Fortunes of War

15

Pavel Saratov knew there were a lot of ships anchored off Yokohama, but he didn’t know how many until he was within the anchorage, which extended for miles. Over a hundred, easily, he estimated. He reduced the boat’s speed to six knots. “The big freighter fifteen degrees right of the bow, about two thousand meters. Containers four deep on her deck. She is our first target.” Saratov was wearing the sound-powered headset. He had sent the talker below. The only other person on the bridge was the second officer, who was scanning behind and to both sides for enemy planes or warships. “We have her, sir.”

Down below, they were using the radar. All the skipper had to do was designate a target. He had already given orders that they would shoot one torpedo at a time, at targets he picked. He wanted to do all the damage possible. The torpedoes were huge — twenty-one inches in diameter, twenty-seven feet long — and carried warheads containing 1,250 pounds of high explosive, enough to sink most ships. Twenty seconds later the first torpedo was on its way. A minute after that they fired another torpedo at a laden bulk carrier. The first one hit the container ship with a dull thud that carried well through the water and was clearly audible aboard the submarine. The bulk carrier and the third target, another container ship, were hit in turn. The fourth torpedo was expended on yet another container ship, a huge one festooned with lights. Still moving at six knots, the sub was deep inside the anchorage, completely surrounded by ships, when the crew fired the fifth torpedo at a monstrous freighter riding deep in the water. It was close, almost too close, but the torpedo warhead exploded with a boom that sounded quite satisfying to Pavel Saratov. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, the freighter began to sag in the middle. The torpedo broke her back. Yes!

Saratov turned to exit the anchorage to the east. One tube was still loaded. In the torpedo room the crew began the reloading process. It would take about an hour to get one of the huge torpedoes into a tube. Well, he had given the Japanese something to think about. No doubt they were alerting their antisubmarine forces right now. The sooner he got this boat out of Tokyo Bay, the better. “Flank speed,” he told the people below. “Give me every turn you’ve got.”

Sushi called Toshihiko Ayukawa at home on the scrambled telephone. “Sir, I thought I should call you immediately. We intercepted a transmission from a Russian submarine. He says he is in Tokyo Bay.”

“What?” Ayukawa sounded wide-awake now. “It’s right off the computer, sir. I thought you should be informed.”

The raw, encrypted signal was picked up by a satellite and directed to a dish antenna on top of the building. From there, it went to a computer, which decoded it, translated the Russian into Japanese, and sent it to a printer. The whole sequence took thirty-five seconds — the paper took thirty seconds to go through the printer — if the Russians were using one of the four codes the Japanese had cracked, and if they had encoded their message properly. Sometimes they didn’t. “Read it to me,” Ayukawa said. Sushi did so. When he had finished Ayukawa spent several seconds digesting it, then asked, “Have you alerted the Self-Defense Force?”

“Yes, sir,” Sushi said blandly, managing to hide his irritation. Ayu-kawa’s question implied that Sushi was incompetent. Apparently Ayu-kawa thought he had no time to be polite, to observe the simplest courtesies. In any event he didn’t try. “The explosive charges in the refinery mentioned in the message began exploding twenty minutes ago, sir. The Lotus Blossom refinery at Yokosuka. And a freighter in the Yokohama anchorage has just radioed in, saying it was torpedoed. “How long have we had the submarine’s message?”

“It came in only minutes ago, sir. I called the Self-Defense Force, alerted harbor security and the Yokosuka Fire District. Then I telephoned you.”

“Very well.” Ten seconds of silence. “A submarine!”

Ayukawa was appalled. Those military fools told the prime minister that they had sunk all the operational Russian subs that were under way when the war broke out at Vladivostok and Sakhalin Island. They refused to tie up scarce military assets guarding ports in the home islands when every ship was needed to conquer an empire. After all, what could you expect of Russians?

Exploding refineries and sinking ships would prove the military men miscalculated, embarrass everybody, cause the government to lose face. Another disaster caused by overweening pride and shortsightedness. Atsuko Abe, take note. “I had better call the minister,” Ayukawa said to no one in particular. He hung up the telephone without saying good-bye. Sushi cradled his instrument and made a face.

