CHAPTER 18
“Captain, the fire-control system is overheating, we’ll have to shut it down.” Weapons Officer Lieutenant Commander Steve Bahnhoff looked very unhappy. Pacino gestured for Bahnhoff to wait. He had a last chore in mind for the Mark I fire-control system.
“Two minutes since the Magnum launch, Captain,” Rapier said, urging Pacino to return fire.
“Very well, XO.”
What had his father thought over two decades before when an older Russian torpedo was on its way, just as a bright shiny Russian Magnum was now on the way to the Devilfish? Had Patch even had time to think? An image of his father coughing up blood and seawater, drowning in both, came to him, etched in his mind. It was almost time. Time for payback. Pacino literally felt the eyes of his crew on him, waiting for his lead. The quiet was palpable. No bass rumble of ventilation. No whine of the SINS navigation system. Only half the lights, the sonar and fire-control systems were functional. Without air-conditioning the residual heat from the steam and reactor plants made the ship stuffy and hot.
Bahnhoffs voice broke the silence. “Captain, fire-control casualty… it’s a disk crash. fire-control is in tape mode.” Which, of course, meant the system would be twenty times slower and all positions would show the same clunky tape-mode display, the line-of-sight view. Pacino had no time to answer.
CHICK! CHICK! PWEEP! CHICK! CHICK! PWEEP! …
“Conn, Sonar, Magnum torpedo is doing a range check.” Pacino didn’t answer. Bahnhoff looked up at him. “fire-control temperature is almost a hundred and fifty, sir. We’re about to lose it…” But Pacino had to wait. The Magnum was still on its way in. Would the fire-control system hold out till the torpedo passed? More to the point, would the Devilfish herself survive?
The Magnum torpedo, serial number 0011779, propelled itself through the cold arctic sea with an external combustion engine, combining fuel with liquid oxidizer in a combustion chamber and sending the expanding gases to twin Bend hydraulic motors, spinning the concentric propulsor shafts. The engine design was old but ingenious. The torpedo cruised through the water, its counter-rotating screws just on the verge of cavitation, its slippery surface enabling it to get up to its final intercept velocity of 110 kilometers per hour. One hundred ten clicks. Fastest torpedo on earth. At the moment, however, the weapon meandered beneath the ice at a leisurely 70 clicks, making sonar reception better. There would be time to speed up to intercept speed once the weapon identified where the enemy ship was.
At first the Magnum “listened” passively as it cruised out toward the target position that the Kaliningrad’s computers had described to it before launch. It had a great deal of memory devoted to the sounds of the American nuclear submarines. Tapes of every submarine class had first been analyzed and coded into the digital memory. Later, tapes of every hull of the American fleet had been inserted. This target’s hull-number, SSN-666, had been fed in only minutes before, but the data from its August sound surveillance, stolen by an industrial espionage agent from the Dynacorp International Sound Analysis Division, indicated that the 666 had a slight amidships rattle when it ran slow-speed reactor recirculation pumps. Its fast speed pumps were so noisy that no comparison data was needed. After a few moments the weapon had “heard” nothing and switched to active sonar. The torpedo cruised on! “knowing” that the 666 was immediately ahead, and waiting for its noise to manifest itself in the listening-sonar gear.
“XO, set the Hullcrusher in tube one to passive-sonar mode with a circling pattern, orbit point 10,000 yards away down the bearing line to the OMEGA. Tubes two, three and four, the same. Tube-two unit at 15,000 yards, tube three at 20,000 and four at 25,000. All will need to transit at high speed to the orbit points.” Pacino’s voice was level but his thoughts of his father moments before had brought a sickening taste to his mouth.
“Sir,” Rapier asked, “you sure you don’t want active sonar mode with the snake pattern? The active mode will still screen out the ice noise. It’s a doppler sonar. And the snake pattern will cover a hell of a lot more territory—”
“No.” Pacino cut him off, wondering how Rapier could argue, with the pinging of the Magnum coming in louder every second. Pacino looked down at the fire-control display. The snake search pattern was a superb open-ocean torpedo program that made the torpedo wiggle side-to-side and up-and-down as it searched, covering huge ocean sectors with the sonar gear either passive or active. But for an underice shot Pacino had decided on a passive circler, a Mark 50 torpedo shot out to a preset range, then instructed to swim in circles until a target came into its passive-search sector. Without some kind of solution, active or passive snake shots would just dud. They examined too thin a slice of the ocean. At least a circler would look around all 360 degrees. And active sonar was out — it would alert the OMEGA that something was there. There was even the possibility a torpedo would home in on another friendly torpedo. It might work, but the odds were still against the OMEGA blindly driving into one of the torpedo’s search cones. Still, it was all Pacino had.
“With four active snake torpedoes out there,” Pacino said to Rapier, “the whole icepack would be filled with pinging. Our solution is getting stale without maneuvers and ownship speed. The OMEGA could be anywhere on this bearing line. Passive circlers are our only chance. All right, XO, program the weapons.”
Rapier nodded. “Programming now.”
The Magnum’s sonar pinging still sliced through the hull, getting clearer and louder. How long would it continue inbound, Pacino wondered.
“We can’t launch until this torpedo goes by, if it goes by, but if we fool it I intend to shoot everything in the torpedo room at Target One.” Rapier took it in.
“Conn, Sonar,” Pacino’s earpiece rattled, “loss of Target One. Signal-to-noise ratio went below threshold.” Pacino and Rapier looked at each other for a long moment. The Russian had disappeared. The torpedoes would be duds for sure now. Pacino pressed on, seeming to ignore the bad news. “And XO,” he said, having to speak over the noise of the incoming Magnum torpedo’s screw, “all units will have ASH disabled.”
“Sir, with Anti-Self-Homing disabled, the units could swim back and acquire on us.”
“I know, but you heard sonar. We don’t even know a bearing to Target One now. He could be anywhere. Time for an educated guess.” Both men paused to listen to the whine of the incoming nuclear-tipped torpedo.
The plot and fire-control officers were staring at the two men. Then, as the torpedo’s sonar sounded through the hull, all eyes looked sideways to port, as if they could see through the steel to the approaching torpedo outside. The ping-pitch had dropped from a shrill squeak to medium tone, the screw noise had gotten deeper, the noise no longer coming from the port side but fading away to starboard.
Pacino looked at Rapier. “We fooled it.”
“Kicked its ass,” Rapier said, the stress leaving his face for a moment.
“Conn, Sonar,” Pacino’s earpiece announced, “we’re getting down doppler on the torpedo. It’s past CPA and opening.”
“Sonar, Captain,” Pacino said into his microphone, “any reacquisition on Target One?”
“Conn, Sonar, no…”
Pacino’s relief quickly faded. “Attention in the fire-control team,” he called out to the room. “We’ve gained a little time but the Magnum may come back around when it realizes it’s been had. I’m going to try to get some weapons out before the Mark I system shuts down on high temperature. And since we no longer have sonar contact on Target One we will be firing on our best guess. Carry on.” Pacino paused, eyeballing his officers, adrenaline pumping, sweat pouring… an intense mix of feelings almost sexual.