The torpedo alarm blared, jolting Williams to full attention. Had to be false, he thought. No way could a Chinese sub get close enough to launch on them without being picked up by his sonar operators.
Next to Williams, Lieutenant Umsle, the Decatur’s tactical action officer, was already on his phone. “Sonar’s confirming a launch, sir.”
In an instant, the ship’s morale became the least of Williams’s problems. “General quarters!” he said. “Immediately!”
A siren rang across the ship. “General quarters! All hands to battle stations! This is not a drill!”
Umsle listened for a few seconds more before hanging up. “The good news is we should have plenty of time. It’s way out. Twenty thousand meters.”
Even a fast torpedo covered only forty-five knots an hour, about 1,300 meters a minute. The Decatur would have at least fifteen minutes for evasive action, and the fish would probably run out of fuel before it reached the Decatur. Obviously, the Chinese captain had been so worried that he would be spotted that he had been afraid to launch from close in.
“Full power to the turbines and hard left,” Williams said. Preserving his ship was the first priority. Then the Navy could bring its attack subs into the area and take out the Chinese sub that had been foolish enough to make this hopeless swipe.
“Yes, sir.” A jolt of power ran through the ship as the engines began to produce peak power.
Umsle’s phone rang again. He listened, then handed Williams the black handset. “You need to hear this, sir.”
“Sir.” It was Terry Cyrus, the Decatur’s sonar chief. “We’re getting an unusual read. The bogey looks like it’s running at two hundred fifty knots.”
“That can’t be right.”
“I know. But it is.”
A Shkval? Those were Russian, and anyway they didn’t work.
“You’re certain?”
“Certain, sir. The arrays are running perfectly. It’s unmistakable.”
“Is it on us?”
“Unclear. It may be a two-stager.” In other words, the missile would slow once it got close to the Decatur and become a conventional acoustic wake-homing torpedo.
“Okay. Assuming it’s on us, how many minutes to impact?”
“Three.”
Three minutes. “Thank you, chief.” Williams turned to Umsle. “Hail the XO”—the executive officer, the Decatur‘s second-in-command, currently on the bridge—“and tell him to get the damage teams ready for impact in three minutes. We’re not outrunning this thing.”
THE NEXT MINUTES SEEMED to pass in a single breath. The torpedo-missile, whatever it was, closed steadily. It seemed to be running blind, not changing course to track the Decatur, but that didn’t comfort Williams. It surely would deploy a second guidance system once it got close. Indeed, two miles from the Decatur, the torpedo surfaced briefly and corrected its course, turning toward the destroyer.
What Williams didn’t know was that the Typhoon had a GPS system and a satellite transceiver that linked it to the Bei overhead, enabling it to home in on the Decatur effortlessly. The Decatur‘s towed array, which created a noisy “wake” capable of confusing a conventional acoustic homing torpedo, had no chance of stopping the Typhoon.
Once the torpedo corrected its course, Williams accepted the inevitable. Time to focus on saving his men. “Clear the turbine room,” he said to Umsle. The engine rooms were close to the waterline and filled with heavy equipment — among the most vulnerable spaces on the ship. “And tell everyone else to buckle down for impact.”
For just a second, Williams let himself pray. Please, God, make it a dud.
It wasn’t.
The explosion cut through the destroyer’s half-inch-thick steel hull, tearing a twelve-foot hole just above the waterline. For a few moments, chaos ruled. The 8,000-ton warship shuddered with the impact, then began to list. Water roared through the hole in the armored plates, flooding the turbine room. Eleven sailors died in the explosion, and six others were swept into the ocean, their bodies never recovered. Fuel poured out of a line burst by the explosion, setting off two small fires.
Still, Williams was proud of the way his crew and his ship responded after the explosion. The years of emergency training had paid off. Within three minutes, the Decatur‘s firefighting squads had put out the fires, the most serious threat to the integrity of the ship. Within seven minutes, the bulkheads were sealed and Williams had his first damage report. And five minutes after that, the most seriously injured sailors had been evacuated and were receiving medical attention in the infirmary, awaiting helicopter transfer to the Reagan.
At that point Williams allowed himself to think for the first time of what the Chinese had done. The sub was gone. The explosion had damaged the Decatur’ s sonar gear, and even if he could find the sub, Williams was in no position to chase it. Not with his boat crippled, not facing this silent submarine and mysterious supertorpedo. Already the Navy had begun to search for the sub, moving a half-dozen surface ships and three attack submarines toward its last known location. Williams wondered if they’d find it. It had sure sneaked up on his sonar operators, and they graded above average every time the Navy tested them. The Chinese had obviously improved their technology in the last couple of years. The fleet was going to have to be much more careful out here, Williams knew that much.
He knew something else too. New torpedoes, new sub, new whatever, the Chinese had made a big mistake today. Did they really think that the United States wouldn’t punish them for what they’d done?
32
WELLS SNAPPED AWAKE.
And wished he hadn’t. Lava burned through his right shoulder, the one he’d dislocated in Afghanistan. He twisted his head, looking around, trying to get his bearings. He seemed to be… he was… hanging off the ground, trussed like a pig in a slaughterhouse. His wrists were handcuffed over his head, dangling from a steel chain attached to the wall behind him. His ankles were pulled up behind so they were at waist height and attached to shackles mounted directly to the wall. His knees and shoulders bore all his weight, and his body tilted forward, over the cement floor. If his arms were cut loose, he’d slam his head on it before he could get his hands down to break his fall. He tried to hold himself still; the slightest twitch caused the pain in his shoulder to spike, tendons catching fire one by one.
Wells looked around the room. His pants, shirt, and shoes and socks sat neatly in a corner. But they hadn’t taken off his black, Halloween-themed boxers. Exley had tried to switch him to boxer-briefs, promising that they’d flatter him, her only effort to upgrade his wardrobe. Now he was glad he’d refused. Though even formfitting shorts might be less ridiculous than smiling jack-o‘-lanterns. Trick or treat indeed. What underwear went best with torture, anyway? Wells supposed the question was unanswerable. Black might be good choice. Hide the blood.
A tiny part of him admired the precision of the setup. His captors could get at his face, his legs, his neck, his everything, without repositioning him. Escape was a fantasy. The shackles were so tight he could hardly feel his hands and feet. He would be up here until they let him out. Or he died.