Seawolf Class

18

"Conn, Sonar! Destroyer changing aspect. He's turning into us!"

"Helm! Come hard right!" Garrett ordered. "Make revs for twenty knots!"

It was, he thought, a little wildly, an uncanny dance… but one ad-libbed rather than choreographed. Seawolf had turned left toward the destroyer; the destroyer had turned right toward Seawolf. Now Seawolf was veering off to the right, hoping to catch the destroyer off his guard.

And all the while, Seawolf's lone torpedo, still connected by an unraveling strand of slender wire, was circling far around to the left, coming up now on a moving point two hundred yards astern of the twisting submarine.

"Captain!" Ward announced from the weapons control board, just behind the helm station. "That last maneuver put our fish astern… two hundred yards."

"Hold it a moment more," Garrett said. He closed his eyes, picturing the positions of the dancers in this ballet in three dimensions… the Luda-class destroyer, the Seawolf, the torpedo, the Kilo….

Ping!

"Sonar, Conn! Do you still have our tail?"

"Negative, Skipper. Too much back-scatter off the seabed."

But he was still back there, somewhere…and almost certainly readying a torpedo or two of his own.

Wait… wait… The Kilo skipper would be copying Seawolf's maneuvers, but each imitation would be delayed by a number of seconds, the time it took for his own sonar crew to pick up the change in Seawolf's sonar aspect, evaluate it, and repeat it.

"Sonar crew. Pull your ears! All hands. Brace for collision!" Now! "Weapons officer! Detonate the torpedo!"

Ward already had his thumb poised above a large, red button. When he pressed it, 650 pounds of PBXN 103 high explosives detonated with a thunderous crash two football fields astern of the Seawolf's screw.

The shock wave was enough to send a shudder along the length of Seawolf's hull, rocking her hard. Seconds later they could hear, they could feel, the looming mass of the Luda directly overhead, as Seawolf twisted hard to starboard beneath the destroyer's keel. The shockwave caught the Seawolf and gently nudged her forward… and also up, just a little. A shattering, tearing crunch sounded from above the control room, and the deck tilted to the right.

Then Seawolf righted herself. Garrett clutched the periscope railing hard, willing the sub to keep moving. If her upper works were fouled with the destroyer, if the damage was too severe…

"Jesus!" Tollini said, looking back at Garrett from his station at the dive board. "I think we just scraped off the bastard's sonar dome!"

"Helm. Come to heading one-five-zero. Slow to eight knots. Maintain silence throughout the boat."

Minutes dragged past, as Seawolf slowly and quietly crawled away from the clash, her sonar ears again probing the water astern, trying to piece together a coherent picture of what was happening. The destroyer appeared to have heaved to, and there were some unpleasant fluttering noises that might have been hull damage of some sort. Toynbee also reported that they could hear the Kilo, blowing her tanks and surfacing.

That was good news, at least, nearly the best they could expect. Garrett had not targeted the Kilo directly because she was so hard to pick up on passive sonar. In any case, what he'd wanted most to do was brush the Kilo off and wreck her sonar picture of the Seawolf.

The detonation of a Mk 48 ADCAP torpedo between the Kilo's blunt prow and Seawolf's screw had undoubtedly done just that… and quite possibly had been close enough to the unseen Kilo to cause substantial damage as well, to her sonar suite if nothing else.

The explosion had also deafened the destroyer, and, if Seawolf's accidental brush with its keel had done what Garrett thought, the destroyer might have been permanently deafened when the bulbous dome containing its Jug Pair sonar was carried away.

The control room was enveloped in complete silence as minute followed minute and Seawolf continued moving southeast at a slow and steady pace. Twice Garrett ordered changes in course and speed to help throw off enemy tracking attempts, but she continued her overall run — if her ultrasilent creep along the sea floor could be called a "run" — toward the southeast and the safety of deep, open water.

"Yellow Dragon, this is Blue Dragon. Yellow Dragon, Blue. Do you copy?" Patiently, Morton repeated the call. The sounds of steady gunfire from up ahead had ceased for a time, but now there were continued brief, sharp flurries of automatic fire, punctuated once by the crump of an exploding hand grenade. A gentle rain had begun falling, somewhat muffling the gunfire.

The SEALs had crept as close to the battle as they could without being discovered. Now they needed to make contact with Tse.

"Blue Dragon! Blue Dragon! This is Yellow!" The voice was Tse's, sounding tired and haggard. "What the hell are you doing here?"

"Pulling your tail out of hot water. What's your tactical situation?"

