"Only one?" Garrett asked. The usual practice was to assign two fish to a target.
"I'm still worried about our shadow. I don't want to—" Lawless stopped, his gaze locked on the Chinese destroyer. "Uh-oh. This may be it."
A semaphore light winked from the Luda's starboard bridge wing. Garrett raised his binoculars to his eyes and spelled out the words as each Morse letter flickered across the open water. "Heave…to…or…I… fire…"
One of her bow guns flashed, as if to punctuate the order. The bang followed a couple of seconds later, as the shell keened across the Seawolf's bow and struck the sea, raising a thundering geyser of water ahead and to starboard.
"Lookouts below!" Lawless shouted. The sail lookouts promptly dropped through their hatches. "You, too, Number One."
"Captain—"
"I'm right behind you, damn it. Clear the bridge!" He already had the phone handset to his head. "Conn! This is the captain! Take us down!"
Garrett dropped through the open hatch in the weather bridge deck, catching the ladder halfway down and sliding the rest of the way to the first level on the rails. He hit the deck and looked up, waiting for Lawless to follow.
A thunderous cacophony filled the sail, like jackhammers pounding on sheet metal. Garrett shouted with stunned pain, hands to his ears. The Luda had seen the lookouts leaving their posts, perhaps noticed Seawolf beginning to settle into the water at the skipper's command, and opened fire…probably with light antiaircraft guns.
Garrett grabbed the ladder railing and scrambled back up, poking his head up through the round and open hatch. Another fusillade of enemy fire swept the Seawolf's superstructure, rounds slamming into her sail.
Captain Lawless was slumped against the cockpit's starboard side, huddled down, as if cold. "Skipper!" Garrett grabbed his arm and pulled; Lawless's head lolled around, left eye staring, revealing the gaping horror where the right side of his skull had been. Blood and brain tissue and chips of bone were splashed across the deck and bulwark in scarlet surprise. The left side of Lawless's binoculars were still gripped in his left hand; his right arm ended at the wrist.
There was no time to retrieve the captain's body, no time to think. Reacting by trained instinct alone, the conscious part of his mind numb, Garrett dropped back through the hatch, slamming it shut above him and dogging it tight.
More rounds slammed into the sail, one punching through with a violent bang. Garrett kept dropping through the sail levels, sealing the last hatch above him as he dropped through into the control room.
Lieutenant Tollini and the COB met him, staring. Everyone on the bridge was staring, and it took Garrett a second to realize that his uniform was covered with blood. "Mr. Garrett… " Dougherty said.
"The skipper's dead," Garrett said sharply. "Dive the boat!"
"We're going down to periscope depth, Captain," Tollini said. "That's about as deep as we can go without bottoming out."
It took Garrett another moment to play back in his mind what Tollini had just said. The diving officer had called him "Captain."
"Are you okay, sir?" Dougherty asked.
He nodded. "Ask me again when we're clear of this, COB."
This wasn't the way he'd wanted to return to command… but as the second man in the rank hierarchy, he was captain after the captain's death. Men failed. Men died. The crew and the boat kept going.
"Maneuvering!" he called. "I am taking command. Bring the helm left, forty degrees. Make revolutions for fifteen knots."
"Coming left to four-oh degrees, aye. Make revs for fifteen knots, aye."
He hit the intercom button by the periscope station. "Sonar! Conn!"
"Conn, Sonar, aye!" Toynbee replied.
"We're coming left forty degrees. See if you can pick up our shadow back there when we drop him out of our baffles."
"Roger that, sir."
"Weps. I want you to swim the warshot out of Tube One. Wire-guide it around to port for a baffles shot."
Ward looked startled. "Aye aye, sir. Swim the fish."
This was a relatively new tactical capability for American submarines. Though they generally still launched torpedoes the traditional way, it was possible to drive a torpedo out the tube without the usual burst — and noise — of compressed air.
This allowed for relatively silent launches and more flexibility in targeting. Wire-guided Mk 48 ADCAP torpedoes were steered by a crewman on the submarine, using a computer-joystick arrangement that sent electrical signals down the slender wire tying the torpedo to the boat. Gone were the days when steam-driven torpedoes were fired more or less straight at a target using a periscope fix and plotting data off of a mechanical angle-on-the-bow computer. Most modern submarines didn't even have stern torpedo tubes; Sea-wolf mounted four forward tubes slanted outward through her hull from the torpedo room. Once a fish was clear of the sub, it could be steered in any direction.
A loud ping sounded through the control room.
"Conn, Sonar," Toynbee reported. "Active sonar from the destroyer. He's pinging us."
Not that he needs to, Garrett thought. He knows exactly where we are. But the turning maneuver might possibly muddy their sonar picture for a critical few moments.
"Conn, Sonar! I have our shadow, designated Sierra One-five-four. Got him on the scatter off that active ping."
"Tell me."
"Two hundred twenty meters astern, bearing three-four-seven. I've got faint screw noise now, too, same heading. We're tentatively IDing him as a Kilo."
Which made the most sense. A diesel boat could follow Seawolf soundlessly, tracelessly… and was small enough to be handier in these tight and shallow quarters.
Another ping echoed through the hull.
"COB? What's the draft on a Luda-class destroyer?"
"Four meters, Captain. Uh… five and a bit, if you add the sonar dome under the bow."
"Damn," he said. "This is going to be tight."
And then all eyes went toward Seawolf's overhead and forward, where they could hear the deep-throated chug-chug-chug of the destroyer's twin screws, steadily approaching….
18
"Conn, Sonar! Destroyer changing aspect. He's turning into us!"
"Helm! Come hard right!" Garrett ordered. "Make revs for twenty knots!"
It was, he thought, a little wildly, an uncanny dance… but one ad-libbed rather than choreographed. Seawolf had turned left toward the destroyer; the destroyer had turned right toward Seawolf. Now Seawolf was veering off to the right, hoping to catch the destroyer off his guard.
And all the while, Seawolf's lone torpedo, still connected by an unraveling strand of slender wire, was circling far around to the left, coming up now on a moving point two hundred yards astern of the twisting submarine.
"Captain!" Ward announced from the weapons control board, just behind the helm station. "That last maneuver put our fish astern… two hundred yards."
"Hold it a moment more," Garrett said. He closed his eyes, picturing the positions of the dancers in this ballet in three dimensions… the Luda-class destroyer, the Seawolf, the torpedo, the Kilo….
Ping!
"Sonar, Conn! Do you still have our tail?"
"Negative, Skipper. Too much back-scatter off the seabed."
But he was still back there, somewhere…and almost certainly readying a torpedo or two of his own.