The Silent Sea (Oregon Files 7)

“Four thousand one hundred.”

A cheer went up. Despite it all, they were pulling away from the submarine. Juan patted his armrest affectionately.

“Contact,” Linda cried. “Sonar. New transient in the water. Speed is seventy knots. They’ve fired! Contact. Sonar. Second torpedo in the water.”

“Let go countermeasures,” Cabrillo ordered.

Mark Murphy worked his magic on the keyboard, and a noise generator was released from a pod under the keel, though it remained attached to the ship on a lengthening cable. The device emitted sounds like those the Oregon was making and was designed to lure the torpedo away from the ship.

“The first torpedo’s coming strong. The second has slowed. It’s going into stand-by.” The Chinese captain was keeping one of his fish in reserve in case the first missed. It was good naval practice. “Range is two thousand yards.”

In combat, time has an elasticity that defies physics. Minutes and seconds seem interchangeable. The tiniest increments can go on forever while the longest duration is gone in an instant. It took the torpedo a little over two minutes to halve the distance, but for the men and women in the op center it seemed hours had elapsed.

“If they go for the decoy, it should happen in about sixty seconds,” Linda announced.

Juan caught himself clenching his muscles and forcibly willed his body to relax. “Okay, Mr. Stone, cut power and go quiet.”

The engines spooled down evenly, and the ship began to slow. It would take at least a mile to come to a stop, but that wasn’t the goal. They wanted the torpedo to concentrate solely on the decoy they were towing.

“Thirty seconds.”

“Take the bait, baby, take the bait,” Murph urged.

Juan leaned forward. On the big monitor, the sea behind the Oregon looked as dark and ominous as ever. And then a geyser, a towering column of water, erupted from the surface and rose nearly fifty feet, before gravity overcame the effects of the explosion and the geyser began collapsing back in on itself.

“Scratch one decoy,” Mark crowed.

“Eric,” Juan said calmly, “turn us about with ten percent power on the thrusters. The acoustics are going to be scrambled for a while, but keep it quiet. Wepps, open the outer doors.”

Mark Murphy opened the ship’s two torpedo doors, as they came about and pointed their bow at the approaching submarine.

“Linda, what’s he doing?”

“He’s slowed down so they can listen, but he’s maintaining his depth. And that second torpedo’s still out there someplace.”

“He’ll want to hear us sinking,” Juan said, “rather than surfacing. Mark, oblige him.”

“Roger that.” He typed in commands on his computer, and an electronic track began to play. The speakers were attached to the hull and they pumped out the sounds of a ship in its death throes.

“It just occurred to me,” Cabrillo said. “We should have the speakers on a wire we can lower from the hull. It’d be more realistic.” He looked over at Hanley. “Max, you should have thought of that.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“I just did.”

“A little late to help us now.”

“You know what they say—”

“Better late than never.”

“No. They say, Wepps, fire both tubes.”

Mark hadn’t been fooled by the repartee, and he launched the torpedoes the instant the order came.

Jets of compressed air blew the two-ton weapons from the tubes as their electric motors came online. In just a few seconds, they were homing in on their target at sixty-plus knots. Cabrillo used the keypad on his chair to switch the view screen to the forward camera. The torpedoes left twin wakes of white bubbling water that streaked away from the ship.

“That second fish will be after us in about three seconds,” he said. “Open the forward redoubt for the Gatling gun, and crank it up.”