"It was a trap," Tse replied, his voice carrying a taste of bitterness. "The Silkworm launchers were there to draw us in. We're on a hilltop about twelve kilometers from our original OP, map coordinates… " He began rattling off a string of alphanumerics. Morton already had his plastic AO map out and swiftly localized Tse's position. As he'd suspected, they were on the hill just ahead.

"I would estimate a full PLA brigade in our immediate area," Tse went on. "I have two dead, four wounded, and we're low on ammo. Situation is desperate."

A sudden sharp sound over the tactical radio channel corresponded with a loud whump from the hill ahead. "They're starting to bring in artillery. We're not going to hold for very much longer."

"You can hold for fifteen more minutes," Morton told him. "Stay low, get ready, and stand by for a fast E and E on a bearing of… one-seven-four. Do you copy that?"

"I copy, Blue Dragon. And… whatever happens… thanks."

"You can thank me when we get to the sea, Yellow Dragon. Stand by."

TM1 Jorghenson crawled over to Morton's position. "We've got visual with the bad guys, Skipper," he said. "Light MGs, assault rifles. They're not dug in and they're not watching their backs."

"Okay, Swede. Let's see what we've got."

They moved forward through the steady drizzle, until Jorghenson tapped his shoulder twice and pointed. From a concealed position behind a fallen log and within a clump of bushes at the edge of a clearing, Morton could see three Chinese soldiers crouched behind boulders at the side of a dirt road twenty yards ahead, their backs to him, their attention focused on something farther up the slope. Pointing again, Jorghenson indicated that more PLA fire teams were located there… there… and over there.

Two more came running up the road, puffing with exertion. One carried a Type 56 machine gun — a close copy of the old Soviet RPD — the other a couple of boxes of linked ammo. An officer stepped out of the trees ahead and waved them on.

The SEALs faded back into the woods. Silently, using hand signals, Morton spelled out what he wanted. First squad… with me. Second squad… set claymores… along that road.

As the word was spread, SEALs began materializing out of the forest, black-faced, nearly invisible against the underbrush. They used sign language and touch, for the most part, but whispered instructions over the tactical channel where necessary. First Squad began spreading out along the clearing, moving around its fringes, closing on the unsuspecting PLA troops who were busily focused on their own prey.

The PLA officer vanished into the shrubs at his back as a black-clad arm swept around his mouth and a SEAL Mk 1 diving knife sliced through jugular, carotid, and windpipe. Another Chinese soldier grunted, then collapsed, the thump of his falling louder than the double-tapped 9mm Hush Puppy rounds that silenced him. Sound-suppressed H&K fire cut down the two men with the machine gun in mid-stride; a nearby PLA soldier saw them fall and shouted. An instant later a 40mm grenade detonated between him and another soldier, flinging them apart like torn rag dolls.

The SEAL squad surged forward then, a general advance that caught the PLA soldiers from behind and completely unprepared. While SEALs were not intended for heavy combat, their tactics and weaponry allowed them to survive short contacts through a sheer, overwhelming viciousness of superior firepower. They stuck with suppressed weapons — H&Ks and Smith & Wesson

Hush Puppies — for as long as possible, but once things went rock-and-roll, Whiteman began cutting loose with his M-60, and the men with M203 grenade launchers, Douglass and Knowles, began popping 40mm rounds at every likely concentration of enemy force.

In moments the Chinese troops along the southeastern side of the hilltop were dead, wounded, or fleeing in utter confusion. Morton gave the call over the tactical channel for Tse and his men to come on down.

Minutes later the Taiwanese commandos were jogging down the slope, carrying their dead and wounded with them. Tse met Morton at the edge of the clearing and shook the American's hand. "Thank you, Commander. I… don't quite know what to say."

" 'Thanks' will do fine for now. Let's get the hell out of here."

"Affirmative to that!"

Bullets snipped among the leaves overhead. The PLA forces were reorganizing. The Taiwanese and their American escort began moving south along the dirt road, the last men in the column walking backwards laying down heavy bursts of rearguard fire.

Five minutes later the first Chinese troops came down the road, a couple of platoons on foot, and more piled into the backs of four trucks. The SEALs of Second Squad, well-hidden in the forest, waited until the lead elements were already past before triggering the first pair of claymore mines… then the second… then the third….

