Voyage of the Devilfish

CHAPTER 19

Lieutenant Commander Todd Nikels fastened both latches of his oxygen mask to his flight helmet. The weapon-loading team had just completed the Mongoose missile-loadout. There had been only time to load two of the air-to-air heatseekers — both missiles were aboard, one below each wing of the F-14 supersonic fighter. Nikels waved to the Weapons Officer and keyed up the throttles. His engines had been idling during the loadout in violation of navy ordinance-loading procedures but this was an emergency.

“Oceana Tower, this is Valley Forge,” Nikels said into his radio set. ‘Taxiing to zero eight now. Request takeoff clearance and a vector to the northwest.”

“Valley Forge, roger, cleared for takeoff runway zero eight, climbout on three two five.” Nikels was almost reckless with the big jet fighter as he turned the taxiway corner. He had never taxied the aircraft this fast before, but he understood he had only minutes, maybe seconds.

Nikels’ backseater, the radar intercept officer, was Lieutenant Brad Tollson, a Virginia native. Tollson had just returned from a tour at Pax River’s Test Pilot School, a rival to Nikels’ own most recent school. Top Gun. The products of each school seemed to think they were God’s gift to aviation. Normally the crew of an F-14 Tomcat was the best two-man team in the Navy, but so far Nikels hadn’t been able to figure out the stony Tollson.

The lights of the runway were lined up in front of Nikels’ canopy in the predawn darkness, the neat twin lines inviting him up to the heavens. He pushed the keys to the stops with full afterburners and the F-14 began its takeoff roll. As the jets came up to full thrust he felt the acceleration push him back into the seat, pull the flesh of his face back, every blood cell wanting to pool in his back and buttocks. The takeoff roll seemed to take forever, but at last the airspeed needle pointed to 170 knots. Nikels pulled the stick gently back, giving the wings just enough lift to pull the jet away from the concrete, retracted the wheels and flaps with one motion of his left hand. Now streamlined, the jet surged ahead, airspeed coming up to 300 knots. He turned left in a three-g turn and headed toward his intercept point with the cruise missile. In the background he could hear Tollson talking with the EA6B radar plane, calling a vector up to him to close the missile. At an altitude of 100 feet Nikels swept back the wings of the F-14 and went supersonic, and within two minutes it seemed that half of Virginia Beach’s glass windows were broken from the sonic booms. Nikels had no time to worry about a little glass.

Captain 3rd Rank Dmitri Ivanov stared at Admiral Novskoyy, wishing Captain Vlasenko were in command instead of under arrest.

“Admiral,” Ivanov said. “We must continue to the east, we must not drive this ship into the blast radius of the Magnum.” Novskoyy suddenly felt a heavy fatigue. Unless he could get back to the polynya and somehow transmit the molniya, his plan would fail. It might already be failing. If an American submarine had come for him here, what had they already done to the ships of his fleet? And here this Ivanov wanted to run away like a woman.

“Men are dying right now, our fellow submariners,” Novskoyy told him. “The entire Northern Fleet is off the American east coast. I must warn them. I am certain they are being hunted down right now. Just as the American submarine was sent here to hunt us down. We must get back to the polynya, we must turn back to the west.”

“Sir, the Magnum detonation will rip us apart, we have to continue east—”

“No,” Novskoyy said, pointing to the fire-control panel. “Look, the Magnum is two minutes beyond the air-point. Has it turned?” Ivanov looked down at the graphic display. “No, it’s still steady on course two eight zero.”

“And it is two minutes beyond the aimpoint.”

“Yes, Admiral… Either it is in a tail chase in pursuit of the American or it has lost the target.”

“It is a tail chase, Ivanov. The American boat is faster than we thought. He must also have a polymer system.”

“But, sir, the Magnum could have just lost the target and continued down the bearing line.”

“We, you heard the American as it fled the area after hitting us. He was loud as a train wreck. You heard his reactor recirculation pumps shifting to fast speed. And he was running at maximum speed when you launched the Magnum?”

“Yes, sir.”

“So why would he stop or slow down with a nuclear torpedo on the way?”

“But, sir, what if he went silent? Shut down?”

“Those are not American tactics.” Novskovyy was also a pedant. He had once been a naval instructor. “What would you do if you were the American commander?”

“I’d clear the area, sir. Run.”

“Correct. The Magnum is in a tail chase and the American is running. Turn the ship. If the American is running, the Magnum is pursuing, and the blast radius is further to the west than the polynya. Get me to the polynya so I can radio the fleet.”

