The sudden barrage of green lines dancing across his screen and the hard thrum of mechanical noise in his headset sent a huge wave of relief flowing through Petty Officer Pencehaven, followed immediately by a rush of adrenaline. If he’d had any doubts at all — and he’d had a few, he admitted to himself — they were now evaporated like the early morning dew.
The acoustic signals tracing across his display, as well as the churning noise of the propeller completely resolved the question of whether or not there was a submarine hiding behind the Arizona on the seabed floor. He turned to glance at Jacobs, a wide smile on his face. “Guess we got him.”
Jacobs shook his head. “Guess you got him,” he pointed out. His smile deepened a little bit, until it almost looked like a snarl. “But we’re gonna kill him — together.”
“Sonar, Conn. I need that targeting solution now!” the captain’s voice said.
“Updating now, sir. Done,” Pencehaven said. “Request weapons free.”
“Weapons free. Fire at will. Flooding tubes three and five — it’s all yours, boys. Good work.”
Pencehaven double-checked the solution, his finger poised over the fire button. Then he glanced over at Jacobs, took the other man’s hand, and pressed it firmly down on the button. “First kill is yours, buddy,” he said. “And thanks.”
A low rumble shot through the submarine as the torpedo left its tube. It appeared immediately on his acoustic display, just after the noise saturated his headset. The automatic gain control cut in, reducing the noise to a tolerable level.
“Looking good, looking good,” Jacobs chanted softly, watching the contact on Pencehaven’s screen. “You can run, but you can’t hide.”
And indeed that was true with the Mark 38 ADCAP torpedo. It had both acoustic and wake homing capabilities built in, as well as a logic discriminator that kept it away from its own submarine. Once it caught the first sniff of a contact, it was virtually impossible to avoid.
Pencehaven and Jacobs watched as the torpedo fell into a lazy circle, then broke the arc to zero in on the contact now streaking across their screen as a bright green lozenge. “Recommend we go active, sir,” Pencehaven said. There was no longer any advantage in maintaining strictly passive and acoustic contact. The other submarine knew that they were there. With a torpedo, it could reach no other conclusion than that it was not alone in the ocean.
As they watched, bright noise splattered across the screen, overlapping clusters and blobs of brilliant noise. The contact faded out, its acoustic return blanked out by the noise.
“Sir, we need that active,” Pencehaven said urgently.
“I hear, I hear — go active,” the captain said.
The submarine had evidently detected the torpedo — and who could not, as much noise as she put in the water — and ejected a series of noisemakers. They spun frantically through the water, churning up massive flumes of air bubbles, probably with acoustic generators inside them as well. The entire passive spectrum was clotted with new frequencies, lines that wavered crazily in and out of contact, completely obscuring the other submarine.
They could see that the torpedo was distracted by a noisemaker off to its right. It fell away from its original course, and started to make an approach on the noisemaker. Jacobs made the correction automatically, steering it away from there and back onto its original course.
“How much longer?” Pencehaven asked.
“Another five hundred yards,” Jacobs said. Another five hundred yards, and the wire umbilical that still connected the torpedo to the submarine would snap, terminating the submarine’s guidance capabilities.
“Man, look at her go. What’s she doing, forty knots?”
“Has to be,” Jacobs agreed. “Her propulsion has to be — ”
“Let’s get another shot off, boys,” the captain’s voice ordered. “No sense in taking any chances.”
“Second shot, aye, sir,” Pencehaven said promptly. Without even looking, he could tell that Jacobs was readying the second shot now. This one would be his, all his. He waited until Jacobs nodded, then depressed the fire button. Another low rumble swept through the submarine along with the whish of compressed air exploding outward from the tube.
“Shit!” Jacobs and Pencehaven exclaimed simultaneously.
“Inbound, inbound!” Pencehaven shouted. “Torpedo, torpedo in the water, bearing zero-zero-zero relative. Range, ten thousand yards. Snapshot procedures.” He had Jacobs toggle off another torpedo immediately down the line of bearing, then held tight to the arms of his chair as the submarine broke into a hard turn to the right. “Noisemakers, decoys,” he ordered.
Suddenly, the water around them was as alive with sound as it had been around the enemy contact. The submarine had managed to snap off a torpedo at them, and while the American submarine had sent one immediately down the same line of bearing, their main problem right now was not to guide their torpedo onto the target, but to avoid being a target themselves. Jacob snapped the wire guidance and said a silent prayer that the torpedo would find its mark.
The submarine was now traveling at one hundred and eighty degrees off its base course, establishing a line of bearing. It then cut hard to the right again, then to port, crossing its own wake several times. Finally, the depth tilted down at a steep angle. Pencehaven watched the depth indicator, and noted that they were moving below the thermocline, entering a region of the ocean where sound waves would be bent downward rather than upward. The change in depth across the gradient was intended to obscure the noise of the American submarine from the other torpedo.
“Can’t be much of a torpedo,” Pencehaven whispered, his voice barely audible. “Look, it’s buying the first noisemaker.” And indeed, the screen bore out his observations, as Jacobs watched the loud, slow torpedo fired by the minisub take dead aim on the first noisemaker they’d ejected. Thirty seconds later, they both pulled their headsets off long enough to avoid being bombarded by the noise of the explosion. “Wonder how many she carries,” Pencehaven said, his voice slightly louder.
“Can’t be more than one or two,” Jacobs observed. “Not as small as she is.”
“Back to the hunt, boys,” the captain’s voice said over the circuit. “I’m coming shallow — I want two more torpedoes up that bastard’s ass.”
The thermocline was a tricky bitch, one that worked both for you and against you, Pencehaven reflected. Sure, it obscured your own noise from an enemy submarine, but it also blocked the return of your own active sonar transmissions, although of course they’d gone silent during evasive maneuvers. The best hunting is done when both the submarine and the target are in the same acoustic layer.
As they came shallower, the enemy contact reappeared on their screens. “Got a targeting solution,” Jacobs announced.
“Hold fire, hold fire!” the captain shouted. “We’re too close to the carrier.”
Pencehaven swore silently. The carrier was showing up as a large, green lozenge on his screen, her acoustic signature unmistakable on both the waterfall display and in his earphones. Nothing but a carrier had that peculiar chug, chug, the rhythmic thumps that accompanied flight deck operations, the peculiar hiss and whine of reactor coolant pumps. “No way we can take the shot,” he observed.
“The best thing the carrier could do is get out of the way,” Jacobs said. He shook his head in frustration. “We’ve still got two torpedoes in the water, though. Maybe one of them — ” As he watched, the submarine contact disappeared from their screen.
Rabies let out a howl of glee. “Okay, boys and girls, time to earn our pay. It’s all ours.” The Desron had just handed off contact prosecution to the two ASW helicopters and the S-3. While their torpedoes were essentially the same type as those held on the submarine, with the helos bracketing the contact and providing a precise location, the targeting solution was improved by a factor of five.