bore down on Forsythe.
But when had there been time to do anything differently? There had not been time to surface and ask for instructions, not the way that things had unfolded. There had not been time to make a stealthy approach on the enemy sub and carefully set up a killing shot.
No, this was undersea warfare the way it really was. Not some tidy game of angles and maneuvers in a classroom, the relative positions outlined in different colors of chalk on a two dimensional board. Not a trainer, where you knew that the result would be the instructor calling, “Stop the problem, stop the clock,” followed by a detailed and unforgiving debrief in front of your classmates. How he had dreaded those moments, when his errors would be exposed to everyone else, the teasing that would follow. Not that he had been anymore gentle when it was someone else under the gun, no. That’s not the way it was done.
And this was why, he saw, watching as his torpedoes reached the end of their wires and were set free on their own.
“There they go,” Pencehaven said as the wires snapped. He could no longer control the torpedoes with his joystick. “Damn, they’re just like little bloodhounds — look at them go! You hear that, Captain? You hear that?” The sonarman pointed at the speaker. The series of shimmering pings from the torpedoes’ seeker heads were growing higher pitched, coming faster now. It sounded eager, certain about what it was doing—
“Fifteen seconds until contact,” Otter said, his mood more closely matching Forsythe’s own than Pencehaven’s did. The sonarman raised his hands to his earphones, ready to peel them away from his head. He glanced over at his friend and nudged him. “Don’t forget this time. Last time, you couldn’t hear for two days.”
“Yes, yes,” the other said, still smiling broadly.
“Five seconds,” Pencehaven said, pulling his own earphones off. “Stand by for it, folks. It’s going to be a doozy.”
“Passing five hundred feet,” the Russian sonarman said.
“Emergency blow, aye,” the officer of the deck said. A loud
“Five seconds!” someone shouted. There was no need for silence now, no advantage at all. A blind man could follow their progress through the ocean.
“Will you look at that?” Otter said, pointing at the screen. “Man, she’s one noisy bitch on emergency blow, isn’t she?”
“Is that what that is?” Forsythe said, a terrible certainty starting in his heart. “Emergency blow?”
Both sonarman nodded. “No doubt about it, sir. She’s scared and running for daylight.”
“Can she make it to the surface?
Neither sonarman answered.
“One hundred feet,” the Russian sonarman said, the relief plain in his voice. Depth was measured from the keel of the submarine, and if the keel was at one hundred feet, the conning tower was just twenty-five feet below the surface. They were near enough to get out if they had to. If they could.
“Captain, are we going to—?” The officer of the day never had a chance to finish his question.
The torpedo struck the ship in the aft one-third of the hull, about twenty feet forward of the propeller shaft. As its nose dented the steel hull, the force shoved the igniter back into the warhead. The torpedo detonated, instantly vaporizing the seawater around it and producing a massive pressure gradient along the hull of the submarine.
The force of the explosion, coupled by the sudden change in pressure, popped rivets along the junction between two plates. The sea took advantage of the submarine’s weakness immediately, pouring in, as though trying to demonstrate the principle that nature abhors a vacuum.
The sea acted like a giant wedge, forcing the two steel plates farther apart. Incredible forces brought to bear on buckled steel, mangled with nature’s force everything man had so carefully machined.
Inside the submarine, the effect was devastating. The original split in the hull filled the space with water, and the force twisted the inner hull out of shape. Given the submarine’s steep angle of climb, and the forces already in play on her, it didn’t take much to breach her hull completely.
The original leak — if such torrential force can be called by such an innocuous name — was located in a machinery space. The stream of water hit with the force of a fire hose, immediately enlarging the hole. The watertight bulkhead to the passageway held for five seconds, then, under the stress of the hull deformity, the rubber seal pulled away from the coming. Again, the water followed.
The submarine was divided, like a surface ship would be, into a series of watertight compartments designed to withstand considerable pressure. But every engineering design works on the assumption that the hull would remain intact.
The passageway running the length of the sub was empty. The submariners were in watertight compartments on either side, at the battle stations, torn between the duty and the compulsion to race forward or aft to one of the escape hatches. Everyone knew what the steep angle on the deck meant — they were surfacing, surfacing hard, and there was only one reason to do that with a torpedo in pursuit. Each one vowed silently that when he heard the submarine break the surface he would abandon his post and head to the escape hatch, protocol and duty be damned.
The ocean, however, had other plans.
The next to the last segment of the passageway flooded first and the watertight hatches on either side of it collapsed almost immediately. As the ancillary equipment room filled with water, it became heavier, deepening the submarine’s already steep angle of ascent, and severely slowing her forward progress. The submarine had enough inertia built up, however, that even the fatal breech of the hull could not stop her from reaching the surface. Still, she broke the surface at a sharper angle than her designers ever intended.
As she breached the surface of the ocean, the sea broke through the aft watertight door. Now, with the full force of the sea behind it, it smashed into engineering, cold seawater surging over the hot main propulsion engines. The engines flashed the first cascade of water into steam, then shattered, metal torn apart by the sudden change in temperature as more water followed.
There were three sailors in that compartment, each with his own general quarters station. The first was assigned to monitor the oil pressure and temperature over the main engines. The second was the damage control petty officer, standing by to coordinate any repairs or actions in an emergency. The third was a very junior member of the crew, whose only job in life was to watch the bilges and make sure that the seepage never rose above two inches.
They had approximately four seconds warning before the ship began to break apart, long enough for a prayer or a curse, depending on each one’s temperament. Long enough for the senior rating to scrabble up the ladder to