The guided-missile destroyer Hatakaze was three hundred yards away from a berth at Yokosuka Naval Base pier when the communications officer buzzed the bridge on the squawk box. A flash-priority message from headquarters had just come out of the computer printer: “Russian submarine attacking ships Yokohama. Intercept.”

Hatakaze’s captain was no slouch. He ordered his crew to general quarters, waved away the tug, and steamed out into the bay, working up speed as quickly as the engineering plant would allow. Hatakaze had been continuously at sea for two weeks. She participated in the destruction of the Russian fleet rusting in Golden Horn Bay and helped shell troops on the Vladivostok neck that were trying to impede advancing Japanese forces. During all that shooting, her forward 127-mm Mk-42 deck gun had overheated, which caused a round to explode prematurely, killing two men and injuring four more. Her aft gun was working just fine. As soon as she could be spared, the force commander sent Hatakaze home for repairs. Due to the shortage of ammunition, most of Hatakaze’s remaining 127-mm ammo was transferred to other ships, yet she still had a dozen rounds on the trays for the aft gun. Hatakaze was making twenty knots when the radar operators picked Admiral Kolchak from among the clutter of ships, small boats, and surface return. The Russian submarine was making fifteen knots southwestward toward the refinery. That merely made her a suspicious blip; her beaconing S-band radar made the identification certain. Although the submarine lacked the excellent radar of the Japanese destroyer, the destroyer was a bigger, easier target. The operator of the sub’s radar saw the blip of a possible warship — a fairly small high-speed surface target coming out of the Yokosuka Naval Base area — and reported it to Captain Saratov as such.

Pavel Saratov pointed his binoculars to the south, the direction named by the radar operator below. The rain had stopped; visibility was up, maybe to ten miles. There was the destroyer, with its masthead and running lights illuminated. After all, these were Japanese home waters. Saratov pounded the bridge rail in frustration. The destroyer would soon open fire with its deck gun. If the sub submerged, the destroyer would pin it easily, kill it with antisubmarine rockets — ASROC. He had known it would end like this. Entering the bay had been a huge gamble right from the start. A suicidal gamble, really. He looked southwest, at the blazing refinery and the ING tanker moored at the end of the pier. He had been intending to use the sixth torpedo on that tanker. A maneuverable destroyer, bow-on, would be a difficult target. Another glance at the destroyer. “What is the range to the destroyer?” he demanded of the watch below. “Twelve thousand meters, Captain, and closing. He has turned toward us, speed a little over thirty knots.”

“And the tanker?”

“Two thousand five hundred meters, sir.”

“Give me an attack solution on the destroyer. Set the torpedo for acoustic homing.”

“Aye aye, sir.”

“And keep me informed of the ranges, goddamnit!”

“Yes, captain.”

Submerging in this shallow bay would be suicidal. Saratov dismissed that possibility. He looked longingly at the ING tanker, a target of a lifetime. She was low in the water, a fact he had noted as he entered the bay and steamed by her. She was full of the stuff. “We’ll run in against the tanker and cut our motors.” The Japanese destroyer captain wouldn’t be fool enough to risk putting a shell into that thing. With the tanker at our back, Saratov thought, maybe we have a chance. At least he could get his men off the sub and into the water. “Aye aye, sir.”

“Come thirty degrees right, slow to all ahead two-thirds.”

He heard the order being repeated in the control room, felt the bow of the sub swinging.

“Destroyer at eleven thousand meters, sir.”

Saratov looked back at the oncoming destroyer. Why doesn’t he shoot? The refinery was blazing merrily. At the base of the fire, he could just make out the silhouettes of fire trucks. The Spetsnaz divers certainly had done an excellent job. Saratov swung the glasses to the tanker pier. Several fire trucks with their flashing emergency lights were visible there. He wondered why they were on the pier; then his mind turned to other things. He checked the destroyer again. Why didn’t he shoot? They most certainly were in range. “Twelve hundred meters to the tanker, Captain.”

