America (38 page)

“All ahead flank, launch the decoys.”

Four decoys were ejected from the housings in the sub's tail planes, two noisemakers and two bubble generators. Bubbles reflect sound, so they acted like chaff clouds that reflect radar energy. The noisemakers and generators would create an acoustic wall, Ryder hoped, which would defeat the active sonar in the nose of the torpedoes he knew Kolnikov would inevitably launch.

*   *   *

Eck sang out the range and bearings to the two submarines as they came up on his display, but the process now was strictly automatic.
La Jolla
was only twenty-four hundred yards away, a little over a mile, while the Johnny-come-lately was at twenty-six thousand yards, about thirteen miles. The information about each contact went to the torpedo data computer, which computed the proper course to those locations and the necessary firing angles, the presets, which were electrically sent to the torpedoes in the tubes. Then they were launched and Turchak slammed the power lever to flank speed ahead. They could feel the acceleration as the turbines accelerated and the prop pushed violently on the seawater. “Watch the temperatures,” Turchak admonished the engine room crew.

Each succeeding sweep of the active sonar beam allowed the computer to determine a slightly different range and bearing to the targets. Subtracting the apparent movement of
America,
the computer then calculated the course and speed of both targets. The torpedo data computer updated the intercept bearings and fed that information to the appropriate torpedo via the fiber-optic wires. Meanwhile, the active seekers in the torpedoes were searching for their targets.

“Should I launch the decoys?” Boldt asked. Rothberg was curled in a chair, useless, staring at the Revelation panels. Heydrich was leaning against the aft bulkhead, a cup of coffee in his hand, discreetly bracing himself against the acceleration and any maneuvers Kolnikov ordered.

“No,” said Kolnikov. “We'll use the antitorpedo weapons.” These were small defensive torpedoes that homed in on the sonars of the incoming ship killers, riding the beam to them and exploding them prematurely. The latest thing in submarine defense, they were going to sea for the first time on
America,
which was the only boat that had them. “Enable two,” Kolnikov added, “and I pray to heaven they work.”

Four of these missiles were mounted in the sail. When enabled, they would automatically fire in sequence when they received a sonar signal on the proper frequency.

“And the jammer,” he added, pointing at Eck, who nodded vigorously.

“Make notes,” Kolnikov said to Turchak, who was monitoring the boat's increasing speed and waiting for the order for the violent turn that he knew was coming. “Anything doesn't work, we'll write a hot letter to Electric Boat.”

*   *   *

The
Los Angeles
–class attack submarine that had sailed into the midst of the torpedo duel at twenty knots was USS
Colorado Springs.
Her sonar operators heard the thrashing of
La Jolla
's prop, then the echo-ranging ping of
America
's sonar. No neophyte, the captain knew precisely what he was hearing—torpedoes had been fired. The sonar quickly provided bearings to the active sonar and the accelerating sub. The problem, of course, was determining which sub contained the pirates and which one held good guys.

Within seconds his leading sonarman confirmed his first deduction. Mk-48s were indeed in the water, several of them. The distinctive sound of the swash-plate piston engine—which burned Otto-fuel, nitrogen ester with an oxidant—driving the pump-jet propulsion system was one he had heard many times before on exercises.

Seconds later the sonarman told the captain that at least one of the torpedoes was closing on
Colorado Springs.

At least now, the captain reflected, he knew which sub was which.

“Fire two fish on the bearing of the incoming. Quickly now, let's do it, people.” Fortunately the integrated sonar/combat control suite performed automatically. As the sonar derived a bearing, that data was fed into the system, which calculated the presets and electrically set the selected torpedoes while the tubes were being flooded.

When the outer doors were opened, the two torpedoes were ejected from their tubes by compressed air, their engines started, and they raced away, accelerating swiftly. The crew of the
Springs
did not elect to let the fiber-optic wires reel out behind them, however. Already the boat was accelerating. The captain intended to maneuver as violently as he could to cause the incoming fish to miss; fiber-optic wires would probably be broken, and they probably weren't long enough anyway.

