A Sword Into Darkness (4 page)

Edwards shrugged.  “Could have been a million ways.  It depends on who’s down there.  Might our intel be wrong and not all the North Korean Kilos are in port?  Could they own some diesel boats we don’t know about?  Did they sneak in or were they already here, bottomed out and quiet?”

“I doubt anyone could have snuck by us with all the buoys and dippers we used, and there’s no way they could just happen to bottom out right where we put our launch basket.”

Edwards looked thoughtful and then turned back to his screen.  “Might be a pair of midget boats.  We never have had good numbers on them.  Maybe those two fishing boats we saw yesterday had more on their mind than fishing.  Attach a couple of North Korean midget subs to your keel, and you’ll chug along like you have a hold full of fish whether you caught any or not.  We’d be none the wiser, even if we’d been allowed to board and inspect them.”

Nathan shook his head in dismay.  “A two billion dollar destroyer ambushed by a pair of fake fishing boats and a couple of communist-crafted midget subs?  If you’re right, then it’s wrong on so many levels.”

“Well, sir, if we survive this, it’s open season on fishermen, I’m tellin’ you.”

“TAO, ASWE!  I have active sonar contacts bearing 265 at 6200 yards and 342 at 5600 yards.  Corresponds to previous lines of bearing, probable subs.  Tracks 04012 and 04013 refer.  Request permission to engage with over-the-side shots!”

“Bridge, TAO.  Go to General Quarters.  Come to 14 knots, course 120.  Break, ASWE, TAO.  Negative.  Hold your fire.”  Edwards looked at him sharply.  The war was on and their rules of engagement covered this, so they were justified in shooting, but Nathan simply held up his hand.  “ASWE, maintain track quality and torps at ready.  Report status of the pouncer.”

The staccato shriek of the GQ alarm sounded, and people all over the ship rushed purposefully about, manning repair stations and additional watches, battening down hatches and scuttles, and making
USS
Rivero
as watertight and survivable as possible.  In CIC, there was yet another shuffling of personnel as watches changed out for their Condition One positions. 
Rivero
herself sped up to a moderate speed, but came about languidly, cruising away from the two submarines as if they were scarcely a concern.  Some might have turned to attack, others might have run away at flank speed, but Nathan had a different plan in mind.

“TAO, ASWE. 
USS
Chafee
was hot-pumping her helo when we called.  Anticipate ten minutes before pouncer can be on station.”  The squadron’s always at the ready SH-60R Seahawk dipping sonar ASW helicopter was in the midst of refueling, another note of either bad luck or excellent timing on the part of the North Koreans.  Their own Firescout UAV would be up before the other destroyer’s helicopter could assist them.

“TAO, aye.”  He turned back to Edwards and the Captain, the question still in the Senior Chief’s eyes.  “Those subs are too damn close to us.  If we shoot, they’ll shoot, and the odds are we’ll be screwed.  If they let us put a little distance between us and them, and maybe even get a couple of helos in the air, the odds shift in our favor.  So we turn away, keep track on them, and try to set ourselves up for a better engagement while not making ourselves into even more of a target than we already are.”

“But what if the only reason they haven’t fired yet is that they’re firming up their weapons solution?  If we fire first and force them to evade, we can wreck their targeting.”

Both Nathan and Edwards pointedly refused to look at the CO, and he, just as stubbornly, said nothing, seeing how his two warfighters would hash it out.  “Those subs are so close, they could put their fish on circle search without any targeting, and they’d still get us.  No, Senior.  We crawl away.  We’ll shoot if forced and fight with helos and P-8’s if they’ll let us.”  He left unsaid whether or not it was likely the North Koreans would allow them to complete their escape.  Captain Jones simply nodded and squeezed both men on the shoulder in silent, unquestioning support as they turned back to their consoles.

Their enemy then rendered the argument pointless.

“All stations, Sonar!  I have launch transients from both subs!”

“Bridge, TAO!  Flank speed! Conduct Hargrove turn and launch countermeasures.  ASWE, TAO!  Counterfire!  Shoot—shoot—shoot!”

