Phoenix Sub Zero

The first Nagasaki torpedo left the tube under the pressure of a gas generator at the breech end. Some moments before it had been divorced from the electrical power from the mother ship. The tube had fed in the target’s data as well as the run speed and search pattern to be used on the target. The expanding gases at the base of the tube pushed on the aft end of the weapon, hard, pushing it into the cool curtain of the Mediterranean water. As the elliptical head of the torpedo left the envelope of the submarine’s bow, the water flowed into a duct set low in the weapon’s nose, spinning a small water turbine on jeweled bearings. The turbine generated a minute current in a generator that energized a small electromagnet in a relay; the magnet shut the relay contact in the engine start logic circuit, providing the computer with a signal to start the weapon’s engine.

The pressurized peroxide fuel flowed out of the opened fuel solenoid valve into the combustion chamber, expanding into vapors as it entered the annular-shaped chamber with the ring of spark plugs. The plugs arced from the high-voltage current of the onboard battery, igniting the peroxide vapors, which soared in temperature at the inlet vanes of the axial turbine in the aft end of the torpedo. The gases spun the turbine and passed out the flapper exhaust valve into the surrounding sea. The spinning turbine turned a shaft connected to a ducted water jet propulsor, similar to the larger unit of the Hegira. The torpedo accelerated to its shallow depth cruising speed on the intercept course to the target, its sonar ears listening hard for the sounds of a gear-driven screw.

* * *

“Conn, Sonar! Torpedo in the water, bearing three one nine! Second launch, two torpedoes — no three — Conn, Sonar, we have multiple torpedoes in the water, all screws cavitating!”

“Helm, all ahead flank! Maneuvering cavitate!” Daminski shouted. “Dive, make your depth one three hundred feet. Off’sa’deck, load Mark 21 evasion devices in fore and aft signal ejectors. Helm, right half degree rudder, steady course one three zero.”

Daminski watched the control room crew follow his orders until the ship was on course, running from the incoming torpedoes. This was a moment he had dreaded — at the business end of an enemy torpedo with nothing to do but run and hope they ran out of fuel. His stomach filled with acid.

“Conn, Sonar, how many torpedoes?”

“Sir, five torpedoes. Bearing rate zero. They’re getting louder. Captain.”

Daminski, in spite of trying to keep his mind from the memory, had been in this position before, but always in the attack simulators in Norfolk and Groton, rooms set up to look exactly like 688class control rooms, with the same attack-center consoles and plots, a room adjacent to the simulator the sonar display room. If the overhead lights were blacked out, a crew could almost believe they were in an actual control room fighting the targets that appeared as diamond symbols on the firecontrol consoles. In the simulators, the computer “target” frequently fired torpedoes at the at tacking submarine, turning hunter into prey, testing the approach officer’s wits to see how well he could evade the torpedo—put the incoming weapon in the baffles due astern, or on the baffle edge if he wanted to be fancy and track it on broadband sonar and run at flank speed.

The reason Daminski hoped to forget was compelling. He had been shot at by the computer over twenty times in the last five years. In those twenty times, his ship had never survived. The computer’s torpedoes always killed him. In the postattack mop-ups he had always wanted to know why the counterattacks were so lethal … “Maybe you’re getting too close to the guy. Commander,” a firecontrol chief had told him. “Shoot him from a longer range and if he shoots back the torpedoes might run out of fuel.”

“Yeah, and he’ll hear mine and evade. I don’t think so.”

“Suit yourself, sir.”

“Does anyone else survive being shot at? Any of these other 688-jockeys on the Norfolk piers? Guys who shoot further out?”

“You want to know the truth, sir?”

“Give it to me straight. Chief,” Daminski had asked, wondering if his own tactics were truly flawed. “Commander, nobody survives. Unless the torpedo coming at you is so far off your bearing that it goes the wrong way, or so grossly flawed that it won’t detonate, or a long way away when you first hear it, that’s it. A sixty-knot long-range torpedo coming down your bearing line will almost always nab a forty-knot submarine. Of course, you might be up against a slower running torpedo. But I doubt it.”

“Thanks a load. Chief,” Daminski had said.

Nobody survives.

Screw him, Daminski thought. When Augusta pulled back into Norfolk he’d look that chief up and demand a beer. Several beers. And an apology.

Chapter 12 Friday, 27 December

STRAIT OF SICILY

“Torpedoes are closing, all five in the baffles.”

The deck shook as Augusta ran from the weapons.