Debt Of Honor by Clancy, Tom

icked the ultrasonic frequencies of the torpedo seeker-heads. Another fea-

ture built into the new ones had a powerful pulsing magnetic field to trick the

under-the-keel influence-exploders the Russians had developed. But the

Mark 50 was a contact weapon, and by controlling them with the wire, he-

could force them to ignore the acoustical interference. It wasn’t fair, wasn’t

sporting at all, but then, who ever said war was supposed to be that way? he

asked the director, who did not answer.

It was a strange disconnect of sight, sound, and feel. The ship hardly shud-

dered at all when the first column of water leaped skyward. The noise was

unmistakably real, and, coming without warning, it made Sanchez jump on

the port-after corner of the island. His initial impression was that it hadn’t

been all that bad a deal, that maybe the fish had exploded in Johnnie Reb’s

wake. He was wrong.

The Japanese version of the Mark 50 had a small warhead, only sixty kilo-

grams, but it was a shaped charge, and the first of them exploded on the boss

of number-two propeller, the inboard postside shaft. The shock immediately

ripped three of the screw’s five blades off, unbalancing a propeller now turn-

ing at a hundred-thirty RPM. The physical forces involved were immense,

and tore open the shaft fittings and the skegs that held the entire propulsion

system in place. In a moment the aftermost portion of the shaft alley was

“flooded, and water started entering the ship through her most vulnerable

point. What happened forward was even worse.

Like most large warships, John Stennis was steam-powered. In her case

two nuclear reactors generated power by boiling water directly. That steam

went into a heat exchanger where other water was boiled (but not made ra-

dioactive as a result) and piped aft to a high-pressure turbine. The steam hit

the turbine blades, causing them to turn much like the vanes of a windmill,

which is all the turbine really was; the steam was then piped aft to a low-

pressure turbine to make use of the residual energy. The turbines had effi-

cient turning rates, far faster than the propeller could attain, however, and to

lower the shaft speed to something the ship could really use, there was a set

of reduction gears, essentially a shipboard version of an automobile trans-

mission, located between them. The finely machined barrel-shaped wheels

in that bit of marine hardware were the most delicate element of the ship’s

drivetrain, and the blast energy from the warhead had traveled straight up the

shaft, jamming the wheels in a manner that they were not designed to absorb.

The added asymmetrical writhing of the unbalanced shaft rapidly completed

the destruction of the entire Number Two drivetrain. Sailors were leaping

from their feet with the noise even before the second warhead struck, on

Number Three.

That explosion was on the outer edge of the starboard-inboard propeller,

and the collateral damage took half a blade off Number Four. Damage to

Number Three was identical with Number Two. Number Four was luckier.

This engine-room crew threw the steam controls to reverse with the first hint

of vibration. Poppet valves opened at once, hitting the astern-drive blades

and stopping the shaft before the damage got as far as the reduction gears,

just in time for the third torpedo to complete the destruction of the starboard-

outboard prop.

The All-Stop bell sounded next, and the crewmen in all four turbine

rooms initiated the same procedure undertaken moments earlier by the crew

on the starboard side. Other alarms were sounding. Damage-control parties

raced aft and below to check the flooding, as their carrier glided to a lengthy

and crooked halt. One of her rudders was damaged as well.

“What the hell was that all about?” one engineman asked another.

“My God,” Sanchez breathed topside. Somehow the damage to Enter-

prise, now two miles away, seemed even worse than that to his ship. Various

alarms were still sounding, and below on the navigation bridge, voices were

screaming for information so loudly that the need for telephone circuits

seemed superfluous. Every ship in the formation was maneuvering radically

now. Fife, one of the plane-guard ‘cans, had reversed course and was getting

the hell out of Dodge, her skipper clearly worried about other possible fish in

the water. Somehow Sanchez knew there weren’t. He’d seen three explo-

sions aft on Johnnie Reb and three under Enterprise’?, stern.

“Smithers, come with me.”

“Sir, my battle-station-”

‘ ‘They can handle it without you, and there’s nothing much to look out for

now. We’re not going much of anywhere for a while. You’re going to talk to

the Captain.”

‘ ‘Jesus, sir!” The exclamation was not so much profanity as a prayer to be

spared that ordeal.