The dark triangular bulk of the ship sounded a higher pitched whine as her gas turbines ramped up, and her electrically driven, twin controllable pitch screws chewed deeper and faster through the sea, churning the water astern into white foam.  The
Rivero
began to loop around in a tight turn to cross her own wake, while noisemakers and bubble generators launched themselves from the bridge wings and disrupted the water further, all in an attempt to confuse the enemy torpedoes and hide the relatively slow moving bulk of the destroyer.  From both sides of the ship, a pair of torpedoes popped out and slid into the water, coming to life and seeking out the enemy like a pod of orcas hunting a couple of whales.  Astern, the men manning the miniature anti-torpedo torpedo rails kept aim on where sonar held the enemy weapons, through the blue-white rooster tail kicking up from the stern, ready to shoot when they came in range.

As bad as the situation was, the
Rivero
still had a chance.  Their countermeasures were as good as the lopsided physics of the situation could make them, and their own Mk-54B torpedoes would ensure that there would not be more than one additional salvo coming for them.  It was an accepted part of modern naval warfare that vessels rarely engaged one another directly.  Instead, they lunged and parried by proxy, their smart weapons doing the lion’s share of the seeking and destroying.  It was the ship’s responsibility to position those weapons and set them up for success.  In this, Nathan Kelley and his combat team excelled, but the enemy could not always be counted on to play fair.

It did not seem possible, but the sonar operator grew even more shrill.  “Combat, Sonar!  Flying Fish!  Flying Fish!  Enemy torpedoes are super-cavs!”

“Shit.  Bridge, TAO!  Cancel Hargrove.  Steady on 090 and standby for hard turn to 180.”  Nathan suddenly found it hard to hear the nets over the pounding of his own heart, but the bridge heard him and he felt the ship heel over as it reversed its maneuver and settled onto its new course due east.  Everything vibrated as the destroyer clawed at the water in her bid to escape.

Supercavitation.  Torpedoes already had a speed advantage over nearly any kind of ship, 50 to 60 knots versus 25 to 30.  The engagements still moved at a snail’s pace compared to aerial battles or duels with cruise missiles, however.  Supercavitating torpedoes, super-cavs, blurred that distinction.  By using a rocket motor rather than screws or propulsors, and by encasing the body of the torpedo in a drag-free layer of continuously generated steam, the torpedo left the viscous confines of the ocean and acted like an underwater missile.  Now rather than a twenty or thirty knot advantage, the enemy weapons had a two hundred knot advantage.  Fired from only a few miles away, there was no time for countermeasures, no time for maneuvers, and almost no time to think.

Nathan’s and
Rivero
’s sole advantage was that super-cavs, or “Flying Fish”, were nearly blind and could barely maneuver even if they could see beyond their enveloping sheath of gas.  Newer Flying Fish had sensors and spars that extended out of the gas bubble, allowing them to both see and turn.  He bet that, surprised as he had been by the North Koreans having super-cavs at all, they probably would not have the latest model.  If he could coax the torpedoes to commit to full speed on one line of bearing, it might be possible to turn the ship at the last instant to offset the blast.  But he also knew that the North Koreans would be aware of their weapons’ limitations and would likely have accounted for them.

He watched the ten subsurface tracks held on sonar.  Four were his, en route to the two tracks furthest out, the enemy subs.  The last four formed a staggered line, showing up as question marks rather than the usual symbology since they were not behaving according to the normal kinematics of submerged contacts.  The whole world paused as they began to merge with
Rivero
’s symbol at the center of the display.

“Bridge, TAO!  Turn!”

USS
Rivero
tilted over toward the outside of her desperate course change to starboard.  The stern of the ship nearly skipped through the water as she came about at 34 knots with a hard rudder angle.  From the ASW Countermeasures compartment at her fantail, Torpedomen began to fire countertorp after countertorp down into the path of the Flying Fish.

The first torpedo streaked past
Rivero
, detonating 100 yards off her port side, turning the water into a globe of pure white that imploded and then erupted in a column of spray hundreds of feet high.  The destroyer was rung like a bell, pushed laterally by over ten feet.  Loose gear rocketed through the air, along with anyone not secured in a seat.  Captain Jones, who was braced for shock but not strapped down, was thrown over a row of consoles and down to the deck.  Sparks exploded from some of the panels and the lights actually brightened as the normal, dim sources in CIC went out and the emergency supplies to all the lights came on.