The captain of the Hatakaze could see the burning refinery with his binoculars. He could not see the black sail of the Russian submarine that his radar people assured him was there, but he could see the blip on the radar repeater scope just in front of his chair on the bridge. And he could see the return of the tanker pier and the tankers moored to it. The range to the sub was about nine thousand meters. ASROC was out of the question, even though the target was well within range. The rocket would carry the Mk-46 torpedo out several kilometers and put it in the water, but the torpedo might home on one of the tankers. Captain Kama elected to engage the submarine with the stern 127-mm gun. Not that he had a lot of choice. He was already within gun range, but he would have to turn Hatakaze about seventy degrees away from the submarine to uncover the gun. Of course, if the gun overshot, one of the shells might hit a tanker. If the ING tanker went up, the results would be catastrophic. He decided to wait. Wait a few moments, and pray the submarine didn’t shoot a torpedo. “Prepare to fire the torpedo decoys,” he ordered. “And watch for small boats. Tell Sonar to listen carefully.” Listen for torpedoes, he meant. What a place to fight a war!

The refinery fire was as bad as it looked. The conflagration lit up the clouds and illuminated the tanker pier with a ghastly flickering glow. Numerous small explosions sent fireballs puffing into the night sky. These explosions were caused when fire reached free pools or clouds of petroleum products that had leaked from ruptured tanks or pipes. The fire fighters had no chance. There was too much damage in too many places. As the fires grew hotter and larger, the glow cast even more light on the sea. The submarine approached the ING tanker, which was limned by the fire behind it. Saratov could see people moving about on the decks, probably trying desperately to get under way. He imagined the tanker skipper was beside himself. “All stop,” he told the control room. The submarine glided toward the tanker, losing way. Two hundred meters separated the two ships. “Left full rudder.”

The nose began to swing. “Looks like another destroyer, sir. Coming out of Yokosuka. Bearing one nine five, range thirty-two thousand meters.”

“Keep the boat moving, Chief, at about two knots.”

“Aye aye, sir. Two knots.”

The deck of the submarine was barely out of the water. He had never ordered the tanks completely blown. “Secure the diesels. Switch to battery power.”

“Battery power, aye.”

Saratov kept his binoculars focused on the Japanese destroyer, which was closing the range at about a kilometer per minute. The throb of the diesels died away. He could hear the rush of air and the crackling of the refinery fire. Somewhere, over the refinery probably, was a helicopter. He could hear the distinctive whopping of the rotors in the exhaust. “We have the first destroyer on sonar,” the XO reported. “Be ready to fire tube six at the destroyer at any time.”

“Aye, Captain. We’re doing that now. Destroyer at seven thousand meters.”

“How long until the first reload is ready?”

“Another twenty minutes, Captain.”

Terrific. We have exactly one shot. If we miss … He must have seen us! “You ready to shoot?”

“Yes, sir.”

Saratov waited, his eyes on the destroyer. He wasn’t shooting, which Saratov thought was because the tanker lay just behind. He could hear voices, shouts, in a foreign language that Saratov thought might be English. It certainly didn’t sound like Japanese, and it sure as hell wasn’t Russian. “Six thousand meters, and he’s slowing.”

Saratov had been waiting for that. The Japanese skipper wouldn’t hear much on his sonar at thirty-two knots, yet the high speed was an edge in outmaneuvering the torpedo. “Tube Six, fire!”

The boat jerked as the torpedo went out, expelled by compressed air.

Aboard Hatakaze, the captain was watching the tiny radar blip that was the submarine’s sail. If only he would submerge, clear away from that tanker!

The destroyer’s speed caused too much turbulence and noise for the bow-mounted sonar, so he had ordered the ship slowed. Way was falling off now. “Torpedo in the water!”

The call from the sonar operator galvanized everyone. “Right full rudder, all ahead flank,” Captain Kama ordered. “Come to a new heading zero nine zero. Deploy the torpedo decoys. Have the after turret open fire when their gun bears.”

The deck tilted steeply as the destroyer answered the helm.

