Attack of the Seawolf

“The upper screen shows the last thirty minutes of history instead of just the last thirty seconds. The dark traces are the Mark 38 decoys. Look here at these lighter traces, the ones that sloped flat about fifteen minutes ago.” Eleven new traces were visible, each vertical at the bottom, sloping flat in the middle and vertical again at the top of the display.

“Those are torpedoes. They came out of our baffles and passed us here, where the traces are horizontal, then drove on ahead of us. They are now catching up to the decoys. In another twenty minutes or so the first wave of decoys will swim into the task force zone. The Chinese will detect them — I hope — and get confused, since there are apparently several submarines.

Then the volley of torpedoes will reach them, and after that, we and those closer decoys will reach the task force. By that time the Chinese should be sinking.”

“Won’t you be shooting at the surface ships?”

“Can’t. None of the torpedoes are working. We thought we had some healthy units but they all failed their self-checks. Two tubes work, but without an intact torpedo there’s no chance. We’ve got vertical launch tubes for cruise missiles, but without the firecontrol computer they’re just useless scrap metal.”

“So what happens after the Seawolfruns out of torpedoes?

Will we be out of hot water?”

Vaughn pushed the function keys on the sonar monitor, returning the original waterfall display, and turned to Bartholomay.

“Who the hell knows? Look, Bart, either we get out of the bay or we don’t.”

“I just don’t like being along for the ride. On an OP at least I have a finger on the trigger. Here, all I can do is wait inside this sewer pipe for you to drive us out.”

Lube Oil Vaughn looked at the SEAL, his face a mask of confidence, his stomach a nest of butterflies, his hands in his pockets to prevent anyone seeing them shake. He was one of only — two officers who could get the ship out, and if he didn’t look steady it would be that much harder to keep the men’s trust.

But the truth was, Vaughn was just as much a passenger as Black Bart.

At 1845 Kurt Lennox came into the control room, his black-rimmed, bloodshot eyes giving away the fact that he had been unable to sleep for days. Each minute stretched into hours, each hour a month. Lennox, Vaughn and Bartholomay stood over the chart table as if gathered around a campfire on a cold night.

“How much longer to international waters?” Lennox asked.

Vaughn walked his dividers across the chart, measured the distance, then grabbed a time-motion slide rule and spun the inner circle twice.

“About ninety minutes,” he said, “assuming we speed up to full when we hit the task force at the channel midpoint.”

“Goddamned long time,” Bart said.

“It’s a big goddamned channel,” Vaughn said, looking at the chronometer, wishing they had just one lousy torpedo.

P.L.A NAVY DESTROYER JINAN

Weapons Department Leader Chen Yun held up the binoculars and looked out the bridge windows at the water to the west. The wind blew the rain against the windshield, the sound like a sandblast rig from the shipyard. Outside the windows, the bay water was black, the sky turning dark brown as the light faded.

The water of the bay was choppy, the whitecaps phosphorescent in the dim light. The ship was on course north, two kilometers astern of a Jianghu frigate, which was two kilometers astern of another frigate.

Chen walked to the surface search radar display and put his face down to the hooded display, the rubber of the hood cold on his forehead. The circular scope was green, the rotating beam lighting up the land around them. The point of Lushun was sharp and clear to the north. The hump of Penglai was more distant, its shoreline fuzzy in the rain. Close to the center of the circle, a group of islands lit up and slowly faded with each rotation of the radar beam. Chen adjusted a range-display knob, setting the radius of the display circle to eight kilometers. The points of land vanished, the scope taken up with twelve dots arranged in an oblong rectangle, the center of the display on the east elongated edge of the rectangle. The dots were the twelve other ships of the task force, all steaming one behind another along an eleven-kilometer by two kilometer racetrack, pacing back and forth over the deep channel through the Bohai Haixia.

Chen didn’t like it. A Udaloy-class destroyer was not meant to march back and forth in formation as if on a parade ground; it was built to prowl the open seas in search of submarines, and when they were detected, to kill them. The ship should have been steaming independently, in a forward deployment, searching over open water for the submarines. To bottle them up here at a choke-point was stupid. Certainly that was fine for the frigates, but to put a sub-hunting Udaloy here made no sense. Even if they detected the subs now, the Udaloy would have a tough time getting to them in the restricted waters of the channel.