“Right full rudder all ahead flank,” the captain bellowed automatically. He punched the button for maneuvering. “Give me everything you’ve got…” His voice drifted off as he listened to the continuing sonar reports.
“High-speed screw… it’s in a search mode… not a hell of a lot higher off the bottom than we are…” The man’s voice droned on, reporting in exactly the same manner as he’d been trained, until he broke off excitedly. “Captain, something else just hit the water… same sounds… dead ahead…”
There was nowhere to run! One was astern, searching. They’d turned away from it. Now there was another in front of them. “Left full rudder.” There was no choice. They had to turn in some direction!
“Both still in search mode… wait one—” There was another pause, no more than seconds. The sonarman strained, his eyes closed, his whole being concentrating on the sounds in his headphones. “First one’s range gating.” The torpedo had ceased circling in search of the distinctive sound it was programmed for. It was now aware of its target, “It seems to be on the same course we were before turning… maybe it’s after our cavitation… now it seems to be turning this way slightly.”
Helena’s noise level was a red flag to a listening torpedo. “All stop. Breach the ship!” The torpedoes were too close, the captain reasoned. They were coming out of their search modes at a depth of two hundred feet going after a high-speed target radiating horrendous noise. Emergency surfacing was the only chance. There was no way those homing devices would stick to the bubbles from Helena’s prop for long. His one remaining choice was to go silent — hope that the torpedoes would lose contact. He felt the deck angling upward. Noisemakers now! “Launch the after signal ejector.”
In the background, the diving officer was speaking calmly to the planesmen. “Increase your angle.” They were going up too slowly!
Helena’s captain closed his eyes momentarily, separating the sounds around him. The sonarman was reporting, “…second torpedo has turned in our direction… she’s range gating, too… closing… second torpedo is also turning…” For a second he was quiet, then he added, “Captain, I think the second one’s locked on the first, coming right up its tail.”
“More angle!” he shouted, but the bow refused to come up properly. They were losing speed rapidly. The engines had been stopped to silence the noisy prop. With the loss of forward motion, the diving officer was unable to maintain an up angle — soon they would start slipping backward. There would be no choice. Before they plummeted straight back down, they would have to blow all the main ballast tanks! That in itself would create almost as much noise.
The captain grabbed for the polished chrome bar, shouting, ‘Emergency! Blow all main ballast tanks!”
“Down angle on the planes,” the diving officer barked as the ship’s control party fought to maintain the proper up bubble. A deep rumble of high-pressure air venting water from the ballast tanks was overpowering.
“Torpedo closing… now at about sixteen hundred yards… range gate… second appears to be following the first… noisemaker seems ineffective…”
The depth gauge read one hundred feet. The diving officer had brought the planes to a slight up angle. Lost forward motion was regained as the ship’s positive bouyancy propelled Helena toward the surface. Now they were roaring upward on the vented tanks.
“Fire more noisemakers!”
“Captain,” the sonarman called out, “I’ve got both torpedoes in a one second ping interval…” The tenor of his voice was increasing as he called out the progress of the two homing weapons.
“Fifty feet,” the diving officer called out. “Prepare to surface.” No one in the control room was moving. Each was caught up in the chase. There was no time to escape. There was only time to wait, to see if the torpedoes would pass below them.
“First torpedo’s in a continuous range gate. Captain, she’s onto us for sure.” His voice was now a squeaky, high-pitched tremor, fear overpowering his training. “The other’s lost in the return from the first… it’s following…”
“We’re on the surface.” Helena burst onto the rough Chukchi Sea like a balloon, floe ice rearing into the air before crashing down on her hull. An observer would have been overwhelmed by the sounds that echoed across the silent water—Helena breaking the surface, the roar of ice falling back on the hull, and then the deafening blast as the first torpedo detonated fifty feet forward of Helena’s stem. Seconds later, it was followed by the roar of a second, which had burst somewhere inside the hole blown by the first.
The initial blast opened the engineering spaces to the ocean. Water poured through fractured bulkheads, rolling the submarine clumsily to port. The second torpedo lifted Helena by the stern, her bow disappearing below the surface. Water rushed through engineering spaces on all decks, covering machinery, filling the reactor space, shorting out electrical wiring, ripping away successive bulkheads.
In the control room, men were tossed about like rag dolls with each blast. None were spared. Handholds vanished, dumping men on top of each other as the bow plunged under the surface. Then, the submarine slipped backward, the flooding aft hauling her stem downward. Emergency lights briefly illuminated the chaos to those still aware before they were tumbled backwards. The captain’s skull had been crushed when he was thrown into the periscope. But there was no longer any purpose for orders. The final sounds were screams of pain and fear as Helena’s bow rose quickly at a sharp angle. The control spaces filled with water as the submarine rolled to starboard, holding just for a moment on her side before she turned belly up, and slid backward out of sight.
The picture of Helena’s demise was quite accurate in Imperator’s control room. While a detached voice from sonar described the submarine’s frantic race with the torpedoes, Caesar displayed an animated projection of the entire sequence on the holographic imager. The silence that descended through the control room was all the more pronounced by the horror pictured for them. The idea of surfacing at the last moment to avoid the closing torpedoes was not entirely original — it had been theorized in the past — but it had never before been attempted by a nuclear submarine. The one argument against making this last-minute effort was simply that the noise created by high-pressure air rushing into the main ballast tanks could be as attractive to a homing warhead as that of the propeller.
Caesar was not programmed to picture how a submarine would appear as it was breaking up. For the sake of everyone in the control room, Hal Snow thanked his lucky stars. The final horror was difficult enough for those listening on the sonar.
For those in the engineering spaces of Helena, it was a quick death. Any survivors must have been killed by the second blast. It would have been longer in the forward spaces it the watertight doors to the engineering spaces held — at least for those who survived the battering as the submarine tossed about in her death throes.
Snow studied the chart, slowly circling the approximate spot where Helena had gone down — no more than three hundred feet! God — if the watertight doors held, there was a chance some of those forward could still be alive. The hull would hold at more than five times that depth. He asked his XO very quietly, so that no one would overhear them, to send a communications buoy to the surface giving Helena’s coordinates. Perhaps something could still be done.