The V. K. Konovalov
“Target aspect has changed, Comrade Captain. Target is now smaller,” die michman said.
Tupolev considered this. He knew everything there was on Soviet combat doctrine — and knew that Ramius had written a good deal of it. Marko would do what he taught all of us to do, Tupolev thought. Turn into the oncoming weapons to minimize target cross-section and dive for the bottom to become lost in the confused echoes. “Target will be attempting to dive into the bottom-capture field. Be alert.”
“Aye, Comrade. Can he reach the bottom quickly enough?” the starpom asked.
Tupolev racked his brain for the October’s handling characteristics. “No, he cannot dive that deep in so short a time. We have him.” Sorry, my old friend, but I have no choice, he thought.
The Red October
Ryan cringed each time the sonar lash echoed through the double hull. “Can’t you jam that or something?” he demanded.
“Patience, Ryan,” Ramius said. He had never faced live warheads before but had exercised this problem a hundred times in his career. “Let him know he has us first.”
“Do you carry decoys?” Mancuso asked.
“Four of them, in the torpedo room, forward — but we have no torpedomen.”
Both captains were playing the cool game, Ryan noted bitterly from inside his terrified little world. Neither was willing to show fright before his peer. But they were both trained for this.
“Skipper,” Jones called, “two fish, bearing constant at three-two-zero — they just went active. I say again, the fish are now active — shit! they sound just like 48s. Skipper, they sound like Mark 48 fish.”
Ramius had been waiting for this. “Yes, we stole the torpedo sonar from you five years ago, but not your torpedo engines. Bugayev!”
In the sonar room, Bugayev had powered up the acoustical jamming gear as soon as the fish were launched. Now he carefully timed his jamming pulses to coincide with those from the approaching torpedoes. The pulses were dialed into the same carrier frequency and pulse repetition rate. The timing had to be precise. By sending out slightly distorted return echoes, he could create ghost targets. Not too many, nor too far away. Just a few, close by, and he might be able to confuse the fire control operators on the attacking Alfa. He thumbed the trigger switch carefully, chewing on an American cigarette.
The V. K. Konovalov
“Damn! He’s jamming us.” The michman, noting a pair of new pips, showed his first trace of emotion. The fading pip from the true contact was now bordered with two new ones, one north and closer, the other south and farther away. “Captain, the target is using Soviet jamming equipment.”
“You see?” Tupolev said to the zampolit. “Use caution now,” he ordered his starpom.
The Red October
“Ryan, all up on planes!” Ramius shouted.
“All the way up.” Ryan yanked back, pulling the yoke hard against his belly and hoping that Ramius knew what the hell he was doing.
“Jones, give us time and range.”
“Aye.” The jamming gave them a sonar picture plotted on the main scopes. “Two fish, bearing three-two-zero. Range to number one is 2,000 yards, to number two is 2,300 — I got a depression angle on number one! Number one fish is heading down a little, sir.” Maybe Bugayev wasn’t so dumb after all, Jones thought. But they had two fish to sweat…
The Pogy
The Pogy’s skipper was enraged. The goddamned rules of engagement prevented him from doing a goddamned thing, except, maybe —
“Sonar, ping the sonuvabitch! Max power, blast the sucker!”
The Fogy’s BQQ-5 sent timed wave fronts of energy lashing at the Alfa. The Pogy couldn’t shoot, but maybe the Russian didn’t know that, and maybe this lashing would interfere with their targeting sonar.
The Red October
“Any time now — one of the fish has capture, sir. I don’t know which.” Jones moved the phones off one ear, his hand poised to slap the other off. The homing sonar on one torpedo was now tracking them. Bad news. If these were like Mark 48s… Jones knew all too well that those things didn’t miss much. He heard the change in the Doppler shift of the propellers as they passed beneath the Red October. “One missed, sir. Number one missed under us. Number two is heading in, ping interval is shortening.” He reached over and patted Bugayev on the shoulder. Maybe he really was the on-board genius that the Russians said he was.
