and put a man on deck with an RPG-9. We might as well try them.”
If the rockets failed — and they probably wouldn’t even fire: He’d had them for six, no, seven years — he would just call it a day and run for it. The torpedomen would get a tube reloaded soon, and boy, it would be nice to have a loaded fish when he went down the bay. “Up scope.”
He walked it around while the XO talked to the forward torpedo room on the squawk box. Hatakaze’s bow was on fire, dead in the water. The stern seemed to have sunk. The ING tanker was still against the pier, the fire in the refinery visible behind it. The second destroyer was not in sight. If that skipper had any sense, he would station himself in the entrance of the bay and wait for the submarine to come to him.
He gave the chief a new heading, to the northeast, so the ING tanker would be off the port side. Hatakaze was three or four kilometers southeast, so that wreck wouldn’t be a factor. In an hour, the sky would be light with the coming dawn, and there would probably be four destroyers waiting. Pavel Saratov lowered the periscope and gave the order to surface.
Saratov opened the hatch and went up the ladder to the tiny cockpit on top of the sail. The second officer followed, taking up his usual station looking aft and to both sides. The tanker was on the port bow, about eight hundred meters away. If anything, the refinery fire was more intense, brighter, than it had been fifteen or twenty minutes ago. Several areas that had not been burning before were ablaze now. He could hear the roar of the flames here, almost a kilometer away. The firestorm sounded like rain and wind on a wild night at sea. Even the clouds seemed to be on fire. They were shot through with sulfurous reds, oranges, and yellows, lighting the surface of the black water with a hellish glare. The submarine lay inert on the oily sea. Beldecks, the crew was blowing water from the forward tanks to lift the deck so that it was no longer awash. Saratov and the second officer scanned the surface of the bay for the destroyer they knew was about, somewhere. The bottom of the burning clouds was about a thousand feet above the water and visibility was good, maybe ten miles. “Who is the shooter?” Saratov asked on the sound-powered headset. “Senka. He knows all about it.”
“Get him on deck. We haven’t got all damned night.”
He shouldn’t have said that. Shouldn’t have let the men know the tension was getting to him. Where in hell is that destroyer?
When he put the binoculars down there was a man on deck, reaching down into the hatch. When the man straightened he was holding an ungainly tube in his hands. He put it on his right shoulder. The batteries in those grenade launchers were probably as dead as Lenin. Senka didn’t waste much time. He braced himself, aimed for the tanker, and fired. The batteries worked. The rocket-propelled grenade raced away in a gout of fire that split the night open. Straight as a bullet it flew across the water, straight for the giant steel ball that contained liquid natural gas. A flash. That was it. Two kilos of warhead in a flash, then nothing. “Try another one. Give him another one.”
At least the rocket reached the target, which Saratov had feared was a bit out of range. The shaped charge must have hit a girder or something, Saratov thought, examining the tanker through his glasses. He could just see the feathery lines of the gridwork of girders that supported the pressure vessel. If the grenade didn’t actually reach the pressure vessel, the warhead would never damage it. Senka didn’t waste time. Apparently he knew what he was about. He put the launcher on his shoulder; then he was examining it, then he threw it into the water. He reached down into the hatch for the third one. Senka fired again. The missile ignited and raced across the black water toward the tanker. Another flash on impact. Then nothing. “Try the last one; then we are out of here.”
“Five more minutes on the torpedo, Captain.”
