Dragon Fire (The Battle for the Falklands Book 2) (4 page)

“You know...” Matias said to Ledesma,
though he was really addressing all those present.
 
“These boats are better than the old S-boats
we used to ride to sea.”
 
Matias spoke of
the dated Type 209’s, the diesel submarines on which he had cut his teeth.
 
“Those boats, like the first
San Luis
, made a racket like the whole
ocean was rushing in.
 
These are
better.”
 
Though he knew Russian welders
were known to cut corners, and that quality control on exported hulls was scant
at best, he suppressed his own lingering doubts about the machine that had, so
far, kept them alive.
 
Matias put on a
brave face and rocked on his heels.

“One hundred twenty-five meters, sir,”
Ledesma reported.

“Planes to zero degrees.
 
Level us off.”

In a small alcove off the Control Room, a
band appeared on a monitor’s sonar waterfall.

“Contact,” the sonar technician
announced.
 
“Distant.
 
On the surface.
 
It’s closing.”

“Classify,” Matias ordered in response.

“Range: four miles.
 
Bearing: one-nine-zero degrees.
 
Speed: 20 knots.
 
I hear two propellers.
 
High speed shafts.
 
Not a merchantman.
 
Computer is working on--
”
 
The
clatter of a printer interrupted as
it began to spit out a report.
 
The sonar
supervisor ripped off the paper it produced and read it aloud:

“Type 23 frigate.
 
United Kingdom.
 
Duke
-class.”

“Good.
 
Our first catch of the day,” Matias said with a greedy smile.
 
Reassured by his captain’s lust for the hunt,
Ledesma grinned back.
 
Then he opened a
binder and began to read:

“Type 23.
 
Thirty-six hundred tons.
 
A top
speed of 28 knots.
 
Thales Type 2050NE
bow-mounted sonar operating in the 4.5-7.5 kilohertz range, and a
Dowty
Type 2087 very low frequency towed array.”

“Anti-submarine armaments?”

“Stingray torpedoes and a Merlin
helicopter.
 
Depending on her hull
number, she could be carrying the SSTD torpedo countermeasures system.”
 
Ledesma scanned the rest of the binder’s
page.
 
“The type is decommissioning;
being replaced with a new class, the Global Combat Ship.”

Matias looked to the weapons status
board.
 
San Luis II
had wire-guided torpedoes in the two outer tubes, and
wake-followers—53-65KEs—in the other four.

“What do you think, Santiago?” Matias
asked Ledesma in a near whisper.

“The British would never expect us to be
this far north.”

Matias nodded agreement.
 
When Admiral Correa had assembled his top
naval officers to review plans, it was Matias who had argued against deploying
Argentina’s best submarines in the waters surrounding
Las Islas Malvinas
.
 
Instead, he pressed, they should be used to
take the fight to the British, and not wait for them to come to the fight.
 
Furthermore, he argued, the highly-capable
and deeply-feared British nuclear submarines would likely deploy to and roam
the war zone, making it the last place where the Argentine Navy should
concentrate their valuable boats.

“That frigate is running too fast to have
her towed array in the water.
 
I would
say she is sprinting south, and her captain is not expecting any interference
just yet,” Ledesma added.
 
Matias smiled.

“Yes, Santiago.
 
I concur.
 
Creep us abeam of her.
 
And bring
us to battle stations.”

3: DUKES
UP

“
The art of war is simple enough: Find out
where the enemy is; Get at him as soon as you can; Strike at him as hard as you
can and as often as you can
,
and keep moving on
.”—Ulysses S. Grant

T
he
storm pushed the sea into tall wind-whipped peaks, cliffs of water that dropped
off sharply into deep troughs.
 
The water
was dark, a deep purple, and rafts of froth rose and fell with the sloshing
surface.
 
A torrent of rain pelted HMS
Iron Duke
as her long, thin, grey hull
rose and slammed back down, her stern corkscrewing and exposing her red
underbelly and the tips of her shiny propellers.
 
As the water piled up and folded over, the
frigate’s bridge crew stabbed the warship’s bow through the waves’ white crowns
at the proper angle, thereby allowing maintenance of a decent speed.

“Five degrees starboard,” the
officer-of-the-watch yelled above the screaming wind and splashing water.
 
Iron
Duke
turned to the right a bit more, rose steeply, rolled some, and then
slammed back down in a surge of water and sea spray, momentarily submerging the
bridge.
 
The windshield’s clear view
screens—small round discs that spun to rapidly shed water—threw the water away
as the ship’s bow came back up and the cold seawater rushed away in a mass of
green foam.
 
