Attack of the Seawolf

The firing sequence continued. When Feyley launched a tube, the torpedo room crew shut the outer door, drained the tube, opened the inner door and rammed another Javelin in, connected the power and signal leads and shut the door so that when the tube’s turn came up three or four minutes later the weapon was spun up and warm and ready to fire. By 1750 the room’s Javelin missiles were gone, all of them floating silently in their watertight capsules below the surface of the bay, waiting for their timers to reach zero hour, 1900, when they would broach, open their nose cones and unleash the rocket-powered cruise missiles. By that time, Seawolf would be far down the channel, within a few hundred yards of the northern channel’s task force. Pacino ordered the ship to enter the channel and proceed east at twenty-five knots while the crew began to load Mark 38 decoys, the torpedo-sized noisemakers programmed to radiate the same noises as a Los Angelesclass submarine, able to be programmed to maneuver in set patterns or follow a channel. By 1812 the initial volley of Mark 38s had been fired and the torpedo room was set up to launch Mark 50 Hullcrusher torpedoes. When they were all gone, except the one earmarked for tube eight, the final volley of Mark 38 decoys was launched.

By 1830, less than an hour after he had started, Pacino’s torpedo room was empty, all weapons gone except tube eight’s Mark 50 and the ASW Standoff Weapon. Pacino took a deep breath and leaned against a railing of the periscope stand, his ears aching from the forty-three tube launches. He checked the chart. Seawolf was twelve miles into the channel, the boundaries of the restricted water narrowing on either side. The throat of the channel was another thirteen miles ahead. Somewhere further down the channel, eleven Mark 50 torpedoes, twelve Mark 38 decoys and the Tampa were making their way east. To the south, there were eight decoys and two torpedoes heading for the entrance to the southern passage at Miaodao, designed to confuse the southwest surface task force.

Pacino couldn’t help wondering what was going on inside the Tampa. At least he had, more or less, control of his destiny. Those guys were passengers, along for the ride. Pacino looked at Jeff Joseph’s Pos Two display at the circle marking Friendly One, now ahead of them by six miles to the east. Pacino plotted a dot on the chart, the position of the Tampa, then stared at the dot, as if by looking at a mark of pencil on the paper on the chart table he could project his mind into the hull of Murphy’s submarine.

At 1851 the first decoy’s acoustic emissions alerted the surface force at the channel midpoint that the intruder submarine was inbound. From that moment on, Pacino had no more time to think about the Tampa or even about Sean Murphy. bohai haixia strait USS tampa

Lieutenant Bartholomay looked up from the chart table in the control room, hoping to see in Lieutenant Commander Vaughn’s face that what showed on the chart was not real.

“Eng, what are you doing here?” Bart asked, his finger pointing to the chart.

“I’m driving down the channel,” Vaughn said, leaning on the periscope pole.

“But you’re driving straight for the surface ships.

Can’t they detect you? Won’t they depth-charge us or something?”

“Come and look at this.”

Bart joined Vaughn in front of the Pos One console.

Set into the overhead was the sonar display console, the broadband waterfall display selected off the sonar spherical array in the nose cone

“See the waterfall? Those vertical streaks falling down the screen are noises, each noise a contact, and their horizontal positions on the display are their true bearings from us. The vertical position is time, the new at the top, the old at the bottom, the new replacing the old. The old falls off the screen, giving it the name waterfall. How many vertical streaks do you see?”

Bart counted: “Twelve. No, thirteen with this dark trace at one hundred degrees.”

“The one zero zero trace is the surface force directly ahead. The other twelve traces are twelve Tampas.”

“Say what?”

“Every one of those noises is a 688-class submarine.

At least so it will appear to the Chinese. Those are Mark 38 decoys. They are torpedo-sized, with large fuel tanks and a computer brain that steers them on a programmed course. In the nose cone of the unit is a sonar transducer that emits noises sounding exactly like this submarine. To the surface ships, it will look like there are thirteen subs coming.”

“So?” Bart said.

“So they shoot a dozen more depth-charge things than normal, and kill us a few seconds later. Is this the great plan you and Lennox have been hatching?”

“Only part of it.”

Vaughn pressed a sequence of touch keys on the lower face of the monitor panel, dividing the waterfall display into two waterfalls.