Piranha: Firing Point

“Very good. Everyone, relax. We’ll wait here at battle stations for any more surface contacts and the 688s. If we don’t have anything in an hour, we’ll secure. Mr. First, what did you think?”

“Fantastic, Captain. This ship is simply amazing.”

If only it had more torpedoes, Ko Tsu thought.

“That it is, Mr. First,” was all he said.

USS ANNAPOLIS, SSN-760

The first explosion was so loud in Demeers’ headset that he was certain his eardrums had ruptured. He hurled the headset to the deck, clapping both his hands to his ears.

Water was running furiously in his eyes and down his nose.

He shook his head to clear it, his ears ringing and useless. His main display he turned to broadband waterfall, which showed reverberations throughout the bearings of the sea. He pulled up “the onion,” the broadband receiver towed from a mile-long cable coming out of the starboard towed-array tube mounted on the top of the starboard sternplane vertical stabilizer. The BSY4ON41B stern-facing sonar set was designed to give them a warning of a torpedo inbound from directly astern, in their cone of deafness, the baffles. The onion was named because of its teardrop shape, the aft half of it hemispherical.

The onion display flashed up, the aft bearings turning into a loud sonar blueout, which meant there was so much broadband noise that nothing could be heard through it. For a half second Demeers wondered where Captain Patton was until he realized that for some time he had been standing right behind Demeers’ shoulder, looking at the displays.

Demeers’ voice was unrecognizable and almost inaudible when he tried to speak to the captain. “Trouble at the convoy.” Patton said something Demeers didn’t catch and vanished.

In the control room, Patton rushed up the steps to the elevated periscope stand and grabbed the stainless steel handrail. He took a quick look around. Then orders poured from his mouth to the officer of the deck, Kurt Horburg.

“Offsa’deck, man battle stations. I have the conn.

Helm, left one degree rudder, steady course east. Sonar, Captain, coming around to the east. Quartermaster, log that the captain suspects the convoy has come under attack and is returning east to investigate and, if possible, counterattack. OOD, flood tubes one through four and warm up weapons one through four.”

The deck tilted far to the right, then back to the left as the ship went through its flank-run snap roll, reversing course. There was a flurry of acknowledgments, except from sonar. Patton shook his head. Demeers had hurt his ears, and who knew how much that would paralyze them?

“OOD, mark range to the convoy.”

“Captain, leading aircraft carrier generated-solution range is twenty-four nautical miles. Our ETA is thirty-five minutes from now, sir.”

“Sir, passing course one zero zero, ten degrees from ordered course,” the helmsman barked.

“Very well.”

The battle-stations crew flooded into the room’s forward door, taking over from the afternoon watch crew.

Forward, to the left of the entrance door, was the ship-control station, a sort of airplane cockpit arrangement.

Two pilot seats flanked a console and a vertical instrument panel was stuffed with computer-driven displays.

The panel extended into the overhead and slanted back over the two pilots’ heads to a seat aft of the center console. To the left of the arrangement an L-shaped wraparound panel surrounded a swivel seat. The four men of the ship-control team were the helmsman in the right pilot seat, who held the airplane-style yoke that controlled the rudder and the bow planes. The planes man in the left seat had control of the stern planes and the ship’s angle. The chief of the watch sat at the left L-shaped ballast-control panel, which controlled the ship’s physical trim and dive systems, the tanks and pumps and hydraulics, and the masts of the sail high above them.

Finally, the diving officer, behind the two pilot seats, supervised the other three.

Aft of the ship-control station was the rectangular periscope stand, the “conn,” where the captain and officer of the deck stood their watches, although they were free to roam the room. The conn was surrounded by gleaming handrails and was packed with equipment in the overheads — sonar repeater displays, television monitors, microphones on coiled cords for various battle-announcing circuits, several phones, a folding command seat, and two stowed type-21 periscopes mounted side by side on stainless steel poles extending into the overhead.

On the port side of the conn aft of the ballast-control panel was a tightly packed row of navigation consoles, where the satellite receivers and inertial nav equipment were set up. On the starboard side of the room was the attack center, a row of BSY-4 battlecontrol consoles set up to allow tracking of multiple targets. Four officers manned these computer screens. The aft station of the attack center was the weapon-control console, set up to program the torpedoes in the torpedo room one deck below.