Terminal Run

18

Commander George Dixon sat at the end of the wardroom table feeling proud of himself. He was surrounded by his officers who were not on watch, half of them working through the remainder of the night on the patrol report reconstruction, playing back the history module tapes of the Cyclops battle control system and printing two-dimensional plots of the targets during key points of the action. The other half of the wardroom worked on a large plaque showing Red Chinese hulls, to commemorate the kills they’d made during the watch. Though it was still the middle of the night, Dixon had been unable to sleep from the tension of battle and the jittery aftermath. It was hard to believe that only an hour ago they’d heard the last torpedo impact one of the Red surface ships. Strangely, the Julang had never made an appearance. Perhaps the Red SSN had heard the carnage and run back north to warn the other battle groups or perhaps it was so broken down that it was still too far north to have made a difference.

The sudden screaming announcement on the ship wide 1MC announcing circuit made Dixon spill half a cup of coffee on his thigh. “Snapshot tube one!” It was the officer of the deck making the emergency call that an enemy submarine had sneaked up on them, and that they were in immediate danger of being fired upon.

Dixon dashed to the control room, finding Kingman hanging half out of a battle control cubicle. The call of snapshot automatically manned battle stations and watch standers were pouring into the room and donning headsets and virtual reality helmets.

“What happened?” Dixon spat.

“I cleared baffles and heard him to the south. We’ve got him on narrowband, but he suddenly came into broadband contact, so he’s barreling in on us, Captain. He’ll be in counter detection range in a matter of minutes, and we need to get a weapon down the bearing line.”

“Very well, OOD,” Dixon said, trying to make his voice commanding and authoritative and calm, but not sure he’d succeeded.

Dixon pulled on his battle control helmet and immediately ordered the system to display the battle space and the battle stations watch standers faces. The sonar chief looked up at his display and made a contact classification.

“Conn, Sonar, narrowband sonar contact Sierra nine six now bears one seven eight and correlates to broadband trace on that same bearing, turn count is pending but screw is seven bladed. Contact is a definite submerged warship.”

Commander Dixon had lowered his view to the antisubmarine domain, the inverted bowl with the incoming Julang-class SSN shown to the south. As yet their contact of the Julang was weak, and they only had a bearing to the intruder.

“Cyclops, power up torpedoes in tubes one through four,” Dixon ordered, concentrating on the submerged firecontrol three-dimensional display. “Dive, all ahead one-third. Attention in the firecontrol party. We have a slight emergency. The Julang-class SSN — designated Target Three Zero — has crashed our party. We need to deal with him right now, because if he detects us he will either counterfire or blast to periscope depth and alert the second surface force, and both actions will ruin our day. My intention is to perform a rapid target-motion-analysis maneuver on him starting now, and maneuver across the line-of-sight and get a rough range, then shoot a snapshot Mark 58 at him selected to high-speed transit —”

“Captain,” Phillips interrupted, “I recommend you launch a Vortex at the contact. It’ll be much faster, and the transit time to the target will be cut in a sixth. And we can clear datum by keeping the Vortex wake between us and the target and withdraw. Once he sinks, we can continue the Vortex battery launch.”

Dixon was about to countermand her recommendation, but forced himself to think about what she was saying. The Vortex would be much quicker to the target, and its bubble-filled wake would blue-out the Julang’s sonar all along the bearings to the Vortex. He might have their launching position, but shooting it would be futile since Leopard would withdraw at full speed.

“Attention in the firecontrol party. Correction, we will be launching Vortex unit one at Target Three Zero and charting our withdrawal to the east, keeping the Vortex wake between us and the target. Carry on. Weapons Officer, make Vortex tube one ready in all respects and open missile door. Coordinator, let’s call this a leg on the target and maneuver now across the line-of-sight. Dive, left full rudder, steady course west. Sonar, Captain, coming to the west to maneuver on Target Three Zero.”

“Captain, Coordinator, possible target zig, Target Three Zero.” The firecontrol solution to the Julang had just blown up. He was maneuvering, throwing off their computations.

“Conn, Sonar, Three Zero may be speeding up. We now have a faint turn count on him. Target Three Zero is making one five zero RPM on one seven-bladed screw.”

“Sonar, Captain, can you call an aspect change?” Did he turn, Dixon wondered.

“Conn, Sonar, no.”

“Coordinator, confirm target zig. What’s he doing?”

