The North Korean captain made his way back into the crowded Control Room. His first officer waited, eyes questioning.
“Comrade Sung, lay us on course zero three five.”
The submarine heeled slightly as it spun slowly through the water, turning to the northeast.
The P-3C Orion shuddered slightly as it hit a small pocket of turbulence. Sierra Five was flying low, cutting through a zone where the hotter air rising off Tsushima ran into colder air held over the ocean. It was hunting submarines, flying low over a twenty-mile-long line of previously dropped sonobuoys, listening in at each in turn for the first sound that might warrant a Mark 46 torpedo.
The Orion shuddered again, this time sloshing hot coffee down the front of the second sonarman’s flight suit as he tried to slide back into his chair. He swore viciously and tried mopping at the spilled liquid with the corner of an air navigation chart.
The first sonarman didn’t pay any attention. He was too busy punching the intercom button. “Skipper! I’ve got something on number ten, a very weak signal. Could be a diesel boat creeping.”
Sierra Five banked even more sharply as it came around to head back up its sonobuoy line. More coffee spilled onto the second sonar operator.
Up in the cockpit the pilot leveled out of his climbing turn and dropped the Orion’s nose to lose altitude. They were closing on the plotted position of Buoy 10 at more than three hundred knots.
“MAD on?”
“MAD is on,” Sierra Five’s tactical coordinator confirmed. The cheap LOFAR sonobuoys they’d dropped had such a limited range in these noisy waters that any sub they detected with them had to be very close indeed. Close enough so that the Orion’s magnetic anomaly detector — its MAD — should have a good shot at picking up the slight distortion of the earth’s magnetic field caused by a submarine’s metal hull.
“Passing number ten… Now!”
The P-3 roared low over the gray-green sea. An onboard display suddenly spiked upward.
“Madman! Madman! Positive contact! Smoke away!” A smoke float tumbled away from the Orion and ignited, settling onto the water to mark its prey.
“Drop a DICASS.” The tactical coordinator wanted a firm fix and he wanted it fast. A DICASS buoy could go active and get both a bearing and range on a detected target.
The Orion banked steeply again, trading airspeed and altitude for a tighter turn. The buoy popped out of its belly and swayed down into the water.
“New buoy number fifteen is on. Target! Bearing one three five, range four hundred yards!” The sonarman fought to keep his voice from cracking with excitement.
Sierra Five settled back into level flight, this time aimed right at the submarine picked up by its active sonobuoy.
“Weapon away!”
Nobody aboard the Orion saw the splash as its Mark 46 torpedo hit the water. They were too busy preparing for another attack run.
“Torpedo in the water! Bearing three three zero!”
The sonarman’s shout froze Min for a crucial half-second. Then he turned and screamed at the helmsman, “Right full rudder! Flank speed!”
The submarine tilted abruptly as it turned and accelerated toward its meager full speed of fourteen knots. Min pulled himself across the control room and into the plot office. He sighed. It was as he’d thought. The water was too shallow to allow any serious maneuvering in the vertical plane. He’d have to try to outturn the American torpedo and hope it lost him. Not that there was much chance of that.
“Torpedo still closing, Comrade Captain!” Min could hear the fear in his first officer’s voice and knew the same hopelessness. Still, they had to try.
“Left full rudder, then!”
Liberator heeled in the opposite direction as the helmsman executed his order immediately. One man at least hadn’t panicked. That was something. He waited, bracing himself for the impact.
“Torpedo screws fading, Comrade Captain! It has lost us!” Cheers greeted the sonarman’s report.
Min smiled tightly. He would let the poor fools celebrate. They would learn the truth soon enough.
“That first torp missed, Skipper. Still running, but it’s moving away from the contact.”
The P-3’s pilot, a burly Naval Reserve commander with the name LAMBROS stenciled across his flight suit, looked at his copilot and smiled. “Ya know, the biggest ASW mistake the Japanese made during Word War II was giving up too soon. I’m not making the same mistake.” His hands pulled the Orion into another turn.
“Madman! Madman!”
“Weapon away.”
The cheers faded into a collective groan.
“Right full rudder!” Min turned to his first officer. “Raise the radio mast.”
“But…” Sung looked confused. “Comrade Captain, the enemy will see it… especially at this speed!”
“Idiot! Do you think that will matter? Listen!” The pings of several active sonars could be heard clearly, even above the noise made by Liberator’s laboring screws. “Signal all units that we are under attack. And do it while there is still time.”
Min watched his lieutenant enter the Radio Room and then leaned back against a bulkhead to await his fate. They had been lucky once. They wouldn’t be lucky again.
“A hit!”
Water fountained skyward in a column of white foam, dead fish, and pitch-black oil. The P-3’s pilot winced slightly watching it. He had an active imagination and could easily visualize how the Mark 46’s high-explosive warhead had killed the enemy submarine — it must have ripped the sub open like a gutted trout. He stared at the oil-coated waves rippling away from the impact zone. There wouldn’t be any survivors. Not in the middle of that.
With an effort he pulled his eyes and mind away from the dead submarine. “Signal the O’Brien. Tell ’em we got the bad guy.”
“Aye, aye, Skipper.” The tactical coordinator’s voice was jubilant. “That’s one down and surely more to go.”
Commander Sohn Chae-Hwan studied the message flimsy. “You’re sure this is all that was sent?”
The signals rating nodded. “Yes, Comrade Captain. Just the call sign for Liberator and those words, ‘under attack.’” He flinched as a dollop of spray sluiced across the Osa-class missile boat’s open bridge. He’d grown too used to his warm cubbyhole belowdecks and didn’t like standing outside, fully exposed to the cold sea.
Sohn dismissed him with a curt gesture and turned to look at the chart for Liberator’s last known position. He had to assume that the submarine had been sunk by whatever enemy had attacked it. And that left just one Romeo-class antique in the probable path of the American convoy. He sneered. It was unlikely that one ancient diesel submarine would be able to do much on its own.
He glanced up from the chart, studying the stubby silhouettes of the other two missile boats that made up his command. The original plan hadn’t called for the Osa squadron to attack until the mop-up phase, but the original plan had just gone by the boards. Liberator sunk without even exacting a price for its loss. Disgraceful.
But perhaps a sudden attack by the twelve SS-N-2C Styx missiles his boats carried could sow enough confusion to give that last Romeo a fighting chance. It was worth trying.