Kane looked at the half-dead ship-control panel, seeing the internal battery-supplied instruments displaying the stenrplane angle easing, then rising. He found the ship’s angle display, the “bubble,” and watched to see if the ship would respond in time. The angle began coming off the deck, the forward bulkhead that had been a floor a moment ago now rotating so that it again became a wall, the men falling off it onto the true deck. Kane held on to the control yoke and blinked as the display reeled off the depth: 1,150, 1,200, 1,250 feet and still diving. He had succeeded in taking the steep down-angle off the ship, but not in checking its downward momentum. The depth gauge spun off 1,300 feet, crush depth, and Kane couldn’t watch it anymore.
But it was not crush depth that claimed the Phoenix.
Thirty-five seconds after Kane first grabbed the control yoke, the ship slammed into the rocky bottom with the kinetic energy of a hundred-car freight train smashing into a cliff wall at eighty-five-miles-per.
Kane hit the ship-control panel, gashed his head open, slid to the deck and tasted blood as it spilled into his mouth.
Chapter 18
Sunday, 29 December
“How close?” Sharef asked, leaning over Tawkidi’s seat at the sensor-control panel. The incoming airplane-launched torpedo had been following them for three minutes now.
Commander Tawkidi, combat-stations deck officer, looked up from the sensor-control section, his eyes widening in surprise, then showing triumph. His headphones had just transmitted a booming roar from the bearing to the Nagasaki torpedo and the American submarine some fifty kilometers distant to the west.
“What is it?” Sharef demanded.
“The Nagasaki torpedo just detonated!”
Sharef leaned closer. “Any indication of the American submarine?”
Tawkidi searched, putting off for a moment the monitoring of the incoming American torpedo.
“No hull breakup noises yet but there are no indications of its reactor or steam plant — wait a minute …” Tawkidi listened, his eyes shut. A second faint rumble came through the headphones. “I think the target just imploded or hit the bottom, Commodore. If he wasn’t dead before he is now.”
Sharef nodded solemnly. Sinking another submarine could never be a time of joy for him, the submarines of the enemy forces sharing more with him than any landlubber in his own nation, men who knew the deprivations of being at sea for weeks, the lack of companionship from family or friends, fighting the sea, existing in the Spartan environment of the ship, the deep-diving vessels built to accommodate the equipment, not the needs of the crew. He forced himself to remember that they were Americans, brothers of the brutal men who had blown his Sahand to the bottom of the gulf, killing so many of his shipmates — and then he felt nothing for them, neither pity nor hatred.
Out of the corner of his eye Sharef saw General Sihoud and Colonel Ahmed standing near the door to the forward passageway. He ignored them and returned to the tactical chart, then to Tawkidi’s console at the sensor panel. The American torpedo continued closing and he began to feel a sense of unreality, as if he were disconnected from the scene. He had tried to tell himself that these could be his last minutes but somehow he remained unconvinced. Every man had a time to die. Sharef still believed it was not yet his time. But then, he wondered if he would know when it was time.
Tawkidi’s enthusiasm faded as the Second Captain displays filled with the curves of dozens of sonobuoys pinging at them and the aircraft engines orbiting overhead.
“Now how close?”
“A kilometer, maybe less.”
“Enable the SCM.”
“SCM is up and enabled in automatic. It needs a few more pings before it will be able to reproduce the false echo.”
“It better start working before that torpedo gets any closer.”
The pinging of the torpedo began to sound through the hull, sharp and high-pitched. A second ping rang through, louder now, suddenly answered by a distorted-sounding pulse that was at a lower pitch but otherwise a copy of the original. The noises continued, the torpedo pinging a high pulse, the ship’s SCM sonar answering with a deeper, throatier false echo. As the minutes passed, the torpedo’s pulses became more frequent until the pings from the weapon and the Hegira’s ventriloquist system merged into one long loud groaning sound, as if the two machines were sounding mating calls to each other. Sharef and Tawkidi glanced at each other, then over to Sihoud and Ahmed. The general seemed serene, Ahmed looked angry as they faced being hit by an American torpedo.
The moaning sonar pulses continued, lasting for one endless second after another. The sonar display above Tawkidi’s head showed the dancing broadband signatures of the orbiting Mark 50 torpedoes shot by the American 688class, the traces as yet unnoticed in the tense room, perhaps because the weapons showed no tonals, perhaps because even their breadboard sonar noises were whisper-quiet, but more likely because the men at the sensor consoles were so focused on evading the incoming weapon. It was then that one of the broadband traces jumped as one of the American Mark 50 units now ahead of them by five kilometers sensed their presence, pulled out of its circular hold pattern and sped up to meet them.
Less than two shiplengths astern, the SCM’s deception pulses had convinced the American Mark 52 torpedo that the ship was immediately ahead. The outgoing pulses were transmitted, immediately answered by a downshifted echo return, the lower pitch the result of the target running away and lowering the pitch of the return. The torpedo looked for a sign of iron with its hull-proximity sensor but there was no hull present where the sonar signals expected it. It searched its mind for the answer to such a puzzle — a strong sonar pulse echo with no sensation of an iron hull — and the computer realized the problem. Obviously the iron-hull sensor was not functioning, but the closeness of the target’s hull could be deduced from the sonar pulses. And there was no sense allowing a valid target to escape merely because the hull sensor had open-circuited.
The torpedo, satisfied with its built-in logic, exploded, 480 meters astern of the Hegira.
By the time the Destiny-class submarine exited the western mouth of the Strait of Gibraltar, seven of the torpedoes launched earlier by the Phoenix had run out of fuel. Spent, the units flooded with seawater and sank to the bottom, some imploding from the deeper depths of the Atlantic, a few breaking apart on the rocks of the sea floor. Every few minutes thereafter another one or two torpedoes became exhausted and executed their self-destruction sinkings. The Destiny’s track leading from the strait passed through a wide gap between still-active torpedoes, six of the weapons too far from her to pick up her acoustic emissions. Her track brought her within acoustic range of four remaining torpedoes.
Three heard her — or perhaps thought they heard the Mark 52 torpedo in pursuit of her — but the fourth experienced a mechanical problem and continued circling until it too ran out of fuel.
The first of the three Mark 50s to detect the Destiny was six nautical miles northwest at the time of detection. The second and third were slightly closer, one to the south at five and a half miles, the other to the northeast at just under five miles. The unit to the south confirmed the target by wiggling and sensing the shift in the bearing to the sounds, then accelerated to its fifty-knot attack speed, computing a lead angle to position itself to a point in the sea where the target would be thirty minutes in the future, the calculated time of interception.
The unit to the northeast did the same, its interception time slightly less with the Destiny’s approach vector.