Debt of Honor - Tom Clancy [204]
One level down, Bud Sanchez looked up. "What was that?"
"Say again, Look-Six!" the OOD ordered.
"I said I saw that Jap destroyer launch a torpedo off her starboard side!"
"This is Look-Five. I didn't see it, sir," a male voice said.
"I fucking saw it!" shouted a very excited young female voice, loudly enough that Sanchez heard this exclamation over the air, rather than on the bridge speakers. He dropped his papers, jumped to his feet, and sprinted out the door to the lookout gallery. The Captain tripped on the steel ladder, ripping his pants and bloodying one knee, and was swearing when he got to the lookouts.
"Talk to me, honey!"
"I saw it, sir, I really did!" She didn't even know who Sanchez was, and the silver eagles on his collar made him important enough to frighten her even worse than the idea of inbound weapons, but she had seen it and she was standing her ground.
"I didn't see it, sir," the senior seaman announced.
Sanchez trained his binoculars on the destroyer, now only about two thousand yards away. What…? He next shoved the older seaman off the Big Eyes and trained them in on the quarterdeck of the Japanese flagship. There was the triple-tube launcher, trained in as it should be…
…but the fronts of the tubes were black, not gray. The weather covers were off…Without looking, Captain Rafael Sanchez ripped the phones off the senior lookout.
"Bridge, this is CAG. Torpedoes in the water! Torpedoes inbound from port quarter!" He trained the glasses aft, looking for trails on the surface but seeing none. Not that it mattered. He swore violently and stood back up to look at Seaman-Apprentice Cynthia Smithers. "Right or wrong, sailor, you did just fine," he told her as alarms started sounding all over the ship. Only a second later, a blinker light started flashing at Johnnie Reb from the Japanese flagship.
"Warning, warning, we just had a malfunction, we have launched several torpedoes," Mutsu's CO said into the TBS microphone, shamed by the lie as he listened to the open talk-between-ships FM circuit.
"Enterprise, this is Fife, there are torpedoes in the water," another loud voice proclaimed even more loudly.
"Torpedoes—where?"
"They're ours. We have a flash fire in CIC," Mutsu announced next.
"They may be armed." Stennis, he saw, was turning already, the water boiling at her stern with increased power. It wouldn't matter, though with luck nobody would be killed.
"What do we do now, sir?" Smithers asked.
"A couple of Hail Marys, maybe," Sanchez replied darkly. They were ASW torpedoes, weren't they? Little warheads. They couldn't really hurt something as big as Johnnie Reb, could they? Looking down at the deck, people were up and running now, mainly carrying their sunbathing towels as they raced to their duty stations.
"Sir, I'm supposed to report to Damage Control Party Nine on the hangar deck."
"No, stay right here," Sanchez ordered. "You can leave," he told the other one.
John Stennis was heeling hard to port now. The radical turn to starboard was taking hold and the deck rumbled with the sudden increase of power to her engines. One nice thing about the nuclear-powered carriers. They had horses to burn, but the ship weighed over ninety thousand tons and took her time accelerating. Enterprise, less than two miles away, was slower on the trigger, just starting to show turn now. Oh, shit…
"Now hear this, now hear this, stream the Nixie!" the OOD's voice called over the speakers.
The three Mark 50 antisubmarine torpedoes heading toward Stennis were small, smart instruments of destruction designed to punch small, fatal holes
into submarine hulls. Their ability to harm a ship of ninety thousand tons was small indeed, but it