Ohio Class

14

"Up periscope."

Stewart waited as the scope slid up out of its well, took hold of the handles when they reached his chest, and rode it the rest of the way up, circling to make sure there weren't any skimmer surprises close by.

It was night on the surface, but the Type 18 scope, switched to low-light mode, revealed the surroundings in eerie swatches of black and green, punctuated by the bright white stars of lights.

According to the plotting tables behind him, Ohio rested now just a mile south of the island of Hormoz, one of the twin guardians to the port city of Bandar Abbas.

Bandar Abbas is nestled into a bight in the southern Iranian coast just at the point where the Straits of Hormuz take a sharp elbow turn to the southwest and the entrance to the Persian Gulf proper. The bight is sheltered by the island of Qeshm, sixty-eight miles long, which at one point is separated from the coast by a shallow strait less than two miles wide. The easternmost tip of Qeshm, however, is some fifteen miles south of Bandar Abbas; just to the east of that, two small and roughly circular islands form the gateway to the sheltered waters of Iran's largest and busiest port. To the southwest is Larak, and ten miles to the northeast is Hormoz.

Through the scope, Stewart could see a scattering of lights along the coast of Hormoz. More lights gleaming south and west were probably ships and boats entering the sheltered area. Bandar Abbas itself was invisible, fifteen miles to the northwest, but the glow from the city's lights turned the sky all the way across the northern horizon a hazy green, backlighting the bulk of Hormoz Island.

This appeared to be a good place to wait out the Iranian search, at least through the night hours. Come sunrise, they would need to be gone. Hormoz was a ruggedly volcanic island just four miles across but over five hundred feet high, its highest peak capped by the ruins of a medieval fortress. Once these shallow waters became sunlit, an observer on that hilltop — and Stewart had no doubt there would be observers up there— might be able to make out the long, dark shadow of the Ohio as she lurked offshore. When daylight came, she would need to seek deeper and darker waters.

For the next few hours, however, this was a good hiding place. The shallow water — less than twenty fathoms deep at this point — offered shelter from Iranian sonar. Ohio had followed in the tanker's wake for nearly seven hours before dropping astern and creeping off to the north at a bare five knots. With luck, the Iranian subs were still following the tanker, going around the kink in the straits and headed southwest for the Gulf.

They wouldn't go too far, though, before breaking off and returning to this area to begin a careful search. They must know that Ohio's interest was in this stretch of coast — from Bandar-e Charak, 125 miles to the west, through to Bandar Abbas here in the east. They would also guess that Ohio had entered Iranian territorial waters.

Their antisubmarine warfare forces, including swarms of ASW aircraft, would be out in major strength.

"Control Room, Sonar. New contact, bearing zero-one-two. Designate Sierra Two-three-seven. Single screw, four blades. Probable commercial traffic."

"Sonar, Control Room. Very well."

He swung the periscope to the indicated bearing. There, against the black loom of Hormoz, he could see a slowly moving pair of lights casting reflections on the still water. The glow cast illumination enough for the low-light optics to distinguish the shape of the craft, with its characteristic high prow and flat stern — a native dhow, of the type known locally as a ghanjah.

A fisherman, then, or a local merchant… or, even more probable, a smuggler. The authorities in Bandar Abbas, he knew, were plagued by smugglers, carrying everything from drugs and alcohol to illicit human cargo — both refugees from Tehran's religious persecution and the victims of a far darker and more vicious traffic in slaves… even if in the enlightened years of the twenty-first century they were no longer called by that name.

Whatever its cargo, this solitary dhow was motoring slowly through the darkness close by the southern coast of Hormoz, possibly on legitimate business, but more likely, like Ohio herself, attempting to elude local surveillance.

"Down scope," Stewart ordered. The periscope was coated with RAM — radar-absorbing material — in order to reduce its radar signature and the chance of detection, but American sub skippers still preferred to reduce their exposure above the ceiling to an absolute minimum. There was also the danger of collision in these busy waterways; the sonar gang would do their best to keep him aware of approaching threats, of course, but accidents did happen, and a small, quiet craft like that dhow, its engine noise masked by the noisy waters around it, might hit the scope, and that would end the mission — and quite possibly the life of every man on board.