“Yes, sir,” Ivanov said, crisply obedient once again.

“Deck Officer, Ship Control Officer, right full rudder, steady course west.”

The officers acknowledged, and 60,000 metric tons of Russian attack submarine came slowly around to the west, enroute to the thin ice of the polynya, on the way to transmit the molniya of Admiral Novskoyy.

Even though Vlasenko had been in the titanium pod for only a half hour the temperature inside was subzero. Since the collision he had sat on a wooden bench, watching his breath form vapor clouds in the cold and trying to decipher the meaning of the sounds of the ship without hard data. The collision must mean that an American submarine had been shadowing them. But did it stop Novskoyy’s lethal transmission?

Vlasenko had felt the hull tremble with the power of speeding up. A few minutes later came the unmistakable sound of a torpedo launch, the deck had angled to the port side, then starboard — turning hard right. The hull had again trembled with speed, then become calm. The polymer injection system was smoothing the ride. It seemed clear Novskoyy had launched a weapon at the intruder, then run like hell — it must be a Magnum! A conventional unit couldn’t hurt the firing ship, but a Magnum could blast them to the bottom if they were closer to it than 20 kilometers. Strangely, though, several minutes later the ship had slowed again and the pod deck angled to and fro as the ship was turned. It made no sense, there had been no detonation shock from the Magnum! Maybe it hadn’t been a Magnum after all. Vlasenko hated his position… from captain to passenger.

He had tried to distract himself with a mental calculation of the amount of air in the sphere, and his rate of oxygenuse. He had decided that the air was good enough for perhaps 12 to 24 hours, depending on the assumptions about his levels of metabolism. He also realized he would probably not last half that long… the cold was chipping away at both his body and his spirit. It was extremely painful. He could feel the circulation slowing in his arms and legs. His toes were numb, so were his fingertips. His ears burned from frostbite and his nasal linings were on fire from the frigid air. Pain. How long could he endure it…?

The Mark 50 Hullcrusher torpedo “felt” the thrust of its spinning propulsor. It had never before cruised on its own power; it had only been through simulated electronic checks. As instructed, it counted out the range from the firing point with a counter on the propulsor shaft so that it knew when to start the circular orbits, swimming in circles until it found a valid return. Seven minutes after launch the weapon reached the orbitpoint, put the rudder over and turned left to the north as it slowed to circling speed. Turning, it “listened” passively.

Nothing to the north. Nothing to the west. The weapon circled. Nothing to the south. Still orbiting, the weapon settled in for a long series of circles to find the target.

Two minutes after Ivanov ordered the turn, the ship was steady on course west, at first at her original polymer injection speed but slower as the polymers ran out. When the ship neared maneuvering range of the polynya she slowed further. All the while the officers continued monitoring the quickly retreating Magnum torpedo, twenty kilometers away, still on its own way west.

It was then that their Magnum turned back to the east, executing its default turn-back, now approaching them. The officers did not hear or detect the Magnum as it turned around. Because at that same moment, the Kaliningrad drove into the search-cone of an American torpedo.

The Hullcrusher torpedo, circling five miles from the firing ship, the Devilfish, “heard” a sound, a loud one, bearing 130, a submerged submarine sound. The unit searched the program codes for instructions. The first line instructed the torpedo to turn toward the sound and wiggle slightly; the unit obediently undulated its rudder and wiggled. The sound changed position from right to left, had a valid left-to-right tag reversal — signifying the target was dead ahead. The second program line told the weapon to put a signal into its guidance wire, telling the mother ship that it had a detect on the enemy. The third line told it to speed up to 50 knots. The propulsor wound up, and the weapon surged forward. The target was just ahead. The unit executed its final arming sequence and strained to feel the magnetic hull-detection-proximity sensor shift from DISTANT to CLOSE. Not long now. Not much longer, and its mission would be fulfilled. Just ahead, the target was coming closer, but then the target zoomed by so fast that it disappeared. The torpedo put its rudder over hard and turned right, the g-forces pushing the fuel in the fuel cell to the port side, almost starving the fuel pump. But then, up ahead, the torpedo received the rapidly retreating sound of the target’s propulsor. It was fast, but it was slowing. Slowing, range decreasing. Closer, catching up. Closer. Soon the target’s propulsor passed by overhead, and the torpedo was under the midsection of the hull. The torpedo “watched” its magnetic-hull-proximity sensor, which sensed iron, followed by a cascade of electrical tickles. The feel of iron was like a reward. In a rush, a compelling sequence of events overcame the weapon, all reflex. The detonators lit off in its belly, a tingling flash.

