Terminal Run

In the first tenth of a second the ship rolled violently to starboard and the deck seemed to tilt to the vertical. Zhou Ping felt like he hung in the air for a terrifying instant, the objects of the command post flying by him. He flew into a console and felt his elbow penetrate the glass of the display screen as the lights went out, and the remainder of the nightmare happened by the lightning flashes of electrical arcs in the space. He realized that he was deafened by the explosion, as the captain had put his face close to Zhou’s and was screaming, but there was no sound. Zhou shook his head, the motion making him so dizzy that he vomited explosively on the console. The world spun again in a flash of sparks just before it went dark.

The Tsunami torpedo fired by the Nung Yahtsu left tube six on the port forward quarter, the tube canted outward by ten degrees from the ship’s centerline. The impulse from the tube’s gas generator accelerated the torpedo to thirty knots, and a speed sensor in the torpedo’s flank activated. A small bottle of compressed air at the nose cone activated, blowing compressed air out a ring distributor that spread out a bubble of air over the forward sixth of the torpedo’s length, the predecessor to the torpedo’s future supercavitating steam bubble, the bubble inserted into the prototypes when test weapons all tumbled at rocket ignition. The jump start of the boundary layer gas bubble fixed the problem, so that when the rocket lit off, the weapon would sail straight as an arrow and the steam bubble would form and take over from the initial gas bubble.

As the compressed air spread out over the nose cone and aft, the rocket fuel ignited. The torpedo rapidly accelerated to attack velocity, and as designed, the steam bubble extended down the skin of the torpedo to the aft nozzle. The torpedo sped up to two hundred knots, heading south down the bearing line to the target. At two minutes into the flight the blue laser seeker came on, the design of it nicely transferred by the payment of a moderate fee to a lab scientist at the David Taylor Naval Research and Development Center owned and operated by DynaCorp. The seeker looked down the bearing line in a spiral search, seeking the target. At twenty miles downrange, it reported to the processor that there was nothing seen, that the target was inconveniently missing.

The processor sent the weapon on a wiggle pattern, searching for the target, but the weapon was relatively small, designed to fit in a torpedo tube dimensioned for the Dong Feng units, and since it had a large and heavy nuclear warhead and a fairly voluminous processor, there was not much fuel space left. The weapon turned back from its last-resort wiggle search, and returned to the twenty-mile distant aim-point from the Nung Yahtsu. At a depth of three hundred meters, the hydrogen bomb warhead detonated, and the ocean was lit up with the light of day.

The explosion shock wave reached outward in the sea in all directions, the wave traveling westward from the center of the detonation, eventually finding the hull of the American submarine Leopard eighteen nautical miles away. The water of the sea acted as an anvil and the shock wave as a hammer as it impacted the submarine.

“What the hell is that?” Commander Dixon asked, hearing something through the hull to the east. “Sonar, Captain, what is that?” he screamed.

Chief Herndon’s mouth had dropped open in the window showing his face on Dixon’s display. He looked at his camera. “Control, supercavitating torpedo in the water, bearing two eight one, bearing drift left.”

“Dive, right full rudder, all ahead emergency flank and cavitate! Weapons Officer, snapshot tube one, Alert/Acute torpedo, targeted at the previous position of Target Three Zero, set in speed zero! Off’sa’deck, arm the sub-sunk buoy and program in our latitude and longitude, and set it for the Internet Email function, encrypted with an SAS authenticator — send a two man detail to the SAS safe and get it out now! Dive, report speed!”

“Sir, throttles at emergency flank, reactor at one five zero percent power, making five nine knots.”

Goddamnit, Dixon thought. Fifty percent reactor power over maximum, and it had only added a lousy eight knots, the reactor now effectively ruined and irradiating the entire ship. The deck trembled even more violently at emergency flank than she did at a hundred percent power, as he would have expected.

“Weapons Officer, report status!”

“Sir, tube one is ready in all respects, outer door open, weapon ready.”

“Snapshot tube one, Target Three Zero!”

“Tube one set,” the Cyclops system barked in its artificially excited state. “Unit fourteen, stand by. Unit fourteen, fire. Unit fourteen — shoot!”

The deck jumped just before the explosion on the port side, rolling the deck to starboard suddenly. It wasn’t the normal crash of a torpedo launch, Dixon thought.

“XO, what happened?” he shouted at Phillips.

“Weps,” she shouted, “what’ve you got?”