With both torpedoes gone,
Colorado Springs
laid over in a hard turn designed to put the incoming torpedo forward of the beam, forcing it into a maximum rate turn, which might make it miss. And she launched a half dozen decoys.

*   *   *

Ruben Garcia's screaming voice in his earphones startled P-3 pilot Duke Dolan. “Torpedoes in the water, noisemakers. They're shooting at each other.”

The P-3 Orion was orbiting at 25,000 feet, fifty miles from the center of the sonobuoy set. Gauzy cirrus aloft softened the afternoon sunlight, diffused it. Four miles below, the surface of the sea appeared a deep blue. The haze and the sea merged twelve or fifteen miles away, so there was no horizon. The surface of the placid ocean was flawless, unbroken by a single ship or wake. And yet, it wasn't empty.

“Tell SUBLANT,” Duke told the TACCO. “Get permission for us to go back in. There may be survivors or something.”

“Roger.”

“Tell me if you hear any explosions.”

“Got it,” Garcia snapped and flipped switches so he could talk to SUBLANT on the radio.

*   *   *

Aboard
America,
Eck and Kolnikov heard the high-pitched pinging of the incoming torpedoes as they locked onto their target.
La Jolla
's decoys were pouring noise into the water, but Eck's sonar was so advanced that the decoy noise was easy to filter out. The Mk-48 Kolnikov had fired, however, lacked Revelation's sophistication.

Although he had ordered
America
to increase her speed drastically, Kolnikov had not ordered a turn for fear of breaking the fiber-optic wire unreeling behind the war shot aimed at
La Jolla.

Eck studied the torpedo sonar data displayed on a separate screen.

He had too many targets. He couldn't tell which was the real one, so he made the assumption that all the targets were false and the submarine was behind them. Eck turned the torpedo to go around the targets he could see and come in behind, where he hoped the forty-knot fish would find
La Jolla.
He was so intent on his task that he didn't hear the antitorpedo weapons being fired from the sail and accelerating away, though the sonar faithfully captured the event.

Kolnikov glanced up at the bulkhead-mounted sonar panels and stood frozen, mesmerized. He could see the decoys, like newborn stars, and the river of disturbed water that was
La Jolla
's wake, which appeared as a luminescent flow of gases in a darker universe. The sight that captured his attention, though, was the streaks left by the wakes of the speeding torpedoes—both his going away and
La Jolla
's incoming.

He couldn't take his eyes off the two incoming fish, racing toward him like tracer bullets.

Out of the corner of his eye he caught the streaks that were the antitorpedo weapons. The one on the right went straight as a flashlight beam for the incoming warhead—and hit it. The detonation of shaped charge rocked the submarine slightly and appeared on the screen as a brilliant flash of white light.

The second antitorpedo weapon missed.

Involuntarily he grabbed for the table, braced himself, unable to tear his eyes from the screen.

Now a series of strobing lights flashed across the screen as more than 150 transducers buried in
America
's anechoic skin began emitting sound in a pattern that was designed to confuse the acoustic receivers in the nose of the torpedo and cause it to turn.

Racing in at forty knots, the incoming death ray seemed to turn away from the center of the screen at the very last second and disappear out the side.

The torpedo had missed!

Vladimir Kolnikov exhaled convulsively.

*   *   *

Over the noise of the incoming torpedo, Buck Brown heard the explosion caused by the premature detonation of
La Jolla
's first torpedo and assumed it had struck
America.
He also heard the active sonar countermeasures of
America,
but the reality of what he was hearing didn't register. He was too busy tracking the incoming torpedo and ensuring that the tactical plot was correct.

