Dragon Fire (The Battle for the Falklands Book 2) (7 page)

The FLASH unreeled again and penetrated
the water’s surface, falling to breach that problematic thermocline.
 
It would peek beneath this layer to verify
and firm up data on the previous contact.
 
As the FLASH did its job, John monitored the sonobuoys that listened for
any possible transitory signals.
 
Kingfisher
21—
Dragon
’s Merlin—had cast its net
wide.
 
Now, it began to cinch it and haul
it in.

◊◊◊◊

The passive array that ran the length of
San Luis II
’s hull heard the thump-thump-thump
of an approaching helicopter, and then the splashes of sonobuoys.
 
Indoctrinated and trained by Argentines, each
submariner had nonetheless studied and held a secret admiration for their
British enemy.
 
After all, the
británicos
had overcome the German U-boat threat by
developing tactics and technology that had turned the table on the greatest
underwater mariners humankind had ever known.
 
They then had joined the Americans in corralling the Soviet threat, whose
machines and men threatened to rule the world.
 
This secret admiration of the British by the Argentines also indicated
an unconscious fear, and fear always meant hesitation.
 
As much as it was Captain Matias’ job to keep
his boat from going to the bottom, it was also his job to inspire the crew to
believe they were better than those British, who seemed to think they had a
God-given right to dominate affairs.
 
As
much as Captain Matias believed
Las Islas Malvinas
were not worth the
risk, he would fight for his flag, and for those placed under his command.
 
His thoughts were interrupted by a sound from
outside.

Captain Matias knew that his submarine
created hydrodynamic noise resulting from the flow of water over its hull.
 
Any protrusions and orifices such as bollards
and free-flood holes, accentuated this noise.
 
Even though the Russian builders had tried their best to minimize such
sources, the propeller remained an insurmountable acoustic problem for any
submarine.

When on batteries, diesel-electric boats
like
San Luis II
enjoyed advantages
over their atom-smashing counterparts, because there were no unbalanced turbine
gears, blades and cooling pumps to make a racket and reveal their position.
 
However, like their nuclear cousins,
diesel-electrics had to transfer propulsive power from an engine to the water,
making the propeller the acoustic weak link in the whole nearly silent
system.
 
In
San Luis II
’s case, it was a single giant six-bladed prop that did
the job.

At the tips of this carefully-machined
wonder, vortex cavitation took place, whereby air bubbles formed and collapsed
under sea pressure, producing a hissing sound that carried for miles
underwater.
 
This noise travelled
horizontally from the propeller, increased with the momentum of the blades, and
became most pronounced at high speed, especially during acceleration and
maneuvers.
 
At lower speeds, the natural
frequency of the blades produced a characteristic ‘beat’ that an enemy could use
to identify the specific class of his adversary.
 
Sometimes, unique acoustic ‘fingerprints’
would even allow a skilled sonarman to identify a submarine by name.
 
Such noise was the very clue Captain Matias
sought to deprive his enemy, the very reason he had ordered: ‘All stop.’
 
Despite his efforts to silence
San Luis II
, there remained the issue of
her physicality.
 
She was, after all, a
steel hole in the water, and despite precautions against detection by passive
systems, active sonar, such as that carried by the enemy helicopter, constituted
another matter altogether.

“Get us closer to the bottom, Santiago,”
Matias ordered.
 
The captain hoped the
seamount off to starboard would screen his boat and spoil any acoustic
reflection that would allow the British aircrew to discern the hull of
San Luis II
from among the boulders,
cliffs, and peaks of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge.
 
Already near their recommended maximum depth, Ledesma shot the captain a
concerned glance.
 
“Down,” Matias
reiterated.

Ledesma hesitated for a moment, and Matias
waved a hand at him that said, ‘Get on with it.’

“
Muy
bien
señor
,” Ledesma finally
acknowledged, and ordered negative buoyancy.
 
Vents on the outer hull were opened, and more seawater flowed into
San Luis II
’s main ballast tanks.
 
Already stationary, the boat dropped straight
down into the pitch black deep.
 
The men
in the Control Room watched the depth gauge needle move from the yellow zone,
into the red.
 
The steel hull protested
with clicks, groans, and tortured snaps.
 
Ledesma swallowed hard and began to read off the depth: “Three hundred
twenty; 330; 340…”
 
The boat protested
with a loud bang.

The ocean tested
San Luis II
.
 
It wanted in,
and it searched for the path of least resistance.
 
Thousands of pounds pressed on the
submarine.
 
Another bang, and everyone
looked to Captain Matias.
 
He looked up
the main ladder at the Control Room hatch.
 
BANG.
 
The thinner steel of the
submarine’s sail had flexed under extreme pressure and deformed, stretching
between its latticed
framework
.

“Deeper,” the captain ordered.

San
Luis II
let out a prolonged noise like the song of a
melancholy whale.
 
One submariner began
to breathe heavily, and then he whimpered.

“
Tomalo
con soda
,” Ledesma calmed the neophyte submariner with an Argentine
expression.
 
Then he turned to
Matias.
 
“
Señor
,
estamos
a 360 metros
.”
 
Then came an unholy creak from
San Luis II
.
 
“I don’t think she can stand much more,”
Ledesma pleaded.

“
Bien
, Santiago,” Matias conceded,
“Hold us here.”

“Neutral buoyancy,” Ledesma said, pointing
at the vent levers.
 
“Hold your depth at
380 meters.”

The boat quieted as the depth gauge
steadied and stopped, just a few hash marks short of ‘400,’ the highest number
the dial showed.
 
Someone sighed with
relief, followed by a moment of silence, of calm.
 
Then suddenly, a water pipe running along the
top of the Control Center whined and burst.

Water sprayed from a valve and ran along
the pipe, raining down.

“Damage control,” Ledesma yelled.

The valve shot off and bounced twice.
 
The deck plate it hit rang fantastically
loud.
 
The metal wheel wobbled for a
moment and then stopped.
 
Everyone in the
Control Room looked at it, hated it, and knew what it had done.

One sailor immediately took a wrench to
the valve and instantly became soaked by the leak, yet he tightened the
connection.
 
The water slowed, but still it
cascaded down a panel.

Sparks flashed and the panel’s display
lights extinguished.
 
However, back-up
analog displays confirmed the tank vents had in fact closed.
 
Valves were opened and closed along the pipe
in order to isolate the leak.
 
Everyone
looked to the curved ceiling.
 
They all
wondered if the enemy had heard the commotion.

“
Señor
,
the leak has been isolated,” Ledesma whispered.

“Very well,” Captain Matias acknowledged.

PING.

“Sir, active--”

PING.

“Yes, Santiago,” Matias put his hand on
his friend’s shoulder, “I hear it.”

6:
ABRAZO

“
Let me embrace thee
,
sour adversity
,
for wise men say it is the wisest course
.
”—William Shakespeare

K
ingfisher
21 hovered.
 
The Merlin’s dipping sonar
dangled in the water, fishing for anything that happened to be biting.
 
Among the miles-wide sonobuoy field
Dragon
’s
helicopter had sown, one passive type—buoy ‘Papa Three’—had registered an
anomalous sound.
 
It transmitted to the
helicopter the contact’s general depth, heading, and range.
 
Kingfisher 21, in turn, bounced the data back
to
Dragon
.

In the Op Room’s cool darkness,
Dragon
’s anti-submarine warfare officer adjusted
his flash hood and gloves and surveyed his screen.
 
It showed the GPS plot of each sonobuoy, and
represented by a green ‘H,’ the radar position of the helicopter.

The Merlin had raced to sonobuoy Papa
Three’s position and hurriedly lowered its dipping sonar below the thermocline.
 
John fired off an active ping.
 
The sound waves moved through the liquid
medium, where they bounced off shoals of fish, off rock, and off sand, and off
anything else in the oceanic water column.
 
Then the sound waves boomeranged and returned to, and were collected by,
the FLASH’s cylindrical transmitter/receiver.
 
Tied into the buoys, the computers in the Merlin’s rear cabin analyzed
the data and presented it on a monochrome screen.

An object differing from the contours of
the sea bottom immediately caught John’s highly trained eye.
 
John tapped the display’s glass in
recognition.

“What have we here?” he mumbled to
himself, and then pushed the transmit button for his headset.
 
“
Draig
TACCO, this
is Kingfisher 21.
 
PROBSUB, PROBSUB,” John
reported to
Dragon
’s tactical
coordinator.
 
He then switched from the
radio to the intercom.
 
“Dropping smoke,”
he told the Merlin’s pilot.

A small cartridge was fired from the
helicopter’s wheel-wells that splashed in, stained the water a glowing green,
and sent up a plume of red smoke.
 
This
marker would help Seamus maintain position over the contact, and also mark the
contact position for the destroyer.
 
On
the horizon,
Dragon
turned.

◊◊◊◊

Captain Fryatt peered through
binoculars.
 
He found the red smoke
cloud, glanced at the compass, and ordered a heading: “Make your course
two-five-five.”
 
It was the captain’s
intent to keep the destroyer’s sharp bow and towering superstructure between
Iron Duke
and ‘Master 1,’ the tactical coordinator’s designation for the probable
submerged submarine.

“Ahead full,” Fryatt ordered.
 
Dragon
’s
two Rolls-Royce gas turbines revved up and drove the ship’s electric
motors.
 
The bow rose, and
Dragon
’s sleek, grey hull planed,
churning the dark water as white as milk.
 
Dragon
became an 8,000 ton speedboat.
 
A minute later, 27,000 shaft horsepower had
shot the destroyer to over 30 knots.
 
She
turned to her new heading, leaned in, and threw spray up in a great fan.
 
Fryatt intended, once at the contact
coordinate, to use
Dragon
’s powerful
bow sonar to localize Master 1.
 
Dragon
drove a wind before her, and as
if pushed by it, the Merlin banked off.

The Merlin was guided by
Dragon
’s Op Room to her next hunting
position.
 
The helicopter dropped its
nose and raced off, to dip its sonar again and add a vertex angle to the
triangulation of the contact.

◊◊◊◊

The sound of the dropped valve wheel
bounced its way down to the confines of Raton’s domain.
 
The repeating clang reverberated through the battery
deck and when the echoes subsided, Raton looked to the submarine’s cold inner
steel hull.
 
Despite its thickness and
strength, the hull was an ideal transmitter of sound.

This was the reason internal machinery was
isolated from the boat’s skin wherever possible, Raton pondered as he fingered
a rubber cylinder that supported his own sled’s track.
 
He felt the track’s metal and recognized the
vibration from
San Luis II
’s diesels.

They, too, were dampened, mounted on big
rubber rafts that kept their reverberations from transmitting to
San Luis II
’s casing.
 
These efforts, however, could be undone by a
hatch closed too hard, a fallen tool, or in this case, a dropped wheel valve.
 
All of these could provide potentially lethal
results.
 
That piece of iron shit
,
Raton postulated.
 
It was forged
in some old Murmansk furnace
.
 
The
noise it made was surely heard by the clams and fish and those
maldito
británicos
.
 
Raton caught his breath and held the air in
his lungs as he heard a trickle of water.

The sound was different from that created
by the flow of water around
San Luis II
’s
hull, and different from the bubbles of trapped air that occasionally escaped
the casing’s free-flood areas.
 
The
sound, Raton realized, had come from inside.

The water that had escaped the Control Room
pipe valve had then found its way down the periscope well.
 
Tugged by gravity, it sought the most direct
path possible to the lowest point in the boat, the bilge.
 
However, between the Control Room and bilge
was the battery deck where, craning his neck, Raton saw the first signs of the
water.

Held fast by surface tension, the water
clung to the steel roof and squirmed and squiggled along in a streamer that
split and merged again.
 
Raton watched
and kept pace.
 
He scooted his sled along
the compartment rails, his belly just over the tangle of leads and wire that
grew from the battery cells.
 
The water ran
into a small protuberance where, no longer able to defy gravity, it stretched
into a long drop over an electrical shunt and disconnect switch.
 
Raton hurried to put his gloved hand on the
switch.
 
He watched the drop elongate.

The liquid orb reflected the lights and
machinery of the confined space.
 
Raton saw
himself there, too, a stretched face with wide eyes and a sweat-covered
brow.
 
He cursed the water.
 
Then he thought of the cool summer
thunderstorms that visited his farm in Salta, where the rains would break the
humidity and drench the croplands.
 
Before
they called him ‘Raton,’ he was Gaston
Bersa
, a
simple farmer, a man who stood among the rows of citrus trees and let the
downpour wash away the day’s dirt and sweat.

Raton had fallen in love with the sea at
first.
 
It had helped him escape the
workaday life, and offered him a perfumed, salty-sweet smell and a vast openness
he had never before experienced.
 
