But to her immense surprise, they didn’t argue. Hicks and Goodman went back to work on their stacks while Fabrini directed the two men she’d designated to get the stricken chief to Doc Reed.
Kristen did her best to put concern for Miller out of her mind as she returned to searching the depths while Goodman reported on the Audacious and the torpedo closing in on her. “Range six hundred yards and closing,” he said, beginning the deadly countdown.
Kristen blocked out the sound. Instead, she listened to the depths in the direction the Akula had fired on them from.
“Four hundred yards.”
Kristen ignored the grim report and stayed focused on the distant Akula. She was rewarded a moment later when she heard the slightest whisper of sound: water rushing softly as if through a tube.
“Submerged contact, bearing zero-one-four. Submarine flooding its tubes.”
“Two hundred yards,” Goodman reported at the same time, as if ringing the death knell for the Audacious.
Kristen put her hands to her headphones, ready to remove them but anxious to hear more. Then she heard the MK48 they’d recently fired go active as Brodie ordered the tracking party to engage the torpedo’s seeker head and light up the water around where the Akula had to be hiding, lashing the sea in front of the torpedo with active sonar.
Kristen removed her headphones as the torpedo destined for the Audacious exploded. She didn’t wait for the shockwave to finish reverberating around them before slipping her headphones back on to be rewarded by the sound of the Akula moving and firing another rocket torpedo.
“Akula Nine, bearing zero-one-four,” she reported as the Akula turned away from the homing MK-48 ADCAP now racing toward it at over fifty knots. “Shkval torpedo in the water. Passing through seventy knots. Speed increasing rapidly.”
“Sonar, where’s that torpedo heading?” Brodie asked coolly.
“The Russian fired the rocket back down the bearing of the MK-48,” Hicks replied.
Now they realized why Brodie had fired the MK48 without a target. After launch, the torpedo swam away from the Seawolf at a diagonal. So, when it went active and headed for the Akula, it was no longer on a direct line between the Seawolf and the Russian. This meant the incoming rocket torpedo was heading not at the Seawolf, but at empty sea.
“Con, sonar,” Kristen reported. “Akula Nine now at thirty-five knots, bearing three-five-eight. Our MK-48 is at fifty-five knots and homing in on active sonar.”
“Roger, sonar. What’s the status on the Audacious?” Brodie asked. She knew this had to be hard on him. She’d only met the British crew briefly while at Sasebo, whereas Brodie and Captain Gardener were lifelong friends.
“She’s trying to get to the surface, Captain,” Fabrini reported. “We’re picking up a lot of transients coming from her. She sounds to be pretty beat up.”
“Roger that.”
Three seconds later Kristen heard another MK48 clear its tube and head for the Akula. The Akula was racing away from the Seawolf at flank speed, trying to outrun the first MK48 coming at it, so the Russian would never hear the second MK48 over the noise of her own power plant.
Kristen listened as the Akula pulled out all the stops in a futile effort to gain more speed. The Akula had been a tough opponent, tougher than it should’ve been. The Russian had outsmarted a MK-48 and sent two Shkvals at the Seawolf. But now that the situation was reversed, Kristen felt no sense of pride. They’d done what they had to do, but she could find no pleasure in it.
She passed the fleeing submarine off to Goodman who started calling out the ever-decreasing range between the Akula and the MK-48, which appeared to have a solid lock on the fleeing Russian. “Five hundred yards. The Akula has launched counter measures and is turning. Coming shallow,” Goodman reported.
Kristen listened impassively.
“Range two hundred…” Goodman said with excitement in his voice. A few seconds later, the torpedo detonated. “Gotcha, you cocksucker!” Goodman nearly cheered, only to be thumped on the back of the head by Fabrini who was standing behind him.
“Knock it off,” Fabrini barked. “That damn well coulda been us.”
They listened as the Akula, now making all kinds of noise, tried to run away from the second MK-48 closing in on the double-hulled, fast-attack boat. But the Akula, now injured and with what sounded like a badly damaged screw, had no chance. They managed to reach the surface, but the second MK-48 bore in on them relentlessly, striking less than a minute later.
Kristen listened as the Akula’s blade noises stopped and the sound of her power plant was replaced by alarm claxons from inside the submarine. There was a secondary explosion, and over the speaker above their heads the men in the sonar room heard the Akula beginning to slip back beneath the waves. There were a lot of transients and Kristen assumed it was the sound of men abandoning the sinking submarine. She couldn’t help but feel sympathy for them. Odds were many were already dead, and many more would not get off the boat before she plunged back into the depths.
Chapter Twenty Two
Kristen reported to the control room ready to deliver a damage report. Ski had arrived from engineering, and she saw he was soaked in seawater. Apparently there was some flooding in engineering. She bit her lip at the thought of how close they’d come. She then noticed Brodie on the periscope platform talking into the Gertrude.
The Gertrude was a rather crude but very effective sound system that allowed two submarines, when very close, to communicate through the water without sending out any radio signal. Brodie was in the process of speaking to his counterpart on the Audacious and getting a damage report from his old friend, Alec Gardener.
“It sounds like you’re out of it, Alec,” Brodie told him.
There was a long pause, and then Kristen heard Gardener’s voice over the squawk box, “I’d prefer not leaving you Yanks to have all the fun, Sean.”
“Nah,” Brodie responded. “Get your people out of here. We’ll clean up what’s left,”
She didn’t know how badly damaged the Audacious was. In the sonar shack, Kristen had clearly heard what sounded like metal banging alongside of the British submarine’s hull. After surfacing, the Audacious had been able to submerge again, but she was clearly in no condition to continue the fight.
“There’re at least two more Akulas in the area, old boy,” Gardener warned Brodie. “They’re going to come looking for you.”
Brodie’s response was dead serious, “They better be damn careful they don’t find me.”
“Good luck, Sean. Sorry to leave you like this.”
“Don’t sweat it. Buy me a pint when we get back to the beach.”
“Count on it, mate. Good hunting.”
Brodie hung up the Gertrude.
Kristen waited as Brodie received detailed damage control reports from the XO and the Chief Engineer. Graves was also soaked to the bone with seawater. Two pipes had ruptured following the first torpedo detonation, and the Seawolf had taken on several tons of water before they’d managed to seal the leaks.