Attack of the Seawolf

CHAPTER 30

The noise of the explosions was loud, even through two inches of HY-80 high-yield steel hull plating.

Vaughn counted, finally coming up with eight explosions.

He looked over at Lennox.

“Those choppers, they’re gone. Maybe we’ve got our air support from outside the bay.”

Lennox shook his head.

“That was just a few SLAAMs from the Seawolf, the sub-to-air missiles, like they used against the choppers when we were aground on the sandbar.”

“How do you know?”

“Look at the traces on the screen. The choppers still up are all headed west to a single bearing. It has to be the launch position of the Seawolf.”

“So now Seawolf’s in trouble.”

“Looks like it, but her skipper’s a good one.”

“Who is her skipper?” a weak voice asked from the forward control room.

Vaughn stared. There in the doorway to the forward passageway was Captain Sean Murphy, bandaged and in a sling, his throat wrapped in a bloody gauze bandage, his shoulder in so many bandages he looked like a mummy. His eyes appeared to drift, as if he were about to fall asleep on his feet. In fact, as Vaughn hurried over to him, he began to sink to the floor, and passed out. Vaughn was able to keep the captain from hitting the deck, but Murphy was clearly out cold.

“I should take him back to his stateroom,” Vaughn said.

“No, leave him here or he’ll just try to get up and get in here when he comes to. Bartholomay, grab the captain’s mattress and pillow and set him up on the deck by the door to sonar.”

Black Bart hurried forward, returning with the mattress.

He and Vaughn lifted Murphy onto the makeshift bed and covered him with a blanket. He was shivering, his skin pale. As Vaughn looked down at him. Murphy lifted his eyelids, squinting through the slits.

“Who?”

“What Skipper? You should try to rest, sir—”

“Who is … Seawolfs … captain?”

“Pacino, sir,” Lennox said.

“Michael Pacino. He said he knows you.”

Murphy half-smiled, some color returning to his face, just before he lost consciousness again, this time his breathing slow and steady.

Vaughn stood. “At least he’s alive.”

“Not for long. As soon as they’re done with Seawolf they’ll be coming after us.”

“Look,” Vaughn said, pointing to the waterfall sonar display. “What the hell is that?”

A broad, incredibly loud sound blanked out the waterfall display for a few seconds, the noise narrowing to a streak that moved rapidly through the bearings, ending up on the bearing to the Chinese aircraft carrier.

“I don’t know, but I’m going to see.”

Lennox didn’t need to raise the scope to see what happened next. The sound of the explosion from the carrier was enough.

When the ASW standoff missile floated to the surface, its central processor waited for the feel of air on the unit’s skin. The momentum of the tube launch quickly brought it to the choppy surface, and its accelerometer told it that its upward progress had momentarily stopped as it lost the buoyant force of the water. A broach sensor dried out and sent its signal to the central processor, the signal the unit waited for.

The rocket motor’s solid fuel lit with the energy of a barely controlled explosion, thrusting the missile from the sea into the air. Unlike a Javelin cruise missile, whose rockets merely did a pop up to give the jet sustainer engine a chance to spin up, the ASW standoff weapon was altogether rocket powered. Although its range was significantly less than a Javelin, it did not carry a jet engine or a large fuel tank or a set of control wing lets or an elaborate navigation system, all of which took up volume and weight. Instead, it had a lightweight processor, a simple tailfin positioner, a small radar transponder for final target confirmation, a relatively small rocket motor and a large charge of explosives. Its warhead was three times the size of the Javelin’s, the explosive power more than three times the punch because of its state-of-the-art shaped charge. The Ow-sow’s nose cone was pointed, designed for supersonic flight, allowing it to cover enormous stretches of ocean in mere seconds, and making it more difficult to shoot down in mid-flight than a subsonic Javelin.

The missile now climbed to its apogee, a mere thousand feet, then began a dive to its target. By the time its transponder found the large target some two thousand yards ahead the missile was traveling at Mach 2.4 and still accelerating. It approached the target, having been airborne less than thirty-five seconds, and hit the aircraft carrier amidships on the port side, crashing into the number-two turbine room before detonating.

The explosion from the warhead blew a sixty-foot wide hole in the flight deck, knocked four turbines off their foundations, killed one hundred and seventy-five men and put a fifteen-foot gash in the ship’s hull.

At an altitude of twelve hundred meters, the limit of visibility, pilot Chu HuaFeng was traveling east, intent on closing the submarine contact that had been pinpointed by the helicopters of first and second squadrons, when the white-flame trail burst out of the sea west of the submarine contact. As he watched, stunned, the rocket traveled in a graceful flat arc. He barely realized that he had jerked the aircraft’s stick in a violent motion, trying to keep the rocket in view as it descended back toward the sea, never having risen more than a few hundred meters. He had the odd momentary thought that the rocket was beautiful, that its perfectly shaped arc was sculpted by the wonders of Newtonian physics. But in another compartment of his mind he began to realize that the missile was headed east, toward its target, and that the target could only be the Shaoguan, his father’s flagship.