The bow, supplemented by the
buoyancy of the bulbous stem that contained the sonar, climbed again and scaled
the next oceanic hill.
 
Though
Iron Duke
’s Artisan 3D radar swept the
area, the screens in the Operations Room were so full of clutter from wave
crests that the radar operator could not discern the black pipe peeking from the
depths.

San
Luis II
’s periscope pierced the surface.
 
Its lens surveyed the area before it
disappeared again, swallowed by the rhythmic rise and fall of waves.
 
Twenty feet below this protuberance, the
black shadow of the Argentine submarine hovered steadily below the
squall-battered surface.
 
In the red glow
of
San Luis II
’s Control Room’s
nighttime lighting, Captain Matias looked through the periscope’s monocular
eyepiece.

Matias spotted the green glow of
Iron Duke
’s bank of bridge windows and
the powerful flashlight of a deckhand scurrying along the rail, checking for
storm damage.
 
Matias waited for the next
wave to pass.
 
Bubbles cleared from the
periscope lens and he turned and fixed the apparatus on these lights.
 
He centered them in the reticle, increased
magnification, and then swept his view toward the ship’s prow.

“I see the pennant number: Foxtrot
two-three-four,” Matias read.

Ledesma flipped pages in his binder,
repeated: “F234
,
” and then
declared: “
Iron Duke
.
 
That is the frigate that departed
Las
Islas Malvinas
right before operations commenced.
 
They must have turned her right around.”

Matias leaned into the periscope again and
squinted into its eyepiece.
 
“Update:
target now at two-six-three degrees.
 
Speed,
11 knots.
 
Bearing, one-seven-zero.
 
Ready tubes two and five.
 
Warm up the weapons.”

Ledesma passed the order to the
chief-of-the-boat.
 
The chief went to the
weapons technician, ordered the fire control system to be updated, and sent
orders to the torpedo room.

In the boat’s forward-most compartments,
two sweating men ducked under racks full of reload torpedoes.
 
They spun valves and checked indicators.
 
One submariner then clicked a switch to talk
to the Control Center.
 
He informed the
chief that power was flowing to the two telephone pole-sized weapons nestled in
the tubes.
 
The chief, in turn, informed
the executive officer, who passed confirmation to the captain.

“Power is flowing to tubes two and
five.
 
Fire control updates are being
transferred,” Ledesma reported.

“Flood tubes two and five,” Matias
ordered.

In the torpedo room, a lever was lowered,
and the respective tubes were pumped full of seawater, air was vented, and
pressure equalized with that outside the submarine.

“Open outer doors.”

Two muzzle doors opened on
San Luis II
’s rounded bow.

Standing behind the Control Room’s weapon
station, Ledesma confirmed the doors were open.

Matias sighed, breaking the anticipatory
silence of the compartment.
 
Then he ordered:
“Fire.”

The weapons technician pushed a button on
his panel.

In the torpedo tubes, a valve slid open
and the water ram operated.
 
This plug of
high-pressure water pushed both torpedoes from their tubes.
 
Power cables severed, and with safeties now
disengaged, both torpedoes activated their onboard kerosene-oxygen turbines.
 
Batteries that powered the torpedoes’
guidance systems and warhead fuses came on.
 
Both of
San Luis II
’s weapons
began their run.
 
Following their
programmed course, the heavy torpedoes turned toward
Iron Duke
’s stern.

The torpedo room technicians immediately
went about closing the muzzle doors and draining the tubes of water.
 
When empty and equalized with the submarine’s
interior, the breeches were reopened and the reloading procedure began.

“Take us down to 500, put us on a parallel
course with the target, and drop back 4,000 meters,” Matias ordered.

When on electric motors, the submarine was
incapable of keeping pace with
Iron Duke
’s
current speed, and running the diesels was certain to expose
San Luis II
to counter-attack.
 
Matias told Ledesma that, should the first
volley of torpedoes fail to hit, he would then fire a wire-guided weapon and
use its high speed to close with and strike the British frigate.

“Very well, sir,” Ledesma said as he
looked to a light on the weapons console.
 
“Torpedo room reports tubes two and five reloaded.”
 
Matias checked his watch.

“Excellent,” Matias said, impressed.
 
The captain had sweated the crew in countless
drills.
 
Although he heard whispers and
grumbling each time, he had reminded his submariners: ‘Better to sweat in
peacetime than bleed in wartime.’
 
Thousands of yards away,
San Luis
II
’s torpedoes began to snake back and forth within the
vee
of
Iron Duke
’s wake.

The Royal Navy frigate slowed and changed
course to take a large wave.
 