The claymores, each with its distinctive, convex-curved "This side toward enemy" face, had been mounted on their tripods in a staggered array that blanketed the road from both sides. Packed with seven hundred ball bearings apiece and a kilo and a half of shaped high explosives, claymores acted like titanic shotguns when triggered, slicing through vegetation, flesh, and even light armor in broad, expanding swathes of bloody destruction. With the kill-zones of the mines overlapping, the Chinese troops on the road were shredded by blast upon blast upon devastating blast.

PLA troops outside the kill zones immediately plunged into the woods beside the road, seeking to avoid further emplaced mines; thirty yards into the forest, they ran headlong into another line of claymores, set by the retreating SEALs to further discourage close pursuit.

The survivors were not eager to follow closely. The SEALs began leapfrogging backward, one line of men crouching in the brush, covering the rest as they fell back, then falling back in turn while the other SEALs covered them. Before long, contact with the enemy was broken, and there were no further sounds of pursuit.

The rain fell harder, as thunder — natural thunder as opposed to the manmade variety that had echoed off the hills earlier — boomed. The SEALs and their Taiwanese allies continued moving south, then east, back toward their insertion point.

Gradually, as the fast-paced minutes of the skirmish lengthened into hours, Garrett ordered Seawolf's speed increased, putting more and more distance between the submarine and any possible search and pursuit.

From the sounds dwindling astern, the PLA Navy had lost the Seawolf completely in the explosion and in the next few moments of chaos. A dozen other naval vessels, from patrol boats to a second Luda, were converging on the area, and Toynbee was even able to report the presence of helicopters passing overhead, so sensitive were Seawolf's underwater ears.

An initial survey of the damage to the boat was completed. The sail was partly flooded. It was sealed off from the rest of the boat by watertight doors, but the periscopes and electronic masts still worked. Handling was a bit sluggish; with water in the sail, Seawolf was top heavy and clumsy but still answered well to the helm.

And there'd been only one casualty — Lawless. The crew was silent, at first.

"Skipper?" Lieutenant Ward said after a long time. "Yes?"

"Didn't you run into a Chinese ship with your last command?"

Ward's tone had a sparkle to it. He was attempting an uneasy joke, hoping, perhaps, to lighten the atmosphere inside the control room.

Good man, Garrett thought. Thanks for the straight line.

"Actually, what I hit last time was a Chinese Kilo-class submarine," he said. "Not, properly speaking, a ship. This time, though, I thought I'd try to ram the destroyer instead. At command school they call this 'innovative tactics.' What do you think?"

Gentle laughter and nervous chuckles fluttered through the control room.

"I'd say, sir," Ward replied, "that any tactics that let you walk out of an enemy harbor full of ASW assets is a good one."

"Thank you, Weps. And good work on swimming that fish. That's what helped us break contact." He waited a beat, then added, "You know, people, I'm going to have to think about this. Hitting the enemy target with a torpedo instead of with my submarine. That's such a wild idea, it just might work!"

It was a weak joke, he thought, but this time the laughter was louder and harder, without the nervousness. While a skipper was expected to show no weakness, he thought he could afford a bit of self-deprecation. The crew would need a strong bond to get them past a double assault on their emotions…the abrupt transition from peace to war, and the death of Captain Lawless.

"Sonar, Conn. What do you have nearby?"

"Nothing close, Captain," came the reply. "We're in the clear."

"Up periscope."

The Mark 18 scope slid smoothly up through the overhead, and Garrett took his place at the eyepiece. In the fast-dwindling light he could just make out the humps of mountains to the northwest. Walking the scope through a full 360, he saw no surface vessels on the horizon at all.

"Radio Shack. What do we have up there?"

"Lots of traffic, Skipper. We're recording."

At Garrett's command, Seawolf released a souvenir of her visit — a radio transmission buoy keyed to send an account of the action just past after an hour's elapsed time. It informed those higher up the chain of command that the Seawolf had been slightly damaged and that Garrett had taken command after Lawless's death. If enemy listeners homed on the brief, burst transmission, they would find only empty ocean.

"Down scope," he said at last. He grinned at Tollini. "You know, that's a hell of a note, when the only defensive maneuver we can make is 'down periscope.' "

"We used to say that on board the Miami when we pulled duty inside the Persian Gulf," Dougherty put in. "The water's so shallow there you feel like a bug on a plate."

"Should get better from here on out, Skipper," the diving officer said. "Bottom is dropping fast… we're passing the hundred-foot mark now."

"Good. Mr. Simms… plot us a course north toward the strait, best possible speed. We'll need to surface after it's dark to make repairs to the sail. And we'll need to see what COMSUBPAC has in mind for us. Until they tell us otherwise, though, I'm assuming we're go for our original mission — to listen for Chinese subs in the Strait of Formosa."

