Charles Taylor: Boomer

“What about…?”

“There’s just a mess out there, sir.” The chief had anticipated Newell’s next question. “We’re so damn close….”

Newell had already begun to speak to the OOD. “Let’s move — just in case he’s got one last gasp left.” He called over to Bob Holloway, “Stand by tubes three and four.” And to the control room as a whole, he added, “We’ll prepare to fire again. Maybe we just blew up some noisemakers. Those titanium hulls can be pretty damn tough, but he’s got to be hurting. Eight hundred feet,” he ordered the diving officer.

The control room had remained silent, almost trancelike, from the moment the torpedoes were fired. There had been no struggle, no frantic scramble, as they prepared for their enemy. They’d approached quietly while their target presented itself — almost an assassination. It had been little different than putting a gun to someone’s head … akin to an execution.

They’d fired.

They’d waited for the body to drop.

But in this case they could not see it drop, not even through the miracle of sound. The turmoil caused by two torpedoes detonating within seconds of each other had left a sound void in the water, and it was absolutely foolish to wait for it to clear. They could become the sitting duck without ever knowing it.

Pasadena returned to normal operation. The OOD and the diving officer brought her to life. Torpedo tubes were readied for another shot. The attack team began the process of preparing another solution — if a target still remained.

“There was at least one hit, Captain,” Tommy Lott bellowed from sonar.

“What have you got. Chief?”

“Got to be going down … propeller’s going crazy… sounds like he’s trying to back out of trouble … blowing main ballast … want me to put it on the speaker?”

Newell was in sonar before the chief had completed his last words. And what he heard left no doubt in anyone’s mind that there was a submarine struggling for life. That was just seconds before another sound came clearly through the water — crumbling, snapping metal.

Bulkheads were shattering.

Pasadena had been unable to hear that initial leak, if indeed that first indication of water had seeped into their target that slowly. But once through the hull, once that first trickle had grown to a flow — then a roaring, smashing cascade — the increasing pressure had burst interior bulkheads like eggshells.

The sound of tortured metal screamed across the depths as the engineering spaces imploded, tearing the frantically spinning shaft from its bearings. Each man in Pasadena’ s sonar would retain a mental picture of exactly how their target was experiencing its final seconds, men and equipment alike bursting apart from the intense pressure. It must have been mercifully quick for most of that crew, even for those in the most distant spaces of the submarine who would have seconds more to imagine their fate before every compartment imploded from the pressure.

Newell turned slowly and walked back into the control room. As he reached behind to slide the sonar door closed, he said softly, “You can go back to business as usual, gentlemen. Pasadena has destroyed the enemy.”

The men in the control room glanced briefly at each other, unable to hold anyone’s gaze for long as they silently thanked their lucky stars that the other guy had been sunk, Their captain had brought them through.

Across the water the remains of their target plummeted to the bottom of the Pacific. USS Alaska’ s pieces spread like windblown seed as they plummeted toward the ocean floor. Her Trident missiles would no longer threaten the Soviet Union.

When Pasadena went to periscope depth and raised her antenna for her normal messages that night, she received new orders. She was sent to a new sector, almost three days from her current location. Her target there would be another Soviet ballistic-missile submarine — and it, too, possessed the same devilish masking device that would imitate an American Trident submarine.

There were a great many similarities in the destruction of Nevada . The messages received by Pasadena communicated even greater peril, warned that her mission was even more critical to the safety of the nation, and described how the next Russian SSBN also carried a masking device that would allow her to imitate another American boomer, Nevada, perfectly. They were not to be deceived. They were not to question their orders. It was imperative that this Soviet missile submarine be sunk at the earliest moment, before she received orders to launch her missiles on America. Any hesitation by Pasadena could mean her own loss, and that could herald the end of the United States.

Wayne Newell reinforced this in his own way until his crew hungered for their new target. Only after Pasadena had successfully destroyed her second target, only after the explosion of her torpedoes and the haunting sounds of the target’s death throes, did they ponder the horror of what they had accomplished — another submarine, one that gave every indication of being one of their own, had gone to the bottom with all hands.

The dark brown, four-door sedan that pulled up in front of COMSUBPAC headquarters at Pearl Harbor was intentionally nondescript, as were the three men who climbed out. They were dressed in civilian clothes — short-sleeve shirts and slacks — as were most of the non-Navy types who worked on the base. They could as easily have been three of the myriad engineers who regularly visited the naval base to troubleshoot the sophisticated electronic equipment carried by the fleet. Anonymity had been their intention since departing Washington. If the Chief of Naval Operations, his DCNO for Undersea Warfare, and the Director of Naval Nuclear Propulsion had ever appeared there together unannounced and in uniform, circumspect articles would have commanded the front pages. Concerned dependents would instinctively have been clamoring for news. And, without a doubt, the word would have found its way to the Kremlin before the first report ever appeared.

Mark Bennett had flown directly from Dulles into Pearl to meet with CINCPACFLEET (Commander in Chief, Pacific Fleet), for indirectly the problem was as much his as anyone’s, considering the chain of command. Then Bennett had been returned to the airport in civilian clothes. No one ever noticed an admiral out of uniform. There he rented the four-door sedan, and was waiting when Ray Larsen and Robbie Newman arrived on separate flights, one from San Francisco, the other from Seattle. It had been planned that way after the meeting in the CNO’s office. Larsen needed to talk with the SSBN squadron commodore at their Bangor, Washington, base beforehand. Bart Bockman had been the last one to talk with the commanding officers of Alaska and Nevada.

As the car eased into visitors’ parking there was no one to hold doors or make a fuss over three of the most senior admirals in the U.S. Navy. That was the way it would have to be — not the slightest hint that there was a crisis, no indication that the White House was on the verge of a military clash with … with the Kremlin, each of them assumed. After all, who else would be involved with something of this magnitude?

Once inside the swinging glass doors, a single officer, COMSUBPAC’s flag lieutenant, escorted them to the large office where the admiral commanding all submarines in the Pacific waited for them, Neil Arrow appeared younger than one would have anticipated of the man who commanded the Pacific Submarine Force, but he’d been C.O. of both attack subs and SSBN’s. He had been the next one in his class promoted to flag rank, after Mark Bennett.