Tom Clancy - Debt of Honor

He increased power one last tune, going to burner to disengage, angling right to keep clear of the fighters advancing in from the south. Those were the planes from Guam, probably. He wished them luck.

"TURKEY, this is TISKKI \ I i M> Disengage now. I say again, disengage now!" Sanchez was well behind the action now, wishing that he were in his Hornet instead of the larger Tomcat. Acknowledgments came in, and though he'd lost a few aircraft, and though the battle had not been entirely to his liking, he knew that it had been a success. He headed north to clear the area, checking his fuel state. Then he saw strobe lights at his ten o'clock and turned further to investigate.

"Jesus, Bud, it's an airliner." his radar-intercept officer said. "JAL markings." That was obvious from the stylized red crane on the high tailfin.

"Better warn him off." Sanchez turned on his own strobes and closed from the portside. "JAL 747, JAL 747, this is U.S. Navy aircraft to your portside."

"Who are you?" the voice asked over the guard frequency.

"We are a U.S. Navy aircraft. Be advised there is a battle going on here. I suggest you reverse course and head back home. Over."

"I don't have the fuel for that."

"Then you can bingo to Iwo Jima. There's a field there, but watch out for the radio tower southwest of the strip, over."

"Thank you," was the terse reply. "I will continue on my flight plan. Out."

"Dumbass." Sanchez didn't put on the air, though his backseater fully agreed. In a real war they would have just shot him down, but this wasn't a real war, or so some people had decided. Sanchez would never know the magnitude of his error.

"Captain, that is very dangerous!"

"Iwo Jima is not lighted. We'll approach from the west and stay clear," Captain Sato said, unmoved by all that he'd heard. He altered course to the west, and the copilot kept his peace on the matter.

"Active sonar to starboard, bearing zero-one-zero, low-frequency, probably a sub." And that was not good news.

"Snapshot!" Claggett ordered at once. He'd drilled his crew mercilessly on this scenario, and the boomers did have the best torpedomen in the fleet.

"Setting up on tube four," the weapons petty officer answered. On command, the torpedo was activated. "Flooding four. Tube four is flooded. Weapon is hot."

"Initial course zero-one-zero," the weapons officer said, checking the plot, which didn't reveal much. "Cut the wires, set to go active at one thousand!"

"Set!"

"Match and shoot!" Claggett ordered.

"Fire four, four away!" The sailor nearly broke the firing handle.

"Range four thousand meters," the sonar officer reported. "Large submerged target, beam aspect. Transient—he's launched!"

"So can we. Fire one, fire two!" Ugaki shouted. "Left full rudder," he added the moment the second tube was clear. "Ahead flank!"

"Torpedo in the water. Two torpedoes in the water, bearing zero-one-zero. Ping-and-listen, the torpedoes are in search mode!" sonar reported.

"Oh, shit. We've been here before," Shaw noted, recalling an awful experience on USS Maine . The Army officer aboard and his senior sergeant had just come into the attack center to thank the Captain for his part in the helicopter mission. They stopped cold on the portside, looking around and seeing the tension in the compartment.

"Six-inch room, launch decoy, now!"

"Launching now." There was slight noise a second later, just a jolt of compressed air.

"We have a MOSS set up?" Claggett asked, even though he'd given orders for exactly that.

"Tube two, sir," the weapons tech replied.

"Warm it up."

"Done, sir."

"Okay." Commander Claggett allowed himself a deep breath and time to think. He didn't have much, but he had some. How smart was that Japanese fish? Tennessee was doing ten knots, not having had rudder or speed orders after submerging, and was at three hundred feet of keel depth. Okay.

"Six-inch room, set up a spread of three canisters to launch on my command. "

"Standing by, sir."

"Weps, set the MOSS for three hundred feet, circling as tight as you can at this depth. Make it active as soon as it clears the tube."

"Stand by…set. Tube is flooded."

"Launch."

"MOSS away, sir."

"Six-inch room, launch now!"

Tennessee shuddered again, with three decoys ejected into the sea along with the torpedo-based lure. The approaching torpedo now had a very attractive false target to track.

"Surface the ship! Emergency surface!"

"Emergency surface, aye," the chief of the boat replied, reaching himself for the air manifold, "Full rise on the planes!"

"Full rise, aye!" the helmsman repealed, pulling back on his control yoke.

"Conn, sonar, the inbound torpedoes are still in ping-and-listen. Our outbound unit is now on continuous pinging. It has a sniff."

"Their fish is like an early 48, troops," Claggett said calmly. His demeanor was a lie, and he knew that, but the crew might not. "Remember the three rules of a -48. It has to be a valid target, it has to be over eight hundred yards, and it has to have a bearing rate. Helm, all stop."

"All stop, aye. Sir, engine room answers all stop."

"Very well, we'll let her coast up now," the Captain said, out of things to say now. He looked over at the Army people and winked. They looked rather pale. Well, that was one advantage of being black, wasn't it? Claggett thought.

Tennessee look a thirty-degree up-angle, killing a lot of her forward as she rose and tumbling several people to the deck, it came so abruptly Claggett held on to the red-and-white periscope-control wheel to steady himself.

"Depth?"

"Breaking the surface now, sir!" the COB reported. A second later came a rush of exterior noise, and then the submarine crashed sickeningly back down.

"Rig for ultraquiet. "

The shaft was stopped now. Tennessee wallowed on the surface while three hundred feet down and half a mile aft, the MOSS was circling in and out of the decoy bubbles. He'd done all that he could do. A crewman reached into his pocket for a smoke, then realized that he'd lost his pack topside.

"Our unit is in acquisition!" sonar reported.

"Come right! " Ugaki said, trying to be calm and succeeding, but the American torpedo had run straight through the decoy field…just as his had done, he remembered. He looked around his control room. The faces were on him, just as they had been the other time, but this time the other boat had shot first despite his advantage, and he only needed a look at the plot to see that he'd never know if his second submarine attack had succeeded or not. "I'm sorry," he said to his crew, and a few heads had time to nod at his final, sincere apology to them.

"Hit!" sonar called next.

"Thank you, Sonar," Claggett acknowledged.

"The enemy fish are circling below us, sir…they seem to be…yeah, they're chasing into the decoy…we're getting some pings, but…"

"But the early -48s didn't track stationary surface targets, Chief," Claggett said quietly. The two men might have been the only people breathing aboard. Well, maybe Ken Shaw, who was standing at the weapons panel. It only made things worse that you couldn't hear the ultrasonic noise of a torpedo sonar.

"The damned things run forever."

"Yep." Claggett nodded. "Raise the ESM," he added as an afterthought.

The sensor mast went up at once, and people cringed at the noise.

"Uh, Captain, there's an airborne radar bearing three-five-one."

"Strength?"

"Low but increasing. Probably a P-3, sir."

"Very well."

It was too much for the Army officer. "We just sit still?"

"That's right."

Sato brought the 747 in largely from memory. There were no runway lights, but he had enough from the moon to see what he was doing, and once again the copilot marveled at the man's skill as the aircraft's landing lights caught reflections from the lights on the ground. The landing was slightly to the right of the centerline, but Sato managed a straight run to the end, this time without his usual look over at the junior officer. He was bringing the aircraft right onto the taxiway when there was a flash in the distance.