Mayport Naval Station, Friday, 9 May; 1535
The Commodore and several other officers stared out the windows of Deyo’s expansive pilothouse at a scene from hell. Huge clouds of black smoke were rolling in over the base, obliterating the afternoon sunlight and making it appear that many ships in the basin were on fire. The smoke was so thick that its source, the partially submerged wreck of the car carrier, was visible in the murk only as a brilliant, pulsating orange glare. An entire sector of the horizon along the carrier piers was obscured, and the towering pillar of black smoke was pushing itself into a mushroom shaped cloud above the base.
The sound of police and ambulance sirens could be heard all over the base. Men on the ships moored near the Deyo were scrambling to help injured shipmates who had been hit by the hail of metal raining down out of the sky when the car carrier, packed with over 2000 partially filled automobile gas tanks, had blown up on the river. It was plain that there was now a major problem on the base as well as in the river junction, with scores of people injured. The Captain of the Deyo hurried in through the back door of the pilothouse, and walked over to where the Commodore was standing.
“Sir, I’ve got some people injured out on deck, and there seem to be a lot of injuries on the ships all around us. My medical people are helping our guys, and then we’re going to send a team out on the base. The base command center has apparently sent out an operational incident report. If you don’t need me right now—”
“Yeah, go ahead,” interrupted the Commodore. “But make sure I still have that circuit up with the Goldsborough. I need to talk to Mike right now.”
“Yes, Sir, base shore power is stable, so we shouldn’t have lost comms, unless an antenna got hit. I’ll verify you’re still on the air.”
He stared out the windows for a moment. “What on earth do you suppose happened out there?”
“I have the inkling of an idea, Captain,” said the Commodore, shaking his head, his face grim. He hurried below to CIC. The IV looked at his Exec, who shrugged his shoulders in a beats-me expression, and hurried back down the ladder.
The Commodore took the handset from the anxious looking watchstander and called the Goldsborough. A radio talker in Goldsborough’s CIC answered at once.
“This is Charlie Delta Sierra One Two,” said the Commodore. “Pass to your Charlie Oscar that a large merchant ship has blown up in the St. Johns river channel. An eyewitness reports that the merchant was torpedoed, I repeat, torpedoed. Tell your Charlie Oscar, Heads Up, we may be right after all, over?”
“This is One Sierra, roger, copy all, out.”
The Commodore put down the handset. Mines, he thought. Fucking mines, not torpedoes, not in sixty feet of water. The bastards laid down mines, right on our front fucking door!
USS Goldsborough, 1610
“Captain, surface radar has a contact we believe is the Coral Sea, bearing 140, range twenty miles, closing on course 310, speed twenty three knots; ESM confirms, Sir.”
There was a stirring among the bridge watch team. Mike leaned forward in his chair on the bridge, and keyed the bitch box.
“Captain, aye. I’ll be right in.”
He turned to the Exec, who was looking wilted in the afternoon heat. Everyone was looking wilted. The strain of waiting was beginning to tell.
“XO, we’re about to turn into a tin can again. I’ll speak to the crew from CIC as soon as I’ve seen the picture in there. Make a quick tour through the ship and let everybody know we may be in action soon. Wake ’em up if they’re slacking off. I know it’s been a long wait.”
“Aye, aye, Sir,” said the Exec, taking off his binoculars.
Mike got out of his chair and hurried into CIC. As hard as the air conditioning was working, it was still only ten degrees cooler in Combat than out on the bridge. He went directly to the plotting table, putting his sunglasses away in his shirt pocket.
“OK,” he said, approaching the plot. “Where is he?”
“Right here, Cap’n. Good solid contact, and ESM holds a GCA radar on that bearing. We’re pretty sure it’s the bird farm. I’ve projected his track, and we’ve laid out the search plan on that axis.”
