Jack Ryan 8 - Debt of Honor (119 page)

“Who are you?” the voice asked over the guard frequency.

“We are a U.S. Navy aircraft. Be advised there is a battle going on here. I suggest you reverse course and head back home. Over.”

“I don't have the fuel for that.”

“Then you can bingo to Iwo Jima. There's a field there, but watch out for the radio tower southwest of the strip, over.”

“Thank you,” was the terse reply. “I will continue on my flight plan. Out.”

“Dumbass.” Sanchez didn't put on the air, though his backseater fully agreed. In a real war they would have just shot him down, but this wasn't a real war, or so some people had decided. Sanchez would never know the magnitude of his error.

“Captain, that is very dangerous!”

“Iwo Jima is not lighted. We'll approach from the west and stay clear,” Captain Sato said, unmoved by all that he'd heard. He altered course to the west, and the copilot kept his peace on the matter.

“Active sonar to starboard, bearing zero-one-zero, low-frequency, probably a sub.” And that was not good news.

“Snapshot!” Claggett ordered at once. He'd drilled his crew mercilessly on this scenario, and the boomers did have the best torpedomen in the fleet.

“Setting up on tube four,” the weapons petty officer answered. On command, the torpedo was activated. “Flooding four. Tube four is flooded. Weapon is hot.”

“Initial course zero-one-zero,” the weapons officer said, checking the plot, which didn't reveal much. “Cut the wires, set to go active at one thousand!”

“Set!”

“Match and shoot!” Claggett ordered.

“Fire four, four away!” The sailor nearly broke the firing handle.

“Range four thousand meters,” the sonar officer reported. “Large submerged target, beam aspect. Transient—he's launched!”

“So can we. Fire one, fire two!” Ugaki shouted. “Left full rudder,” he added the moment the second tube was clear. “Ahead flank!”

“Torpedo in the water. Two torpedoes in the water, bearing zero-one-zero. Ping-and-listen, the torpedoes are in search mode!” sonar reported.

“Oh, shit. We've been here before,” Shaw noted, recalling an awful experience on USS Maine. The Army officer aboard and his senior sergeant had just come into the attack center to thank the Captain for his part in the helicopter mission. They stopped cold on the portside, looking around and seeing the tension in the compartment.

“Six-inch room, launch decoy, now!”

“Launching now.” There was slight noise a second later, just a jolt of compressed air.

“We have a MOSS set up?” Claggett asked, even though he'd given orders for exactly that.

“Tube two, sir,” the weapons tech replied.

“Warm it up.”

“Done, sir.”

“Okay.” Commander Claggett allowed himself a deep breath and time to think. He didn't have much, but he had some. How smart was that Japanese fish? Tennessee was doing ten knots, not having had rudder or speed orders after submerging, and was at three hundred feet of keel depth. Okay.

“Six-inch room, set up a spread of three canisters to launch on my command. ”

“Standing by, sir.”

“Weps, set the MOSS for three hundred feet, circling as tight as you can at this depth. Make it active as soon as it clears the tube.”

“Stand by…set. Tube is flooded.”

“Launch.”

“MOSS away, sir.”

“Six-inch room, launch now!”

Tennessee
shuddered again, with three decoys ejected into the sea along with the torpedo-based lure. The approaching torpedo now had a very attractive false target to track.

“Surface the ship! Emergency surface!”

“Emergency surface, aye,” the chief of the boat replied, reaching himself for the air manifold, “Full rise on the planes!”

“Full rise, aye!” the helmsman repealed, pulling back on his control yoke.

“Conn, sonar, the inbound torpedoes are still in ping-and-listen. Our outbound unit is now on continuous pinging. It has a sniff.”

“Their fish is like an early 48, troops,” Claggett said calmly. His demeanor was a lie, and he knew that, but the crew might not. “Remember the three rules of a -48. It has to be a valid target, it has to be over eight hundred yards, and it has to have a bearing rate. Helm, all stop.”

“All stop, aye. Sir, engine room answers all stop.”

