Larry Bond - Exit Plan

USS Michigan, SSGN 727

It was a long three minutes. Guthrie paced around the periscope stand, pausing only to look occasionally at the sonar display. Nothing. The ADC Mark 4 sonar jammer he had deployed was exceptionally loud and affected the BQCKLO hull arrays just as much as their adversary’s sensors. They had to get clear so the fancy signal processing equipment could digitally screen out the influences of their countermeasure.

“Conn, Sonar, new contact, bearing one three five. Designate new contact Sierra-five seven.”

“Sonar, Conn, aye,” replied Simmons. Guthrie was already on his way to the sonar shack.

“What do you have for me, Woody?” Guthrie asked eagerly, as he entered the darkened space where four sonar operators worked their magic.

Buckley pointed to the passive broadband display showing the input from the spherical array. “Here is the weak trace we just picked up off the sphere. There is nothing on the low frequency bow array — no narrowband tonals — but without a towed array we can’t be confident of this. The initial cut on bearing rate suggests he’s close, about two degrees per minute, drawing left. My chief here says it’s a submerged contact, and I concur, sir.”

Although Buckley couldn’t see it, there was a big grin on Guthrie’s face. “Well done, gentlemen, well done. We’ll stay on this course for another minute or two, and get a good first leg. Then I’ll turn us to the southeast. Don’t lose ‘em!”

“Aye, aye, sir!” exclaimed the occupants of the sonar space.

Guthrie walked quickly over to the geoplot and gestured for Harper to join him.

“What do you have so far, Erik?” the captain demanded.

“Sir, we have two decoys. One bears one three zero and the other one three seven. If you add in the bearing spread from the torpedoes, that puts the Kilo somewhere down here.” Nelson pointed to a circle two thousand yards in diameter, five thousand yards to the southeast.

“Very nice, Erik. Well done. You, too, Sean and Daniel.” Guthrie was pleased with what his junior officers had put together given the sparse data they had to work with; but they had missed an important clue. “However, I think we can improve upon this a little. Hand me the ruler, please, Daniel.”

Guthrie took the ruler and marked lines between the bearing cuts for the two torpedoes, explaining as he drew. “If you assume these weapons were fired nearly simultaneously, then the respective ranges to them, should be fairly close as well. By linking the corresponding bearings together, you get rough positions, which we can trace back to their point of origin.”

The captain then aligned the ruler along the position dots and drew two more lines. Guthrie finished by drawing another line through the two bearings to the decoys. The three lines formed a small triangle within the much larger circle constructed by his JOs.

“Sweet,” whispered Hogan.

“This last line is more of a swag,” admitted Guthrie, “but it’s not that sensitive as long as it’s roughly in an east-west direction, the direction of his travel. That, gentlemen, is where the Kilo fired from. Now let’s figure out where he’s going.”

Porter and Hogan plotted out the rest of the bearing information and merged it with their skipper’s initial starting point. In less than a minute, they had worked out an initial solution of course two six three, speed six knots, range four thousand yards. For all the high-tech ASW hardware his boat carried, nothing conveyed more information to Kyle Guthrie than a good old-fashioned paper plot. He wrote down the initial solution on a fire control chit and handed it to Harper. “Have Sandy put this into her analyzer and start stacking the dots against it,” he ordered.

“Yes, sir,” replied the engineer. He took the information and read it to Ensign Wagner, who quickly entered the starting solution into the fire control console. She immediately began manipulating the passive sonar bearing information by adjusting the course, speed, and range knobs until the bearing dots formed a nice neat vertical stack. The initial solution was a good one, and the dots stacked up quickly. They had a good first leg. Harper gave the skipper a thumbs-up sign.

“Attention in Control,” Guthrie announced. “I intend to come left, and execute a second leg for an Ekelund range. As we turn, we’ll deploy a mobile decoy to distract the Kilo skipper’s attention. After a good fire control solution has been generated, we’ll launch a single Mark 48 ADCAP. Stay on your toes. This isn’t over yet. Carry on.”

“Skipper, won’t turning to the left get us awfully close to the Kilo?” Simmons voice was edgy with apprehension.

“You’re correct, Isaac, we’ll be closing the target. But if he’s where I think he is, his sonar will be staring straight at the ADC Mark 4 countermeasure that’s still cranking out a ton of noise. It should not only mask our approach, but also our shot. To quote our XO, ‘we’ll be coming at him from out of the sun.’”

Simmons face fell when Guthrie mentioned the XO. “I sure hope the XO and the other guys are okay. We left them high and dry.”

For a brief moment Guthrie took the comment personally, but quickly realized that his navigator was merely expressing the same feelings of concern that they all shared. “I hope so, too, Nav. But right now, we can’t afford to think about it.”

“Helm, left fifteen degrees rudder. Steady on course one three zero,” commanded Guthrie.

“Captain, my helm is left fifteen, coming to course one three zero.”

“Very well, helm. Weps, stand by to launch a mobile decoy, course two two five, speed eight knots.”

Zelinski quickly punched the buttons on the countermeasure panel, double-checked the settings, and reported, “Standing by to launch mobile decoy, course and speed laid in.”

“Launch countermeasure!” barked Guthrie.

“Countermeasure away, Captain.”

Let’s hope he falls for this , Guthrie thought. If he doesn’t, it’ll get real interesting, real fast. Looking around the control room, he saw his crew carrying out their duties calmly and with determination. Pride filled him as he watched the team that he and Jerry Mitchell had worked so hard to train functioning like a well-oiled machine, preparing for the moment when he would order them to shoot.

It just seemed so bizarre; he had gone through this procedure countless times during his career, but that was in the attack trainers or on a test range. This was real; he was going to launch a warshot torpedo at a hostile target that had already taken a shot at him. The Kilo skipper was about to get what he deserved; no more, no less.

“Open the outer door on tube one.”

Kilo-Class Submarine, Yunes, SS903

There was an old joke posted on the squadron headquarters bulletin board from some Western defense journal that read, “ASW means Awfully Slow Warfare.” Mehr couldn’t agree more. It had been a little over ten minutes since their initial attack, and there still was no sign of the Ohio -class boat. Had they truly hit the Americans the first time? Or had her captain decided that discretion was the better part of valor?

All but one of the deployed countermeasures had ceased to function and sank to the bottom, clearing up the sonar picture immensely. This last one, deployed by the Americans, was still causing some problems. Were they hiding nearby, lying in wait? Mehr dismissed the idea, because to use a countermeasure effectively in that manner he’d have to know exactly where Yunes was. And that was most improbable.

The Iranian skipper stood up and stretched. He was starting to get drowsy in his chair and he needed to get his blood moving. It would be bad form to fall asleep in the middle of the hunt. He strolled around all of the watch stations, checking in on his men, who had to be just as tired as he was. After speaking with Lieutenant Kashani at the MVU-110 fire control console, Mehr wandered back to the sonar cubicle. He leaned up against the door to the closet-sized space and looked inside; the two operators seemed to be in a trance, both watching their displays and listening intently to the waters around them.