Virginia Class

17

"Fire! Fire in the boat!"

The warning windows appearing on his touchscreen told Garrett that the alert was coming from the torpedo room. The compartment had just been sealed, containing the fire and smoke.

"Rig the boat for fire, now, rig the boat for fire" sounded over the 1MC. Both of the control room's watertight doors clanged shut hard, the dogging wheels pushed hard to the right to seal them—"righty-tighty, lefty-loosey" as the old mnemonic phrase had it.

"Ventilation systems secure, Captain," Jorgensen announced. "All compartment hatches shut and dogged. Fire party laying forward to the torpedo room."

"Very well."

"Captain," Lieutenant Carpenter, the weapons officer, reported. "I have negative signal on tube two. The fire may have melted the fiber optics."

"Very well."

The tension on the control room deck was electric. The men were scared, but they continued to carry out their duties with the calm professionalism Garrett expected of them.

Three problems now complicated Virginia's survival, and Garrett needed to deal with all three. The submarine was racing away from four oncoming torpedoes now strung out astern, with four minutes more to go before the first one caught up with the racing Virginia. One of Virginia's snapshot ADCAPs was hung in torpedo tube two, and there was no way as yet to tell if the fish was damaged — or if the fire casualty had armed the ADCAP's warhead. The torpedo was wire-guided, but Carpenter was reporting negative signal… meaning information wasn't getting through in either direction. If the torpedo had armed itself, it could explode at any moment.

And finally, there was the fire. Electrical fires were rare on board American submarines, but they did happen from time to time. They were almost commonplace on board Russian boats, which had older technology, wiring that was nowhere near up to U.S. Navy spec, and crews not nearly so well trained as American sailors. Torpedo-room fires were especially dreaded. Those silently ranked ton-and-a-half monsters down there possessed both peroxide — a fuel that contained its own oxygen supply — and 650 pounds of PBXN-103 in the warhead. A torpedo-room fire had been responsible for the sinking of the Russian submarine Kursk, K-141, in August 2000, killing all 118 men aboard.

And a fire inside Virginia's torpedo-room bulkhead could also have another disastrous effect — touching off the fuel in the Tomahawk missiles in their vertical launch tubes, nestled in between the outer hull and the bulkhead on either side of the torpedo room. If a Tomahawk engine lit off while the missile was still in the tube, the blowtorch blast from its engine would melt right through hull and bulkhead both, resulting in a swift and one-way trip to the bottom.

Yeah, as they said… a torpedo-room fire could ruin your whole day.

At the moment, though, there was little else Garrett could control. The hang-fire would explode or not, and there was little that could be done now save closing the outer doors and emptying the tube, tasks that would be carried out once the fire was under control. Fire-control parties were dealing with the fire.

And Garrett had done all he could about the oncoming torpedoes, at least for the moment. When they got closer, maybe…

He wondered if the Sea Hawk had been able to pluck the CIA "package" back from the angry sea. He didn't regret doing what he'd done; making that kind of decision was what the U.S. government paid him to do.

Yet he also had to consider what must be going through the crew's minds right now. Even knowing that Virginia's survival depended on instant response, they would be identifying with that poor son of a bitch adrift in the storm, watching his ticket home slide away into the depths. And they would be aware that standing orders had sealed off the men in the torpedo room as soon as fire was detected. That was survival.

Survival meant sacrifice.

Garrett found himself thinking about one of the great heroes of the U.S. submarine service — Commander Howard W. Gilmore. While commanding the USS Growler on her fourth combat patrol in the Pacific during World War II, he'd been on the conning tower when a Japanese gunboat attacked out of the darkness, spraying the bridge with machine-gun fire. Desperately wounded as the lookouts had scrambled below deck, he'd waved off the sailors who'd tried to come back for him. "Take her down!" had been his final command.

Growler had submerged out from under Gilmore, and for that act he'd been posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor.

Survival.

And more than survival. Striking back.

Who was it who'd just ambushed the Virginia? Occam's Razor — the premise that the simplest explanation was most often the correct one — suggested that that other sub out there in the darkness was the rogue submarine that had been torpedoing Vietnamese assets, taking American hostages…

… and blowing helpless civilian airliners out of the sky.

He wanted that other submarine, wanted it very badly indeed. Curse the damned luck that had crippled Virginia's weapons system on her very first shot fired in anger! He detected the hand of the ubiquitous Murphy here. If something can go wrong, it will go wrong.