Saratov acknowledged. Where is that second destroyer? A flash from the right. Saratov looked. He saw a destroyer, bow-on, headed this way. other flash from the bow gun. A shell hit the water just beyond the sub. Saratov was about to yell “Dive,” but he saw Senka face the ING tanker and raise the launcher to his shoulder. Saratov opened his mouth just as a shell hit the aft top corner of the sail and exploded. A piece of shrapnel caught the captain in the side of the head and knocked him unconscious. The shrapnel disemboweled the second officer, killing him instantly. The XO reached up through the hatch and grabbed Saratov by the ankles. He had a firm grip on the skipper and was pulling him into the hatch when Senka, on deck, fired the last RPG-9. This time the rocket went through the gridwork that supported the pressure vessel and vented its shaped explosive charge into the vessel itself, puncturing it. The intense pressure on the liquefied natural gas inside the vessel caused it to vent out the hole in a supersonic stream that made a high-pitched, earsplitting whistle. Several people on the tanker heard it. That was the last thing they would ever hear. In less than a second, a large cloud of natural gas had formed outside the hole, which was still molten hot from the explosive. The gas ignited. The fireball from this explosion grew and grew; then the pressure vessel split. A thousandth of a second later, six thousand tons of liquefied natural gas detonated. The explosion was the worst in Japan since the atomic bombing of Nagasaki, and almost as violent. The ING tanker was vaporized in the fireball, as was much of the tanker pier. One of the tankers still moored there had been taking on gasoline, and it too detonated, adding to the force of the explosion. The other tanker, off-loading crude oil, was split open by the blast like a watermelon dropped on concrete. Its cargo spontaneously ignited. The concussion and thermal pulse of the initial blast leveled the remaining structures at the refinery. The petroleum products that had not yet been consumed merely enhanced the force of the expanding fireball. Of course, the people on the tankers and pier and fighting the fires in the refinery were instantly cremated. When the concussion reached the submarine eight hundred meters away, Michman Senka, who had fired the final PRG-9, was swept overboard. It didn’t matter to Senka, because he was already dead, fried by the thermal pulse of the explosion. The pulse instantly heated the black steel hull of the boat and sent the water droplets and rivulets that had been on the deck wafting away as steam. A tenth of a second later the concussion arrived, denting the submarine’s sail, smashing loose dozens of the anechoic tiles that covered the boat’s skin and pushing it so hard that the sub went momentarily over on her beam. Pavel Saratov knew nothing of all this, because he was unconscious. Somehow as the boat went over, the XO managed to pull him through the hatch. A ton or so of water came in before the boat righted itself. Water also poured through the hatch in the forward torpedo room and would have flooded the boat had the sub stayed on its side any longer. Miraculously, the submarine righted itself, and the men in the forward torpedo room managed to get the hatch closed and secured. In the sail, the men there wrestled with the hatch and dogged it down just as the second concussion and the bay surge from the explosion pushed the boat over on her beam a second time. When the captain of the destroyer Shimakaze, charging for the Russian submarine, saw the fireball growing and expanding, his first thought was that one of the shells from his deck gun had hit the tanker, just exactly the calamity he had warned the gunners against in the event they got a chance to shoot. The thermal pulse ignited the destroyer’s paint. The concussion smashed out the bridge windows and dented the sheet metal as if had been pounded by Thor’s hammer. Since the destroyer was almost bow-on to the blast, it rode through the first concussion with only heavy damage to its superstructure, its radar and antennas and stack. The helmsman was killed by flying glass. He went down with a death grip on the helm. Still making over twenty knots, the destroyer went into a turn. When the second concussion arrived, the ship heeled hard, then righted herself. The bay surge that followed, however, put her over on her beam. Unlike the submarine, she did not come up again. The fireball from the ING tank expanded and grew hotter and hotter, brighter and brighter. The temperature inside the submarine rose dramatically — until the men were being parbroiled inside a 150-degree oven. Then the temperature fell, though not as fast as it had risen. Minutes later, the temperature in the boat almost back to normal, the XO climbed to the bridge to assess the damage. Angry black water roiled over the place where the tanker and pier had been. All the small boats that had dotted the waters of the bay were gone. In three or four places the water appeared to be on fire, but it was gasoline and raw crude burning. The shore…, the city was aflame for five miles in both directions. The thermal pulses and concussions had done their work. The surges of air into and away from the fireball had done the rest. The main periscope was bent, the glass smashed. Whether from the five-inch shell of the destroyer or the blast, Askold couldn’t tell. There was no trace of the second officer, whose corpse, like Senka’s, had gone to a sailor’s grave. The XO called down a heading change, and more speed. With the main periscope out of action, he kept the boat on the surface. With her diesels driving her at twenty knots, Admiral Kolchak went southward down the bay, charging the batteries as she went. When the first light of dawn appeared in the eastern sky she was rolling in the Pacific swells. Askold took her under. She was a tiny little boat, swimming through a great vast ocean, so when she disappeared beneath the surface it was as if she had never been.
16
