The call came from below, “What’s going on up there, Captain?”
“We’re being fired upon! All ahead FLANK!” And then after further thought, “XO, you have the conn. Use your GPS to keep us in the middle of the channel.”
“Aye-aye, sir. I have the conn!”
“Send somebody up here with a line. Seaman Hayes has been wounded in the arm, and we need to get him down the ladder and to sick bay.”
“Aye-aye, sir. Petty Officer MacKenzie is on the way up.”
Captain Adams was still wearing his night-vision goggles. He faced forward and poked his head up high enough to see over the top edge of the bridge. “Still clear ahead. We have to make sure there are no surface contacts in our path. Sonar is useless when we’re running at flank on the surface.”
“Sir!” Seaman Olson shouted. “That’s my job. If someone has to take the risk of putting himself in the line of fire, it should be me, sir, not you.” With that, Seaman Olson removed Seaman Hayes’s night-vision goggles and donned them himself.
“Thank you, Seaman Olson, but I think this is a risk we can share.” The captain’s legs began to ache from squatting below the edge of the bridge, and so he sat down on the deck in a position of relative safety. “Well, it would have been nice to make it all the way to blue water without being discovered, but I guess it was too much to ask. All we can do now is run like hell and hope they don’t get any attack aircraft on us before we can submerge. Then we need time to evade before they get the P-3s out here.”
Just then, there was a huge explosion a few hundred feet forward of their position, off the starboard side of the Louisiana.
“What the heck was that, sir?”
“Well, they have obviously gotten a bigger gun!”
“How are we going to evade that?”
“There’s nothing we can do except continue to run as fast as we can. The channel is too narrow here to make any evasive maneuvers. And it will be at least another hour and a half before we have the depth needed to submerge.”
Then another huge explosion. This one was several hundred feet off the port side, just slightly forward of the bridge.
“Captain, that one was on the other side!”
“Yes, it’s Fire Control 101—bracket the target in range and azimuth, and then walk it in with subsequent rounds for a kill. Luckily for us, it’s manual Fire Control 101. If they had an automatic, computerized fire control system on whatever they’re shooting at us, we’d be dead already!”
A third blast came close aboard off the starboard side.
“That was close, Captain!”
“Yes it was, but close doesn’t count. Those are small shells actually — maybe a mortar. They can’t hurt us unless they get a direct hit. And that’s unlikely because we’re close to their maximum range; it’s dark; and we’re moving at twenty-five knots. If they hit us, it would be a magic BB.”
A fourth blast came close aboard off the port side, just aft of the missile compartment.
“A magic BB?”
“Yeah, attack pilots talk about dodging anti-aircraft fire and surface-to-air missiles during a bombing run, but they recognize there is always the chance some farmer with a BB gun will shoot it into the air, and the BB will have just the right trajectory to cause it to hit the aircraft in just the right spot that it causes catastrophic failure of the engine or some other vital system. It’s a very slight chance, but mathematically, the chance is always there.”
“So these guys could hit us? Right?”
“Yes, they certainly could… and it would ruin our whole day!”
“Who do you think it is, sir?”
“I don’t know, but they have to be firing from the shore. I don’t hear any aircraft, and there are no surface contacts on the scope.”
A fifth blast hit right in the center of the Louisiana’s wake, just 20 feet or so aft of the screw.
“All right! Yes!” yelled the captain.
“Sir? That one was closer than any of them. Why are you cheering?”
“Don’t you see, Olson? Every blast has been farther and farther aft. That one was completely behind us.”
“Ah, so we’ve outrun them!”
“Exactly. We are officially out of range!”
A few more of the marine mortars fell harmlessly into the sea aft of the Louisiana as she made her way toward deep water.
Back at the base commander’s office at Kings Bay, Captain Worley grabbed the phone from his yeoman and screamed at the duty officer at NAS Jacksonville. “I need P-3s airborne NOW! As we speak, we have a renegade submarine making an escape at Saint Marys Entrance! I need P-3s and attack aircraft to converge on that position and destroy the Louisiana!”
Captain Worley listened for a few seconds and then incredulously yelled, “What?!? What do you mean it’s peacetime, and no forces are on alert?… You have to call the flight crews in from home?… Aircraft have to be serviced and readied for flight? You mean they’re not already?… And you have to get your base commander’s approval to draw live ordnance from the armory?… There’s nobody at the armory… you’ll have to call them in too?… Yes, by all means call the commander and wake his ass up!”
By the time armed P-3 patrol planes flew over the area, it was 0400 hours — several hours after the Louisiana submerged and slipped into the wide and deep Atlantic Ocean.
Chapter 21
Early the next morning, Admiral Yates flew from COMSUBLANT to the new capital at Philadelphia to brief President Thornton, the cabinet, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff on the situation. His report stunned the assembled audience as he reported in quick succession:
• No one had seen the Louisiana get underway.
• The marine guards from the refit wharf were also missing, without any sign of a struggle.
• There was no evidence of forced entry anywhere around the perimeter of the Naval Submarine Base Kings Bay, and the guards at the main entrance and back gate had not reported anything unusual.
• A couple of local fishermen may have seen the Louisiana in the exit channel, but they would have to be questioned further because they were apparently quite inebriated at the time.
• A marine contingent had rushed to the channel entrance at Amelia Island and fired at a dark object at sea, but there was no confirmation that it was the Louisiana or that they had inflicted any damage.
• P-3 anti-submarine warfare planes had been scrambled out of NAS Jacksonville but had failed to locate any submarines in the vicinity of the channel entrance.
• The Louisiana had simply disappeared with no warning and with approximately one-third of her crew missing.
By the time of the admiral’s briefing in Philadelphia, the New York Times had already issued a special edition with the news plastered on its front page. The headline covered the entire top half of the page:
GONE: 120 NUCLEAR WARHEADS MISSING! BALLISTIC MISSILE SUBMARINE FEARED HIJACKED!
The sub-headline read:
SUB DISAPPEARS FROM KINGS BAY DURING DEAD OF NIGHT
The news was devastating! No one at the Times had contemplated the effect the story would have on the civilian public. There was mass panic in every major city in the country. The roads were gridlocked as millions of people tried to get out of densely populated areas, which were seen as being likely targets for terrorists armed with long-range ballistic missiles. Hundreds died in the panic. There was looting and anarchy across the nation. The president declared martial law and mobilized reserve and National Guard units to restore law and order.