The howl was now a scream, and the vibration was beginning to make the coffee mugs dance on the console tops.
Chief Engineer Carl Thomson paced his set path behind the chair backs of his systems operators — thirty feet to port, then thirty feet back to starboard — his eyes flowing from one telepanel to the next.
“Main Engine Control, this is the CIC.” Thomson paused his pacing and lifted one hand to his headset, pressing the earphone tight to cut out the outside sound. “Main Engine, aye.”
“Chief, this is the Captain. We have hostile torpedoes inbound and we’re trying to outrun them. I need everything you’ve got. Right now!”
“You’ll get it, Captain.” There was nothing more to be said on that front.
Thomson lifted his voice. “Heads up! We’ve got a couple of wake chasers coming up behind us. Stand by to put her to the wall!”
“Chief, all mains and auxiliaries are already at one hundred percent output,” one of the Motor Macs called back over her shoulder, fear dawning in her eyes. “We’re at redline limits all across the board!”
“That’s the problem with this modern generation of marine engineers,” Thomson replied, leaning in between two of the operators’ seats. “Some damn fool paints a red line on a dial and you kids think it means something. Smith, kill the anticavitation programs. Set blade trim to manual. Swensen, you call up your IPS flow charts. Let’s see where we can scavenge some extra juice.”
“We got fish in the water! Lieutenant, they’ve fired at the ship … Son of a bitch!”
Gus Grestovitch snatched for the cockpit grab bar as Retainer Zero One’s nose dipped toward the ocean. The Sea Comanche’s engines shrieked and she accelerated out of her hover with all of the thrust and lift her rotors could produce.
“Lieutenant! Where the hell are we going?” Gus asked.
“Back!” Arkady replied grimly.
“Dix, what about our own torpedoes? Could we try an intercept shot with a Mark 50?”
The TACCO glanced across at his commanding officer.
Amanda sat erect in the captain’s chair, her fine-boned features set, her eyes level and controlled.
“No good, ma’am,” he replied. “To use the Barracuda’s antitorpedo program, we’d need to use wire guidance and the main-hull sonar arrays. We’d have to slow way down and turn in to target to acquire it. I don’t think we have the sea room.”
The tactical situation was being sketched out on the Alpha screen before them. The Cunningham’s own sonars had been deafened by the flow noise of her own passage through the water. However, the data flow from the sonobuoy pattern was being used by the Aegis battle-management system to build a display of the tactical situation.
The Duke’s position hack was fleeing back down its course line. Closely pursuing it were two overlapping dot centered-in-cross icons, glowing in red, the mark of an active, hostile torpedo threat. The separation between the ship and weapon symbols was perceptibly shrinking.
“It looks like we’ll have to run them out of fuel, then,” Amanda said determinedly.
Beltrain didn’t reply. The Duke’s senior weaponeer was deep into assembling a critical equation on his console repeaters. Calling up time of launch, range estimations, and performance statistics from the torpedo data annex, he was trying to dispel an ominous gut feeling.
“Oh, Jesus, sweet Jesus!”
“Dix, what is it?”
“The Red fish have a range overlap. They got us, Captain! Impact in four minutes!”
Twenty feet off the deck, Retainer Zero One blazed back along the bearing line toward the Cunningham.
Unbidden, the story of the Japanese Zero pilot who had dived into the path of a torpedo to save his carrier came to Vince Arkady’s mind.
Futilely, he scanned the wave tops for some sign of the passage of the hostile weapons. Nothing. Old-model fish would leave a telltale stream of steam bubbles behind. Modern units left no more wake than a passing shark.
Beyond having Gus’s life to consider, he was denied even the Zero pilot’s option. They were targeting the ship commanded by his Lady and there was absolutely nothing on God’s green earth he could do about it.
“Set LEAD decoys for ten-second activation delay. Stand by to drop.”
“LEADs set, Captain.”
“Drop LEAD decoys. Helm, ten degrees right rudder.”
The Launched Expendable Acoustic Devices rolled off the Cunningham’s stern and into her boiling wake. Upon activation, they would produce the simulated sound signature of their launching ship, literally screaming “Hey, I’m a destroyer!” into the face of the oncoming homing torpedoes. Hopefully, their mimicry would be sufficiently convincing.
The LEADs were the last technological trick left in the Cunningham’s bag.
“Man, I sure hope that’ll do it,” Beltrain said fervently.
“Even if it doesn’t, we’re still going to be okay.” Christine Rendino had left the intelligence bay and was now standing behind and between the command and tactical officer’s stations. Squeezing in beside Beltrain, she was studying the performance graphs on Beltrain’s flatscreens.
“What are you talking about, Chris—” Amanda’s demand was cut off by a heavy thudding concussion. On the aft-view television monitors, a towering column of white water leaped into the air half a mile astern.
“We got one!” the sonar chief yelled from the sound bay.
“The lead fish just killed the decoys. The second torpedo is … shit! The second fish is still running hot and tracking. It’s still on us, Captain!”
“Stand by, second LEAD set!” Amanda twisted around to face her intelligence officer. “Now, what are you saying?”
“That fish won’t reach us.” Christine’s finger stabbed at the torpedo stats on the flatscreen. “We’re right at the edge of the range envelope for a Type 53.”
“Yeah, but there is still overlap,” Beltrain insisted.
“Not for real, Dix. The analysts frequently dial a fudge plus factor into the opforce stats listed in our data annexes. The logic is that it’s better to overrate enemy weapons performance than it is to underrate it.”
“I can’t count on that, Chris,” Amanda snapped. “Drop LEAD decoy set two! Zero time activation! Helm, ten degrees left rudder!”
The single scarlet cross-dot symbol of the remaining torpedo still crawled up the Cunningham’s course line like a spider on a thread.
Now the blue square-dot of a decoy marker appeared in the Duke’s wake, a barrier between the fleeing ship and its lethal pursuer. Would it hold? All hands in the CIC gave up on breathing until they learned the answer.
Cross-dot and square-dot merged … and passed through each other.
“Captain, torpedo has not decoyed! Continuing to close the range! Ninety seconds to impact!”
“Damn, damn, damn!”
“Then here’s something you can count on!” Christine continued relentlessly, grabbing for Amanda’s shoulder. “The listed range we have for the Type 53 torpedo is for the original weapons design as used by the Russian Navy. The fish that’s been fired at us will be a Chinese copy of the simplified export model — what they call a monkey-version weapon. There will be a performance degradation! It’s not gonna reach us!”
“I hope you’re right.” Amanda’s hand struck the interphone key. “All decks, this is the Captain! Evacuate all compartments below the waterline and all frames aft of amidships! Rig for torpedo impact! Expedite!”
“That’s it!” Chief Thomson yelled. “Lock down your breaker boards and get out of here. Move!”