Piranha: Firing Point

“Because they put us on the bottom before we even knew we had company. Men, I was going five knots, dead slow, trying damn hard to hear a Rising Sun class that I knew was out there. Next thing I know, I’m on the deck and the ship is on fire, and my coveralls are flaming, and my sonar chief drags me out of the hatch and throws me on a raft and I’m looking at a fucking periscope. Does everyone understand this? These Rising Suns are badasses. They kicked the shit out of us, and they think they can do it again.”

“Well put. Captain.” Pacino smiled. “We’re not a threat to these guys. The 688s are toys.”

“What about the Piranha, the Seawolf class?” Chris Porter asked.

“Good point, Navigator. Any theories? No? Here’s mine. The SSN-23 is in just as much trouble as the 688s, because he’s using the old narrowband-broadband detection methods against a target whose tonals we don’t know. If the Piranha knew what it was looking for, life would be simple. Just set the frequency gate to pick up a 237 hertz tonal and wait for it to fall into your lap.

But we don’t know what tonals these guys put out.”

Pacino took a drink of water, looking into the eyes of the men around him, an old trick to gauge his audience.

“So my plan is to use acoustic-daylight sonar to the maximum extent we can. At zero hour ten P-5 Pegasus patrol planes will fly out of Kagashima to drop the first load of twenty Yo-Yo remote-sonar sensors. We’ll be hanging out at periscope depth to receive the signals.

We’ll spend a lot of our time at PD this run, guys. With the Yo-Yos out there, we’ll use our intelligence of the location of the six Rising Suns to call in torpedo strikes.

I’m putting the twelve 688s of the Pacific Fleet here at Point Echo with us. Yes, they’re loud and relatively vulnerable, but I brought them out here for their torpedo rooms. With twelve subs, each carrying 26 Mark 52 torpedoes, I’ve got 312 torpedoes I can vector into the target locations. That will be like a bunch of bees buzzing around them.

“Now, the Rising Suns have good torpedo countermeasures, according to the tapes we’ve gotten from the Maritime Self-Defense Force. They have four pods that detach from the X-tail aft that sound just like a Rising Sun, just louder. Each pod inflates a foil balloon that acts as a sonar reflector. Guaranteed to confuse a torpedo.

But like I said, they have only four apiece, so we run the bastards out of decoys. Then they have a ventriloquist sonar, an active system in the tail that puts out fake sonar returns to the incoming torpedo, throws it off. They can evade one weapon, maybe two at once, but not a dozen.

“Now, even though I’ll be putting out torpedoes from our vintage 688s, the main weapon will be Piranha’s Vortex Mod Bravo battery, ten weapons, all long-range.

If it’s a good day, Bruce Phillips aboard the Piranha fires six Bravos and this war is over. If it’s a bad day, some or all of us take plasma torpedoes on the chin. No guarantees.

Next resort after Piranha are the Vortex Mod Charlies we carry, the smaller, shorter-range Vortex, or Vortex-Lite, if you will. We’ve got more of them than the Piranha has Mod Bravos, but with their shorter range, we’ll have to go in deeper in the op area to get them on target.

“In general, gentlemen, I’m optimistic, but here is my list of worries. One, the Rising Suns have antiair missiles.

If they detect the P-5 Pegasus patrol planes, they might shoot them down, and with them, our Yo-Yo remote OTH sensors. If that happens, I’ll blow the wad on the Mark 4 Sharkeyes, but if I only detect some of the Rising Suns, we’ll be in trouble. I’ll have to send in Piranha to shoot what we see, and risk that it may be shot at by the Rising Suns we don’t see.

“Next worry, that we look out here and don’t find any Rising Suns. If I missed my guess, the boats are dispersed.

If that’s the case, we’ll deploy and redeploy Yo-Yos until we see them. At some point we may need to draw their fire. Not a popular option, and the only way to do it is with the Devilfish, because everyone else is blind. If they take us down when we do that, the operation is over and the convoy goes in without us.” “What? The convoy goes in anyway?” Porter asked.

“Exactly. The Rising Sun weapon loadout is 48 weapons per sub, total of 288 units. We lost a total of 110 ships. Say that’s about 120 weapons. That means they have about 148 or so torpedoes left. We would draw their fire with a convoy until there are no more torpedoes.”

“But they have enough to take down the lion’s share of the second convoy,” Porter protested.

“Look, I didn’t suggest this. It’s just what General Baldini will do. I know that guy. He’s bullheaded, and he’s been known to do frontal attacks on brick walls.

Maybe he’ll gamble that the Red force spent more than 120 weapons on 110 kills, and that he can at least get half his men in. Half of a 400,000 man force is better than none, or so Bull Baldini thinks.

“There is one consolation here,” Pacino continued.