"So what's the game plan, sir?" Shea asked.

"We wait." He glanced at the clock on the forward bulkhead. A quarter past midnight… and in these waters, at this time of year, they could only count on another four to five hours of sheltering darkness. "Two hours. Then we find a deeper hole. And pass the word for Commander Drake, Mr. Mayhew, and Mr. Wolfe to see me."

"Aye aye, sir."

Admiral Baba-Janzadeh didn't like being awakened from a sound sleep. He had not stood a night watch for more years than he could remember, and at sixty-four he was getting too old for this sort of thing.

Still, Admiral Vehedi's call from naval headquarters had been urgent, and indicated that Bold Fire was in jeopardy, and that news commanded his full attention. He left both of his wives asleep and called a motor pool driver to take him to the Defense Ministry. There, in the basement communications center, he watched the situation unfold in lengths of colored string tacked onto a wall-sized map of the Straits of Hormuz.

Six of Iran's nine submarines were currently in the straits, searching for the giant American submarine that had vanished there during the early evening hours. Given the American's known capabilities, it could be anywhere within the straits now, though the most probable area, bounded by a rectangle of bright red string, was somewhere off Bandar Abbas — possibly close to the harbor entrance, possibly south of Qeshm. The local ASW forces had been alerted as well, and they were beginning a sweep of the harbor's waters, a sweep that would move south to Qeshm and southeast into the straits proper as the early morning hours passed. Admiral Vehedi had also put as many of his airborne ASW assets into the sky as he could. They were busy deploying sonobuoys and mines now, seeding those areas through which the Ohio would have to move.

The possibility existed, however, that the Ohio had not entered Iranian waters, but had moved south through the straits. She could be sheltering in the relatively deep waters of the international channel south of Iran's coast, or she could be making for the port facilities of the U.S. Fifth Fleet three hundred miles to the west, at Manama, in Bahrain.

Even if the Ohio was lurking now in Iranian territorial waters, the possibility remained that she would elude the search. Admiral Baba-Janzadeh had a great respect for American technology, and in particular for their ability to move submarines silently and invisibly through the tightest of defenses. His Russian teachers, former officers of the Soviet fleet, had spent a lot of time emphasizing American stealth capabilities. During the Cold War, only rarely had Russian hunter-killer subs found and successfully tracked American ballistic missile submarines like the Ohio and her sisters, and it was an open secret that their Los Angeles-class subs had repeatedly entered Soviet waters — even slipped inside of Soviet ports — to carry out missions of reconnaissance and espionage.

His Russian teachers had spent so much time on the superiority of American technology that he suspected they were trying to save face; that they were anxious to cover the fact that the Americans had penetrated their most heavily defended bastions.

Face-saving or not, the lectures had impressed Baba-Janzadeh, and he was determined not to underestimate the enemy.

Of one thing he was certain. Unless the American submarine captain had broken off and was going to join the U.S. fleet at Manama, his target almost certainly was the new special weapons complex at Bandar-e Charak. American naval commandos had attempted to penetrate that facility weeks before, and had been repulsed. Washington would be intensely curious about what was really going on there. If what Savama had reported about the capabilities of the Ohio-class SSGN conversions was accurate, the Americans could be close to landing a very large and powerful reconnaissance force in south-central Iran. Admiral Baba-Janzadeh was determined to be ready for them.

And there was one clear way he could be certain of foiling the enemy's plans.

The admiral reached for a telephone with an outside line. He wouldn't like being awakened, either, but there was no way of helping that.

"Captain!" the sonar officer called out. "Splashes ahead and to port!"

"Very well." Commander Fareed Asefi was not worried. "They are ours."

Noor was one of Iran's six Tareq-class submarines— what the West called Kilos. Noor, hull number 902, had been acquired from a cash-desperate Russia in 1993, the second of an initial purchase of three diesel-electric submersibles. Like other Kilo-class vessels, she was 74.3 meters long, displaced just over three thousand tons, and was operated by a crew of fifty-three— fifty-four if you counted the mullah Reza Sharabiani.

A moment later a sharp, ringing ping sounded through Noor's control room. Sharabiani started, looking upward. "What is that?"

