Attack of the Seawolf

He and Vaughn lifted Murphy onto the makeshift bed and covered him with a blanket. He was shivering, his skin pale. As Vaughn looked down at him. Murphy lifted his eyelids, squinting through the slits.

“Who?”

“What Skipper? You should try to rest, sir—” “Who is … Seawolfs … captain?”

“Pacino, sir,” Lennox said.

“Michael Pacino. He said he knows you.”

Murphy half-smiled, some color returning to his face, just before he lost consciousness again, this time his breathing slow and steady.

Vaughn stood.

“At least he’s alive.”

“Not for long. As soon as they’re done with Seawolf they’ll be coming after us.”

“Look,” Vaughn said, pointing to the waterfall sonar display.

“What the hell is that?”

A broad, incredibly loud sound blanked out the waterfall display for a few seconds, the noise narrowing to a streak that moved rapidly through the bearings, ending up on the bearing to the Chinese aircraft carrier.

“I don’t know, but I’m going to see.”

Lennox didn’t need to raise the scope to see what happened next. The sound of the explosion from the carrier was enough.

BOHAI HAIXIA STRAIT

When the ASW standoff missile floated to the surface, its central processor waited for the feel of air on the unit’s skin. The momentum of the tube launch quickly brought it to the choppy surface, and its accelerometer told it that its upward progress had momentarily stopped as it lost the buoyant force of the water. A broach sensor dried out and sent its signal to the central processor, the signal the unit waited for.

The rocket motor’s solid fuel lit with the energy of a barely controlled explosion, thrusting the missile from the sea into the air. Unlike a Javelin cruise missile, whose rockets merely did a pop up to give the jet sustainer engine a chance to spin up, the ASW standoff weapon was altogether rocket powered. Although its range was significantly less than a Javelin, it did not carry a jet engine or a large fuel tank or a set of control wing lets or an elaborate navigation system, all of which took up volume and weight. Instead, it had a lightweight processor, a simple tailfin positioner, a small radar transponder for final target confirmation, a relatively small rocket motor and a large charge of explosives. Its warhead was three times the size of the Javelin’s, the explosive power more than three times the punch because of its state-of-the-art shaped charge The Ow-sow’s nose cone was pointed, designed for supersonic flight, allowing it to cover enormous stretches of ocean in mere seconds, and making it more difficult to shoot down in mid-flight than a subsonic Javelin.

The missile now climbed to its apogee, a mere thousand feet, then began a dive to its target. By the time its transponder found the large target some two thousand yards ahead the missile was traveling at Mach 2.4 and still accelerating. It approached the target, having been airborne less than thirty-five seconds, and hit the aircraft carrier amidships on the port side, crashing into the number-two turbine room before detonating.

The explosion from the warhead blew a sixty-foot wide hole in the flight deck, knocked four turbines off their foundations, killed one hundred and seventy-five men and put a fifteen-foot gash in the ship’s hull.

At an altitude of twelve hundred meters, the limit of visibility, pilot Chu HuaFeng was traveling east, intent on closing the submarine contact that had been pinpointed by the helicopters of first and second squadrons, when the white-flame trail burst out of the sea west of the submarine contact. As he watched, stunned, the rocket traveled in a graceful flat arc. He barely realized that he had jerked the aircraft’s stick in a violent motion, trying to keep the rocket in view as it descended back toward the sea, never having risen more than a few hundred meters. He had the odd momentary thought that the rocket was beautiful, that its perfectly shaped arc was sculpted by the wonders of Newtonian physics. But in another compartment of his mind he began to realize that the missile was headed east, toward its target, and that the target could only be the Shaoguan, his father’s flagship.

And as the missile descended and hit the carrier and exploded into a hundred-meter-wide mushroom cloud of flame and smoke and shrapnel, Chu HuaFeng felt an explosion in his mind, an explosion of anger, as well as a trembling so intense that the jet was picking up the vibrations in his stick hand and converting it to aileron and elevator motion. His aircraft began to shake so violently that Lo Yun asked over the intercom if they had been hit. Only then could Chu focus his energy on flying and away from the sight of his father’s burning ship.

He brought the aircraft around and headed for the foamy sea that marked where the missile had been launched from below. The enemy submarine was there, he thought, but it would not be there long.

“Extend the MAD probe, Lo,” Chu ordered.

“And arm the depth charge.”