SSN - Tom Clancy [45]
The Alfa had gotten lucky, but she hadn't come away undamaged. The two American light weight torpedoes had hit the Alfa on its starboard side, damaging the starboard ballast tanks. To make matters worse, their reactor had automatically shut down when the control rods came unlatched as a result of the torpedo concussions. Without its reactor, the Alfa could not run away.
The officers and crew of the Alfa had just begun to get a grip on their problems when Cheyenne fired her second torpedo at Master 38, and things suddenly became much worse.
"Conn, sonar, unit 2 running hot, straight, and normal," the sonar supervisor said.
There was nothing for the Chinese submarine to do except wait and die. If it tried to surface, it would list heavily to starboard. With their sonar barely working, the Alfa's sonarmen listened as Mack's torpedo came closer and closer to their submarine. One minute before impact, the Chinese captain did try launching a noisemaker, but the Mk 48 ignored it and continued to close on the helpless submarine.
The torpedo detonated on the same side as had the smaller Mk 50s, but it had more of an impact. The titanium hull had already been weakened by the earlier explosions. This one cracked it clean through, flooding the Alfa and killing all forty-seven men on board. From the moment Cheyenne's torpedo had acquired, they never had a chance.
That didn't bother Mack at all. This was war, and he knew the Chinese hadn't planned on giving Ingraham any chance, either.
The Alfas were gone, and now Cheyenne and her crew had to focus on their mission once more. The Chinese task group was still headed her way, but there was little time left for Cheyenne and Ingraham's helos to prepare for the quick but deadly upcoming attack. Mack allowed his crew a short respite from battle stations.
Nineteen hours later, Cheyenne came to periscope depth with battle stations remanned. She received word that one of Ingraham's helicopters had detected the Chinese task group 150 miles to the north of Cheyenne's position. Ingraham had relocated about fifty miles to the south of Cheyenne, but her Seahawks were flying as rotating radar pickets to detect the enemy fleet. As soon as the Chinese task group was discovered, the second Seahawk, freshly fueled and armed, was sent to relieve the first one and allow it to return to the frigate for refueling.
The Seahawk's powerful surface-search radar allowed the helicopter to stay out of Chinese SAM (surface-to-air missiie) range while she painted the task group with radar waves. This data would be used to guide Cheyenne's Harpoons into their targets.
Cheyenne proceeded back down to her normal patrol depth and increased her speed to twenty-five knots. Two hours later she was well within Harpoon missile range of the Chinese task group, with Harpoons in all four torpedo tubes and "battle stations missile" manned.
Mack's orders were unchanged, and so was his plan. He intended to fire his six Harpoons in salvos and then launch his TASMs at the remaining targets. His biggest concern was the speed with which Cheyenne would have to operate-both for her own sake and because, if they took too long, the Seahawks risked entering SAM range and being engaged by Chinese missiles.
Cheyenne had trained for this kind of mission, and Mack had always felt that this type-striking at unsuspecting surface ships-was very much the same as that of a waiting sniper: get in position, wait for an opportunity, fire, and slip away.
Cheyenne came to one hundred feet and within minutes had launched all her Harpoons. Without missing a beat, Mack ordered VLS tubes five through ten fired. The Tomahawks were launched one by one as the hatches on each tube opened in sequence and the missiles were ejected skyward.
When the last TASM was away, Mack ordered Cheyenne back down to four hundred feet and headed toward the submarine