Terminal Run

“One, rig in the port and starboard torpedoes and shut the bulkhead doors. Power down the torpedoes.”

Krivak wasn’t sure how he knew the carbon processor had obeyed him. It was not that he felt or heard or saw. He simply knew. This mission was becoming very eerie, and he wanted it to end. He considered what he should do if One Oh Seven continued to obey him. He tried another order.

“One, turn to the southwest and increase speed to flank.”

At the very least, Krivak needed to get the Snare out of the area, since anyone realizing the Piranha had gone down would give the word to the American military, and they would be searching for the cause of the ship’s loss. It would not be good for the Snare to be here.

In the same way he knew before, he knew the submarine’s speed had increased and their course had come around to the southwest.

“Display a global map of the waters surrounding Africa and show our position.”

In Krivak’s mind he could see the chart.

“One, plot the most efficient course to take us to the Indian Ocean.”

A line was generated on the chart from their position around the Cape of Good Hope and up the eastern coast of South Africa and into the Indian Ocean.

“One, follow the southward course you just generated.”

The ship changed course slightly.

“One, increase reactor power to a hundred twenty percent.”

In the same odd way knowledge had come into his mind before, he knew that One Oh Seven had received his message. The ship moved to his orders. Despite the odd way he was connected to the ship, it was almost like being the captain again. He didn’t prefer it this way — he’d rather stand on the deck and give verbal orders to human crewmen, but at least this had the advantage of efficiency.

Now there was little to do but wait until they were outside the detection radius of anyone who had heard his attack on the Piranha, then come to periscope depth and establish radio contact with Admiral Chu. They had gotten lucky with the Piranha sinking, he thought. If they were fortunate, the next contact he would have with anyone would be in the Indian Ocean.

18

Commander George Dixon sat at the end of the wardroom table feeling proud of himself. He was surrounded by his officers who were not on watch, half of them working through the remainder of the night on the patrol report reconstruction, playing back the history module tapes of the Cyclops battle control system and printing two-dimensional plots of the targets during key points of the action. The other half of the wardroom worked on a large plaque showing Red Chinese hulls, to commemorate the kills they’d made during the watch. Though it was still the middle of the night, Dixon had been unable to sleep from the tension of battle and the jittery aftermath. It was hard to believe that only an hour ago they’d heard the last torpedo impact one of the Red surface ships. Strangely, the Julang had never made an appearance. Perhaps the Red SSN had heard the carnage and run back north to warn the other battle groups or perhaps it was so broken down that it was still too far north to have made a difference.

The sudden screaming announcement on the ship wide 1MC announcing circuit made Dixon spill half a cup of coffee on his thigh. “Snapshot tube one!” It was the officer of the deck making the emergency call that an enemy submarine had sneaked up on them, and that they were in immediate danger of being fired upon.

Dixon dashed to the control room, finding Kingman hanging half out of a battle control cubicle. The call of snapshot automatically manned battle stations and watch standers were pouring into the room and donning headsets and virtual reality helmets.

“What happened?” Dixon spat.

“I cleared baffles and heard him to the south. We’ve got him on narrowband, but he suddenly came into broadband contact, so he’s barreling in on us, Captain. He’ll be in counter detection range in a matter of minutes, and we need to get a weapon down the bearing line.”

“Very well, OOD,” Dixon said, trying to make his voice commanding and authoritative and calm, but not sure he’d succeeded.

Dixon pulled on his battle control helmet and immediately ordered the system to display the battle space and the battle stations watch standers faces. The sonar chief looked up at his display and made a contact classification.

“Conn, Sonar, narrowband sonar contact Sierra nine six now bears one seven eight and correlates to broadband trace on that same bearing, turn count is pending but screw is seven bladed. Contact is a definite submerged warship.”

Commander Dixon had lowered his view to the antisubmarine domain, the inverted bowl with the incoming Julang-class SSN shown to the south. As yet their contact of the Julang was weak, and they only had a bearing to the intruder.