A live fire exercise begins to go wrong.
Hammerhead's first live fire exercise took place on the American side of the polar ice cap, just northwest of Alaska. Their depth was 200 feet of frigid, unforgiving black water. Another nail-biter.
The Hellstorms were a great idea in theory, but they'd never actually been field tested, and only three successful launch and retrievals, followed by three destroyed targets, would establish the new torpedoes as the States' undersea weapon of choice. They certainly were fearsome.
Capable of generating a frictionless envelope of air, the super-sonic Hellstorms could not be outrun, nor evaded. Your best defense, the engineers joked, was prayer.
Once again, Captain Craig had the Conn, though his steering and sonar crews had changed. It was halfway through second watch, and the live fire sea trials would begin in a matter of minutes.
David Alvarez and Louis Peete were in the engine room, manning their emergency fire stations and waiting, like everyone else, for the next command. Around them Hammerhead seemed to shift and breathe like a living thing. The reactors hummed in their triple-thick casings. Steam, oil and water thrummed industriously through dozens of insulated pipes. Vibrations, faint creaks, the muffled pad of sneaker soles on painted metal, a scrap of conversation through an open hatch... Then the PA system crackled alive. The old man's voice, calm and steady, announced,
"All hands at full alert. Torpedo sea trials to commence with fire and retrieval. Stand by."
At the Conn station the word was given to load tube one.
"Load tube one, Conn, aye!" Came the reply, from the fire control officer, a sallow, steady young man with heady dreams of his own command. At his signal, the fish was locked and loaded. Chains and pulleys had long since been replaced by hydraulic lifts, but the process still required careful attention. No one really needed a live torpedo rolling about on the deck. As Captain Craig was so fond of repeating, "there's room for everything on a submarine except a mistake."
Now the word came down: "Attack center, Conn; flood tube one."
The fire control officer nodded as he repeated the command, forgetting that Craig couldn't see him.
"Flood tube one, Conn, aye."
The tube was pressurized next, equalizing the water inside and out. This was critical, as an error here could send a high-powered jet of sea water roaring in through the launch tube, sending Hammerhead straight to the bottom.
The attack center's heads-up display ticked off the rapid pressure change in so many hundred pounds-per-square-inch, showing green at last when the tube was fully pressurized. The fire control officer (Lt. James Pleasance, by name; fast and dangerous with his fists, miserable with women) relayed the news to his captain.
"Very good, Attack Center," the reply came back. "Open the hatch, and stand by to fire."
They had no target, at this point. Murmansk lay hundreds of miles behind, another success in a growing chain of proud achievements. All they were attempting now was the wire-guided launch and retrieval of a prototype torpedo. No need for targeting solutions, even. They'd fire it, cut off the motor remotely, then haul their fish back in with magnetic grapplers. Compared with sneaking around a busy, heavily guarded harbor, simplicity itself.
"Attack Center, Conn: fire one!"
Once again, Lt. Pleasance nodded, tapped a few keys on his touch pad, then hit the red firing button.
Back in the engine room, Alvarez and Peete shifted their stance slightly, feeling Hammerhead roll a bit as the Hellstorm thundered out of its tube. So far, so good. Grinning at his buddy, David Alvarez released a breath he hadn't even realized he was holding. Beside him, Louis made an elaborately casual shoulder-brushing gesture, as though to say, "Ain't no thing, Bro. Just another day at the office."
Cloaking itself in a shroud of air, the Hellstorm went silver, kicked on, and jetted away at mach 1.
Pleasance smiled. "One away, Conn, aye. Hot, straight and..."
Then the Hellstorm began to turn.