Garrett decided that he needed to be a bit proactive with old Murph. There had to be a way to encourage things to start going wrong for the hostile sub out there.

If he could understand the enemy, understand his thinking, he could kill him.

"Don EABs!" Giangreco yelled. The compartment was swiftly filling with smoke, burning the lungs and rendering sight all but useless.

Wallace had been through the emergency drill a hundred times, first back at sub school, then later as a raw, air-breathing unqual during the trip under the ice — being forced to find EABs and overhead air source manifolds in every compartment on board— blindfolded.

Emergency Air-Breathing masks were full-face respirators with regulators that clipped to your belt, and air hoses that attached to manifolds in the overhead. Wallace pulled his mask into place, tightening the straps behind his head, and inhaled hard to draw his first breath. Submariners called wearing the damned things sucking air or, more impolitely, sucking. Partly that was because you had to suck hard to draw each breath, which was incredibly tiring after the first few minutes, and partly too, the sailors said who'd done it, it was because wearing the things sucked.

With the EAB on, however, he could breathe, and he could see better without the stinging smoke searing his watering eyes. The other Virginia men had their masks on, too. The SEALs, though, were coughing and gasping in the aft end of the compartment; there weren't enough masks for everyone.

But, then, all that was necessary was to have enough masks for the people needed to fight the fire. A CAT— an emergency Casualty Assistance Team — would be on the way by now, but if the fire could be extinguished sooner, so much the better. Giangreco had snatched a bright red CO₂ fire extinguisher off the bulkhead and was approaching the fire like a warrior prepared for battle.

It was tough to see through the boiling smoke, but to Wallace's eye it appeared that a bundle of plastic tubes and plastic-coated wires had caught fire inside the opened access, and the stuff was bubbling up into a tangled, blazing mass of molten plastic.

Something exploded inside the access panel, and a glob of flaming plastic smacked against Giangreco's visor. He stumbled back, dropping the fire extinguisher and clawing at the clinging, burning goo.

"Chief!" Rodriguez yelled, turning to catch the chief torpedoman. For an instant, all was chaos in the noisy, smoky hell of the fire-lit compartment.

The explosion, Wallace saw, had also spit a mass of burning plastic the size of his head out of the panel and onto the black-and-red steel of a Mark 48 ADCAP, just ahead of the propulsor shroud. It landed right over a peroxide intake vent, blazing furiously.

Wallace didn't think; he couldn't think. Somewhere, deep inside his mind, fear gibbered… and with it the knowledge that if the fuel supply of that torpedo ignited, it would be like loosing a three-and-a-half-ton rocket inside this tiny space. Lunging forward, he scooped up the burning mass, dragged it from the torpedo, and looked wildly about for something to do with it.

His hands were burning. Christ the pain! But he managed to take three swift steps aft, drop to his knees, and plunge the plastic, the flame, and his blistering hands into the bucket of mop water he'd been using just a few minutes before to swab the linoleum tiles of the deck.

He discovered he was shrieking in white agony into his EAB mask.

"Conn, sonar! First torpedo has just gone active! Range seven hundred yards!"

"Thank you, sonar." Acoustical homing torpedoes could follow the sounds made by the target, or, if they got close enough, they could begin using active sonar to ping the target, homing on the echoed return.

Only two strategies were really open to Garrett— using decoys or outrunning the hunters. The trouble was, that other sub skipper was good. Rather than firing four torpedoes all at once, he'd staggered the firing, spreading the torpedoes out from side to side and stringing them sequentially, so that the first was now seven hundred yards away, but the last was still nearly two thousand yards away.

That meant that Garrett was going to have to defeat each torpedo in turn, that the decoy he used to trick the first one would not take out the next as well.

"Captain!" sounded over his headset, the voice muffled by an EAB face mask. "This is BM1 Johnson, CAT leader!"

"Go!"

"Sir, the fire in the torpedo room is secured! We have one man down with burns."

"Get a corpsman down there on the double."

"Already on the way, sir."

"Very well. Set a reflash watch and report back to me."

"Aye aye, sir."

With any fire on a submarine, there was always a danger that hot flammable materials would rekindle themselves. The reflash watch was a sailor detailed to just sit there and watch the smoldering rubble, and to sound the alarm if the fire flashed back into life.

He would also need to deal with ventilating the smoke.

However, there was the small matter of enemy torpedoes to deal with first.

"Sonar! Conn! Give me a range countdown on the nearest fish!"

