Piranha: Firing Point

All hell broke loose. Dietz snapped the periscope grips to the up position and lowered the scope with the hydraulic control ring. The helmsman dialed in full on the engine-order telegraph. The planesman put his stern planes on full dive until the ship took on a ten-degree down angle. The shipwide circuit one PA system blared out, “Emergency deep! Emergency deep!” all through the ship. The engine-order telegraph answering bell rang as the answer needle climbed to full speed. The deck tilted dramatically downward, and the depth indicator on the ship-control console began to spin—60 feet, 80, 100, 120, then deeper.

“Increase the angle. Dive,” Patton commanded.

“Twenty-degree down angle on the ship, Sternm-planesman,” the diving officer said.

“More!”

“Down thirty-five degrees!”

The deck became a steep ramp, the ship hanging by its tail, the forward part of the control room almost fifteen feet lower than the aft part. The depth indicator kept spinning—200 feet, 250, 300, the numbers rolling faster as the ship picked up speed. The speed indicator climbed through 15 knots, on to 20, then 25. Soon the depth read 750 feet, and the deck began to level off as the diving officer pulled them out of the plummeting dive.

“Sir, steering course one two zero,” the helmsman barked. “Answering all ahead full.”

“All ahead flank,” Patton commanded. Stepping up to the conn, he found the coiled cord to the microphone that announced in the nuclear control room, called maneuvering.

“Maneuvering, Captain, all ahead emergency flank!”

Emergency flank meant they would be burning out their brand-new reactor, taking a ten-million-dollar plant to two hundred percent power and frying the aft spaces with high radiation. The crew would be ordered out of the reactor compartment tunnel and aft compartment unless absolutely necessary for ship safety. At emergency flank he’d be able to make speed in the high forties, maybe even fifty knots. He watched the speed indicator as it climbed to forty-one knots, normal for a flank bell at 100 percent reactor-rated power.

“Captain, Maneuvering, all ahead emergency flank, aye, resetting battle-short switch and resetting reactor-protection limits.”

“Conn, aye,” he replied. Now that things were calming down in control, the crisis was switched to the nuclear-control room. For the next five minutes eight men would be sweating, trying to bring the reactor to a state as close to meltdown as it could achieve. Throughout the ship high-radiation alarms would start to go off, since the nuclear shielding was not designed to handle such a level. The deck began to tremble with the power of the emergency flank bell. Every ounce of shaft horsepower went to the screw. The speed indicator climbed slowly from 41 knots to 43, 45, 46, finally settling at 49.5 knots.

He’d doubled horsepower, and had added only nine lousy knots. That was because the drag of the water outside the skin of the ship had quadrupled. And in fact, the power to the main turbines hadn’t really doubled, since some of the power intake was lost to heat leaks and thermal inefficiencies. Still, to trash a ten-million-dollar power unit to make nine extra knots seemed extreme.

Absolute urgent you clear datum op area asap asap asap.

The term “clear datum” was submarine-speak for “get the hell out of there as fast as you can.” It was the equivalent to “retreat” for the Marine Corps, rarely used, and if it was, it meant there was ship-threatening trouble out there. Pacino was damned serious.

Patton leaned over the chart, watching the ship’s position dot as his vessel ran for the Ryukyu Island chain, the entrance to the Pacific. It had been a hell of a day.

The violent explosion caught him completely by surprise.

The sonarmen of the submarine Annapolis never heard the Mod 11 Nagasaki torpedo trying to catch up to them.

The Nagasaki had been approaching the Annapolis when the ship was at periscope depth, and when the ship went deep and sped up, the Nagasaki had found itself in a tail chase. The onboard computer automatically up-shifted the propulsor speed to fast, accelerating the unit to maximum attack velocity of eighty-five clicks, all of five clicks slower than the Annapolis. The weapon had closed to within a half kilometer, but as the target sped up, the distance began to open. The torpedo fell behind six hundred meters, then seven hundred, growing to a kilometer.

Minute after minute clicked off. At two kilometers’ distance the weapon’s onboard computer’s calculations showed that the unit would run out of fuel within thirty seconds, and when it did, the target would escape.