The detonators caused the 1500 pounds of high explosives to go up in one final, colossal fireball. The torpedo exploded, vaporizing into fifty thousand fragments, and its awareness stopped, ending in a fulfilled blackness. The explosion was focused in the exact direction of the maximum magnetic flux of the hull-sensor, putting 90 percent of the explosive force toward the enemy hull. Short of a nuclear weapon, it was the best, perhaps the only way to kill a doublehulled submarine. The force of the torpedo’s blast melted through the outer steel hull of the fifth compartment of the OMEGA, exactly amidships, vaporizing a hole fourteen feet in diameter. The annular tank space was the location of the external battery canisters, and the blast, though somewhat attenuated by the energy expended in breaking through the outer hull, blew the battery canisters into flat plates and scattered the remainder to the bottom of the sea. The force of the blast was lessened by the canisters absorbing the energy of the expanding hot gases. The burst next sought out the titanium inner hull, initially finding the external heavy frames bent into hoops, with the sheet titanium stretching between each frame. Four frames were forced inward, breaking them apart. The titanium skin welded onto the hoop-shaped frames was blown inward, creating a gaping eight-foot-diameter oblong hole. The rest of the explosive force was, as designed, concentrated inward, ready to unleash its deadly force on the interior of the hull.

The blast shouldered aside the titanium and came rushing into the interior of the submarine, to find that it was inside a storage tank of fuel oil for the emergency diesel generator.

Since the fifth compartment was aft of and adjacent to the reactor compartment, the fourth compartment, the oil served as a liquid-shield for the sixth compartment, the turbine room. From the outside, the physical result of the Mark 50 torpedo’s explosion, the pride of COMSUBLANT and DynaCorp International Underwater Systems Division, was little more than a dead battery and a small oil spill. The story was inside.

The blast of the American torpedo they had stumbled into caused the deck of the control compartment to jump, though slightly.

“What was that?” Ivanov asked.

“I heard an explosion,” Chekechev said.

“What’s sonar indicate?” Novskoyy demanded.

Ivanov: “Sonar is out, so is fire-control. The communications and navigation consoles are still up. We must have had a computer casualty in the fifth compartment. All the computers located there are dead. Without sonar and fire-control we can’t shoot any more weapons.”

Novskoyy reset the computer power-breaker. No use. The sonar and fire-control computers were lifeless.

And without sonar and fire-control, as Ivanov had said, Kaliningrad was no longer an offensive-weapon system, was no longer able to track the American submarine or shoot at it again. But they could hope the American would be on the bottom within the hour, the Magnum torpedo inflicting their revenge. The Magnum had fuel for 60 to 90 minutes of pursuit, and it had only been 23 minutes since it was launched. But without sonar and fire-control, Novskoyy thought, it would be difficult to return to Severomorsk. Well, at least the communications computer was still up and running, he only needed to reach the polynya to transmit the attack order, the molniya… Without sonar, there was no way of him detecting that the Magnum had turned around and was heading back to the aimpoint a mere eight kilometers from the west side of the polynya.

Ivanov looked over at Novskoyy, a phone in his hand.

“The communications circuits are intact. Admiral. Once we reach the polynya you will still be able to transmit your message.”

Novskoyy nodded, the man echoed his own thoughts, which turned bitter as he muttered, “I wanted to put all the computers up forward in the first compartment but Vlasenko insisted that the systems be split out. If all four had remained up forward as I had envisioned the ship would be at full capacity—”

“Not full, sir,” Ivanov said, looking at the damage-control display, “the oil-shield tank in compartment five is ruptured. The inner hull is compromised over more than half the circumference. Another explosion like that last one and we could be cut in half.”

“There will be no more detonations. The Magnum will be taking care of the American and very soon.”

“I wish we had some sonar. Admiral. Without it we’ll have to guess at the boundaries of the polynya. And there is no way to see if the Magnum has turned toward us.”

“We will find the polynya,” Novskoyy pronounced. “And the Magnum will find the Americans.”

Kaliningrad continued west, nearing the pressure ridge at the east end of the oval-shaped polynya.

Lieutenant Commander Todd Nikels pulled the F-14 into a final five-g turn and grunted against the g’s as the plane whipped around on an approach vector to the SSN-X-27 cruise missile.