"Conn, Sonar! Range five hundred yards… four-seven-zero… four-five-zero… four-three-zero…"

It felt as though the torpedo were crawling after the Virginia, but it came on, relentless and deadly.

He could hear the pinging now, a faint, high-pitched ringing, growing steadily louder as the torpedo probed the ocean ahead of itself, searching for Virginia's hull. "All hands. Brace for sudden maneuvering!"

"Two-five-zero… two-three-zero…"

"Release countermeasures!" he called.

Lieutenant Carpenter practically pounded on his touchscreen. "Countermeasures released, Captain!"

"Emergency dive!" Garrett said. "Make depth seven hundred feet!"

"Emergency dive, aye. Make depth seven-zero-zero feet, aye aye!"

The deck tilted sharply as Virginia angled sharply down and plunged into the depths.

The countermeasures — a pair of canisters designed to release a cloud of highly reflective bubbles, popped clear of Virginia's hull, drifting along in her wake. Virginia, meanwhile, went nose-down in a steep dive, letting the expanding cloud of bubbles momentarily mask her maneuver.

Coming in two hundred yards astern, the first torpedo, its active sonar pinging, picked up the reflected echoes from the bubbles and kept coming in straight, punching straight through the bubble cloud…… and losing the target echo.

The torpedo's idiot-level brain fell back on its list of programmed directives. Still pinging, it began to circle, searching for a target, any target.

It would continue to do so until its fuel supply ran out.

Virginia, meanwhile, continued its dive, gradually leveling off at seven hundred feet.

Of the remaining torpedoes, the fourth one, at the southernmost extreme of the spread, had traveled far enough off the line-of-sight to the Virginia that it had failed to acquire the target, and continued moving in a straight line off into the empty darkness of the ocean, again until its fuel gave out.

Numbers two and three, however, were close enough that both had already acquired the Virginia when their sonars went active, and far enough back not to be decoyed by the countermeasures. Both detected Virginia's dive, and both angled their propulsors to change their paths into dives that would intercept the fleeing American submarine in another few moments.

Because of the enemy sub's firing spread, the angle between the two incoming torps was almost thirty degrees. Garrett couldn't turn left or right, because to do so would sharply reduce the distance between the sub and one or the other of the torpedoes. All he could do was continue traveling straight, seeking to outrun them both.

Virginia's published dive depth was 800 feet, but in fact she was capable of a bit more… one thousand feet with a 10-percent safety margin. The Seawolf could dive deeper but certain trade-offs had been forced on the new submarine design. Virginia's hull was made of HY-100-grade steel, the same as Sea-wolf, but the pressure hull was thinner to save on weight and on-board space. Her smaller power plant meant she wasn't as fast as Seawolf, even though she was just three-quarters of the Seawolf's weight, and that meant she wasn't as easy to handle at great depth.

"Leveling off at seven-zero-zero feet, Captain," the diving officer announced.

"Very well. Sonar, Conn! Update on the closest fish."

"Torpedo two, Captain. Range now four hundred yards. Closing at a relative speed of fifteen knots. Time to impact… forty seconds."

He waited. The ventilation system was still off, in order to avoid spreading smoke from the torpedo room throughout the boat. That meant it was hot. Sweat was dripping from every face — partly from the lack of air circulation, partly from simple, stark fear. As the seconds passed, as the torpedoes drew closer, the stink of fear grew thicker and thicker.

There was also, Garrett realized, a slight haze of smoke as well. The CAT party would have opened the watertight door to the torpedo room in order to enter it, and some of the smoke would have escaped. Even though all watertight doors on board were sealed now, a little smoke seeped through every time someone went from one compartment to another, and the air was fast becoming pretty foul.

"Incoming torpedo at one-three-zero yards… one hundred yards…"

"Release countermeasures! Full up planes!"

"Countermeasures released, Captain."

"Full up planes, aye aye!" Virginia's deck tilted sharply, bow-up. A calculator slid off a console and clattered aft across the deck, followed by the crash of a carelessly placed coffee mug.

Again, a cloud of bubbles exploded in Virginia's wake. Again, the torpedo — this time coming down at an angle as it continued to pursue the sub on its dive— homed on the bubbles and not the Virginia. Punching through the bubble cloud, it abruptly lost its sonar lock. Still diving, it began to circle, simple-mindedly searching for the suddenly vanished submarine.

