At last Castillo’s watchstanders fell silent, all the orders given and executed. Pasadena dove, slipping down into a dark, still silence more complete than anything her crew could ever hope to replicate.
The Japanese destroyer was already dead — she just didn’t know it yet.
Castillo leaned across the dead reckoning table, studying the relative positions of the two vessels. The DRT tracked every course and speed change Pasadena made. Every three minutes a petty officer leaned over and marked the sub’s position — as well as the position of all her contacts — on a scrolling piece of trace paper. What emerged was a birds-eye view of the tactical situation, pencil tracks snaking across the paper showing the deadly dance of submarine and destroyer.
After the run, Castillo had brought Pasadena up above the deep layer, but not above the shallow layer. What submariners called the layer was actually a border between two masses of water with different sound velocity profiles. Variations in pressure, temperature, and salinity gave neighboring regions of the ocean distinct acoustic properties. As a result, surface ships couldn’t see below the layer with their bow-mounted sonars.
Unfortunately, hiding beneath the layer wasn’t a guarantee of safety. A destroyer with a towed-array sonar could listen below the layer. So could a Seahawk’s dipping sonar. Castillo had Kirishima dead to rights. But Amagiri could be out there too, drifting silently, waiting for Pasadena to engage her sister.
Complacency was the constant enemy of a submarine commander.
Right now Castillo was in a long, slow turn, firming up Kirishima’s course and speed.
What his DRT trace showed was that his Los Angeles-class boat had worked her way to within eight thousand yards of Kirishima. Torpedo run time at four nautical miles was four minutes, 22 seconds. If this had been war, instead of an exercise, the beautiful Aegis-class destroyer would have been doomed.
Castillo would have loosed a pair of the Mk 48 ADCAP’s in his torpedo room, sending the two ship killers on a brief wire-guided journey that would have ended when they broke the back of Kirishima and sent the two halves of the destroyer pinwheeling down to the deep, dark bottom of the Sea of Japan.
Of course this was an exercise with an allied navy so the DRT trace was enough to prove his victory over the Japanese destroyer.
But that wasn’t enough for Castillo. He turned away from the DRT table, and flashed a wolfish smile at Glazer. “Officer of the Deck, make your depth six two feet.”
Glazer grinned. “Six two feet, aye aye, sir. Diving Officer, make your depth six two feet.”
“Make my depth six two feet,” said the senior chief. Ezekiel Washington was the chief of the boat, the senior enlisted man aboard. The cob was as crusty an old salt as Castillo had ever met. He was a twenty-year veteran, an African-American from Georgia.
Washington looked over at Castillo and, unlike everyone else in Control, he wasn’t smiling. For a moment the captain saw something in the cob’s eyes, not disapproval, surely, but maybe…assessment.
And then the senior chief turned away, focused on the helmsman and stern planesman as they pulled back on their control yokes, watching the chief of the watch as he pumped ballast to sea.
Castillo had his submarine at bare steerageway, about three knots, the slowest speed at which his submarine could hold a course, so she responded sluggishly to his command. Slowly, slowly, the sea flowed over the boat’s angled stern and fairwater plane’s generating lift that pushed the now-lighter submarine up.
USS Pasadena slowly rose toward the sky.
Coming to periscope depth was a dangerous maneuver, some would say a reckless maneuver. Kirishima was not easy prey. The Japanese Maritime Self-Defense Force was a tough, professional navy and the destroyer’s captain, Sakutaro Kagawa, was one of the JMSDF’s best. The destroyer might hear the sound of Pasadena’s ballast pumps or the submarine’s hull popping as she rose above the layer. Or Kirishima’s surface-search radar might pick Castillo’s periscope out of the sea clutter.
Worse yet, the destroyer had been modified to carry helicopters and she had a Sikorsky SH-60J Seahawk up. Castillo held the Seahawk twenty-three thousand yards to the east, but that datum was nineteen minutes old — the ASW bird might be dangerously close. Even if it weren’t, even if the helo was exactly where he thought it was, it had a top speed of 146 knots. If the destroyer caught even a whiff of Pasadena, the Seahawk could be on station in 4.7 minutes, lashing the sea mercilessly with its active sonar, localizing his submarine.
Turning Castillo’s victory into sudden, humiliating defeat.
So there was significant risk in coming to pee dee and really no upside. Except …pencil markings on a piece of paper was a bloodless victory. Castillo wanted to walk into Kagawa’s stateroom and slap down an eight-by-ten glossy of Kirishima’s hull number centered in his attack scope’s cross-hairs.
Castillo told himself that he wanted to show Kagawa and the Japanese just what they were up against.
The rules of SCARLET GOALPOST were simple. Pasadena was restricted to a box a hundred nautical miles on a side. Two JMSDF destroyers, Kirishima and Amagiri were supposed to hunt and localize the submarine. Pasadena’s goal was to stay hidden.
The Japanese held all the advantages. They knew the submarine was there and by the rules of the ex, Pasadena couldn’t slip outside the box. And the pair of destroyers not only had their Seahawks to rely on, but they were being supported by U.S. Navy P-3’s.
And still his submarine had won.
Castillo told himself he was coming up to pee dee because a picture would reinforce a very important lesson: the JMSDF and their USN allies needed to do better at ASW. But the truth was, a part of him just wanted to win.
And so did his crew, which was why he saw smiles on the faces of his people. They liked to win just like he did, and they liked to be bad-ass about it. Grrrrr, we’re the Pasadena. Stay out of our way.
Castillo stepped up onto the periscope stand and pulled down the Type 18. He turned the search scope in a quick circle, peering through green water, looking for the shadowy silhouette of a surface ship’s hull. He thought he had a good handle on the surface picture, but if he’d missed something and came up in front of a freighter a collision could send his beautiful boat straight to the bottom. He went around and around, looking, looking.
The scope broke the water and he did another quick circle, making sure there wasn’t a hidden contact before he came back to Kirishima. The destroyer looked nearly identical to the U.S. Arleigh Burke-class destroyer on which it was based: the oddly angular superstructure that housed the powerful phased-array radar, the long bow loaded with deadly missiles, the two trapezoidal stacks aft. If not for the Rising Sun flying from her stern, Castillo might have mistaken her for a U.S. vessel.
He had her. She was showing port quarter aspect, eight thousand yards, dead center in his sights. And look at that, the Seahawk was sitting on her helo deck, refueling, which meant he was relatively safe until the helo lifted off again.