Attack of the Seawolf

CHAPTER 22

Leader Tien Tse-Min felt the rush of air as the bullet flew by his ear, felt a sticky wetness on his neck from the blood that came from Captain Murphy, who twitched in his arms. The commando had shot at him and instead hit the captain. He dropped the hostage and the pistol and bolted for the ladder behind him, thrusting himself out of the cavern of the submarine, wondering if he would feel the rounds of the American’s machine gun crashing into him. What he heard were the sounds of the commando’s footsteps as the man ran toward him, but fear propelled Tien out of the hatch and onto the deck before the man got to him. Tien wondered momentarily if the commando had been running to catch him or to attend to the captain. It no longer mattered. He felt more than heard the two additional bullets from the direction of the American, but the shots missed and by then Tien had reached the top of the ladder.

He emerged from the forward hatch to a fiery landscape, the destroyer hulks burning, the fuel in the water of the slip burning, gunfire coming in from the pier, the helicopters overhead spraying bullets onto the ship. He had a brief impression of motion, of the destroyers and the pier moving away from him as the submarine, incredibly, moved backward, the water of the slip flowing swiftly over the bow as the ship backed up. It was true — the Americans had somehow found a way to recapture the submarine and were driving away with it in spite of the platoon of heavily armed guards Tien had stationed in the ship’s control room. How could his troops have been overcome in seconds since the explosions sounded from the pier?

Impossible or not, it was happening right before his eyes. He continued out of the hatch, his body’s momentum propelling him forward along the sloping bow of the submarine. He took a deep breath and dived into the water of the slip, closing his eyes against the scummy oil floating on the surface, came up for air, spitting out brackish bay water, and watched as the submarine backed clear of the slip, two heads visible at the top of the ship’s conning tower, one of them driving the submarine.

Tien swam to the berth that had been occupied by the frigate Nantong astern of the sub. He could only hope that it would be chasing the American submarine.

He found a maintenance ladder leading up to the pier, and climbed out of the oily bay water. In front of him were the troops of an armored unit of the P.L.A, the troops firing their weapons without effect at the retreating submarine.

Tien watched as the ship pulled out, the wake boiling around its bow as it reversed its way into the channel water of the bay.

He found the man who seemed to be in command and took his radio, calling for the Hangu airfield, where he knew there was a fleet of Hind assault helicopters.

On the third try he reached the base and convinced the duty officer to scramble the helicopter gunships.

“How long for the Hinds to get here?” Tien shouted.

“Five minutes.”

Tien waited, hoping that five minutes would be soon enough.

Lieutenant Pig Wilson lay on the deck forward of the port rack of torpedoes in the forward compartment’s lower level torpedo room, waiting for the last Chinese sniper to make a mistake. When he and Chief Python Harris had first inserted into the room there had been at least a dozen guards. The initial volley of shots had dropped four, sending the others for cover. Unfortunately, there were too many places to hide in the room, including inside the tubes themselves.

In the rush of taking the room Pig had heard a torpedo tube door slam shut. No doubt one of the guards had dived into an empty tube, hoping to pop back out unexpectedly and shoot the SEALs from behind.

But Pig knew how to lock a tube from the central console in the room. He peeked up at the torpedo room central console. The top of the console was burned out and full of holes, but the controller section for the port tube bank looked as if it had been hastily repaired and rewired, the plastic function keys ripped out with crude toggle switches installed in their place.

Hoping the repaired switches worked, he had thrown a switch and watched as the thick steel ring rotated over the dogs of the inner tube door. He could hear the faint sound of a man shouting, the sound muffled and resonant, as if the noise came from inside a metal can, which in a way it did. Pig threw a second switch to vent the tube to the torpedo room, opening a valve in a pipe on top of the tube, the pipe intended to make sure no trapped air remained in the tube when it was filled with water. The third switch was the best; the marking above it said FLOOD. Pig hit the switch, opening up the tube to the water in the tube tanks, filling the tube with seawater all the way to the vent valve, which automatically shut when the tube was full of water. There followed a rushing noise, louder shouts from the tube. By the time the vent valve shut, the tube was full of water, and all human sound was extinguished.

But they couldn’t all be that easy, Wilson knew.

The room was the most vulnerable of all the spaces they would be raiding, full of weapons and their high explosive warheads as well as the volatile fuel. A single bullet would be enough to cause a fire that could kill the whole ship … the self-oxidizing torpedo fuel, once lit, could not be extinguished by anything — it burned under water, it burned when blasted by a CO^ or PKP or foam-extinguisher, it just burned until the fuel was gone. That kind of violent fire would blow every warhead in the room, creating a chain reaction that would breach the hull, perhaps even cutting the ship to pieces. One goddamned bullet.

When the stun grenade exploded in the space, Pig held his breath, but heard only the clatter of guns dropping to the deck and the screams of the guards as the stun juice hit them. After a moment of quiet, Pig and Python began to search the space.

Fighter Sai, the last Chinese P.L.A guard remaining alive aboard the Tampa, managed to escape Pig and Python and bolted for the stairs leading from the torpedo room to the middle level, his AK-47 clattering against the rails of the stairs as he ran. He ran aft along the passageway between the crew quarters and officers’ country, heading toward the crew’s mess to the tunnel and the aft compartment. He knew a hiding place where he hoped they wouldn’t look for him.

When the Americans thought they were safe in their recaptured boat, he would emerge and take over the ship, killing the complacent, overconfident Americans with some of their own weapons. Or at least he could sabotage the vessel, sufficient to sink the ship somewhere in the bay.

Sai reached the corner of the galley and turned into a short passageway leading starboard. He thought he heard an American shouting something and worried he’d been seen. At the end of the passageway was the massive hatch to the aft compartment that lay open on its latch. Without stopping to shut the hatch Sai climbed through and ran along the tight tunnel leading to the aft compartment, and felt the deck tilt as the ship turned at high speed.

Midway along the tunnel Sai stopped at the door to the room he privately called the forgotten compartment.

Forgotten because it seemed to be between the forward and aft compartments, but other than the one tunnel going through it there was no access to the space. The one door to the space was set into the wall of the tunnel and it had a window with a mirror that rotated with a hand wheel providing a view into each corner of the room. Inside the space there were large pieces of equipment, mostly tanks or storage containers.

Sai knew that no one ever ventured into the room because the oval door to the space was locked with a thick chain and padlock. No one went in, no one ever came out. There were a hundred places where no one would see him from the tunnel. He was feeling better.

As Sai shot the chain of the lock and turned the wheel of the door’s latch, he ignored the yellow-and magenta-colored sign set above the door as well as the panel next to it flashing red letters. He pulled the thick door open, marveling at its thickness and heaviness. Once inside the room, on a grating platform on the other side of the door, a suffocating steamy heat assaulted him. What was the compartment’s original purpose? Part of the engine room But if so why would it be locked? Why was it so hot? Sai pushed the thoughts from his mind and shut the door, then climbed down the two ladders to the grating at the lower level and found a place to sit next to a large steel tank, keeping the tank between himself and the window of the door high above.

The sign Sai had been unable to read was printed in block letters in English: CONTROLLED ACCESS — NO ADMITTANCE — HIGH RADIATION AREA. The panel flashing the red letters read: WARNING — REACTOR CRITICAL. The tank that Sai sat next to, his hiding place, was the pressure vessel of the Tampa’s nuclear reactor, which was then at fifty percent power.

Sai could not feel the radiation as it went through his body. The gamma radiation ionized the molecules of his cells as the waves penetrated, the radiation some ten million times the strength of an X-ray, the equivalent of standing next to a nuclear explosion. The neutrons from the uranium atoms’ fissioning slammed into his tissues, the flux of the radiation vaporizing the structure of his cells.

The first indication Sai had that something was wrong was his hair standing on end as if he had grabbed a hot wire. The second sign came within ten seconds, when Sai’s eye lenses changed from being clear to being black and opaque, leaving him blind.