"Those orders'll likely read 'listen for, find, and sink' now," Dougherty said.

"Agreed. It would be nice to get in a few licks of our own."

A radioman entered the control room, a message flimsy in hand. "Captain? Flash-priority urgent. From COMSUBPAC."

"Well, they're on the ball!" COB said. "They don't have our update yet," Garrett said. He scanned the decrypted message.

There was more to the message — signal codes and communications protocols, for the most part, and a purely gratuitous warning not to allow Seawolf to be trapped in Hong Kong, but the body of the message was brutally to the point.

America was at war, and Seawolf was on point.

Rain hissed down through the forest canopy, soaking already swampy ground. Morton and three of his SEALs, plus Commander Tse, huddled beneath the partial cover of a south-facing rock shelter, an overhang that deflected the worst of the downpour. Knowles and Haggarty had set up the LST-5 with the dish antenna trained on the southern sky, relaying their transmission through the comsat to Coronado.

"You were dead right," Commander Randall's voice said, through crackles of static and the watery roar of the storm. "It is a cluster fuck, and some heads are going to roll all the way from Taipei to Washington."

"Copy that, sir," Morton said. "But it's not helping us here and now."

"I know. But I want you boys to know we have not forgotten about you. We're putting together a recovery effort now. And Navy Intelligence has a man going out to one of the carrier battle groups to coordinate things."

"That's good to know. What do we do now?"

"Continue your E and E to the coast. Check in at your scheduled times for updates. And for God's sake steer clear of the PLA."

"What about the Silkworm launch vehicles, Commander? We're still in a position to call in air strikes. As long as we're here, it would be a shame to waste an in-country asset."

"It would be a shame to lose that asset in a gunfight with regular army troops," Randall replied. "This thing is a lot bigger than one SEAL platoon, Commander, and way over our heads. Your orders are to get your people out of there."

"Aye aye, sir."

"Talk to you at your next check-in, Jack. Randall out."

They began packing up the satcom radio. "So?" Tse asked him. "What's the story?"

Morton sighed. "It sounds like one of those cases where the right hand didn't know what the left hand was doing. Some of your people decided it would be a good thing to involve SEALs in a ground op on the mainland. Some of my people, with business interests in Taiwan, decided that that would be a wonderful idea and approved it, but apparently the approval didn't go as high as J-SOCOM. The op was what they call 'compartmentalized,' with only need-to-know personnel in the loop.

"The only trouble with that was, they weren't expecting that last minute peace overture from the President. The State Department negotiators were off to Beijing, and nobody at that level knew we were on the ground here." He chuckled. "New Orleans all over again."

Tse frowned in the rainswept darkness. "Please?"

"Sorry. One of the great mistakes of military history. The Battle of New Orleans — one of the great military victories for the United States — was fought in 1815, something like six weeks after the Treaty of Ghent ended the war we were fighting against England at the time. Back in those days, news traveled by horseback or by ship, and battles could be fought between forces that technically were at peace but who hadn't gotten the word yet. You don't expect that to happen with satellites, computers, and high-speed data connections, but things have gotten so top-heavy lately, with departments and directorates and a hundred different headquarters, control hierarchies, and command structures…most of them not talking to one another." He sighed. "Commander, did you know that in 1983 the American invasion of the little island of Grenada nearly failed in complete confusion… because different branches of the U.S. Armed Forces were using different time tables? No one had bothered to check to see whether the orders were being issued for the Grenada time zone or for Eastern Standard time, an hour earlier. Units in different services couldn't talk to one another because they hadn't agreed on common communications frequencies. Some Navy SEALs died because they were dropped in the wrong place at the wrong time, in heavy seas, too far from land. We can fight any enemy in the world, but we can't master our own cumbersome chain of command."

"Perhaps," Tse said, "we need an electronic form of bureaucracy. To do for bureaucracy what electronics did for communication."

"Hmm. A way to do much more, even more slowly?"

"Or to do it more quickly, but with even more confusion."

"Sometimes I think the only thing that is standing between civilization and absolute disaster is the fact that bureaucracy gets in its own way. It's so damned clumsy it's not a serious threat to anyone."

Morton stared off into the rainswept darkness. "Let's saddle up, people. We can make good time in this storm."

"The PLA will not be anxious to track us in this," Tse agreed. He looked at Morton. "Commander Morton. Some of us will still be remaining behind."

"I figured as much. You have your own war…and your own orders."