And as the missile descended and hit the carrier and exploded into a hundred-meter-wide mushroom cloud of flame and smoke and shrapnel, Chu HuaFeng felt an explosion in his mind, an explosion of anger, as well as a trembling so intense that the jet was picking up the vibrations in his stick hand and converting it to aileron and elevator motion. His aircraft began to shake so violently that Lo Yun asked over the intercom if they had been hit. Only then could Chu focus his energy on flying and away from the sight of his father’s burning ship.

He brought the aircraft around and headed for the foamy sea that marked where the missile had been launched from below. The enemy submarine was there, he thought, but it would not be there long.

“Extend the MAD probe, Lo,” Chu ordered. “And arm the depth charge.”

Two minutes later Chu’s Yak was over the sea from where the missile had come and he flew a tight circle around the spot, the magnetic anomaly detector picking out the position of the submarine contact.

“Depth charge armed and ready,” Lo reported. “We have contact on a submerged vessel on MAD. Contact is definite and shallow.”

Chu cut in the lift and idled the cruise engines. The aircraft hovered over the exact position of the submarine.

In a few seconds the people who had dared launch the destructive rocket at the Shaoguan would be dead. Only then could he fly back to what was left of his father’s ship.

“All ahead flank!” Lennox ordered as the sounds of a hull breaking up came through. The sonar screen showed the bright angry trace at bearing zero six seven, now northeast instead of due east as the ship made progress and got closer to the “finish line.” Now that the carrier was hit by whatever it was the Seawolf had fired, Lennox wanted to get beyond her and to international waters as soon as he could. He was no longer concerned with leaving a wake on the surface that would pinpoint their position. It was clear that the aircraft and surface ships were intent on attacking Seawolf. And since Tampa was useless in a fight, the only thing he could do was get the ship and her crew out of the bay and into the safety of international waters.

Still, even as the ship’s deck vibrated with power, he couldn’t help feeling guilty and frustrated at not being able to help. For a moment he wondered how he could live with himself if Tampa survived and Seawolf went to the bottom. Seawolf had seemed so invincible that he had always assumed it would be Tampa that would never make it. Abruptly he heard Murphy’s voice:

“XO,” Murphy’s voice rattled, “we can’t leave Seawolf. We’ve got to help.”

Lennox and Vaughn looked over at Murphy, who had been lifted from his mattress and was now sitting in front of Pos Two.

“Sir,” Vaughn said, “three of our tubes leak, not one of the torpedoes is whole and the firecontrol computer is blown to pieces. The torpedo room console is shattered. There’s nothing we can do to help—”

“The Javelins, we have to launch the Javelins.”

“Sir,” Vaughn said, looking at Lennox, “the computer is gone and we can’t target them manually. The Javelins are inert.”

“No,” Murphy said. “Get one of the firecontrol techs. Get a signal simulator and” — Murphy coughed, a rattling hacking sputter— “open up the signal cable, input a signal to open the door and launch the weapon.”

“But there will be no target,” Lennox told him.

“Just launch them. The liftoffs will … confuse the Chinese.”

“Sir,” Lennox said, “we don’t have a missile tech, they’re all in shock, unconscious or dead. And we don’t have a signal simulator. And who knows where the cable connectors are? I’m very sorry. Captain, somewhere in Korea Bay there’s a carrier air group that’s supposed to take over now … Seawolf, with whatever help she can get from the air group, will have to get out of this without us. Our cards have been played.”

Murphy stared up at Lennox, then lowered his head, and for a moment Lennox thought he’d lost consciousness again. He hadn’t. He was trembling slightly, from anger and frustration, Lennox guessed.

“Eng, mark our ETA at the finish line,” Lennox ordered, the bite in his voice showing some of his own frustration.

Vaughn went to the chart table, glanced at the sonar display one last time, took out his dividers, checked the ESGN position a second time, then said to Lennox:

“The ETA is negative, XO. We’re here. We crossed the finish line two minutes ago. We’re now 1.1 nautical miles into international water. We made it!”

Lennox looked at the sonar display, his face still grim. The Tampa had indeed made it out of the bay.

But now there was no way Seawolf would.