The V. K. Konovalov
The second Mark C torpedo was cutting through the water at forty-one knots. This made the torpedo-target closing speed about fifty-five. The guidance and decision loop was a complex one. Unable to mimic the computer homing system on the American Mark 48, the Soviets had the torpedo’s targeting sonar report back to the launching vessel through an insulated wire. The starpom had a choice of sonar data with which to guide the torpedoes, that from the sub-mounted sonar or that from the torpedoes themselves. The first fish had been duped by the ghost images that the jamming had duplicated on the torpedo sonar frequency. For the second, the starpom was using the lower-frequency bow sonar. The first one had missed low, he knew now. That meant that the target was the middle pip. A quick frequency change by the michman cleared the sonar picture for few seconds before the jamming mode was altered. Coolly and expertly, the starpom commanded the second torpedo to select the center target. It ran straight and true.
The five-hundred-pound warhead struck the target a glancing blow aft of midships, just forward of the control room. It exploded a millisecond later.
The Red October
The force of the explosion hurled Ryan from his chair, and his head hit the deck. He came to from a moment’s unconsciousness with his ears ringing in the dark. The shock of the explosion had shorted out a dozen electrical switchboards, and it was several seconds before the red battle lights clicked on. Aft, Jones had flipped his headphones off just in time, but Bugayev, trying to the last second to spoof the incoming torpedo, had not. He was rolling in agony on the deck, one eardrum ruptured, totally deafened. In the engine spaces men were scrambling back to their feet. Here the lights had stayed on, and Melekhin’s first action was to look at the damage-control status board.
The explosion had occurred on the outer hull, a skin of light steel. Inside it was a water-filled ballast tank, a beehive of cellular baffles seven feet across. Located beyond the tank were high-pressure air flasks. Then came the October’s battery and the inner pressure hull. The torpedo had impacted in the center of a steel plate on the outer hull, several feet from any weld joints. The force of the explosion had torn a hole twelve feet across, shredded the interior ballast tank baffles, and ruptured a half-dozen air flasks, but already much of its force had been dissipated. The final damage was done to thirty of the large nickle-cadmium battery cells. Soviet engineers had placed these here deliberately. They had known that such a placement would make them difficult to service, difficult to recharge, and worst of all expose them to seawater contamination. All this had been accepted in light of their secondary purpose as additional armor for the hull. The October’s batteries saved her. Had it not been for them, the force of the explosion would have been spent on the pressure hull. Instead it was greatly reduced by the layered defensive system which had no Western counterpart. A crack had developed at the weld joint on the inner hull, and water was spraying into the radio room as though from a high-pressure hose, but the hull was otherwise secure.
In control, Ryan was soon back in his seat trying to determine if his instruments still worked. He could hear water splashing into the next compartment forward. He didn’t know what to do. He did know it would be a bad time to panic, much as his brain screamed for the release.
“What do I do?”
“Still with us?” Mancuso’s face looked satanic in the red lights.
“No goddammit, I’m dead — what do I do?”
“Ramius?” Mancuso saw the captain holding a flashlight taken from a bracket on the aft bulkhead.
“Down, dive for bottom.” Ramius took the phone and called engineering to order the engines stopped. Melekhin had already given the order.
Ryan pushed his controls forward. In a goddamned submarine that’s got a goddamned hole punched in it, they tell you to go down! he thought.
The V. K. Konovalov
“A solid hit, Comrade Captain,” the michman reported. “His engines stopped. I hear hull creaking noises, his depth is changing.” He tried some additional pings but got nothing. The explosion had greatly disturbed the water. There were rumbling echoes of the initial explosion reverberating through the sea. Trillions of bubbles had formed, creating an “ensonified zone” around the target that rapidly obscured it. His active pings were reflected back by the cloud of bubbles, and his passive listening ability was greatly reduced by the recurring rumbles. All he knew for sure was that one torpedo had hit, probably the second. He was an experienced man trying to decide what was noise and what was signal, and he had reconstructed most of the events correctly.