Attack of the Seawolf

“Firing point procedures. Javelin units five and six. Target Four, over-the-shoulder shots, five to go west, six to go east.”

“Ship ready,” Turner said.

“Weapons ready.” Feyley.

“Solution ready,” Keebes reported.

“Shoot five, shoot six,” Pacino ordered, hoping the Jianghu frigate would show up better on the cruise missile-seeker radars than the Tampa. Tubes five and six barked, slamming Pacino’s eardrums, sending two Javelin cruise missiles up to the surface to kill the frigate.

Pacino waited, hoping the Javelins would be able to tell a frigate from a submarine.

USS TAMPA

Commander Jack Morris ran the ten steps to the prone bleeding body of Captain Sean Murphy, glancing up once to see the Chinese officer’s feet leaving the hatchway above, the feet lit by the glow of the pier. Gently Morris pulled Murphy up into a sitting position and looked at him, trying to see if he was still alive.

Blood was coming out of Murphy’s neck but at least the flow was not from an artery. It oozed out, dark and dull. With a good field dressing and some antibiotics Murphy should make it. If he had been healthy before getting the wound, which did not look to be the case. Murphy had lost consciousness, his breathing unsteady, face pale, skin clammy.

The ship’s roll to starboard threatened to knock Morris into a bulkhead. He steadied himself on a rung of the ladder, felt drops of water splashing down on him from above. The hatch shouldn’t be open, he thought, laying Murphy back down on the deck while he stepped to the top of the ladder and looked out the forward hatch.

One look was enough. The pier was fading away in front of them, the tanks on the pier were getting ready to shoot. Morris reached up and shut the lower hatch, spinning its wheel to engage the dogs. No sense letting in Chinese commandos or shipping water into the boat once Lennox started going forward. Next he came back down the ladder and looked at Murphy. As soon as Tien had bolted up the ladder Morris had sent Bony Robbins aft to see to the security of the upper level. Morris knew he should have been joining Robbins in the control room, but Murphy’s helplessness He picked up Murphy and carried him to the captain’s stateroom. When he saw a dead body, on its back, knees bent, blocking the doorway, he carried the wounded captain to the next stateroom, almost stumbling as the deck rolled hard to port — Lennox had to be turning the ship to leave the harbor. He ducked into the executive officer’s stateroom, which was empty, put Murphy on the bed, wrapped a towel around his neck wound and covered him with a wool blanket. For a moment he looked down at the man who had commanded the submarine but who now was perhaps only moments from death. Well, Morris thought, there was nothing else he could do for the man.

He left and moved into the control room, nodded at Bony and joined in a search of the space. The smell of the stun juice was still pungent in the room, mixed with the smell of gunfire, the meaty smell of blood, and of the guards’ bodies as they died. He had begun checking the cubbyhole between the ship control panel and the ballast-control panel when the room seemed to turn upside down, tossing him into the console, smashing him in the head and dumping him onto the deck.

Somehow he got himself up, nearly overcome by dizziness, and soon realized it wasn’t dizziness that had tilted the world but something they had hit. The deck was quiet, no longer vibrating with the power of the reactor aft. Morris went for the hatch to the bridge tunnel. Bony Robbins right behind him. He rebelled against the thought that filled his mind but there was no sense denying it. Lennox had run the ship aground.

They were now sitting ducks.

* * *

At the top of Seawolf’s sail four small doors opened.

Below the doors were circular seals that kept the Mark 80 SLAAM missiles from being damaged by seawater. Below each seal a Mark 80 missile waited for the launch signal. The four signals arrived at the base terminal box one after another at half-second intervals. The first missile to receive the electronic signal to fire experienced a warm sensation at its base as the gas generator lit off — the gas generator was a small casing around a solid rocket motor, the nozzle of the rocket pointing downward into a reservoir of water. The rocket motor ignited and sent a stream of superheated gases toward the reservoir. The water in the reservoir immediately boiled, forming a highpressure bubble of steam. When the steam at the base of the Mark 80 missile reached a pressure higher than the external sea pressure, the seal above the missile ruptured and the missile was expelled from the sail by the highpressure steam bubble. It rose to the surface, never even getting wet from the seawater, the steam bubble that followed it surrounding it all the way to the surface.