Piranha: Firing Point

“Conn, Sonar, this missile is constant bearing, decreasing range. Conn, Sonar, recommend evade!” The master chief’s voice suddenly became distorted as he screamed into his circuit. “Captain, Sonar, the missile is targeting us! Recommend immediate emergency blow!”

Phillips didn’t stop to wonder what was going on. He turned his head to the chief of the watch at the ballast-control panel and screamed, “Emergency blow, both groups! Helm, ahead full! Dive, thirty-degree up angle!”

No one needed to be told twice. The emergency-blow levers, two stainless steel levers in the overhead, put ultrahigh-pressure air to the ballast tanks. The draining was as quick and violent as if an explosion had happened in the tanks. The room was engulfed in a symphony of ear-splitting noise as the air blew into the ballast tanks.

Piranha drove to the surface at a thirty-degree angle, the full bell and the blow and the angle bringing her up from a thousand feet to the surface in less than two minutes.

The ship was traveling at thirty-four knots when it broke the surface above. The parabolic cross-section nose cone penetrated the waves first, bringing with it tons of seawater. The cylindrical length of the ship followed, the sail emerging, then the aft cylinder, until the tail came out of the water. The giant submarine then crashed back into the ocean and vanished to a depth of two hundred fifty feet, then returned for the second time, bobbing and rolling on the surface.

“Scram the reactor!” Phillips ordered. “Shut down the ship!” The OOD passed the word aft to maneuvering, and within seconds the lights flickered and the air conditioning shut down. All but one console of the fire-control system went dead.

“Sonar, status of the missile?”

“Still inbound, sir, getting closer,” the master chief said.

Phillips tossed the soggy cigar, started to pull out a new one, but then put it back in his pocket. He tapped his feet, waiting.

Four hundred feet beneath the USS Piranha the Vortex Mod Charlie passed. Its detonation circuits told it to disregard targets shallower than two hundred feet, so it sailed by the Piranha and continued on until its fuel ran out forty seconds later. Then, as programmed, it shut down and sank to the bottom of the sea.

The three Nagasaki torpedoes became confused and sailed far beyond where their target should have been.

They didn’t have a ceiling setting, and were allowed to climb all the way to the surface. But at a depth of 178 feet lay a steep thermal layer. The water above was stirred by the wind and waves, heated by the sun. Below, the water temperature hovered a tenth of a degree above freezing. The Nagasaki torpedoes were deep, searching using passive sonar — listening only. As a result, any sound from above the layer reached downward only when the source was directly overhead. Sound waves out ahead of the torpedo, to the side, or behind bounced off the thermal layer like light bouncing off a mirror.

Waiting quietly above the layer, the Piranha confused the torpedoes. They drove back and forth and in circles before detonating in plasma explosions. But by that time they had drifted many miles away from the Piranha’s position.

The explosions that had come after the Devilfish’s battlecontrol system had crashed had been two Rising Sun submarines, put down by Piranha’s last Vortex shots.

The sea was empty. Almost.

Piranha had survived. Yet there remained one last Rising Sun submarine, the Arctic Storm.

USS DEVILFISH, SSNX-1

“Status of Cyclops?” Patton asked.

“Down hard,” Colleen O’Shaughnessy said on the battle circuit.

“Can we launch Vortex missiles in manual?” Pacino asked.

“Should be able to,” Colleen said.

“John, let’s get fifteen of them out there in a saturation attack. And get someone on the horn to Piranha.

Tell Phillips under no circumstances shall he submerge.”

“Aye, sir.”

Pacino leaned against the conn handrail, shutting his eyes, listening to the battle litany as they attempted to open the torpedo-tube muzzle doors to program the Vortex missiles to go out on a specific bearing line and look for contacts. A fan of fifteen Vortexes ought to do it, and if they didn’t, perhaps by then the Cyclops system would be back and they could actually target the last Rising Sun.

The Vortex launches went on for a half hour, the solid-rocket motors igniting and flying off into space, looking for the Red sub. There was no way to tell if the missiles ever hit their target. Over the next hour, explosions started to be heard. That could just be their termination detonations, since the missiles were programmed to explode as they ran out of fuel, just in case by dumb luck they were close to a target.

Pacino felt a heavy weight of exhaustion fall on his shoulders. He had lost five Pegasus patrol planes, twelve 688s, and perhaps even the Piranha, all in a few hours’ time.

He looked up to see Patton walking into the room from the forward centerline passageway.

“Colleen says she’ll be up in about two minutes,” he said.