Phillips’s voice was calm. “He’s speeding up, Captain. Must have been doing a sprint-and-drift, and he’s got to speed back up to cover ground to expand his search for us. And since he sped up, we can assume he didn’t hear us.”

“Coordinator, have you a new first leg on the target after his speed increase?”

Phillips nodded her head inside her helmet, her dark eyes wide in the display window. “One more minute, then turn to the east, sir, but do the second leg at ten knots.”

“I’ll give you eight, XO.” Dixon waited, the tension making him twitch inside his gloves.

“Leg one complete, Captain.”

“Dive, left full rudder, steady course east, all ahead two thirds, turns for eight knots. Sonar, Captain, coming left to zero nine zero for leg two.”

The watch standers acknowledged and the ship turned to the east. Dixon waited, his teeth chattering from adrenaline. He clamped his jaw in annoyance.

“Sir, steady course east, ship is making turns for eight knots,” the diving officer called.

“Go, Coordinator,” Dixon said. “Get me a solution. Weps, check your Vortex status.”

“Aye, Captain, Vortex is on internal power, signal wire continuity is on, waiting for a solution—”

“Captain, Target Three Zero at range twenty-four thousand yards, bearing one seven eight, course zero one zero, speed two zero knots. We have a firing solution!”

“Cyclops and firecontrol party, firing point procedures Vortex unit one, Target Three Zero,” Dixon shouted, realizing in detachment that his voice was too loud.

“Ship ready,” Kingman said.

“Weapon ready,” Taussig snapped.

“Solution ready,” Phillips said.

“Cyclops ready.”

“Shoot on programmed bearing.”

The deck jumped slightly as Vortex unit one left the vertical tube. The tube barked as the gas generator pumped out the weapon, but the sound was not nearly as violent as a torpedo launch. The Vortex’s first stage was a small torpedo-type propulsion unit to carry it safely away from its own ship before it fired the solid rocket fuel. After thirty seconds on torpedo propulsion, the first unit’s missile engine lit off. A loud crashing roar filled the control room as the rocket motor fired and the Vortex sped up to three hundred knots on its way to the Julang submarine.

“Dive, all ahead flank and cavitate! Make your depth thirteen hundred feet smartly! Weps, make Vortex tube two ready in all respects with the exception of opening the missile door. Attention in the firecontrol party, be alert for a torpedo in the water from Target Three Zero, and be prepared for an emergency flank bell.”

The deck tilted dramatically down to a thirty-five-degree angle as the diving officer put on full turns and pushed the bow planes to the full dive position. As their speed rose above forty knots the deck began its flank speed tremble.

“Sonar, Captain, is the target masked by the Vortex wake?”

“Conn, Sonar, yes.”

Dixon took a deep breath. He’d shot at the Julang and run away. Now he’d find out what the Chinese were made of.

“Command Post, Sonar, torpedo launch transient bearing south! I have a rocket motor ignition — supercavitating torpedo inbound, bearing zero zero eight!”

Without conscious thought Lien Hua spit out a string of orders, his heart rate immediately tripling. “Engine ahead emergency! Thirty-degree up angle!” He grabbed his microphone and selected it to the ship wide announcing circuit and shouted into it: “Torpedo inbound! All hands man tactical stations!” By the time he’d gotten that out, the deck had inclined so far up that he could barely stand. He grabbed a hand hold and thought about the next step.

There was only one thing he could do to fight an inbound supercavitating torpedo, particularly if it were an American one with a three-hundred-knot top speed, and that was to execute an emergency surface. If he could get the ship going fast enough, there was a small chance that he could actually make it jump out of the sea like a whale, and if the missile’s seeker only then found him, it would be confused by his sudden disappearance from the ocean. Even after the ship fell back in the water, the sea would be filled with bubbles and foam, and that might confuse the torpedo. And there was the possibility that the torpedo had a ceiling setting to keep it away from the surface effect, its three hundred knots causing a huge suction Bernouli effect near the ocean’s surface, which could cause it to shoot out of the sea or to become unstable and tumble, or perhaps just to keep it from becoming decoyed on a surface ship. But an emergency surface was dangerous, because the emergency de ballasting system explosives had a bad habit of blowing the ballast tanks open, and even penetrating the pressure hull. But Lien was coming to the realization that he had only seconds to live, and for some reason he decided that he didn’t want his spirit to leave his body when he was deep — heaven was too far away from here.