“All right. Come around to match her course, speed fifteen. We’ll let her overtake us while we sweep out ahead of his track. Tell Main Control to release the locked shaft, and get the sonar going in omnidirectional mode. Make sure they’ve taken a BT drop in the past half hour. Let’s go find this guy if he’s out here. Are there any other contacts?”
“Only two fishing boats, about 12,000 yards away to the south and west. They’re no problem to our track or the carrier’s.”
“OK. Ops, activate the 1MC for me.”
The operations officer handed him a long cord microphone and threw a switch, and then nodded at the Captain. Mike stood by the side of his chair.
“Gents, this is the Captain speaking. The carrier has been sighted, and we’re going to begin our hunt. We’re going to sweep the waters ahead of the carrier’s track for the next hour or so, until we flush this guy or until we’re into the beach and the Coral Sea is safe. I know it’s been a long day of waiting around. Look to your gear, and check your spaces, and figure out what you’re going to do if we
take some damage. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: we don’t know for sure that there’s a bad guy out here, but if there is, Goldy is the only thing between him and the carrier, so pay attention. That is all.”
“It’ll be a couple of hours before he overtakes us,” said the operations officer, looking down at the track geometry.
“Not really,” replied Mike. “Once we begin the search plan, we’ll be maneuvering on various courses and speeds on either side of the carrier’s track; our net effective speed of advance will probably only be ten knots or so relative to his twenty three. He’s going to be on us like stink on shit before we know it. I just hope we shake something out before he runs right past us.”
“Sonar going active,” announced the 29 MC speaker.
“Find his ass, Linc,” muttered the Captain.
“And if we do get a contact, Captain, we’re to tell the carrier something about a possible floating mine, and recommend he turn away?”
“Right. I’ll do that myself so they pay attention. Get a radio check on Fleet Common with the bird farm in the next five minutes.”
The radio messenger came through the door a moment later and handed Mike a message board. Before he could read it, the CIC radio talker took off his headset, and gestured for Mike to come over.
“Captain, I’ve got a message from ComDesRon Twelve himself.”
“Hang on a minute, messenger,” said Mike, handing him back his board. He headed for the communications console.
“But, Sir,” said the radio messenger, “this is a—”
“Hang on, this is our boss calling here.”
Mike picked up the message pad with the Commodore’s message about the Toyota carrier and read the message. He whistled once. He handed the message pad back to the operator, and then took the message board from the anxious radio messenger.
“That was the Commodore,” he announced to the officers at the plotting table, as he scanned the board. “Remember
that big Toyota car carrier that went by this morning? It apparently blew up all over the entrance to the St. Johns river a few minutes ago. First reports are that it was torpedoed! Gentlemen, we may be in business after all. Now, what’s this.”
“Sir,” began the messenger again. “It’s a flash message to the Coral Sea, info us, warning him—”
“OK. Lemme read it,” said Mike.
He finished scanning the message.
“Well I’ll be goddamned,” he said, finally. “This is from CincLantFlt, warning Coral Sea of a possible submarine threat in its path into Mayport. He’s been ordered to divert back to sea at best speed until otherwise directed.”
He looked up at their eager faces.
“I wonder what the hell triggered this? Maybe the Commodore tried again.”
“Are they sending any additional forces out, like heloes?” asked the operations officer.
“This message doesn’t say anything about help, and I suspect nothing’s getting by the river entrance right now. A helo or two would sure be useful, wouldn’t they. What’s the carrier doing on the scope?”
“Sir, the carrier is continuing to track straight in.”
Mike shook his head.
“Typical aircraft carrier; sometimes they act like a dinosaur: smack ’em on the ass and it takes fifteen minutes for the head to get the message. You watch, it’ll take ten minutes to get the message up to the CO from radio, and then another five for the aviators to decide there’s no pictures in it and then someone will have to read it to them.”
There were grins around the CIC. Destroyer officers did not think much of the fly boys.
“OK, everyone, let’s settle down and let’s get to work finding this sewer pipe, preferably before the Coral Sea tramples all over both of us. Ops, tell the XO about what’s happened back at the base.”
