Attack of the Seawolf

CHAPTER 31

Aircraft Commander HuaFeng’s radio headset crackled with the voice of the squadron commander:

“ALL UNITS, SQUADRON ONE LEADER, THIS IS TO ADVISE YOU THAT THE CARRIER HAS BEEN SUNK BY THE AMERICAN MISSILE. WATCH YOUR FUEL AND BE READY TO DIVERT TO LUSH UN OUT.”

Chu HuaFeng’s jaw muscles tightened as he listened to the flat tone of the squadron leader marking the sinking of the flagship, and very possibly the death of his father.

“What’s the status of the Type-12, Lo?”

“Armed and ready. We have a good estimated depth of the submarine.”

“Prepare to drop,” Chu said, jockeying the jet directly over the position of the submarine.

“ALL AIRCRAFT UNITS BOHAI HAIXIA STRAIT, THIS IS UDALOY DESTROYER ZUNYI APPROACHING ESTIMATED POSITION OF ENEMY SUBMARINE SUSPECTED OF FIRING MISSILE ON FLEET FLAGSHIP. WITHDRAW TO A SAFE POSITION NO CLOSER THAN THREE KILOMETERS FROM SUBMARINE POSITION. I SAY AGAIN, WITHDRAW TO A SAFE POSITION NO CLOSER THAN THREE CLICKS FROM THE SUBMARINE. WE HAVE IMMEDIATE SILEX MISSILE LAUNCH PENDING IN THREE ZERO SECONDS, COMMANDER DESTROYER ZUNYI, OUT.”

“You ready, Lo? Drop on my mark.”

“Chu, we’ve just been ordered out of here, you need to clear the area—”

“No. We’re dropping the Type-12.”

“Chu, the commander of the Zunyi obviously wants a piece of this action. Let him have it. After he fires his damned Silex we’ll come back and let this submarine have a real treat. Come on or we can be taken out by that Silex—”

“This guy down there may have killed my father. I don’t care about Silexes—”

“You’d better, he just launched the damned thing and it’s incoming — Chu, don’t be an idiot, get us out of here.”

Chu, hating it, knew Lo was right. He throttled up the cruise engine and flew the Yak away from the position of the submarine. As the jet flew outside the one-kilometer radius from the sub, the bright flame trail from the Silex missile illuminated the cockpit.

“Conn, Sonar, incoming missile—”

“All ahead flank!” Pacino shouted.

The helmsman rang up the flank order. The deck began to tremble with the power of Seawolf’s main engines as the turbines spun at maximum revolutions, accelerating the ship away from the missile launch position.

The crew held onto consoles and handholds, waiting for the detonation, except for Pacino, who looked from the firecontrol display to the chart to the sonar repeater. The wait for missile impact seemed to stretch on and on. Pacino looked over at Jack Morris.

Sweat had broken out on the SEAL’s forehead. This wasn’t his game, waiting instead of acting. The ship continued accelerating to 44.8 knots as the reactor plant reached one hundred percent power. Pacino looked back toward the firecontrol geographic display, calculating … With a missile average flight speed of Mach 1, firing range of thirteen nautical miles, the missile flight time would be a little over one minute.

With Seawolf’s average speed since he accelerated thirty knots, in the one minute of flight time he would have the ship a thousand yards from her position at launch. If sonar had only given him half the flight time’s warning, and if the commander of the Udaloy had fired at his future position instead of his actual position, the ship would perhaps only be two hundred or three hundred yards from the missile impact point, maybe less. In a worst case, only a hundred yards, three hundred feet.

Now, Pacino thought, would three hundred feet away from a rocket-launched depth charge be enough to save the ship?

The Silex missile lifted out of the quad launcher of the destroyer Zunyi and accelerated away from the sleek warship, its tailfins moving slightly in response to the onboard processor’s commands. The missile reached apogee and arced back down toward the dark sea, the inertial navigation system aiming the missile for the position of the submarine, not its position at launch but the position it was calculated to be at time of impact. After forty seconds of rocket-powered flight, the rocket motor cut out, exhausted, the explosive bolts in the ring separating the motor from the depth charge below, jettisoning the inert rocket-motor canister.

The warhead flew on, the surface ahead approaching at Mach 0.95.

The impact of the water jarred the missile’s warhead.

The accelerometer tied into the arming circuit felt the negative four g’s of deceleration and completed the circuit to the depth-charge arming-circuit.