There'd been a chance, actually, that the torpedo might plunge beneath its operational depth and implode, but a torpedo was a fairly densely packed mechanism, and could generally operate at greater depths than most subs. After a few moments, the torpedo angled upward, widening its search spiral.

By that time, the third torp was closing on the fast-rising Virginia.

"Torpedo range now four hundred yards! Three-eight-zero. Three-five-zero…"

"What's our depth?"

"Depth five hundred feet, Captain. And rising."

What Garrett was counting on was that a torpedo moving through the water at fifty-five knots could not react immediately to a change in the target's bearing. The tactical trick, here, was to let the hostile torpedo get close enough that, when he pulled a sudden maneuver, it didn't have time to react.

But he couldn't wait too long. At a relative velocity of fifteen knots, that torpedo was closing at a rate of ten yards each second.

"Incoming torpedo at one-two-zero yards…"

"Release countermeasures!"

"Countermea—"

"Full right rudder! Emergency turn, hard right!"

Virginia slewed so sharply that the deck, already canted from her rise up through the depths, now heeled over far to starboard. A sailor standing by the helm station lost his grip, slipped, and hit the deck with a yelp of pain, sliding across the deck to thump against the starboard bulkhead forward.

"Captain! Sonar! Torpedo number two has reacquired!"

Ignore it. Right now, he was dancing with number three….

"Captain! Sonar! Torpedo has not decoyed! Range one-three-zero yards…"

"Blow emergency ballast!"

"Blow emergency ballast, aye aye!"

Virginia's hull shuddered as bottles of compressed air blasted the water from her ballast tanks, and she began rising toward the roof. Three shrill ooo-gah! alarm blasts sounded, as the 1MC blared "Now, surface! Surface! Surface! … "

Her rise was spectacular — better than ten feet per second — as her nose lifted to a forty-five degree angle. Still driving forward at forty knots, she sprinted for the surface.

The third torpedo struck turbulent water and detonated….

"Hit!" the sonar operator called over the intercom. "Torpedo three hit the target!"

Jian allowed himself to relax. He'd been following the chase for long minutes now, as it was relayed to him by his sonar officer. The twists, turns, and dodges of the American submarine had been spectacular, but at least one of the Chinese fish had ignored the decoys and homed in for the kill.

"Correction, Captain," the sonar officer announced. "I am not getting break-up noises." There was a hesitation. "Sir, target has blown his ballast tanks and is surfacing. He may be damaged…."

Jian slammed his palm against the periscope housing. Ancestors!

He immediately regretted the outburst, even unspoken. The men expected him to be passionless and cool.

He knew one simple fact, however. Either the American submarine would be sunk or crippled within the next few minutes, or it would turn on its attacker with the ferocity of a wounded tiger. If the first, there was no problem. If the second, however, Jian doubted that the Yinbi would survive the assault. Frankly, he was surprised the American hadn't sent a torpedo back down the line of attack. That bespoke a curious confidence on his adversary's part. Confidence or foolishness.

Jian never underestimated an opponent. If the American was that confident of finding and killing the Yinbi …

"Maneuvering! Come to zero-three-zero! Ahead slow, silent operation!"

The torpedo blast slammed against Virginia's aft hull like a sledgehammer, rolling the fast-rising submarine onto her port beam. In the control room, men were thrown from their seats — those who weren't buckled in. Instead of the ooh-gah of the emergency surface alarm, the swooping wail of the collision alarm cut through the shouts and cries of shaken men.

Garrett hadn't fallen out of his seat, not quite, but he'd had to cling to the arm and his touchscreen console with a grip that left his hands painful. Slowly, still surfacing, Virginia righted herself, and members of the control room watch began scrambling back to their stations.

No leaks in the control room… no thunderous blast of water exploding through the submarine like a detonating bomb. What the hell had happened?

"We're still in one piece, Captain!" Jorgensen called from a board where he could monitor leaks or damage throughout the boat. "Jesus! What happened?"

Garrett had the same information coming up as a schematic on his screen as well. "I'm not sure, XO," he replied. "Either that torpedo had a proximity fuse, or else it hit the turbulence from our EMBT blow." The initials were shorthand for Emergency Main Ballast Tank.

"Makes sense." Jorgensen nodded. "At this depth, hitting the MBT outflow would've been like hitting a solid wall. Either way…" He slapped the bulkhead fondly. "The old girl held together."

Old girl? Virginia was scarcely that on this, her first mission.