He quickly pulled the protective cover off the panel, the cover marked with red and white diagonal stripes indicating an emergency system. The second protective bar covering the toggle switches was also colored red and white, and he pulled that aside to reach the four toggle switches beneath. There were two arming switches that would bring the circuits to the explosives to life, and two switches to detonate the explosives, one for the forward system and one for the aft. He flipped up both arming switches, waiting an eternity for the ARM light, knowing that it could only be a second, then flipped the forward toggle switch up. An explosion boomed through the command post from forward. He hit the aft switch, the explosion from it much more muted.

“Emergency de ballasting to the surface,” he called on the ship wide microphone. The ship seemed to remain whole, so the detonations in the ballast tanks must not have breached the metal skin of the ship or of the tanks themselves.

“Status of the Tsunami in tube six,” Lien barked.

“Loaded, sir, but powered down and the tube is dry,” Zhou Ping replied.

Lien tried to listen, as if he could hear the incoming supercavitating torpedo, but he knew that at three hundred knots, it would find the Nung Yahtsu long before a sound from the torpedo could be heard. They would all die in silence unless the emergency surfacing worked.

Lien grabbed a hand hold bar on the command console and flipped to the weapon control panel as the deck rose to a forty five-degree angle.

“Three hundred meters, sir,” the helm officer called. “Up angle is fifty degrees and I can’t keep it down.”

“Silence in the command post,” Lien snapped as he worked his way through the weapon control software. In the seconds he had been working he had flooded tube six and applied weapon power, but he could do no more until the tube was fully flooded — so he could open the outer door — and the Tsunami was powered up with its gyro up to full revolutions, and that would take another sixty seconds. Lien blamed himself for not having it powered up once they’d started the search for the American sub, but then consoled himself that doing so would have been a violation of fleet standing orders. If they lived through the watch, they would always have a weapon powered up and a tube door opened, he thought.

“On the surface, sir!” the helm officer called.

The angle suddenly came off and the deck fell back down to a flat surface from its steep staircase angle.

“Sinking back down, Captain, seventy meters, eighty, and rising back up, sir.”

“Engines stop!” Lien commanded.

“Engines stop, well received, Captain, and nuclear control answers, engines stop.”

“Sir, should we stay surfaced? We can perhaps fool the torpedo, but on the surface, we’ve lost our stealth.”

Lien made a dismissive sound in his throat. “We lost that some time ago, as the incoming torpedo can testify. No, Zhou, we will remain on the surface until this is over. It is too dangerous to be submerged until that damned torpedo gets lost. And even then, if we stay surfaced without motion, the enemy sub may not find us. He is undoubtedly below the layer. In case his sonar systems continue to listen on narrowband, we need to shut down the rotating machinery. Obviously we have a pump or a turbine or a generator that is sound shorted, and is giving us away. We’ll shut it all down, and keep battle control on the uninterruptible power supply.”

Lien picked up his microphone and clicked the selector to nuclear control. “Engineroom, Captain, shut down the reactor and place the ship on battery power.”

The voice of the chief engineer came through the speakers. “Captain, this is the chief engineer. Are you sure you want to do that?”

“Shut it down, Chief.”

Almost immediately the lights flickered and the air handlers stopped. The command post became much quieter, almost immediately becoming stuffy and humid. The extinguishing of the ship’s power source seemed sadder than the pending death of the vessel from the torpedo. It seemed as if the seconds had turned to hours and that the Tsunami would never warm up. The thought entered Lien’s mind that he might die standing here stupidly, from an enemy torpedo that had gone unanswered.

Vortex Mod Echo missile number one had been nestled securely and warmly in its vertical launch tube, its power applied two minutes before. Its self-checks had all been satisfactory, and it reported back to the control room its perfection. The solution to the target came in from the signal wire port and became locked in to the processor. The processor signaled back to control that it had received the target. The control room informed the processor that launch was imminent, and the Vortex waited.

At time zero the gas generator ignited, a small rocket engine aimed into a reservoir of distilled water, which erupted into a tremendous volume of high-pressure steam at the missile’s aft end. The pressure of the bottom of the tube rose until it bore the weight of the missile and far beyond, until without moving more than an inch, the missile was experiencing five g’s of acceleration. The tube began moving so fast around the missile that it seemed as if it were tumbling down a steel tunnel, leaving the envelope of the ship and entering the cold sea.

