Terminal Run

Taussig’s face looked thunderstruck in the weapons control cubicle. “Ma’am, the torpedo detonated as it left the tube — the speed at emergency flank must have snapped the weapon in half as it was leaving, and it blew the high explosive on the hull. I’ve got a wire continuity open circuit, outer door won’t shut, and the tube is leaking—”

“Flooding in the torpedo room!” Chief Joyce’s voice called on the tactical circuit. “Flooding in the torpedo room from tube one door!”

“Flooding in the torpedo room,” Officer of the Deck King man announced on the 1ME ship wide announcing system. “Casualty assistance team lay to the torpedo room.”

“XO,” Dixon said to Donna Phillips, “turn the coordinator watch over to the navigator and lay to the torpedo room and take charge at the scene.”

“Aye, sir,” Phillips said, her window going black as she pulled off her headset.

“Sonar, Captain! Report status of the torpedo in the water!”

“Conn, Sonar, bearing drift high left on the torpedo, sir, it doesn’t have us.”

Dixon nodded. He might evade the torpedo, and all he had to do was save the ship from the flooding in the torpedo room. If anyone could do that, Donna Phillips could. He took a deep breath, his only regret that the flooding casualty meant that further torpedo launches at the Julang position would have to wait. The torpedo had to have been a counterfire that the Julang launched just before it died in the Vortex detonation, a sort of goodbye present from the Chinese crew just before they checked out, the bastards.

Dixon selected his view to come above the ASW bowl, looking down on the display from high above, and ordered Cyclops to display the chart. He looked at the bearings to the torpedo, the solution on it weak since they had done no maneuvers on the torpedo. He debating pinging an active sonar pulse to determine the torpedo’s range, but decided against it. No sense alerting the unit to his presence if it hadn’t found him. It would be nicely fading far astern of them by now.

Dixon hadn’t counted on a nuclear detonation from the torpedo. The Shockwave hit the Leopard from aft without warning. The ship in one instant was running full out to the west to evade the torpedo. The next it was slammed by a giant sledgehammer. Dixon’s body smashed into the wall of the cubicle hard enough to break his collarbone and his right arm. The boom microphone of his headset broke off and cut clear through the flesh of his cheek and into his tongue, the helmet visor broken. He slipped to the deck on a trail of blood from a laceration to his shoulder, and his unconscious body collapsed in the tight cubicle.

The other members of the battle stations firecontrol party in the control room were also thrown against bulkheads and injured beyond the point of helping themselves with one exception — the diving officer of the watch, an ensign studying for his OOD quals, the electrical officer Brendon “Tiny” Farragut, the nickname in reference to his 250-pound frame. Farragut was strapped into the ship-control console’s diving officer seat with a five-point harness, and though he suffered whiplash from the blast of the torpedo and couldn’t see after every electrical circuit aboard went dead, he did the one thing he’d been trained to do over and over again at the dive simulator in New London — he reached for the dual stainless-steel emergency main ballast tank blow chicken switches, pulled their lock mechanisms downward, and lifted both levers high into the overhead. He reached for the 1MC microphone to announce an emergency surface, but the circuit was as dead as the rest of the ship.

He still had emergency hydraulics, so he pulled back on the bow planes and the stern planes and held the up angle at fifty degrees, dumping the unconscious bodies behind him into the aft bulkhead, perhaps even injuring them worse. But Farragut had been trained in the submariner’s mantra by Lieutenant Commander Phillips: “Save the mission, save the ship, save the reactor plant, save the crew, in that order.” The mission was beyond his ability to save, but he could save the ship, and he fully intended to surface the flooding submarine if the ship systems cooperated. He had no depth gauge and no Cyclops inclinometer, but he hit the battle lantern switch, the light shining on his panel. There, mounted in the overhead, was an old fashioned water-filled bubble inclinometer. The ship’s up angle was approaching sixty degrees up. He fought the bow planes down, wondering how long the hydraulic pressure would last, and was able to get the angle down to fifty degrees. A brass Bourdon-tube pressure gauge was also nestled in the overhead, for use in extreme loss-of-all-power emergencies, and its needle was climbing rapidly past three hundred feet. They’d break the surface in no time.