Debt of Honor - Tom Clancy [452]
"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.