Attack of the Seawolf

He would either have to continue in a semicircle going backward until his bow was pointed east or go forward with the bow pointing north and do a one-hundred eighty-degree turn to the south. The first option could cause the stern to ram into the supertanker-pier. The second would cost him extra time.

Whatever, he couldn’t continue to be at the mercy of the goddamned rudder and screw. He had to get the ship to be predictable again. As he watched the bay turn around him in the wrong direction, he felt a pain in his chest and wondered if he was having a heart attack. No … it had to be the anxiety from the screwed-up maneuver. Good thing Murphy was below, Lennox thought. At least the captain couldn’t see this amateurish ship handling.

“All ahead full,” Lennox barked.

“ROGER, ALL AHEAD FULL.”

The screw aft of the rudder, a moment before pumping water forward, slowed, stopped and began rotating in the opposite direction, now pumping water aft, thrusting the ship forward. The water above the scimitar blades of the spiral screw boiled and churned in angry phosphorescence. Lennox felt the deck tremble, the hull not accustomed to the force-reversal. The ship slowed to a stop and then began to accelerate as it surged forward. Around them the water was a bubbling foam from the power of the main engines, the P.L.A pier drifting by amidships. The only problem was that they were now going north, not south.

Lennox raised his head above the scarred steel of the top of the sail to look aft, making sure the rudder was turned to the right instead of left. A wrong rudder direction could send them crashing into the P.L.A piers, which would be the end of the rescue attempt.

The deck’s vibrations steadied out somewhat, but the power of the main engines at fifty percent reactor power and the full-rudder order still caused perceptible vibrations. As the ship came around to the south Lennox heard the sound of the Dauphin helicopters coming closer, preparing for another strafing run. He ducked down and reached for a clamshell on the port side of the cockpit — the clamshells were hinged panels that covered the top of the cockpit when rigged for dive, smoothing it out with the contour of the top of the sail. Without the clamshells the cockpit hole would cause a flow-induced resonance, like a breath of air over the mouth of a soda bottle. The clamshell was heavy, made of inch-thick HY-80 steel for breaking through polar ice. While Lennox struggled to raise the panel into the horizontal position he silently thanked the design engineers who had replaced the old fiberglass clamshells with hardened steel. Once the port shell was up, he raised the center forward-and-aft shells, which left him only a small cubbyhole to look out of on the starboard side.

As the choppers approached for their strafing run Lennox ducked into the clamshells on the port side.

The bullets impacted directly over his head, zinging off the heavy steel. Lennox poked his head out the starboard clamshell, ducked quickly back in as he saw the second chopper in its approach. This time he hugged the deck of the cockpit, the loud clanging of the bullets seeming closer, harder. When the noise died down he put his head out again and saw that the ship was now almost completely turned around, heading south into the deep channel. They should be out of there in no time … He was about to order the rudder amidships, thinking ahead to his next order to increase speed to flank, when he saw the buoys just ahead of him. Sure as hell he was no expert on Chinese coastal buoys, but it struck him that the only plausible reason he could think of to put a line of buoys this close to a deep channel was that there was a submerged obstruction or. God forbid, a sandbar.

“Right hard rudder!” he shouted into the VHF radio. Too late.

The Tampa hit the submerged sandbar at over twenty knots, slowing down to a complete stop in less than two seconds, plowing her bow deep into the sand.

Lennox was thrown into the forward bulkhead of the cockpit, smashing his cheek, breaking his nose. The deck was tilted absurdly to the port side, a twenty-or twenty-five-degree list. Lennox looked aft and saw that the foam was no longer boiling up around the screw. The deck no longer vibrated with the power of the main engines — they must have lost propulsion when they hit the sandbar, which meant he couldn’t use the engines to back the sub off the sand.

Lennox tried his radio, wondering if it broke when he hit the cockpit lip. He heard a new sound, the sound of the rotors of a big assault chopper approaching from the north. He looked up in time to see the flying bulk of the Hind helicopter circling around to approach the crippled submarine from the bow. As it drew up, it went into a hover, its rockets and guns hanging on struts protruding from the gunship’s flanks. Then a second Hind pulled into a hover behind it.