Debt of Honor

The CAG turned. 'Take a deep breath and listen to me: you might be the only person on this whole goddamned ship who did their job right over the last ten minutes. Follow me, Smithers.'

'Shafts two and three are blown away, Skipper,' they heard a minute later on the bridge. The ship's CO was standing in the middle of the compartment, looking like a man who'd been involved in a traffic accident.

'Shaft four is damaged also…shaft one appears okay at the moment.'

'Very well,' the skipper muttered, then added for himself, 'What the hell…'

'We took three ASW torps, sir,' Sanchez reported. 'Seaman Smithers here saw the launch.'

'Is that a fact?' The CO looked down at the young seaperson. 'Miss, you want to sit over in my chair. When I'm finished keeping my ship afloat I want to talk to you.' Then came the hard part. The Captain of USS John Stennis turned to his communications officer and started dialling a signal to CincPacFlt. It would bear the prefix NAVY BLUE.

'Conn, Sonar, torpedo in the water, bearing two-eight-zero, sounds like one of their Type 895,' 'Junior' Laval reported, not in an overly excited way. Submarines were regularly shot at by friends.

'All ahead flank!' Commander Kennedy ordered. Exercise or not, it was a torpedo, and it wasn't something to feel comfortable about. 'Make your depth six hundred feet.'

'Six hundred feet, aye,' the chief of the boat replied from his station as diving officer. 'Ten degrees down- angle on the planes.' The helmsman pushed forward on the yoke, angling USS Asheville toward the bottom, taking her below the layer.

'Estimated range to the fish?' the Captain asked the tracking party.

'Three thousand yards.'

'Conn, Sonar, lost him when we went under the layer. Still pinging in search mode, estimate the torpedo is doing forty or forty-five knots.'

'Turn the augmenter off, sir?' the XO asked.

Kennedy was tempted to say yes, the better to get a feel for how good the Japanese torpedo really was. To the best of his knowledge no American sub had yet played against one. It was supposedly the Japanese version of the American Mark 48.

'There it is,' Sonar called. 'It just came under the layer. Torpedo bearing steady at two-eight-zero, signal strength is approaching acquisition values.'

'Right twenty degrees rudder,' Kennedy ordered. 'Stand by the five-inch room.'

'Speed going through thirty knots,' a crewman reported as Asheville accelerated.

'Right twenty-degrees rudder, aye, no new course given.'

'Very well,' Kennedy acknowledged. 'Five-inch room, launch decoy now-now-now! Cob, take her up to two hundred!'

'Aye,' the chief of the boat replied. 'Up ten on the planes!'

'Making it hard?' the executive officer asked.

'No freebies.'

A canister was ejected from the decoy-launcher compartment, called the five-inch room for the diameter of the launcher. It immediately started giving off bubbles like an Alka-Seltzer tablet, creating a new, if immobile, sonar target for the torpedo's tracking sonar. The submarine's fast turn created a 'knuckle' in the water, the better to confuse the Type 89 fish.

'Through the layer,' the technician on the bathythermograph reported.

'Mark your head!' Kennedy said next.

'Coming right through one-nine-zero, my rudder is twenty-right.'

'Rudder amidships, steady up on two-zero-zero.'

'Rudder amidships, aye, steady up on two-zero-zero.'

'All ahead one-third.'

'All ahead one-third, aye.' The enunciator changed positions, and the submarine slowed down, now back at two hundred feet, over the layer, having left a lovely if false target behind.

'Okay.' Kennedy smiled. 'Now let's see how smart that fish is.'

'Conn, Sonar, the torpedo just went right through the knuckle.' The tone of the report was just a little off, Kennedy thought.

'Oh?' the CO went forward a few steps, entering sonar. 'Problem?'

'Sir, that fish just went right through the knuckle like it didn't see it.'

'Supposed to be a pretty smart unit. You suppose it just ignores decoys like the ADCAP does?'

'Up-Doppler,' another sonarman said. 'Ping-rate just changed…frequency change, it might have us, sir.'

'Through the layer? That is clever.' It was going a little fast, Kennedy thought, like real combat, even. Was the new Japanese torpedo really that good, had it really just ignored the decoy and the knuckle? 'We recording all this?'

'You bet, sir,' Sonarman 1/c Laval said, reaching up to tap the tape machine. A new cassette was taking all this in, and another video system was recording the display on the waterfall screens. 'There go the motors, just increased speed. Aspect change…it's got us, zero aspect on the fish, screw noises just faded.' Meaning that the engine noise of the torpedo was now somewhat blocked by the body of the weapon. It was headed straight in. Kennedy turned his head to the tracking party. 'Range to fish?'

'Under two thousand, sir, closing fast now, estimate torpedo speed sixty knots.'

'Two minutes to overtake at this speed.'

'Look at this, sir.' Laval tapped the waterfall display. It showed the track of the torpedo, and also showed the lingering noise of the decoy, still generating bubbles. The Type 89 had drilled right through the center of it.

'What was that?' Laval asked the screen. A large low-frequency noise had just registered on the screen, bearing three-zero-five. 'Sounded like an explosion, way off, that was a CZ signal, not direct path.' A convergence- zone signal meant that it was a long way away, more than thirty miles. Kennedy's blood turned a little cold at that piece of news. He stuck his head back into the attack center. 'Where are Charlotte and the other Japanese sub?'

'Northwest, sir, sixty or seventy miles.'

'All ahead flank!' That order just happened automatically. Not even Kennedy knew why he'd given it.

'All ahead flank, aye,' the helmsman acknowledged, turning the annunciator dial. These exercises sure were exciting stuff. Before the engine order was acknowledged, the skipper was on his command phone again: 'Five-inch room, launch two, now-now-now!'

The ultrasonic targeting sonar on a homing torpedo is too high in frequency to be heard by the human ear. Kennedy knew that the energy was hitting his submarine, reflecting off the emptiness within, because the sonar waves stopped at the steel-air boundary, bouncing backward to the emitter that generated them.

It couldn't be happening. If it were, others would have noted it, wouldn't they? He looked around. The crew was at battle stations. All watertight doors were closed and dogged down as they would be in combat. Kurushio had launched an exercise torpedo, identical to a warshot in everything but the warhead, for which an instrument package was substituted. They were also designed not to hit their targets, but to turn away from them, because a metal-to-metal strike could break things, and fixing those things could be expensive.

'It's still got us, sir.'

But the fish had run straight through the knuckle…'Take her down fast!' Kennedy ordered, knowing it was too late for that. USS Asheville dropped her nose, taking a twenty-degree down-angle, back over thirty knots with the renewed acceleration. The decoy room launched yet another bubble canister. The increased speed degraded sonar performance, but it was clear from the display that the Type 89 had again run straight through the false image of a target and just kept coming.

'Range under five hundred,' the tracking part said. One of its members noticed that the Captain was pale and wondered why. Well, nobody likes losing, even in an exercise.

Kennedy thought about maneuvering more as Asheville ducked under the layer yet again. It was too close to outrun. It could outturn him, and every attempt to confuse it had failed. He was just out of ideas. He'd had no time to think it all through.

'Jesus!' Laval took his headphones off. The Type 89 was now alongside the submarine's towed-array sonar,