Acts of Vengeance

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN TARGET REAGAN

“Range?”

“Six thousand meters, Captain. No change.”

Manilov peered at the console and nodded. The waiting was over. It was as close as the Reagan would come on its present course, passing them broadside, then opening the distance again as it cruised to the southwest.

“Ready tubes one, two, three, four.”

“Tubes one, two, three, four loaded and ready.”

Theoretically, two torpedoes were enough. If he could get two into the hull of the Reagan, he had a chance to sink her. He would fire a salvo of four, fanning them to account for any evasive maneuvering the giant ship might attempt. The remaining two tubes — the Mourmetz had six available — he would save for defense while the fast-loader replenished the first four tubes.

The Mourmetz’s survival depended on the magnitude of surprise. If they detected his periscope on their radar — and he was certain they would — he might fend off incoming destroyers with his remaining torpedoes. Antiship missiles would be better, but those were left behind in Vladivostok.

Without doubt, aircraft would come after them too. For that he had a solution. “Igla batteries on standby,” he ordered.

“Aye, sir. Already done.”

The Igla SA-N-10 was a short-range, heat-seeking anti-aircraft missile that could be launched from beneath the surface. With only three of the missiles on the Mourmetz, Manilov knew he couldn’t wage a sea-air battle with the sub-hunting aircraft. But the enemy wouldn’t know how few he had. When they saw one of the vicious little killer missiles bursting from the sea, it might hold the helicopters and S-3 Vikings at bay long enough for the Mourmetz to break out of the search envelope.

Manilov felt the eyes of his crewmen on him. He saw no rancor, no hostility, just determination and faith. For this tiny speck in time, the lives of Yevgeny Manilov and his fellow submariners were intertwined.

“Gentlemen,” he said, “I’d like you to know it has been a privilege to serve with you. Remember that we are Russians. We will fight with honor.”

“Aye, aye, Captain,” said the executive officer. Each man in the control room nodded in agreement.

“Ascend to periscope depth.”

Petty Officer Third Class Wanda Rainey, the nineteen-year-old radar operator in the Arkansas’s Combat Information Center, was the first to see it. Fresh from the Navy’s “A” school, she had arrived on the Aegis cruiser two months ago.

“Contact, bearing 290, range seven thousand yards,” Rainey called out.

The watch supervisor, Lt. Cmdr. Walt Finney, walked over and stood behind her. “Track?”

“Track 2672,” she said, reading the number that appeared on her screen.

“Link it to flag ops on the Reagan,” said Finney.

“I was just about to — Whoops.” She peered intently at the console. “It’s gone.”

Finney leaned closer, also peering into the display. “Damn!”

“Just like the one the other day. Four sweeps, then nothing. No course, no speed.”

Finney shook his head. “Here we go again. We spend the rest of the day chasing another damn ghost — a whale or some piece of floating junk.”

“Do you still want me to link it over to flag ops?”

“Wait a sec.” He continued to watch the screen, just in case the contact reappeared. Like most antisubmarine warfare officers, he knew you could get yourself branded as a hipshot if you were too quick to jump on spurious targets, sending ships and airplanes running off after shadows. With experience and a cool head, you evaluated these things. You made a judgment call before you called in the hounds.

Half a minute later, he was still evaluating when the sonar operator called out, “Sonar contact, screws in the water, bearing 310, range—” The operator’s voice went up an octave. “Oh, man! It’s a… it’s a torpedo! Range five thousand yards. No… make that two torpedoes!”

As he called out the contacts, his voice rising in pitch, he punched a mushroom-shaped button that sent an alert to the combat information rooms of every vessel in the battle group.

Finney ran to the sonar console. “What the fuck is going on?”

“Three torpedoes!” yelled the sonarman. “No, goddammit, we got four now! Four torpedoes in the water, Mr. Finney. Looks like two hundred down, bearing 305, four thousand yards inbound.”

Finney felt the hair stand up on his arms and neck. He knew the information on the sonar screen was being repeated on a similar screen in flag plot in the Reagan.

This is a drill, he thought. It had to be some kind of stupid damned exercise to see if all this gee-whiz shit really worked. No one had fired a real torpedo at an American ship for over fifty years.

“Bearings 300, 290, 280, range three thousand to five thousand yards,” called out the sonarman. “All tracking on Reagan.”

