The Lotus Eaters (60 page)

"Ten seconds is long enough to press a firing button," Quijana answered.

"Yes, sir," Garcia agreed. "Yes, sir, it is. But if the sub's destroyed, and there's no one to provide guidance to the torpedo, we've got a much better chance."

"You want to start a war, XO?"

"No, sir. But I don't want to die right now, either."

Neither do I
, Quijana silently agreed.
But . . ."
I will press on with my Cazador mission, though I be the last man standing."

"Yes, sir," Garcia agreed. "We all went to the school, too."

"The thing that bugs me, Dario," Quijana said, "is that frog captain. Flooding tubes is not a minor step. Either he's got a crappy attitude or he's got orders to engage. I wish I knew which it was."

"Maybe not," Garcia answered. "Maybe we just make him nervous."

"
We
don't get nervous that easily," Quijana said.

"
We
aren't responsible for guarding a multi-billion drachma nuclear carrier either, skipper."

"I'm not sure that makes things any better." Quijana considered, and compromised. "Weapons, stand by to fire number fourteen at the Gaul. My command
only
."

"Aye, sir."

"The enemy's stopped," the deck officer informed the captain. This was the first time that anyone aboard the
Diamant
had actually referred to the Balboan sub as "the enemy." It was, perhaps, an unfortunate choice of words.

The captain really didn't notice the word choice; he'd long since classified the Balboan as an enemy. He attached no particular emotion to the word.

For the rest of the bridge crew, however, the use of the word went through the men like an electronic shock. Not a one of them, no moreso the captain, had ever fired a shot in anger. To actually classify someone as "the enemy" was unheard of outside of a lecture room, a motion picture, or a history book. Indeed, the bureaucrats who actually ran the Tauran Union had a semi-official policy of not considering or permitting anyone to be considered an "enemy."

Tension on the bridge, already high, shot upward.

From a chest pocket the captain took out a handkerchief and began dobbing at the sweat building up around his neck, discoloring his uniform collar.

"What now, sir?" the deck officer asked.

"Now we wait. Once the fleet has passed out of range, I'll order our tubes unloaded and allow the Balboan to leave."

"And if he won't wait for that?"

The captain sighed. Yes, he'd long since classified the Balboan as an enemy, yet he still had no great desire to destroy that enemy.

"Pray he does," the captain said.

"We can't sit here forever," Quijana announced, folding the piece of paper on which his orders were written and sliding it into a pocket. "I'm going to try something."

"Skipper?" asked Aleman.

"Start letting the rubbers in the ballast tanks chill. We'll liquefy the ammonia and sink. As we sink I want to use the dive planes to glide."

"But our orders are to use the clicker when we move?"

Quijana smiled. "No, actually, our orders were to use the clicker whenever moving under engine power. We won't be . . . mostly . . . just enough jet to keep us gliding."

* * *

The process of boiling the ammonia to expand the "condom" to force water out of the tanks made a little noise, though less than a normal submarine made pumping air in or out. Chilling the ammonia, on the other hand, made virtually none, since the only process used was to cut the flow of power to the heating elements. This cut, they cooled. With them cooling, the ammonia naturally reverted to a liquid state. With that, the "condoms" collapsed under the water pressure, letting the tanks flood. The sub began to sink, in utter silence.

It began to pass through the thermal layer to the ocean level in which rode the
Diamant
. The Gallic sub took no notice. Continuing on downward, through the layer, the
Orca
twisted her dive planes in opposite direction and began to turn back in the direction from which it had come. Because it was natural to drive, fly or dive forward, it also moved closer to the
Charlemagne
, even as it made its very slow turn. As it did, just before it's turn became noticeable, one of its dive planes aligned at right angles, briefly, with the sonar from the hunting helicopter's sonobuoy.

The captain's face went white and his eyes opened wide at the news from the underwater telephone. "Dear God, she's still closing on the carrier and we didn't hear a thing." The captain was torn with indecision. Still, he was by trade a hunter and a killer, even if that hunting and killing had, so far, been purely theoretical. His indecision lasted but a moment.

"Ping the enemy vessel now. Continuous. Weapons, as soon as you have a firing solution open fire. Kill that sub."

Under the sonar barrage of
Diamant
, closer to the same ocean level, very powerful, and much more discriminating,
Orca
stood out clearly.

"Target is found, captain," said sonar.

"Range and bearing to target entered."

Weapons was only a few moments slower in reporting, "Fire control. Firing solution is ready. Torpedoes are ready, one programmed to go direct, the other three to bracket the target and veer inward."

"All tubes in sequence: Shoot!"

"Unit One away. Running straight and normal. Good wire."

Charlemagne
was just ahead, five kilometers. They couldn't hear it through the hull, not at this depth, but Auletti had it firm on the sonar. At the current speed of the carrier it would pass almost directly overhead within the next six minutes.

"You sure this is a good test, skipper?" Aleman asked. His tone of voice made it clear he was dubious.

"Sure," Chu answered, "why not?"

"Because
Orca
drew the escorts away."

"Not all of them. There are enough here for a test and we
did
go right under that Amethyst Class' nose."

Aleman nodded. "That's true, I suppose. Even so—"

Auletti interrupted. "Skipper, the frog sub just pinged the
Orca
! Continuous pinging . . . oh, shit, she fired!
Orca
's returning fire with a supercavitating torpedo! I've got . . . JESUS!" Auletti pulled the headphones from his head and cupped his ears with the pain of multiamplified noise assaulting his eardrums.

