Without a submerged sail to counterbalance it, the ship rolled hard to the left. Renard staggered towards the Subtics monitors but caught himself.
“I cannot hold the surface long,” Henri said. “We are too heavy and losing speed in the turn.”
“Very well,” Renard said. “Either the torpedo has acquired us or it has not.”
“Terminal homing!” Jake said. “The torpedo has acquired and is range-gating.”
“Henri,” Renard said, “make your depth thirty meters.”
The ship dived and accelerated. Renard felt Jake brush by and swoop towards Remy’s ear. After rapid-fire banter, Jake appeared before Renard.
“It’s accelerating towards sixty-five knots,” Jake said. “Conservative guess, it’s eight hundred yards behind us. Speed advantage thirty-five knots. Forty-one seconds to impact.”
“But at least it’s following us and headed to sea,” Renard said. “No matter what, our mission is accomplished.”
“Our evasion,” Jake said. “We can still do it.”
For a moment, Renard envisioned himself carrying his son on his shoulders and walking with Marie up the slopes of Mont Saint Victoire. He wanted to return home.
“And so we shall,” he said. “Launch countermeasures.”
Jake stormed to Commander Ye and conveyed the command. Canisters of compressed gas popped on either side of the Hai Lang’s hull as they spat countermeasures into the water. A hiss echoed throughout the operations room and slipped into the ocean’s submerged recesses as the Hai Lang raced away.
“Right ten-degrees rudder,” Renard said. “And dive, Henri! Drive us to the bottom as fast as we can go!”
The Russian ET-80 torpedo sent a signal down the wire streaming from its stabilizer fin requesting a confirmation of its position. There was no response, and the torpedo’s algorithms had to accept the onboard gyroscopic positions as truth. It turned on its seeker and noticed a target where it should have been — on the surface and heading into the harbor.
With minimal battery charge remaining, the weapon accelerated with intent to fulfill its destiny. Poised to detonate its twenty-kiloton plutonium fission warhead, the torpedo noticed that the target had accelerated and turned erratically, and it raced after its prey.
A wetness sensor on the plastic skin indicated the intermittent presence of gas. The gyroscopes sensed a small plummet in depth as bubbles displaced water, and the seeker could not capture a return.
The torpedo drove through the countermeasures and pinged where the target should have been but heard nothing. It aimed its acoustic energy to the left and heard no return. It aimed to the right, and reacquired its prey.
Its battery charge dying, the torpedo squeezed life from itself and bore down on its target. Sensing it was close enough to detonate, it sought a final series of pings and then — the final signal to unleash its fury — the interruption of its self-generated magnetic field. It created the field above its shell and closed in.
It pounded the target with sound, but the return was stronger from the depths. Seeking to slide its magnetic field under a surface ship’s keel, the weapon angled downward. It dived deeper until it hit the depth limit set by the protocols of attacking a surfaced vessel.
As it headed towards the ocean floor, the nuclear torpedo reacted to prevent itself from attacking the submarine that had launched it, turned from the target, and set a new course to search again for the target where it was supposed to have been — in the harbor.
The weapon slowed and swam toward the target, but a program warned the torpedo that battery cells were inverting, the stronger cells recharging the depleted ones. The torpedo accelerated, shortened its ping interval, but exhausted its final watt of power. It unleashed its suicide protocol, opened valves that inundated a small ballast tank, and sank.
CHAPTER 35
Renard clenched a stainless steel rail and held his breath. He wanted to believe he would live.
“Do you hear anything, Antoine?” he asked.
Remy shook his head.
“We’re going too fast to tell,” he said, “and we’re blind in our stern sector due to our countermeasures.”
“We’ll keep running just a few more minutes then,” Renard said. “How far are we from our countermeasures?”
Jake glanced over Ye’s shoulder.
“One mile,” Jake said.
“That’s far enough,” Renard said. “Launch another pair of countermeasures.”
Canisters of compressed gas popped on either side of the hull as they spat hissing countermeasures.
“Right ten-degrees rudder, Henri,” Renard said.
As the ship reeled, Jake appeared before Renard.
“We’re going to make it,” he said.
“I agree,” Renard said. “The torpedo must have exhausted itself by now.”
“Yeah,” Jake said. “It’s over. We did it.”
“Henri, steady on depth and slow to five knots,” Renard said. “No need to invert our battery cells.”
As the tension in his muscles waned, Renard assessed his victory. Sailors certainly had given their lives on the Stennis, but the toll would be a tiny fraction of the tally had the nuclear torpedo detonated. As for the harbor and surrounding cities, including Honolulu, he had spared them from shock waves and fallout.
He also realized that he had sent more than thirty dutiful Pakistani sailors to their death. Their greatest mistake had been following orders of a charismatic commanding officer who was seeking personal peace in a violent way. He inhaled cool tobacco flavor and decided to delay his lamentations for the dead.
There was still business he needed to finish.
“Henri,” he said. “Belay my last ordered depth. Surface the ship.”
The Hai Lang rolled with the calm surface waves. With a ball cap pulled low, a jacket lapel pulled high over his neck, and sunglasses to conceal his identify from any onlooker, Renard accompanied Lieutenant Wu in the bridge atop the sail.
While Wu raised the Taiwanese flag to make obvious the submarine’s nationality, Renard called Admiral Khan. The conversation was brief and bittersweet as Renard declared victory at the expense of a Pakistani submarine and dozens of Pakistani lives.
As Renard ended the call, he sensed that Khan had held hope that the Hamza’s run could have been thwarted without violence. But as the admiral had accepted the results, he agreed to work with Defense Minister Li to manage the diplomatic fallout, and he conceded that Renard could position the Taiwanese submarine atop the Pakistani wreckage for salvage rights.
Khan also agreed to pay Renard his twenty-five-million-euro bounty upon verification of the Hamza’s demise through diplomatic channels.
Renard scurried down the ladder and explained his conversation with Khan to Ye and Jake. Then he gave his final command on the Hai Lang.
“Henri, station us above the wreckage of the Hamza,” he said. “Ten knots, course two-six-zero.”
“That’s fast, given our low battery and fuel.”
“I know,” Renard said, “but we must make haste.”
“I will need to make a call to Keelung,” Ye said. “We must hasten the departure of an underwater salvage team.”
“And you will need to contact the defense minister,” Renard said. “He and Admiral Khan will jointly be facing a hefty amount of diplomatic damage control.”
“I will call him,” Ye said as he pulled a global account phone from a cubby under a Subtics monitor.