As the aft end of the missile cleared the ship the missile’s first-stage propulsion ignited, a small torpedo motor with a combustion chamber piped to a B-end hydraulic motor. The escaping high-pressure exhaust gases made the motor spin against its swash plate, spinning the shaft up to a speed of five thousand RPM and beyond, and the thrust built up as the unit sped up to ten thousand revolutions per minute. As the engine thrust built up, it turned its nozzle to roll the missile from the vertical to the horizontal, then took it to a down angle. It continued to accelerate downward at thirty degrees, taking the missile to a depth a hundred feet deeper than the Leopard, then pulling the missile out of the dive and leveling off. After a final burst of acceleration, the first stage’s explosive bolts fired, and it fell away in the slipstream.

Seventy milliseconds later a small grain can of highly volatile flammables was lit off from a spark generator, the grain can contained in a pocket of solid rocket fuel, a composite clay of complex chemicals that was surprisingly inert until it reached a high temperature, and then became alive with the winds of hell. The grain can exploded into incandescence, and the fuel in the pocket surrounding the can ignited and began to burn the neighboring fuel matrix, a volume of high-pressure combustion gases collecting near the pocket. The pocket was at the end of a long tunnel bored through the fuel assembly, the tunnel becoming wider near the nozzle of the missile farther aft. The combustion gas pressurized the tunnel until the aft part of the tunnel reached nearly the same pressure as the forward pocket, and the missile’s protective nozzle cover blew off into the sea. The missile nozzle began to channel the in creasing rush of exhaust gas, until the entire aft surface of the fuel was burning and nozzle-entry pressure had sailed up to tens of thousands of pounds per square inch. The rocket flames from the nozzle built up until the missile felt the acceleration. The force of the impulse from the fuel sailed beyond five g’s to twenty, and the missile’s speed increased from thirty knots to eighty. The missile body trembled violently as it passed through a region of natural frequency, the ride settling slightly, until suddenly the missile went supercavitating. The skin friction vanished to near zero when the water molecules at the surface of the missile vaporized to steam. The steam bubble grew from the sharp point of the nose cone seeker module all the way aft until it enveloped the missile’s nozzle, and soon the missile accelerated to 100 knots, 150, until it reached supercavitating terminal velocity at 308 knots.

The missile’s attitude was controlled by the nozzle, the rocket engine rotating to keep the thrust in line with the missile’s center of gravity, and adjusting for steam bubble shape variations. The control system was required to be one of the fastest processors on the planet for a silicon computer, since the time constant to control the missile had to be measured in the tenth of a millisecond. In one ten-thousandth of a second, the missile’s flight could degrade from perfection to disastrous, and only that rapid a response from the missile’s nozzle could keep it from tumbling.

The nose cone blue laser seeker came on in test mode, then illuminated the narrow cone of the sea ahead. The cone widened as the laser searched ahead in a spiral shape like a locomotive’s headlight. The laser saw multiple returns from the waves high above, but nothing yet from the target. The processor compared the sea ahead to its model of the sea from the target solution given it by the mother ship. It expected the target location to change with time, the target locus becoming a probability matrix, a circle of possibility that enclosed the target, and the circle grew at the maximum speed of the target, which had been assumed to be forty-five knots. The missile had been ordered to aim for the center of the probability circle, even though that had a minimal chance of being the location of the target. It was expected that as the missile transited the Target Probability Circle, the TPC, that it had at most a ten percent chance of detecting the target. The attack profile called for the missile to sail through the TPC and continue on for one TPC diameter and execute an Anderson turn, a loop in the sea that would put the missile on a reverse course on its exact transit line, except offset by five hundred yards to the west, and it would cruise through the TPC again, still seeking, and if that did not yield the target, it would turn again and reenter the TPC, this time another five hundred yards to the west. As this search continued, the weapon would chart a grid through TPC until the TPC was completely covered, even though the TPC grew bigger with each second, its boundaries expanding at forty-five knots. Eventually the target would be detected, and the missile would connect.

The weapons console lit up with the green light annunciator that the Tsunami was powered up, but there was a red light indicating that it lacked a target.

“Sonar, Captain,” Lien said into the intercom microphone, “do you have a contact to the south?”

“Captain, Sonar, no, sir. We’re blued out from the bearing of the torpedo launch to the torpedo.”

“Report the bearing of the beginning of the torpedo wake.”

“One seven five, sir.”

Lien dialed in a phantom target to the weapon control function of his command console.

“I’ve got a bearing line, Mr. First,” Captain Lien said, “but I need to decide whether to have the unit search and, if it fails to find a target, shut down and sink, or to send it out to search and on failure-to-acquire, execute a default detonation.”

