“Ready, Captain.”
“Snapshot tube three!”
Becker fired the tube-three torpedo at the phantom target, the one Keebes had guessed, at least to get a torpedo out there. The torpedo launch transient didn’t seem as loud this time, perhaps because it caught Keebes by surprise.
“Set up tube four for another snapshot!”
Keebes intended to keep pumping them out. He could always get a reload, but if he got hit by a Japanese torpedo his own weapons would be useless on the bottom of the sea. And if he kept shooting torpedoes, the crew would be distracted by the activity, since the only thing he could do as a torpedo closed in on him was run from it, as Becker already had done.
Either the torpedo ran out of fuel, or they died. There was nothing more he could do.
“Snapshot tube four,” Keebes ordered. The second counterfired torpedo was fired. “XO, get a SLOT buoy loaded, put a message in the disk that we’re being fired on and get it out to Fleet command.”
The sound of the torpedo’s sonar came through the hull then. The high pitched squeal of it was horrible to hear. And if the torpedo was so close that he could hear its pinging… He tried to keep his face impassive, but what he was thinking was that he was not ready to die.
They had been right in the fleet briefings. There was no running from a Nagasaki torpedo.
The sound of the torpedo sonar changed from a high pitched ping to a siren sound, no longer transmitting and listening, just transmitting. It had to be extremely close.
Keebes glanced at his watch. It told the date as well as the time. Christmas was only four days away, his kids’ toys would be opened without him…
“Set up for a snapshot, tube one,” he ordered.
But the explosion came then, the deck of the Cheyenne ripping open, the lights going out, the blast wave bending Keebes, head first, into the steel of the overhead.
The hull came completely open, the torpedoes two decks below went up in sympathetic detonation with the Nagasaki warhead explosion. The hull of the Cheyenne came apart in two pieces, though there was little left of the bow section, and the middle where the sail had once been was blown into fragments by the huge torpedo warhead and the other warheads’ explosive charges. The aft section of the ship dived for the bottom, going down in a thousand fathoms of water, the aft-section hull imploding at crush depth of slightly more than 2000 feet. When Cheyenne hit the sandy bottom it was little more than twisted high tensile steel sheeting. The sail landed intact a halfmile to the south of the stern section. The bow, the sonar sphere and the tunnel that led to it went into the sand six feet. The bottom between the bow and stern section was littered with wires, valves, computer cards, glass, books, severed body parts and boots.
A small piece of debris the size of a baseball bat, pinned under a heavy technical manual, was hit by another falling piece of debris. The debris, a sheet of glass, knocked the manual aside, and a cylinder began to rise, to float to the surface. It had been the SLOT buoy, the one-way transmission unit that Jensen had been coding the message into when the torpedo hit the ship. Forty feet to the north, a body was pinned below a section of jaggedly ripped steel. The torso had a set of gold submariner’s dolphins pinned to it and an embroidered patch below the pin. The letters on the patch spelled the word KEEBES.
“Sir, the enemy submarine is down. We’ve confirmed the breakup of the hull.” Mazdai made the report from the sensor consoles at the aft port corner of the room.
“Status of the weapons he counterfired?” Tanaka asked, standing on the periscope platform.
“Both far off to the west, Captain. One is shutting down now, probably out of fuel. The other is circling, confused.”
With the Destiny’s double-hull design, Tanaka thought, he could probably take a direct hit from one of the small American torpedoes and keep going. His ship systems would be hurt but he would not have a hole in the inner hull.
“Let me know when the second unit shuts down, and keep the Second Captain looking for other American submarines. Have a track calculated for the trip to the east side of the islands.”
“Yes, Captain. Sir, second torpedo unit has shutdown. It looks like it is breaking up, imploding as it sinks.”
“Make your course 250 degrees true and take ship speed to full ahead.”
“Yes, sir.”
Tanaka stared at the electronic chart table, adjusting the scale to show the entire Home Islands, the location of the American aircraft-carrier battle group pulsing in blue about sixty miles from Tokyo Bay. That was where he had to get. But at least his orders were different now. He had permission to do his job — unrestricted submarine warfare against the American fleet.
Because after the supertanker exploded, no supply ship would dare cross into the exclusion zone until every last ship in the American task force was on the bottom.
“Admiral?” Paully White was at Pacino’s stateroom’s open door.
“Come on in, Paully.”
“Intel photos, sir.” White put the photos down on the small table in the center of the stateroom. “Supertanker went down hard. Two hits. Look at this. The oil slick is washing toward Japan now.”
“Not pretty,” Pacino said heavily. “What about survivors?”
“No lifeboats ever came down. No one got out of the ship alive.”
“Did we get a situation report from the Cheyenne?”
“No, sir. We should have heard an hour ago, but if I know Keebes, he probably just wanted to get out of the area before he transmitted anything about the sinking.”
“Any word from President Warner?”
“White House has been informed. No new orders.”
Pacino thought about Wadsworth. The C.N.O was probably blaming him for the supertanker. Of course, stateside, its sinking was probably seen as a sign that the US meant business, but to Pacino the blockade had failed if the first ship tried to break through. He told himself that no other ships would try that, at least not for a while.
“Admiral?” The enlisted messenger stood at the doorway.
“Yes, what is it?”
“Flash message for you, sir, downloaded to your Writepad.”
“I’ll get it.”
Pacino had turned off the unit to recharge the battery. Now he turned it on and heard its urgent alarm calling him to get his E-mail. There on the screen he saw a fragmented message:
202037 Z DEC
FLASH FLASH FLASH FLASH FLASH FLASH FLASH FLASH
FM USS CHEYENNE SSN-773
TO C.N.O WASHINGTON, DC // COMPACFORCE // COMUSUBCOM
SUBJ NAVY BLUE OPERATION ENLIGHTENED CURTAIN SECRET
/BT//
1. UNDER ATTACK FROM SUBMARINE UNIT OF JMSDF.
2. POSITION APPROXIMATE AT
“That’s it?” Pacino said.
Paully White scanned it, looking at his watch.
“That message is a half-hour old yet it’s marked flash. And it’s partial. The time on the date-time group is just about an hour after Cheyenne sank the supertanker. You don’t think—”
“It’s right there. In black and white. The Cheyenne been attacked and it’s on the bottom.”
The phone rang. Pacino answered it, listened and stood. “Aye, sir.”
“Where are you going?”
“Bridge. Admiral Donner wants answers.”
“Good luck, sir.” And added, “You’ll need it.”
The Destiny III-class submarine Curtain of Flames was, on the outside, identical to the sister ships of the Destiny II class. The difference was the interior, forward of the high fin.