“Two of them,” the captain informed the control crew as the attack scope slid into position. “Both tankers. Enormous brutes.”
Eyes welded to the attack scope, Valery quickly picked the ships up again on the same bearing. The attack scope, its field of view not as wide as that of the search scope but higher, allowed the sub to go deeper for a shoot. The scope’s hair-crossed circle was completely blocked by the massive walls that were the tankers’ sides, the bridge and crew housing astern of one tanker etched silver in moonlight as the clouds broke and two small blobs — tugs — could be seen bobbing up and down in the swells.
“Prevoskkodno”— “It couldn’t be better,” said Valery. Not only had he made the right decision by venturing in closer to the coastline — now he was no more than three miles from them— but at this angle of attack he would in effect not be firing at two separate hulls but at one long cliff of steel, over seven hundred meters — almost half a mile long. For safety’s sake, the second tanker was sailing not directly behind the first where it could not hope to stop should anything happen to the tanker in front, but starboard aft of it in staggered convoy position. And the two tugs were all but obscured by the rising seas now. Even if they were armed with ASW depth bombs and sub-surface torpedoes Valery knew that they would be so busy with damage control if one or both tankers were hit that they would give him little cause for concern. In any event he ordered forward tubes two and four loaded with submarine simulator decoys of the kind that had been perfected after the cruiser Yumashev had been the victim of an American MOSS — a mobile submarine simulator — the cruiser dummied into positioning itself to be sunk by the U.S. nuclear sub Roosevelt in the early months of the war.
Now it was Valery’s chance for revenge. But he would try to save the decoys for later use if possible. Hopefully he’d have complete surprise and wouldn’t have to use them at all. He heard the officer of the deck confirming forward tubes one, three, five, and six were loaded with “live fish.”
“Bearing?”
“Zero eight three.”
“Mark!” Valery ordered. “Range?”
“Thirty-four hundred meters, sir.”
Valery could feel a movement — energy transmitted by under-the-surface wave oscillation, a slight down pitch. “Hold her steady!” he said without unlocking his eyes from the scope. “Forward tubes one, three, five, and six. Set the up angle.”
“Forward tubes one, three, five, and six — set up angle.”
The confirmation came from torpedo control. “Up angle set.”
The first officer was watching the relay screen showing the computerized, keyed-in angles that allowed for everything from the enemy’s speed, variable friction caused by differing salinity, and water temperatures, to surface turbulence. Next he checked that the “decoy fish”—the simulators — were in forward tubes two and four.
“Bearing?”
“Zero eight four.”
“Range?”
“Thirty-five hundred meters.”
“Bearing?”
“Steady. Zero eight four.”
“Shoot!” ordered Valery.
“Set,” came the firing officer’s reply.
“Fire one!”
“Fire one,” confirmed the firing officer.
“Fire three,” said Valery. A slight tremor passed through the sub as one was away and running.
“Fire three,” came the confirmation.
“Fire five… fire six.. down scope.”
“Down scope, sir.”
“Hold position.”
The first officer was reading out the count from 120 seconds as the four twenty-one-foot-long torpedoes sped, without visible wakes, toward their target.
“Two apiece,” announced the officer of the deck. Valery said nothing, his eyes on the computer clock. He knew he should hit both of them if all the computations were right, but with such a storm raging on the surface off the heavily timbered and logged coast there were bound to be deadheads, or floating logs, in the water. It would take only one torpedo to hit a piece of waterlogged timber and the remaining three torpedoes could all be blown off track. “Molis”— “Pray,” said Valery. “Sonar?”
“Sir?”
“Everything alright?”
“Humming, sir. Beautiful.”
“Pipe it to the PA but low on the volume.”
“Yes, sir.”
Now everyone throughout the sub, as if equipped with stethoscopes, could hear the fast, heavy heartbeats of the tankers and the steady hiss of the four torpedoes running for them.
“Get the book,” said Valery. The officer of the deck passed over the enemy ship silhouette recognition binder. The moment they blew — if they blew — it was Valery’s intention to surface for quick visual confirmation of type. Naval intelligence at Vladivostok would want to know. For a moment the surge of adrenaline in him stopped as he remembered the reason for HQ’s insistence on getting all possible information including sea conditions during attack. The scuttlebutt going the rounds of Vladivostok was that apparently some Jews from the Jewish Autonomous Oblast, or region, around the Sino/Soviet border along the Amur River had been sabotaging munitions. Valery hoped it had only been air force and army munitions that had been tampered with and that when they found the saboteurs they hanged them — slowly. Shooting was too quick for saboteurs.
“Nine seconds to go,” answered the first officer softly. Valery nodded, still leafing through the book, trying to identify the class of tankers he was attacking from the brief glimpse he’d had through the scope. He tried to suppress his excitement, but it was difficult. It was so easy — a dream of an attack. One thing he knew already — they were not VLCCs — very large crude carriers but ULCCs — ultra large crude carriers. “Ha,” he exclaimed to the first officer. “Give it to the Americans — they always do things big, eh?” Even if only one was hit there’d be a hell of a spill; and if the crude’s flash point was raised high enough and it started to burn, there would be no way the enemy crews could put it out. He could use the light to take his time on the second should any of the first four torpedoes miss.
On the first tanker, MV Sitka, captained by Jesus Llamos, assistant radio operator Sandra Thompson was taking her break. A shy, slim redhead, the subject of half the crew’s on- and off-duty fantasies — despite the fact that she was married and in the early stages of pregnancy — she stood on the quiet, semidarkened bridge of the enormous tanker watching the amber island of light that was the Marconi anticollision radar. She found the phosphorescent dance of its hypnotic sweep comforting. Nothing was showing west of them. Eastward the coastline ran crooked, the radar trace a knotted, amber-colored snake flanked by the salt-and-pepper dots of offshore islands.
Glancing up from the radar for a moment, out through the darkness of the Sitka’s bridge, Sandra could see the moonlight bathing the sea’s turbulence in a deceptively soft light, the great, sliding, gray metallic swells momentarily robbed of their violence. Something hit her, like a strong, hot wind. As she reached for the radar’s console for support there was a flash from forward midships, an enormous crash, the ship shaking violently like a car at speed with a blowout, then a tremendous whoomp as the shock wave rebounded. In an ethereal moment of calm she saw Captain Llamos running toward the steering console, but his image shivered, and he looked as if he were moving in slow motion, hands outstretched for the auto-to-manual levers.
Then the ship listed to port. For a second Sandra thought the tanker had collided with one of the big tugs. The next moment the bridge shifted violently to port, and she was thrown hard in the darkness onto the cleated matting, glass shattering, its invisible hail all about her, alarm klaxons blaring, several lights on the wing tank monitor console blinking furiously, indicating at least five of the forward starboard wing tanks were ruptured, spilling their liquid cargo into the sea. Her face and hands soaking wet, she tried to get up, but the port list had increased to fifteen degrees, and she felt herself sliding down the incline. Suddenly lights came on.