Phoenix Sub Zero

Out of the corner of his eye Sharef saw General Sihoud and Colonel Ahmed standing near the door to the forward passageway. He ignored them and returned to the tactical chart, then to Tawkidi’s console at the sensor panel. The American torpedo continued closing and he began to feel a sense of unreality, as if he were disconnected from the scene. He had tried to tell himself that these could be his last minutes but somehow he remained unconvinced. Every man had a time to die. Sharef still believed it was not yet his time. But then, he wondered if he would know when it was time.

Tawkidi’s enthusiasm faded as the Second Captain displays filled with the curves of dozens of sonobuoys pinging at them and the aircraft engines orbiting overhead.

“Now how close?”

“A kilometer, maybe less.”

“Enable the SCM.”

“SCM is up and enabled in automatic. It needs a few more pings before it will be able to reproduce the false echo.”

“It better start working before that torpedo gets any closer.”

The pinging of the torpedo began to sound through the hull, sharp and high-pitched. A second ping rang through, louder now, suddenly answered by a distorted-sounding pulse that was at a lower pitch but otherwise a copy of the original. The noises continued, the torpedo pinging a high pulse, the ship’s SCM sonar answering with a deeper, throatier false echo. As the minutes passed, the torpedo’s pulses became more frequent until the pings from the weapon and the Hegira’s ventriloquist system merged into one long loud groaning sound, as if the two machines were sounding mating calls to each other. Sharef and Tawkidi glanced at each other, then over to Sihoud and Ahmed. The general seemed serene, Ahmed looked angry as they faced being hit by an American torpedo.

The moaning sonar pulses continued, lasting for one endless second after another. The sonar display above Tawkidi’s head showed the dancing broadband signatures of the orbiting Mark 50 torpedoes shot by the American 688class, the traces as yet unnoticed in the tense room, perhaps because the weapons showed no tonals, perhaps because even their breadboard sonar noises were whisper-quiet, but more likely because the men at the sensor consoles were so focused on evading the incoming weapon. It was then that one of the broadband traces jumped as one of the American Mark 50 units now ahead of them by five kilometers sensed their presence, pulled out of its circular hold pattern and sped up to meet them.

* * *

Less than two shiplengths astern, the SCM’s deception pulses had convinced the American Mark 52 torpedo that the ship was immediately ahead. The outgoing pulses were transmitted, immediately answered by a downshifted echo return, the lower pitch the result of the target running away and lowering the pitch of the return. The torpedo looked for a sign of iron with its hull-proximity sensor but there was no hull present where the sonar signals expected it. It searched its mind for the answer to such a puzzle — a strong sonar pulse echo with no sensation of an iron hull — and the computer realized the problem. Obviously the iron-hull sensor was not functioning, but the closeness of the target’s hull could be deduced from the sonar pulses. And there was no sense allowing a valid target to escape merely because the hull sensor had open-circuited.

The torpedo, satisfied with its built-in logic, exploded, 480 meters astern of the Hegira.

* * *

By the time the Destiny-class submarine exited the western mouth of the Strait of Gibraltar, seven of the torpedoes launched earlier by the Phoenix had run out of fuel. Spent, the units flooded with seawater and sank to the bottom, some imploding from the deeper depths of the Atlantic, a few breaking apart on the rocks of the sea floor. Every few minutes thereafter another one or two torpedoes became exhausted and executed their self-destruction sinkings. The Destiny’s track leading from the strait passed through a wide gap between still-active torpedoes, six of the weapons too far from her to pick up her acoustic emissions. Her track brought her within acoustic range of four remaining torpedoes.

Three heard her — or perhaps thought they heard the Mark 52 torpedo in pursuit of her — but the fourth experienced a mechanical problem and continued circling until it too ran out of fuel.

The first of the three Mark 50s to detect the Destiny was six nautical miles northwest at the time of detection. The second and third were slightly closer, one to the south at five and a half miles, the other to the northeast at just under five miles. The unit to the south confirmed the target by wiggling and sensing the shift in the bearing to the sounds, then accelerated to its fifty-knot attack speed, computing a lead angle to position itself to a point in the sea where the target would be thirty minutes in the future, the calculated time of interception.

The unit to the northeast did the same, its interception time slightly less with the Destiny’s approach vector.