Seawolf End Game (37 page)

 The hatch opened and Brodie appeared. She half expected him to rip into the sonar crew for allowing an enemy to sneak up on them, but he was far beyond recriminations. Instead, he patted a few men on the shoulder comfortingly as he made his way back to where she was seated and Fabrini was standing. “What can you still do?” he asked, speaking directly to her.

Kristen motioned to the various stacks and other equipment. “We’re still putting things back together in here, sir,” she explained in little more than a whisper. “But the hull arrays are all off line. All we have at present is the bow mounted sonar.”

“Okay,” he replied with exasperating calm, “then the bow mounted will have to be enough.”

Her first thought after realizing they weren’t sinking was that they would turn and escape back out of the Gulf. But his tone of voice and mannerisms made it clear he was determined to press on. Kristen had never found cause to question him. But now she hesitated, staring. She was scared. She wanted to live. The
Seawolf
was potentially fatally wounded; they still didn’t know for certain. Yet, despite this, he was focused on the mission before them.

Regardless of the risk.

“Do you have any idea what shot at us?” he asked.

“Only that it was a submarine,” Kristen replied, catching a hint of his scent and immediately remembering her dream and how he’d smelled exactly as he currently did. The dream had been so real she glanced at his neck and cheek where she had brushed against him. But he was oblivious to her thoughts.

“That’s all right, we’ll soon have a chance to set things right,” he said confidently.

“How so, Skipper?” Fabrini asked.

“Unless I miss my guess, whoever shot at us is on his way right now to finish us off,” Brodie warned them. “So, we need everyone in here looking sharp. We’re all tired, but we can’t afford to let our guard down.”

With that, Brodie departed.

Kristen quickly questioned everyone who’d been on duty when the surprise attack occurred. But they could give her very little information. The attack had come at them from their baffles, which meant someone had either sneaked in behind them, or more likely, someone had been lying quietly in ambush as the
Seawolf
sailed by.

The
Seawolf
had come to rest facing back toward where the torpedo had come from, which was good since they could now only hear with the powerful bow mounted array covering the area in front of the submarine. Kristen settled back down, feeling the pressure upon her and the others to find their attacker before the reverse happened. She hated herself for having been asleep when they’d probably cruised right past the hidden submarine. Her logical self knew she’d been dead on her feet. In fact, she couldn’t actually remember sitting down to sleep. But she’d been so tired after exiting the minefield nothing had seemed real.

Kristen pushed the self-recriminations aside and returned to listening. The sea around them was completely devoid of anything but the normal background noises in the Persian Gulf. She could hear the manmade racket from oil platforms, normal biological sounds, and distant patrol craft, but there were almost no ships around. She spent a solid hour listening and growing accustomed to every audible noise in the sea, hoping to pick up something different.

Meanwhile,
Seawolf’s
damage control parties were busy sealing leaks, rerouting power systems, repairing equipment, and attending to the wounded. They were still resting on the bottom and running on the sub’s finite battery capacity. The reactor, although undamaged, had scrammed automatically when the shock wave from the explosion hit and was currently dormant. This was good since it made the
Seawolf
even quieter than usual. But the reactor couldn't be restarted off battery power; the batteries weren’t strong enough to provide the power necessary to reactivate it, only the diesel engine could do this. But the only way to use the diesel was to rise back up off the bottom and raise the snorkel above the surface. Even then the diesel would be noisy and alert any lurking predators to the
Seawolf’s
position. So they waited on the bottom, their batteries slowly draining.

Kristen methodically moved her search back and forth, identifying every sound she could find, cataloguing it by bearing and its identity. It was slow and tedious work, but necessary since whatever had surprised them was exceptionally quiet. As two hours of patient listening turned to three and it became clear their antagonist was not rushing in to finish them off, she began to worry they might be waiting for the
Seawolf
to make the next move. But, on her battery power alone, the
Seawolf
was almost crippled. The submarine’s speed would be significantly reduced, and, more importantly, they couldn’t wait forever.

