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“Left bearing, mark. Right bearing, mark.” “Course three-two-three.”
Slowly the lights he was watching grew brighter and further apart as Chapman drove the sub back toward the SEALs.
“Left bearing, mark.” Swing the scope. “Right bearing, mark” “Course three-two-one.”
Sweat trickled down Chapman’s back as he made the meticulous maneuvers.
“Captain, plot shows one minute,” Witte called out.
The lights were almost one hundred and eighty degrees apart now.
“Left bearing, mark.” Chapman lugged the scope around, now swinging it almost a full half-circle. “Right bearing, mark.”
“Looking good skipper. Right through the uprights.”
Chapman watched as the two black boats seemed to swing astern and then come together behind the submarine. The men in the boats were little more than black shapes against an even blacker sky. One of the SEALs, and there was no way to tell who it was, flashed an IR light at the periscope.
Chapman read the Morse code out loud.
“Snag good. Now for a Nantucket sleigh ride.”
Extract # 5
Firing Point
Lieutenant Commander Sam Witte looked up from the computer display. The dots were all neatly stacked in a vertical line.
No doubt about it. He had the target dead nuts. It was like watching a snail meander its way across his flagstone patio back on Oahu. Corpus was running a steady course and speed, not the slightest hint of a zig. And now he had his own submarine exactly where the captain wanted it to be when he decided to shoot: five thousand yards aft of the sub and deep on her port quarter.
Witte tried to swallow. His mouth was too dry. Nothing went down.
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It was time to shoot, before the nuclear sub somehow got away from them. Or turned around and found them. Then the hunter would become the hunted in an underwater free-for-all if anybody on the other boat were alive. If whoever had control of the vessel knew how to fire its deadly weapons.
But it still didn’t feel right. They would be shooting friends. No, more than friends. Shipmates. A nd shooting them in the back.
Sam Witte took a deep breath and, in a voice far calmer than he felt, said, “Captain, I have a shooting solution. Recommend firing point procedures.”
Don Chapman moved quietly to stand next to Witte. He glanced at the computer screen for a second and then, in a commanding voice, said, “Firing point procedures, master one, tube two. Tube one will be the back-up tube.”
Witte immediately replied, “Solution ready.”
The Officer of the Deck called out, “Ship ready.”
Marc Lucerno glanced at his weapons monitoring panel and then yelled out, “Weapon ready!”
“Shoot on generated bearings.”
“Jesus,” somebody in the control whispered.
Marc Lucerno pulled the heavy brass handle to the left. A row of lights blinked from red to green.
“Standby,” he said, in a voice that surprised him with its strength. First time he had ever done this for real. First time. He yanked the handle to the right, the way he had drilled a thousand times before. “Shoot tube two.”
Down in the torpedo room, two decks below where Chapman, Witte, and Lucerno wrestled with their feelings, a solenoid valve opened and ported fifteen-hundred-pound-per-square-inch air into the chamber behind the firing piston. The piston slammed forward, shoving seawater ahead of it and up into a series of slide valves arranged around the aft end of number-two torpedo tube. The high-pressure water gave a mighty shove to the Mark 48 Mod 6 ADCAP torpedo sitting in tube two, flushing it forward. The first few inches of travel broke the A-cable connection just moments after the bits and bytes of the final firing solution were downloaded into the torpedo’s microprocessor. The forward jerk generated
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enough G force to close the acceleration switch in the aft end of the torpedo just as it cleared the torpedo tube shutter door. The switch made an electrical circuit that fired a tiny explosive squid in the torpedo’s swash plate engine. The charge pushed the engine so that it was already up to speed when Otto fuel was sprayed into the combustion chamber. The tiny engine was attached to a pump jet that shoved the torpedo forward. As it came up to its pre-enable speed, steering vanes brought the ADCAP around to a course that would intercept with The City of Corpus Christi in a little over four minutes.
Four minutes. If the torpedo ran true—and there was no reason to think it wouldn’t—then that was just about how much life anyone aboard the rogue submarine had left to live.