As she rode
up and over the building-tall upsurge, her stern came up.
 
One torpedo lost track of the frigate’s wake
and went wide.
 
However, as the stern again
displaced water, the second weapon detected its steel and turned toward
it.
 
The torpedo struck the bottom of the
rolling ship and detonated its 678-pound warhead beneath
Iron Duke
’s main engine room.

The ship shook from stem to stern as it
was lifted by the blast and dropped again into the bubble jet created by the
explosion.

The keel snapped and superhot gases punched
a hole through the hull, cracking and curling its steel.
 
A fireball rose through the ship, venting through
the ship’s stack and ripping the decking surrounding it.
 
The shockwave from the blast was amplified
underwater.

A mile behind and 500 feet below
Iron Duke
,
San Luis II
felt the rumble.
 
A cheer went up, but it was quickly stifled by the officers and the more
disciplined.
 
Matias closed his eyes for
a moment, knowing that aboard
Iron Duke
,
sailors were confronting a hell of twisted metal, smashed machinery, flame, and
water.

On
Iron
Duke
’s bridge, the shouts of men and the noise of equipment being dragged
from repair lockers and hose racks could be heard in nearby areas.
 
Temperature readings from the gas turbines
shot up.

“Fire in the main engine room,” someone shouted.

The Halon flame-suppression system was
started just as the ship’s electrical power began to brownout.
 
Generators began to shut down from damage,
and the sole remaining one could not handle the demand.
 
It would soon shut down as well.
 
Iron
Duke
’s captain believed he had struck a mine.
 
Certain the Argentinians were incapable of
operating this far north, he disagreed with an officer’s contention that they
had been stalked and attacked by a submarine.
 
Despite this contrary conclusion, the captain
ordered that the active sonar be powered up.

“Negative availability, sir,” his
second-in-command informed him.
 
There
was no power for a sonar pulse, let alone weapons.

Iron
Duke
stopped and bobbed.
 
The warship rolled
in the storm and shuddered as she took wave after wave to her broadside.
 
The damaged ship let out an unearthly
metallic groan.
 
The sailors did all they
could to save her.

A machinist managed to restart the
undamaged generator and selectively got power flowing to the fire-fighting
pumps and interior lighting.
 
Sailors
pounded wooden wedges into bulkhead leaks with mallets.
 
Clothing, mattresses, and pillows were also
brought into play to slow down the leaks.
 
Portable eductor pumps began to suck water from the now-flooded main
engine and auxiliary machine rooms.
 
The
pumps dispatched water overboard from vents and hoses snaking from other hull
openings.
 
But despite valiant efforts,
Iron Duke
began to ride lower and
lower.
 
After leaning overboard to check
the waterline, an officer ran down a darkened passageway.

He passed a burned and bloodied man, naked
save for the blanket draped over his shivering shoulders.
 
The officer stopped and, gasping, pointed the
way to triage that had been set up in the mess.
 
He then continued on to the bridge, where he
went to the officer-of-the-watch and reported: “Sir, we are sinking ourselves.”

The reason was firefighters had sprayed
tons of water into the ship’s skin, and the pumps were being overwhelmed by the
accumulating water.
 
This spurred a
counter-intuitive order that crackled over the ship’s public announcement
system: “Cease all firefighting efforts.”
 
The captain ordered a damage report.

Inside and out, sailors went about
inspections.
 
On the upper deck, the
rain, even though lighter now, sizzled on hot metal.
 
Fires flashed, sparked by the hot
superstructure, and deck cracks opened everywhere.
 
Smoke billowed from the stricken ship.
 
None of the sailors crawling over
Iron Duke
’s pitching hulk saw the enemy
periscope peeking from between waves.

Everyone in
San Luis II
’s Control Room stared at Captain Matias, silently willing
him to give the order to launch another torpedo—to deliver the coup de
grâce
on the British vessel.
 
He scanned their faces.

“
¿
Señor
?” Ledesma prodded his captain.

“Take us down to 95 meters; course
zero-four-zero.
 
Make turns for five
knots,” Matias ordered.

Several submariners turned back to their
panels, hiding their disgust.
 
Ledesma
did not respond at first and simply stared at his captain.
 
Matias had reasoned that the British frigate
was combat-ineffective and he refused to slaughter men for no reason.
 
A flame flickered in Matias’ eyes.
 
Then he seemed to grow taller and his gaze
became stern.
 
Ledesma saw this.
 
Finally, he acknowledged and repeated the
order.

The submarine’s bow planes tilted
downwards.
 
San Luis II
dived and leaned into her turn.
 
The British survivors had been granted a
chance to return home to their families.