“He’s turning eastward, Captain,” the attack team told Saratov, who was still on the bridge, his binoculars glued to his eyes. “I see that, goddamnit. What’s his speed?”

“Fourteen knots. His engines are really thrashing. I think he is accelerating.” The destroyer was almost beam-on now. Flashes from the gun on the afterdeck! Even with that tanker directly behind the submarine, he is shooting!

“Dive, dive, dive. Let’s go down.”

Saratov unplugged his headset. Hanecki was already going through the hatch. The deck was tilting. Saratov clamored through the hatch and pulled it down after him just as the first of the five-inch shells hit the water…, right beside the sail. “Periscope depth!”

“Periscope depth, aye.”

They could hear the shells splashing into the water. Damn, the shooting was accurate. “Running time on the first fish?”

“Thirty more seconds, sir.”

“Give me a ninety-degree right turn. Tell the torpedo officer to get a tube loaded with all possible speed.”

“Aye aye, sir.”

“Thank you, XO.”

They were just flat running out of options. He wasn’t ready to tell them yet, but if the last torpedo missed, he was going to surface the boat alongside the tanker and abandon her. He wasn’t going to let his men die in this sardine can when they had nothing left to fight with. He was thinking about this, watching the heading change as the boat turned, waiting for the boat to sink the last five feet to periscope depth, when he heard the explosion. The torpedo! It hit something. But what?

The men cheered. A roar of exultation. “Quiet!”

“Keep the turn in, Chief, make it a full three hundred and sixty degrees. All ahead one-third. Raise the big scope.”

He glued his eye to the large scope when it came out of the well. The small attack scope was nearly useless at night. The destroyer was still moving. At least the front half was. The stern … Jesus! The torpedo had blown it off. “The torpedo blew the ass off the destroyer,” Saratov said to the control room crew. “Pass the word. It is on fire and sinking.” When the whispers and buzzing died away, Saratov asked, “Sonar, what do you hear?”

“Not much, Captain. The ING tanker has started its engines. It will be getting under way soon, I think.”

“Let’s get out of here, Captain, while we are still alive.” The second officer said that. He looked pale as a ghost. Saratov looked from face to face. Several men averted their gaze; one chewed on his lip. Most met his gaze, however. The second officer couldn’t stop swallowing — he was probably going to puke. Saratov took the microphone for the boat’s PA system off its hook, flipped the switch on, adjusted the volume. “This is the captain. You men have done well. We have hit the enemy hard. We have destroyed a huge refinery, sunk three ships at least and damaged two more. We have just killed a destroyer that was trying to kill us. I am proud of each and every one of you. It is an honor to be your captain.”

He paused, took a deep breath, thought about what he wanted to say. “We are going to surface in a few moments, see if we can set this ING tanker on fire; then we are going to get out of this bay, run for the open sea.”

The second officer lost it, vomiting into his hat. “Do your job. Do what you were trained to do. That is our best chance.”

He put the microphone back into its bracket. “There’s another destroyer up there, Captain.”

“I am aware of that.” Saratov looked at the XO, lowered his voice. “Let’s leave the radar off. Without the radar beaconing, we are just another tiny blip.”

“As long as we keep our speed down,” Askold muttered. “Sonar, what’s the position on that second destroyer?”

“I estimate twenty thousand meters, Captain. It’s hard to tell for sure, with all the noise in the water.”

“Keep listening.”

“Do you want to finish reloading one of the bow tubes before we surface, Captain?” Askold asked. “The Japanese will put the time to better use than we can. Every gray boat they have will be strung across the bay’s entrance if we give them time enough.”

He raised his voice. “Sonar, leave the radar secured. No emissions.”

“Aye aye, sir.”

“Have the forward torpedo room break out the rockets. We will surface, blow the bow tanks. Pop the hatch and put a man on deck with an RPG-9. We might as well try them.”

If the rockets failed — and they probably wouldn’t even fire: He’d had them for six, no, seven years — he would just call it a day and run for it. The torpedomen would get a tube reloaded soon, and boy, it would be nice to have a loaded fish when he went down the bay. “Up scope.”