“Captain, we have nothing to lose. Order it to search and if it fails, have it come back to an aim-point range and detonate.”

“Give me a range to aim-point.”

“Twenty miles, Captain.”

“No, closer.”

“Fifteen?”

“Ten,” Lien decided, and dialed in the aim-point.

“Sir, if the incoming torpedo misses, the Tsunami will take us out at ten.”

“Fine, twenty miles.” The Tsunami had a full line of green lights. “Tsunami auto-sequence in five seconds, Mr. First.”

Zhou waited, biting the inside of his lip, wondering what the incoming torpedo was doing. It should have arrived by now. The deck trembled as the torpedo tube’s gas generator detonated, ejecting the Tsunami.

“Tube six fired, Mr. First, and the Tsunami is on its way. A pity we don’t have more.”

“Perhaps we should put the Dong Feng units in tubes one through five down the bearing line, sir—”

Zhou never finished the sentence.

After a flight time of four minutes, the missile hit the southern boundary of the TPC, and the arming circuit in the plasma warhead energized. The warhead was a fusion weapon — a hydrogen bomb — encased in the materials that would interact in the hundred-million-degree temperatures of the detonation to act to contain the blast to a small volume plasma, a tiny spoonful of the center of the sun, and that plasma would vaporize a third of the target and blow the rest of it to shrapnel. The seeker searched in the wide and narrow search cones as the missile flew through the TPC, but there was no target. The missile continued on past the TPC by a diameter, then turned and came back. The north-south grid search continued through the TPC over the next four minutes, but came up empty.

There was no target.

The missile executed an east-west grid search of the TPC, this time above the layer depth of two hundred feet, on the off chance that the target had come above layer and that the thermal layer might be interfering with blue laser reception. The missile was careful to avoid coming within a hundred feet of the surface, since the suction from the interface between water and air could pull the missile into an unstable angle of attack, and the missile could tumble faster than the control system could correct it. Some of the test units had even rocketed out of the water and spun out of control and broken up on impact with water. Above the layer, there was still no target.

The missile realized it was about to run out of fuel, and it was time to execute the default detonation. Had the missile been programmed, it would have removed the plasma enhancements from the warhead casing, making the warhead a wider distribution fusion bomb, but this had been strictly prohibited by the Mod Echo designers. All it could do was detonate a plasma at a default point. The default detonation point had been selected as the centro id of the northern third of the TPC, under the assumption that the probability held that the target would have run away from the missile rather than toward it. The missile timed its arrival at the default point so that it would still have two minutes of fuel remaining, in case as it prepared to default detonate it found the target. But there was still nothing.

The missile dived back below the layer to a depth of five hundred feet, sailed toward the default detonation point, and seeing nothing, executed the default routine. The low-explosive initiator train ignited, setting off the medium explosives, which detonated the high-explosive shaped charges that caused separated pie-shaped elements of plutonium to collide and form a critical mass. The combined plutonium exploded in a nuclear blast that vaporized the tritium bottles, which then in the millions of degrees of the small high-energy blast reacted to fuse together into helium molecules. The resulting helium was slightly lighter than its reactants, because the mass loss was converted into pure energy, and the fission explosion became an even more powerful fusion explosion. Had the reaction continued from there, the sea would have erupted in a five-mile-wide mushroom cloud with radiation scattering over the seascape, but instead the plasma-containment chemicals fused and reacted and surrounded the blast in the most powerful magnetic field ever invented by human hands. The mag bottle contained the nuclear blast and focused its energy into a three-meter-diameter sphere of high-energy plasma. The mass inside the bottle rose to hundreds of millions of degrees while the exterior — for a few tens of microseconds — remained undisturbed.

But soon the plasma envelope collapsed, and the blast effect began. The explosion was still powerful when viewed from the surface, but nothing like the weapon’s nuclear ancestors. The pressure pulse, the shock wave, from the explosion traveled through the water and blew the surface into a rising cloud of spray, then traveled sideways in all directions, eventually reaching the hull of a surfaced shape of high-yield low-magnetic steel that had been given the name Nung Yahtsu.

