Chief Scott thought for a couple of seconds before answering. “Unknown nuclear submarine. Possibly Asian construction. That’s the closest I can get to a concrete classification.”
“Hey…” Denisha said slowly. “This might be our North Korean supercav… What if this is what that thing looks like when it’s not tearing up the ocean at three-hundred knots?”
“You may be right,” said the chief. “But even if you’re not, there’s only one friendly sub in the blockade zone, and this is definitely not the Albany.”
STG1 Wyatt reached for the 29MC microphone. “You want me to call it away, Chief?”
The chief nodded. “Do it.”
Wyatt pressed the mike button. When he spoke, his voice was heard over speakers in Combat Information Center, the bridge, and the CO’s and XO’s staterooms. “All Stations — Sonar has passive narrowband contact off the port quarter! Bearing one-seven-five! Initial classification: POSS-SUB, confidence level high!”
The antisubmarine warfare team went into action before he finished speaking.
The first sub engagement had been a complete (and rather nasty) surprise. It had come during blockade operations, when the Bowie’s watch standers had expected only surface action. The unprepared crew had scrambled to assemble an ASW team on the fly.
That mistake would not be repeated. Since the earlier encounter, the ship had been operating continually at Condition Two-AS, with two full antisubmarine warfare teams working in alternating watch shifts.
Team Two-AS Gold was on watch now, and the Undersea Warfare Evaluator spoke over the tactical net no more than ten seconds after the initial contact report. “All Stations — USWE. Bearing is clear. No surface tracks within forty degrees of one-seven-five. Contact is now designated as Gremlin Zero-One. Break. UB — USWE. Target Gremlin Zero-One with Anvil. Let me know when you have a firing solution. Break. TAO — USWE. Request permission to set Helo Ready-Five. Request batteries released.”
Lieutenant Amy Faulk was back in the Tactical Action Officer’s seat today. Her response came over the net almost immediately. “USWE — TAO. You have permission to set Helo Ready-Five. Stand by on your request for batteries released.”
The delay was normal operating procedure. Per Captain Heller’s standing orders, any Tactical Action Officer was authorized to fire defensive weapons at his or her own discretion, provided that the ship was being directly threatened. But the submarine contact had not (so far) made any overtly threatening moves. Consequently, an ASROC launch against Gremlin Zero-One would count as an offensive attack. To do that, the TAO needed authorization from the captain, who would already be on his way to CIC by now.
While they were waiting for permission to filter back down the chain of command, the ASW team had plenty to keep them busy. Out on the flight deck, the helo detachment would be prepping Sky Wolf to get airborne on five minutes’ notice. The rest of the team was working toward a fire control solution.
Denisha already had the contact fully locked and tagged. With every refresh cycle of the acoustic processors, updated bearing and frequency data were automatically transmitted to the Underwater Battery Fire Control System, which was already working the problem.
An ASW fire control solution is composed of four critical variables, which combine to identify a submarine’s position and movement through the water. Those variables are bearing, range, course, and speed.
The bearing of Gremlin Zero-One was already a known value. It was being tracked in real-time by Denisha and the towed array. The remaining three variables were still undetermined.
By comparing miniscule changes in the data stream from Denisha’s console, the fire control computer — under the watchful guidance of the UB operator — could use bearing rate and Doppler shift to calculate the three unknown variables, and “solve” the fire control problem.
If the resulting estimates were accurate enough, a weapon fired at the sub would have a good chance of hitting its target. If any of the estimates were too far off the mark, the weapon would miss and the submarine would counterattack. Because Gremlin Zero-One was probably the North Korean mystery sub, the Bowie could end up running from the same kind of supercav torpedoes that had killed the USS Mahan.
The bitch of it was, you could never really tell how accurate your fire control solution was. The only way to find out for sure was to launch a weapon and see how the dice rolled. If you got a hit, you knew your solution must have been pretty good. If you found yourself floating in a burning oil slick with half of your internal organs gone, maybe the fire control solution hadn’t been so great.
Denisha knew she should be afraid. Her own death might be only minutes away. The contact on her screen could be the last thing she ever saw. By all rights, she should be shitting her pants right now. But fear — if she felt any at all — was way down on her list of priorities.
You couldn’t run from a Shkval, or whatever those fucking rocket torpedoes were. They had a speed advantage of like two-hundred knots. If they came after you, there wasn’t a damned thing you could do, so there wasn’t much point in worrying. Besides, she was too pissed off to be scared.
Bernadette Tompkins from North Philly had been aboard the Mahan. “Bernie” had been a boot camp buddy who (just like Denisha) had joined the Navy to get out of a bad neighborhood and build a new life.
Teddy Hicks from Sonar A-School had been on the Mahan too. He’d been a tall quiet boy, with big hands and a shy smile.
Bernie and Teddy hadn’t been family, or even close friends, but they had meant something to Denisha. She had cared about them. And now they were dead.
Neither one had made it out of the Mahan alive. Denisha couldn’t stop thinking about that, wondering what it must have been like.
Had the end been fast and painless? The quick hammer blow of the big explosion and then nothing? Or had it been a prolonged nightmare of terror and pain? Trapped and bleeding in the powerless wreck of the sinking destroyer — scrabbling in the dark to find air pockets as the water rushed in through every crack, every hole, every broken seal. Fighting for ten more seconds of breath. Five more… One more… Pleading with a god who either didn’t exist, or couldn’t be bothered to answer the prayers of people who actually needed him.
None of these thoughts awoke fear in Denisha’s mind. Instead, they stoked the fires of her anger, and strengthened her determination to kill the submarine that had destroyed the Mahan.
She wished the chief and the Sonar Supe would stop hovering behind her chair, but she couldn’t realistically expect them to go anywhere else. For the next several minutes, her display screens were the center of the universe.
“Contact isn’t maneuvering,” observed Wyatt. “Probably finalizing his own firing solution. Getting ready to blow us away.”
Chief Scott nodded. “That’s one of the hard parts of being a sub hunter. You never know how close the other guy is to pulling the trigger.”
Denisha kept her eyes on the contact and tried to ignore the conversation taking place behind her.
The target was showing slow left bearing drift, gradually moving toward the aft end of the array. She recentered her display to shift the submarine back to the middle of the screen. She considered tweaking the processor thresholds to bring some of the weaker frequencies into greater prominence, but decided not to press her luck.