings of rocks or the hulls of other ships known to be sunk in the previous day’s battle.

  Inside the hull of the half-buried Seawolf all the lights were off. Only the dim beams of battle lanterns fought the darkness. The atmosphere was close, stuffy, damp.

  The decks were tilted into a twenty-five-degree roll to starboard. Men lay scattered on the tilted tiles of the decks, some half-conscious, most out cold. Of those unconscious, several were out because of injuries, others because of the diminishing levels of oxygen.

  In the control room Pacino tried to open an eye but couldn’t. Had he gone blind? He reached up and put a hand to his face and felt that his right eye was swollen shut. His left seemed normal. While he tried to open his good eye, he tasted copper, as though he were sucking on a penny. He stuck his tongue out in distaste, but his tongue seemed to dissolve into a ball of sparks, the feeling from his mouth turning into an odd combination of partial numbness and coppery taste. He felt something with a part of his tongue that wasn’t numb. A tooth. He spit it out, tried to raise his head but vertigo hit him so hard that he had to drop his head again.

  After a moment he heard a pinging noise, a sonar ping. Only then did he fully realize where he was. He grimaced as he tried to stand, pulling himself up to a seat at the attack center’s Pos Two console. He looked around the room, his good eye blurry, and saw only dim lights. He took a headset and called into it for someone, anyone. He tried to move to the aft end of the room but immediately felt tired and dizzy. He found a cubbyhole locker and pulled out a gas mask, wrapped it on his sore face and plugged it into an air manifold in the overhead.

  He took a slow breath, wondering if the air system might be contaminated, it seemed dry and stale. He took another deep breath, feeling his head clear. It had to be the levels of oxygen in the ship. For a moment he considered going to the lower level to the oxygen bottles and opening up the bleed valve, then dismissed the idea. Oxygen was not enough—they needed to clear the air of carbon dioxide. Hell, they needed to get the hell out of the bay.

  Pacino began to make his way aft to the shielded tunnel, unplugging and re plugging his mask every forty feet until he was in maneuvering. He pulled a mask out of the overhead and strapped it onto the engineer’s face. Ray Linden opened his eyes, shook his head to clear it.

  “We need to restart the scrubbers and burners,” Pacino told him.

  “We need to restart the reactor,” Linden managed to get out.

  “The battery’s down, must have shorted out and opened the battery breaker …”

  “We’re in big trouble with no battery,” Pacino said.

  “Don’t need it to restart,” Linden said, getting fresher.

  “The reactor protection circuitry has backup batteries and we don’t need coolant pumps. You say the word and we’ll start this thing out of here.”

  Another reverberating sonar ping through the hull.

  “Not yet, they’re still looking for us. Get everyone into a mask. I’ll call you.”

  Pacino headed forward to the control room and began strapping masks on the men. When two, then three regained consciousness Pacino told them to help get the rest of the crew in masks and went into the sonar room and found Chief Jeb in a mask staring at him, his face badly swollen.

  “Hear the pinging?” Pacino asked. Jeb nodded.

  Pacino figured as long as they could hear the pinging through the hull they wouldn’t need sonar and could stay on the bottom.

  After a few moments the pings died down.

  Pacino went back into control, trying to find out how many men were hurt seriously. So far the worst had been some broken bones. The men had fairly well recovered with the breathing air, but the supply was limited. One way or another they had to get the hell out of the bay. He checked his watch. It had been a half hour since the last sonar ping he could remember.

  He called Linden aft.

  “Start up the reactor and get the atmospheric equipment up, full power lineup, but no main engines yet.”

  In twenty minutes the fans were working, blowing cool air into the stuffy room. The ESGN navigation system came on with a moan, its ball spinning up to several thousand RPM. The firecontrol and sonar screens lit up as the ship’s computer came back to life.

  The control panel’s displays flashed up. Seawolf was back.

  Pacino pulled on his headset over the straps of his air mask.

  “Chief Jeb, can you hear me?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “Is sonar up? I’m getting a waterfall screen.”

  “I’m initializing, sir, but we’ll be up in no time.”

  “Listen for surface and aircraft contacts. I want to know if they’re still waiting for us. There hasn’t been an active ping in a while.”

