Porter took a detour from his usual prewatch tour and went below one deck to the torpedo room, went forward past the shining green-painted Mark 50 torpedoes stacked neatly on the hydraulically controlled racks. He stopped at one of the torpedoes and touched its flark, its surface cool and smooth. Stenciled on the side were the words “MK 50 MOD ALPHA WARSHOT.” Porter walked again to the forward bulkhead to examine the tubes.
All eight had large white phenolic tags with red letters proclaiming “warshot loaded.” Porter stood there for a moment, then walked back up the ladder to the upper level, arrived back in control and nodded to Lt. David Voorheese, the man Porter would relieve as officer of the deck. Porter scanned the status boards, the navigation plot, took a final look at the sonar display and told Voorheese he was ready to take the watch.
“Nothing going on. The Oparea’s empty. Captain’s racking, XO’s got the command duty officer, the place is dead. Midwatch as usual.”
“Captain’s night orders?”
“Same as last night’s. Find the Destiny. Don’t wait to shoot at him while you’re manning battlestations.”
“Hell, maybe I’ll just shoot his ass and let you guys keep sleeping.”
“Fine. You got it? I’m tired.”
“One more thing. Where’s the admiral?”
“He haunts the place, hangs out in sonar or the crew’s mess. Guy works the crowd a lot. Never seen a guy with two stars shoot the shit with a third-class petty officer for a half-hour.”
“That shows you he’s got nothing to do. You know these riders. No responsibility, no worries, just leave the driving to ship’s company and watch movies, eat ice cream and sleep, maybe diddle themselves while looking at some of that Tahitian porn we picked up the last run.”
“If I had nothing to do I’d get about twenty hours of sleep. Well, the engineer calls.”
“You working aft tonight? We’re rigged for ultraquiet.
You can’t take anything apart, Voorheese. Hit the bunky, man.”
“Good point. Helm, Quartermaster, Mr. Porter has the deck and conn. See you, buttface.”
Porter raised his voice. “Helm, Quartermaster, log that Lt. Christopher Porter the third has the deck and conn for the midwatch on December 26, the watch in which we expect to put at least one Destiny submarine on the bottom of the Pacific.”
CHAPTER 37
Lt. Comdr. Hiro Mazdai heard the dressing-down that the captain was giving one of the junior officers. Mazdai was in his first officer’s stateroom, trying to concentrate on the chart of the offshore waters, but only hearing Tanaka raging at the officer about his failings and how weak he was. In Tanaka’s view everyone but himself was weak.
The captain was driven to find and sink the Americans.
For the sake of his own sanity Mazdai wished he’d get it over with, put them on the bottom so this mission with Tanaka could come to a conclusion.
Bruce Phillips picked up the phone from a sound sleep.
He listened for fifteen seconds, said, “Man silent battlestations,” and tossed the phone on his desk, then headed out for the control room.
“Gambini’s got another one, skipper,” Scott Court said.
“Very well,” Phillips said, putting on a headset. “Sonar supervisor, Captain, report status of the contact.”
It took only forty-five seconds for Phillips to plug into the tactical situation. Target One was a submerged Destiny class off the point of Oshikahanto, contact faint on narrowband, bearing nailed down at one nine seven degrees true, with little else known.
The limiting factor on the attack was the time for the Vortex missile to get ready. Within two minutes from battlestations being called, the missile was away. Phillips took a digital stop watch from his vest pocket. The time of flight of the Vortex through the water was less than five minutes, putting the target some twenty-five nautical miles away.
The explosion from this Destiny was as spectacular as the first, the noise easily audible to the naked ear. Phillips nodded, returned to his stateroom. Court looking after him.
The cloud of steam and vaporized iron of the Vortex fireball had once been the Destiny II-class submarine Winter Dragon. The crew of the Piranha would never know that. Piranha sailed on southward, closing on Tokyo Bay.
Comdr. Toshumi Tanaka sat at the Second Captain console in his stateroom, eyes bleary, dark circles under his eyes. He had stayed awake all through the previous night and on into the day, and was still awake now well after midnight. His consumption of tea had been a record, but nothing next to the amphetamines the Yokosuka doctor had given him. The uppers kept him going after all these hours, letting him stick at the console. He hadn’t eaten, slept or spoken to his crew for almost thirty hours, with the exception of Lieutenant Ito, who had come into the stateroom to give his view of the American forces’ deployment. Tanaka had ripped into him for thinking he could express himself any way he felt to the ship’s commanding officer. It was something that would happen on an American ship, he had said. Ito had never seen discipline before, not from his parents or his teachers or his previous commander, Tanaka told him. The younger generation was soft. Weak.
Which was why he insisted on standing watch at his own Second Captain. He believed he couldn’t trust the officers. The Americans had probably been lost while he was on the last sleep cycle. Well, not this time. He would not sleep until he had a detection on the screen.
He stared at the console as the clock ticked into the night.
The third and fourth Vortex missile launches had gone off much like the first two — a faint narrowband detection on 154 Hertz on the towed array sonar, a sniff of the enemy, battlestations silently manned, the Vortex missile warmed and ready while the battlestations team was still relieving the watches, Phillips in the control room, the missile roaring away, then exploding, the shock wave and noise of the explosion deafening.
The last two Vortex missiles had blown up Destiny II hull numbers SS-807 and 814, the Godlike Snowfall and the Heavenly Mist.
Phillips proceeded to work his way south, on toward Tokyo Bay, uncertain what the hell he would do when he got there.
CHAPTER 38
The ship was dead quiet, the way Porter liked it. There was something special to him about the midwatch, the officers in their racks, the captain and admiral sawing logs, the enlisted men bedded down, every space deserted except for the watchstanders. Porter scanned the sonar repeater screen, able to send it through every display that Chief Omeada had forward in sonar. Nothing on the displays. The sea was deserted.
Or was it? He felt an electricity, the same he had felt before on both good and bad occasions. He’d felt it the day before he got his acceptance letter from the academy. And the Thursday night before the Friday he met his first serious girlfriend Diane. He’d begun to think this tingle of premonition could only mean good things, but he’d also felt it the week before he and his roommate Todd had gone skydiving.
He had piled into Todd’s ‘02 two-seat T-bird with the retro tailfins and they had gone out to the field, packed their chutes, saddled up and gone up in the Cessna. As usual, at 14,000 feet he and Todd had left the plane, goofing off all the way down until the altimeter buzzed at 3000 feet and he pulled the ripcord, the mattress-shaped parasail deploying above him and jerking him up by the crotch. He smiled with the sheer joy of flying without wings — until he saw Todd in trouble.