“Loss of torpedo-control wires, units one and two. Captain,” Bahnhoff said, not yet registering that the target had counterfired. He was so caught up in his two torpedo hits that he didn’t realize it.
“Torpedo room. Conn,” Pacino ordered over a hand-held microphone he had grabbed, “cut the wires to tubes one and two, shut the outer doors and drain tubes.”
Suddenly the deck levelled out at 1500 feet, test depth, her deck still vibrating as 30,000-shaft horsepower blasted her through the water at flank speed.
“Conn, Sonar,” Pacino’s headset crackled, “incoming torpedo now bears two three three. Slight right bearing drift. It’s range-gating.” Outside the hull they could hear a high-pitched pinging that got louder, more frequent, more insistent. The torpedo knew exactly where they were. And Pacino knew his only chance was that by going flank speed he might draw out the chase long enough to make the torpedo run out of fuel.
“Maneuvering, Captain,” he said into a mike, “unload the turbine generators as much as possible and load the battery. I want every ounce of steam we have going to the main engines. And raise T-AVE to 520 degrees — you’ll have to override the cutback.”
A speaker in the control room overhead boomed harshly through the previous quiet.
“UNLOAD THE TG’S, LOAD THE BATTERY, MAXIMIZE MAIN ENGINE STEAM, T-AVE TO 520 AND CUTBACK OVERRIDE, CONN, MANEUVERING, AYE.”
Pacino strained to check out the speed indicator. Thirty-five knots and steady. He watched to see if he was getting a bit more speed from the reactor but it was no good. The incoming torpedo would be at the hull at any minute. The torpedo pinged louder. Pacino looked at the geographic plot, then at Position One on the fire-control screens. Position-One’s officer was trying to get a solution on the torpedo, but without maneuvering the ship it was all a guess. The weapon could be five thousand yards away or five hundred.
“Conn, Sonar,” Pacino heard in his headset, “torpedo still incoming, range-gate narrowing. Within one thousand yards.” Pacino shook his head. He’d gotten two hits on the enemy, so what? The enemy weapon was zooming in at over 50 knots and Devilfish was only doing 35. That put torpedo-impact less than two minutes away. Pacino looked toward the rear of the control room at the ship’s framed Jolly Roger flag with the Devilfish’s motto sewn above and below the grinning skull and crossbones of the pirate flag. The motto read:
IF YOU AIN’T CHEATIN’ YOU AIN’T TRYIN’
Every watchstander in the control room of the Devilfish had frozen, waiting for torpedo-impact. The sound of the torpedo’s screw was now louder, huge fingernails scraping a giant blackboard. While Pacino stared at the flag, and its motto, an idea came to him. He mounted the periscope stand and called to the Chief of the Watch at the portside ballast-control paneclass="underline" “Emergency blow the forward group.”
“Blow forward, aye,” the chief said, his tone betraying how odd he thought the order. Nonetheless, he reached for one of two large levers, hit its plunger and pushed it up to the stop.
Immediately a sudden loud roar filled the control room, the sound of ultrahigh-pressure air roaring into the ship’s ballast tanks and blowing out the water. Dense fog filled the room, condensation from the leakage around the blow valve. Visibility shrank to less than a foot. The chief grabbed a small lever and pulled it to the right, sounding the alarm throughout the ship for an emergency surface.
OOH-GAH, OOH-GAH, OOH-GAH. It was not the submarine’s klaxon horn of John Wayne movies. The alarm was generated electronically and sounded like it came from a cheap video arcade game amplified to a distorted, earsplitting volume. The chief pulled a hand-held microphone from the paneclass="underline" “SURFACE, SURFACE, SURFACE.”
Pacino shouted over the violent roar of the emergency blow system: “Chief, emergency blow aft.”
“Emergency blow aft, aye sir. Blowing aft.” The noise got worse, the roar louder than a torpedolaunch, and instead of a quick crash it was a sustained kind of scream. The fog in the room grew thicker. The ship-control party pushed their faces close to the panels to read their gages. In the Devilfish’s main ballast tanks, filled a moment before with seawater, high-pressure air forced the seawater out. The tanks went dry fifteen seconds after the aft-system blow, and suddenly Devilfish was hundreds of tons lighter. Nothing would keep her submerged for long now.
“Secure the blow,” Pacino ordered. The room went quiet again, only the sound of the pinging and torpedo screw could be heard. The depth gage clicked once, twice, several times. The fog began to disperse. The deck floated upward, becoming steeper a degree at a time.
Pacino’s voice reverberated throughout the ship on the circuit-one microphone: “This is the captain. We are emergency blowing to the surface to try to avoid the torpedo. We may get lucky — if it’s like ours the weapon will be programmed not to go above a ceiling. If we can get shallow fast enough and above the ceiling we may be able to get away from it.”
The deck inclined up and up, 20 degrees, 25, to 45 degrees. The sternplanesman held full dive on the stern planes. Without the planes on dive the boat would certainly have been vertical. The ship’s speed indicator showed 40 knots.
Pacino was hanging from a stainless steel rod above the number-two periscope. The depth gage reeled off the depth—750 feet… 500 … 300. Devilfish was rocketing to the surface. Pacino glanced at the sonar repeater. He might evade the torpedo but he might have made things worse — once they punched through the thermal layer, if there was any kind of shipping above it was about to get 4500 tons of nuclear submarine rammed into it at 40 knots. The force of such a collision would surely sink both vessels.
The USS Diamond was an ugly surface ship, a typical salvage vessel. She was the range-safety ship for the day’s highly realistic submarine-versus-submarine torpedo-shot exercise. Her sonar showed Devilfish had gotten off the first two shots, the USS Allentown had been slow to get off a counterfire but had nearly sunk Devilfish. Both of Devilfish’s torpedoes had hit their mark, but as the Allentown”s torpedo zeroed in on the Devilfish the sonar officer on the Diamond pulled off his headset and shouted, “Devilfish is emergency-blowing, bearing north.”
The pilothouse, in a near-panic, put the rudder over hardright to head south and away from the submarine emergency-blowing to the surface. The wake boiled up at Diamond’s stern as she tried to run from the area. The offwatch crew gathered at the fantail aft to catch sight of the sub about to come screaming out of the depths.
Suddenly the sea directly astern of the retreating Diamond exploded, a tower of foam leaping in a column from the water. Following the foam, a streamlined nose leaped from the ocean. Almost in slow motion, the rest of the cylindrical shape came out of the sea, black on top, dull red on the bottom. In less than a second the massive three-hundred-foot-length of 32-feet-diameter steel shape came roaring out of the water at a 50-degree angle, jumped completely out of the sea, a spray splashing over the salvage ship as the submarine’s huge brass screw became momentarily exposed. The behemoth fell crashing back to the water, a tidal wave coming over the transom of the Diamond, soaking the men at the rail and nearly washing one overboard.
As the Devilfish bobbed in the water in a field of white foam and angry bubbles, most of the drenched Diamond crew cheered in appreciation… it wasn’t every day they saw a submarine so blatantly break the rules and win. One soaked chief petty officer turned to another: “The captain of that sub is going to pay for that stunt with his dolphins.” The other shook his head. “No he ain’t. That there’s the Devilfish — she cheats at ever’thang. Gets away with it, too.”