Debt of Honor

'Talk to me, honey!'

'I saw it, sir, I really did!' She didn't even know who Sanchez was, and the silver eagles on his collar made him important enough to frighten her even worse than the idea of inbound weapons, but she had seen it and she was standing her ground.

'I didn't see it, sir,' the senior seaman announced.

Sanchez trained his binoculars on the destroyer, now only about two thousand yards away. What…? He next shoved the older seaman off the Big Eyes and trained them in on the quarterdeck of the Japanese flagship. There was the triple-tube launcher, trained in as it should be…

…but the fronts of the tubes were black, not gray. The weather covers were off…Without looking, Captain Rafael Sanchez ripped the phones off the senior lookout.

'Bridge, this is CAG. Torpedoes in the water! Torpedoes inbound from port quarter!' He trained the glasses aft, looking for trails on the surface but seeing none. Not that it mattered. He swore violently and stood back up to look at Seaman-Apprentice Cynthia Smithers. 'Right or wrong, sailor, you did just fine,' he told her as alarms started sounding all over the ship. Only a second later, a blinker light started flashing at Johnnie Reb from the Japanese flagship.

'Warning, warning, we just had a malfunction, we have launched several torpedoes,' Mutsu's CO said into the TBS microphone, shamed by the lie as he listened to the open talk-between-ships FM circuit.

'Enterprise, this is Fife, there are torpedoes in the water,' another loud voice proclaimed even more loudly.

'Torpedoes—where?'

'They're ours. We have a flash fire in CIC,' Mutsu announced next.

'They may be armed.' Stennis, he saw, was turning already, the water boiling at her stern with increased power. It wouldn't matter, though with luck nobody would be killed.

'What do we do now, sir?' Smithers asked.

'A couple of Hail Marys, maybe,' Sanchez replied darkly. They were ASW torpedoes, weren't they? Little warheads. They couldn't really hurt something as big as Johnnie Reb, could they? Looking down at the deck, people were up and running now, mainly carrying their sunbathing towels as they raced to their duty stations.

'Sir, I'm supposed to report to Damage Control Party Nine on the hangar deck.'

'No, stay right here,' Sanchez ordered. 'You can leave,' he told the other one.

John Stennis was heeling hard to port now. The radical turn to starboard was taking hold and the deck rumbled with the sudden increase of power to her engines. One nice thing about the nuclear-powered carriers. They had horses to burn, but the ship weighed over ninety thousand tons and took her time accelerating. Enterprise, less than two miles away, was slower on the trigger, just starting to show turn now. Oh, shit…

'Now hear this, now hear this, stream the Nixie!' the OOD's voice called over the speakers.

The three Mark 50 antisubmarine torpedoes heading toward Stennis were small, smart instruments of destruction designed to punch small, fatal holes

into submarine hulls. Their ability to harm a ship of ninety thousand tons was small indeed, but it was possible to choose which sort of damage they would inflict. They were spaced about a hundred meters apart, racing forward at sixty knots, each guided by a thin insulated wire. Their speed advantage over the target and the short range almost guaranteed a hit, and the turn-away maneuver undertaken by the American carrier merely offered the ideal overtake angle because they were all targeted on the screws. After traveling a thousand yards, the seeker head on the first 'fish' went active. The sonar picture it generated was reported back to Mutsu's CIC as a violently bright target of yellow on black, and the officer on the director steered it

straight in, with the other two following automatically. The target area grew closer. Eight hundred meters, seven, six…

'I have you both,' the officer said. A moment later the sonar picture showed the confused jamming from the American Nixie decoy, which mimicked the ultrasonic frequencies of the torpedo seeker-heads. Another feature built into the new ones had a powerful pulsing magnetic field to trick the under-the-keel influence-exploders the Russians had developed. But the Mark 50 was a contact weapon, and by controlling them with the wire, he could force them to ignore the acoustical interference. It wasn't fair, wasn't sporting at all, but then, who ever said war was supposed to be that way? he asked the director, who did not answer.

It was a strange disconnect of sight, sound, and feel. The ship hardly shuddered at all when the first column of water leaped skyward. The noise was unmistakably real, and, coming without warning, it made Sanchez jump on the port-after corner of the island. His initial impression was that it hadn't been all that bad a deal, that maybe the fish had exploded in Johnnie Reb's wake. He was wrong.

The Japanese version of the Mark 50 had a small warhead, only sixty kilograms, but it was a shaped charge, and the first of them exploded on the boss of number-two propeller, the inboard postside shaft. The shock immediately ripped three of the screw's five blades off, unbalancing a propeller now turning at a hundred-thirty RPM. The physical forces involved were immense, and tore open the shaft fittings and the skegs that held the entire propulsion system in place. In a moment the aftermost portion of the shaft alley was flooded, and water started entering the ship through her most vulnerable point. What happened forward was even worse.

Like most large warships, John Stennis was steam-powered. In her case two nuclear reactors generated power by boiling water directly. That steam went into a heat exchanger where other water was boiled (but not made radioactive as a result) and piped aft to a high-pressure turbine. The steam hit the turbine blades, causing them to turn much like the vanes of a windmill, which is all the turbine really was; the steam was then piped aft to a low-pressure turbine to make use of the residual energy. The turbines had efficient turning rates, far faster than the propeller could attain, however, and to lower the shaft speed to something the ship could really use, there was a set of reduction gears, essentially a shipboard version of an automobile transmission, located between them. The finely machined barrel-shaped wheels in that bit of marine hardware were the most delicate element of the ship's drivetrain, and the blast energy from the warhead had traveled straight up the shaft, jamming the wheels in a manner that they were not designed to absorb. The added asymmetrical writhing of the unbalanced shaft rapidly completed the destruction of the entire Number Two drivetrain. Sailors were leaping from their feet with the noise even before the second warhead struck, on Number Three.

That explosion was on the outer edge of the starboard-inboard propeller, and the collateral damage took half a blade off Number Four. Damage to Number Three was identical with Number Two. Number Four was luckier. This engine-room crew threw the steam controls to reverse with the first hint of vibration. Poppet valves opened at once, hitting the astern-drive blades and stopping the shaft before the damage got as far as the reduction gears, just in time for the third torpedo to complete the destruction of the starboard-outboard prop.

The All-Stop bell sounded next, and the crewmen in all four turbine rooms initiated the same procedure undertaken moments earlier by the crew on the starboard side. Other alarms were sounding. Damage-control parties raced aft and below to check the flooding, as their carrier glided to a lengthy and crooked halt. One of her rudders was damaged as well.

'What the hell was that all about?' one engineman asked another.

'My God,' Sanchez breathed topside. Somehow the damage to Enterprise, now two miles away, seemed even worse than that to his ship. Various alarms were still sounding, and below on the navigation bridge, voices were screaming for information so loudly that the need for telephone circuits seemed superfluous. Every ship in the formation was maneuvering radically now. Fife, one of the plane-guard 'cans, had reversed course and was getting the hell out of Dodge, her skipper clearly worried about other possible fish in the water. Somehow Sanchez knew there weren't. He'd seen three explosions aft on Johnnie Reb and three under Enterprise's stern.

'Smithers, come with me.'

'Sir, my battle-station—'

'They can handle it without you, and there's nothing much to look out for now. We're not going much of anywhere for a while. You're going to talk to the Captain.'

'Jesus, sir!' The exclamation was not so much profanity as a prayer to be spared that ordeal.