He walked it around while the XO talked to the forward torpedo room on the squawk box. Hatakaze’s bow was on fire, dead in the water. The stern seemed to have sunk. The ING tanker was still against the pier, the fire in the refinery visible behind it. The second destroyer was not in sight. If that skipper had any sense, he would station himself in the entrance of the bay and wait for the submarine to come to him.

He gave the chief a new heading, to the northeast, so the ING tanker would be off the port side. Hatakaze was three or four kilometers southeast, so that wreck wouldn’t be a factor. In an hour, the sky would be light with the coming dawn, and there would probably be four destroyers waiting. Pavel Saratov lowered the periscope and gave the order to surface.

Saratov opened the hatch and went up the ladder to the tiny cockpit on top of the sail. The second officer followed, taking up his usual station looking aft and to both sides. The tanker was on the port bow, about eight hundred meters away. If anything, the refinery fire was more intense, brighter, than it had been fifteen or twenty minutes ago. Several areas that had not been burning before were ablaze now. He could hear the roar of the flames here, almost a kilometer away. The firestorm sounded like rain and wind on a wild night at sea. Even the clouds seemed to be on fire. They were shot through with sulfurous reds, oranges, and yellows, lighting the surface of the black water with a hellish glare. The submarine lay inert on the oily sea. Beldecks, the crew was blowing water from the forward tanks to lift the deck so that it was no longer awash. Saratov and the second officer scanned the surface of the bay for the destroyer they knew was about, somewhere. The bottom of the burning clouds was about a thousand feet above the water and visibility was good, maybe ten miles. “Who is the shooter?” Saratov asked on the sound-powered headset. “Senka. He knows all about it.”

“Get him on deck. We haven’t got all damned night.”

He shouldn’t have said that. Shouldn’t have let the men know the tension was getting to him. Where in hell is that destroyer?

When he put the binoculars down there was a man on deck, reaching down into the hatch. When the man straightened he was holding an ungainly tube in his hands. He put it on his right shoulder. The batteries in those grenade launchers were probably as dead as Lenin. Senka didn’t waste much time. He braced himself, aimed for the tanker, and fired. The batteries worked. The rocket-propelled grenade raced away in a gout of fire that split the night open. Straight as a bullet it flew across the water, straight for the giant steel ball that contained liquid natural gas. A flash. That was it. Two kilos of warhead in a flash, then nothing. “Try another one. Give him another one.”

At least the rocket reached the target, which Saratov had feared was a bit out of range. The shaped charge must have hit a girder or something, Saratov thought, examining the tanker through his glasses. He could just see the feathery lines of the gridwork of girders that supported the pressure vessel. If the grenade didn’t actually reach the pressure vessel, the warhead would never damage it. Senka didn’t waste time. Apparently he knew what he was about. He put the launcher on his shoulder; then he was examining it, then he threw it into the water. He reached down into the hatch for the third one. Senka fired again. The missile ignited and raced across the black water toward the tanker. Another flash on impact. Then nothing. “Try the last one; then we are out of here.”

“Five more minutes on the torpedo, Captain.”