But soon
he came to consider the whole other world, beneath the undulating plane of the
sea’s surface.

Submarine school imparted a healthy fear
of, and respect for, that domain.
 
High-pressure water had sprayed Raton and his classmates, filling the
training compartment fast.
 
He then
learned that the ocean was the enemy, something to be resisted and fought.
 
When mechanical aptitude and a slight frame
had gotten him assigned to the battery deck, he quickly learned that, should
saltwater contact the electrolyte within the imperfectly sealed battery cells,
a plume of lethal chlorine gas would flood the compartment, and potentially the
entire submarine.
 
Raton snapped the
disconnect switch over, and isolated a block of batteries.

The water seemed to fall all at once, a
brief rain that splattered across the square tops of the battery cells.
 
I love
my job
, Raton thought ironically.
 
He
began to hum; his usual remedy for doubt or fear.
 
Then his tight little world was shattered by
another sonar ping.
 
This one was lower
in frequency and clearly more powerful, for it shook the very skin of
San Luis II
.

◊◊◊◊

“Active sonar…and propeller noises,”
San Luis II
’s sonar technician
announced.
 
“Twin screws,” he added.
 
“It is Delta 1, sir.
 
The destroyer.
 
She has turned in our direction, and is
closing fast.” ‘Destroyer.’
 
The word
bore so much weight to submariners.
 
Throughout
history, such ships were both respected and cursed by those that lurked and sneaked
about beneath the sea.
 
Captain Matias
looked to Ledesma, who rolled his eyes, a gesture that communicated much.

“Sir, airborne contact,” the sonar
technician said.
 
With
the thermocline breaking up,
San Luis II
’s
sonar could now discern the high rpm turbine and thumping rotors of the
hovering Merlin.
 
“Designate:
‘Hotel 1.’”

The Merlin—that vexatious helicopter that
seemed to appear and disappear to aggravate the very captain who had kept them
alive so far—now had a designation, a neat packet to contain the venom they
felt for this contraption.
 
Matias looked
at the clock.
 
1930
.
 
It’s
getting dark top-side
.
 
Then the Control Room lights flickered.

“Report,” he ordered.

Ledesma looked to the Control Room’s
engineering panel and the battery read-outs, and then his gaze shifted to the
electrician’s mate whose job it was to monitor the boat’s systems.
 
Grasping for an answer, the electrician’s
mate threw switches, pushed buttons, and read gauges.

“Sir, voltage drop,” he reported.
 
“I show a manual tripping of ‘primary
disconnect one.’
 
Available power now
down to 22 percent.”

Ledesma went to the growler, lifted the
receiver, and selected the battery deck.
 
After he made inquiries, Ledesma hung up and turned to the captain.

“Battery deck reports bank two isolated
due to water.
 
Corporal
Bersa
is trying to get another eight percent with cable
bridging.”

“Goddamn it.”
 
Matias knew that, with battery reserves so
low, he would soon need to run the diesels, and the diesels needed air.

“Captain, we must decrease our depth,”
Ledesma beseeched.
 
Just then, in seeming
support of his recommendation, begging for relief from the black crush,
San Luis II
let out a shudder and a prolonged
groan.

“Very well,” Matias added with the calm of
someone with nothing to lose.
 
If I am forced to the surface
, the captain
thought,
I will put my boot right up
their ass
.
 
Although Matias had
already made up his mind on a course of action, he asked Ledesma for advice
nonetheless: “Options?”

“Well, sir, there are not many.
 
Just one really,” Ledesma raised his eyebrows
into a black arch.
 
Matias nodded.

“
Maldito
británicos
,” someone mumbled.
 
They had eavesdropped on the officer’s
conversation—not hard inside a steel pipe that amplified mere whispers and bounced
them in all directions.
 
Matias’s bowed
head lifted.
 
He strolled the compartment
and surveyed the men under his command.
 
He could have asked, ‘Who said this?
 
Who was undisciplined enough to offer such a statement?’
 
Though, in this case, he would not make an
example for the sake of discipline.
 
Why?
 
Fatigue mainly, and because
Captain Matias agreed with the comment.
 
Yes
,
damn the British
.

“
Señor
,”
Ledesma sought his captain’s attention once again.

“¿
Si
,
Santiago
?”

“Captain, we must attack.”

Captain Matias studied his executive
officer, liking what he heard, and the look of determination in his
subordinate’s eyes.