Rage of Battle

Mk-48s, sank like a stone, nose first.

* * *

Six… seven… eight seconds, and aboard the Yumashev, Stasky knew something had gone wrong. The sea astern, off his port quarter, should be erupting in towering greenish-white mushrooms streaked with black oil from the sub’s raptured hydraulic systems. Instead the Yumashev’s captain looked out on a sea that was exploding only here and there. He estimated that less titan twenty percent of the RBUs and depth charges were detonating.

“Bozhe moy, Mendev!”—”My God, Mendev!” he said, turning to his first mate. “Chto zhe tut takogo?”— “What’s wrong?”

* * *

On Roosevelt, the depth gauge’s needle was passing the two-thousand-feet mark and quivering. There was a hiss, then a jet of water — thinner than a needle. Coming in at over a thousand psi, it created a stinging aerosol, a “car wash” mist in the control room, temporarily blinding the planesman and the chief petty officer watching the ballast tank monitors. In six seconds the Roosevelt had reached twenty-one hundred feet. There was a dull thump, then another, the sound punching Brentwood so hard in the stomach, he could tell the depth charge was even closer than the sound indicated. The sub leveled out at twenty-three fifty, its pressure hull starting to groan. Three minutes passed and nothing. Then another explosion so close that it threw him back against the periscope rail, the Roosevelt shuddering so violently it blurred the red-eyed squares of the monitors, more jets of water shooting into the control room, creating an even denser aerosol.

“Up angle!” shouted Zeldman.

In the forward torpedo room, rivets began popping, one ricocheting about the titanium casing until it lodged in a crewman’s brain, splattering the pinkish-gray mass over the bulkhead, another smashing a Perspex fire button protector, sending off a torpedo. The torpedo was not yet armed, but its impact inside the tube was like that of a bullet in a closed barrel, its flame-burst concussing several crewmen in the torpedo room. The fire in the tube quickly died through lack of oxygen, but not before the meticulously tooled lining of the tube had been badly scoured. The first torpedo that Roosevelt had fired from the forward section and the two fired from the stern had gone haywire, heading into the fallen “chaff,” but these torpedoes’ premature explosion sent shrapnel whistling high into the air, inadvertently clearing a path for the lone stern-fired Mark-48 that was still running. It glanced the Yumashev’s starboard bow beneath the water-line — not enough to sink her, but the shock wave of methane and carbon dioxide from the explosive gases was enough to buckle the cruiser’s outer plating, imploding it with an elliptical gash twelve feet long and three feet wide.

The Russians were quick to the pumps, however, and with watertight compartments sealed, the cruiser was able to limp away at five knots, her two twin Goblet antiaircraft missiles, which could also be used in an antiship role, intact as well as her Kamov-26 over-the-horizon missile-targeting helicopter. The Kamov was already airborne, its contra-rotating rotors catching afternoon sunlight, its bug-eyed face, remarkably like that of a blowfly, hovering off the ship’s port quarter, its chin-mounted Bulge-B surface-search radar already scanning the horizon for any NATO ships that might be diverted to the area by the British commander of the western approaches. The helicopter’s radar and its height allowed it to pick up hostile targets well beyond the seventy-nautical-mile limit of the Yumashev’s head net-C air search radar.

* * *

The Allied ships the Yumashev expected didn’t materialize, most of them within steaming distance committed to the vital convoy duty farther south, where the Gulf Stream curves into the North Atlantic drift. But Allied aircraft did come, the Russian sub chaser detected by another sub chaser, a Dassault- Breguet Atlantic-2 patrol aircraft, which, too slow, low on fuel, and not equipped to attack the seven-thousand-ton cruiser, relayed the information to St. Mawgan, the USAF communication center in Cornwall.

Within five minutes, south of St. Mawgan, in the lush and windswept countryside, the orange jet of flame from a Sepecat Jaguar could be seen as the aircraft taxied out of its hardened “splashed-greens” camouflaged shelter onto a short stretch of highway, the blacktop marked off by detour signs. The plane’s high wing would enable it to take off from half the tarmac length usually used in its close support and reconnaissance role. Normally a light-strike aircraft kept for coastal defenses and photographic overflights of the battlefields across the Channel, the Franco-British jet had been scrambled because RAF fighter squadrons were in the process of intercepting large incoming Soviet formations over the North Sea. The Jaguar, its dark green-gray shape fleetingly veiled in fog, began its short run, the two eight-thousand-pound Adour turbofans, on afterburner, thrust into the mottled sky over England’s Land’s End, taking it to Mach 1.1 in less than a minute. The pilot, Roger Fernshaw, kept the plane low, where its small wing and fly-by-wire touch controls enabled the Jaguar to skim over the ruffled, cobalt-colored sea without emitting telltale radar signals, its FIN digital inertial navigation and weapon aiming system going through its paces, Fernshaw checking his HUD or head-up display and the Ferranti laser range and marked-target seeker. The late sun glinted momentarily off the metallic sea as Fernshaw punched in the coordinates for the Yumashev’s last reported position as relayed via St. Mawgan by the Dassault-Breguet patrol aircraft.

He saw a fleeting shadow below him, began evasive action, then realized it was the shadow of the external fuel pod needed to give the Jaguar an extended range of twenty-one hundred miles as it streaked west sou’west, armed on all five hard points, including two fifteen-hundred-pound Exocet missiles.

* * *

Inside the Roosevelt, everything was shaking violently, as if in an earthquake, both the deep rumble and high-pitched screeching of her bent prop reverberating throughout. Suddenly the sub jerked hard right, sending Brentwood and Zeldman crashing into the scope island, Brentwood striking his head on the girth rail.

* * *

A crewman grabbed for one of his sneakers floating in the ankle-deep pool now sloshing between the control room’s sill and the forward electronics room.

“What the hell—” Brentwood began, but now the noise had suddenly decreased, the chief engineer apparently having dropped the sub’s speed to five knots on his own initiative as the sub leveled out fifty feet above her crush depth. Yet Brentwood knew that despite the reduction in the noise level and the fact that most of the leaks had been sealed, his sub was in serious trouble. The noise was still a problem, a giveaway to an enemy sub anywhere within fifty miles or so. And now a bank of square red eyes, circuit monitors, grew bright, the control room’s light dimming with the drop in current.

In the gloomy light the sound of the sloshing water created an ominous overtone amid the crunching noise of the prop’s warp and, above, the rhythmic pulse of the pumps. He gave the order to reduce speed still further, but the vibration unexpectedly grew worse and for a second all monitors faded.

“Fucking great!” someone said.

“Hold your tongue!” snapped Brentwood. “Mr. Zeldman!”

“Sir?”

“Shut down the prop.”

“Yes, sir.”

For a moment all was quiet — the sub in neutral buoyancy, no longer diving or rising. Then they could hear a choking, gurgling noise, the only sound above the rapid purr of the pumps that were sucking up the water, transferring it to number one ballast tank. Brentwood ordered the other tank vented to keep the sub in neutral trim and listened to the damage reports coming in. Someone had thrown up and the stench was overpowering, telling Brentwood that the airconditioning was out of action. In an effort to get the crew’s full attention back on their job, he chewed out a forward torpedo room bosun for not responding earlier but was chagrined to discover the bosun had already done so — that what he was now receiving was a follow-up report.

“You were out for a bit, sir,” explained Zeldman. Brentwood apologized to the bosun over the intercom, then turned to Zeldman.

“Where’s the Russian?”

“Three miles off, sir, and limping. Looked like we banged him up pretty—”

“Damn it! Give me a bearing.”

“Yes, sir. Zero three seven, sir.”