“Five hundred yards,” Fabrini reported as the other sonar operators prepared for the torpedo impact. Goodman literally groaned beside her as the torpedo bore in remorselessly.
“Three hundred yards,”
“Launch countermeasures,” she heard Brodie’s calm voice. “Hard right rudder, all stop.”
The Seawolf turned abruptly, causing the deck to pitch wildly to one side. Kristen tensed her muscles to hold herself erect and in front of her display. She knew what Brodie was trying to do. By turning sharply at high speed, the Seawolf’s huge rudder bit into the water and created a huge knuckle of swirling water and air bubbles into which he also launched their countermeasures. The result would hopefully look like a real target to the inbound torpedo and allow the Seawolf to escape yet again. But with the inbound torpedo already locked onto them with its own sonar…
Despite the alarms, despite the warnings, no one was ready for the blast when it came.
The Seawolf was slammed, as if by a massive fist, and thrown sideways. Several men screamed in fear as the lights twinkled and went out. The submarine shuddered violently. For a moment, Kristen thought her seat had broken loose from the deck as she was thrown viciously to the side.
She hit the console and barely avoided smashing her skull into the bulkhead. Emergency lighting came on immediately, and she sat up carefully. Her screens were blank, and Kristen glanced to her left to see that all of the other systems were down as well. She expected to hear the sound of the Seawolf’s ballast tanks blowing and lifting them to the surface, but instead she heard a far worse sound: water streaming in.
Kristen removed her seatbelt automatically as men donned their EABs. She climbed over two men who’d been thrown to the deck by the blast and then went through the hatch to see a ruptured pipe spraying water in the control room. She turned forward, remembering a valve in the passageway for the fractured saltwater line and ran for it. The sound of men shouting in the control room as they struggled to seal the damaged pipe, along with more ominous sounds of alarms blaring, assaulted her senses as sparks from shorted out systems fell in the passageway.
Kristen reached the valve and began turning it, forcing her arms to work and ignore her instincts screaming for her to run. They were sinking, and they needed to evacuate the stricken submarine. But she squelched these morbid thoughts and turned the valve as fast as she could.
Kristen heard the spraying water stop. She turned, looking down the dimly lit passageway to the control room beyond. Regular lighting still hadn’t returned, but she worked her way back past the sonar shack and into the control room as systems started coming back on line. Brodie was soaked from spraying water and there was standing water on the deck. Plus, several men were injured from being thrown about by the blast.
“COB, get me a damage report,” Brodie ordered as he made his way forward to the helm control. “Are you okay?” he asked as he reached the helm and saw her standing in the hatchway.
She ignored any concern for herself, knowing that if the submarine was going down, her injuries were irrelevant. “How bad are we hit?” she asked instead.
“I don’t know yet,” he admitted. “We’ve lost the reactor for certain and are currently on batteries. What does it look like in sonar?”
Kristen shook her head. “We lost power when the reactor scrammed. I’ll check and see what’s come back on line.”
Brodie nodded in response as he ordered the planesman to bring them down. Most men in his position, would surface, but even now, Brodie’s instincts drove him toward the depths and safety.
Kristen returned to sonar and saw the narrowband stack and the spectrum analyzer coming back on line, but everything else was dark. “Get some technicians in here,” she ordered Fabrini and then directed the others to go through the emergency procedures while she returned to the spectrum analyzer.
Kristen again took her seat and strapped in, automatically reaching for the headphones as she felt something she’d never felt before. The Seawolf seemed to strike something. The boat had already been going slow, but now suddenly slowed abruptly and tilted to one side as they gently struck the sandy bottom, coming to rest on the sea floor. The boat didn’t sit even though, and was tilted downward by the bow ten degrees and canted to the starboard side by nearly fifteen degrees.
“What the fuck’s happening?” someone shouted in panic.
“Dammit!” she barked angrily. She was as scared as anyone, but panicking would help none of them. “Settle down and get back on your system checks and damage control procedures!”
The sonar operators returned to their duties, but were — like her — clearly shaken by the fact they were now resting on the bottom of the Persian Gulf.
Kristen ran a systems check as soon as her equipment came back on line. “Starboard passive arrays are down, but the bow mounted sonar is still functioning,” she told Fabrini.
Fabrini reported to the control room as technicians arrived to begin assessing the damage and repairing it. The acoustic intercept box came back on line after a few minutes, a fuse having been tripped in a junction box in the passageway. But the broadband and classification stack would be at least twenty minutes. Similar teams were already moving throughout the submarine trying to repair damaged systems.
The hatch opened and Brodie appeared. She half expected him to rip into the sonar crew for allowing an enemy to sneak up on them, but he was far beyond recriminations. Instead, he patted a few men on the shoulder comfortingly as he made his way back to where she was seated and Fabrini was standing. “What can you still do?” he asked, speaking directly to her.
Kristen motioned to the various stacks and other equipment. “We’re still putting things back together in here, sir,” she explained in little more than a whisper. “But the hull arrays are all off line. All we have at present is the bow mounted sonar.”
“Okay,” he replied with exasperating calm, “then the bow mounted will have to be enough.”
Her first thought after realizing they weren’t sinking was that they would turn and escape back out of the Gulf. But his tone of voice and mannerisms made it clear he was determined to press on. Kristen had never found cause to question him. But now she hesitated, staring. She was scared. She wanted to live. The Seawolf was potentially fatally wounded; they still didn’t know for certain. Yet, despite this, he was focused on the mission before them.
Regardless of the risk.
“Do you have any idea what shot at us?” he asked.
“Only that it was a submarine,” Kristen replied, catching a hint of his scent and immediately remembering her dream and how he’d smelled exactly as he currently did. The dream had been so real she glanced at his neck and cheek where she had brushed against him. But he was oblivious to her thoughts.
“That’s all right, we’ll soon have a chance to set things right,” he said confidently.
“How so, Skipper?” Fabrini asked.
“Unless I miss my guess, whoever shot at us is on his way right now to finish us off,” Brodie warned them. “So, we need everyone in here looking sharp. We’re all tired, but we can’t afford to let our guard down.”
With that, Brodie departed.
Kristen quickly questioned everyone who’d been on duty when the surprise attack occurred. But they could give her very little information. The attack had come at them from their baffles, which meant someone had either sneaked in behind them, or more likely, someone had been lying quietly in ambush as the Seawolf sailed by.