In the first tenth of a second the ship rolled violently to starboard and the deck seemed to tilt to the vertical. Zhou Ping felt like he hung in the air for a terrifying instant, the objects of the command post flying by him. He flew into a console and felt his elbow penetrate the glass of the display screen as the lights went out, and the remainder of the nightmare happened by the lightning flashes of electrical arcs in the space. He realized that he was deafened by the explosion, as the captain had put his face close to Zhou’s and was screaming, but there was no sound. Zhou shook his head, the motion making him so dizzy that he vomited explosively on the console. The world spun again in a flash of sparks just before it went dark.

The Tsunami torpedo fired by the Nung Yahtsu left tube six on the port forward quarter, the tube canted outward by ten degrees from the ship’s centerline. The impulse from the tube’s gas generator accelerated the torpedo to thirty knots, and a speed sensor in the torpedo’s flank activated. A small bottle of compressed air at the nose cone activated, blowing compressed air out a ring distributor that spread out a bubble of air over the forward sixth of the torpedo’s length, the predecessor to the torpedo’s future supercavitating steam bubble, the bubble inserted into the prototypes when test weapons all tumbled at rocket ignition. The jump start of the boundary layer gas bubble fixed the problem, so that when the rocket lit off, the weapon would sail straight as an arrow and the steam bubble would form and take over from the initial gas bubble.

As the compressed air spread out over the nose cone and aft, the rocket fuel ignited. The torpedo rapidly accelerated to attack velocity, and as designed, the steam bubble extended down the skin of the torpedo to the aft nozzle. The torpedo sped up to two hundred knots, heading south down the bearing line to the target. At two minutes into the flight the blue laser seeker came on, the design of it nicely transferred by the payment of a moderate fee to a lab scientist at the David Taylor Naval Research and Development Center owned and operated by DynaCorp. The seeker looked down the bearing line in a spiral search, seeking the target. At twenty miles downrange, it reported to the processor that there was nothing seen, that the target was inconveniently missing.

The processor sent the weapon on a wiggle pattern, searching for the target, but the weapon was relatively small, designed to fit in a torpedo tube dimensioned for the Dong Feng units, and since it had a large and heavy nuclear warhead and a fairly voluminous processor, there was not much fuel space left. The weapon turned back from its last-resort wiggle search, and returned to the twenty-mile distant aim-point from the Nung Yahtsu. At a depth of three hundred meters, the hydrogen bomb warhead detonated, and the ocean was lit up with the light of day.

The explosion shock wave reached outward in the sea in all directions, the wave traveling westward from the center of the detonation, eventually finding the hull of the American submarine Leopard eighteen nautical miles away. The water of the sea acted as an anvil and the shock wave as a hammer as it impacted the submarine.

“What the hell is that?” Commander Dixon asked, hearing something through the hull to the east. “Sonar, Captain, what is that?” he screamed.

Chief Herndon’s mouth had dropped open in the window showing his face on Dixon’s display. He looked at his camera. “Control, supercavitating torpedo in the water, bearing two eight one, bearing drift left.”

“Dive, right full rudder, all ahead emergency flank and cavitate! Weapons Officer, snapshot tube one, Alert/Acute torpedo, targeted at the previous position of Target Three Zero, set in speed zero! Off’sa’deck, arm the sub-sunk buoy and program in our latitude and longitude, and set it for the Internet Email function, encrypted with an SAS authenticator — send a two man detail to the SAS safe and get it out now! Dive, report speed!”

“Sir, throttles at emergency flank, reactor at one five zero percent power, making five nine knots.”

Goddamnit, Dixon thought. Fifty percent reactor power over maximum, and it had only added a lousy eight knots, the reactor now effectively ruined and irradiating the entire ship. The deck trembled even more violently at emergency flank than she did at a hundred percent power, as he would have expected.

“Weapons Officer, report status!”

“Sir, tube one is ready in all respects, outer door open, weapon ready.”

“Snapshot tube one, Target Three Zero!”

“Tube one set,” the Cyclops system barked in its artificially excited state. “Unit fourteen, stand by. Unit fourteen, fire. Unit fourteen — shoot!”

The deck jumped just before the explosion on the port side, rolling the deck to starboard suddenly. It wasn’t the normal crash of a torpedo launch, Dixon thought.

“XO, what happened?” he shouted at Phillips.

“Weps,” she shouted, “what’ve you got?”

Taussig’s face looked thunderstruck in the weapons control cubicle. “Ma’am, the torpedo detonated as it left the tube — the speed at emergency flank must have snapped the weapon in half as it was leaving, and it blew the high explosive on the hull. I’ve got a wire continuity open circuit, outer door won’t shut, and the tube is leaking—”

“Flooding in the torpedo room!” Chief Joyce’s voice called on the tactical circuit. “Flooding in the torpedo room from tube one door!”