The depth indicator felt the pressure increase of the water as the unit sank, the pressure rising as it fell to ten meters, twenty, thirty … At a depth of forty-five meters the depth-indicator output matched the limits set by the processor’s set point and the detonation circuit software logic interlock was satisfied. The detonator went off, exploding the depth-charge warhead in an underwater fireball. The shock wave of the explosion traveled outward, seeking the hull of a submarine.

Which it did not take long to find.

The White House basement’s situation room was walled with painted cinder block, full of Formica-topped tables and cheap carpet. An entire wall on the west side was lined with communication and crypto gear. The east wall was filled with television screens, some of them selected to cable feeds from Langley, CIA Headquarters; Ford Meade, home of NSA; or the Pentagon. But two were selected to CNN, since the open media often got stories as quickly as CIA, DIA or NSA. The north wall of the room was reserved for charts and maps, in this case the Go Hai Bay. The south wall had a table filled with stale sandwiches and donuts and another one with a large coffee urn on it. Coffee cups filled the waste cans and cigarette butts were piled high in the ash trays. A door in the east wall led to the situation room’s conference area, lined with curtains, where the President would meet with the National Security Council. The press or the White House photographer often captured the NSC in situation-room meetings, the conference table neat, the curtains pressed and clean. But this morning, the table was strewn with top-secret briefing papers and the curtains were drawn.

Secretary of Defense Napoleon Ferguson stood in the conference area, chewing on a tasteless donut and washing it down with cold coffee, waiting for President Dawson and Secretary of State/ National Security Advisor Eve Trachea to arrive. He had been in the situation room all night. He had hoped he could catch Dawson’s ear when Trachea wasn’t around, but that seemed more and more difficult in recent months. Trachea was apparently becoming Dawson’s favored advisor, and Ferguson had begun to wonder why the hell he continued in the job. He had begun to feel Trachea’s guiding philosophy was to disagree with anything he wanted, which tempted him to argue for what he did not want and count on Eve to disagree. But now Dawson relied so heavily on Eve Trachea’s guidance that often Department of Defense personnel weren’t invited to meetings. NSC meetings had grown less frequent, as had Cabinet meetings.

When Dawson and Trachea arrived, Ferguson checked his watch, then sat down. He only took a few moments updating them on the situation in the Go Hai Bay, ending with his request to allow the Reagan’s air wing to overfly the bay and escort the subs out.

Dawson seemed inclined to go along, but then Trachea spoke up:

“Mr. President, this course of action would be an all-out attack against the Chinese fleet. Our agreement with your admiral was to use the Seawolf to get out the spy sub. Now there’s pressure to escalate. Why does that sound so familiar. Secretary Ferguson? “Just give us a few troops now,” you say, and later it’s ‘we need to support the troops we already have.” We cannot commit to a killing air war …”

Ferguson looked from Trachea to Dawson, who clearly was unhappy with his choice.

“She’s right, Napoleon. I only authorized the use of force for the Seawolf. The country can’t go to war over this …”

Ferguson pulled a crumpled sheet of paper from his pocket, spread it on the desk and smoothed it out before handing it to Dawson. Dawson began to read, with Trachea, who sat next to him, reading along with him. The paper was the message transmitted from the Tampa describing the torture the men had undergone when the Chinese had taken the ship. Dawson’s face went pale at first, then changed to the flush of anger.

“These are the people we’re dealing with,” Ferguson said.

“Is it possible this is exaggerated, Napoleon?” Dawson asked, the certainty on his face from a moment before seeming to evaporate.

Ferguson tried to control himself. Somehow he needed to find something to shock this well-meaning but misguided president into unleashing the aircraft.

But what …

“Chief of the Watch, prepare to emergency blow all main ballast tanks,” Pacino ordered, his eye on the chronometer.

“What are you doing?” Morris asked.

“Sonar, Captain, report the splash of the SS-N-14 as soon as you have it.”

“Captain, Sonar, aye.”

“We’re going to surface,” Pacino finally told Morris.

Morris began to protest when the overhead speaker blared out the report from sonar:

“SPLASH FROM THE MISSILE DIRECTLY ASTERN!”

“Emergency blow fore and aft!” Pacino shouted.

“Take her up, ten degree up bubble! All stop!”

The emergency blow system levers were thrown upward to the BLOW position, forcing ultra-high-pressure bottled air into the ballast tanks of the Seawolf, blowing them dry of sea water. At her already shallow depth, it took only a moment to blow the tanks dry, and the sudden increase in buoyancy forced the ship toward the surface, her nose rocketing upward.

