The torpedo to the northeast of the Destiny also sped up, its calculated contact time shorter.
There was little time and much to do for the closest Mark 50. It hurried through its arming sequence, sensitized the hull proximity detector, made a few course corrections and depth corrections, and watched as the target zoomed in.
The explosion of the aircraft-launched torpedo shook the ship, the impact smashing into the stern. The force of the hammer blow jarred every compartment and deck. The men aboard experienced the impact as a booming roar and a trembling sensation, a shaking of the deck. Sharef, standing at the tactical plot table, waited for the explosion to smash him into the glass-topped table or hurl him into the overhead.
He waited for the water to come roaring in to take his life, and likewise he waited for the panicked thoughts and fears and visions to fill him as they had long ago on the Sahand when he had thought he was dying. But the roar of the explosion died out and left only quiet. Sharef remained standing, his knuckles white where he had tightened his grip on the table’s handholds. The trembling of the deck calmed almost as soon as it had come, its violence concentrated in its first quarter-second. The ship was dry, and the slight tremble in the deck suggested they were still moving at emergency-ahead speed.
They had survived.
Sharef did a quick inventory of the control room. The Second Captain consoles were still alight with displays, only a half-dozen dark and disabled. The Japanese designers had been worried about this moment, because the ship was completely controlled by the Second Captain’s supercomputer process-control modules in the lower level with their operator-control consoles in the control room. They were not shockproof, in fact were highly vulnerable to the slightest accelerations. This ship was so different from the old Victor III he’d last commanded. The ex-Russian ship, re named the Tabarzin, had been almost entirely hardwired.
Computers were unavoidable, but the late-1980s vintage ship had been designed with a stark distrust of microprocessors and process controllers. As a result the old sub had been bulletproof, a bucket of bolts that could be taken into combat with confidence. But this ship, so automated and filled with electronics, seemed unprotected. To Sharef, who had seen what damage a ship could experience before dying, the idea of losing computer control in the first few seconds of taking hostile fire was unacceptable. He had voiced his concerns to the shipbuilders, and surprising him, the Japanese had listened, stopping production for a week to interview him and then conduct shock testing. The results of the shock tests were not good — a minor explosion from a torpedo distant enough to spare the hull would still take out the entire Second Captain, requiring wholesale replacement of bubble memories and microprocessor cards. The Japanese, though, had recovered quickly, replacing the computer-process controller cabinets with larger units that had layers of thick gel to cushion against shock. The tests were redone with mixed results. With the gel filling, the Second Captain computers could take a mild shock, but more intense impacts would be gin causing damage. In the time left to them the computer designers added redundant components to the circuits, standby boards and cards and microprocessors, kept warm and on-line and ready to be switched into the process train in the same instant as the loss of the primary component.
The dual-pressure hull of the ship could take a huge torpedo before flooding, but without ship-control computers the ship could only surface and surrender if the Second Captain died.
Sharef watched the consoles, waited for the remaining displays to wink out. None did. He turned aft to the weapons-control area and put his hand on Lt. At Ishak’s shoulder.
Ishak was the computer-systems officer, a bright young man who understood electronic entities far better than he understood people.
“What’s the damage?”
Ishak had already rolled his seat to the Second Captain master console in the aft port corner of the room. The master console could review the health of the entire system and reprogram it if required. Ishak interacted with the console, and watching the electronics engineer talk to his system— his face took on the intensity of a man talking to his loved one. He spun in his chair, his face bright, ready to report the system still healthy, when he was interrupted by Tawkidi at the sensor-control area.
“Commodore, multiple torpedoes in the water! Bearing abeam to port to abeam to starboard!”
The midchannel P-3 Orion patrol turboprop that had launched the Mark 52 torpedo continued following it as it pursued the Destiny submarine. The Mark 52 was easily tracked, its broadband noise signature loud and steady. The Destiny faded in and out. The P-3 had used up three-fourths of its load of sonobuoys tracking the UIF sub, and it would not be long before it would need to be relieved onstation.
The west mouth P-3 had been notified of the attack but could not help out from its position sixty nautical miles farther west, where it orbited as it tried to find the Phoenix.
And from the position of the explosion of the Nagasaki torpedo there was no sign of Phoenix, not even the sound of her reactor cooling on the ocean floor. It was as if she had buried herself in the earth’s crust and vanished. The western P-3 continued the search, standing by in case the eastern aircraft needed help.
Meanwhile, a flash message had been transmitted to CINCNAVFORCEMED detailed the situation with the exchange of torpedoes, the apparent loss of the Phoenix, the pursuit of the escaping Destiny, and the need for further ASW assets at the entrance to the Atlantic to prosecute the target. Soon after the cinc’s receipt of the signal, the Burke-class destroyers searching the Med’s western basin were vectored to Gibraltar and ordered to outchop into the Atlantic. Several S-3 Viking ASW jets lifted off the deck of the USS Reagan deeper in the Med, the jets banking hard in their turns to the west as they deployed to help the P-3s. At Sigonella Naval Air Station, three more P-3s, all fueled and loaded out with Mark 52 torpedoes and sonobuoys, rolled out onto the runway and lumbered off into the night, but it would be some hours before they would reach the strait.
Within the next fifteen minutes the Mark 52 torpedo caught up with the Destiny submarine and exploded. The sonar techs and the ASW officer in the P-3 above got their hopes up, but when the bubbles and turbulence finally stopped, there had been no sign of a hull breaking up. Two sonobuoys placed farther west radioed their signals, the screen display on the techs console showing that the Destiny submarine continued on its path heading west. By the time the P-3 had throttled up, banked hard and overflown the positions of the reporting sonobuoys, the Destiny was gone.
The sonar tech slumped into his control seat, his eyes shut, then suddenly sat up straight again and looked to the ASW officer.
“Mr. Quaid! I’ve got three traces of torpedoes. American Mark 50 torpedoes. They’re all at attack velocity.”
Quaid leaned over the console, frowning.
“Where’d they come from?”
“Must have been launched by the Phoenix and we didn’t pick them up when they were slow in transit, or maybe they were passive circlers.”
“Maybe Phoenix will get her revenge yet.”
“Too bad it’ll be posthumous,” the tech mumbled.
“Too early to call that. What’ve you got?”
“Multiple weapons, look like they’re several miles apart, all of them homing toward the same spot at once.”
“Good, maybe we’ve got a chance for at least one hit. Let’s set up a sonobuoy field inside the triangle of the torpedoes and hope for the best.”
Sharef knew the order he had to give.