She swept through the arc covered by the bow array for what felt like the thousandth time in the last few hours. At first she heard nothing new, but then she picked up something she didn’t remember hearing during previous sweeps. It was faint, so faint it was hardly a sound at all. It was more like the sensation of a sound instead of anything concrete. What’s more, it was an unexpected sound; something that didn’t belong here. But over the past few hours, Kristen had memorized every sound on every bearing, and this new sound hadn’t been there a few minutes earlier.

Kristen raised her hand to get Fabrini’s attention as she homed in on the sound. She ran it through several filters and washed it through the computer, only to have the computer tell her she was listening to a natural sound.

“The computer says it’s a biological,” Fabrini whispered.

“It isn’t a biological,” she replied as she closed her eyes and listened intently. She was sweating profusely and struggling to concentrate. With the reactor off line, the air conditioning system had been shut down to conserve power. So, over the last three hours, the sonar shack had slowly become a sauna.

To help alleviate some of the heat emanating from the equipment, Fabrini had left the door opened and through it, Brodie appeared. “What is it?” Brodie whispered after making his way back to Kristen.

“Lieutenant Whitaker picked up something she thought might be a submerged contact,” Fabrini replied. Kristen noted his hint of skepticism. “But the computer says it’s a biological; crabs probably.”

Kristen ignored him and instead focused all of her energy on the bearing she’d heard the sound come from. She then felt a gentle hand on her shoulder. She glanced up and saw Brodie leaning over her. “What is it, Lieutenant?”

“It’s them,” Kristen replied softly.

“The computer said it’s a biological, Miss.” Fabrini offered again. “Snow Crabs to be exact.”

“That might be possible, Mister Fabrini,” she replied as she glanced back over her shoulder. “Except Snow Crabs aren’t found in the Persian Gulf.”

Brodie immediately rewarded her with a slight smile and a sudden glow in his eyes. “That a’girl,” Brodie said to her as his hand patted her shoulder. “Where’s the sneaky bugger?”

Kristen pointed to an intermittent thin line on her waterfall display. “Three-five-one, sir.”

He nodded, still leaning over her as the other operators began listening, trying to gain anything from the distant sound. “Any idea on the classification and range?”

“It’s not another
Akula
,” she explained. “And it’s no diesel electric boat I’ve ever heard.” She then added, “There are no plant noises at all, no cooling pumps… just this…”

She turned on the speaker at her station and Fabrini and Brodie listened closely. “Damn, that’s nothing but a shadow,” Fabrini said in disbelief. “How did you hear it?”

Brodie however reached up and pulled down a microphone. “Con, this is Brodie.”

A moment later Kristen heard Ryan Walcott’s voice,
“Yes, Captain?”

“Have tubes one and four made ready in all respects. We may have a snapshot coming in a few minutes.”

“Aye, Captain.”

Meanwhile, Kristen was once more focused entirely on the noise. Her hands were on her headphones, her eyes closed, and motionless as if frozen in place. Around her she could almost feel every eye staring at her, but she did her best to tune all of them out as well. “New bearing,” she whispered, “three-four-eight.”

Her eyes didn’t open, nor did she hear the information transferred to the tracking parties who began working up a possible firing solution. Instead, Kristen continued to listen. The other sonar operators were on it now as well, but the computer had still not registered anything but a biological sound.

“Transients!” Hicks whispered as Kristen nodded her head, having heard the same thing.

“What was it?” Brodie asked, his voice still perfectly calm.

“It sounded like someone slamming a hatch, sir,” Hicks reported softly.

Kristen felt Brodie’s hand upon her shoulder. “Lieutenant?” he asked, wanting her opinion.

She shrugged her shoulder slightly. “It could’ve been a hatch,” she replied seeing no reason to argue over it, even though she thought it sounded more like someone jumping off a ladder and landing on a deck while wearing boots. “New bearing, three-four-zero,” she whispered and then added, “He’s very close, Captain.”

