The Reply

CHAPTER 29

On board the USS Springfield Captain Forster was the senior commander among the three Los Angeles-class attack submarines hovering above the Greywolf’s position. The Springfield and the Asheville were at a standstill, power down to a minimum to keep life-support systems operating on board the boats. The Pasadena, the third ship of the flotilla, had all systems active and was monitoring the situation for the group.

The first indication that the foo fighters were moving again was from the Pasadena, which reported two foo fighters coming up from the depths.

Forster didn’t reply, still running silent as they had planned. The captain of the Pasadena had his orders.

On board the Pasadena the crew reacted as they’d thoroughly been trained to, rushing to battle stations. The firing crew began tracking the two targets.

On board the Greywolf Commander Downing watched the two foo fighters sweep by, heading up. The three that had been shadowing the submersible still remained on station. Downing turned and met Tennyson’s glance.

“Your guess is as good as mine,” he said.

As the foo fighters passed the Greywolf’s depth, the captain of the Pasadena gave the order to arm the Mark 48, Mod 2 torpedoes.

“Fire!” the captain of the Pasadena ordered as the foo fighters passed through three thousand meters.

Four torpedoes launched with a hiss of compressed air, each foo fighter double-targeted. The torpedoes raced away from the sub, a spool of wire unreeling behind each one, allowing it to be continuously targeted by the submarine. Each Mark 48 weighed over 2,750 pounds and was ten feet long by twenty-one inches in diameter. The conventional warhead consisted of over a thousand pounds of high explosive.

“Tracking,” the weapon officer announced in the crowded control center. “I’ve got four good ones. All tracking clear, tracking two separate targets. Time to impact forty-two seconds…” He paused, his eyes widening at the information his computer was giving him. “We’ve got inbound!”

“Inbound what?” the captain demanded.

“Our own torpedoes!” the weapons officer exclaimed. “They’ve been turned.” His fingers were working the keyboard, trying to regain control of the weapons. “Time to impact, twenty seconds.” Every eye in the control room fixed on the commanding officer.

The captain was staring over the man’s shoulder, reading, interpreting. “Fifteen seconds!”

“Abort, abort, abort!” the captain yelled.

The weapons officer flipped up a red cover and pressed down on the button underneath. All four torpedoes detonated less than two hundred meters away from their launch point.

“Prepare for impact!” the captain ordered, knowing his order had been much too late as the shock wave from the four simultaneous explosions hit the sub.

Captain Forster, on board the Springfield, was listening passively through a hydrophone headset. He tore the headphones off when the thunderous noise of the torpedoes going off hit them. The submarine rocked in the water. Forster yelled for a damage report as he put the headphones back on.

He heard the sounds coming from the Pasadena every submariner feared the most: the screech of metal giving way, water rushing in, air being blown out under pressure. He even imagined he could hear the screams of the crew of the Pasadena as they were crushed, but that might simply have been his imagination.

There was absolute silence throughout the Springfield as even sailors not wearing the headphones could hear the faint sound of bulkheads giving way echo through their ship, like the sound of popcorn popping in the distance.

“Sir!” the first officer hissed. “What do we do?”

“We do nothing for now,” Forster ordered, turning away from the other men in the control room. He felt his hastily eaten breakfast threatening to come back up as he imagined the fate of the crew of the Pasadena. “We do nothing.”

On board the Greywolf they had heard the explosion and now they could also hear the sound of the Pasadena dying. Half a minute later they could pick up the noise of the battered hulk of the once proud submarine dropping by, heading for the ocean depths, more bulkheads shattering as the pressure increased.