His abdomen began to swell with fluid buildup as his tissues tried to compensate for the massive damage.

When his stomach ballooned he could no longer see it from the blindness.

Unfortunately, in a sense, for Fighter Sai, his brain was the last organ to be affected by the radiation, protected as it was by the bones of his skull, which acted as a partial shield, leaving a capacity to feel the effects of the radiation inflating his body to several times its normal size. He was still alive when his abdomen exploded. An observer standing at the window of the door to the compartment would have seen only a dark stain in the bilges.

Fighter Sai’s death marked the end of the occupation of the submarine Tampa by the Chinese P.L.A. Inside, the ship again belonged to the U.S. Navy. The same could not be said for the outside.

Aircraft Commander Yen Chitzu jogged out of the ready-building off the taxiway at Hangu, pulling on his flight helmet and blinking the sleep out of his eyes.

He only half-cursed the late hour. A year before he would have been mumbling obscenities about the senior officers and whether they had any idea what time it was. Now, with the White Army closing on Beijing, the landscape of reality had changed. Now when the alarm to scramble to an aircraft blared in the ready building Yen rushed to his aircraft without a complaint.

He climbed up the step over the 23-mm forward gun into the upper cockpit of the Mil Hind-G helicopter, pulled his feet up and over the sill of the door and landed in the thinly padded seat, then shut the cockpit door after him, already starting in on his preflight checklist while his weapons systems officer, Leader Ni Chihfu, checked the weapons pods and, apparently satisfied, climbed into the lower forward cockpit. The Hind was the largest assault-helicopter gunship in the Chinese P.L.A Navy, the ship licensed for construction from the Russians, the new variant named the G, although it was essentially identical to the F variant of the old Red Army. This particular helicopter was fairly new, its interior still smelling of the vinyl and plastic and paint.

Below in the forward cockpit Ni ran through his checklist, tested the intercom, announced he was ready. Yen waved at the fighter out on the pad, who backed away, and put on ear protectors, then snapped the toggle for the electrical starting motor for number two turbine on the port-engine control-console and watched the engine tachometer as the turbine spun up to speed, the whining noise coming from over his left shoulder. At ten thousand RPM he snapped up the second toggle marked FUEL INJ, beginning the fuel injection to the combustors, then toggled in the IGNITION switch, lighting off the combustion cans. The tachometer needle lifted as the engine became self sustaining He pushed up the throttle-tab to stabilize the turbine above the idle point, then repeated his actions for the starboard number-one turbine, the sound of it spooling up adding to the earsplitting noise-level in the cockpit. When both turbines were up, he engaged the clutch, connecting the power turbines’ output shafts into the main reduction gearbox.

The gears began to moan as the main rotor overhead began to spin slowly, taking some five seconds to complete its first revolution of the seventeen-meter diameter four-bladed rotor.

It took almost a minute for the main rotor to accelerate to full idling speed, and while Yen waited he plugged in his radio headset and adjusted the UHF to the frequency designated for this mission. Immediately he heard a man speaking his call sign on the radio.

Yen listened for a moment and acknowledged, transmitting that he was now taking off.

He lifted the collective lever on his left side, checking the tachometer to ensure that the automatic throttle was compensating for the drag of the increased rotor pitch. As the aircraft lifted off the pad he pushed on his right anti-torque pedal. The heavy assault helicopter lifted slowly off the asphalt of the pad, lights marking the boundary of the pad rotating to the left as the chopper slowly turned to the right. For a moment Yen paused, waiting for the second Hind helicopter to start its main rotor and lift off. When the nose of Yen’s Hind pointed south, he stopped the rotation with his left anti-torque pedal while easing the collective. The helicopter hovered above the pad at two meters, and Yen frowned, aware he was burning fuel while waiting for the second Hind. Finally the other chopper was ready. Yen raised the collective and pushed forward on the cyclic stick between his knees. The helicopter took off from the pad and accelerated forward, suddenly getting a burst of lift as it passed through transition velocity, the rotors now in air undisturbed by the rotor-wash blasting off the ground.

