“Confirm mechanical transient, copied on buoys five and six,” the aircraft called immediately.
“Confirmed,” Pharris’s TAO answered. “We got that on the towed array, too. We evaluate the contact as positive submarine at this time.”
“Concur,” the Orion replied. “Positive Redboat classification-madman! Madman, madman, smoke away! We have a NLAD contact.” A big spike appeared on the MAD readout. Instantly, a crewman flipped a switch to deploy a smoke marker and the aircraft turned hard right to circle back on the contact point.
“Plotted!” The tactical action officer marked the position on his tactical display scope with a large V symbol.
The helo raced in on the contact as the Orion circled back.
“Madman!” its systems operator called out, and the helo dropped its own smoke bomb, slightly south and west of the Orion’s.
The data was now being relayed to the frigate’s torpedo-tube and ASROC attack directors. Neither had anything like the range to engage the target, but that could change quickly.
“Patience,” Morris breathed from his chair in the CIC, then louder: “Take your time, people. Let’s lock this guy in before we fire.”
The Orion’s tactical coordinator agreed, forcing himself to relax and take the time needed. The P-3 and the helicopter made another MAD run north to south. This time the Orion got a reading and the helo did not. Another run, and both had the contact’s course line. Next came an east-to-west run. At first, both missed, but on the second run both had him. The contact was no longer an it. Now it was a he, a submarine being driven by a man. Control of the operation now passed exclusively to the tactical coordinator on the Orion. The big patrol aircraft orbited two miles away as the helicopter lined up for the final pass. The pilot made a very careful check of his tactical display, then locked his eyes on the gyrocompass.
The helo began the last MAD run, with the Orion two miles behind it.
“Madman, madman, smoke away!” The final smoke marker dropped, a green flare floating on the surface. The Sea Sprite banked hard to the right to clear the area as the Orion came in low. The pilot watched the smoke’s movement to figure wind drift as he lined up on the target. The P-3C’s bomb bay doors opened. A single Mk-46 ASW torpedo was armed for launch.
“Torp away!”
The torpedo dropped cleanly, its braking parachute trailed out of the tail to make sure the weapon entered the water nose down. The Orion also dropped an additional sonobuoy, this time a directional DIFAR.
“Strong signal, bearing one-seven-niner.”
The torpedo dove to two hundred feet before beginning its circular search. Its high-frequency sonar came on as it reached search depth. Things started happening quickly.
The submarine had been oblivious to the activity over her head. She was an old Foxtrot. Too old and too noisy for front-line operations, she was there nonetheless, hoping to catch up with the convoy reported to her south. Her sonar operator had noted and reported a possible overhead splash, but the captain was busy plotting the position of the convoy he had been ordered to approach. The torpedo’s homing sonar changed that. Instantly, the Foxtrot went to flank speed, turning hard to the left in a pre-planned evasion maneuver. The suddenly increased noise of her cavitating screws was discernible to several sonobuoys and Pharris’s tactical sonar.
The torpedo was in ping-and-listen mode, using both active and passive sonar to find its target. As it completed its first circle, the passive receptors in the nose heard the cavitation noises of the submarine and homed in on them. Soon the active sonar pings were reflecting off the submarine’s stem as it dodged left and right trying to get away. The torpedo automatically went to continuous pinging, increasing to maximum speed as it homed in on its target like the remorseless robot it was.
The sonar operators on the aircraft and the frigate had the best picture of what was happening. As they watched, the bearing lines of the submarine and torpedo began to converge. At fifteen knots, the Foxtrot was too slow to run away from the forty-knot torpedo. The submarine began a radical series of turns with the torpedo in pursuit. The Mk-46 missed its first attempt for a kill by twenty feet, and immediately turned for another try. Then the submarine’s captain made a mistake. Instead of continuing his left turn, he reversed it, hoping to confuse the oncoming torpedo. He ran directly into its path . . .
Immediately overhead, the helicopter crew saw the water appear to leap, then froth, as the shock wave of the explosion reached the surface.
“We have warhead detonation,” the pilot reported. A moment later his systems operator dropped a passive buoy. The sound came into them in less than a minute.
The Foxtrot was dying. They heard the sounds of air blowing into her ballast tanks and continued flank power from her electric motors, her propellers struggling to overcome the weight of water entering the hull and drive the wounded submarine to the surface. Suddenly the engine sounds stopped. Two minutes later, they heard the metallic scream of internal bulkheads being torn asunder by water pressure as the submarine fell below crush depth.
“This is Bluebird. We score that one as a kill. Can you confirm, over?”
“Roger, Bluebird,” the ASW officer answered. “We copied blowing air and breakup noises. We confirm your kill.” The crewmen cheered, forgetting the decorum that went with duty in CIC.
“All right! That’s one less to worry about. We’ll give you a big assist on that one, Pharris. Nice job from your sonar folks and the helo. Out.” The Orion increased power and returned to her patrol station forward of the convoy.
“Assist, hell!” snorted the ASW officer. “That was our contact. We could have dropped the torp on him just as easy as he did.” Morris punched him in the shoulder and went up the ladder to the pilothouse.
The bridge crew was all grins. Soon the bosun’s mate would paint half of a red submarine silhouette next to the pilothouse door. It had not struck them yet that they had just helped in the killing of a hundred young men not at all unlike themselves, their lives cut short by the hammering pressure of the North Atlantic.
“What’s that?” called a lookout. “Possible explosion on the starboard beam!”
Morris grabbed his binoculars and raced out the open door. The lookout pointed.
A column of black smoke was reaching into the sky from the direction of the convoy. Someone else had just gotten his first kill.
USS NIMITZ
Toland had never seen so many welding torches operating. Under the supervision of the executive officer and three damage-control experts, crewmen were using acetylene torches to cut away the damaged portions of Nimitz’s flight deck and its supporting steel beams. What had been bad enough became worse on more thorough examination. Six of the enormous frames under the flight deck had been wrecked, and the damage extended two decks below that. A third of the hangar deck was burned out. Most of the plane-fueling network and all of the ordnance elevators had to be repaired. CIC was gone, and with it all of the computers and communications needed to fight the ship. The arrester wire systems would have to be fully replaced. The main search radar was gone. The list went on.
Tugs were pushing the wounded carrier into Southampton’s Ocean Dock, a task made doubly hard because of the ship’s induced ten-degree list. Water cascaded from the carrier’s clifflike hull into the harbor while more entered the bilges below. Already a senior Royal Navy repair expert and the chief of the Vosper Ship Repair Yard were aboard, reviewing the damage below and cataloging the material needed to enable the ship to operate again. Captain Svenson watched the messenger lines being shot off to handlers who would secure the ship. He was an angry man, Toland noted. Five hundred of his men known dead, another three hundred wounded, and the count was nowhere near complete. The most grievous losses were in the flight deck crews, many of whose shelters had been immolated by the two Soviet missiles. They would also have to be replaced before Nimitz could sail and fight again.
“Toland, you’ll be heading to Scotland.”
“Excuse me, sir?”
“The air wing is being split. The fighters and Hawkeyes are going north. Ivan’s been pounding on the Brits’ northern radar line, and their fighters have taken a beating trying to help the Norwegians out. The Tomcats are already on the way, and we’ll be loading their missiles onto the dock so the Brits can fly them north. I want you to operate with the fighter teams to evaluate what Ivan’s up to with his Badgers, and maybe help our guys to cull off some of the bastards. The attack birds are joining the NATO tactical air reserve for the present.”