“Who is … Seawolfs … captain?”
“Pacino, sir,” Lennox said.
“Michael Pacino. He said he knows you.”
Murphy half-smiled, some color returning to his face, just before he lost consciousness again, this time his breathing slow and steady.
Vaughn stood. “At least he’s alive.”
“Not for long. As soon as they’re done with Seawolf they’ll be coming after us.”
“Look,” Vaughn said, pointing to the waterfall sonar display. “What the hell is that?”
A broad, incredibly loud sound blanked out the waterfall display for a few seconds, the noise narrowing to a streak that moved rapidly through the bearings, ending up on the bearing to the Chinese aircraft carrier.
“I don’t know, but I’m going to see.”
Lennox didn’t need to raise the scope to see what happened next. The sound of the explosion from the carrier was enough.
When the ASW standoff missile floated to the surface, its central processor waited for the feel of air on the unit’s skin. The momentum of the tube launch quickly brought it to the choppy surface, and its accelerometer told it that its upward progress had momentarily stopped as it lost the buoyant force of the water. A broach sensor dried out and sent its signal to the central processor, the signal the unit waited for.
The rocket motor’s solid fuel lit with the energy of a barely controlled explosion, thrusting the missile from the sea into the air. Unlike a Javelin cruise missile, whose rockets merely did a pop up to give the jet sustainer engine a chance to spin up, the ASW standoff weapon was altogether rocket powered. Although its range was significantly less than a Javelin, it did not carry a jet engine or a large fuel tank or a set of control wing lets or an elaborate navigation system, all of which took up volume and weight. Instead, it had a lightweight processor, a simple tailfin positioner, a small radar transponder for final target confirmation, a relatively small rocket motor and a large charge of explosives. Its warhead was three times the size of the Javelin’s, the explosive power more than three times the punch because of its state-of-the-art shaped charge. The Ow-sow’s nose cone was pointed, designed for supersonic flight, allowing it to cover enormous stretches of ocean in mere seconds, and making it more difficult to shoot down in mid-flight than a subsonic Javelin.
The missile now climbed to its apogee, a mere thousand feet, then began a dive to its target. By the time its transponder found the large target some two thousand yards ahead the missile was traveling at Mach 2.4 and still accelerating. It approached the target, having been airborne less than thirty-five seconds, and hit the aircraft carrier amidships on the port side, crashing into the number-two turbine room before detonating.
The explosion from the warhead blew a sixty-foot wide hole in the flight deck, knocked four turbines off their foundations, killed one hundred and seventy-five men and put a fifteen-foot gash in the ship’s hull.
At an altitude of twelve hundred meters, the limit of visibility, pilot Chu HuaFeng was traveling east, intent on closing the submarine contact that had been pinpointed by the helicopters of first and second squadrons, when the white-flame trail burst out of the sea west of the submarine contact. As he watched, stunned, the rocket traveled in a graceful flat arc. He barely realized that he had jerked the aircraft’s stick in a violent motion, trying to keep the rocket in view as it descended back toward the sea, never having risen more than a few hundred meters. He had the odd momentary thought that the rocket was beautiful, that its perfectly shaped arc was sculpted by the wonders of Newtonian physics. But in another compartment of his mind he began to realize that the missile was headed east, toward its target, and that the target could only be the Shaoguan, his father’s flagship.
And as the missile descended and hit the carrier and exploded into a hundred-meter-wide mushroom cloud of flame and smoke and shrapnel, Chu HuaFeng felt an explosion in his mind, an explosion of anger, as well as a trembling so intense that the jet was picking up the vibrations in his stick hand and converting it to aileron and elevator motion. His aircraft began to shake so violently that Lo Yun asked over the intercom if they had been hit. Only then could Chu focus his energy on flying and away from the sight of his father’s burning ship.
He brought the aircraft around and headed for the foamy sea that marked where the missile had been launched from below. The enemy submarine was there, he thought, but it would not be there long.
“Extend the MAD probe, Lo,” Chu ordered. “And arm the depth charge.”
Two minutes later Chu’s Yak was over the sea from where the missile had come and he flew a tight circle around the spot, the magnetic anomaly detector picking out the position of the submarine contact.
“Depth charge armed and ready,” Lo reported. “We have contact on a submerged vessel on MAD. Contact is definite and shallow.”
Chu cut in the lift and idled the cruise engines. The aircraft hovered over the exact position of the submarine.
In a few seconds the people who had dared launch the destructive rocket at the Shaoguan would be dead. Only then could he fly back to what was left of his father’s ship.
“All ahead flank!” Lennox ordered as the sounds of a hull breaking up came through. The sonar screen showed the bright angry trace at bearing zero six seven, now northeast instead of due east as the ship made progress and got closer to the “finish line.” Now that the carrier was hit by whatever it was the Seawolf had fired, Lennox wanted to get beyond her and to international waters as soon as he could. He was no longer concerned with leaving a wake on the surface that would pinpoint their position. It was clear that the aircraft and surface ships were intent on attacking Seawolf. And since Tampa was useless in a fight, the only thing he could do was get the ship and her crew out of the bay and into the safety of international waters.
Still, even as the ship’s deck vibrated with power, he couldn’t help feeling guilty and frustrated at not being able to help. For a moment he wondered how he could live with himself if Tampa survived and Seawolf went to the bottom. Seawolf had seemed so invincible that he had always assumed it would be Tampa that would never make it. Abruptly he heard Murphy’s voice:
“XO,” Murphy’s voice rattled, “we can’t leave Seawolf. We’ve got to help.”
Lennox and Vaughn looked over at Murphy, who had been lifted from his mattress and was now sitting in front of Pos Two.
“Sir,” Vaughn said, “three of our tubes leak, not one of the torpedoes is whole and the firecontrol computer is blown to pieces. The torpedo room console is shattered. There’s nothing we can do to help—”
“The Javelins, we have to launch the Javelins.”
“Sir,” Vaughn said, looking at Lennox, “the computer is gone and we can’t target them manually. The Javelins are inert.”
“No,” Murphy said. “Get one of the firecontrol techs. Get a signal simulator and” — Murphy coughed, a rattling hacking sputter— “open up the signal cable, input a signal to open the door and launch the weapon.”
“But there will be no target,” Lennox told him.
“Just launch them. The liftoffs will … confuse the Chinese.”
“Sir,” Lennox said, “we don’t have a missile tech, they’re all in shock, unconscious or dead. And we don’t have a signal simulator. And who knows where the cable connectors are? I’m very sorry. Captain, somewhere in Korea Bay there’s a carrier air group that’s supposed to take over now … Seawolf, with whatever help she can get from the air group, will have to get out of this without us. Our cards have been played.”
Murphy stared up at Lennox, then lowered his head, and for a moment Lennox thought he’d lost consciousness again. He hadn’t. He was trembling slightly, from anger and frustration, Lennox guessed.