Asefi smiled. "Active sonar. One of our aircraft is overhead, dropping sonobuoys. These are devices that float on the surface of the water, sending out active sonar pulses. The pulses are like radar. They reflect off of ships and submarines, are picked up by the buoy, and transmitted back up to the aircraft."

"And you say it is one of ours?"

"Assuredly, Mullah. We are well within Iranian territorial waters here. Our ASW forces are joining in the hunt for the American submarine."

"Active sonar pulses, Captain," the sonar officer announced, confirming Asefi's guess. "Iranian origin. Bearing zero-eight-one."

"Ah." Sharabiani stroked his beard, relaxing. "Then we can be sure the enemy will soon be cornered and brought to the surface. Ah… how do our pilots know that the signals picked up by their sonobuoy are from a friendly submarine, and not from the enemy?"

In fact, Asefi had just been considering that point. True, a Tareq-class sub was almost one hundred meters shorter than the Ohio. It would take a skilled sonar operator to judge target size from a series of reflected pings. Fortunately, headquarters would have put their best ASW personnel into the air for this operation.

"Captain! Torpedo in the water!"

"What?" Or perhaps not.

"Torpedo in the water, bearing zero-five-five! It has acquired! Torpedo has gone active!"

Which meant an Iranian antisubmarine torpedo was now homing on the Noor.

"Range!" With active sonar in the water, from the sonobuoy and from the torpedo itself, it was possible for Noor's sonar officer to calculate the torpedo's range.

"Sir! Twenty-eight hundred meters!"

"Maneuvering! Come hard to starboard! Make course… two-three-five! All ahead full!"

Calculations flitted through his mind, relentless and unforgiving. For air-launched ASW work, Iran used Mark 46 light torpedoes, weapons originally acquired decades ago from the United States. The Mk. 46 had a range of eight thousand meters and could travel at 45 knots. At her best, Noor could manage seventeen knots.

At 45 knots, the torpedo would cover 2.8 kilometers in just under two minutes. In that same time, Noor, running directly away from the incoming weapon, would cover about three-tenths of a nautical mile, or half a kilometer. The Mark 46 would cover that additional distance in another twenty or thirty seconds. Make it… make it…

"Torpedo impact in one minute, twenty seconds!" the sonar officer reported, beating by a hair Asefi's own calculations. Less than he'd been thinking… but then, Noor would need precious time to accelerate to a full seventeen knots, and more time still to complete her turn away from the torpedo.

"This is madness!" Sharabiani cried. "Raise them on the radio! Tell them they've fired on one of their own!"

"It's not that simple, Mullah." In fact, unlike a wire-guided torpedo from another submarine, the Mk. 46, once fired, could not be recalled or disabled. "I wish it were."

"Torpedo now at twelve hundred meters," Lieutenant Mohammadi, the sonar officer, reported. The man sounded impossibly calm, almost bored. "Time to impact, fifty seconds."

"But they are firing on their own submarine!"

"I know, Mullah. Friendly fire. It is one of the dangers of warfare."

The mullah's face had gone death-white. His beard wagged up and down as he mouthed a fervent, desperate prayer.

Fareed Asefi joined him, silently. Allah, the merciful and the most wise! If it be your will, save us!.. The captain of the Noor was absolutely convinced in the rightness of the Shi'ite Islamic cause, and of the power of almighty God. He was realist enough to know, however, that fatal accidents did happen in war, no matter how just and holy your cause.

"Diving Officer! What is our depth?"

"Sir! Depth twenty-eight meters!"

Deep, for these waters.

"What is the depth beneath our keel?"

"Sir! Depth beneath keel, fifteen meters!"

There was no hope of finding a thermocline beneath which they could hide from the approaching weapon's sonar. Sometimes you could find a thermocline out in the main channel, where the water was as much as sixty meters deep. But not here, in these shallows.

"Range seven hundred meters," Mohammadi announced. "Time to impact, thirty seconds."

"Release countermeasures!" Asefi snapped. Either God would deliver them in the next few moments, or He would not. There was yet a human trick or two, however, that Asefi knew he could use to improve the chances of divine intervention.

