The man beside him was pale and shaken. He had not understood initially what the hard, buzzing noise was from the speaker, but the crew had quickly filled him in. He would be lucky if he lived long enough for the torpedo to kill him.
“Every projection said that they would not,” he said, aware of how very lame his explanation sounded. “They would not risk it — they are too conscious of their body count, too afraid to take any casualties. They would not—”
“They did!” Andropov grabbed him by shoulders, shook him violently, then transferred his grip to the man’s neck.
“You imbecile, you have killed us!”
The Russians could not presume to know the American mind any more that the Americans could know the Russian psyche. For just one second, he wondered if the Americans had advisers such as this.
Coleman saw the two new bursts of noise on the display, and watched as they resolved into the characteristic shapes of torpedoes. Cold fear clutched at his gut, followed immediately by relief as they turned away from him.
“They’re ours, Captain. Ours!”
Good old Seawolf. She’s pulling us out of this. Now, if I can do so well on the air battle, we may have a chance.
“Two thousand yards, Captain!” Stark terror filled the sonarman’s voice. “Bearing constant, range decreasing. Captain, your orders? Captain?”
“Hard left rudder, flank speed, and…” For just a moment he paused, uncertain of himself for the first time in nearly twenty years. Classic evasion tactics called for him to go deep, forcing the torpedo to follow him down, leaving hard knuckles in the water as he went and ejecting decoys and noisemakers. The theory was that the torpedo could be tricked into attacking one of the phantom targets as the submarine slipped safely below the thermocline.
But the hard, cold knot in his gut told him it wouldn’t work this time. Couldn’t work — no, they had no chance of evading this torpedo using classical tactics. Therefore, his only option was to attempt something radical.
“Surface the ship,” he ordered after what seemed like minutes, but in reality had been a few seconds. “Surface the ship.”
“Captain?”
The Captain reeled around to glare at the conning officer, murder in his eyes. The body of the psychologist stretched out across the deck was ample proof that he was prepared to follow through on his threats. “I said, surface the ship.” He waited.
The junior officer glanced down at the dead psychologist and made his decision. “Surface the ship, aye, sir.”
“One thousand yards — bearing constant, range decreasing.”
I may be too late, he thought, watching the torpedoes move across the time-versus-bearing display. I hesitated — I should not have done that. The other captain — he did not hesitate.
“Oh, no you don’t,” Otter said. The other submarine’s acoustic signature was changing. Otter made a tiny correction with the joystick, turning the wire-guided torpedo. “You’re a bad, bad little bastard, aren’t you?”
“What are you doing?” Forsythe asked. “You’re bringing the torpedo shallow! That sub’s not coming shallow. That would be insanity. She’s got no chance on the surface.”
“She’s got no chance either way, Captain,” the sonarman said quietly. “And she is surfacing — she is.” He pointed at an interference pattern on the screen, tracing out the details as he spoke. “She’s shallow right now, and she’s going to surface. And,” he said with conviction, “she’s going to die.”
She’s going to die. He called me Captain. Again, the full weight of what he’d done bore down on Forsythe.
But when had there been time to do anything differently? There had not been time to surface and ask for instructions, not the way that things had unfolded. There had not been time to make a stealthy approach on the enemy sub and carefully set up a killing shot.
No, this was undersea warfare the way it really was. Not some tidy game of angles and maneuvers in a classroom, the relative positions outlined in different colors of chalk on a two dimensional board. Not a trainer, where you knew that the result would be the instructor calling, “Stop the problem, stop the clock,” followed by a detailed and unforgiving debrief in front of your classmates. How he had dreaded those moments, when his errors would be exposed to everyone else, the teasing that would follow. Not that he had been anymore gentle when it was someone else under the gun, no. That’s not the way it was done.
And this was why, he saw, watching as his torpedoes reached the end of their wires and were set free on their own. This is why it was done that way. Because real warfare was nasty, bloody stumbling around the dark, acting and reacting on insufficient information, praying to God that you hadn’t screwed up. Because, if you have, it’s not just worrying about a hard time your roommates are going to give you or the bad marks on a fitrep. It’s knowing that thirty other people will die along with you.
“There they go,” Pencehaven said as the wires snapped. He could no longer control the torpedoes with his joystick. “Damn, they’re just like little bloodhounds — look at them go! You hear that, Captain? You hear that?” The sonarman pointed at the speaker. The series of shimmering pings from the torpedoes’ seeker heads were growing higher pitched, coming faster now. It sounded eager, certain about what it was doing—
Stop it. Don’t anthropomorphize it. It’s a weapon, not a bloodhound.
“Fifteen seconds until contact,” Otter said, his mood more closely matching Forsythe’s own than Pencehaven’s did. The sonarman raised his hands to his earphones, ready to peel them away from his head. He glanced over at his friend and nudged him. “Don’t forget this time. Last time, you couldn’t hear for two days.”
“Yes, yes,” the other said, still smiling broadly.
Hours of boredom punctuated by seconds of sheer terror. But at least for them, not for us.
“Five seconds,” Pencehaven said, pulling his own earphones off. “Stand by for it, folks. It’s going to be a doozy.”
“Passing five hundred feet,” the Russian sonarman said.
Not good enough. We’re not going to make it in time. “Emergency blow,” the Captain ordered, feeling his skin crawl. The sonar pings sounded like ball peen hammers on his hull, an incessant hammering that would drive you insane if you listened to it long enough. But he wouldn’t have to, would he? That was the whole point — he wouldn’t listen to it that long at all.
“Emergency blow, aye,” the officer of the deck said. A loud whooshing filled the submarine and his ears popped, as every bit of available compressed air was dumped into the ballast tanks, forcing out seawater, and jerking the submarine toward the surface. The captain felt heavier as the submarine surged up under him. Then, the submarine tilted hard to the right, and loose gear went flying, cascading down from the elevated front parts of the submarine. It could not fall all the way to the stern, of course. Watertight hatches stopped the debris’s progress, and piled up at the rear of every compartment.
“Five seconds!” someone shouted. There was no need for silence now, no advantage at all. A blind man could follow their progress through the ocean.