“Captain, roger. We may have something wrapped around the screw…so propel maximum on emergency…and try main propulsion in astern…we might just be able to unwind it.”
“One hundred feet, sir…ten degrees bow up.”
Judd shouldered the XO to one side and ordered a short blast of high-pressure air into the after-main ballast group, in a desperate attempt to stop the stern-down trend.
Somehow he remained outwardly calm. But inwardly, he was seething. FUCKING FUCKING FUCKING XO…what a total prick…we’ll be real lucky to get out of this one.
Judd’s mind raced, scanning the options. What do I do? Dive? Surface? Declare war? Scuttle the ship? Surrender? Call the cavalry? FUCK ME!
And then, Steady, Judd. For Christ’s sake, steady. Think it through, from best to worst.
Best was easy. If we’re very lucky the destroyer’s CO will think his array snagged the bottom — maybe won’t even notice it’s off for a few minutes — if he’s real stupid.
But from there, the entire scenario went south. Because he’s still not going away, is he? He’ll want to mark the position to get the fucking thing back.
Judd’s mind raced on. Since he’s going no place fast, it’s me who must make the move. But I’m stuck with three knots max on emergency propulsion…and I’ve got 50 fucking tons of deadweight on my stern. And not much chance at all of restoring the main shaft. Holy shit!
This was the real loneliness of command. There was no one he could turn to, least of all. his XO. And all around him his team was coping, rock steady, with a crisis beyond the realm of their worst nightmares.
“Conn maneuvering…shaft will not move in astern, sir…EPM running ahead full.”
“Planes are answering.…One hundred and ten feet steady…trim’s good, sir…that is with five degrees bow up.”
“Conn-Sonar…all contacts drowned out by EPM, sir.”
Judd knew he was running out of options. If he stopped the emergency propulsion motor, Seawolf would also stop. And the weight aft, too heavy to be compensated for, would drag her down, stern first.
The only chance of stopping that was to blow the main ballast tanks. And holding even an approximate trim that way was unbelievably noisy anyhow and unlikely for more than 30 minutes before the sheer physics of the game overtook him.
Lack of air, a depth surge up, or, even worse, down, or an excessively steep angle — any of those could routinely “scram” the reactor, crippling the beleaguered Seawolf totally.
If, alternatively, he left the noisy emergency motor running, he was deaf to the outside world, but could probably maintain depth, give or take 30 feet.
But he couldn’t maintain a steady periscope depth under those circumstances, which meant he’d be blind as well as deaf. At PD, on the little emergency motor, he’d end up showing the whole sail occasionally, which would nicely advertise his presence to the entire South China Sea. The EPM was only a get-you-home kit for peacetime use. It was about as stealthy as a buzzsaw.
Judd fought off a feeling of helplessness. There was only one conclusion. He had to get back to the surface and check out the propeller. But that meant surfacing right beside the Chinese destroyer, though at least they were in international waters.
And so he issued the command, and Seawolf wallowed her way clumsily up, her motion slow and ungainly, barely under control, a wounded whale with a harpoon jutting out of her backside. Judd Crocker took the periscope in the dawn light. The rain had stopped and the sea was very beautiful, but the sight that greeted him was not good.
Through the glass he could actually see the ghastly tangle of thick black wire wrapped hard around his propeller, locking it rigid.
Worse yet, he could see now, 200 yards off his port beam, one 6,000-ton Chinese destroyer, with a gun turret pointed straight at Seawolf’s bridge. From where Judd was looking it seemed to be pointing straight between his eyes.
“Jesus, Mary and Joseph!” he breathed.
The CO’s mind flew. The situation was dire, but not unique. Submarines had wrapped their propellers around towed arrays before, most spectacularly when a Royal Navy nuclear boat did it in the Barents Sea back in the early 1980s, surfaced, cut it free, and made her way home safely.
And of course everyone knew of the incident somewhere off the Carolinas in the late 1970s when a cruising Soviet submarine wound the towed array of an American frigate into its prop. Navy folklore says the submarine had to surface, much like Seawolf had done now, while the crew tried to cut their way free with inadequate equipment. The American crew apparently sat on the stern of the frigate, eating hot dogs for lunch, howling with laughter and loudly cheering every failed attempt by the Russians to clear their huge propeller.
Judd knew also that one of the giant Soviet ICBM Typhoons had wrapped one of its two propellers around the array of another of the Royal Navy’s nuclear spy ships in the Barents Sea, HMS Splendid, on Christmas Eve 1986. The Typhoon ripped it off the much smaller British submarine, and the Soviets retreated with the array still entwined.
But right now Judd had to decide what to do himself. Until they unlocked the prop shaft they were trapped, so the decision essentially made itself. There was no point submerging again, with no propulsion. They could not get away, and in the end they’d have to return to the surface.
So the CO ordered a diving team to prepare for immediate action. Master Chief Brad Stockton selected eight men, four for the initial dive, with four more for backup on the casing behind the prop. Within minutes, the men were being suited up in wet suits and flippers. Brad ordered scuba gear to be brought out, along with oxyacetylene cutting equipment, big double-handed wire cutters, even axes, anything to hack the array off Seawolf’s prop.
The team made its way to the sail door, starboard side, hidden from the Xiangtan, and one by one they moved along the casing toward the stern, where they would begin the work. However, the first man around the aft end of the sail instantly came into the view of the Chinese gunnery team, and in a hail of small-arms fire the entire diving team was driven back, bullets slamming against the one-inch-thick steel of the sail, and ricocheting in all directions. It was a miracle no one was killed. But no one was, and they retreated safely back into the submarine.
So the first guideline was laid down: The Chinese were not about to let the American submarine break free, or even allow its crew out of the hull.
Judd Crocker appreciated the situation, and reconsidered his narrowing options. If he had any mobility, he could have considered taking out the destroyer with torpedoes, but more Chinese ships and aircraft were surely on their way.
The captain of that goddamned destroyer won’t be keeping this little epic to himself, he thought. Unlike my fucking XO.
Since he could not get to the screw and then get away, they were, by any standards, already prisoners of the Chinese. But the Xiangtan was not trying to sink them, and they were in international waters with several miles to spare.
It seemed for a few moments that no one on either ship knew quite what to do, but suddenly the Chinese made the first move, launching one of their Haitun helicopters off the stern. Judd watched it through the periscope, clattering low over the sea and hovering right above Seawolf’s bow. Then its door opened, and four men were lowered onto the submarine, each of them carrying what looked like heavy-duty gear on his back.