"Hit!" the sonar operator called over the intercom. "Torpedo three hit the target!"
Jian allowed himself to relax. He'd been following the chase for long minutes now, as it was relayed to him by his sonar officer. The twists, turns, and dodges of the American submarine had been spectacular, but at least one of the Chinese fish had ignored the decoys and homed in for the kill.
"Correction, Captain," the sonar officer announced. "I am not getting break-up noises." There was a hesitation. "Sir, target has blown his ballast tanks and is surfacing. He may be damaged…."
Jian slammed his palm against the periscope housing. Ancestors!
He immediately regretted the outburst, even unspoken. The men expected him to be passionless and cool.
He knew one simple fact, however. Either the American submarine would be sunk or crippled within the next few minutes, or it would turn on its attacker with the ferocity of a wounded tiger. If the first, there was no problem. If the second, however, Jian doubted that the Yinbi would survive the assault. Frankly, he was surprised the American hadn't sent a torpedo back down the line of attack. That bespoke a curious confidence on his adversary's part. Confidence or foolishness.
Jian never underestimated an opponent. If the American was that confident of finding and killing the Yinbi …
"Maneuvering! Come to zero-three-zero! Ahead slow, silent operation!"
The torpedo blast slammed against Virginia's aft hull like a sledgehammer, rolling the fast-rising submarine onto her port beam. In the control room, men were thrown from their seats — those who weren't buckled in. Instead of the ooh-gah of the emergency surface alarm, the swooping wail of the collision alarm cut through the shouts and cries of shaken men.
Garrett hadn't fallen out of his seat, not quite, but he'd had to cling to the arm and his touchscreen console with a grip that left his hands painful. Slowly, still surfacing, Virginia righted herself, and members of the control room watch began scrambling back to their stations.
No leaks in the control room… no thunderous blast of water exploding through the submarine like a detonating bomb. What the hell had happened?
"We're still in one piece, Captain!" Jorgensen called from a board where he could monitor leaks or damage throughout the boat. "Jesus! What happened?"
Garrett had the same information coming up as a schematic on his screen as well. "I'm not sure, XO," he replied. "Either that torpedo had a proximity fuse, or else it hit the turbulence from our EMBT blow." The initials were shorthand for Emergency Main Ballast Tank.
"Makes sense." Jorgensen nodded. "At this depth, hitting the MBT outflow would've been like hitting a solid wall. Either way…" He slapped the bulkhead fondly. "The old girl held together."
Old girl? Virginia was scarcely that on this, her first mission.
But Garrett knew he was feeling pretty old right now….
"Sonar! Where's that last torpedo?"
"Sorry, sir. We lost it there for a moment." Between the roar of the EMBT blow and the explosion itself, it was a miracle Queensly could still hear anything. "Torpedo two has definitely reacquired and is closing, bearing one-seven-oh, range three hundred!"
Too close! "Helm! Come left to zero-one-zero! Maneuvering, maintain flank!"
"Come left to zero-one-zero, aye! Maintain flank speed, aye aye!"
"Depth!"
"Passing two-seven-five feet, Captain! Ascending at eighteen feet per second!"
"Release countermeasures!"
"Countermeasures away!"
"Come left four-zero degrees!"
"Come left, four-zero degrees, aye aye!"
Virginia turned while still climbing, twisting away as the last torpedo homed in for the kill. Garrett could hear the torpedo now, they all could hear it… a faint, high-pitched whine growing louder… louder… accompanied by the ping of its sonar….
A scraping sound, metal grating on metal, sounded from overhead, from the sail. Garrett saw the faces of Jorgensen and several others go white… but then the whine faded.
"Christ! It missed us!" Queensly called over the comm link. "Correction… sir, I think it struck a glancing blow on the sail, but it didn't explode!"
It must have been deflected just enough by the countermeasures and Virginia's half twist to the side. That had been way too close for comfort.
"Track it, Sonar."
"Yessir! Still tracking. It's lost us… it's starting to circle… "
They weren't out of it yet. When that torpedo circled halfway around, it would pick them up again.
"Conn! Sonar! It's coming around again!"
Fortunately, it would have to cut a pretty wide circle to come about. And in the meantime, Virginia was going up on the roof.
And Garrett had one final bit of physics on his side in his limited bag of tricks.
Throughout the world's oceans, at a depth that varies with conditions between one hundred and two hundred fifty feet, is a layer called the thermocline where the warm waters near the surface change rapidly to the near-freezing chill of the depths. Because the speed of sound waves decreases sharply in the colder water, the thermocline tends to isolate sounds above the layer from those below. Subs and ship-borne sonar systems had a lot of trouble hearing submarines below the thermocline.
And submarines — or acoustically homing torpedoes — had a lot of trouble hearing targets above the thermocline as well.
Racing upward at a forty-five degree angle, "flanking it," as submariners would say, Virginia pierced the thermocline layer at a depth of 130 feet, then seconds later burst from the ocean and into the rain-swept night, hurtling so far out of the water that only her screw remained submerged. She hesitated there a moment, in an unlikely attempt to conquer the air… before falling forward like a breaching whale, hitting the water with a thunderous crash of spray.
The last torpedo swept by somewhere beneath her. Possibly it had been damaged by its glancing encounter with Virginia's sail, or possibly its fuel supply was nearly spent. In any case, the sounds of its engine and sonar pings were masked by the thermocline. Queensly reported he was no longer hearing it.
A few long minutes later, they could assume that its engine had run out of juice.
Garrett slumped back in the command chair, his uniform drenched with sweat, the strength leached from his body.
"Jesus H. Christ!" Jorgensen said, shaking his head. "You did it, Skipper!"
"Never seen a performance like that in all my years in the service!" Bollinger added. "Fuckin'-A!"
"Sonar! Any sign of the boat that 'bushed us?"
"Negative, Captain. If he's out there, he's laying low and keeping quiet."
"Put all your ears out, Queenie. If anything so much as twitches out there, I want to know."
"Aye aye, sir."
The battle had in fact been a draw. Virginia had survived — barely — but the first shot she'd ever tried to fire in anger had hung in the tube, and they'd come that close to being sent to the bottom. The enemy sub was still out there, doing what submarines do best.
Waiting and listening.
And in the meantime, Virginia was an easy target, wallowing on the surface with a smoke-filled torpedo room and fumes leaking through the boat. They would have to tend their wounds before going back and hunting down that enemy submarine… and hope to hell the enemy didn't come looking for them first.