“Very well, we'll let her coast up now,” the Captain said, out of things to say now. He looked over at the Army people and winked. They looked rather pale. Well, that was one advantage of being black, wasn't it? Claggett thought.

Tennessee look a thirty-degree up-angle, killing a lot of her forward as she rose and tumbling several people to the deck, it came so abruptly Claggett held on to the red-and-white periscope-control wheel to steady himself.

“Depth?”

“Breaking the surface now, sir!” the COB reported. A second later came a rush of exterior noise, and then the submarine crashed sickeningly back down.

“Rig for ultraquiet. ”

The shaft was stopped now. Tennessee wallowed on the surface while three hundred feet down and half a mile aft, the MOSS was circling in and out of the decoy bubbles. He'd done all that he could do. A crewman reached into his pocket for a smoke, then realized that he'd lost his pack topside.

“Our unit is in acquisition!” sonar reported.

“Come right! ” Ugaki said, trying to be calm and succeeding, but the American torpedo had run straight through the decoy field… just as his had done, he remembered. He looked around his control room. The faces were on him, just as they had been the other time, but this time the other boat had shot first despite his advantage, and he only needed a look at the plot to see that he'd never know if his second submarine attack had succeeded or not.

“I'm sorry,” he said to his crew, and a few heads had time to nod at his final, sincere apology

to them.

“Hit!” sonar called next.

“Thank you, Sonar,” Claggett acknowledged.

“The enemy fish are circling below us, sir… they seem to be… yeah, they're chasing into the decoy… we're getting some pings, but…”

“But the early -48s didn't track stationary surface targets, Chief,” Claggett said quietly. The two men might have been the only people breathing aboard. Well, maybe Ken Shaw, who was standing at the weapons panel. It only made things worse that you couldn't hear the ultrasonic noise of a torpedo sonar.

“The damned things run forever.”

“Yep.” Claggett nodded. “Raise the ESM,” he added as an afterthought. The sensor mast went up at once, and people cringed at the noise.

“Uh, Captain, there's an airborne radar bearing three-five-one.”

“Strength?”

“Low but increasing. Probably a P-3, sir.”

“Very well.”

It was too much for the Army officer. “We just sit still?”

“That's right.”

•     •     •

Sato brought the 747 in largely from memory. There were no runway lights, but he had enough from the moon to see what he was doing, and once again the copilot marveled at the man's skill as the aircraft's landing lights caught reflections from the lights on the ground. The landing was slightly to the right of the centerline, but Sato managed a straight run to the end, this time without his usual look over at the junior officer. He was bringing the aircraft right onto the taxiway when there was a flash in the distance.

Major Sato was the first Eagle back to Kobler, actually having passed two damaged aircraft on his way in. There was activity on the ground, but the only radio chatter was incoherent. He had little choice in any case. His fighter was running on vapors and memory now, all the fuel gauges showing almost nothing Also without lights, the aviator chose the proper glide-slope and touched down in exactly the right spot. He didn't see the softball-size submunition his nosegear hit. The fighter's nose collapsed, and the Eagle slid, pinwheeling off the end of the runway. There was just enough vapor in the tanks to start a fire, then an explosion to scatter parts over the Kobler runway. A second Eagle, half a mile behind Sato's, found another bomblet and exploded. The twenty remaining fighters angled away, calling on their radios for instructions. Six of them turned for the commercial field. The rest looked for and approached the large twin runways on Tinian, not knowing that they, too, had been sprinkled with cluster munitions from a series of Tomahawk missiles. Roughly half survived the landing without hitting anything

Admiral Chandraskatta was in his control room, watching the radar display. He'd have to recall his fighters soon. He didn't like risking his pilots in night operations, but the Americans were up in strength, doing another of their shows of force. And surely they could attack and destroy his fleet if they wished, but now? With a war against Japan under way, would America choose to initiate another combat action? No. His amphibious force was now at sea, and in two days, at sunset, the time would come.