The Hind accelerated to one hundred and fifty clicks, the Hangu base fading away, the terrain of the land coming in rapidly from ahead. Within a few minutes the water of the bay flashed below the fuselage, and a few moments after that, the piers of the P.L.A complex at Xingang came into view.

Yen smiled as his target became visible.

The ship began to respond to the rudder, the bay beginning to turn beneath Lennox. His mind momentarily fogged by Baron’s death, it took him a moment to realize that the ship was in fact turning in the wrong direction, the stern headed south toward the supertanker pier instead of north. Lennox had intended to have the stern come around to the north, where he would have put the rudder amidships and gone ahead flank, just like pulling a car out of a driveway and. heading off to work. But goddamn if the screw wasn’t walking the stern in the opposite direction as the rudder and so pulling his tail in the wrong direction. No wonder they always used tugs to get out of the slip.

Lennox realized hundreds of lives depended on his next decision. The stern was now pointing almost southeast, too late to reverse the direction of the turn.

He would either have to continue in a semicircle going backward until his bow was pointed east or go forward with the bow pointing north and do a one-hundred eighty-degree turn to the south. The first option could cause the stern to ram into the supertanker-pier. The second would cost him extra time.

Whatever, he couldn’t continue to be at the mercy of the goddamned rudder and screw. He had to get the ship to be predictable again. As he watched the bay turn around him in the wrong direction, he felt a pain in his chest and wondered if he was having a heart attack. No … it had to be the anxiety from the screwed-up maneuver. Good thing Murphy was below, Lennox thought. At least the captain couldn’t see this amateurish ship handling.

“All ahead full,” Lennox barked.

“ROGER, ALL AHEAD FULL.”

The screw aft of the rudder, a moment before pumping water forward, slowed, stopped and began rotating in the opposite direction, now pumping water aft, thrusting the ship forward. The water above the scimitar blades of the spiral screw boiled and churned in angry phosphorescence. Lennox felt the deck tremble, the hull not accustomed to the force-reversal. The ship slowed to a stop and then began to accelerate as it surged forward. Around them the water was a bubbling foam from the power of the main engines, the P.L.A pier drifting by amidships. The only problem was that they were now going north, not south.

Lennox raised his head above the scarred steel of the top of the sail to look aft, making sure the rudder was turned to the right instead of left. A wrong rudder direction could send them crashing into the P.L.A piers, which would be the end of the rescue attempt.

The deck’s vibrations steadied out somewhat, but the power of the main engines at fifty percent reactor power and the full-rudder order still caused perceptible vibrations. As the ship came around to the south Lennox heard the sound of the Dauphin helicopters coming closer, preparing for another strafing run. He ducked down and reached for a clamshell on the port side of the cockpit — the clamshells were hinged panels that covered the top of the cockpit when rigged for dive, smoothing it out with the contour of the top of the sail. Without the clamshells the cockpit hole would cause a flow-induced resonance, like a breath of air over the mouth of a soda bottle. The clamshell was heavy, made of inch-thick HY-80 steel for breaking through polar ice. While Lennox struggled to raise the panel into the horizontal position he silently thanked the design engineers who had replaced the old fiberglass clamshells with hardened steel. Once the port shell was up, he raised the center forward-and-aft shells, which left him only a small cubbyhole to look out of on the starboard side.

As the choppers approached for their strafing run Lennox ducked into the clamshells on the port side.

The bullets impacted directly over his head, zinging off the heavy steel. Lennox poked his head out the starboard clamshell, ducked quickly back in as he saw the second chopper in its approach. This time he hugged the deck of the cockpit, the loud clanging of the bullets seeming closer, harder. When the noise died down he put his head out again and saw that the ship was now almost completely turned around, heading south into the deep channel. They should be out of there in no time … He was about to order the rudder amidships, thinking ahead to his next order to increase speed to flank, when he saw the buoys just ahead of him. Sure as hell he was no expert on Chinese coastal buoys, but it struck him that the only plausible reason he could think of to put a line of buoys this close to a deep channel was that there was a submerged obstruction or. God forbid, a sandbar.