The second torpedo went far afield, detonating 500 yards away.  The third fell victim to the swarm of anti-torpedo torpedoes, with four of the miniscule devices detonating in its path.  The supercavitating torpedo’s gas bubble was ripped away and a combination of shaped charge jets and a water hammer moving at 240 knots ripped the torpedo apart.  It never detonated.

The fourth torpedo slid beneath
Rivero
’s violently maneuvering stern as if destiny had willed it there.  The underwater rocket detonated, blowing a spherical hollow in the water below the destroyer’s aft keel.  The screws sped up into a blur, freed from their watery prison, followed immediately by the buckling of both shafts.  Thousands of tons of mass, now unsupported by the buoyant ocean, sagged down amidships and snapped the ship’s spine.

Then, even above the sound of screeching steel and screaming men, there came the roar of water rushing back into the void.  Hydrodynamics coalesced the collapsing sphere of liquid into a beautiful, terrible lance of pure, incompressible force.  The lance speared the already broken back of the ship and erupted upwards through deck upon deck, emerging in a fountain of destructive energy from the middle of
Rivero
’s hangar.

Rivero
collapsed back into the water, her after third shorn away in a blast of twisted, torn, burning metal.  The stern of the ship sank in less than a minute, greedily claiming everyone stationed inside.  The bodies of the flight deck crew and wrecked hulk of the autonomous Firescout-II helo were launched several hundred yards.  None of them survived intact.

The forward two thirds of the
Rivero
wallowed in relative peace.  The hangar crew and the engineers who had faced the blast directly were no longer even recognizable as bodies.  Water flooded into open spaces, past sprung doors and hatches and into the forward half of the ship, even as oil and sewage spilled back out into the sea.  Throughout the ship, the few survivors who remained conscious set about organizing themselves to make it out to the life rafts and to evacuate everyone they could.  They stopped any real attempt at damage control once they realized there was no way to stop the ship from going down, nor could they tell if it was going down in five minutes or fifty.

Unseen by any aboard, either because they were unconscious, dead, or too busy to worry about being attacked again, there was a sequence of four more explosions a couple of miles away to the north and to the west.  These eruptions were followed by a pair of spreading oil slicks, some debris, and nothing more.  The dark, wind tossed sea returned to a state of calm without further attacks upon the doomed destroyer.

Five minutes later,
Chafee
’s helicopter hovered into view to face a scene sailors had only regarded in nightmares since the end of the Second World War.  Pitifully few of the
Rivero
’s bright orange inflatable life rafts floated around her rolling, sinking wreckage.  It was another twenty minutes before
USS
Chafee
herself arrived, with
Halsey
and
Port Royal
showing up to render aid soon thereafter.

LT Nathaniel Robert Kelley, Weapons Officer of the former
USS
Rivero
, kept his haunted eyes upon her grave long after she slipped beneath the waves.

3:  “ZINGER”

June 15, 2034; Lee Estate; Santa Cruz, California

Looking
up at the redwood shrouded main house, Nathan Kelley realized this had to go down as the weirdest damned job interview in history.  If he had known the process would be quite this … complicated, he doubted he would have ever responded to Windward Technologies’ invitation to that first meeting.

That initial interview had been almost painfully normal.  The Windward representative had come out to Boston as part of a larger science and technology job fair along with a score of other companies like Lockheed, Raytheon, and Orbital Sciences.  Nathan—like a few hundred other prospective candidates—was finishing up his Master’s degree at MIT, ready to begin the next chapter of his life.  Having come from a now aborted career in the Navy, he had been older than his competition and not a perpetual student.

His Windward meet-and-greet had been utterly typical interview fodder, blending in with his dozen or so other attempts to sell himself to corporate America that day:

“What are your goals, Mr. Kelley?”

“What are your best and worst qualities, Mr. Kelley?”

“Why should Windward hire you, Mr. Kelley?”

Nathan had left the job fair less than hopeful about the possibility of Windward calling him back, so he had gone back to school and finished the final draft of his thesis.  There were no nibbles from Windward Technologies, so he had moved on to other applications, other prospects, targeting résumés to every tech-firm that might remotely be hiring.