“Yes, Sir, but if the Toyota boat got torpedoed back there, it means we don’t have a submarine out here …”
“Those weren’t torpedoes, Ops. Nobody would shoot
torpedoes into the mouth of a river—they’d go out of control in all those shallow water currents and blow up on the bottom. Those were mines. Which means somebody had to put ’em there. And I’m betting that somebody is within our sonar range. Now tell the XO, and then get me comms with the carrier. We need to make him believe that flash message from CincLantFleet.”
The Submarine Al Akrab, 1610
The control room was darkened down to red lighting to conserve electric power and to reduce heat from the noisy, Russian fluorescent lights. The officers and petty officers of the battle team were pale shadows in the half light, clustered over their instruments and consoles. The hum of electrical machinery permeated the compartment. The Captain watched the visual display of the sonar console intently.
“Classify,” he ordered.
“Sir. Multiple screws, high speed, up doppler, closing from the east. The surface duct carries it clearly, thus deep draft. No merchant ship has that many screws. Classify as target Coral Sea.”
The Captain straightened up and took a deep breath.
“Very well. Track target Coral Sea. Attack director, flood torpedo tubes, open outer doors, forward; open outer doors aft on tube eight.”
“Attack director, aye. Establishing track on sonar target channel one. Opening all forward outer doors. Flooding torpedo tubes one through six and eight.”
The Captain turned and walked over to the plotting table. They were at sixty meters, on the battery, and rigged for silent running. The Captain thought for a moment. What was the accursed destroyer doing? They had remained well clear of the warship, not willing to take the chance of a detection. The destroyer had remained passive, not pinging on his sonar. He ached to take another look at
him, but had to steel himself to stay hidden. It was an ominous sign that there was almost no sound from the destroyer. Loitering speed, no engine noises, not even a fathometer.
The presence of the waiting destroyer had thwarted his plans to use the electronic listening buoys. And now he could not know about radars without putting up the ESM mast, and with these flat seas, he was not going to put up anything he did not have to. The destroyer was waiting—but for what? The carrier? But why then the silence?
Twenty-five minutes ago they had heard the deep booming sounds of explosions reverberating along the bottom from the west. The mines had found a victim, probably that large merchant ship. Now the base would be alerted, but, hopefully, unable to dispatch forces with the wreck of the ship littering the river channel junction. The mines had claimed the wrong victim. Inshallah. At any rate, it was more than twenty five miles to the base. With the carrier already approaching, nothing but an aircraft could get out here to interfere. And there should be no obvious tie between what had happened at the river and the Coral Sea. After an explosion that could be heard underwater for twenty five miles, he thought that the base itself might not be operational for a while. Which brought him back to the mysterious, silent destroyer.
“What is the layer?”
“Sir. The layer is at twenty meters, refractive.”
Twenty meters. Effective shielding against a destroyer’s sonar, but not as good as the double and triple layers of the Gulf Stream margins. The plotting team had begun a passive bearing analysis on the carrier; in forty minutes they would have her course and speed, enough to set up the basic firing solution. He would rise to periscope depth just before firing to confirm with a few, quick looks, and then release six steam driven torpedoes down the carrier’s path.
He regretted the loss of the mines. That would have been a nice touch. But then a happy thought struck him: if the base had been neutralized when the merchant ship had
struck them, then the carrier could not go home. She would have to stop and wait. In his attack zone.
“Any preliminary estimates of range?” he asked.
“No, Sir,” replied the Deputy from his position at the plot. “It is too soon. The bearing plot shows almost no, perhaps slight right drift, so we should be off axis and in good position. We need—”
The Deputy was interrupted by the sudden sound of the destroyer’s sonar ringing throughout the control room. It sounded very close. Too close. Everyone looked up.
“Bearing of the sonar.”
“Sir: the sonar bears 110.”
