He was pondering this question when the second blast went off.
The shock wasn’t powerful enough to jar Hwa from his seat, but it rang the hull like a gong. The remaining control room lights flickered, and red warning lamps began flashing on the Weapons Console.
Hwa jerked his head around toward the bow, the apparent direction of the detonation. “Si-bal! (Fuck!) Are we making way?”
“No, Comrade Captain!” said the helmsman. “We’re at dead stop, as you ordered.”
“Then we couldn’t have hit another mine,” Hwa said. “So what was that?”
No one had an answer.
The Weapons Officer looked around from his station. “Sir, torpedo tube number one is showing a critical fault. The torpedomen are investigating.”
“Si-bal!” said Hwa again. The Steel Wind only had two torpedo tubes. The loss of one tube represented a fifty percent reduction in the submarine’s firepower.
That was bad enough, but not knowing the cause of the explosions was worse.
“Ahead one-third,” Hwa said. “Take us to periscope depth.”
The order was sufficiently rare to catch the Diving Officer by surprise. The Steel Wind hunted and navigated almost exclusively by sonar. The submarine’s most reliable defense was the ability to transition to supercavitation mode in seconds, outrunning all enemy weapons. That transition wasn’t possible with ten meters of periscope extending beyond the supercav envelope. The resulting hydrodynamic drag would slow the submarine (possibly below supercavitation speed), and (potentially) rip the periscope out of its mountings — allowing seawater to rush in through the broken fittings.
The extra minute or so required to fully retract the periscope and avoid such a disaster might turn out to be more time than the submarine could afford.
“Do I have to repeat myself?” Hwa snapped.
The Diving Officer shook his head. “No, Comrade Captain!” He turned and began relaying orders.
Fifteen minutes later, after the usual pause at the forty meter mark to check for shapes and shadows, the Steel Wind reached periscope depth.
Hwa stepped to the scope stand, reached up and gripped the hydraulic control ring encircling the upper hull penetration for the periscope. He turned the control ring ten degrees to the right.
With a muted bump and a low hydraulic whine, the periscope emerged from its form-fitting recess below the deck plate. As the optics module rose into view, Hwa flipped the periscope handles into position. When the scope had risen about a meter, he crouched and pressed his face into the light shroud surrounding the eye piece.
He followed the optics module as it continued to rise, starting from a crouch and gradually straightening to his full standing height as he turned the scope through a 360 degree revolution.
Halfway through the circle, his concentration was disrupted by the third explosion. Somewhere aft by the sound of it, a suspicion that was quickly confirmed by muffled shouts from the direction of the engineering plant.
His eyes missed the shape on the first rapid sweep, but he spotted it on the second time around. Off the starboard bow, bearing two-seven-eight: a dark silhouette, running without lights.
A flick of a thumb tab engaged the scope’s light amplification mode. The image became grainier, but the shape took on sharper visual contrast. A destroyer, moving from starboard to port, crossing the Steel Wind’s line of advance.
The click of another tab called up the stereoscopic range finder. This created two ghostly images of the ship, and Hwa spent a few seconds turning the handgrip that adjusted the range finder’s prisms, until the images overlapped and merged.
He checked the estimated range from the readout at the top of the image. Six-thousand four-hundred meters. Jen-jang! How had the enemy ship gotten in so close without being detected by sonar?
Hwa could ask such questions at another time. For now, he had to move quickly. “Ready tube two! Prepare for a snap shot!”
“Comrade Captain!” said the Weapons Officer. “Tube two is now reporting a fault in the firing circuits.”
“Is the local firing mechanism operational?”
“Yes, sir! It seems to be, sir!”
“Then we’ll fire locally,” Hwa said. “Inform me when the torpedo is ready.”
He felt a tickle of something on his upper lip. His fingers swiped at it automatically and came away wet. His nose was bleeding again.
No time for that now.
“Sir, tube two is ready!”
Hwa adjusted the angle of the periscope to keep the destroyer in his crosshairs. His grip tightened on the handles.
“All Stations — Sonar has hydrophone effects off the port quarter! Bearing zero-nine-six, correlated to current position of Gremlin Zero-One. Initial classification: supercavitating torpedo!”
Ensign Moore jabbed his mike button. “Bridge — USWE. Crack the whip! We have an in-bound hostile torpedo. I say again — crack the whip! Break! UB — USWE. Kill Gremlin Zero-One with Anvil!”
The deck began to tilt as USS Bowie heeled into the first turn of the crack-the-whip evasion maneuver.
“UB, aye! Going to launch standby. Launch ordered. Weapon away — now, now, NOW!”
The entire ship vibrated as an ASROC missile blasted out of the forward vertical launch module and shot toward the sky. “Anvil away, no apparent casualties!”
On the screen of the CDRT, the red hostile-torpedo symbol had already covered half of the distance that separated the Bowie from the North Korean submarine.
It was the speed differential again, and USS Bowie was on the wrong end of the curve. Although it could not have emerged from the tube at its top speed, the supercav torpedo was probably moving at two-hundred knots by now. There was just no hope of outrunning the thing.
The commanding officer’s voice came over the net. “Bridge, this is Captain Heller. I have the conn. Hard right rudder! Steady on new course three-two-five!”
The Officer of the Deck acknowledged the order, and the ship rolled heavily as she came about.
Ensign Moore watched the screen, trying to figure out what the CO was thinking. This was nothing like the evasion maneuvers taught in the USWE course, and he couldn’t remember anything similar from the tactical manuals.
The OOD’s voice came over the net. “Steady on three-two-five, sir!”
“Very well,” said Captain Heller. “All stop.”
“All stop, aye, sir!”
This new order was just as confusing to Ensign Moore as the captain’s earlier commands had been. All stop? When they were running away from a torpedo? Wasn’t that the exact opposite of what you wanted to do in this situation?
The CO patched his headset into the 1MC general announcing circuit. When he spoke, his voice was heard from every speaker on the ship. “All hands, this is the Captain. Brace for shock!”
Ensign Moore gripped an overhead grab rail with one hand, and the edge of the CDRT console with the other. Just as he’d been trained to do, he bent his knees to absorb at least some of the shock that would be transmitted through the deck plating, and opened his mouth to keep the overpressure of the coming explosion from blowing out his eardrums.
He wondered if these precautions would offer any real benefit at all. And then he wondered if he was living out the last few seconds of his life.
Contrary to the speculations of the U.S. Navy’s acoustic analysts, the incoming weapon was not a Russian-built Shkval, or even the similar (but less capable) Iranian counterfeit model known as the Hoot. It was a Superkavitierender Unterwasserlaufkörper (Supercavitating Underwater Running Body) built in Kiel, Germany by the international arms firm Ozeankriegsfuhrungtechnologien (Ocean Warfare Technologies).