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“Murph,” he said, “prepare to fire.”
“Opening hull doors,” Murph replied. The steel plates would now be retracting to expose the ship’s 120mm cannon.
Murph looked down at the targeting reticle on his weapons monitor, which was also displayed on the main view screen. The reticle was aimed at the center of the expanding cloud.
“This may be tricky without the radar,” he said.
“I trust your aim,” Juan said.
All they could do now was wait for the sub to show itself.
* * *
—
Admiral Yu was not pleased when he heard from the sonarman. They were in a critical maneuver rounding the bend in the fjord, and the crewman was telling him that the Wuzong was effectively blind.
“Is the sonar malfunctioning?” Yu demanded.
The sonarman looked perplexed. “I don’t know, Admiral. There might be some kind of interference, but I can’t tell where it could be coming from. Our signal still seems to be emitting, yet I can’t see the fjord walls on my monitor anymore. We could drift right into the cliffs or any underwater obstacle.”
Yu cursed his luck. “Reverse engines! All stop!”
As the Wuzong came to a halt, Yu waited for the sound of the hull scraping the rocks, but all was silent. They’d stopped in time.
“It looks like we’ll have to use visual navigation,” Yu said. “Bring us to periscope depth.”
He raised the periscope and peered through it. When the scope cleared the surface, he still could see nothing. This time, however, it was because of fog. He did a complete three-hundred-sixty-degree turn, but the cover was so dense that he couldn’t even see the nearby cliffs.
It might only be low-level, Yu thought. The periscope was just a meter or so above the surface. They had to get above the mist.
“Surface the boat,” he ordered.
“But we will be visible, sir,” the executive officer objected.
“Not in this soup, we won’t,” Yu said. “We can’t just sit here. Do it.”
The XO looked dubious, nonetheless saying, “Yes, sir.”
The ballast tanks were emptied, and the Wuzong breached the surface.
Yu once again looked through the periscope. The fog was less dense at this level, and it looked like it was starting to clear. He turned, seeing just how close they’d come to running straight into the side of the canyon. The rock face was less than fifty meters from the starboard bow of the boat.
He kept rotating and suddenly stopped when, out of the parting gloom, he saw a ship a mile away at the dead end of the fjord. It was either the Oregon or the Portland, he couldn’t tell which.
“Radio the Portland. Now! Tell them our position and ask for theirs.”
The radio officer made the call, but Admiral Yu didn’t need to wait for a reply to realize he’d made a grave mistake. There was a muzzle flash from the bow of the ship.
“Crash-dive!” he yelled. “Fire torpedo tubes one and two!”
A second later, a huge splash from an explosion erupted off the port bow, and the sub shook from the impact.
The crew scrambled to follow his orders, but Yu realized it wouldn’t matter.
A second muzzle flash told him he was too late.
* * *