“Make your depth 90 meters, and come left to 090,” ordered the Captain. Depth accentuated the effect of the layer, and coming to an easterly heading put the submarine’s narrowest aspect facing the probing sonar, and also helped him close the range to the carrier.
If the destroyer had begun a search, it might mean that he was running out of time to make his attack. The danger was that any maneuver to close the carrier also closed the submarine into the destroyer’s sonar beams.
“Set up a second firing solution on the destroyer,” he ordered.
If he had to, he would smash the destroyer and then attack the carrier.
“Attack director, aye. Establishing second track on sonar channel two.”
“Sir,” reported the sonarman. “The destroyer is occasionally cavitating; his speed is probably right at or above fifteen knots. His screws are nearer than the carrier. His sonar is in the omni-directional mode. I estimate the range to the destroyer by ping stealing to be about 14,000 meters. Sir. We have heard this sonar before. It is the old destroyer.”
The Captain’s eyebrows rose.
“Is it indeed,” he said. “Very well, that is better for us than a Deyo.”
He looked over at the attack director, where the weapons officer was entering and monitoring the two data
streams coming from the sonar system. Finally, the weapons officer activated the computer, and the dials began to swing on the attack director. The weapons officer studied the readouts for a moment, and then shook his head.
“No solution, but we are close,” he declared. “I need a stable estimate of course and speed of the target in channel two, and a range estimate for channel one, the carrier.”
“Sonar?”
“Sir: according to the doppler, the destroyer is changing aspect. I suspect base course is westerly, but it is not steady. He is now left of the bearing of the carrier. A few minutes ago he was coincident.”
“Very well.”
The Captain went back over to the paper plot. The passive bearing analysis on the carrier, which was being carried out by one plotter, was a spider web of lines occupying one side of the tactical plot. Passive bearing analysis was always a time consuming process, typically taking one or more hours to compute a refined solution. He did not have the time. The course change to the east, the direction from which the carrier was approaching, would not help the analysis. If anything, the submarine needed to move off the bearing axis in order to develop cross bearings, but that would put her full beam aspect in the path of the probing sonar.
A second plotter had begun a track on the destroyer, taking the bearings from the sonar console as the sonar operator locked in on the point source of the pinging. A destroyer’s sonar in the active mode was always a beacon for a submarine. Better yet, knowing the velocity of sound in the present water conditions, they could make a rough range estimate by timing the individual sonar pings from source to their own hull. But the destroyer was not steering a steady course, which made firing on him a very uncertain proposition.
Tension rose in the control room. The sudden appearance of the destroyer had everyone on edge, especially now that she had begun a sonar search. It was one thing to creep around avoiding detection; it was quite another to set up an
attack on a target while a destroyer was hunting you. This was supposed to be an ambush of an unsuspecting, capital warship in peacetime. The persistent pinging from above indicated that the other side might be aware that there was danger here.
The seams of the submarine began to creak as she descended to 280 feet. No one was worried about crush depth. The problem now was the proximity of the bottom. The Musaid perched on his stool, his legs spread in front of him to keep from sliding forward as the deckplates dipped, his gnarled hands gripping the stainless steel seat of the stool as he fixed his eye on the depth gauge and the diving plane indicators.
“Depth is 90 meters,” he announced softly. “Request permission to trim aft.”
“Permission to trim.”
The Captain continued to study the nascent plot. Too soon to develop a clear picture. He began to conjure one up in his mind. The big carrier plowing westerly towards her base. Ahead of her a destroyer had begun his screening work. If indeed he was screening, then he would generally match the carrier’s expected route. Track the destroyer and obtain attack geometry on him, and that would also serve as a good estimate for the carrier. As long as the destroyer did not detect the Al Akrab.
“Bring me the most recent BT trace,” he ordered.