“Right hard rudder!” he shouted into the VHF radio. Too late.

The Tampa hit the submerged sandbar at over twenty knots, slowing down to a complete stop in less than two seconds, plowing her bow deep into the sand.

Lennox was thrown into the forward bulkhead of the cockpit, smashing his cheek, breaking his nose. The deck was tilted absurdly to the port side, a twenty-or twenty-five-degree list. Lennox looked aft and saw that the foam was no longer boiling up around the screw. The deck no longer vibrated with the power of the main engines — they must have lost propulsion when they hit the sandbar, which meant he couldn’t use the engines to back the sub off the sand.

Lennox tried his radio, wondering if it broke when he hit the cockpit lip. He heard a new sound, the sound of the rotors of a big assault chopper approaching from the north. He looked up in time to see the flying bulk of the Hind helicopter circling around to approach the crippled submarine from the bow. As it drew up, it went into a hover, its rockets and guns hanging on struts protruding from the gunship’s flanks. Then a second Hind pulled into a hover behind it.

For a moment Lennox forgot the radio. The painful truth was that the operation was almost surely blown, and it was his fault.

Aircraft Commander Yen Chitzu looked through the plastic bubble of the Hind’s upper cockpit at the scene below. The reason for the Hind’s call-up from Hangu was immediately apparent. Pulling out of the P.L.A slip was a large black submarine, the one that had been captured spying on the Chinese coastline. The destroyers that had been its guards were smoldering and sinking into the water of the pier’s slip, the water around them in flames as the kerosene and diesel oil burned.

An armored P.L.A force on the pier was firing tank guns and artillery into the water, the rounds missing the sub as it entered the bay channel still going backward.

Two kilometers to the southeast a Jianghu-class frigate was reversing course to turn and come back to attack the escaping submarine. To the south, two poorly armed Dauphin helicopters were coming in on a futile strafing run. Yen activated his radio and ordered the Dauphins out of his airspace, then called the second Hind in his formation to follow him in.

Next he radioed the captain of the Jianghu frigate and told him to hold his fire while the Hinds lined up. He brought the aircraft around a wide circle, crossing over the deck of the frigate and approaching the submarine, slowing to a hover.

Now he spoke into his intercom to the weapons officer, Leader Ni Chihfu, ordering him to arm the Spiral missiles and the UB-32 rockets and to commence firing, then sat back to watch the fireworks.

On the Tampa’s bridge the VHF radio sputtered:

“REACTOR SCRAM! WHAT THE HELL HAPPENED UP THERE?”

Lennox spat into the radio.

“We ran aground.” We, hell, he thought, I ran us aground.

“What happened to the reactor?”

“WAIT ONE, THEY’RE CHECKING.”

The Hind helicopters hovered barely a halfshiplength in front of the sail at twenty feet. Lennox, still standing with his head exposed out the starboard clamshell opening, stared at the missiles slung on missile rails on booms extending from the flanks of the choppers. He could even see the laser sights on the helmets of the chopper pilots in the nose cone cockpits as they aimed the missiles. Further ahead in the channel, south of the supertanker-pier, he could see the Jianghu frigate driving up closer, its 100-mm gun up forward moving, the barrel lining up on his position.

Lennox’s VHP radio squawked:

“CAUSE OF THE SCRAM WAS SHOCK OPENING THE SCRAM BREAKERS. WE’LL HAVE POWER IN ABOUT TWO MINUTES. THE ENGINEER WANTS TO KNOW HOW BAD THE GROUNDING IS. CAN YOU GET US OUT OF THIS?”

The frigate had come to a stop a ship length in front of them. The helicopters hovered, at most one hundred feet away. Lennox continued to stare at the choppers’ and frigate’s guns and missiles, the world tilted in a twenty-five-degree slope. Forget answering the radio, he thought. He ducked down into the cockpit and waited for the missiles and gun projectiles to hit, wondering how it would feel to die.