The supercavitator was much faster than the more conventionally propelled torpedoes launched by the
Diamant
. Flying, for all practical purposes, in a vapor bubble created by a combination of its own speed and the shape of its nose, it closed the five and a half kilometer range to the Gallic sub in just at one minute. Guiding by sonar from the
Orca
and vectoring itself by thrusting out small fins just past the gaseous supercavitation envelope, it reached the
Diamant
and detonated at a point very near and just forward of where the sail met the hull. The resulting shock wave breached that hull, allowing very high pressure water to burst inside.

The captain knew he, his crew, and his boat were dead as soon as he saw the wave of water coming for him. Pressure built up almost instantly to the point of agony. The flooding being more forward than aft, the
Diamant
's nose sank quickly to point at the ocean floor. Crew, though by this point few if any were aware of it or much of anything else, were thrown from their feet and down into the collecting mass of water.

Crew further back were likewise catapulted from their feet and tossed against bulkheads. One of them, known but to God, managed to get a watertight door shut after of the hull breach. This didn't matter in the slightest as, without control, the submarine continued its plummet into the depths. At a point in time, that depth exceeded the hull's rating. It collapsed. The pressure, thus the temperature, of the air inside shot up so much and so rapidly that it, and anything it surrounded that was combustible, ignited.

The death shriek of the
Diamant
could be heard halfway across the ocean.

Yermo had had enough warning to remove the headphones from over his ears before the
Orca
's torpedo exploded. He replaced them immediately after the shudder that ran through sea and ship told him it was safe to do so. Thus, he heard the death of
Diamant
clearly.

"Poor bastards," he muttered, voicing the thoughts of every man of
Orca
's crew.

Sympathy however was short-lived, mainly because the Gallic sub had gotten off four torpedoes before
Orca
had fired. With their main guidance platform—
Diamant
, with its greater computational power and better sonar—now gone, the torpedoes were on their own.

"One," said Yermo, "two . . . three . . . four fish in the water, skipper. Marking them one through four. They're pinging and hunting independently." The sonar man forced a degree of calm into his voice he in no way felt.

"Deceptive countermeasures," ordered Quijana.

The defense station pressed a button to release a small pod from the hull. It began to rise like a cork. Once it was about three hundred feet above the still passively diving sub, the pod let in a minor quantity of sea water, which reacted with a chemical inside to release a massive cloud of bubbles. The pod also generated a major magnetic and electronic signature on the chance that a pursuing torpedo might be MAENAD (Magnetic And ElectroNic Anomaly Detector) equipped and proximity fused.

"Two of the fish have locked onto the pod, skipper," Yermo announced. "I make them as one and four. Two—two and three—are still hunting, and . . ." Again, Yermo pulled his headphones away from his ears as twin explosions rocked the water and the sub. "I guess they
are
MAENAD equipped."

Yes
, Quijana mentally agreed,
since the pod's too small to hit and the bubble cloud too insubstantial. Proximity fused, based off the MAENAD or sonar return. Think clearly, Miguel, think clearly if ever you did.

Quijana's eyes searched again over the screen mounted forward.

"Right side screen, vertical display," he ordered. After a brief pause for the operations man to enter the command, the right third of the screen changed color from light blue to green. The green also showed the thermal layer the sub had passed through, in a still darker green. Possible thermal layers, caused by volcanism and the cold current that ran through the Shimmering Sea were marked in a green so light it was almost white. Both screens showed the explosions from the two torpedoes, in red, as well as the known tracks of the two still hunting, in dotted red lines preceded by torpedo icons. The icons radiated the active sonar pulsing of the hunting torpedoes.

Release another deception pod?
Quijana wondered.
On a delay? We only had the two. And what about those surface frigates? They've got to know we took out their
Amethyst
Class.

More clearly than any other ship in the battle group, the Gallic frigate
Portzmoguer
heard the engagement below and the death scream of the
Diamant
. The shocker had been that that destruction had been the result of a supercavitating torpedo. Like many another, the captain of the frigate had been extremely skeptical of the notion that the Balboan submarines had been unarmed.

But a supercavitator? Portzmoguer
's monarch, Captain Casabianca, shuddered.
We can't hope to outrun one of those and they're so fast we probably can't even react with countermeasures quickly enough.

Of course, between ourselves,
Horizon,
and
Cotentin
we can
drench
that submarine with more torpedoes than it can hope to dodge.

Fat lot of good that will do us if she fires first, or even fires last but before we can destroy her. How many, I wonder, of those supercavitators does she carry? Bastard intel shits! Insisting the subs were unarmed!

The captain's musings were interrupted by the admiral's voice. Coming over the radio. Admiral Duguay sounded furious. His orders were simple. "Sink that submarine."

Already Casabianca could see three more helicopters rotoring in from
Charlemagne
. A quick glance at his own operations board showed that a fourth frigate,
Montcalm
, was joining the hunt, leaving only one to secure the carrier. He thought this questionable policy but, hoping to be an admiral himself, someday, chose to say nothing.

The problem, though, is that we can't hear that sub but it can almost certainly hear us. Fortunately, the carrier is a good distance away.

On the plus side, she's still fairly close underneath. If she'd moved much, we'd have heard those irregularly cut gears again.

Charlemagne
was moving slowly ahead and towards the coast.
Meg
had no trouble keeping up with the carrier and being perfectly silent while doing so. Of course the Carrier could burst into speed and lose the submarine if it chose to. Range from sub to ship was under two kilometers. Even at the slow headway she was making, and even with somewhat substandard Volgan sonar,
Charlemagne
stood out clear.

In
Meg
's control room, as Quijana had aboard
Orca
, Chu had ordered his main screen split for a vertical display.

Mixed bag
, he thought, looking at it.
One of the Gallic torpedoes is searching upward; but the other is gradually spiraling down to where I think
Orca's
at. Our double hull and the cones that connect the two give pretty good scattering from active sonar, but if the torpedo comes close enough it will see Quijana. And there's not a lot I can do about that.