“Fifteen seconds to intercept,” Tollson, the radar-intercept officer, called out. “Yeah, that’s it. Okay, radar contact, I’m looking at five miles, come on, close the bastard, it’s only doing maybe six-hundred knots.” Nikels pulled up his MASTER ARM switch and armed the Mongoose heatseeking missiles, then held his breath, waiting for Tollson to call the firing point. At this hour of the morning he didn’t expect to see the target missile at all.

“Range, one point five miles… come left five degrees… that’s it… stand by, and… FIRE!” Nikels pushed the launch button on the control stick and felt the plane jump as the rocket motor lit up the sky in front of him and the Mongoose left the rail on the port wing enroute to the target. Momentarily blinded, Nikels blinked rapidly while he spoke into the intercom.

“Firing one.”

“Roger,” Tollson said, “FIRE.” Nikels hit the stick button again, and again a Mongoose missile lit up the night sky as it flew away. This time Nikels had clenched his eyes shut so he would have the night vision to follow the missile to see if he got a kill.

“Fire two. Are you tracking?”

“Got’em,” Tollson said. Nikels looked out ahead at the Mongoose tracks as the heatseeking missiles flew on toward the cruise missile fired by the Vladivostok as it neared the boundary between the air base and the naval base, passed over a fence and was now officially over Norfolk Naval Base…

The shock of the detonation had quickly penetrated Vlasenko’s sluggish doze induced by exposure to the cold. The bare titanium of the escape pod was so cold that his cheek burned from the direct contact. With a major effort he lifted his head off the curved wall of the sphere, skin sticking to the metal, pulling off a patch of flesh. The wound was the least of his problems. The onset of hypothermia from the freezing pod was evident in his numb limbs, and if he had been able to check a mirror he would have seen that his lips were blue. He tried to force himself to motion, struggling against the pain, struggling against the cold… The intruding submarine, he decided, must have managed to get a torpedo in close, and the fact that he was still alive at least meant that the enemy did not use nuclear warheads on their torpedoes — Severomorsk’s intelligence estimates had been correct, after all. Conventional explosives were relatively ineffective against Kaliningrad’s hardened combination of titanium and steel, and Vlasenko allowed himself a moment of pride in the ship that had, after all, survived a direct hit. He listened for the sounds of another torpedolaunch but heard none. Strange. If he had been in command he would have pumped out more weapons, even if he had already launched a salvo of Magnums. But the torpedo tubes were silent. Why?

A loud explosion reverberated from the port side of the stuffy control room. The control room watchstanders believed the OMEGA was sinking. Pacino, stone-faced, held up his palm for quiet.

A sound came from the other side of the control room, faint, high-pitched. A screw at high speed, coming from… the west… the direction the Magnum had driven off to. Commander Jon Rapier’s face lost its color. “Captain… it’s coming back. The Magnum. We fooled it once…”

“I know, XO. It could be doing a default routine. Why else would it have turned around and come back? This thing may detonate with or without contact on us, a nuisance detonation—”

“A damned sight worse than a nuisance, skipper.” Pacino looked at Rapier, standing there at the base of the periscope stand, scanning his face, looking for answers. Pacino was out of answers.

“Yes, XO. Much worse than a nuisance,” was all he said.

Captain Vlasenko strained to hear sounds from the inside of the control compartment. What was going on below now? Was Novskoyy approaching the enemy to return fire? Was he headed back to the polynya to transmit his doomsday message? He heard nothing. Complete silence.

A new thought occurred — what if the attacking submarine was Russian? What if Northern Fleet Headquarters had pieced together Novskoyy’s wild scheme and sent an attack submarine to stop him. It made sense — another Russian ship would try a collision before shooting them, to stop the transmission and try to save a crew held hostage by Novskoyy. The thought buoyed him as he began to hope for the success of the other submarine. Who would HQ have sent? The Smolensk? The Novgorod? The Nevski? The Leningrad? That would be an irony — Novskoyy sunk by his own former submarine Leningrad. How could he himself help them? There was nothing to bang on the pod wall with, so he couldn’t make noise. Wait — there was the lever for the manual-pod release. But then he realized the attacking submarine would not need noise. They had already found Kaliningrad with a close torpedo. Perhaps they would finish it off with their own Magnum. Was it right to hope for the sinking of his own ship?

After thinking on it a moment, he decided it would be better for the Kaliningrad to sink than for Novskoyy to let loose his incredibly destructive plan. Still, the thought of losing the Kaliningrad made him sick. As Vlasenko sat in the cold of the pod, his breath still clouding the air, his mind on terrible events he had no power to change, a Magnum nuclear-tipped torpedo only seven kilometers away, launched by the Kaliningrad, began to explode.