But Garrett knew he was feeling pretty old right now….

"Sonar! Where's that last torpedo?"

"Sorry, sir. We lost it there for a moment." Between the roar of the EMBT blow and the explosion itself, it was a miracle Queensly could still hear anything. "Torpedo two has definitely reacquired and is closing, bearing one-seven-oh, range three hundred!"

Too close! "Helm! Come left to zero-one-zero! Maneuvering, maintain flank!"

"Come left to zero-one-zero, aye! Maintain flank speed, aye aye!"

"Depth!"

"Passing two-seven-five feet, Captain! Ascending at eighteen feet per second!"

"Release countermeasures!"

"Countermeasures away!"

"Come left four-zero degrees!"

"Come left, four-zero degrees, aye aye!"

Virginia turned while still climbing, twisting away as the last torpedo homed in for the kill. Garrett could hear the torpedo now, they all could hear it… a faint, high-pitched whine growing louder… louder… accompanied by the ping of its sonar….

A scraping sound, metal grating on metal, sounded from overhead, from the sail. Garrett saw the faces of Jorgensen and several others go white… but then the whine faded.

"Christ! It missed us!" Queensly called over the comm link. "Correction… sir, I think it struck a glancing blow on the sail, but it didn't explode!"

It must have been deflected just enough by the countermeasures and Virginia's half twist to the side. That had been way too close for comfort.

"Track it, Sonar."

"Yessir! Still tracking. It's lost us… it's starting to circle… "

They weren't out of it yet. When that torpedo circled halfway around, it would pick them up again.

"Conn! Sonar! It's coming around again!"

Fortunately, it would have to cut a pretty wide circle to come about. And in the meantime, Virginia was going up on the roof.

And Garrett had one final bit of physics on his side in his limited bag of tricks.

Throughout the world's oceans, at a depth that varies with conditions between one hundred and two hundred fifty feet, is a layer called the thermocline where the warm waters near the surface change rapidly to the near-freezing chill of the depths. Because the speed of sound waves decreases sharply in the colder water, the thermocline tends to isolate sounds above the layer from those below. Subs and ship-borne sonar systems had a lot of trouble hearing submarines below the thermocline.

And submarines — or acoustically homing torpedoes — had a lot of trouble hearing targets above the thermocline as well.

Racing upward at a forty-five degree angle, "flanking it," as submariners would say, Virginia pierced the thermocline layer at a depth of 130 feet, then seconds later burst from the ocean and into the rain-swept night, hurtling so far out of the water that only her screw remained submerged. She hesitated there a moment, in an unlikely attempt to conquer the air… before falling forward like a breaching whale, hitting the water with a thunderous crash of spray.

The last torpedo swept by somewhere beneath her. Possibly it had been damaged by its glancing encounter with Virginia's sail, or possibly its fuel supply was nearly spent. In any case, the sounds of its engine and sonar pings were masked by the thermocline. Queensly reported he was no longer hearing it.

A few long minutes later, they could assume that its engine had run out of juice.

Garrett slumped back in the command chair, his uniform drenched with sweat, the strength leached from his body.

"Jesus H. Christ!" Jorgensen said, shaking his head. "You did it, Skipper!"

"Never seen a performance like that in all my years in the service!" Bollinger added. "Fuckin'-A!"

"Sonar! Any sign of the boat that 'bushed us?"

"Negative, Captain. If he's out there, he's laying low and keeping quiet."

"Put all your ears out, Queenie. If anything so much as twitches out there, I want to know."

"Aye aye, sir."

The battle had in fact been a draw. Virginia had survived — barely — but the first shot she'd ever tried to fire in anger had hung in the tube, and they'd come that close to being sent to the bottom. The enemy sub was still out there, doing what submarines do best.

Waiting and listening.

And in the meantime, Virginia was an easy target, wallowing on the surface with a smoke-filled torpedo room and fumes leaking through the boat. They would have to tend their wounds before going back and hunting down that enemy submarine… and hope to hell the enemy didn't come looking for them first.

As the minutes stretched out, though, it became clear that the enemy sub was not pursuing its momentary advantage. If it was still out there, it was staying very quiet indeed.

Garrett knew, though, that there would be another confrontation. As soon as Virginia was ready to resume the hunt, they were going to track the enemy submarine down, and when they caught him, they were going to nail his metaphorical hide to the metaphorical wall.

And Garrett was going to take a great deal of personal satisfaction in doing just that.