“That frigate is running too fast to have her towed array in the water. I would say she is sprinting south, and her captain is not expecting any interference just yet,” Ledesma added. Matias smiled.
“Yes, Santiago. I concur. Creep us abeam of her. And bring us to battle stations.”
3: DUKES UP
“The art of war is simple enough: Find out where the enemy is; Get at him as soon as you can; Strike at him as hard as you can and as often as you can, and keep moving on.”
The storm pushed the sea into tall wind-whipped peaks, cliffs of water that dropped off sharply into deep troughs. The water was dark, a deep purple, and rafts of froth rose and fell with the sloshing surface. A torrent of rain pelted HMS Iron Duke as her long, thin, grey hull rose and slammed back down, her stern corkscrewing and exposing her red underbelly and the tips of her shiny propellers. As the water piled up and folded over, the frigate’s bridge crew stabbed the warship’s bow through the waves’ white crowns at the proper angle, thereby allowing maintenance of a decent speed.
“Five degrees starboard,” the officer-of-the-watch yelled above the screaming wind and splashing water. Iron Duke turned to the right a bit more, rose steeply, rolled some, and then slammed back down in a surge of water and sea spray, momentarily submerging the bridge. The windshield’s clear view screens — small round discs that spun to rapidly shed water — threw the water away as the ship’s bow came back up and the cold seawater rushed away in a mass of green foam. The bow, supplemented by the buoyancy of the bulbous stem that contained the sonar, climbed again and scaled the next oceanic hill. Though Iron Duke’s Artisan 3D radar swept the area, the screens in the Operations Room were so full of clutter from wave crests that the radar operator could not discern the black pipe peeking from the depths.
San Luis II’s periscope pierced the surface. Its lens surveyed the area before it disappeared again, swallowed by the rhythmic rise and fall of waves. Twenty feet below this protuberance, the black shadow of the Argentine submarine hovered steadily below the squall-battered surface. In the red glow of San Luis II’s Control Room’s nighttime lighting, Captain Matias looked through the periscope’s monocular eyepiece.
Matias spotted the green glow of Iron Duke’s bank of bridge windows and the powerful flashlight of a deckhand scurrying along the rail, checking for storm damage. Matias waited for the next wave to pass. Bubbles cleared from the periscope lens and he turned and fixed the apparatus on these lights. He centered them in the reticle, increased magnification, and then swept his view toward the ship’s prow.
“I see the pennant number: Foxtrot two-three-four,” Matias read.
Ledesma flipped pages in his binder, repeated: “F234,” and then declared: “Iron Duke. That is the frigate that departed Las Islas Malvinas right before operations commenced. They must have turned her right around.”
Matias leaned into the periscope again and squinted into its eyepiece. “Update: target now at two-six-three degrees. Speed, 11 knots. Bearing, one-seven-zero. Ready tubes two and five. Warm up the weapons.”
Ledesma passed the order to the chief-of-the-boat. The chief went to the weapons technician, ordered the fire control system to be updated, and sent orders to the torpedo room.
In the boat’s forward-most compartments, two sweating men ducked under racks full of reload torpedoes. They spun valves and checked indicators. One submariner then clicked a switch to talk to the Control Center. He informed the chief that power was flowing to the two telephone pole-sized weapons nestled in the tubes. The chief, in turn, informed the executive officer, who passed confirmation to the captain.
“Power is flowing to tubes two and five. Fire control updates are being transferred,” Ledesma reported.
“Flood tubes two and five,” Matias ordered.
In the torpedo room, a lever was lowered, and the respective tubes were pumped full of seawater, air was vented, and pressure equalized with that outside the submarine.
“Open outer doors.”
Two muzzle doors opened on San Luis II’s rounded bow.
Standing behind the Control Room’s weapon station, Ledesma confirmed the doors were open.
Matias sighed, breaking the anticipatory silence of the compartment. Then he ordered: “Fire.”
The weapons technician pushed a button on his panel.
In the torpedo tubes, a valve slid open and the water ram operated. This plug of high-pressure water pushed both torpedoes from their tubes. Power cables severed, and with safeties now disengaged, both torpedoes activated their onboard kerosene-oxygen turbines. Batteries that powered the torpedoes’ guidance systems and warhead fuses came on. Both of San Luis II’s weapons began their run. Following their programmed course, the heavy torpedoes turned toward Iron Duke’s stern.
The torpedo room technicians immediately went about closing the muzzle doors and draining the tubes of water. When empty and equalized with the submarine’s interior, the breeches were reopened and the reloading procedure began.
“Take us down to 500, put us on a parallel course with the target, and drop back 4,000 meters,” Matias ordered.
When on electric motors, the submarine was incapable of keeping pace with Iron Duke’s current speed, and running the diesels was certain to expose San Luis II to counter-attack. Matias told Ledesma that, should the first volley of torpedoes fail to hit, he would then fire a wire-guided weapon and use its high speed to close with and strike the British frigate.
“Very well, sir,” Ledesma said as he looked to a light on the weapons console. “Torpedo room reports tubes two and five reloaded.” Matias checked his watch.
“Excellent,” Matias said, impressed. The captain had sweated the crew in countless drills. Although he heard whispers and grumbling each time, he had reminded his submariners: ‘Better to sweat in peacetime than bleed in wartime.’ Thousands of yards away, San Luis II’s torpedoes began to snake back and forth within the vee of Iron Duke’s wake.
The Royal Navy frigate slowed and changed course to take a large wave. As she rode up and over the building-tall upsurge, her stern came up. One torpedo lost track of the frigate’s wake and went wide. However, as the stern again displaced water, the second weapon detected its steel and turned toward it. The torpedo struck the bottom of the rolling ship and detonated its 678-pound warhead beneath Iron Duke’s main engine room.
The ship shook from stem to stern as it was lifted by the blast and dropped again into the bubble jet created by the explosion.
The keel snapped and superhot gases punched a hole through the hull, cracking and curling its steel. A fireball rose through the ship, venting through the ship’s stack and ripping the decking surrounding it. The shockwave from the blast was amplified underwater.