The CAG turned. “Take a deep breath and listen to me: you might be the

only person on this whole goddamned ship who did their job right over the

last ten minutes. Follow me, Smithers.”

“Shafts two and three are blown away, Skipper,” they heard a minute

later on the bridge. The ship’s CO was standing in the middle of the com-

partment, looking like a man who’d been involved in a traffic accident.

“Shaft four is damaged also . . . shaft one appears okay at the moment.”

“Very well,” the skipper muttered, then added for himself, “What the

hell…”

“We took three ASW torps, sir,” Sanchez reported. “Seaman Smithers

here saw the launch.”

“Is that a fact?” The CO looked down at the young seaperson. “Miss,

you want to sit over in my chair. When I’m finished keeping my ship afloat I

want to talk to you.” Then came the hard part. The Captain of USS Jnhn

Stennis turned to his communications officer and started dialling a signal to

CincPacFlt. It would bear the prefix NAVY BLUB.

“Conn, Sonar, torpedo in the water, bearing two-eight-zero, sounds like one

of their Type 895,” “Junior” Laval reported, not in an overly excited way.

Submarines were regularly shot at by friends.

“All ahead flank!” Commander Kennedy ordered. Exercise or not, it was

a torpedo, and it wasn’t something to feel comfortable about. “Make your

depth six hundred feet.”

“Six hundred feet, aye,” the chief of the boat replied from his station as

diving officer. “Ten degrees down-angle on the planes.” The helmsman

pushed forward on the yoke, angling USS Asheville toward the bottom, tak-

ing her below the layer.

“Estimated range to the fish?” the Captain asked the tracking party.

“Three thousand yards.”

“Conn, Sonar, lost him when we went under the layer. Still pinging in

search mode, estimate the torpedo is doing forty or forty-five knots.”

“Turn the augmenter off, sir?” the XO asked.

Kennedy was tempted to say yes, the better to get a feel for how good the

Japanese torpedo really was. To the best of his knowledge no American sub

had yet played against one. It was supposedly the Japanese version of the

American Mark 48.

“There it is,” Sonar called. “It just came under the layer. Torpedo bear-

ing steady at two-eight-zero, signal strength is approaching acquisition val-

ues.”

“Right twenty degrees rudder,” Kennedy ordered. “Stand by the five-

inch room.”

” Speed going through thirty knots,” a crewman reported as Asheville ac-

celerated.

‘ ‘Right twenty-degrees rudder, aye, no new course given.”

“Very well,” Kennedy acknowledged. “Five-inch room, launch decoy

now-now-now! Cob, take her up to two hundred!”

“Aye,” the chief of the boat replied. “Up ten on the planes!”

“Making it hard?” the executive officer asked.

“Nofreebies.”

A canister was ejected from the decoy-launcher compartment, called the

five-inch room for the diameter of the launcher. It immediately started giv-

ing off bubbles like an Alka-Seltzer tablet, creating a new, if immobile,

sonar target for the torpedo’s tracking sonar. The submarine’s fast turn cre-

ated a “knuckle” in the water, the better to confuse the Type 89 fish.

“Through the layer,” the technician on the bathythermograph reported.

“Mark your head!” Kennedy said next.

“Coming right through one-nine-zero, my rudder is twenty-right.”

“Rudder amidships, steady up on two-zero-zero.”

“Rudder amidships, aye, steady up on two-zero-zero.”

“All ahead one-third.”

“All ahead one-third, aye.” The enunciator changed positions, and the

submarine slowed down, now back at two hundred feet, over the layer, hav-

ing left a lovely if false target behind.

“Okay.” Kennedy smiled. “Now let’s see how smart that fish is.”

“Conn, Sonar, the torpedo just went right through the knuckle.” The tone

of the report was just a little off, Kennedy thought.

“Oh?” the CO went forward a few steps, entering sonar. “Problem?”

“Sir, that fish just went right through the knuckle like it didn’t see it.”

“Supposed to be a pretty smart unit. You suppose it just ignores decoys

like the ADCAP does?”

“Up-Doppler,” another sonarman said. “Ping-rate just changed . . . fre-

quency change, it might have us, sir.”

“Through the layer? That is clever.” It was going a little fast, Kennedy