Stephen Coonts - Combat

“Turn left, come to flank speed,” Harding said calmly.

“Aye, sir, turning left full rudder, ordering flank speed,” Lieutenant Trela repeated.

“Time to impact?” Harding asked the sonarman.

“Ninety seconds, skipper.”

“Release the noisemakers as soon as we pass three-six-zero degrees,” Harding ordered. “Prepare to fire tubes one and two.”

“Don’t do it, Captain,” McGarvey shouted, coming into the control room directly on Paradise’s heels.

Harding’s head snapped around. McGarvey stood dripping next to the plotting tables, blood covering his face, a wild look in his eyes. “Get out of here, Mac. Now!”

“Listen to me, Tom. We have to make the PRC skipper think that he’s destroyed us.”

“He very well might do just that.”

“Sixty-five seconds to impact,” Fisher reported.

“Tubes one and two ready to fire, Captain,” the fire-control officer said.

“If it can be done without risking our own destruction, we have to try it,” McGarvey argued. “That’s the entire point of the mission. Getting Shizong out of here in secret, or making the Chinese believe that he’s dead.” McGarvey shook his head. “They were waiting for us up there. They knew we were bringing him. And I lost one of my people.”

“Captain?” the Chief of Boat prompted.

“Release the noisemakers now,” Harding said. “All stop, rudder amidships.”

“All stop, rudder amidships, sir,” Trela responded crisply after only a moment’s hesitation. He hoped the old man knew what he was doing this time.

“Fifty seconds to impact.”

Harding looked at McGarvey and Paradise. “I’m sorry that you took a casualty,” he said. “Stand by to fire tube one, only tube one.”

“Stand by one, aye,” the weapons-control officer said.

“Sonar, this is the captain. want you to pull up the BRD program that we were given in Pearl. Feed it to the main sonar dome.” BRD was Battle Response Decoy system. The Seawolf was supposed to have tested it on the initial part of this cruise, but not under actual battle conditions.

“Aye, skipper, I understand. Forty seconds to impact.”

“I’ll tell you when to transmit. Just be ready.”

“Yes, sir.”

Harding motioned for Paradise to man the ballast control panel. “On my mark I want all aft tanks explosively vented.” This would fill them with water all at once, making the boat stern-heavy. She would sink to the bottom tail first.

“Thirty seconds to impact,” Fisher reported.

“Fire tube one,” Harding said.

“Fire one, aye,” the weapons-control officer said. “Torpedo one is away.”

“Sonar, conn. Stand by, Fisher.”

“Aye, sir.”

“Send autodestruct,” Harding told the weapons-control officer.

The man looked up. “Sir—?”

“Twenty seconds to impact.”

“Autodestruct now!” Harding ordered.

The weapons-control officer uncaged the button and pushed it. Their wire-guided HE torpedo, which had not had enough time to began searching for a target, exploded less than eight hundred feet from the Seawolf, and directly in the path of the oncoming Chinese torpedoes.

“Brace yourselves,” Harding shouted as the first tremendous shock wave hammered the hull.

Both Chinese torpedoes fired almost simultaneously, slamming the Seawolf’s hull as if they had been hit by a pair of runaway cement trucks.

“Transmit now,” Harding told sonar. An instant later the water all around them reverberated with the transmitted noises of a submarine breaking up; internal explosions, water rushing, bulkheads collapsing, even men screaming, machinery spinning wildly out of control and breaking through decks as the boat was torn apart.

Paradise was waiting at the ballast control panel, and Harding gave him the nod.

“Take us down.”

Paradise twisted the controls, air was vented out of the aft tanks, and immediately they began a rapid descent to the bottom. Harding reached up to a handhold on the overhead and braced himself. Everyone else did the same.

Heishui held the earphones close. He was hearing the noises of a dying submarine. It excited him and saddened him at the same time. More than one hundred officers and men were dead or dying beneath him.

He focused on Zenzhong and the other sonar operators who had done such brilliant jobs. He felt a great deal of respect and affection for them. For all of his crew. They had gone up against one of the best ships in all the U.S. Navy and had been victorious.

“Good job,” he said, smiling warmly as he took off the earphones and handed them to one of the sonarmen. “Our mission was a complete success, and now it is time for us to go home.”

Zenzhong was busy with his equipment. At least six distinct white horizontal lines were painted on his sonar display scopes. “We have many targets incoming,” he said. He marked them on the screen with a grease pencil as quickly as he identified them.

“Then we’ll thread the needle,” Heishui said. “And you will lead us to safety.”

Zenzhong looked up, his eyes wide, but then he started to work out the relative bearings of the incomings.

Heishui went back to the control room. His crew all looked respectfully at him. He smiled and bowed to them all. “Thank you. We have succeeded in fulfilling our orders. We will go home now.”

“What is our course and speed, Captain?” his Chief of Boat asked.

Heishui went to the plotting table and took the bearings of the incoming warships as Zenzhong gave them. They were almost boxed in, but not quite. One lane leading out to sea was somehow still open to them.

“Make our course three-five-zero, speed two-five knots,” he told the Chief of Boat, who immediately relayed his orders. At that speed they would be very noisy.

Lagao came over and studied the plots. “They have left us a way out,” he said.

“Either it’s a mistake for it’s a political decision on their part,” Heishui said, looking up. He felt at peace, but it was clear that his XO was troubled.

“Or it may be a trap.”

Heishui nodded. “Prepare a message for Admiral Pei. Tell him that we have succeeded and are en route to Ningbo.”

“When shall I send it?”

“Immediately,” Heishui said, and he turned back to the chart as his boat accelerated. There was no possibility that they would make it home this time. But their mission was a success. The traitor Shi Shizong was dead, and a war with Taiwan had been avoided. At least for the moment.

On the way up to New York from Langley, McGarvey had a lot to think about. There was a new, troubling situation heating up in the Balkans, more unrest in Greece, rumors that someone at the highest levels inside the Mexican government was in bed with the leading drug cartels, and Castro’s successor was courting Pakistan for nuclear technology.

The funeral for Tom Preston had been a quiet affair at Arlington, with only a handful of friends and relatives. He hadn’t been married, and there weren’t any children. There’d been some confusion about who he was, but the Taiwanese Coast Guard had finally gotten it figured out, and his body had been flown home.

The Chinese Navy and Air Force had finished their extensive exercise, packed up their toys, and gone home all of a sudden with no explanation about Peter Shizong, or about the apparent destruction of two submarines, an American boat somewhere off Taiwan’s north coast and a PRC boat a couple of hours later and fifty miles north. There were no survivors.

The media never got the last story, and at the diplomatic level China and the U.S. politely avoided mentioning the issue at all. It was, as far as both sides were concerned, a completely fair and equitable exchange.