“XO, if that weapon sped up to seventy knots when we went to flank, how long to intercept?”
Kane waited. The question translated to: If that torpedo knows we’re here, how long do we have to live?
Mcdonne looked over the H-P computer and down at his own distance-time slide rule.
“Sir, fifty-eight minutes to intercept from detection point. That’s fifty minutes from now.”
Schramford looked up from the aft sector of the conn, where he’d been peering over the tactical plot. “Captain, I think I can give you an extra six minutes. That would be an other four miles down the line, maybe enough to make this torpedo run on fumes.”
“Another six minutes, Eng? What’re you talking about?”
“We’ll take the core to the design limit, maybe further. I might get another couple thousand horsepower at the screw. We’ll overpower the core, take average temperature to 530 or 540, pick up the grid on the battery”
“Don’t waste time telling me, for God’s sake,” Kane said.
He’d skipped the engineer tour, serving as a weapons officer and navigator, thinking of himself as more a tactician and a leader and a seaman than a technocrat, privately referring to all things related to the mysterious reactor plant as “neutron shit.”
“You’re the engineer, get back there. I relieve you of the deck. Get Houser up here to replace you.”
Schramford was gone, announcing that the captain had the deck and the conn. Kane now thought about Daminski’s last message. The fleet commander would need to know that the enemy might be trying to break out into the Atlantic, and if the worst happened — the admiral would need to know.
“Get a slot buoy ready, XO. Copy this for coding into the buoy.”
Mcdonne spoke on his mike to radio, then looked up at Kane. “Addressee, CDMCNAVFORCEMED. Priority, flash. Subject, contact report.” Mcdonne’s pen flashed over his clipboard.
“Message: “One, position approximate at—”
Mike Jensen, the navigator, spoke up from the port plotting table: “Two miles east of the narrows at Gibraltar.”
“Copy that, XO?” “Two, USS Phoenix detected single incoming Nagasaki torpedo from the east at long range on faint broadband, no tonals. Estimated time of torpedo intercepting Phoenix, 2130 zulu. Am now attempting to outrun UIF weapon. Three, request ASW aircraft vectored to this position to ensure Destiny does not break out of Med enroute Atlantic. Four, due to suspicion that Destiny unit is westbound, intend to mine exit of Gibraltar with salvo of Mark 50 torpedoes in circular passive patterns, ceiling settings set to avoid damage to surface shipping. Five, Phoenix reports negative, repeat negative acoustic advantage against Destiny class. If we survive Nagasaki and if passive circle Mark 50s fail to hit Destiny, intend to clear datum for Faslane, Scotland and reload. Six, Commander D. Kane sends.’ Got it? Code it in, flood and launch.”
“Weapons officer, status of the Mark 50s in one and two?”
“Ready in all respects, sir,” Lieutenant Commander Chris Follicus intoned from the weapons-control panel at the end of the line of fire control consoles. Follicus, a chunky man with thick eyeglass lenses that made his eyes appear large and liquid, was sharp and quick, some would say glib. Kane had started to think of the weapons officer as something of a bullshit artist.
“Set both for medium-speed run to enable, passive low-speed circular search patterns, ceiling one five zero feet, search depth 400 feet, active homing on acquisition. Tube one unit will orbit 5,000 yards from launch at bearing zero eight five, tube two 10,500. And make tubes three and four ready in all respects.”
Kane waited for Follicus to make the presets, then climbed the steps to the conn platform.
“Attention in the firecontrol team,” Kane announced, two dozen pairs of eyes locking onto him. “We’re sprinting away from a torpedo launched by the Destiny submarine, but confidence is high that we can outrun this thing.” Right, he thought. Until it speeds up to seventy knots and cuts us to pieces. “While we’re running I intend to put out some weapons of our own. We don’t know where the Destiny is, except that it’s east of us in the Med’s western basin. I believe this torpedo shot is an attempt to get by us and break out into the Atlantic.” God knows why, he thought, and how would he prove it if asked by the admiral? He had no answer. “So to counter the Destiny’s outchop we’re going to fill the gap at Gibraltar with Mark 50 torpedoes set for circular searches. If he comes out while the Mark 50s are still alive he’ll get hurt bad. On the plots, I want the orbit points and shutdown times of these weapons plotted and kept up to date so we can plan the weapon deployment. That’s all, carry on.”