A pair of cylinders dropped from the Noor's flanks, swiftly falling astern. Moments after release they began filling the water around them with a dense cloud of bubbles, created by the interaction of seawater and the chemicals they carried. With luck, the torpedo's active sonar would reflect from the bubbles, breaking its lock on the Noor.

"Maneuvering! Come hard right, twenty degrees!" Asefi ordered. It would help if, when the torpedo punched through the decoy bubble cloud, Noor were no longer directly ahead of it. Once the torpedo lost its target, it was programmed to begin circling, sending out active pings in quest of a target. The idea was to turn away from it and try to get outside of its reach. After traveling eight kilometers, the torpedo would exhaust its fuel supply.

"I have lost the torpedo, Captain," Mohammadi announced. Several men let loose a cheer.

"Silence!" Asefi yelled. "We're not out of this yet!" Sonar had lost the incoming target behind the bubbles, but it would emerge any moment now….

"I have the torpedo again, Captain," Mohammadi reported. "Torpedo is now circling… torpedo has re-acquired."

Someone in the control room groaned aloud. Asefi did not bother to reprimand him. The countermeasure ploy had failed.

"Range now four hundred meters," Mohammadi said, an emotionlessly recited death sentence. "Time to impact… twenty seconds."

Sharabiani let loose a wail of despair, dropped to his knees and began praying aloud.

"Diving Officer!" Asefi yelled. "Blow all ballast! Up planes! Emergency surface! Surface!"

The deck tilted sharply, bow rising, and Asefi heard the sharp and boiling hiss of seawater being blasted from Noor's ballast tanks by high-pressure air.

There was just a chance that the sudden maneuver would outfox the simple-minded torpedo bearing down on them. Besides, if the Noor were about to be hit by a warhead consisting of forty-three kilograms of PBXN-103 high explosives, he would buy precious time for the crew if they were hit on the surface, rather than fifty meters down.

"Time to impact, ten seconds! Eight seconds! Five… four… three… two… "

"Explosion in the water!" Caswell called, pulling the headset from his ears. The blast, a loud, solid thump like the slamming of a door, had been loud enough to leave his ears ringing. He looked at the bright white line appearing now on the waterfall. "Bearing two-one-five degrees."

"Sonar, Control! Give me a range estimate!"

"Sir… About ten thousand yards."

"Confirmed, Captain," Dobbs said at his side. "That matches the track for Sierra Two-four-four."

Caswell stared at the waterfall display, as if to see beyond the moving points of light to the drama unfolding somewhere in the depths up ahead. Twenty minutes ago he'd been yawning. After standing the afternoon watch the day before, he'd been scheduled for the midnight watch this morning, and he was running short on sleep. All tiredness had evaporated, however, when out of the hiss of background static he'd heard the quiet hum of an approaching Kilo — Sierra Two-four-four, approaching steadily from the southwest.

He'd reported the contact, and in seconds the skipper had cut Ohio's forward movement to a couple of knots. Now she was creeping along the seabed, hoping to remain invisible against the bottom. Moments later Dobbs had picked up tonals that he'd interpreted as a helicopter passing overhead… and moments after that they'd all heard the sharp if distant ping of the sonobuoy. The Iranians had been scattering the things all along the southeastern coast of Qeshm Island, evidently hoping to spot the Ohio as she crept southwest, ten miles off the shoreline.

The launch of a torpedo, though, had caught them all by surprise. From the sound of things, the Iranian ASW helicopter had picked up one of their own submarines, mistaken it for Ohio, and popped a fish at it.

That sharp thud echoing through the sea told them all that the Iranians had just scored an own goal.

Ears still ringing, Caswell picked up the headset and pulled it back over his ears. Like any good sonar tech, he could pick up more with his ears than the boat's electronics could sort out and put on the waterfall display.

It took no special effort, though, to hear that curiously high-pitched shriek in the distance, the sound of a woman screaming, overlaid with deeper thumps and popping sounds.

"Control Room, Sonar," he said. "I'm getting breakup noises from Sierra Two-four-four."

"Acknowledged."

