“Right hard rudder!” he shouted into the VHF radio. Too late.
The Tampa hit the submerged sandbar at over twenty knots, slowing down to a complete stop in less than two seconds, plowing her bow deep into the sand.
Lennox was thrown into the forward bulkhead of the cockpit, smashing his cheek, breaking his nose. The deck was tilted absurdly to the port side, a twenty-or twenty-five-degree list. Lennox looked aft and saw that the foam was no longer boiling up around the screw. The deck no longer vibrated with the power of the main engines — they must have lost propulsion when they hit the sandbar, which meant he couldn’t use the engines to back the sub off the sand.
Lennox tried his radio, wondering if it broke when he hit the cockpit lip. He heard a new sound, the sound of the rotors of a big assault chopper approaching from the north. He looked up in time to see the flying bulk of the Hind helicopter circling around to approach the crippled submarine from the bow. As it drew up, it went into a hover, its rockets and guns hanging on struts protruding from the gunship’s flanks. Then a second Hind pulled into a hover behind it.
For a moment Lennox forgot the radio. The painful truth was that the operation was almost surely blown, and it was his fault.
Aircraft Commander Yen Chitzu looked through the plastic bubble of the Hind’s upper cockpit at the scene below. The reason for the Hind’s call-up from Hangu was immediately apparent. Pulling out of the P.L.A slip was a large black submarine, the one that had been captured spying on the Chinese coastline. The destroyers that had been its guards were smoldering and sinking into the water of the pier’s slip, the water around them in flames as the kerosene and diesel oil burned.
An armored P.L.A force on the pier was firing tank guns and artillery into the water, the rounds missing the sub as it entered the bay channel still going backward.
Two kilometers to the southeast a Jianghu-class frigate was reversing course to turn and come back to attack the escaping submarine. To the south, two poorly armed Dauphin helicopters were coming in on a futile strafing run. Yen activated his radio and ordered the Dauphins out of his airspace, then called the second Hind in his formation to follow him in.
Next he radioed the captain of the Jianghu frigate and told him to hold his fire while the Hinds lined up. He brought the aircraft around a wide circle, crossing over the deck of the frigate and approaching the submarine, slowing to a hover.
Now he spoke into his intercom to the weapons officer, Leader Ni Chihfu, ordering him to arm the Spiral missiles and the UB-32 rockets and to commence firing, then sat back to watch the fireworks.
On the Tampa’s bridge the VHF radio sputtered:
“REACTOR SCRAM! WHAT THE HELL HAPPENED UP THERE?”
Lennox spat into the radio.
“We ran aground.” We, hell, he thought, I ran us aground.
“What happened to the reactor?”
“WAIT ONE, THEY’RE CHECKING.”
The Hind helicopters hovered barely a halfshiplength in front of the sail at twenty feet. Lennox, still standing with his head exposed out the starboard clamshell opening, stared at the missiles slung on missile rails on booms extending from the flanks of the choppers. He could even see the laser sights on the helmets of the chopper pilots in the nose cone cockpits as they aimed the missiles. Further ahead in the channel, south of the supertanker-pier, he could see the Jianghu frigate driving up closer, its 100-mm gun up forward moving, the barrel lining up on his position.
Lennox’s VHP radio squawked:
“CAUSE OF THE SCRAM WAS SHOCK OPENING THE SCRAM BREAKERS. WE’LL HAVE POWER IN ABOUT TWO MINUTES. THE ENGINEER WANTS TO KNOW HOW BAD THE GROUNDING IS. CAN YOU GET US OUT OF THIS?”
The frigate had come to a stop a ship length in front of them. The helicopters hovered, at most one hundred feet away. Lennox continued to stare at the choppers’ and frigate’s guns and missiles, the world tilted in a twenty-five-degree slope. Forget answering the radio, he thought. He ducked down into the cockpit and waited for the missiles and gun projectiles to hit, wondering how it would feel to die.
CHAPTER 23
The periscope lens finally broke the surface and cleared, revealing the scene Pacino had most worried about. The Jianghu frigate was dead in the water just a few hundred yards in front of the bow of the Tampa. Two huge helicopters hovered just in front of the sail of the motionless submarine. But the worst of it wasn’t the frigate or the choppers, it was the appearance of the Tampa. The sail was canted over in a twenty-or twenty-five-degree angle, leaning hard to port, and there was no bow-wave, no disturbance of the water at all from her stern — she must have hit an underwater obstacle. She must have run aground on the way out and was now a cripple in the channel while the P.L.A Navy was getting ready to deliver the coup de grace.
“Conn, Sonar, no propulsion noises from Friendly One. Looks like—” Pacino interrupted and shouted over the noise of his headset:
“Belay the report. Sonar. Off’sa’deck, arm the SLAAM 80 missiles. Weps, report status of tube loaded Javelins.”
“SLAAM 80 missiles armed. Captain,” Tim Turner said from the Mark 80 Submarine-Launched Antiair Missile console, the control unit mounted on the port railing of the conn, the console no bigger than a lunch pail.
“All missile doors indicate open.”
Pacino lifted the protective cover over a red button on his left periscope grip.
“SLAAM 80, SLAAM 80,” he said as he hit the key. He punched it two more times, chanting the launch notice twice more. There was no telltale sound of the missiles leaving the ship — for a moment Pacino wondered if the missiles had actually been launched, then … “Four Mark 80s away, sir,” Turner reported from the SLAAM control box.
“Javelins tube-loaded in tubes five and six. Captain,” Feyley said.
“Both are spun up and ready in all respects.”
“Open outer doors, tubes five and six,” Pacino commanded.
“Firing point procedures. Javelin units five and six. Target Four, over-the-shoulder shots, five to go west, six to go east.”
“Ship ready,” Turner said.
“Weapons ready.” Feyley.
“Solution ready,” Keebes reported.
“Shoot five, shoot six,” Pacino ordered, hoping the Jianghu frigate would show up better on the cruise missile-seeker radars than the Tampa. Tubes five and six barked, slamming Pacino’s eardrums, sending two Javelin cruise missiles up to the surface to kill the frigate.
Pacino waited, hoping the Javelins would be able to tell a frigate from a submarine.
Commander Jack Morris ran the ten steps to the prone bleeding body of Captain Sean Murphy, glancing up once to see the Chinese officer’s feet leaving the hatchway above, the feet lit by the glow of the pier. Gently Morris pulled Murphy up into a sitting position and looked at him, trying to see if he was still alive.
Blood was coming out of Murphy’s neck but at least the flow was not from an artery. It oozed out, dark and dull. With a good field dressing and some antibiotics Murphy should make it. If he had been healthy before getting the wound, which did not look to be the case. Murphy had lost consciousness, his breathing unsteady, face pale, skin clammy.
The ship’s roll to starboard threatened to knock Morris into a bulkhead. He steadied himself on a rung of the ladder, felt drops of water splashing down on him from above. The hatch shouldn’t be open, he thought, laying Murphy back down on the deck while he stepped to the top of the ladder and looked out the forward hatch.