There was a brief lull in the action while Kane waited for Follicus to run the weapons’ confirmation of the presets. It was only a matter of seconds but seemed an hour. The stark reality of it was only now reaching Kane that inside an hour he might be dead on the bottom of the Strait of Gibraltar. If he could act he could almost forget that, but waiting was hell. During that wait the thought intruded that he should live as if today were the last day of his life, a notion he had always sarcastically met with the comment: If today’s my last day on earth I’m buying a Porsche Turbo on credit and driving it to Atlantic City. On the business end of a Nagasaki torpedo, the remark no longer seemed so witty.
Kane’s contact message was relayed at highest priority through the eastern Atlantic communications satellite to CINCNAVFORCEMED’s headquarters at the old Sixth Fleet compound in Naples, Italy. The NAVFORCEMED watch officer, a mustang lieutenant, held a secure phone to his ear, and while waiting for Admiral Traeps scratched a tactical message to the airborne antisubmarine forces in the western basin directing them to Gibraltar.
Four P-3 Orion ASW patrol turboprops received the NAVFORCEMED flash transmission. One ignored the order, already departing station, low on fuel and empty of sonobuoys, its replacement enroute from Sigonella. The remaining three throttled up, climbed and headed west, reaching their destinations and cruising back toward the dark water of the strait. The moon had been full but had vanished behind dull unremarkable clouds that seemed to boil up from nowhere and everywhere. The first four-engined plane shut down the two inboard turbines and feathered the props, swooping low over the water sixty nautical miles east of the narrowest point of the strait, turning slowly as it steadied on a southern course, leveling its wings and slowing further until it almost seemed suspended over the water. Silently, at five-second intervals, the cylindrical sonobuoys fell out of the underside of the fuselage, plunking into the water in a neat row, the splashes lost in the powerful thrumming of the props.
A few moments later, twenty miles west of the first plane, the second P-3 arrived on station, dropped a load of sonobuoys and circled back around. The third took station off Tangier at the opening of the mouth of Gibraltar, laying its sonobuoy field just as the USS Phoenix passed under it. The buoys laid, the P-3s orbited the drop points at sufficient distance that the buoys’ sonars would not be impaired by the noise of the planes’ engines but not so far that radio reception would be impacted. They settled into north-south elongated orbits parallel to the sonobuoy fields, cruising close enough to the surface so that their MAD probes could reach down into the sea in search of anomalies in the earth’s magnetic field, the iron hull of a submerged submarine able to focus magnetic lines of force just as a lens bends light waves. The MAD probes detected nothing, but that wasn’t unusual since the probes were useful only at extremely short range.
While the P-3s had been turning toward Gibraltar, two pilots and a sonar tech climbed into the Seahawk LAMPS III antisubmarine helicopter on the rolling aft deck of the Burke-class destroyer John Warner and ran through the laminated startup checklist in record time, the twin turbines whining and then howling to idling revs, the clutch catching and spooling up the main rotor. The chopper shook as the rotor passed through several resonance points, then steadied as the blades sped up to idling revolutions. The pilot’s radio headset crackled, a distorted voice from the Wamer’s combat information center, the pilot’s reply competing with the roar of the turbines and the beating of the main rotor as the Seahawk lifted off the deck, the bull’s-eye painted on the dark surface barely visible in the overcast night as the Warner shrank below and astern. Thirty miles south, an identical helicopter turned west and soon joined the first, the two units ready to drop dipping active sonar sets at the first sniff from one of the P3s.