The senior sonarman collected a piece of paper from the sonar console and presented it to the Captain, who studied it carefully. A bathythermograph, or BT trace, was a plot of temperature versus depth, obtained by firing a thermocouple probe attached to a wire out of the submarine into the depths. It recorded the thermal structure of the ocean until the wire broke off. Kinks in the trace indicated thermal layering, and thereby the depths of relative safety for submarines. This plot showed only one layer, and not a strong one at that, fifty to sixty feet below the surface. Better than nothing, he thought. Some of the destroyer’s sonar energy would be refracted back up, creating acoustic shadow zones
underneath the layer where strong returns would not materialize.
But he could not count on that for very long, especially as he was headed towards that sonar. At some point, the energy levels of the returns from the boat would break through the acoustic mirror surface, and they would be in trouble. He stared down at his shoes in the red light. He would have to deal with the destroyer, sink him if possible, or disable him at the least, in order to get a free shot at the carrier. If the destroyer made a detection, the carrier would be warned and would speed away, out of range, wrecking the mission. But timing was crucial—a premature attack on the destroyer would produce the same results.
“Is the carrier continuing in on her original course?”
“Sir,” said the Deputy. “We cannot tell her precise course, but the rate of her bearing drift is fairly constant, which would indicate—”
“Yes, that she has not changed her course; I understand the basics,” interrupted the Captain, annoyed by the pedantic response from the Deputy.
“Make ready tubes one and two; I intend to fire at the destroyer as soon as we have a reasonably good solution on him,
and
some idea of the range to the carrier. Give me a southerly course recommendation that will put the destroyer and the carrier on the same bearing; when we achieve that geometry, I will fire two torpedoes on wire guidance at the destroyer. If they miss, or he evades, I want them redirected down the bearing of the carrier. Set the running depth for one and two at four meters; select wire guidance. Retain the settings on the remaining four tubes at seven meters. Make haste!”
The Captain walked back over to the sonar console, and studied the bearing traces. The weapons officer set up the running depth settings for tubes one and two, transmitted them to the torpedo guidance systems, verified continuity between the wire and the guidance modules, and initiated warmup power to the computers in the two torpedoes.
The Deputy and the operations officer scrambled to work a maneuvering board solution. They could estimate
the range to the destroyer, but not to the carrier. In order to start the problem, the operations officer postulated that the carrier was twice the distance of the destroyer. If the destroyer was about six miles away, and closing, then the carrier was about twelve miles away, also closing. They looked across the table at each other and agreed on the assumptions; with hard data absent, they made estimates in order to set up trial geometry.
The Captain watched the bearing traces, and listened to the audio from the passive sonar. From the sounds of the screws, the carrier was going faster than the destroyer. She would also be overtaking her because the destroyer was changing course often as she worked her search pattern out in front of the carrier. He walked back over to the plot.
“What is the best range estimate you have on the carrier,” he demanded.
The Deputy looked up at him and shrugged. It was far too soon. The Captain leaned forward and put his thumb down in the middle of the spiderweb of bearing lines.
“What is that range? Now!” he hissed.
“Sir, that range is—”
The Deputy measured quickly with the protractor arm.
“—approximately thirty-two thousand yards. But—”
“Yes, I know. Keep refining it. And the range to the destroyer?”
“Sir. From ping stealing we have 12,000 yards. But his course is unstable. Widely unstable. It would be useless—”
The Captain spun away from the plotting table, and went to the attack director’s console. The persistent pinging of the sonar was getting louder. It was only a matter of time before there would be a shift to directional pinging and the dreaded click of contact.
He stared down at the weapons console. The submarine’s sonar was feeding direct bearing inputs to the weapons console for both targets. The big torpedoes could go fifteen miles at their best speed of almost 55 miles per hour. They knew the destroyer was closer than that. As long as they had the bearing information, they could steer the big fish using the wire guidance system right down that
bearing towards the source of the pinging. As long as the wire did not break, they could not miss. But the range to the carrier was uncertain. If they hit the destroyer, or missed and alerted him, the carrier could run back out of range faster than either the submarine or the torpedoes could catch her.