“Akula Nine is firing,” Martinez reported before she could.
Kristen concentrated, trying to block out the multiple noise signatures she heard so she could focus on the new sound. She then heard the telltale signature of surging bubbles and what sounded like a roaring screw churning through the water. “Torpedo in the water. Bearing zero-zero-five” she reported and then added, “Bearing constant!” This meant the torpedo the Akula had fired was coming right at them. “It sounds like a Shkval rocket torpedo. Speed undetermined, but she’s coming right at us.”
“Rocket torpedo inbound,” Miller barked into the microphone above his head in case Brodie in the control room hadn’t heard Kristen. “Bearing zero-zero-five! Bearing constant!”
Kristen suddenly felt herself pressed forward in the seat as the Seawolf increased speed to commence high-speed maneuvering. She reached for her seatbelt, realizing she’d forgotten to fasten it as those around her reached for handholds to help keep their balance.
The Tomahawk missile targeting the Alvand class frigate had cleared the water, cast off its casing, and ignited its turbojet motor before lowering back down to barely fifteen feet above the surface where it accelerated to near the speed of sound. The frigate picked up the inbound missile breaking the surface on its radar, but the radar operators barely had time to lean forward in their seats before the automatic alarm claxon sounded. Despite its effective range of nearly three hundred miles, the Tomahawk had appeared barely ten miles away. The Iranian crew manning the frigate was hardly well trained. They were accustomed to only mine laying and coastal patrolling. They’d never been involved in any realistic war games, and other than shouting to the bridge a warning about the inbound missile, the crew didn’t respond by turning on the limited jamming equipment they had on board to try and fool the Tomahawk.
It wouldn’t have helped.
The missile had acquired the frigate as soon as it leveled off above the waves. Its own radar locked on to the massive radar signature created by the frigate.
The general alarm claxon sounded throughout the frigate. One level-headed seaman thought to fire a chaff canister, filling the air with thousands of tiny pieces of aluminum foil in a vain attempt to confuse the missile’s radar. But they never had a chance. The Tomahawk’s active radar was state of the art. Even the chaff cloud appearing in front of the missile as it closed in on its prey didn’t distract the mindless machine as it suddenly streaked skyward.
A seaman on the deck of the frigate saw the missile arc upward and cheered in glee, assuming the missile had been distracted by the chaff cloud. But then the Tomahawk, having reached its programmed apogee, turned back downward to complete its “top down” attack on the helpless frigate. The missile slammed through the center of the ship and passed downward through multiple decks before the thousand pound explosive warhead detonated. The entire midsection of the tiny frigate was torn apart by the blast, immediately followed by a fireball as the remaining fuel in the missile ignited while its motor continued on through the frigate. In less than a second, the frigate had broken in half and was sinking.
“Tomahawk impact on the Alvand,” Martinez reported as the Seawolf continued to increase speed, heeling over slightly.
Kristen focused on the Akula, considering it the greatest threat. The sound of the charging Shkval rocket torpedo roared in her ears as it raced toward them at nearly two hundred miles an hour. But she could also hear the Aselsan decoy charging at over thirty knots away from the Seawolf as the submarine turned away from the trajectory of the incoming Russian torpedo.
The water around them was filled with competing sounds as both Kilos launched countermeasures and began running from the single MK 48 ADCAP torpedoes assigned to each of them. Each torpedo had acquired its target and had gone active with internal sonar. The result of all the activity in the vicinity was that Kristen was having a hard time focusing on the Akula which was much quieter than everything now racing around the Seawolf.
“Shkval now at one hundred ninety knots, range two thousand yards and closing,” Kristen reported. “Bearing constant. Akula Nine now passing through thirty-five knots and on a course due south.”
The racing Russian rocket torpedo was coming in hard, its goal not so much to hit and sink the Seawolf, but to force them to commence radical maneuvering to evade the torpedo and thus break the wire links with the multiple torpedoes the Seawolf currently had in the water. This had been the main reason the Russians had designed the revolutionary Shkval in the first place. It was a defensive weapon intended to force the Americans to commence high-speed maneuvering.
But Brodie wasn’t playing by those rules. The Seawolf was maneuvering, but was turning slowly toward the two Kilo submarines and not so radically the guidance cables might be cut.
“Shkval now one thousand yards. Bearing three-zero-five,” she reported, hearing the torpedo’s bearing change slightly, but there was no way to tell if it would miss them. Kristen heard the collision alarm sound and managed to pull her headphones off as the torpedo, racing in like a bullet through the water, closed in. Over the speaker above her head, she could hear the torpedo as it past just astern of the Seawolf.
She cringed, bracing herself for the blast.
The torpedo missed the Seawolf, but its proximity fuse initiated detonation just as the torpedo was passing astern of the submarine. Just how close it was she couldn’t be certain, but she felt the entire submarine shudder under the blast. All of their systems momentarily went off line as the submarine was forced downward by the stern. Kristen was flung forward but caught herself. Martinez wasn’t so lucky. His head crashed into the display in front of him. He fell back, slumping in his chair with blood pouring from his head as the submarine shuddered violently.
Kristen turned her attention away from the badly injured Martinez, knowing she had to focus on her task. She had no way of knowing how badly the Seawolf was damaged, but her system was coming back on line, and the Akula was still out there somewhere and possibly firing at them again. At first, all she could hear was the Seawolf’s hull still vibrating from the blast, but then she heard another explosion, this one more distant.
“He’s all fucked up!” someone near her shouted, drowning out the noise in her headphones.
“Get him out of there!” someone else yelled.
“I think he’s dead,” another shouted nearly in panic.
“Shut up, dammit!” Kristen barked reflexively as she glared at them. She then saw Chief Miller. He was leaning against the rear bulkhead and looked to be in pain. She didn’t know if he was injured but realized that pandemonium had come to the sonar shack. “Fabrini,” she ordered sharply, “get everyone back to their stations and get Martinez to sickbay!”
“Aye, ma’am,” Fabrini replied and quickly got everyone calmed down.
Kristen returned to listening as the others were silenced and put back to work. Kristen hazarded a worried glance at Chief Miller. He was still leaning against the bulkhead. “Senior Chief,” she called out, “are you hurt?”
He waved a hand at her in reply. “I’m okay,” he stammered. “I just had the wind knocked out of me.”