“Flooding in the torpedo room,” Officer of the Deck King man announced on the 1ME ship wide announcing system. “Casualty assistance team lay to the torpedo room.”

“XO,” Dixon said to Donna Phillips, “turn the coordinator watch over to the navigator and lay to the torpedo room and take charge at the scene.”

“Aye, sir,” Phillips said, her window going black as she pulled off her headset.

“Sonar, Captain! Report status of the torpedo in the water!”

“Conn, Sonar, bearing drift high left on the torpedo, sir, it doesn’t have us.”

Dixon nodded. He might evade the torpedo, and all he had to do was save the ship from the flooding in the torpedo room. If anyone could do that, Donna Phillips could. He took a deep breath, his only regret that the flooding casualty meant that further torpedo launches at the Julang position would have to wait. The torpedo had to have been a counterfire that the Julang launched just before it died in the Vortex detonation, a sort of goodbye present from the Chinese crew just before they checked out, the bastards.

Dixon selected his view to come above the ASW bowl, looking down on the display from high above, and ordered Cyclops to display the chart. He looked at the bearings to the torpedo, the solution on it weak since they had done no maneuvers on the torpedo. He debating pinging an active sonar pulse to determine the torpedo’s range, but decided against it. No sense alerting the unit to his presence if it hadn’t found him. It would be nicely fading far astern of them by now.

Dixon hadn’t counted on a nuclear detonation from the torpedo. The shockwave hit the Leopard from aft without warning. The ship in one instant was running full out to the west to evade the torpedo. The next it was slammed by a giant sledgehammer. Dixon’s body smashed into the wall of the cubicle hard enough to break his collarbone and his right arm. The boom microphone of his headset broke off and cut clear through the flesh of his cheek and into his tongue, the helmet visor broken. He slipped to the deck on a trail of blood from a laceration to his shoulder, and his unconscious body collapsed in the tight cubicle.

The other members of the battle stations firecontrol party in the control room were also thrown against bulkheads and injured beyond the point of helping themselves with one exception — the diving officer of the watch, an ensign studying for his OOD quals, the electrical officer Brendon “Tiny” Farragut, the nickname in reference to his 250-pound frame. Farragut was strapped into the ship-control console’s diving officer seat with a five-point harness, and though he suffered whiplash from the blast of the torpedo and couldn’t see after every electrical circuit aboard went dead, he did the one thing he’d been trained to do over and over again at the dive simulator in New London — he reached for the dual stainless-steel emergency main ballast tank blow chicken switches, pulled their lock mechanisms downward, and lifted both levers high into the overhead. He reached for the 1MC microphone to announce an emergency surface, but the circuit was as dead as the rest of the ship.

He still had emergency hydraulics, so he pulled back on the bow planes and the stern planes and held the up angle at fifty degrees, dumping the unconscious bodies behind him into the aft bulkhead, perhaps even injuring them worse. But Farragut had been trained in the submariner’s mantra by Lieutenant Commander Phillips: “Save the mission, save the ship, save the reactor plant, save the crew, in that order.” The mission was beyond his ability to save, but he could save the ship, and he fully intended to surface the flooding submarine if the ship systems cooperated. He had no depth gauge and no Cyclops inclinometer, but he hit the battle lantern switch, the light shining on his panel. There, mounted in the overhead, was an old fashioned water-filled bubble inclinometer. The ship’s up angle was approaching sixty degrees up. He fought the bow planes down, wondering how long the hydraulic pressure would last, and was able to get the angle down to fifty degrees. A brass Bourdon-tube pressure gauge was also nestled in the overhead, for use in extreme loss-of-all-power emergencies, and its needle was climbing rapidly past three hundred feet. They’d break the surface in no time.

The problem was, when they did, how long would they stay with a flooded torpedo room and the damage from the detonation of that torpedo? As the ship broached and came back to a zero angle, Farragut couldn’t help wondering how the torpedo, which had been so far astern, had managed to do this much damage. There must have been a second torpedo they hadn’t seen, he thought, and it had pursued them from directly astern. After the ship reached the surface she sank again, to two hundred feet, then returned sluggishly to the surface, the deck rolling in the swells. Farragut ditched his helmet, hit the quick release on his harness, and jumped out of the ship-control console, and turned on the control room battle lanterns. The litter of dead or unconscious bodies was ghastly, but what made his heart pound even faster was the fire roaring out of the aft bulkhead.