Commander Jim Collins taxied the F-14 to the number one catapult while latching his oxygen mask to his flight helmet, the word MUGSY printed in block letters above the visor of the helmet. Collins commanded VF-69, the Reagan’s F-14 squadron. He was on his last sea tour as a pilot, and hated the idea of leaving the flying fleet for nuclear power school, where he was assigned to learn how to command a nuclear aircraft carrier. The thought of spending a year with a bunch of green submarine-bound ensigns at nuke school was an unhappy one, as was the notion of spending two years as XO of a carrier before he could spend four years in command. He wasn’t a fool and realized he should take some satisfaction in having been chosen for higher command, but he would still find it hard to give up flying supersonic fighters. It was what he did. Watching the action from the bridge of the carrier didn’t exactly compare to seeing it from the cockpit.

The thought of this operation being the last for him made the adrenaline flow. The cockpit was an extension of his body, the sky waited for him, as did the Chinese fleet. He would not need to wait much longer.

His body ached from the hours in the ready room preparing for the mission, the hours without sleep, waiting for the go order.

Finally, his F-14 was lined up on catapult one, the deck sailors attaching the catapult to the nose gear

Collins checked his instruments, the twin turbines purring aft, waiting to be kicked into full thrust. Collins tested his ailerons, rudder, and elevators, the last item on the checklist. He spoke into his intercom to his radar intercept officer. Lieutenant Commander John Forbes.

“Ready, Bugsy?”

“Ready, Mugsy.”

The radio handles had developed separately years before, but now somehow it seemed fitting that the squadron commander and his RIO would go by gangsters’ names. To some deck-bound types they were considered loose cannons.

Collins nodded to the deck officer below. Aft of the aircraft a large thrust-deflector shield rotated upward to protect the deck crew from the F-14’s jet exhaust.

The deck officer signaled with his wands, and Collins’s gloved left hand reached the throttle levers and pushed them forward to their stops, the jet turbines aft shrieking as they spooled up. Collins watched the instruments, then pulled the levers right past the de tents and forward again into the AFTERBURN position.

Far aft, the turbines’ nozzles opened and injected fuel into the jet exhaust, the hot gases igniting for the second time, adding even more thrust to the jet’s push.

Collins looked out his canopy to the Deck Officer and saluted. The Deck Officer, now crouched low on the deck, his forward leg bent, his aft leg ruler straight, quickly waved his wand forward in a big arc, the wand finally touching the deck, then coming up to point straight ahead down the deck into the wind. The catapult operator activated the cat, and Collins’s F-14 rocketed down the carrier’s deck under the three-g acceleration of the steam-driven catapult and the F-14’s own jets on full afterburners.

Collins’s skin stretched aft, his body thrown into the seat as the big jet accelerated. The deck and the dark sea flew toward him as if he were falling through a blurred tunnel. At the end of the cat the jet was doing one hundred and fifty knots, enough to stay airborne, but barely. Collins felt the jolt as the catapult disconnected, freeing his nose wheel of the deck, and the ship faded astern as he retracted the landing gear, the jet surging forward as the gear pulled up out of the slipstream.

The jet continued accelerating as Collins pulled the stick back, and the sea and the carrier shrank behind as the fighter clawed its way skyward, the airspeed and altimeter needles winding up on the panel. Collins smiled at the sheer joy of flight, pulling the jet over into a tight turn, entering the pattern to wait while the other pilots in his squadron took off and joined him. As soon as they were aloft he would lead the way to their hold-point two nautical miles east of the line from Lushun to Penglai, the line of Chinese international waters.

With luck, once they were there, they would get the word to fly in and kick ass.

The ship had taken on a fifteen-degree list to port and had begun to settle noticeably into the water. Fleet Commander Chu Hsueh-Fan continued to stare out the port bulkhead glass windows toward the west, hoping to catch sight of the fleet sinking the American submarine. The ship seemed quiet now, the engines long since dead, the fires continuing to rage but the firefighting given up by order of Ship Commander Sun Yang. The flooding was uncontrollable, the damage extending through four major compartments to port and amidships. The abandon-ship routine was almost complete. All the lifeboats and rafts were over, all the survivors floating in the boats watching the crippled vessel.

Somewhere far below an explosion rumbled through the bowels of the dead ship, the detonation sharp at first, then settling into a sustained roar. Chu shivered at the sound, the carrier’s death-rattle. The ship’s heel increased suddenly to twenty-five degrees, the deck becoming a steep ramp. Ship Commander Sun Yang broke into the room, the door slamming against the bulkhead, the tilt of the ship keeping the door from latching open, as Yang stared at Chu.

“Fleet Commander, our helicopter is waiting. It can’t hold onto this deck much longer. The ship is about to capsize.”

Chu turned around, his face lit only by the dim battery-powered battle lantern. His face was deeply lined.

“You go. Transfer the flag. Get that submarine. I will stay here—”

“Sir, you can’t do this. Tien is already waiting in the helicopter. This is Tien’s fault. If you go down with this ship his story will be the one they believe.”