A split second before Seawolfs sonar dome broached the sea, the depth charge from the Silex missile exploded directly astern of the ship.

Aircraft Commander Chu HuaFeng watched as the Silex missile impacted the water, the splash still phosphorescent in the bay. He flew around in a circular pattern, waiting for orders to finish off the submarine, waiting for the Silex missile’s depth charge to explode.

He watched the spot of foam for signs that the depth charge had succeeded. In a way he hoped it would fail and give him the chance to put the submarine on the bottom. He glanced at his fuel gages, saw how little fuel he had left. As he looked back down to the bay he saw a black shape coming out of the dark water. For a moment he could not believe his eyes. Half a kilometer east of the depth-charge detonation, the American submarine had surfaced, either surrendering or damaged beyond the ability to stay submerged, he decided. As the water of the depth charge explosion rained back down into the bay and its spot of foam calmed, Chu flew his Yak toward the submarine, which now bobbed in the water, no longer underway, as if it had lost its engines.

The deck jumped with the explosion. The bank of fluorescent lights in the overhead flickered and went out. The firecontrol displays and sonar repeater monitor winked out, then the lights came back on, illuminating the room in a red glow.

“Weps, get your firecontrol back and hurry,” Pacino said.

“Conn, Sonar, loss of sonar. We’re reinitializing.”

“Get it back up. Chief,” Pacino ordered. Two firecontrol technicians scrambled to the outboard side of the attack center consoles and began typing into a console hidden from the conn platform. The screens of the firecontrol system came back for a moment, then winked out.

“We’re doing a cold start. Captain,” Feyley reported, frowning over the technicians.

“Chief of the Watch, any damage aft?”

“No, Captain, all nominal. We’re checking aux machinery now.” He held up a finger.

“Sir, some leakage in the auxiliary seawater piping to the diesel. Otherwise, we seem okay.”

The deck rocked gently in the waves of the bay.

The depth indicator showed the ship on the surface.

The speed indicator read zero.

“Turner, get to the bridge and open the clamshells,” Pacino ordered.

“We’ll send up a white sheet for you to wave and a walkie-talkie to transmit that we surrender—”

“Sir, are you really going to do this?”

Morris stepped close to Pacino as he raised the number-two periscope and looked out toward the east, centering the periscope on the approaching Udaloy and Luda destroyers.

“Pacino, submerge this ship and get us out of here,” Morris said, removing his Beretta from its holster. “If you actually surrender I swear I’ll put a bullet in your head.”

Pacino pulled his face from the periscope and looked at Turner.

“Get the hell up to the bridge and follow my orders,” he barked, and Turner went to the upper level carrying the white sheet and walkie-talkie the phone talker had handed him.

Pacino then looked over at Morris, put his face as close to Morris’ as he could with his hand still on the grips of the periscope.

“Morris, I still have one torpedo and two main engines. Are you reading me?”

Jack Morris stared at Pacino for a moment, then holstered the pistol.

“Attention in the firecontrol team,” Pacino called from the periscope.

“We have the Udaloy destroyer, Target fourteen, and the Luda destroyer. Target fifteen, closing in on our position. I’m betting these guys are going to try to take us alive. Status of firecontrol?”

Feyley turned to Pacino.

“Firecontrol is nominal, cold start complete. I’m configuring the positions now and I’ll be ready in a minute.”

“Sonar, Captain, status of sonar?”

“Still working on it, sir.”

“Hurry up. XO, looks like we’ll be launching by periscope observation. You ready? Observation Target fourteen. Bearing mark, range mark, four divisions in high power. Observation Target fifteen, bearing mark, range mark, three-and-a-half divisions in high power.”

Pacino lowered the scope, waited for a minute, then raised the periscope again. This time the destroyers were very close. He called out another observation, then lowered the scope.

“Sir, we have a firing solution to both targets,” Keebes said.

“Stand by for torpedo attack. Target fourteen, tube eight,” Pacino said.

“Set the Mark 50 torpedo for shallow, low speed, direct-contact mode, active snake. Disable ACR and ASH interlocks. We will fire the unit as Target fourteen approaches, then submerge and head out of the bay.”

“Sir,” Keebes said slowly, “we only have one torpedo and there are two destroyers.”

“I know,” Pacino said.

