Liaoning was only going to do a little bit of that, Child realized, before the middle of the ship hit the bottom mud.
Her keel was broken. She was in two halves.
Child jabbed a fist aloft, went down the ladder and dogged the hatch, and shouted exultantly, “They did it! Broke her back! Let’s get the hell outta here, coxs’n.”
Child personally typed the success code into his com unit and hit the SEND button.
When he finished, he turned and saw that every man there was grinning widely.
Yessss!
Aboard Utah, the sonarman had the audio of his gear on the control room speaker, with the volume turned way down.
It was here that Roscoe Hanna and the control room crew heard a sonar ping from one of the destroyers around Hornet. One ping, pause, two pings, pause, two more. Then silence again.
The success signal. That meant the two Sealions were on their way back to Hornet.
Hanna glanced again at the plot. The Chinese attack boat was still four miles in front of them, still heading a little south of east toward the Hornet task group.
Hanna decided to wait until the Chinese boat heard the oncoming Sealions, which weren’t quiet. When the Chinese heard them, they would do something. Hanna didn’t know what, but the unknown sound coming from the direction of Qingdao might tempt the Chinese skipper to take his boat to periscope depth for a look around.
It would be at least an hour before the Sealions were close enough to hear. Roscoe Hanna took a head break.
It was midafternoon in Washington when Rear Admiral Hurricane Carter notified the Pentagon and White House of the success of the SEAL mission. In the White House Situation Room the civilian staffers and bigwigs made a happy noise, then wandered out. Finally only the permanent Situation Room staffers were left … and Admiral Cart McKiernan and Jake Grafton. They sat side by side in chairs at the back of the room.
Those two didn’t get excited when the news was announced. They wouldn’t get excited until the SEALs were back aboard Hornet. They wandered over to the coffeepot, helped themselves and inspected the stale doughnut and bagel selection.
McKiernan paused to whack Grafton on the arm with his fist. Grafton gave him a grin. Then each took a chunk of carbohydrates and a cup of sour coffee back to his seat and tried to get comfortable.
Utah heard the Sealions at least ten minutes before the Chinese attack submarine in front of her reacted by turning so her right flank was fully exposed to the noisemakers. Silently, slowing carefully, Utah entered a gentle turn so that her bow remained pointed at the Chinese sub, which was heading off to her right. The helmsman kept the turn in. The result was that the angle between their headings increased.
Roscoe Hanna knew precisely what he was going to do. The only thing he worried about was the timing. When? So he waited until the oncoming Sealions were about five miles away at two o’clock relative to him. They were going to cross in front of the Chinese boat, with the closest point of approach being three miles.
“Now,” Hanna said, and the sonarman flipped the switch to active pinging. Ping, the sound went out, and returned. The Chinese sub blossomed on the screen. Another ping. And another, regularly. The Chinese sub was pinned.
“Noisemakers,” Hanna ordered, and three acoustic bouys were launched from small tubes in the sail. They shot away from Utah, then slowed and began making wonderous amounts of noise, noise that would overwhelm the sensitive listening sensors of the Chinese sub, at least for a few moments.
The result of all this, Hanna hoped, was confusion. At the least, he thought the Chinese skipper would forget about the surface contacts he had detected and worry about the origin of all this noise. No doubt it was from another submarine, but where?
“Open outer doors on Tubes One and Two.”
The fact that Utah was going to shoot two torpedoes had been briefed and rehearsed. Now the sailors went right down the checklist. The torpedoes would travel a buttonhook path so that they approached the Chinese submarine from her beam.
“Fire One.”
Everyone in the control room felt the jolt of the big torpedo being ejected.
Ten seconds later, “Fire Two.”
The second torpedo went into the water.
Now Hanna ceased pinging and turned his boat to port to present its stern to the Chinese boat and open the distance.
Aboard the Chinese sub, confusion reigned. The active pinging of a subsurface sonar so near had come as a shock to the entire crew. Then the noisemakers.
They knew where the other sub was, or thought they did. But why all the noise?
While the skipper was trying to figure it out, the sonar operator called, “Torpedo running. Active homing. Approaching…”
The Chinese sub wasn’t even at action stations. The OOD in the control room smacked the collision alarm with his palm and the noise rang in every compartment in the boat.
The captain grabbed the headset from the sonarman. Put one pad against his ear. He could hear the distinctive gurgle of the approaching torpedo. He grabbed the volume knob and turned. The torpedo was close. Seconds from impact. He could hear the pinging of its seeker head.
“Surface,” he shouted. “Emergency surface.” He tossed the headset back to the sonarman, who flipped a switch to put the audio on the loudspeaker system.
Bedlam in the control room. Everyone shouting and reaching for knobs and buttons as the torpedo closed. The sound of the approaching torpedo was rising in pitch and volume as it sped toward the submarine. The pinging from the seeker came faster and faster as the range diminished.
Then … whump! A noise like the impact of a huge hammer. The torpedo struck the outside of the boat and didn’t explode! The noise from the seeker head and the pump-jet propulsion system fell silent.
But …
There was another torpedo in the water! Like the first, it roared in with its pinging head probing for the sub, whining louder and louder.
Whump!
Silence.
Two duds.
Or two practice torpedoes …
“Level off at this depth,” the captain roared. “Get the boat under control. And where is that Yankee sub?”
While the ocean floor was shallow here, Roscoe Hanna thought he could safely take Utah a little deeper, so he had the chief drop her down another hundred feet. Perhaps he would get a bit of help from a thermal layer, if there was one, or a discontinuity in salinity.
A minute passed, then two. “More speed,” Hanna told the chief of the boat. “Twenty knots.”
“Aye aye, sir. Twenty knots.”
The noisemakers had hidden the sound of the practice torpedoes, but he figured he got two hits at the end of running time. And gave the Chinese skipper the thrill of his life.
Hanna turned the boat so he was heading straight for the center of the Hornet task group.
Now the Chinese boat went active on its sonar. Ping.
It was turning toward Utah.
If the Chinese skipper fires a torpedo, this will be World War III. But he won’t, Hanna told himself. He’s been surprised, humiliated, lost a bucket of face, but he won’t pull the trigger. I hope.
“He’s accelerating, Captain,” sonar reported.
“Range?”