"Where?"
"Almost directly astern, sir. Speed thirty knots, range estimated at twelve hundred meters!"
"So close!"
"I couldn't hear him until he went active, Captain. Our speed…."
"Never mind that. What of the other enemy torpedoes?"
"They… sir! They appear to have broken off circling and are tracking the third torpedo. Sir! It's leading them to us!"
"I don't believe it!" Khalili snarled.
Ul Haq sighed. "Believe it." There was one chance left… to lose the enemy torpedoes above the thermocline. "Diving Officer! Take us up! Make depth ninety meters!"
The deck tipped. They rose….
"Torpedoes appear to be following us, sir! Range one thousand meters!"
Too far for countermeasures to be effective. What was that third American torpedo, anyway? They weren't supposed to be able to do that.
A little longer, now. He still had two torpedo tubes loaded and ready to fire. If he could evade this American salvo, he would be able to close for the kill….
"Take us below the thermocline, Mr. Falk. Let's see how we stand."
"Aye aye, sir. Depth?"
"Make depth three hundred fifty feet."
"Three hundred fifty feet, aye, sir."
"Captain, Junior is just about dead. He's losing speed."
"Have the torpedoes acquired the target?" A pause. "Torpedoes have acquired! Yes, sir!"
"Recall Junior, then. Cease active pinging and bring him back in."
"Yes, sir!"
"I think Bill is getting attached to that machine," Jorgensen commented.
"If I could give it a medal, XO, I would. Sonar! What's the target doing?"
"I think he may be trying to evade, Skipper. I'm hearing sounds of blowing ballast."
"Is he going up to the roof?"
"It's not a full emergency blow, sir. Sounds like he's just trying to get above the temperature gradient."
Exactly what I would do. "Stay with him." But he's doing it too little, too late.
"Both torpedoes are closing fast, now, sir. Time to target now… twenty seconds."
Wait for it…
"Fifteen seconds…"
"Range to incoming torpedo… three hundred meters! Two hundred fifty! Two hundred!.."
"Release countermeasures!" ul Haq barked. "Emergency surface!"
"Countermeasures released!"
"Blow main ballast! Emergency surface!"
Shuhadaa Muqaddaseen shuddered as high-pressure air blasted into her ballast tanks, tanks already partially emptied during her attempt to get above the thermocline. The submarine rose, but sluggishly… sluggishly…
"One hundred meters!.. Fifty meters!.."
"Hard right rudder!" Maybe he could still twist them aside. The American ADCAPs must be nearly out of fuel by now…
The nearest ADCAP went dead, its fuel supply exhausted. Automatically, its active sonar switched off and, slowed by friction with the water, it began to sink, having missed the Shuhadaa by scant meters.
The second ADCAP still had another twenty seconds of fuel left when it punched through the cloud of countermeasure bubbles and, rising sharply, reacquired the target and drove itself home.
The torpedo struck just forward of the aft diving planes and exploded.
24
"Hit!"
The sound of the distant explosion rang through Virginia's hull.
Garrett's fist came down on the arm of his command chair. "Got the bastard!"
Only much later did another thought arise.
Kazuko. …
He felt a wetness on his cheeks. Not tears, he told himself. Sweat.
And in the red-lit control room, no one would notice.
"Good shot, Captain!" Stevens said, but Garrett ignored him.
The explosion aft hammered at the hull, threw men to the deck, and plunged the submarine's interior into darkness. After a moment, emergency generators kicked in and the battle lanterns switched on, but the light was dim and uncertain.
The control room had been tipped almost ninety degrees, so that the aft bulkhead was now the deck, the forward bulkhead the ceiling. Ul Haq struggled to sit up, shoving the chart table off of a painfully injured leg. Around him, pandemonium reigned — men screaming, cursing, praying, shouting, some trying to crowd their way to an escape hatch, others sitting down where they were amid wreckage and debris and injured men and waiting to die.
I had hoped, he thought, to accomplish more. Merciful Allah… we commend ourselves into Your hands….
Khalili was at his side, eyes wide with terror. "Do something!" the man screamed, his face a hands' breadth from ul Haq's. "Do something! Save the ship! Save us!"
"There is nothing to be done, my friend. Shuhadaa is doomed, as are we." Not even their vaunted Chinese allies could help them now.
Shuhadaa Muqaddaseen was sinking slowly, tail first. A gaping hole blown into the aft machinery spaces had already flooded the shaft and motor compartments, and was swiftly flooding the engineering room. As more and more water flooded the aft compartments and the half-empty trim and ballast tanks, the Kilo's rate of descent increased.
Ul Haq could hear the water shriek as it entered the vessel somewhere beneath him. With every meter of descent, the water pressure outside grew greater. They'd been hit at one hundred meters, more or less. How deep were they now? Four hundred? Four hundred fifty? Too deep, at any rate, to attempt to use the escape trunk and make for the surface. Too deep for anything, in fact, but prayer.
His eardrums popped, the pain sharp and stabbing. With the submarine in this tail-down attitude, the air was trapped in the forward compartments by water boiling in from the open stern. As the water pressure outside increased, so, too, did the air pressure inside. The water would continue to force its way up from engineering as the air was crowded into a smaller and smaller space. The watertight doors had been secured when Shuhadaa went to action stations, but evidently the shock of the explosion had sprung enough of them badly enough that they no longer held the pressure.
It didn't matter, of course. One way or another, the immense pressure of the abyss would crush them like a titan's closing fist. Only minutes remained, if that.
The emergency generators failed, again plunging the control room into a darkness so absolute ul Haq could not see his own hand. Around him, the pleading, the cursing, the screaming seemed louder, more frantic. Somehow, the unrelieved darkness made the descent that much more horrific. It was the knowing you would never see light again….
A new sound shuddered through the straining bulkheads, high-pitched, grating, and terrible, like a woman's scream, the piercing shriek of a dying ship.