“You tell the story. I let Tien botch this operation … I will join my men who suffered for it. Now go.”

Sun Yang was about to speak when the deck began to roll further to port, now a dangerous thirty-degree angle. He shook his head, turned and made his way up the steep deck to the door.

“At least try to swim out of here, sir. My helicopter will circle the water to find you …”

Sun ran down the steps to the flight-deck level, the passageways barely illuminated by the battle lanterns, emerged from the superstructure and paused while his eyes adjusted to the dark. He made out the gaping hole in the deck, a brief hellish impression, the torn steel girders, the ripped piping, the dangling cables, mangled deckplates, the jet-fuel fires and reflections of fires from the lower decks, and the sight of some two dozen torn bodies. Another distant rumbling explosion shook the deck, the energy of it more a feeling than a sound, the bass of the shock vibrating Sun’s chest, the treble barely registered in ears already abused by the earlier explosion when the missile hit the ship.

He became aware of the sound of beating helicopter rotors and ran toward the sound, skirting the deep gash in the ship, and found the Hind helicopter hovering over the ship, no longer able to idle on top of the deck because of the steep angle. Sun threw himself toward the door, and men grabbed him as the helicopter lifted off the ship.

Just as the Hind cleared the deck the huge carrier, now inert scrap metal, began to capsize, its huge form rolling to port, the splash a phosphorescent burst of foam as the superstructure hit the water on the port side. Soon the entire superstructure vanished into the sea and the deck became vertical, exposing the flank of the ship’s hull. For a moment the hole in the hull revealed itself as the ship continued to roll, then stopped, the ship completely upside down, the bow deeper than the stern. After another minute, all that was left of the ship was her four huge brass screws, the blades waving mournfully toward the sky. Finally the stern went down, and the P.L.A Navy aircraft carrier Shaoguan vanished into the rain-swept water of the Go Hai Bay.

The pilot of the helicopter flew around the bubbling turbulence of water where the ship had once been, but finding no survivors outside the lifeboats and rafts, flew on to the west.

Tien Tse-Min looked out the window at the foam marking the spot where the aircraft carrier had been.

“Stupid fool. He should have listened to me. I tried to tell him the submarines would be coming out of the north passage, not the south…”

In the darkness Tien could not see Sun Yang’s eyes glaring at him.

Forty meters under the dark water of the Go Hai Bay, the strategy room of the Shaoguan was now upside-down and flooded with water. Fleet Commander Chu Hsueh-Fan was still conscious, still aware of the water around him. He had been a strong swimmer all his life, and even now he instinctively had held his breath. The room had toppled quickly, and he remembered taking his last deep breath as the windows shattered and admitted the flood of bay water, the water cold as it smashed him against the starboard bulkhead.

The room had rolled completely over, leaving the battle lantern on the floor instead of the ceiling, its weak light insistently illuminating Chu’s too real nightmare.

The ship had gone down so fast that the pressure rise had ruptured Chu’s eardrums. He held onto the hood of what had once been the radar repeater, which now hung from the ceiling. It was almost a welcome event when the crushing grip of sea pressure smashed his ribcage and he gave up his last air to the sea. The battle lantern failed, leaving darkness. Chu lost consciousness, and four minutes later was brain-dead. The corpse of the Shaoguan came to rest on the bottom of the deep passage of the Bohai Haixia Strait. One last explosion sounded from one of the boiler rooms, and then she remained quiet.

Michael Pacino shut his eyes in concentration as Jeb’s announcement came over his headset.

“Conn, Sonar, multiple aircraft overhead circling our position. If you put up the scope I think you’ll see about five of them. Most of the contacts are helicopters but I’ve got a definite jet in the mix. And that’s not all. The two destroyers are close now and slowing. I’m guessing they’re inside of their weapons range.”

“Jeb called it. Skipper,” Keebes said. “Firecontrol range to Target Fourteen is twenty-six thousand yards. He’s within SS-N-14 range.”

“What now. Captain?” Morris asked, an edge in his voice.

Pacino ignored him.

“Conn, Sonar, the aircraft overhead are backing off.”

“Say again?”

“The aircraft are flying away, they’re bugging out.”

“That’s good,” Morris said.

“No,” from Keebes, his face grim. “It means the Udaloy destroyer, Target Fourteen, has decided he’s the senior man and wants to fire the killing weapon. An SS-N-14 will be on the way any minute.”

Morris stepped close to Pacino, who was staring into space in deep thought. Morris tapped his shoulder.

“Pacino, what are you gonna do?”

Michael Pacino blinked and looked at Jack Morris for a long moment, his face blank and hard. When he spoke his tone was that of someone stating the obvious.

“We surrender.”