Attack of the Seawolf

“Whiskey, this is Bourbon, over.” He listened while looking out the periscope at the pier. Any minute the prisoners would be moved, he thought. He had to act which meant launch the missiles. He fought for control as he called into the microphone a second time.

“Whiskey, Whiskey, this is Bourbon, over. I say again. Whiskey, this is Bourbon, come in, over.”

Still nothing from the SEALs. There was the off chance that they couldn’t transmit, could only listen.

Pacino decided to send his message and hope they received it. He didn’t want to think what would happen if they didn’t.

“Whiskey, this is Bourbon, break. I am executing Plan Juliet. I say again, I am executing Plan Juliet, break. Bourbon, out.”

What else could he do? The satchel charges were not laid in time, the SEALs had not yet opened fire on the pier, and they didn’t answer the radio call. Plan Juliet, “J” for Javelin, was the fallback.

Pacino snapped up the grips on the periscope and rotated the control ring, sending the pole back down into the well. He turned to stand at the railing and looked out at the assembled battle stations watch standers The time had come. The show was his now.

“Attention in the firecontrol team. We’re executing Plan Juliet; the Chinese are getting ready to off load Tampa’s crew onto buses waiting at the pier. Firingpoint procedures. Javelin missiles, tube one Target Three, tube two Target Two.”

“Ship ready,” Tim Turner said.

“Weapons ready,” Feyley reported from the weapon-control panel.

“Solutions ready,” Keebes said in front of Pos Two.

“Tube one,” Pacino ordered.

“Shoot.”

“Fire,” Feyley barked from the WCP, pulling the trigger. From the deck below the violent blast of the tube belching the missile into the sea popped the eardrums of the men in the control room.

“Tube two. Shoot.”

“Fire,” Feyley said again. Again the tube ejection mechanism filled the ship with a roaring boom as the ultra-high-pressure air loaded a piston that pressurized a water tank surrounding the torpedo tube, the pressurized water pushing the Javelin’s capsule out of the tube like a schoolboy’s spit wad flying out of a straw.

“Tubes one and two fired electrically,” Feyley reported.

“Conn, Sonar, own-ship’s units, normal launches.”

Pacino wondered what the Chinese on the pier were thinking at that moment.

“Off’sa’deck,” Pacino ordered Turner, “train the thruster to two seven zero and turn the ship around to the east. Let’s get the hell away from the end of the pier.”

“Aye, sir.”

Somewhere above them two solid fuel rockets were igniting, sending two cruise missiles at two of the surface warships. It would not do for them to remain too long under the rocket plumes, two fingers pointing at their position.

“Conn, Sonar, we have rocket-motor ignition, units one and two.”

Javelin Unit One was ejected from the starboard side of the Seawolf by the water pressure of the tube. Silently it glided from the tube, accelerating as it slipped past the skin of the ship and emerged fully over sixty feet below the murky surface of the Go Hai Bay. As the stern of the encapsulated missile came out of the tube door, twin fins snapped down into place and acted as elevators, turning the missile toward the surface above. The missile was moving at thirty feet per second as it angled upward, reaching the surface three seconds after it left the tube. The nose cone of the capsule broached, sensing balmy May air on its surface, drying out two of the electronic sensors that proved it was no longer underwater. Next, the nose cone of the capsule blew off, exposing the nose cone of the Javelin missile inside.

For a moment the capsule bobbed in the water, the lid spinning in the night air twenty feet overhead. In the next instant the missile streaked out of the capsule, its rocket motor’s white-hot flames sinking the capsule and hurling the missile clear of the water toward the overcast sky, the moonlight glinting off the flat black of its paint. The rocket’s trail of flame extended vertically several thousand feet above the water, vanishing into a cloud.

Seconds later the Unit Two capsule of the second Javelin penetrated the surface, the second nose cone blowing toward the sky, a prelude to the second missile’s liftoff sequence. Milliseconds later the second unit roared out of its capsule and flashed toward the sky, its flame trail illuminating the end of the supertanker pier and the water of the slip between the tanker and P.L.A piers. The second unit flew up into the night sky as if chasing the first unit, the twin missiles’ exhausts blindingly bright, their noise deafening.