Farragut grabbed an extinguisher and ran to the fire, the unit empty while the fire continued to grow. It was only a fist grabbing his coverall sleeve that stopped his frenzied search for another fire extinguisher. He looked up to see the XO’s grime smeared face. Only her eyes and her grimacing teeth shone white.

“Farragut!” she shouted at him, her words coming in slow motion from the adrenaline of the moment. “The torpedo room is completely flooded and we’re flooding aft. She won’t last more than a few minutes. We have to abandon ship. Get to the forward escape trunk and open both hatches. Then get back here and help me with the wounded.”

As Farragut ran out of the space to the forward ladder, Phillips went to Captain Dixon’s cubicle. She knelt at his body and pulled off the Cyclops helmet, gently pulling the boom microphone out of his cheek.

“Sir? Sir? Can you hear me,” she asked, touching his face, then slapping it.

Dixon opened his eyes, the room blurring and spinning. “Donna,” he croaked.

“Sir, the ship was hit. The flooding in the torpedo room is catastrophic. We’re flooding through a twenty-one-inch open torpedo tube. I secured the hatches, but the bulkheads are leaking and we’reshipping water through the shaft seals and the main seawater system.”

“Can we restart the reactor?” he asked, his eyes glazed.

“Captain, the ship is doomed, we’re sinking fast. We have to abandon ship, sir. Farragut’s opening the escape trunk now. We need to get you out of here, sir. We’ve only got a few minutes to get you out of here.”

“You go,” Dixon said. “I’ll stay behind and hit the self-destruct. The Reds won’t salvage the Leopard, not on my watch.”

Dixon faded back into unconsciousness. Phillips pulled him to his feet, and when Farragut returned, they carried him up the ladder to the upper level.

“Get him through the hatch, Farragut,” she ordered. “I’m going to look for other survivors.”

Commander Donna Phillips had taken command of the operation to abandon ship, and had personally walked every passageway on the ship, making her way through the flooded lower-level engine room and pulling the injured to the access hatches. The junior officers stationed there lifted the barely breathing to the deck above. The torpedo room hatches had been shut and dogged. The flooded space was a total loss, the dozen crew members there consigned to the deep. The dead crewmen littered the deck of the operations compartment, and as the last of the living were hoisted out of the hatch, Phillips hurried to the control room, hoping with the flooding there was still power from the battery. With the flooding continuing, it was possible the battery compartment would explode, but the control room uninterruptible power supply should at least keep the ship-control circuits active until they too were underwater.

Control was a wreck. She found the sub-sunk buoy and coded in a sub-sunk message, typing quickly that they had attacked the surface force and been blindsided by a counterattack, and that the captain was down and she intended to self-destruct the ship. She loaded the buoy and armed it. She flipped back the toggle switch cover and hit the switch. The light energized to show the buoy was away. It would start sending their position to the overhead server, and with better luck than they had had so far they would be rescued.

There was only one thing left — she found the panel cover over the self-destruct circuit and punched in the code to open the cover. The panel came open, revealing a simple arm toggle switch, a red mushroom button, and a dual timer display. One was a timer setting, the second the time left to auto destruct She set the timer for ten minutes, armed the circuit, and punched the mushroom button. The second display counted from ten minutes to 9:59, rolling downward. Phillips shut the cover and took one last look around the room, then dashed to the ladder to the upper level and out the hatch. She tapped twice on the hatch ring’s steel, her farewell to the Leopard, then dived off the hull and swam to the nearest life raft.

“Paddle away from the hull,” she ordered loudly. “Taussig, did you find the emergency locator beacon?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Pull the pin and make sure it’s transmitting.”

The USS Leopard settled slowly in the water. Fifty yards to the east, three four-meter life rafts floated in the four-foot swells of the East China Sea. Lying in them were a total of forty-one survivors, sixteen of them unconscious — including Captain George Dixon. For those in the life rafts, there was nothing left to do but watch the ship sink. The nose cone and the sail were all that were visible. The aft deck vanished beneath the waves. The ship took a severe up angle until it faded backward The forward hatch went underwater, the sail vanished, then finally the bullet nose of the bow lowered until it disappeared between wave crests, and the Leopard was gone.

A tear rolled down Phillips’s cheek just as the double rolling booming noise of the plasma destruct charges exploded far below them in the depths of the sea. For them. Phillips thought, the war was over.