Red Shark

Scott’s gaze locked on the pit log: twenty-three knots and ticking up. Not good enough — the four decoys would have to run interference for them. He heard the screee of incoming props, tightened his jaw in anticipation. Twenty-eight knots. He saw Kramer gnawing a knuckle.

An explosion and shock wave from a decoyed North Korean torpedo hammered the Reno. She staggered like a drunk, yawed as if gut-punched, and, like a drunk, struggled to right herself.

Scott saw piping in the control room vibrate to invisibility, saw shock-mounted lighting fixtures shatter, paint chips and dust plume into the air. He felt the deck drop away as if he were riding a runaway elevator. Something carried away topside with a scrape and roar of steel on steel down the length of the pressure hull. Somewhere aft he heard water blowing in under high pressure. Then a stuttering water hammer.

The ship’s emergency lighting recycled twice, then kicked back to service normal. The smell of scorched insulation stung Scott’s nostrils, and a moment later he was viewing the control room through a blue haze. The roar he’d heard was a fire extinguisher honking on empty.

“Damage report, all compartments!” Scott bellowed over the 1MC.

“Skipper,” said Kramer, his chest heaving, “reactor’s at full power, we’re making turns for thirty-three knots, depth one-eighty. Course zero-seven-five.”

“Very well, but get that damage report in here on the double.” Scott toggled a mike. “Sonar, Conn, where’s that other NK fish?”

“Lost it, sir, took off after one of our decoys. All I’ve got is the Red Shark, fading on a bearing of two-six-zero.”

“What’s the merchie doing?”

“Slowing, probably gonna heave to and change his drawers.”

“Yeah, like us. What about those DDs and frigates?”

“Speeding up. I’ve got nine contacts now moving east, not west.”

“All right. Keep on them. They’re on their way here for sure.”

“Aye, sir.”

“I want a plot on the Red Shark. My guess is she’s heading for that littoral zone south of Chenjigang. If I was him now, I’d want shallow water to hide in, and there’s plenty there.” Scott found the OOD. “Put us on two-six-zero. All ahead flank.”

“Sir…”

Scott turned to Kramer. “Damage?”

“Not too bad.” He rattled off a short list of cracked lines and spun-open valves that needed attention, food stores strewn in the galley, and a small fire that had broken out in an electrical cabinet in the sonar equipment room. “That torpedo went off close aboard. Engine room said they saw the hull dish in and pop out again. They put this baby together real good, Skipper.”

“Let’s see if she can hold together long enough to find that North Korean bastard so we put him away for keeps.”

Park sat slumped in the captain’s chair in the control room. Water trickled down the scope from a packing gland damaged by their own torpedo detonation closer aboard than he had at first realized. The engineering officer warned that the explosion had damaged two shock-mounted rafts that supported a portion of the fuel cell’s manifold connected via flexible joints to the frozen valve. His report of a potential sound short to the hull, as well as the possibility that the valve and line had been wrenched out of alignment, had thrown Park into a depression from which the first officer couldn’t rouse him.

“Comrade Captain, please, sir, your orders.”

Park avoided the officer’s pleas. The crew kept their eyes glued to their work and stood like mannequins at their stations, not daring to look away.

“Sir, we are south of the Chinese warships patrolling the coast. There is no trace of the American submarine. Perhaps it was damaged or is fleeing from the Chinese. With deepest respect, sir, if we maintain a southerly course, we can reach Shanghai at sunset and make our transit to deep water. By daybreak we will be south of Shanghai and from there can proceed east for Okinawa. I am sure we can pick up another merchant vessel along the way.”

Park looked at him but said nothing.