Just as the Captain was about to say that perhaps they should try to raise NAVEUR to see if they were experiencing the same problem, one of the officers manning the carrier’s defense systems shouted, “Vampires! Vampires! We have inbound cruise missiles coming from heading 018. I count four missiles. Fifty seconds to impact!”
Everyone’s eyes simultaneously turned towards the officer who had just shouted, and then to the threat monitor on one of the walls.
Another voice shouted, “Torpedoes in the water! I count one — no four torpedoes heading towards us. Make that thirteen torpedoes now. They appear to be targeting several of the ships in the fleet!”
The Other Side
Captain Rubin Malahit had settled his submarine, the Severodvinsk, on the bottom of the ocean floor, not far from the exit of the Bosphorus, just as he had been instructed to do. He did not like his orders one bit. He had been in the Navy for nearly twenty years, and in all that time, he never thought he would be sent on a suicide mission until now. Attacking an American carrier group was a pipe dream — something the Admirals talked about and submariners joked about, but the reality of pulling it off and surviving to tell the tale was something completely different. Yet, those were his orders.
Of course, he had the support of a number of Kilo, Akula, and Oscar submarines to distract the Americans, but he was the one who had to get close enough to the American carrier to launch his torpedoes. They had been monitoring the movement of the carrier strike group as they entered the Black Sea, waiting for their primary target to head their way. The Kilos and Akulas had two of the other avenues well-covered, and their presence would help to guide the Americans in his direction.
After a stressful two hours of monitoring the American strike group as it exited the Bosphorus, the Americans began to slowly head in his direction, and so did their prized primary target, the carrier, which was finally moving within striking distance. Captain Malahit looked at the clock; they were running late. The American satellites were supposed to go down in the next forty minutes and his submarine was still not in position yet.
Malahit turned to his pilot. “Navigator, raise us up off the bottom of the ocean, slowly, so as to make as little noise as possible. I want to settle about a hundred feet above the floor of the ocean.”
“Ay, Captain,” came the response. The sub began moving gradually; when it stopped, they were still nearly 1,200 feet below the surface.
Once they reached the desired depth, Malahit ordered, “Approach the American aircraft carrier at three knots.”
“That should be slow enough,” he thought. “It’s barely a crawl… hopefully they won’t detect us before we are in place.”
All around them, the other submarines of his attack group were making noise — far more noise than they should have, but that was all part of the plan. They were there to attract the Americans’ attention and keep them focused elsewhere while the Severodvinsk snuck up on the carrier. The closer they were to the carrier when they fired their torpedoes, the less time the Yankees would have to respond to his torpedoes and the higher the likelihood of sinking the carrier.
Thirty-nine minutes had gone by; one more minute until it was show time. They were now within five miles of the carrier, having slipped past her destroyer escorts roughly thirty minutes earlier. As the seconds ticked by, the Captain looked at the faces of the sailors around him. Beads of sweat were forming on many of their faces… the stress had reached a boiling point. They were about to sink an American aircraft carrier. It was exciting, but also terrifying since the chances of them surviving were low. However, they certainly would try.
Finally, the appointed time arrived. The Americans should just be realizing they had lost access to their GPS satellites and communications systems. He turned his head to look at the sonar operators. One of them was lifting his headset. “The Akulas and Kilos have begun their attack runs,” he announced. “We are now reporting multiple torpedoes in the water, some heading for the carrier, and others heading towards the destroyers and guided missile cruisers.”
Then another sonar operator reported, “The Oscar is launching his anti-ship missiles.” That was their signal. It was time for the Severodvinsk to launch its torpedoes.
The Americans above them would be far too occupied with the numerous torpedoes in the water and cruise missiles heading towards them to realize that his submarine had breached their defensive perimeter and was now practically on top of their prized possession. The carrier had gone to flank speed and so had the rest of the fleet, meaning their ability to listen for his submarine had greatly diminished.
The Captain looked at his weapons officer and uttered the words the crew had been waiting to hear for the past several days. “Fire all torpedoes!”
With that simple order, the submarine shuddered as one after another of her eight 650mm torpedoes was ejected from the submarine and began to race quickly towards the USS George H.W. Bush. In less than five minutes, the torpedoes would impact against their target.
As soon as all cylinders had fired, Malahit immediately ordered, “Bring the sub back down to a depth of 1,000 feet, and turn 56 degrees to port. Vacate the area at 5 knots!” The Captain hoped that moving at such a slow pace would allow them to make a “silent crawl” to their escape.
“Captain Miller! One of the torpedoes appears be going for the Nixie, but the others are going to impact us in less than a minute!” yelled one of the anti-submarine warfare officers, breaking through the chorus of voices vying for the captain’s attention.
“Alert damage control that we are about to take some hits, and brace for impact!” shouted the captain.
Someone yelled over the ships PA system, “Prepare for impact from a torpedo!” The warning came mere seconds before the first “fish in the water” hit.
The first torpedo battered the rear of the ship near the engineering room, detonating underneath the keel. The explosion from the warhead created an enormous overpressure of the water around the keel, causing the hull to collapse and throwing its explosive force into the engineering room and the lower decks. As the explosion dissipated, the back of the carrier fell into the newly created hole of water, causing further strain on the rest of the keel of the ship.
Then the second and the third detonated underneath the center of the carrier, lifting the 97,000 ton ship several feet upwards before it crashed back down into the waterless hole left by the explosion. These twin blasts blew two large holes through the bottom of the ship, filling the lower deck with an immediate flash explosion, then enveloping the lower decks in water. One of the two torpedoes exploded near the ship’s aircraft fuel tank, which ignited, causing an enormous secondary explosion that ripped through numerous decks of the ship until it reached the hanger deck, where a series of aircraft were in the process of being armed with anti-ship missiles.
Those anti-ship missiles ignited, creating a massive explosion of their own. Men and women in the hanger decks ran to grab their fire suppression equipment, but unfortunately, some of their shipmates were simply engulfed in the flames.
Captain Smith had been thrown to the ground by the explosion on the hanger deck. Alarms were showing red all across the damage control board as he tried to pick himself off the floor. He saw that others in the CIC had been injured and were helping each other as best they could. He turned to find Admiral Munch, only to see him bleeding on the floor with a cut to his forehead. One of the petty officers nearby was tending to him. Pushing aside his concern for the Admiral, he began to focus on trying to save his ship, and ensuring he was not going to be the first captain in naval history to lose a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier.