Piranha Firing Point

by Michael Dimercurio

  Admiral Pacino came into the room laughing, his teeth white in the dim backwash of light from the battlecontrol-system consoles. He walked up to Patton and extended his hand in a high-five. Patton slapped it and smiled back.

  “Excellent job, John,” Pacino said. “You have as much aggressiveness as your namesake, maybe more.”

  Patton smirked in dismissal, knowing the truth, that his heart had been pounding with the fear of failure, and that he’d never thought it would go this well.

  “Just one thing. Captain Patton,” Pacino said, throwing his arm around the younger captain. “We weren’t at war with Russia. The scenario was to find a Destiny II Japanese sub amongst all the clutter of a Russian fleet.”

  He shook his head, still laughing. “But what the hell, that attack was one for the books. I’ll be playing the tape of your battle as required viewing for all prospective commanding officers, and that Destiny II stuff, that’ll be our little secret. Just remind me, John, never to give you war-shot torpedoes until I tell you who the enemy is.”

  Patton blushed, but smiled in pleasure. Pacino took him to dinner, and amazingly enough turned out to be a regular guy. Patton was up half the night telling Marcy about the trip to Norfolk, and how he soon would be named to command a 6881-class submarine. Orders came in to take over the USS Tucson. He was tasked as an escort submarine for the carrier battle group out of Pearl Harbor when the Japanese blockade occurred. He went to sea on a moment’s notice, screening the carrier Abraham Lincoln as the convoy plowed its way northwest to Japan. The Japanese submarines attacked when Lincoln was barely an hour out of port. Patton and Tucson had just heard a bare sniff of the first Destiny attacker when the Nagasaki torpedoes were launched. Patton drove at flank toward the firing submarine, unloading a tube bank into it. It sank without ever knowing Patton was there.

  The same happened with the second Destiny III and the third. By then the Nimitz-class carrier Abraham Lincoln was bow down, only her massive brass screws showing above the water. When Patton found the fourth Destiny III attacker, he had only one torpedo left, and fired it at the final submarine, expecting this one to shoot back.

  One torpedo was not enough. The Destiny came to the surface, wounded. Patton watched through the crosshairs of his periscope, waiting for a hatch to open, crewmen to come out, but there was no sign of life. More curious than angry, he ordered Tucson to surface, and he and a landing party of his officers boarded the Japanese submarine, packing 9mm automatics and MAC-11 machine pistols. With an acetylene torch Patton carved his way into the vessel. On the Tucson, one of his officers filmed the boarding from the periscope video camera.

  He went down a ladder to an empty submarine. The entire forward compartment was tiny, holding only three decks of computer consoles. It turned out the ship was unmanned, computer-driven. Patton returned to Tucson, took the Japanese sub in tow, picked up survivors of the Lincoln task force, and sailed to meet an oceangoing tug.

  On the way back to Pearl, the tug reported seeing flames coming from the open fin hatchway of the Japanese sub. When it stopped, it found that the computer onboard had executed a self-destruct sequence. The contents of the forward computer cabinets had burned to ashes. After all that trouble, the Pearl naval experts learned nothing about the computer system.

  The periscope video film was released by the Navy to the media. The film replayed on every television screen, and soon pictures of John Patton forcing his way into the Japanese submarine made the covers of every newspaper and magazine, paper and electronic. Patton became an instant icon, his name synonymous with dagger-in-teeth courage.

  Only John Patton himself knew the truth. He had been burning with curiosity and just wanted to meet face-to-face the men who’d downed his task force.

  When the Tucson went into a drydock modernization program, Pacino pulled Patton off, sparing him the dull reality of the shipyard. He was handed command of his second submarine, the USS Annapolis. The chance of a second sub to command was extremely rare in Pacino’s navy, and this was the ultimate compliment.

  Now here he was, in the center of it all, once again guarding a surface task force, this one so huge as to dwarf the Lincoln carrier group. The Annapolis was steaming at flank, making forty-one knots on the improved hydrodynamic seven-bladed screw. There was one major problem with this, though.

  Searching for an enemy submarine required that the searching platform be quiet. And steaming at all-ahead flank was anything but quiet, making sonar reception much more difficult. True, the Annapolis was as close to a brand-new submarine as any captain could ask. The ship had been completely gutted on its shipyard overhaul, and was now fitted with a new quiet screw and new whisper-quiet electric drive. The clanking reduction gear and geared propulsion turbines had been ripped out, replaced by electrical propulsion turbines powering a massive but quiet AC motor driving the screw’s shaft.

  The reactor had likewise been removed and replaced by a Dynacorp S10D 200 megawatt thermal nuclear power unit, increasing shaft horsepower from 35,000 to a whopping 70,000, raising the ship’s top speed to 41 knots, a speed previously attainable only by the venerable but prohibitively expensive Seawolf-class. In addition Annapolis had also had its battlecontrol system—sonar and fire-control—ripped out and replaced with an ultramodern BSY-4 system previously available only on the Seawolfs. An additional shipwide computer network had been installed, complete with video systems, giving Patton instant information in his stateroom about the status all over the ship.

  Patton had just completed a tour of the vessel, timed to coincide with an hour before watch change. He’d gone back as far as the shaft seals in the aft compartment forward to the chief’s quarters. The ship was amazing, her 6,900 submerged tons, 362 feet of hull packing twenty-six Mark 52 Hullcracker torpedoes, ten Mark 80 SLAAM submarine-launched antiair missiles, and ten vertically launched land-attack and ship-attack Javelin cruise missiles in the vertical tubes in the bow. The ship had the latest radar-invisible periscopes, the latest communication suite and antennae, and the most modern electronic detection systems ever installed on a submarine, as modern as the last remaining Seawolf hull. The ship was sleek and clean and combat ready.

  But that was not enough to succeed in this situation.

  He was doing an antisubmarine sweep at forty-one knots, and the ocean sound acoustics were terrible at that speed. The ideal speed, fifteen knots, would give him an acoustic-detection range against another 6881 hull at approximately ten nautical miles, twenty thousand yards. But a search at forty-one knots meant the water noise around the hull was dramatically increased.

  The massive reactor circulation pumps were running fast, four of the two thousand horsepower monsters pouring their noise into the sea. Plus the screw—although hydrodynamic, was still loud at flank speed, putting out high decibels aft. At forty-one knots, the same target hull would not be detected until a distance of two nautical miles, only four thousand yards, a degradation of seventy-five percent There was worse news still. The most likely candidate for an intruder submarine was a diesel boat. True, it would be tough for a diesel boat to get in the proper position in front of them, but a boat lurking directly ahead in their path would be dead silent, no rotating machinery at all to make any noise in the water, just a quiet screw and main motor. The only thing they’d hear would be the launch of torpedoes. An old nuke boat was louder, but if it was cruising slowly, it would put out much less noise than Annapolis. Again, the only way to detect it might be its launched torpedo.

  That made the Annapolis something of a sacrificial lamb. They were now thirty nautical miles ahead of the convoy. Astern of them by ten miles was the USS Santa Fe, commanded by young Chris Carnage. If a hostile submarine was waiting for them, the Annapolis and Santa Fe would draw their fire. His operation order required him to make an emergency transmission to the carrier in the event he came under attack. That meant he’d have to come to periscope depth and shoot at the same time, a truly impossible tactical burden.

 
There had been no excuse for Admiral Henri not sending them out days ahead of the task force, to sanitize the western Pacific and the East China Sea. Hell, it wouldn’t have cost him anything. They could have sailed ahead while Henri loaded troops and equipment. They could have done an initial East China Sea search at twenty knots and a second at a slower fifteen, with Santa Fe escorting in the convoy a mile ahead while Annapolis drove ahead. Between the S-14 Blackboards and the P-5 Pegasus patrol planes out of Japan, the East China Sea could have been cleaned of every single marine mammal, much less offensive submarines. But now all the two U.S. subs were amounting to was a security blanket for Henri, perhaps at best a lightning rod for any attack that would be aimed at the convoy.

  Patton looked up at the officer of the deck while the youth gave him a status report. No sonar contacts, ship was at best detection depth, sound channel good at seven hundred feet, ship rigged for patrol quiet, as best as they would do while at flank. He nodded, checking his watch and frowning, when the off-going engineer officer of the watch came in. Patton got his report, nodded curtly, and walked into the sonar room, forward and starboard of the control room.

  At the second console sat Senior Chief Byron Demeers, his acerbic sonar expert. They had served together since his days on the Providence, because Patton had taken him on his two command tours. He and De-Meers meshed well. Their words were minimal but each was attuned to the moods and thoughts of the other.

  Demeers had formerly been plump, with a bald pate, penetrating eyes and a dark, full mustache, but two years before he had discovered a fitness center, and now he was a poster boy for chiseled abs and pumped-up pecs.

  For the first time in two decades he was considered attractive by the opposite sex. And he was single, his wife having filed for divorce after his first submarine tour. He now had several aggressive women calling the boat every time he was in port, but for the most part he stayed on the ship, tending to his equipment and the sonar system’s software programming.

  The chief sonar billet on the Annapolis was perhaps the number two slot in the entire fleet, and working with Patton seemed to agree with him. He wasn’t too enthusiastic about this mission, though, having said to Patton in private that it was a fool’s errand, a waste of time, that they were being employed by an admiral who didn’t know how to spell submarine. Patton, again keeping his mouth shut, had thought that it was damned hard to disagree.

  “Tell me again about your search plan,” Patton said to Demeers.

  “If I do, it’ll be the twelfth time this run.” Demeers sighed. “But okay.” He turned the half-empty Coke bottle upside down, draining it “The search plan is in four parts.

  “Part one—diesel boat search. We’re looking for a diesel on the battery, looking for low-frequency main-motor or screw noise. Not much chance of finding her, so processing time would normally be low since we don’t want to waste time, but on the other hand, ‘Diesel Boat Eddy’ is more likely to be found out here than the other threats, so we’ve upped the processor time.

  “Part two—snorkeling diesel boat search. We’re trying to find a low-and medium-frequency ocean noise from a diesel engine, like we’d hear from a diesel boat snorkeling at periscope depth, recharging the batteries. Not much probability on this one, because anyone trying to attack the fleet would sure as hell want to keep it quiet.

  “Part three—nuke boat. We’ve got it tuned for three nuke profiles. The first an older 688 boat, like the kind we sold to the third world. Low probability on those.

  Second profile is an updated Han-class, like the Reds used to have, but which should have rusted to dust twenty years ago. Who knows? Maybe someone kept an old vintage boat and sent it to sea. Also low probability.

  And damned loud if it is out there—I’d hear it with my naked ear. Third profile is a French Rubis-class, the sub they sold on the market for ten years. It’s tiny, it’s loud, and it has only eighteen weapons. This is also low probability.

  “Part four—all sub classes. This is the transient classification system. We’re looking for any of about four hundred transient noises, all of which are guaranteed to be manmade. Hatch slams, pump startups, check-valve slams, dropped wrenches—”

  “Torpedo tube doors coming open,” Patton added.

  “Oh, yeah. Torpedo gyro startups, torpedo propulsor startups, and a bunch more. None of which can come from whales or shrimp. The processor module is brand-new, and we’re not sure how well it’s going to work.

  You’d better prepare yourself for some false alarms. We could hear a hatch slam and it might just be a whale fart.”

  “And that’s it?”

  “That’s it. Skipper.”

  “What about that alert that came from USUBCOM, the one about possible variants of Japanese Destiny or Rising Sun ships being used by the Red Chinese?” Patton had read the skeletal message from Admiral Pacino, with veiled references to the Reds possibly having some Japanese-type submarines, but it had sounded strange.

  “USUBCOM thinks the Reds stole the technology, reverse-engineered a nuke platform based on the Destiny or the Rising Sun. Yeah, I saw it Trouble is, a reverse-engineered carbon copy of a Destiny won’t sound like a Destiny. The sound signature would be nothing like the copied boat”

  “So, why would USUBCOM put us on alert for a Destiny or Rising Sun?”

  “Especially when our intelligence would come up with any carbon copy the Reds had been building or testing out in Go Hai Bay? You got me. Skipper. I’m lost”

  “Doesn’t add up. But what if they somehow got the Japanese to do something for them? Japanese could still be upset with us after the blockade….”

  “Come on. Captain. That makes zero sense. They put the Rising Suns to sea with American permission.”

  “Yeah, and then they all sank.”

  “Who knows? Maybe the USUBCOM engineering guys sabotaged the Rising Suns. Maybe the Japanese subs were considered too much of a threat” Demeers said, his active imagination firing up. Patton glanced at the dogeared science fiction novel on the side console, Demeers’ passion. He wondered if the sonarman’s reading preference was affecting his on-watch thinking.

  “I highly doubt it And it just seems like it’s off the wall. Destinys? Rising Suns? What next a Severodvinsk-class Russian?”

  “No more whacky than a Rubis or a Han or an old Los Angeles.”

  “True. What if we put some processing time on a Rising Sun?”

  “I’d be happy to. Skipper. Just one problem. We don’t know what the hell they sound like.”

  The old search paradox had returned, Patton thought.

  They couldn’t very well search for a sub unless they knew its “sound signature,” the pure tones that it emitted from its rotating machinery. It was usually discovered only by shadowing a new submarine, lead ship of the class, with a U.S. sub, recording the sounds heard as it submerged the first time out of the shipyard. But absent that acoustic intelligence, it would be difficult at best to find an intruder submarine. Perhaps only the transient noises would give it away.

  “So, here we are, steaming ahead of the convoy, going max out at forty-one knots, half deaf because of our own speed, half blind because we have no idea what we’re searching for, with cryptic messages that there might be an advanced-technology Japanese sub or mirror image out here, and we’re supposed to keep the whole East China Sea clean with all that?”

  “That’s it. Skipper. That’s why you get that command pay.” “Yeah, all forty bucks a week,” Patton said. “You got an old Destiny III search plan?”

  “Sure. It’s covered with dust, but yeah, I could find it for you.”

  “Do me a favor. Load it in. It’s as realistic as a Rubis or a Han.”

  “No problem, coming right up. Anything else? Fries with your Destiny III? A Coke?”

  “Just an open seaway. That’s all I want Last thing I need is to have the convoy attacked on my watch.”

  “We lost the Lincoln together, sir. I’m not all that interested in lo
sing a second task force.” Uncharacteristically, Demeers’ voice was dead serious.

  Irritated, John Patton returned to the control room, frowning and thinking.

  SS-403 arctic storm

  Even after almost two weeks, the command console took some getting used to. Admiral Chu Hua-Feng thought, busy scanning the screens.

  For two weeks Chu had put the crew on a crash course to learn the ship. The training sessions had taken hours, with the Second Captain both driving the ship while simulating combat-screen readouts for the control-room watchstanders. The Second Captain had proved one of the keys to the operation’s success—up till now. The Second Captain ran everything aboard, including the galley ovens, and fortunately they had managed to convince it that they were the legitimate crew members. Had that gone wrong, the mission would have been scrubbed.

  After the Second Captain had listened to and obeyed Chu’s first order, he’d put up an antenna, and using the computers they’d hauled aboard from the submersible just before cutting it loose, Chu had communicated with each of the other Rising Sun submarines. He’d been pleasantly surprised to find that not one of his unit commanders had had trouble taking over their vessels. In fact, of the six, only Arctic Storm had given the invading Chinese a struggle. The other five crews had walked aboard, fired a few shots, and calmly taken over. That he alone had had to fight his way aboard seemed odd, an inconsistency. Perhaps it had something to do with this vessel, this very ship, he’d thought, wondering for the merest moment if the machine could have a soul, but he’d shaken off the superstition immediately and gone on to the next of the endless number of tasks required to train the crew and the flotilla.