The hard, shimmering ping of the active sonar cut through the still compartment like a knife. The captain sucked in a hard breath, and his face turned pale. Every man on the ship knew it immediately — the most deadly foe of a submarine was a dipping helo. Two of them working together, or one working with a surface ship, was the most fearful adversary any of them ever faced.
A second active sonar shimmered in the water, this one higher pitched and more insistent. The captain’s guts felt as though they were about to explode. An active sonobuoy, operating on a different bearing from the dipping sonar. With those two sources, the helos undoubtedly had them localized.
“All forward flank, hard right rudder. Make your depth six hundred feet.” With that maneuver, he hoped to create a mass of air bubbles in the water that would distract the torpedoes that must surely be ready to launch. Six hundred feet was near the maximum of the ancient diesel’s capabilities, but there was no choice now. Even more dangerous, operating at that depth would make escaping the submarine, should they be hit, virtually impossible.
In theory, at least, the submarine would create a second target in the water that would distract the torpedoes, giving the submarine a chance to disappear in the thermocline. Then, if the sonars were unable to relocate them, the submarine would creep away stealthily, putting distance between itself and the attackers, before resuming transit speed.
In theory, at least. As a practical matter, both the dipping sonar and the sonobuoys were capable of being set at different depths, and both pilots would undoubtedly attempt that. Additionally, the depth of the Taiwanese frigate’s towed array could be varied, and it could be repositioned in deeper water, although it would take longer to settle down and generate stable bearings.
Even with those disadvantages, the situation was absolutely critical. Escaping a dipping sonar was no mean feat, and the captain had done it only a couple times in the simulator.
A third active sonobuoy joined into the cacophony. The submarine’s hull was bombarded with acoustic energy, each sonar refining the submarine’s location further until it was practically a pinpoint in the ocean.
The deck heeled underneath them as the submarine made its hard turn. Any could tell without looking at the sonar display that they were generating massive amounts of acoustic energy on their own. “Decoys, noise makers,” he ordered, dumping the countermeasures into the water around his air bubble.
The deck tilted down as she dove at her top speed for the bottom of the ocean. The old hull creaked and groaned around them, and just for one fearful moment he wondered if that would be their fate rather than a torpedo. The noise around them was increasing, almost deafening them, and he could see the stark terror on everyone’s face.
Suddenly, every noise stopped. The water around them was silent, punctuated only by the noise of their decoys and their own propeller. A young helmsman, on his first cruise aboard a submarine, let out a stifled yelp of joy. He turned to his captain, his eyes shining, relief on his face. The relief turned to puzzlement when no one else joined in. Stark fear crept back in.
In those final moments, the captain did not have the heart to tell the young man that the reason the noise had stopped was to avoid distracting the torpedoes that were surely on their way into the water now.
Staring at the young man’s face, the captain made an instant, irrevocable decision. “Emergency blow — emergency blow!”
The officer of the deck hit the valve that would immediately blast compressed air into every ballast tank. The captain felt the momentum change immediately, as the deck seemed to rise up under him. They lost the depth they’d just gained in seconds and rocketed up toward the surface of the water.
He could hear them now, the hard, grinding whine of the small torpedo propellers as they bore in on his boat. At least if they were hit now, perhaps they would have enough momentum to reach the surface and give the crew a chance to survive. And at that moment, that was all the captain cared about — not politics, not Taiwan, not the court-martial or certain disgrace and instant execution that would await him if he returned home. All he cared about was that his crew would have a chance to live.
The first torpedo encountered the noise makers and the mass of air bubbles simultaneously, and its tiny electronic brain froze in a moment of indecision. It ran nose-first into one of the noise makers, fatally jarring a critical component. It continued on, executing a wide turn to the right, until it ran out of fuel.
The second torpedo was luckier. It entered the water well to the north of the noise makers and cavitation and began its search circle. Almost immediately, it acquired the enticing sounds of the submarine heading away from it. It changed course, locked on, and bore in steadily.
Another round of noise makers failed to distract it. It simply brushed passed them, driving unwaveringly toward the delectable sounds of the submarine’s machinery.
As the submarine heard it approaching, bearing constant and range decreasing, her captain tried one last series of desperate measures. He threw the submarine into another tight turn — tight at least by submarine standards — hoping desperately to generate another knuckle in the water. But as he did so, the torpedo adjusted its course, and impacted the submarine just aft of the control room.
The immediate force of the explosion buckled the old hull and frigid seawater came pouring in. The submarine was at two hundred feet, still rising, and it took several moments for the incoming rush of water to overcome her negative buoyancy.
The water blasted through the compartment with the force of a sledgehammer, pulverizing three crewman against the bullhead. The watertight door between the passageway and a control room buckled almost immediately. The first few streams of water were ice pick-hard as they hammered into the control room, finding their targets in the electronics panel and immediately shorting out electrical power. The submarine plunged into blackness for a moment, and then battery-operated emergency red lights came on. In a way, it would have been better if they had not.
The captain shouted out orders, urging the crew toward the emergency egress hatch, but panic and confusion ruled. Most knew what to do for emergency escape, and they grabbed emergency escape breathing devices and tried to wade through the increasingly deep water to the escape trunk. Three made it up the ladder into the tower safely, but the rising flow of water caught the rest of them.
Ten seconds after the hatch buckled, it gave way completely. Seawater flooded through, a solid tidal wave immediately capturing those few who were still struggling for the ladder. The three men inside the escape hatch had time to pull it shut, gazing down on the stricken faces below them as they were swept away, and dog it shut. They donned their breathing devices, listening to the awful screaming beneath them. They could feel the submarine already starting to settle lower in the water, heading back down for the depths. They opened the valves full, to flood the compartment as quickly as possible.
The minutes ticked over, and each one knew despair. Finally, the trunk was flooded sufficiently to equalize the pressure and allow them to leave the dying submarine. By that time, the bottom of the hull was approaching four hundred feet in depth.
The three left, and the buoyancy of their breathing devices pulled them toward the surface. As they ascended, they exhaled continuously, trying desperately to keep the change in pressure from rupturing their lungs. The other denizens of the sea happening by stared at them in mild astonishment, then turned to follow them up.
Below them, the remaining crew members’ deaths were just as terrible, if far less graphic. The middle section of the submarine was immediately flooded and then the forward one-third. But the aft section retained, through some miracle of engineering, its watertight integrity. The submarine was bow down so hard that the forward bulkheads became the deck, and crippled and wounded men piled up there like rag dolls. Several were still able to move, and tried desperately to reach the aft egress trunk against the force of gravity, with no success. That did not keep them from trying, even as the submarine sank deeper into the water.