“Standby. And Chief of the Watch, get a man up to the bridge and tell Turner that as soon as we accelerate to shut the hatch and get below, fast. We’ll be submerging immediately. Prepare to dive.”

On the bridge Lieutenant Tim Turner stood beside the open hatch of the bridge trunk, being careful not to fall the twenty-five feet down to the deck. The clamshells were open, allowing him to stand up and look out. Turner looked around at the moonlit bay, sniffing the salty air that smelled oddly bad after being submerged with their canned stink for so long. The evening was pleasant, the sea and the moon beautiful. But Turner had no thoughts of beauty, no ability to sense anything other than the urgency of the coming battle.

He looked to the east at the approaching destroyers and began to wave the white flag, even though he knew the ships were still too far away to see him.

“Approaching Chinese destroyers, this is U.S. Navy submarine Seawolf. I say again, approaching Chinese destroyers, this is U.S. Navy submarine Seawolf. We surrender. We are standing by for you to come alongside. I say again, we are standing by for you to come alongside, over.”

The ships were headed directly for them, picking up speed. Turner waved the white sheet and made the surrender call again, continuing to transmit and wave the flag for the next ten minutes, all the while expecting to see more missiles or torpedoes or aircraft with depth charges. But all he saw were the surface ships approaching the ship, the destroyers purposeful and steady. Finally his VHF ship-to-ship radio crackled with a Chinese accent:

“AMERICAN SUB SEAWOLF STANDBY FOR US TO COME ALONGSIDE AND BOARD YOUR VESSEL.”

Turner had no idea what Captain Pacino was planning. It was time for blind faith.

Secretary of Defense Ferguson leaned over the table, his face intense and flushed.

“Mr. President, I want an order to launch aircraft to rescue the Tampa and I want that order now. I’m sorry to be blunt but—”

A Marine colonel came in at that moment.

“Sorry to interrupt, sir, but we just got a message from CINCPAC aboard the Reagan. The Seawolf has surfaced in the Bohai Haixia Strait, and she’s transmitting a message to the Chinese fleet that she’s surrendering …”

Ferguson reacted first.

“What’s the Chinese fleet doing?”

“CINCPAC says they’re approaching to take her alive. They’re coming alongside.”

Ferguson looked to President Dawson.

“Sir, that’s it. Now we’ll lose the Seawolf, the most advanced submarine in the world. And her crew can enjoy Chinese hospitality, until they’re dead—”

“Ferguson, enough,” Dawson snapped. “Launch the damned aircraft. You have twelve hours and unlimited weapons release authorized. You get that submarine back, understand?”

“Yes,” Ferguson said, hurrying to the radio console, where he hoisted the handset to his ear, waiting for Donchez’s voice to come through the connection.

Chu felt like spitting into his oxygen mask.

“I don’t believe it,” he said to Lo. The commander of the Udaloy destroyer Zunyi had ordered all aircraft to stay outside of a one-kilometer radius of the American submarine, declaring that the sub had surrendered and that they were going to take it captive.

“Don’t they see it’s a trick?”

“Maybe it isn’t.”

“Just keep us armed and your eyes on that submarine.”

Pacino looked out the periscope at the approaching destroyers. The closest was the Udaloy, now at six hundred yards bearing zero nine five. The Luda was at bearing one zero five, only eight hundred yards away. That was about as close as he intended them to get.

“Chief, tell Turner to get ready to come down, but tell him to keep waving that white flag until the torpedo detonates.”

“Yes sir.”

“Firing point procedures, tube eight. Target fourteen,” Pacino called, his periscope crosshairs on the approaching Udaloy.

“Ship ready, solution ready,” Keebes said.

“Weapon ready,” Feyley said.

“Shoot!”

“Fire!” Feyley said, pulling the trigger.

The tube fired, the pressure slamming Pacino’s ears.

He watched the Udaloy, waiting.

Finally a brilliant orange-and-white-and-black fireball bloomed from the port side of the destroyer’s superstructure. Pacino turned the crosshairs to the Luda, seeing its bearing, now one zero six degrees, then lowering the scope.

“All ahead flank, steer course one zero six!”

Only then did the sound of the explosion reverberate through the hull, the violent sound of a warship dying.

“Ahead flank aye, one zero six, maneuvering answers all ahead flank, steering course one zero six, sir,” the helmsman replied.

“Sir, you’re headed straight for the Luda—”

“Chief of the Watch, tell Turner to get below! Diving Officer, submerge the ship to nine zero feet!”

The Chief of the Watch shouted into his headset and reached to the ballast-control panel to open the main ballast tank vents at the same time. The diving officer ordered the bow planes to twenty degrees dive, the stern planes to five degrees. The deck began to take on an angle. The Chief of the Watch, still following the rig for ultra quiet called “Dive, Dive!” into his headset rather than on the Circuit One PA. system.

The deck began to incline as the ship drove deep, then flattened as the Diving Officer pulled out.

On the bridge Tim Turner felt the deck beneath his feet tremble as the ship began to move. He dropped the white sheet and bent to snap up the heavy clamshell on the port side. When he stood to fold up the central clamshell he saw the Luda destroyer directly ahead. The bow wave was gone, the hull already under. His eyes were level with the shoes of the men running on the main deck of the destroyer, men running away from him … Turner stood half-frozen as the hull of the destroyer grew closer. The captain was going to ram it, he thought dimly, the thought breaking his inertia. He dropped the walkie-talkie down the bridge hatch and jumped down after it. He had reached up for the hatch when the ship hit the destroyer, the force of the collision throwing him down the tunnel.

The sail of the Seawolf hit the hull of the Luda destroyer Kaifing at a speed of twenty-eight knots, forty seven-feet-per-second. The sail’s top five feet still protruded above the water as it hit the hull of the Kaifing, but the destroyer had a draft of about fifteen feet, reaching deep enough that only a few feet separated the top of Seawolf’s cylindrical hull from the bottom of Kaifing’s keel. The leading edge of the sail crumpled, the hardened steel yielding but not rupturing, the sail designed to impact submerged icebergs under the polar icecap without giving, the designers knowing that a six-foot-thick chunk of polar ice was equivalent to a half-inch plate of steel, at least when approached at two-feet-per-second. But now Seawolf had hit the Kaifing’s hull at twenty times that velocity, and the target’s hull was not just a single plate of steel but a matrix of steel plates stretched over structural-shaped frames. As the sail slammed into the port-side hull, the steel dented, then gave way, finally tearing open into a gash large enough to allow the sail to pass through. The sail continued inward, slicing through a fuel tank, through a berthing compartment and shower room, through a passageway into a row of engineering maintenance offices and through the plate steel of the starboard side.

By the time the Seawolfs sail emerged from the far side of the Kaifing, the submarine had slowed to two knots, her kinetic energy almost expended in ripping open the hull of the Kaifing. The Seawolfs screw continued to turn, eventually accelerating her back to flank speed, but Kaifing’s screw would never turn again. The destroyer settled in the water, her lower compartments flooding as she sank to the silty bottom of the strait.

“I told you it was a damned trick,” Chu said into Lo’s intercom.

Below them the Udaloy destroyer was in flames and dead in the water, starting to sink by the bow while listing to port, crippled and near death. A half-kilometer to the southeast the Luda destroyer was closing the position of the submarine, but the sub was developing a bow wave and sinking into the water. Chu had to believe his eyes. The American submarine was not hurt at all but speeding eastward, not toward open water but directly toward the Luda-class destroyer. As he watched, the submarine’s hull vanished, leaving only its conning tower behind. The Luda’s stern boiled in foam as the ship tried to accelerate out of the way-too late.

The conning tower of the American submarine hit the Luda destroyer’s hull amidships, slicing into it.

Smoke rose from the collision, and Chu brought his jet closer to observe. The conning tower of the sub had vanished, not emerging from the other side. The Luda destroyer began to slow down, coasting to a halt, the hole in her hull now invisible as the ship settled into the water and began to list starboard, now completely stopped. Chu no longer wanted to wait to see what would happen to the second destroyer. A glance over his shoulder revealed that the Udaloy was gone, sunk, nothing left but a foamy oil slick, a few boats, and men floating in the water.

“It’s up to us, now,” he told Lo. “I’m flying over the continuation of the submarine’s course. Do you have a detection?”

“Yes, four hundred meters ahead. Depth shallow but getting deeper.”

“Drop the Type-12 on my mark.”

Chu cut in the lift-jets and throttled back on the cruise engine, finally matching the submerged submarine’s speed.

“Call it,” Chu said.

“Directly overhead now.”

“Drop!”

“Type-12 away, clear the area.”

Chu throttled up the cruise engine and sped away, waiting for the results of the depth charge.