Finney could see it now on the screen. The computer-enhanced display made the sonar returns look like pulsing yellow worms. They were in trail, diverging in about a five-degree spread.

All moving at forty knots toward USS Ronald Reagan.

Finney turned to the tactical display, checking the disposition of the battle group. the Reagan was nestled in the middle of the formation like a mother hen surrounded by her chicks. On her starboard beam were the two screening destroyers, O’Hara and Royal. On the far side, cruising off the carrier’s port beam, was the ammunition ship Baywater. Two miles in trail was Finney’s own ship, the Aegis cruiser Arkansas.

The torpedoes were on a path that would take them between the lead destroyer, USS Royal, and the trailing vessel, USS O’Hara. Every ship in the battle group was maneuvering now, responding to the torpedo alerts.

“The decoys are deploying,” reported the sonar operator. He pressed his finger against the display, leaving an oily print. Finney could see the sonar echoes of the decoys as they spilled into the wake of each warship.

This is no goddamn drill, he thought. With morbid fascination he stared at the pulses on the display. Real ships, real torpedoes. It didn’t make sense. Who the hell would be firing torpedoes?

Reagan was in a hard turn to starboard. Both O’Hara and Royal were making their own tight turns to starboard inside the massive ship’s radius. On the screen the decoys were casting a large acoustic clutter behind each ship.

The torpedoes were ignoring the decoys.

“Two thousand yards and closing,” called out the sonar operator.

Rear Adm. Langhorne Fletcher kept his eyes riveted on Claire. As she told him what she had heard in San‘a, his eyes steadily narrowed. The features of his lean face seemed to harden.

The four of them — Fletcher and Claire, Boyce and Maxwell — sat at the small table in the admiral’s stateroom, directly below the flag bridge.

“Ms. Phillips, you’re quite sure that your contact, Mr.—”

“Maloney.”

“You’re sure he mentioned Mr. Babcock by name?”

“Yes, sir. Several times.”

“And you are certain that he—”

Fletcher stopped. A drink skittered across the glass table. The ship was leaning hard to the port side.

Fletcher’s telephone was ringing. While the others at his table watched, he snatched the phone up, listened for a moment, then said, “I’m on my way.”

Heading for the door, he grabbed his float coat survival vest. “Thank you, Ms. Phillips. Your story has cleared up several issues for me. Now all of you get to your stations. the Reagan is about to go to general quarters.”

He dashed out of the compartment, feet pounding on the steps as he ascended the ladder to the flag bridge.

The voice of the bosun’s mate boomed over the public address system: “General quarters! General quarters! All hands, man your battle stations. This is not a drill.”

As Fletcher stormed into the flag bridge, he saw that everyone in the space — Vitale, Morse, the flag chief yeoman — was staring at the tactical display on the bulkhead.

He looked at the display and said, “Oh, shit.”

The torpedo tracks were pulsing yellow on the screen. They were close, diverging at separate angles toward the Reagan in a fan-shaped pattern. The first two were sliding off behind the carrier’s stern. The second two torpedoes were aimed amidships.

Fletcher realized again that a hundred-thousand-ton aircraft carrier didn’t dodge and weave like a destroyer. Not even a cruiser, which was the largest vessel he had commanded, could elude forty-knot homing torpedoes.

The torpedoes must have been fired at close range. And they weren’t going for the decoys, which meant they were still in an inactive guidance mode.

Not much longer, he knew.

Instinctively he looked out at the whitecapped sea for the distinguishing white wakes. He knew that they didn’t really look like that. These fish were almost surely running deep, invisible from the surface. Not until the last few seconds of their run would they arc upward to explode into the hull of their target.

A blur of impressions sped across Fletcher’s mind. Something had gone horribly wrong, and it was just coming to him what it was. The traditional military chain of command had been severed. Instead of reporting directly to his superiors — Fifth Fleet, CincLant, the Chief of Naval Operations — Fletcher had been receiving orders from a civilian official. Worse, he had not reported the circumstances to the officers above him.

It was a classic mistake — one that had been committed before with tragic consequences.

Torpedoes were homing in on the USS Reagan, and the dismal thought occurred to Fletcher that it was his fault. In his great vanity and hubris, he had taken leave of his judgment. He had allowed his command authority to be suborned by —

The door to the flag bridge burst open. A white-faced Whitney Babcock entered the compartment as the first torpedo struck the Reagan.