Jacobs and Pencehaven maintained a continuous firing solution, double-checking their current contact information against the torpedoes’ progress. Jacobs made one small correction with his joystick to one — the other needed no assistance in locating, identifying, and designating its target. Finally, at the one thousand yard mark, the guidance wires snapped and the torpedoes were on their own.
In addition to obscuring the enemy contacts, the U.S. torpedoes also dumped a substantial new amount of noise into the water, thus decreasing the other submarine’s overall detection capabilities. However, it was clearly not sufficient to degrade them completely. Within moments, the hard, high-pitched pinging of torpedoes inbound was clearly audible over the speaker and visible on the sonar screen.
“Snapshot, Captain — they got us now,” Jacobs said. And indeed that was not unexpected — the first consequence of launching torpedoes was to immediately rip off the “cloak of visibility” from the firing platform. If the other submarine had not know they were in the area, they had no doubts about it now.
“Officer of the deck, make your depth eighteen hundred feet,” the captain said.
The officer of the deck repeated the order immediately, glancing at the captain to make sure that he had heard correctly.
The captain nodded, reassuring him. Yes, it was a risk. The stress on a submarine hull from the last attack could not be completely evaluated, and there was a chance that her structural integrity was compromised. But in every other category, the submarine had far outperformed the operating capabilities ascribed to her by her builders, and he was pretty certain that she was fully capable of withstanding that depth even with some minor structural damage.
Pretty sure. Confident enough, at least, to risk his life and that of his crew. Because from what they had seen of the Chinese torpedoes thus far, their best chance for evading it was to run below its operating depth. Like earlier Russian models, this torpedo could not go deep enough to catch her.
Around them, the hull creaked and groaned as the submarine pitched bow down and headed for the depths. The pressure of the seawater as she dove increased all around her, increased to unimaginable levels, compressing the tensile steel hull. It was a normal sound, one they had all heard before, but when descending this quickly the noise took on an eerie rhythm that threatened to spook them.
“She’s singing to us, men,” the captain said quietly. “Telling us how safe we are in her. You hear it?” He glanced around the control room and saw nods, a few expressions of relief.
And why wouldn’t she sing? She talked to him in his dreams, didn’t she? And, in the end, there was nothing odder about her singing to them than there was about her talking.
Everyone fell silent, straining to hear the first sounds of imminent danger. There wouldn’t be time to react to it, no, not at this depth. Even a pinhole leak would result in an ice pick of water under such pressure that it could slash through flesh as quickly as superheated steam. Were the submarine to implode, there wouldn’t be time to be frightened. There wouldn’t be time to be anything.
All at once, the captain had an overwhelming, unbridled sense of safety. This submarine had brought him through too much already — there was no way she would let him down now. He patted the bulkhead next to him, almost absentmindedly, as though she were one of the horses on his ranch in Montana. “Come on, old girl. You know you got it in you,” he said quietly, and his voice carried to every corner of the compartment.
“Range, five thousand yards and closing, Captain. Bearing constant, range decreasing,” Jacobs said, his voice calm. The captain shot off a momentary prayer, thankful for Jacobs’s tone of voice. To hear one of their own reacting so calmly was even more reassuring than hearing it from their captain. Because, after all, officers were supposed to be confident — everyone on the ship knew that. And although they trusted the captain with their lives, they trusted Jacobs to tell the truth.
“Descending, sir,” Jacobs continued. “She has us, Captain.” Everyone in the control room could hear that that was true, as the active sonar pings from the Chinese torpedo increased in frequency and speed, blasting acoustic energy off their anechoic-coated hull to further pinpoint their location.
“What do you think, Mannie?” the captain asked. “Wake homer or acoustic?”
“Tough call, Captain,” Jacobs said, as though they were in a classroom discussing the latest advances in technology instead of putting it to a field test. “Could be a combination, since the wake homer is older technology. But then again, they have had some U.S. technology, haven’t they? So I’d expect them to have some acoustics capability in it, if not as good as ours. I bet they’re wishing right now they’d paid a little extra and gotten the right casing to hold it all.” Jacobs laughed quietly. “Penny-wise and pound foolish, they say. They’re screwed if we make it to eighteen hundred feet.”
The captain groaned silently, and Jacobs immediately recognized his error. “When, I mean,” he said, but the damage was already done. Everyone in the control room had heard Jacobs say “if.”
“Oh, don’t worry about that,” the captain said off-handedly. “That’s one thing we never skimp on, structural integrity. How’s she sounding, acoustically?”
“Four thousand yards, Captain,” Otter Pencehaven said, taking up Jacobs’s duty of calling off the ranges.
“Sounds as solid as ever, Captain,” Jacobs said. “The usual bitching as we descend, but nothing out of the ordinary. Heard it a thousand times already and I’ll hear it a thousand more before I retire.”
There was a moment of silence, broken only by Pencehaven’s announcement. “Three thousand, Captain.”
Just then the speaker picked up a new sound, and it took a moment for the captain, as focused as he was on incoming torpedoes, to realize what it was. It was just barely audible, as the submarine made her way down through the thermocline, decoys, noise makers and air bubble masses, corkscrewing violently.
And just before he could speak the words, Jacobs confirmed it.
“Torpedo, sir. But moving away from us. This one’s headed for the carrier.”
“United States, Lake Champlain—torpedo inbound! Recommend you commence evasive maneuvers immediately.” As the destroyer continued to reel off locating data as they waited for the contact to appear in the LINK, Coyote felt a thrill of horror. Ballistic missiles, torpedoes — all the threats that couldn’t be countered by the aircraft carrier herself, the ones that they had to depend on others to take care of. And the torpedo — if they were carrying the most advanced models, one exploding directly under the keel could crack a backbone of the carrier. Not only would thousands onboard the ship die, but all the aircraft airborne would have nowhere to land on the seriously damaged deck. And with Japan closed down, they would start running out of options fast.
“Hard right rudder!” the bitch box said, as the officer of the deck gave standard evasive maneuver orders. “Flank speed — now, engineer. I need it now!” It was odd to feel the deck of the carrier move under their feet. Normally she made slow, ponderous course and speed changes as she made allowances for the ships around her, the safety of personnel, and the security of the aircraft spotted on her deck. But this was no time for safety — not at all. Coyote swore softly, wondering why in the five hells he hadn’t taken the submarine out the first time they had contact on her.
Because you were under orders not to — you know that’s why it was. If it had been up to you or anybody out here, it would have been flotsam and jetsam by now. And to hell with international relations, walking the brink of diplomacy, all that shit. Because it allowed threats that we knew about to continue to exist, ones that could have been eliminated before they were allowed to jeopardize my entire battle group.