Vengeance

66 USS THEODORE ROOSEVELT

As USS Theodore Roosevelt surged through the dark green water at ahead flank, Captain Ryan Noss looked over his shoulder through the aft Bridge window, his gaze settling on the torpedo that had just finished snaking back and forth into the aircraft carrier’s frothy white wake. On each side of the hundred-thousand-ton ship, the Arleigh Burke — class destroyers USS Halsey and USS O’Kane kept falling behind, each with a torpedo also in its wake, steadily closing. Three other torpedoes had failed to latch onto their assigned targets and had continued north, while Theodore Roosevelt and her escorts sped east.

Moments ago, after the incoming torpedoes had been spotted and Theodore Roosevelt had turned to evade them, Noss had watched two HAAWCs get shot down, similar to the loss of the MH-60R helicopters the previous day. The Russian submarine that had fired the torpedoes was still out there and had undoubtedly begun its pursuit. The knowledge that three more Russian submarines were closing from the north and that the carrier and her escorts were headed toward a minefield stretching across the Strait of Hormuz hovered in the background of Noss’s thoughts, but he pushed that concern aside for the moment. The far more urgent issue was how to shake the trailing torpedo that was steadily gaining on his ship.

Maybe, if Theodore Roosevelt increased speed, the carrier could keep the torpedo chasing it at bay until it ran out of fuel. But the aircraft carrier was already at ahead flank. Noss needed more speed, and the only option was to increase reactor power above the authorized limit.

Noss picked up the 23-MC, issuing orders to DC Central. “RO, Captain. Override reactor protection and increase shaft turns to one hundred and twenty percent power.”

The Reactor Officer acknowledged, and Noss felt vibrations in the deck as the main engines strained under the increased steam load. Theodore Roosevelt surged forward as the carrier’s four screws churned the water more rapidly, and Noss watched his ship slowly increase speed.

Stepping close to the aft Bridge window, he studied the incoming torpedo. It was still gaining on the carrier, but not as rapidly.

Both destroyers, having fallen notably behind the aircraft carrier, were in dire straits. The torpedoes had almost closed the remaining distance. Both ships began an evasive maneuver called an Anderson turn — essentially a turn forming a complete circle. The torpedoes would follow the destroyers, and once each ship crossed its wake where it began the turn, each torpedo would be forced to choose which wake to follow. Hopefully, it would choose the wrong one.

Each destroyer crossed its wake and Noss watched tensely, hoping the torpedoes would be tricked into following the original wake. But he was observing from a distance, unable to discern what the torpedoes had done. Both ships turned sharply away from their original wakes, steadying up as they increased speed, having slowed down during the sharp turn due to the immense rudders digging into the water.

As both ships returned to flank speed, Noss was about to breathe a sigh of relief when USS Halsey was engulfed in a geyser shooting two hundred feet into the air. Seconds later, USS O’Kane was similarly shrouded as a water plume shot up from beneath the warship, falling back down in a misty rain. As the air cleared, Noss hoped that neither ship had suffered a mortal wound. But both destroyers slowed down, and Noss noted that in each case, the ship’s bow was no longer aligned with its stern. The keel on each ship had been broken. It would only be a matter of time before each warship went to the bottom.

Noss’s attention returned to the torpedo chasing Theodore Roosevelt, which had continued to close. The torpedoes chasing the destroyers had ignored the decoys trailing behind the warships — the new Russian Futlyar torpedoes were superior to the previous model indeed, able to ignore the small countermeasures trailed behind the massive warships. He concluded that the torpedo chasing Roosevelt would not be fooled either.

Their only hope was to either outrun the torpedo or successfully confuse it with an Anderson turn. Lieutenant Commander Michael Beresford, the aircraft carrier’s Officer of the Deck during General Quarters, decided to give the Anderson turn a try.

“Helm, left full rudder!” Beresford called out.

He kept the rudder on as the carrier circled around, and Roosevelt crossed its original wake a minute later, the torpedo not far behind.

“Shift your rudder!” Beresford ordered, “Steady course one-two-zero.”

Beresford steered the carrier onto a thirty-degree tangent from its original course, hoping the torpedo chose the wake heading to the left rather than the right. All eyes on the Bridge turned aft, watching the torpedo reach the intersecting wakes. Noss momentarily lost the light green trail as the torpedo traveled into the dual wakes, his hope rising each second the torpedo failed to reappear. Finally, a light green trail emerged, snaking within the starboard wake.

The torpedo hadn’t been fooled.

By now the torpedo was only a thousand yards behind Theodore Roosevelt. Noss estimated they had less than a minute before the torpedo reached the carrier’s stern, the last place he wanted to get hit by a torpedo. It would destroy the rudders and propellers, reducing the carrier to a drifting hunk of metal, awaiting the coup de grâce that would send it to the bottom.

Noss approached the Officer of the Deck. “You cannot let the torpedo hit us in the stern! Do whatever you have to, but protect the screws and rudders!”

Beresford nodded his understanding, his eyes shifting back to the torpedo for a second. Then he called out, “Helm, hard right rudder. Starboard engines, back emergency!”

The Helm complied and the hundred-thousand-ton carrier tilted to port as the twin twenty-by-thirty-foot rudders dug into the ocean and the starboard screws quickly slowed, then began churning the water in reverse. Beresford was using the starboard engines to help twist the carrier around faster. But as a result, the carrier slowed down rapidly as it made the sharp turn, while the torpedo sped toward its target.

Whether Beresford’s bold maneuver would succeed depended on which of the torpedo’s homing algorithms was dominant. As modern torpedoes closed on their targets, they depended on the magnetic field of the large metal ship to determine when to detonate; heavyweight torpedoes didn’t run into a ship. They ran below the ship and detonated beneath the keel, with the explosion creating a huge bubble void, followed by a water jet that shot upward when the bubble collapsed. The weight of the unsupported ship in the bubble void, combined with the water jet cutting through the hull and compartment decks, was usually enough trauma to break a warship’s keel.

However, Theodore Roosevelt was not an ordinary warship, and the carrier could likely survive a single torpedo explosion without incurring fatal damage, as long as propulsion and the rudders were spared. The question in Noss’s mind was whether the torpedo would continue spiraling toward the carrier by following the ship’s wake, or, when it was close enough and sensed the ship’s magnetic signature, would it cut through the water directly toward it?

The torpedo reached the point where Beresford had begun the sharp turn, and Noss’s stomach tightened as the torpedo remained in the ship’s wake. Roosevelt kept turning, its rate rising rapidly now that the starboard engines had reached back emergency speed.

Suddenly, the torpedo veered sharply, speeding out of the wake, traveling directly toward Roosevelt’s starboard side.

It was an odd sensation — the relief spreading through Noss’s body — as he realized his ship was about to be torpedoed. But Theodore Roosevelt was going to take it in the side instead of the critical stern.

The torpedo trail disappeared as it ran beneath the carrier, and a second later, Noss felt and heard the explosion as a water plume shot a hundred and fifty feet above the carrier, dousing the tower and flight deck as it fell.

The Flooding Alarm sounded, followed by emergency announcements reporting flooding in several starboard compartments amidships. Noss listened tensely for any indication that the ship’s keel had been broken, but… there was no indication it had. Just flooding, plus the damaged equipment and injured personnel from the water jet slicing through the hull. A query to Engineering confirmed that the ship was ready to answer all bells; there had been no damage to the rudder, screws, or nuclear reactor plants.

“Your orders, sir?” Beresford asked.

Noss evaluated his options, which weren’t many. Actually, with four Russian submarines in pursuit, only one plan came to mind. Head east and coordinate with the ASW commander to have the P-8A squadrons lay down a sonobuoy field stretching across the Persian Gulf behind the aircraft carrier, just west of the strait.

“Head east,” Noss ordered, “at ahead flank.”

Soon, Roosevelt would be protected by mines to the east and sonobuoys to the west. Noss’s ship would be safe, as long as the Russian submarines didn’t penetrate the sonobuoy field.