"We appreciate your help back there. More than we can say. And we will ask you to escort some of us back to Taiwan, with our dead and wounded. But the rest of us… "

"Understood. But your men are low on munitions."

"If we could have some extra 5.56 and 7.62, that would help a lot. Until we can arrange for a resupply air mission."

"Damned if I want to lug that shit all the way back to Taiwan." Reaching down, Morton thoughtfully tapped a metal case resting beside the wall of the overhang. "You know, I haven't seen our laser target designator. We must have dropped it up the trail a ways. If you happen to see it, make sure it doesn't fall into PLA hands, okay? I mean, it has directions on how to use it, frequencies for calling air strikes, all kinds of sensitive information I wouldn't want the enemy to have."

Tse grinned. "We'll see what we can do."

Morton put out his hand. "You take care of yourself, Tse."

"And you, Commander. It has been good serving with you. Very good."

The two parties separated at that point, Morton and his SEALs, along with ten of the Taiwanese commandos, moving on toward the coast, while Tse and his men faded back into the storm.

Morton wondered if he would ever hear of those men again.

Captain Frank Gordon was miserable. The COD air-craft — the acronym stood for Carrier On-board Delivery — was a C-2A Greyhound, literally a bus for hauling personnel, supplies, and mail back and forth among far-flung naval air stations and bases and the U.S. carrier battle groups at sea. With two turboprop engines and a ferry range of almost 1,500 nautical miles at 260 knots, it was ideal for the job it was designed for… but not exactly the latest thing in comfort.

Especially while bouncing around the western Pacific in the middle of a class-two storm.

He was strapped into a passenger seat just abaft the cockpit. A Greyhound could carry thirty-two passengers in addition to its three-man crew, but this flight was empty except for Gordon, a distinction of sorts, he supposed. He wouldn't have been quite so worried if he wasn't seated directly behind the pilot, who was clutching the steering yoke and peering ahead past the steady thwick-thwick-thwick of the windshield wiper, as though trying to penetrate the murk by sheer force of will… and muttering obscenities under his breath.

This, he decided, was fitting punishment for any sin he'd ever committed in the line of duty. As the Greyhound bucked and side-slipped in the turbulent air, he was repeatedly glad he'd had little for dinner…and miserably sorry that he'd had anything at all.

"Okay, Captain Gordon!" The copilot had to shout to make himself heard above the roar of the engines and the howl of the storm. "Just got word from the Stennis! They'll have a Hawkeye ready to go airborne the minute we bite steel!"

Gordon could only nod understanding. The E-2C Hawkeye was essentially identical to the C-2, a twin-turboprop design with folding wings for carrier stowage, but with most of its interior space taken up by electronics. The naval equivalent of the big Air Force E-3 Sentry AWACS aircraft, Hawkeyes mounted a powerful APS-125 radar inside a rotating radome above the fuselage and served both as radar pickets and to coordinate combat communications among ships and aircraft.

"Don't worry, Captain! We'll have you down in one piece and airborne again in a jiff!"

He nodded again and wished the copilot would leave him alone. He was trying so hard not to be sick.

The string of muttered obscenities from the pilot grew fiercer. "Where the fuck is that damned postage stamp?" he heard the man say aloud, and decided he must mean the aircraft carrier they were hunting for. It was tough enough to spot something as tiny as a carrier in the middle of all this ocean. Add midnight darkness and a howling storm…

"Okay! Okay! Got 'em!" the copilot said. "Call the ball."

"I'll give them a fucking ball. Okay. On track.

Easy… "

Gordon tried to peer past the pilot's shoulder but could see absolutely nothing except blackness. What the hell were they looking at? The Greyhound slewed sharply sideways and the swearing upped a notch, the pilot battling the wind through his yoke and rudder control pedals.

Suddenly, it felt as though the seat dropped away beneath Gordon, then slammed up hard to meet him coming down. There was a shriek of tires on steel, a surge of acceleration as the pilot threw the throttles full-forward just in case they missed their catch… and a final, violent yank as the Greyhound's tailhook snagged a taut arrestor cable on the deck.

The pilot cut back the throttles and began taxiing the aircraft through the storm. They were down, and Gordon still couldn't see much outside but blackness. No… wait. There were some lights, high up and to the right… probably the pri-fly bridge overlooking the flight deck.

"Told you we'd get ya down in one piece, sir!"

"Just fucking wonderful" was all Gordon could say.

Because now that he was down, he had to change aircraft and go up into that mess again.

Some days it didn't pay to get out of bed… particularly those days when you never got to go to bed in the first place.