The French mechanic shook his head. “I can dissect you with razor-like precision. But the Iranians? I admit I’m at a loss. I don’t know if they mean to destroy us or simply to harass us at this point.”
“They’ve got a right to be angry. Waiting for their wrath, not knowing if it’s coming or when, is worse than having to react to it.”
“I’m not sure I—”
“High-speed screws!” The toad-head turned its jaw upward. “Torpedo in the water! Bearing two-eight-eight. High bearing rate to the left. No threat to our ship.”
Jake darted around the table to Remy’s side. “Then who’s it a threat to?”
“Terry.”
Moving behind Jake, the tall American rider spoke with a Texas drawl. “That’s Terry and the Indiana.”
“Right. One torpedo shot at two ships.” Jake studied the incoming lines of sound representing the weapon’s propeller blades. The bearing and movement agreed with his sonar guru’s assessment. “Antoine, enter your solution into the system.”
Jake returned to the charting table and eyeballed an evasion course for Cahill. “Henri, get the system solution for the Iranian torpedo into a communications buoy, zero delay. Include a recommendation for Terry to run on his choice of one-four-zero or two-zero-zero. Launch it when it’s ready.”
“Zero delay communications buoy. I’m on it.” The French mechanic tapped keys at his console. “The communications buoy is ready… the communications buoy is launched.”
His teammates warned, Jake considered what else he could do for them, and distracting the shooter of a wire-guided weapon came to mind. He walked to the central table, grabbed a stylus, and shifted the hostile torpedo backwards in time to the moment the Indiana had stressed the groaning presses of the Goliath’s cargo bed. Allotting the Iranians a three-minute reaction time, he geo-located the shooter and tapped in an adversarial submarine. “Antoine, do you see what I just added to the system?”
“Yes.”
“That’s the shooter. Can I borrow Julien and Noah to assign weapons?”
“Hurry. I need them to listen elsewhere.”
“I’ll be fast. Julien, assign tube three to a phantom target five degrees to the left of the shooter. Noah, assign tube five to a phantom target five degrees to the right. Got it?”
The two young Frenchmen voiced simultaneous affirmations.
Jake raised his voice. “Henri, ready tubes three and five.”
“Tubes three and five are being readied.”
As his gaze caught the tall Texan, Jake wondered about the roaming American submarine. “What about the California?”
The rider grunted. “It’s on them to avoid your weapons. But be smart about it, and use long enable runs.”
“Long enable runs for a target with shitty targeting?”
“You think the shooter’s going to close distance towards our colleagues after shooting?”
“Maybe. I don’t know what they’re doing, but the sooner they know I’ve got weapons headed their way, the sooner their anxiety levels go up, and the sooner they might maneuver and break their wire.”
“But if you warn them too soon, they may be able to evade without drastic maneuvers.”
Jake moved between the two young Frenchman. “What’s the default runs for your weapons?”
Their responses overlapping, the sonar technicians declared a distance of four and a half miles during which the torpedoes would cruise with their seekers dormant. The weapons were ready.
“Good enough?” Jake glanced at the American submarine officer.
Silently, the rider nodded his concurrence.
“Shoot tubes three and five.” The back-to-back impulse launches popped Jake’s ears. He walked to the central table, pressed his palms into it, and slumped over it. Below him, icons of his torpedoes raced towards his guess of the Iranian shooter’s position. In a side window, Renard’s low-speed feed confirmed receipt of the warning. “Henri, Pierre’s acknowledging our communications buoy.”
“I was going to mention it, but I noticed you reading it.”
The Specter’s commander digested his boss’ response. Limited by the water-penetrating, low-frequency radio waves, the characters trickled like dewfall. As usual, Renard crammed meaning into few words. After a two-character system-generated code confirming receipt of the buoy’s message, the Frenchman wrote: ‘Terry evading’. “Antoine, do you hear any sign of Terry surfacing?”
“No.
“Do you hear him at all?”
“He’s too far away and moving too slow.”
“That doesn’t sound like an evasion.”
“Hold on.” Remy pressed his muffs into his ears. “I hear him now. Making turns on both screws for thirteen knots, his maximum submerged sustainable speed.”
“He must’ve received the note from Pierre just before we got ours. He was deep when he received it.” Jake watched the Goliath’s icon, waiting for its surfacing and its acceleration. And he kept waiting. “What the hell, Antoine? Is he holding thirteen knots?”
“Yes. I mean no, not exactly. He’s making turns for thirteen knots, if that’s what you meant. But he’s moving slower because of the drag from the Indiana. You’ll have to give the solution time to play out, but he’s probably moving closer to twelve knots. And he’s still submerged.”
“Damn it.” Jake recalculated the Goliath-Indiana tandem’s evasion using the submerged speed limitation. “They won’t make it. Impact’s in six and a half minutes, and that torpedo should have almost ten percent fuel remaining. Something’s wrong. They should be blowing the Indiana’s forward ballast tanks and surfacing.”
Henri announced an incoming message. “I think Pierre’s latest feed may explain it.”
Glancing at the trickling characters, Jake read the words ‘Gunships over Terry’, and then he recalled the Iranian airborne arsenal. “Shit. Sea Cobras. Twenty-two-millimeter cannons and rockets. Lots of rockets. Enough to put holes in all of Terry’s compartments.”
The American rider added emphasis to the lamentation. “And holes into the Indiana’s only inhabitable compartment. You also need to assume there’s at least one anti-submarine warfare helo out there and jet fighters in control of the air space. Our jets can’t enter their air space without turning this into an unacceptable escalation.”
“You’re sure about that?”
The American’s drawl was somber. “I was briefed. Yes. We’re not sending our aircraft into their air space.”
“Why not? What are they afraid of?”
After a slow sigh, the commander explained it. “The closer you get to endangering civilians, the tighter everyone’s sphincters get. I hate to say it, but if you sink a submarine, that’s about the last thing anyone cares about. It’s such a strange machine in the eyes of civilians, especially politicians, that it’s almost like telling them we lost a spacecraft. We go out, we hide, we do shit they don’t understand. God willing, we come back. If we don’t, it’s news until it ain’t anymore.”
Recalling the last catastrophe that took away his forty-three brothers and one sister, the Argentine submarine San Juan, Jake had to concede. It was a blip in international news, and he doubted that anyone except family members of the deceased, Argentine military enthusiasts, and his fellow submariners could remember the lost diesel boat’s name. He slumped his shoulders. “Yeah. You’re right.”
“People care more about surface combatants because they can relate to big ships. Most people have sailed on cruise ships or know someone who has, and they know their consumer goods arrive every day on big ships. But when you get to aircraft, everyone flies, and nobody wants to see a jet shot down. It’s too close to home, literally and figuratively.”