Saratov acknowledged. Where is that second destroyer? A flash from the right. Saratov looked. He saw a destroyer, bow-on, headed this way. other flash from the bow gun. A shell hit the water just beyond the sub. Saratov was about to yell “Dive,” but he saw Senka face the ING tanker and raise the launcher to his shoulder. Saratov opened his mouth just as a shell hit the aft top corner of the sail and exploded. A piece of shrapnel caught the captain in the side of the head and knocked him unconscious. The shrapnel disemboweled the second officer, killing him instantly. The XO reached up through the hatch and grabbed Saratov by the ankles. He had a firm grip on the skipper and was pulling him into the hatch when Senka, on deck, fired the last RPG-9. This time the rocket went through the gridwork that supported the pressure vessel and vented its shaped explosive charge into the vessel itself, puncturing it. The intense pressure on the liquefied natural gas inside the vessel caused it to vent out the hole in a supersonic stream that made a high-pitched, earsplitting whistle. Several people on the tanker heard it. That was the last thing they would ever hear. In less than a second, a large cloud of natural gas had formed outside the hole, which was still molten hot from the explosive. The gas ignited. The fireball from this explosion grew and grew; then the pressure vessel split. A thousandth of a second later, six thousand tons of liquefied natural gas detonated. The explosion was the worst in Japan since the atomic bombing of Nagasaki, and almost as violent. The ING tanker was vaporized in the fireball, as was much of the tanker pier. One of the tankers still moored there had been taking on gasoline, and it too detonated, adding to the force of the explosion. The other tanker, off-loading crude oil, was split open by the blast like a watermelon dropped on concrete. Its cargo spontaneously ignited. The concussion and thermal pulse of the initial blast leveled the remaining structures at the refinery. The petroleum products that had not yet been consumed merely enhanced the force of the expanding fireball. Of course, the people on the tankers and pier and fighting the fires in the refinery were instantly cremated. When the concussion reached the submarine eight hundred meters away, Michman Senka, who had fired the final PRG-9, was swept overboard. It didn’t matter to Senka, because he was already dead, fried by the thermal pulse of the explosion. The pulse instantly heated the black steel hull of the boat and sent the water droplets and rivulets that had been on the deck wafting away as steam. A tenth of a second later the concussion arrived, denting the submarine’s sail, smashing loose dozens of the anechoic tiles that covered the boat’s skin and pushing it so hard that the sub went momentarily over on her beam. Pavel Saratov knew nothing of all this, because he was unconscious. Somehow as the boat went over, the XO managed to pull him through the hatch. A ton or so of water came in before the boat righted itself. Water also poured through the hatch in the forward torpedo room and would have flooded the boat had the sub stayed on its side any longer. Miraculously, the submarine righted itself, and the men in the forward torpedo room managed to get the hatch closed and secured. In the sail, the men there wrestled with the hatch and dogged it down just as the second concussion and the bay surge from the explosion pushed the boat over on her beam a second time. When the captain of the destroyer Shimakaze, charging for the Russian submarine, saw the fireball growing and expanding, his first thought was that one of the shells from his deck gun had hit the tanker, just exactly the calamity he had warned the gunners against in the event they got a chance to shoot. The thermal pulse ignited the destroyer’s paint. The concussion smashed out the bridge windows and dented the sheet metal as if had been pounded by Thor’s hammer. Since the destroyer was almost bow-on to the blast, it rode through the first concussion with only heavy damage to its superstructure, its radar and antennas and stack. The helmsman was killed by flying glass. He went down with a death grip on the helm. Still making over twenty knots, the destroyer went into a turn. When the second concussion arrived, the ship heeled hard, then righted herself. The bay surge that followed, however, put her over on her beam. Unlike the submarine, she did not come up again. The fireball from the ING tank expanded and grew hotter and hotter, brighter and brighter. The temperature inside the submarine rose dramatically — until the men were being parbroiled inside a 150-degree oven. Then the temperature fell, though not as fast as it had risen. Minutes later, the temperature in the boat almost back to normal, the XO climbed to the bridge to assess the damage. Angry black water roiled over the place where the tanker and pier had been. All the small boats that had dotted the waters of the bay were gone. In three or four places the water appeared to be on fire, but it was gasoline and raw crude burning. The shore…, the city was aflame for five miles in both directions. The thermal pulses and concussions had done their work. The surges of air into and away from the fireball had done the rest. The main periscope was bent, the glass smashed. Whether from the five-inch shell of the destroyer or the blast, Askold couldn’t tell. There was no trace of the second officer, whose corpse, like Senka’s, had gone to a sailor’s grave. The XO called down a heading change, and more speed. With the main periscope out of action, he kept the boat on the surface. With her diesels driving her at twenty knots, Admiral Kolchak went southward down the bay, charging the batteries as she went. When the first light of dawn appeared in the eastern sky she was rolling in the Pacific swells. Askold took her under. She was a tiny little boat, swimming through a great vast ocean, so when she disappeared beneath the surface it was as if she had never been.