Daminski leaned over the Pos Two panel and changed the mode from the dot-stacker to line-of-sight, an odd configuration showing two rowboats, one at the bottom representing own-ship, the one at the top the target. Daminski put the bearing of the target due astern at bearing 520, with a range of 20,000 yards, course northwest heading out of the strait.
“There, now you’ve got a solution. Keep that in.”
“Conn, Sonar, we’re getting active sonar from one of the torpedoes.”
“What’s the range gate look like?” The range of a torpedo could be guessed by how often it pinged active sonar. Long ping intervals meant the receiver had to wait to get a return ping over a large distance, rapid pings meant the torpedo needed to wait only seconds for the ping return and was close. The more rapid the pings, the closer the weapon.
“Ping interval is prolonged. Range is probably two thousand to three thousand yards.”
A nautical mile, Daminski thought. He was a mile to a mile and a half ahead of the weapons. He was going forty-two knots. Allowing for a fifty-knot torpedo — no, he’d give it fifty-five knots — that meant he had between four and seven minutes till the torpedoes caught up.
“Listen up,” he said to the watchstanders, “we’ll be launching the counterattack now, then launching a radio buoy in the signal ejector telling the boss we’ve been attacked and to watch out for the Destiny’s shutdown-and-hide tactics. I’m going to order us to slow to twenty knots to launch, then we’ll throttle right back up and keep running. Ready? Helm, all back two-thirds, mark speed two one!”
The helmsman rang up the order on the engine telegraph.
Back aft in the maneuvering room the throttleman answered the bell, shut the forward turbine throttles and opened up the astern turbines. The ship shook hard, as if rattled by the hand of a god. A bookcase above the chart table dumped its contents to the deck, one of the volumes hitting the plotting officer in the head on its way down.
“Speed two one, sir,” the helmsman called.
“All stop! Snapshot tube one!”
“Set,” Skinnard called.
“Standby and fire,” Hackle said, rotating the trigger. The blast of the tube firing sounded more violent than the previous four.
“Snapshot tube two.”
“Standby and fire.” The second tube fired. Daminski shouted over the second blast, “All ahead flank, maneuvering cavitate, 150-percent reactor power, T-ave five twenty!”
The deck trembled again with the power of the screaming main engines. The speed indicator needle climbed slowly, too slowly, to forty-two knots.
“Conn, Sonar, both own-ship units, normal launch.”
“Sonar, Captain, what’s the pulse interval?”
“Sir, active sonar from the torpedo has shut down.”
“Jeez, what the hell does that mean?” Daminski mumbled to Kristman. “Danny, have we got that radio buoy loaded?”
Kristman nodded. “Loaded forward, tube flooded, muzzle door open.”
“Shoot the forward signal ejector.”
Daminski looked around the room at the watchstanders, trying to maintain his war face. There was nothing more he could do. He had shot back at the enemy submarine. He had warned cincnavporcemed that they were on the business end of five UIF torpedoes. He had launched evasion devices, for whatever good they would do. And he had taken the reactor far over the redline, overpowering it as far as he dared without melting the core or breaching the steam piping or blowing open a turbine casing.
He had Augusta running for her life.
He had always wondered whether he would want to know in advance if he were going to die. He had decided he would want five minutes warning, no more. Not enough time to worry about it, just time to think about the children and perhaps make peace with the angry Catholic Church God of his youth. Maybe say goodbye to the good things in life, tip back a Coors or down a shot of Wild Turkey. He tried to remember the last time he had made love to Myra but it was a blur. He fingered the letter from her, imagined her face. He had a momentary memory, sharp as a new razor, of the faces of his three little children, then one of his father, his dad angry even in this reflective memory—
“Conn, Sonar, active sonar from one of the torpedoes.”
“Range gate?”
“Sorry, Cap’n, the unit is pinging a ramp wave in continuous.”
Daminski shared a look with Kristman. The incoming torpedoes were so close that one of them was transmitting a continuous waveform, getting a precise fix on Augusta’s location.
There was only one thing he could do, Daminski thought. If he did an emergency surface, he might get above the ceiling setting of the weapon, or perhaps it would blow its warhead at the bubbles the ballast tanks left behind. And even if they got hit, maybe if they made it to the surface he could save some of the men, maybe not all, but some.
“Chief of the watch, emergency blow fore and aft! Diving officer, take her up, twenty degree up-bubble!”
The COW slammed two large stainless-steel levers into the overhead while the diving officer ordered the ship up.
The room filled with the blasting noise of high-pressure air as the bottles emptied the air into the ballast tanks, pushing out the seawater and making the ship lighter. The deck tilted up, the helmsman overreacting, the ship coming up in a thirty-degree angle before the diving officer could push the control yoke forward to get the bubble back to twenty degrees.
The depth indicator numerals spun as the ship climbed out of the depths, heading for the surface, her speed aided by the buoyancy in the tanks, the speed indicator reading forty-five knots, then forty-six. Augusta was screaming for the surface.
But even over the noise of the roaring emergency blow system, Daminski could hear the wailing sonar system of the lead torpedo in pursuit. The depth indicator unwound, 500 feet, 400, 350, but the screaming siren of the torpedo sonar system grew louder. Daminski could hear the torpedo’s screw itself, a whooshing sound just outside the hull. He turned away from the depth indicator on the ship control panel. It had spun to sixty feet as the bow of the ship blew out of the water, climbing at her tremendous velocity until the sail came out, then the long length of black hull, her underside painted a dull anticorrosion red, until gravity dragged her back, the deck already coming back to level as the ship fell back into the sea, the splash raising a cloud of water vapor in a 300-foot diameter around her. Her downward momentum then carried her under again, the hull vanishing from the surface, only the upper half of the sail breaking through the waves.
It was at that moment that the first Nagasaki torpedo detonated, the weapon having followed the target as it went shallow, as if the torpedo had expected it. The explosion was centered below the reactor compartment, the explosive force directed upward, breaching the hull and rupturing a steam generator and its main coolant piping, the seawater smashing into the compartment. The second Nagasaki detonated farther aft, beneath the turbine generators of the aft compartment, the hull breaching there too, the water filling the space. The third torpedo was a dud, the detonation from the second knocking the detonation train off, the preexplosive failing to detonate the high explosive and the unit disintegrated.
The fourth torpedo impacted the aft section of the forward compartment, blowing a twenty-foot gash in the lower level, the blast smashing through two decks and tearing apart the navigation space aft of control before the water came flooding in. Daminski had a quarter-second to turn and see the deckplates flying upward in slow motion as the blast disintegrated the aft part of the room. The last torpedo detonated at the flank of the forward compartment, forward of the control room. The wall of water from the aft of control had washed its way to the plot tables by the time of the last explosion and its unmerciful water came blasting in from the forward end.