Kristen heard the contact clearly now, and she was certain it was either the
Borei
or the
Gagarin
operating on a fuel cell. All the sonar operators were picking up more transients now, including what sounded like someone speaking.

“New bearing, three-zero-five, Captain,” Kristen reported, knowing the submarine was on a course to within a few hundred yards of them. The temptation for Brodie to fire had to be enormous, but he maintained his cool despite the grueling pace of the previous few days.

“He’s passing astern of us,” she reported in a barely audible whisper. “I lost him on our port side.”

Brodie nodded but said nothing in reply. Instead, he issued orders to the control room via the microphone. “Bring her up off the bottom slowly, Spike.” Brodie then ordered the officer of the deck to prepare to bring the
Seawolf
around.

“Mister Fabrini, prepare for a Yankee search,” he said softly.

Kristen knew they would have little choice but an active sonar search. The contact had been nearly impossible to find and would be hard to reacquire as they came around. Kristen felt the canted deck begin to level off as the
Seawolf
slowly rose up off the sandy bottom. She heard Brodie whisper commands to engage the pump-jet, ordering the
Seawolf
around slowly.

Kristen turned her attention back to listening for the strange sound. She focused on the area to the rear of the
Seawolf
as they turned to port. Sweat dripped from her forehead and chin; her coveralls were drenched. But she noticed nothing, not even the stale air around her or the expectant stares of men on her as they waited for her to find their antagonist.

Through her headphones, she heard numerous other sounds cluttering up the water, making it difficult to isolate the particular sound she was searching for. Slowly, she dismissed each superfluous sound, filtering out the clutter, forcing her exhausted brain to work. Then she heard it. “Bearing three-four-seven and coming around fast,” she reported. “He’s still close. I can hear voices in engineering.”

“Snapshot, Weps,” Brodie ordered over the microphone. “I want them active the moment they leave the tubes, Andy.”

“Bearing now three-five-zero,” Kristen reported.

“Hold your course, helm,” Brodie ordered, still issuing commands from the sonar shack. Fabrini was standing by the active search panel, ready to initiate a powerful sonar search to quickly give them an exact range to the target. There was no doubt it was close and they were now in their opponent’s baffles. But Brodie waved Fabrini away from the active search sonar.

“All right, Andy, fire one,” he ordered smoothly.

Kristen heard the first torpedo leave the tube, its propeller turning to full speed as the torpedo’s own sonar went active. Kristen immediately got a return off the other submarine.

“Fire four!” Brodie ordered.

The second torpedo left the tube and also went active immediately. Kristen heard the torpedoes racing toward the target as well as their sonar lashing the other sub.

“Range seven hundred yards!” Fabrini reported using the return signal from the torpedo sonar to get the exact position of their antagonist.

Kristen knew what was about to happen. The other submarine had no chance. She briefly heard alarms, and then, for the first time, the submarines propeller as it began turning faster. But then the first MK-48 ADCAP torpedo hit. It was followed a few moments later by the second.

Kristen heard the detonations and felt the
Seawolf
shake slightly as the shock wave of the twin blasts reached the hull. There was no doubt they’d killed the other boat. The two blasts would have severely damaged the entire aft section of the submarine, and Kristen was betting the entire engineering compartment was already flooded.

“Bring us to periscope depth, standby on the diesel generator,” Brodie ordered abruptly, apparently having already put the dying submarine out of his thoughts.

Kristen continued to listen to the submarine, hearing the bow tanks blowing in a vain attempt to surface. She could clearly hear the alarms and screams in both Russian and what she thought might be Arabic coming from the submarine. Then she heard something extremely unsettling. She turned her head toward the other sonar operators, and saw their questioning looks.

“What was that?” Greenberg asked.

The sound had been a loud hissing, like cold water droplets on a hot surface.

“It’s their reactor,” she replied. “We cracked their reactor vessel. Cold seawater is rushing in.”