The B-1's were lower than the flight crews had ever driven them. These were reservists, mostly airline pilots, assigned by a particularly beneficent Pentagon (with the advice of a few senior members of Congress) to a real combat aircraft for the first time in years. For practice bombing missions over land, they had a standard penetration altitude of no less than two hundred feet, more usually three hundred, because even Kansas farms had windmills and people erected radio towers in the damnedest places—but not at sea. Here they were down to fifty feet, and smokin', one pilot observed, nervously entrusting his aircraft to the terrain-avoidance system. His group of eight was heading due south, having turned over Dondra Head. The other four were heading northwest after using a different navigational marker. There was lots of electronic activity ahead, enough to make him nervous, though none of it was on him yet, and he allowed himself the sheer exhilaration of the moment, flying over Mach-1, and doing it so low that his bomber was trailing a different sort of vapor trail, more like an unlimited-class racing boat, and maybe cooking some fish along the way…

There.

“Low-level contacts from the north!”

“What?” The Admiral looked up. “Range?”

“Less than twenty kilometers, coming in very fast!”

“Are they missiles?”

“Unknown, Admiral!”

Chandraskatta looked down at his plot. There they were, the opposite direction from the American carrier aircraft. His fighters were not in a position to—

“Inbound aircraft!” a lookout called next.

“Engage?” Captain Mehta asked.

“Shoot first without orders?” Chandraskatta ran for the door, emerging onto the flight deck just in time to see the white lines in the water even before the aircraft causing them.

“Coming up now,” the pilot said, aiming himself just at the carrier's bridge. He pulled back on the stick, and when it vanished under his nose, checked his altitude indicator.

“Pull up!” the voice-warning system told him in the usual sexy voice.

“I already did, Marilyn.” It sounded like a Marilyn to the TWA pilot. Next he checked his speed. Just under nine hundred knots. Wow. The noise this big mother would make…

The sonic boom generated by the huge aircraft was more like a bomb blast, knocking the Admiral off his feet and shattering glass on the wheelhouse well over his head and wrecking other topside gear. Another followed seconds later, and then he heard more still as the massive aircraft buzzed over his fleet. He was slightly disoriented as he stood, and there were glass fragments on the flight deck as he made his way back under cover. Somehow he knew his place was on the bridge.

“Two radars are out,” he heard a petty officer say. “Rajput reports her SAMs are down.”

“Admiral,” a communications lieutenant called, holding up a growler phone.

“Who is this?” Chandraskatta asked.

"This is Mike Dubro. The next time we won't be playing. I am authorized to tell

you that the U.S. Ambassador is now meeting with your Prime Minister…"

“It is in everyone's best interest that your fleet should terminate its operations,” the former Governor of Pennsylvania said after the usual introductory pleasantries.

“You may not order us about, you know.”

“That was not an order, Madame Prime Minister. It was an observation. I am also authorized to tell you that my government has requested an emergency session of the U.N. Security Council to discuss your apparent intentions to invade Sri Lanka. We will offer to the Security Council the service of the U.S. Navy to safeguard the sovereignty of that country. Please forgive me for speaking bluntly, but my country does not intend to see the sovereignty of that country violated by anyone. As I said, it is in everyone's interest to prevent a clash of arms.”

“We have no such intentions,” the Prime Minister insisted, taken very aback by the directness of this message after the earlier one she'd ignored.

“Then we are agreed,” Ambassador Williams said pleasantly. “I will communicate that to my government at once.”

It took nearly forever, in this case just over half an hour, before the first, then the second torpedo stopped circling, then stopped pinging. Neither found the MOSS a large-enough target to engage, but neither found anything else, either.

“Strength on that P-3 radar?” Claggett asked.

“Approaching detection values, sir.”

“Take her down, Mr. Shaw. Let's get below the layer and tool on out of here.”

“Aye, Cap'n.” Shaw gave the necessary orders. Two minutes later, USS Tennessee was underwater, and five minutes after that at six hundred feet, turning southeast at a speed often knots. Soon thereafter they heard splashes aft, probably sonobuoys, but it took a long time for a P-3 to generate enough data to launch an attack, and Tennessee wasn't going to linger about.

47

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