He looked again at the chart. Texas was off Louisiana’s southwestern coast and proceeding into deeper water on a course just a bit east of south. Over a thousand feet of water below the keel. If he didn’t find a surface warship by the time he reached the southern tip of the area, he thought he should swing more westerly to get into the main channel to Houston and Galveston.
He went back to the monitor. He was looking southwest, almost on the right beam, when something airborne passed quickly from left to right. He tried to focus the image, pan out, and catch it. If it was a patrol plane, they were in trouble. But it had been so small. A chopper servicing rigs?
Whatever it was, it was gone now. Off to the northwest.
“What was that?” Jugs Aranado asked. She was behind him, watching over his shoulder.
“I don’t know.”
“Play it back and freeze-frame it.”
“You do it. You’re better at this.”
He got out of the chair, and she sat and began manipulating the controls. In fifteen seconds she had it on the screen.
“Tomahawk.”
Loren Snyder looked at the chart and gave Fuentes a new course to steer, one twenty degrees to the right of her current course. “Let’s kick it up to about twelve knots, see if we can close on this guy. I’ll keep you away from the rigs. George, those rigs should stand out like sore thumbs on the sonar.”
“They do, but there is so much noise in the water…”
“We’re very shallow for twelve knots,” Fuentes objected. She was worried that an aircraft or satellite scanning the surface with radar or in optical wavelengths might detect the wake.
The problem, Snyder knew, was that the surface ship, if that was what shot the Tomahawk, could simply run away from a sub cruising slowly. Snyder wanted to put a fish into a destroyer or frigate, and to do it he was going to have to take some chances. On the other hand, if a sub had fired the missile, going in there at twelve knots was asking to be smacked, although Snyder doubted an attack sub would be shooting missiles in water this noisy.
“Twelve knots,” he said.
Five minutes later Snyder saw another Tomahawk fly past, just a little to the right, or west, of the sub, on a reciprocal course. It was low, no more than a hundred feet above the ocean. This one seemed to come from almost dead ahead.
He picked up the ICS mike and keyed it. “Folks, I think we should all take our general quarters stations. We have a ship ahead, surface or subsurface, that is punching off Tomahawks heading for Texas. I intend to try and torpedo it.”
Loren lowered the photonics mast and told Ranta to listen carefully. To give the hydrophones a little better angle, he turned another twenty degrees to the west. A half hour later, he had Fuentes go a little deeper and slow to ten knots.
Now Ranta heard the destroyer, or thought he did. It was just a low, deep throb amid the cacophony, one of the echoes bouncing off the bottom. There it was again! Three-three-five degrees, relative. Twenty-five degrees left of the bow.
“There are two destroyers out there,” George Ranta announced. “Both at slow speed, probably launching missiles.”
“Retract the photonics mast,” Loren Snyder said, and to Ada Fuentes on the helm he added, “Take us down to two hundred fifty feet. Maybe the acoustics are better down there.”
The first Tomahawks from the navy’s salvo slammed into power plants in the Houston area and knocked out the grid.
JR Hays and Elvin Gentry thought this moment might come, so they had some planes on alert, with the pilots sitting in cockpits. Four planes on alert at Lackland in San Antonio were scrambled and fanned out to the east to look for cruise missiles inbound. They stayed relatively low so their radar would be more effective against the missiles with tiny radar cross-sections, a choice that gave them a high fuel burn.
The fighter pilots were forbidden to cross the coastline. Neither general wished to risk those precious airplanes in attacks on destroyers, which were very capable of defending themselves.
There wasn’t much else they could do. Except give a heads-up to Jack Hays, who had spent a long half hour with Billy Rob Smith, the Texas emergency coordinator. Billy Rob had been busy borrowing National Guard emergency generators and wiring them into nursing homes and hospitals that didn’t have their own. He had even signed a contract with a machine shop in Bryan, Texas, that normally made custom oil-field equipment. Now the fifty machinists employed there were busy manufacturing emergency generators. It would be a week or two before the first ones were ready to be installed, but as Billy Rob told Jack Hays, it was the best he could do. Every generator he could buy, borrow, or steal was being positioned and wired up.
Jack Hays gave him a slap on the back and told him, “Good work!”
The acoustics were indeed better at two hundred fifty feet. Ranta found a cluster of rigs ten degrees to port, and found both destroyers. One was dead ahead, the other ten degrees starboard. They were heading northwest, toward Galveston.
To get the range to the target, Ada Fuentes turned the boat, which was trimmed up and doing about ten knots. After a few minutes, plotting the bearing change, the range was resolved at ten miles to the port target, ten and a half to the starboard one. The targets were moving from left to right, but this would be a fairly simple shot for the Mk-48 torpedoes. They had active sonar seekers and trailed a fiber optic cable behind them, which would allow the submarine crew to ensure they were heading toward the proper targets. If the cables didn’t break. If they did, the pump-jet torpedoes would continue on course at fifty-five knots searching for their targets on passive sonar based on the internal logic of their onboard computers, which were programmed by Jugs Aranado. At the very last moment the torpedoes’ sensors would go active, ping. Nineteen feet long, twenty-one inches in diameter, the weapon would run under the target and a proximity fuse would trigger its 650-pound warhead. The explosion would break the target ship’s back. Time to cover the ten nautical miles to target — eleven minutes.
“Flood Tubes One and Two,” Snyder ordered. Jugs Aranado was on the torpedo control console, programming each torpedo. She worked her way through the checklist quickly.
“Torpedoes ready, Captain,” Jugs sang out.
“Fire One,” Snyder said, and Jugs checked the panel, saw that all lights were green, and pushed the fire button on Tube One. The boat bobbed slightly as the torpedo was ejected by compressed air. On the sonar, Ranta said, “It’s running.”
“Fire Two.” Another little bob as the boat reacted to the loss of the weight of the torpedo and the rush of incoming water to replace it.
“Close outer doors,” Snyder ordered.
Now the data from the torpedoes began coming in. Number One was running almost straight, so the chances of the fiber optic cable breaking were small. Number Two turned to a course to intercept the second destroyer. Both were soon up to fifty-five knots, rising from the depths to just under the surface. Both were now armed, but they weren’t pinging from their seeker heads.
Jugs Aranado was watching their track, waiting. She didn’t want to activate their seeker heads until the last possible moment, because the active pinging would be plainly audible to the destroyers’ sonar operators. Amazingly, the propulsion system, a pump jet, was very quiet, and so the targets of the torpedoes might not hear them until they were very close. Too close. Especially in these noisy waters.
Aboard USS Harlan Jones the cry “Torpedo incoming!” from the sonarman in the Combat Control Center galvanized the watch. They knew Texas might be in the area, but had relied upon the noise from the drilling rigs to shield them from attack. Obviously they had been detected and fired upon. The sonar operator had picked up the telltale sound of the pump-jet engines in the torpedoes. He didn’t know how close the torpedo was. Actually, it was less than a mile away, approaching at fifty-five knots.