Caswell and the others in the sonar room were silent for a long time. Submariners everywhere share a special bond with all other submariners, whatever their nationality or politics, a camaraderie born of shared suffering and danger. What was happening to that other submarine out there could easily happen to Ohio and her crew.

He found himself thinking of those other sailors, and hoping that they made it ashore safely.

The torpedo had struck Noor on her starboard side near her stern. The shock had thrown everyone in the control room to the deck and, as electrical circuits and generators failed, plunged the entire vessel into darkness.

Emergency lighting had switched on moments later, just as the vessel broke through the surface. Asefi rose to his feet, grasping a stanchion to stay upright as the deck continued to tilt. He could tell from the feel that Noor was heeling over to starboard and going down by the stern. The engine rooms must be flooded already.

"Abandon ship!" he yelled. He fumbled for the intercom handset, wondering if internal communications were still working. "All hands, all hands! Abandon ship!"

The exodus began in an orderly fashion, but as seamen began jamming up against the narrow hatches, panic set in. Most were choosing to move forward, up the slanting deck, rather than risk going aft to try to make it out the escape hatch on the afterdeck, which was almost certainly submerged.

Men screamed and shouted, punching one another. Within the struggling tangle he heard the voice of Mullah Sharabiani, ragged with fear, invoking the name of

Allah.

Mohammadi and a few others had elected instead to climb the ladder straight up out of the control room and through Noor's sail. Asefi waded into the struggling roadblock, grabbing men, yanking them back. "That way! That way!" he shouted. "Go that way!"

A shrill, weird scream echoed through the stricken vessel — steel bending and tearing under unimaginable stress. The flooding of the aft compartments, he thought, was putting so much weight on Noor's spine that it was breaking.

The block evaporated at last, as men crowded forward or clambered up the sharply canted ladder. Asefi was alone in the control room.

He would go down with the vessel. There would be nothing for him within the navy after this. Acrid smoke was beginning to filter through from the aft compartments — gases venting from the batteries, he thought, as seawater flooded them. Turning, he started up the ladder.

It was still dark outside, the night a hot and muffling cloak. There was just enough light from a waning half-moon and the lights along the southern shore of Qeshm for him to make out several knots of men wrestling with inflatable rubber boats on the forward deck. As he watched, he could see that Noor was settling deeper, the sea washing across half the forward deck between the rounded prow and the foot of the sail. Someone fired a flare, the red beacon streaking high into the sky, arcing over, then igniting with a raw, sullen light.

Overhead, drawn, perhaps, by the flare, a helicopter clattered out of the night, and an instant later the forward deck and sail were enveloped in a harsh, white glare of light. Holding his hand up to shield his eyes from the searchlight, he could make out the Iranian military markings… and the fact that a Mk. 46 ASW torpedo was slung beneath the portside weapon rack, but that the starboard torpedo rack was empty.

It was the helicopter that had fired on them.

Someone on board the helicopter shoved a large package out of the open cargo deck hold. It fell and hit the water nearby, off the port side, and began expanding into another rubber boat.

It occurred to Asefi that the American sub would hear the commotion, and might even be taking advantage of it. The crew of that helo, obviously, weren't listening to their sonobuoy transponders now.

"Captain! Captain! Down here!"

It was Mohammadi, standing on the Noor's forward deck, waving his arms. Asefi waved back.

"Save yourself, Captain! Quickly!"

Asefi considered this, then shook his head. Standing at attention, he saluted his officers and men. In another few moments the last of the men on the forward deck were swept into the sea by an incoming wave. Noor gave a shudder, then heeled even farther to starboard. He could hear the repeated thuds of bulkheads giving way below, and the shrill hiss and gurgle of water flooding every compartment.

Fear gripped him then… and a new thought. If he died… what would be the point? There would be a court of inquiry, certainly. And the testimony of Noor's captain might keep unjust charges or recriminations from landing on the men.

Scrambling onto the lip of the weather bridge, he leaped as far out over the water as he could… falling… falling, then landing in the sea with a splash. The water, after the stifling heat belowdecks, was surprisingly cold.

Then he was swimming, hard, struggling to outrace the suction of the Noor as she went down.

And when at last he reached a rubber boat and willing hands had pulled him on board, he turned to look back at his command.

But the Noor was gone.