  “Yes sir.”

  Pacino hoisted a phone to his ear.

  “Eng, how’s the plant?”

  “Normal full power lineup, turbines working in spite of the heel. But I’d like to get us horizontal. The condensers don’t drain very well like this.”

  “I’ll get back to you. How’s the air?”

  “Analyzer says we have high CO and COz, very low oxygen. We should all be dead.”

  “Clean it up as fast as you can.”

  “Conn, Sonar,” Jeb’s voice announced, a ring of pride coming through.

  “Sonar’s up, no surface contacts, no air contacts. We’re cleared for takeoff, Captain.”

  Pacino liked the sound of that.

  “Eng, start the main engines and prepare to answer all bells.”

  Pacino leaned over the chart, wondering where the ship was. The navigation systems were out of line after the depth charging.

  “Conn, Maneuvering. Propulsion is on the main engines, ready to answer all bells,” Linden said.

  “Diving Officer, blow depth control number two empty and don’t let us broach if that’s too much buoyancy.

  Helm, all ahead two thirds!”

  First water, then air blew out of the Seawolf’s underside as the depth control tank went dry. The propulsor aft spun, still submerged in silt. As the ship grew buoyant she lifted out of the mud, righted her roll and surged ahead, the stern lifting out of the silt.

  The deck leveled and the speed indicator rolled the numerals up on the ship control display.

  “Helm, all ahead full. Steer course east. Depth one five zero.”

  When they had gone down, Padno remembered having less than ten miles to go. At full speed he could be out of the Go Hai Bay before the Chinese realized he wasn’t dead. He watched the chart and when he was sure they’d gone at least twenty miles he stood up on the conn, grabbed the microphone to the Circuit One PA. system and put the mike to his gas mask exhalation filter.

  “Attention, this is the captain.” His voice rang out through the decks and the compartments of the submarine.

  “We are now in international waters in the bay of Korea. Because our atmosphere is still contaminated I intend to surface, which will give us a chance to check out the sail and see how bad the damage is.

  That’s all, carry on.”

  He took a last look at the sonar display console.

  The surface was clean.

  “Diving Officer, surface the ship.”

  “Su
rface the ship, aye. Chief of the Watch, prepare to start the low-pressure blower on all main ballast tanks. Bowplanes to full rise, five degree up angle on the ship. Depth eight zero, seven five, six zero, sir.

  Depth three eight, three seven. Open inboard induction, drain the header, okay. Open the outboard induction valve, and, Chief, start the blow.”

  “PLACING THE LOW PRESSURE BLOWER

  ON ALL MAIN BALLAST TANKS.”

  With a howl from the fan room aft, the huge displacement blower began blowing the ballast tanks dry.

  Ten minutes later the Chief of the Watch stopped blowing air into the tanks and began to ventilate the ship with the same blower.

  “Captain,” the Diving Officer announced, “the ship is on the surface, atmosphere is in spec. Recommend securing air masks.”

  “Very well,” Pacino said.

  “Mr. Keebes, announce to the crew to remove air masks and let’s get a navigation fix, then get Mr. Turner up here to check out the sail. If it will work let’s get the radar mast up and find out where the surface action group is. Once you’ve got their position, recommend a course to intercept the task force.”

  “Yes sir,” Keebes said, already working on the navigation system.

  Pacino sat back down on the Pos Two control seat and put his feet up on the console. The best feeling on the run was taking off the gas mask and breathing pure, clean outside air.

  USS reagan

  Admiral Richard Donchez stood on the starboard bridge wing looking out to sea, chewing on a cigar that had gone out a half hour before. Next to him Captain Fred Rummel waited for Donchez to speak.

  “I’m sorry, Fred, what did you say?”

  “We’ll have to notify the Pentagon, sir, that Seawolf is lost.”

  Donchez stared at the blue waves running down the starboard side of the massive aircraft carrier, not seeing the waves but the face of a man he considered his own son.

  “Admiral, sir, the Officer of the Deck wants you,” an enlisted man announced from the bridge.

  Donchez walked into the bridge.

  “Sir,” the commander said, “we have radar contact on an unidentified submarine that just surfaced about two minutes ago, about twenty miles east of the line marking international waters.”