Wait… wait… The Kilo skipper would be copying Seawolf's maneuvers, but each imitation would be delayed by a number of seconds, the time it took for his own sonar crew to pick up the change in Seawolf's sonar aspect, evaluate it, and repeat it.
"Sonar crew. Pull your ears! All hands. Brace for collision!" Now! "Weapons officer! Detonate the torpedo!"
Ward already had his thumb poised above a large, red button. When he pressed it, 650 pounds of PBXN 103 high explosives detonated with a thunderous crash two football fields astern of the Seawolf's screw.
The shock wave was enough to send a shudder along the length of Seawolf's hull, rocking her hard. Seconds later they could hear, they could feel, the looming mass of the Luda directly overhead, as Seawolf twisted hard to starboard beneath the destroyer's keel. The shockwave caught the Seawolf and gently nudged her forward… and also up, just a little. A shattering, tearing crunch sounded from above the control room, and the deck tilted to the right.
Then Seawolf righted herself. Garrett clutched the periscope railing hard, willing the sub to keep moving. If her upper works were fouled with the destroyer, if the damage was too severe…
"Jesus!" Tollini said, looking back at Garrett from his station at the dive board. "I think we just scraped off the bastard's sonar dome!"
"Helm. Come to heading one-five-zero. Slow to eight knots. Maintain silence throughout the boat."
Minutes dragged past, as Seawolf slowly and quietly crawled away from the clash, her sonar ears again probing the water astern, trying to piece together a coherent picture of what was happening. The destroyer appeared to have heaved to, and there were some unpleasant fluttering noises that might have been hull damage of some sort. Toynbee also reported that they could hear the Kilo, blowing her tanks and surfacing.
That was good news, at least, nearly the best they could expect. Garrett had not targeted the Kilo directly because she was so hard to pick up on passive sonar. In any case, what he'd wanted most to do was brush the Kilo off and wreck her sonar picture of the Seawolf.
The detonation of a Mk 48 ADCAP torpedo between the Kilo's blunt prow and Seawolf's screw had undoubtedly done just that… and quite possibly had been close enough to the unseen Kilo to cause substantial damage as well, to her sonar suite if nothing else.
The explosion had also deafened the destroyer, and, if Seawolf's accidental brush with its keel had done what Garrett thought, the destroyer might have been permanently deafened when the bulbous dome containing its Jug Pair sonar was carried away.
The control room was enveloped in complete silence as minute followed minute and Seawolf continued moving southeast at a slow and steady pace. Twice Garrett ordered changes in course and speed to help throw off enemy tracking attempts, but she continued her overall run — if her ultrasilent creep along the sea floor could be called a "run" — toward the southeast and the safety of deep, open water.
"Yellow Dragon, this is Blue Dragon. Yellow Dragon, Blue. Do you copy?" Patiently, Morton repeated the call. The sounds of steady gunfire from up ahead had ceased for a time, but now there were continued brief, sharp flurries of automatic fire, punctuated once by the crump of an exploding hand grenade. A gentle rain had begun falling, somewhat muffling the gunfire.
The SEALs had crept as close to the battle as they could without being discovered. Now they needed to make contact with Tse.
"Blue Dragon! Blue Dragon! This is Yellow!" The voice was Tse's, sounding tired and haggard. "What the hell are you doing here?"
"Pulling your tail out of hot water. What's your tactical situation?"
"It was a trap," Tse replied, his voice carrying a taste of bitterness. "The Silkworm launchers were there to draw us in. We're on a hilltop about twelve kilometers from our original OP, map coordinates… " He began rattling off a string of alphanumerics. Morton already had his plastic AO map out and swiftly localized Tse's position. As he'd suspected, they were on the hill just ahead.
"I would estimate a full PLA brigade in our immediate area," Tse went on. "I have two dead, four wounded, and we're low on ammo. Situation is desperate."
A sudden sharp sound over the tactical radio channel corresponded with a loud whump from the hill ahead. "They're starting to bring in artillery. We're not going to hold for very much longer."
"You can hold for fifteen more minutes," Morton told him. "Stay low, get ready, and stand by for a fast E and E on a bearing of… one-seven-four. Do you copy that?"
"I copy, Blue Dragon. And… whatever happens… thanks."
"You can thank me when we get to the sea, Yellow Dragon. Stand by."
TM1 Jorghenson crawled over to Morton's position. "We've got visual with the bad guys, Skipper," he said. "Light MGs, assault rifles. They're not dug in and they're not watching their backs."
"Okay, Swede. Let's see what we've got."
They moved forward through the steady drizzle, until Jorghenson tapped his shoulder twice and pointed. From a concealed position behind a fallen log and within a clump of bushes at the edge of a clearing, Morton could see three Chinese soldiers crouched behind boulders at the side of a dirt road twenty yards ahead, their backs to him, their attention focused on something farther up the slope. Pointing again, Jorghenson indicated that more PLA fire teams were located there… there… and over there.
Two more came running up the road, puffing with exertion. One carried a Type 56 machine gun — a close copy of the old Soviet RPD — the other a couple of boxes of linked ammo. An officer stepped out of the trees ahead and waved them on.
The SEALs faded back into the woods. Silently, using hand signals, Morton spelled out what he wanted. First squad… with me. Second squad… set claymores… along that road.
As the word was spread, SEALs began materializing out of the forest, black-faced, nearly invisible against the underbrush. They used sign language and touch, for the most part, but whispered instructions over the tactical channel where necessary. First Squad began spreading out along the clearing, moving around its fringes, closing on the unsuspecting PLA troops who were busily focused on their own prey.
The PLA officer vanished into the shrubs at his back as a black-clad arm swept around his mouth and a SEAL Mk 1 diving knife sliced through jugular, carotid, and windpipe. Another Chinese soldier grunted, then collapsed, the thump of his falling louder than the double-tapped 9mm Hush Puppy rounds that silenced him. Sound-suppressed H&K fire cut down the two men with the machine gun in mid-stride; a nearby PLA soldier saw them fall and shouted. An instant later a 40mm grenade detonated between him and another soldier, flinging them apart like torn rag dolls.
The SEAL squad surged forward then, a general advance that caught the PLA soldiers from behind and completely unprepared. While SEALs were not intended for heavy combat, their tactics and weaponry allowed them to survive short contacts through a sheer, overwhelming viciousness of superior firepower. They stuck with suppressed weapons — H&Ks and Smith & Wesson
Hush Puppies — for as long as possible, but once things went rock-and-roll, Whiteman began cutting loose with his M-60, and the men with M203 grenade launchers, Douglass and Knowles, began popping 40mm rounds at every likely concentration of enemy force.