Terminal Run

The deck tilted dramatically down to a thirty-five-degree angle as the diving officer put on full turns and pushed the bow planes to the full dive position. As their speed rose above forty knots the deck began its flank speed tremble.

“Sonar, Captain, is the target masked by the Vortex wake?”

“Conn, Sonar, yes.”

Dixon took a deep breath. He’d shot at the Julang and run away. Now he’d find out what the Chinese were made of.

“Command Post, Sonar, torpedo launch transient bearing south! I have a rocket motor ignition — supercavitating torpedo inbound, bearing zero zero eight!”

Without conscious thought Lien Hua spit out a string of orders, his heart rate immediately tripling. “Engine ahead emergency! Thirty-degree up angle!” He grabbed his microphone and selected it to the ship wide announcing circuit and shouted into it: “Torpedo inbound! All hands man tactical stations!” By the time he’d gotten that out, the deck had inclined so far up that he could barely stand. He grabbed a hand hold and thought about the next step.

There was only one thing he could do to fight an inbound supercavitating torpedo, particularly if it were an American one with a three-hundred-knot top speed, and that was to execute an emergency surface. If he could get the ship going fast enough, there was a small chance that he could actually make it jump out of the sea like a whale, and if the missile’s seeker only then found him, it would be confused by his sudden disappearance from the ocean. Even after the ship fell back in the water, the sea would be filled with bubbles and foam, and that might confuse the torpedo. And there was the possibility that the torpedo had a ceiling setting to keep it away from the surface effect, its three hundred knots causing a huge suction Bernouli effect near the ocean’s surface, which could cause it to shoot out of the sea or to become unstable and tumble, or perhaps just to keep it from becoming decoyed on a surface ship. But an emergency surface was dangerous, because the emergency de ballasting system explosives had a bad habit of blowing the ballast tanks open, and even penetrating the pressure hull. But Lien was coming to the realization that he had only seconds to live, and for some reason he decided that he didn’t want his spirit to leave his body when he was deep — heaven was too far away from here.

He quickly pulled the protective cover off the panel, the cover marked with red and white diagonal stripes indicating an emergency system. The second protective bar covering the toggle switches was also colored red and white, and he pulled that aside to reach the four toggle switches beneath. There were two arming switches that would bring the circuits to the explosives to life, and two switches to detonate the explosives, one for the forward system and one for the aft. He flipped up both arming switches, waiting an eternity for the ARM light, knowing that it could only be a second, then flipped the forward toggle switch up. An explosion boomed through the command post from forward. He hit the aft switch, the explosion from it much more muted.

“Emergency de ballasting to the surface,” he called on the ship wide microphone. The ship seemed to remain whole, so the detonations in the ballast tanks must not have breached the metal skin of the ship or of the tanks themselves.

“Status of the Tsunami in tube six,” Lien barked.

“Loaded, sir, but powered down and the tube is dry,” Zhou Ping replied.

Lien tried to listen, as if he could hear the incoming supercavitating torpedo, but he knew that at three hundred knots, it would find the Nung Yahtsu long before a sound from the torpedo could be heard. They would all die in silence unless the emergency surfacing worked.

Lien grabbed a hand hold bar on the command console and flipped to the weapon control panel as the deck rose to a forty five-degree angle.

“Three hundred meters, sir,” the helm officer called. “Up angle is fifty degrees and I can’t keep it down.”

“Silence in the command post,” Lien snapped as he worked his way through the weapon control software. In the seconds he had been working he had flooded tube six and applied weapon power, but he could do no more until the tube was fully flooded — so he could open the outer door — and the Tsunami was powered up with its gyro up to full revolutions, and that would take another sixty seconds. Lien blamed himself for not having it powered up once they’d started the search for the American sub, but then consoled himself that doing so would have been a violation of fleet standing orders. If they lived through the watch, they would always have a weapon powered up and a tube door opened, he thought.

“On the surface, sir!” the helm officer called.

The angle suddenly came off and the deck fell back down to a flat surface from its steep staircase angle.

“Sinking back down, Captain, seventy meters, eighty, and rising back up, sir.”

“Engines stop!” Lien commanded.