Junior Ryder also heard the first explosion and thought for a fleeting instant that he had torpedoed
America.
That thought died when he heard the active countermeasures. Although he had never heard it before, he had been briefed about it and recognized the sound for what it was. Still, these thoughts occupied only a corner of his consciousness—his attention was devoted to the tactical plot, a two-dimensional computer presentation of the tactical situation. His submarine was in the center of the plot.
America
and the
Springs
were depicted in their relative positions … as was the track of the incoming torpedo.

He could see that the torpedo was being steered around the acoustic decoy cloud. He ordered more decoys deployed and called for a hard turn into the oncoming torpedo to try and force an overshoot.

If his boat had been going faster, the maneuver would have worked.

Ryder's eyes widened and he involuntarily grabbed the table as the torpedo track merged with the center of the plot.

The explosion rocked the boat.

Aft! It hit aft!

Then the lights went out and the computer screens went blank.

The explosion of the shaped charge in the warhead of the Mk-48 ruptured the hull of USS
La Jolla.
The enormous pressure of the ocean did the rest. The engineering spaces were crushed. The watertight hatch leading forward held for a long moment … as the steel carcass that had been a sub settled deeper into the sea. Down she went, slowly, the pressure building inexorably.

“Emergency surface. Blow the tanks!”

Junior Ryder shouted the order over the groans of steel being twisted and deformed under the enormous pressure. They heard the compressed air being released, heard the rumbling of water being forced from the ballast tanks.

The generators had failed. In the glow of the battery-operated emergency lantern, Junior watched the depth gauge. If he could get the sub to the surface he could save some of his men—the ones still alive. If not …

Behind him the talkers on the sound-powered circuit were trying to raise the men in the engineering spaces. One of them was sobbing.

The needle on the depth gauge quivered as the boat tilted, the aft end sinking and the bow rising. There was too much water aft.

“Shit!” shouted the chief of the boat over the voices and the noise of tortured steel. “It ain't gonna work.”

He was right. The needle on the depth gauge began moving clockwise. The boat was going deeper.

“Oh, Jesus,” someone exclaimed. Then the sea crushed the bulkheads aft and the air pressure increased astronomically, rupturing every eardrum, collapsing lungs and eyeballs in the microsecond before the wall of water hit them like a flying anvil.

And then they were dead.

*   *   *

Kolnikov recognized the ripping, tearing, crushing noise after the torpedo detonation for what it was. He immediately turned his attention to the
Springs.
He had one torpedo on the way, which the attack sub might well avoid.

He checked the combat computer to ensure that the remaining torpedoes in the tubes were getting presets. One was receiving range and bearings to
Colorado Springs,
the other to what was now the wreck of
La Jolla.
He flooded the tube, opened the outer door, and launched the torpedo that was tracking the
Springs.
Then he set up the remaining fish to track her too.

He turned away from the combat computer and stood in the center of the room looking at the Revelation panels. Noises were still coming from
La Jolla
as metal tore and she was crushed, compartment by compartment. Revelation displayed her agony as random flashes and smears of light that were brighter than the general glow of the acoustic decoy area, which was beginning to cool off.

The torpedoes fired at the
Springs
were two streaks that led away into the darkness.

Twenty-six thousand yards, about thirteen miles, the torpedoes would need a little over nineteen minutes to traverse that distance. And no doubt that sub had fired torpedoes in this direction that would require about the same amount of time to arrive.

America
was still accelerating. Kolnikov directed Turchak to turn to ninety degrees off the bearing to the
Springs.
With a lot of luck he might run out of the detection cone of the incoming torpedoes, for undoubtedly there was more than one. He didn't expect to succeed in this maneuver, but he thought it worth a try. In any event, he would have the torpedoes in his stern quarter. When they were close enough, he would begin turning into them, tighter and tighter, trying to bring them forward of the beam and force an overshoot. At the same time, he would trigger the active acoustic defense. He had only two more antitorpedo weapons, and he didn't want to use them here unless forced into it. On the other hand, as Turchak pointed out, it is silly to die holding a loaded gun you refused to shoot.

“Let's pray there are no more than two torpedoes inbound,” he said aloud.