"We're going to do one fish each. Firing order Two, One. Do we have a solution light?" the captain asked.
"Valid solutions for both fish," the weapons officer replied.
"Ready Tube Two."
"Tube Two is ready in all respects, tube flooded, outer door is open, sir."
"Very well, Match generated bearings and… shoot!"
The handle was turned on the proper console. “Tube Two fired electrically, sir." Tucson shuddered through her length with the sudden explosion of compressed air that ejected the weapon into the seawater.
"Unit is running hot, straight, and normal, sir," Sonar reported.
"Very well, ready Tube One," the captain said next.
"Tube One is ready in all respects, tube is flooded, outer door is open," Weps announced again.
"Very well. Match generated bearings and shoot!" This command came as something of an exclamation. The captain figured he owed it to the crew, which was at battle stations, of course.
"Tube One fired electrically, sir," the petty officer announced after turning the handle again, with exactly the same physical effect on the ship.
"Unit Two running hot, straight, and normal, sir," Sonar said again. And with that, the captain took the five steps to the Sonar Room.
"Here we go, Cap'n," the leading sonarman said, pointing to the glass screen with a yellow grease pencil.
The nine thousand yards' distance to 406 translated to four and a half nautical miles. The target was traveling at a depth of less than a hundred feet, maybe transmitting to its base on the radio or something, and steaming along at a bare five knots, judging by the blade count. That worked out to a running time of just under five minutes for the first target, and then another hundred sixty seconds or so to the second one. The second shot would probably get a little more complicated than the first. Even if they failed to hear the Mark 48 ADCAP torpedo coming, a deaf man could not miss the sound of 800 pounds of Torpex going off underwater three miles away, and he'd try to maneuver, or do something more than break out the worry beads and say a few Hail Maos, or whatever prayer these people said. The captain leaned back into the attack center.
"Reload ADCAP into Tube Two, and a Harpoon into Tube One."
"Aye, Cap'n," the Weapons Officer acknowledged.
"Where's that frigate?" he asked the lead sonarman.
"Here, sir, Luda-class, an old clunker, steam-powered, bearing two-one-six, tooling along at about fourteen knots, by blade count."
"Time on Unit Two," the skipper called.
"Minute twenty seconds to impact, sir." The captain looked at the display. If Sierra-Eleven had sonarmen on duty, they weren't paying much attention to the world around them. That would change shortly.
"Okay, go active in thirty seconds."
"Aye, aye."
On the sonar display, the torpedo was dead on the tone line from 406. It seemed a shame to kill a submarine when you didn't even know its name…
"Going active on Unit Two," Weps called.
"There it is, sir," the sonarman said, pointing to a different part of the screen. The ultrasonic sonar lit up a new line, and fifteen seconds later-
–"Sierra-Eleven just kicked the gas, sir, look here, cavitation and blade count is going up, starting a turn to starboard… ain't gonna matter, sir," the sonarman knew from the display. You couldn't outmaneuver a -48.
"What about-Twelve?"
"He's heard it, too, Cap'n. Increasing speed and-" The sonarman flipped his headphones off. "Yeow! That hurt." He shook his head hard. "Unit impact on Sierra-Eleven, sir."
The captain picked up a spare set of headphones and plugged them in. The sea was still rumbling. The target's engine sounds had stopped almost at once-the visual display confirmed that, though the sixty-hertz line showed her generators were still-no, they stopped, too. He heard and saw the sound of blowing air. Whoever he was, he was trying to blow ballast and head for the roof, but without engine power… no, not much of a chance of that, was there? Then he shifted his eyes to the visual track of Sierra-Twelve. The fast-attack had been a little more awake, and was turning radically to port, and really kicking on the power. His plant noise was way up, as was his blade count… and he was blowing ballast tanks, too… why?
"Time on Unit One?" the captain called.
"Thirty seconds for original plot, probably a little longer now."
Not much longer, the skipper thought. The ADCAP was motoring along on the sunny side of sixty knots this close to the surface… Weps went active on it, and the fish was immediately in acquisition. A well-trained crew would have fired off a torpedo of their own, just to scare their attacker off, and maybe escape if the first fish missed-not much of a play, but it cost you nothing to do it, and maybe got you the satisfaction of having company arrive in hell right after you knocked on the door… but they didn't even get a decoy off. They must have all been asleep… certainly not very awake… not very alert… didn't they know there was a war going on…? Twenty-five seconds later, they found out the hard way, when another splotch appeared on the sonar display.
Well, he thought, two for two. That was pretty easy. He stepped back into the attack center and lifted a microphone. "Now hear this. This is the captain speaking. We just launched two fish on a pair of ChiComm submarines. We won't be seeing either one of them anymore. Well done to everybody. That is all." Then he looked over at his communications officer: "Prepare a dispatch to CINCLANT. 'Four Zero six destroyed at… Twenty-Two-Fifty-Six Zulu along with escorting SSN. Now engaging Frigate.' Send that off when we get to antenna depth."
"Yes, sir."
"Tracking party, we have a frigate bearing two-one-six. Let's get a track on him so we can Harpoon his ass."
"Aye, sir," said the lieutenant manning the tracking plot.
It was approaching six in the evening in Washington, where everybody who was somebody was watching TV, but not the commercial kind. The Dark Star feeds were going up on encrypted satellite links, and being distributed around Washington over dedicated military fiber-optic lines. One of those, of course, led to the White House Situation Room.
"Holy God," Ryan said. "It's like some kind of fucking video game. How long have we had this capability?"
"It's pretty new, Jack, and yeah," the Vice President agreed, "it is kind of obscene-but, well, it's just what the operators see. I mean, the times I splashed airplanes, I got to see it, just I was in a G-suit with a TOMCAT strapped to my back. Somehow this feels dirtier, man. Like watching a guy and a gal go at it, and not in training films-"
"What?"
"That's what you call porno flicks on the boats, Jack, 'training films.' But this is like peeking in a window on a guy's wedding night, and he doesn't know about it… feels kinda dirty."
"The people will like it," Arnie van Damm predicted. "The average guy out there, especially kids, to them it'll be like a movie."
"Maybe so, Arnie, but it's a snuff film. Real lives being snuffed out, and in large numbers. That division CP Diggs got with his MLRS rockets-I mean, Jesus Christ. It was like an act of an angry pagan god, like the meteor that got the dinosaurs, like a murderer wasting a kid in a schoolyard," Robby said, searching for just how dirty it felt to him. But it was business, not personal, for what little consolation that might be to the families of the departed.
"Getting some radio traffic," Tolkunov told General Bondarenko. The intelligence officer had half a dozen electronic-intelligence groups out, listening in on the frequencies used by the PLA. They usually spoke in coded phrases which were difficult to figure out, especially since the words changed on a day-to-day basis, along with identifying names for the units and personalities involved.