Piranha Firing Point

by Michael Dimercurio

  President Warner feels that we are at a crossroads, and with the world watching, she is unwilling to—”

  “Admiral,” Warner interrupted, obviously unhappy to have the CNO give her opinions for her. “Forget the politics I’m up against for a second. We have—”

  Feeling emboldened by O’Shaughnessy’s use of Pacino’s father’s old nickname, Pacino said, “Madam President, hold on. I will not forget the politics, because one thing I’ve learned, one thing you taught me, is that it’s all about politics. I can’t fight a war if you don’t have time to let me win.” He wished they were on a videoconference call, so he could see her face, gauge her reaction.

  He had to get through to her this time.

  “Believe me. Admiral Pacino, I remember Japan. I’ll give you time.”

  Here go my stars, he thought. Stars that she got for me after Japan.

  “Ma’am, please forgive me, but god damn it, you didn’t listen to me. If we’d done what I recommended last night in Jackson, your fleet would be on its way.

  Late but intact! Now we’ve lost, what, a half million troops? Once again you don’t give me time, time to scour the East China Sea, and now you call me and say ‘forget the politics.’”

  Jaisal Warner’s laugh came though the circuit. “Admiral, that’s the second time tonight I’ve been spoken to with that kind of bald candor. I have to tell you, it hurts, but I appreciate it.”

  Pacino wondered momentarily who the other person had been, then replied. “Thank you, ma’am. I think.”

  “So, what now. Admiral? The backup force is embarking now, and we’ll have the ships convoying in from Hawaii.” “How many ships?” “Two hundred,” the CNO said. Pacino lifted his eyebrows.

  “This time we have 430,000 troops embarked, not as tightly packed as before, but they’ll be on the way very soon.”

  “But what about all the urgency? It’ll take four days to get them there, more if the weather goes against us.” “We have other things going on,” O’Shaughnessy said.

  “Don’t worry about it. General Baldini will hold off the Reds with some troops he’s airlifting and parachuting into White China. We’ll be putting some Stealth bombers to work with a lot of fuel-air explosives and plasma anti-troop weapons. And we’re not stopping there.

  White China’s given us unlimited permission to use WMD’s in the Red-occupied zones.” WMD’s were weapons of mass destruction. Warner was pulling out the stops, authorizing chemical weapons, dispersion glue weapons, incendiary devices, even large-scale plasma bombs. This was heating up into a hell of a ground war, he thought. “We think we can freeze the Reds where they are, or at least slow them down, for about seven to fifteen days. That’s enough time to get the backup force into the East China Sea.”

  So why the hell didn’t she authorize his suggestions yesterday? Pacino thought. Then we’d have 375,000 troops and a fleet. But that was hindsight. Now she was asking for his revised opinion.

  “Okay,” he said.

  “So, Admiral,” Warner said, “now that you know the gloves are off, we all have a slight problem, even greater than the fact that Congress wants to pass an order of impeachment against me.”

  “Impeachment?”

  “Haven’t you been listening to the news? They want my neck for the loss of an entire army. Can’t say I blame them.” Pacino thought he heard a slight sniffle. “Three hundred seventy-five thousand troops lost. Every one of them has a family, that’s millions of votes, and if you believe the news, I’ve lost eighteen points in the last twenty-four hours. I figure I’ve got about two weeks before I’m Jaisal Warner, private citizen. That’s four days to get the backup force to the East China Sea, and a week to win a ground war. What do you think, Admiral?” think you’d better take a good look at the balance in your blind trust, Pacino thought.

  “Sounds like we’re in the huddle, with the quarterback saying, ‘Same play, on one.’ The backup force could get attacked just like the first RDF. I think we stand a good chance of getting our butts kicked.”

  “Do you think they will sink us before we get to the East China Sea?”

  Pacino thought, the circuit silent for a moment.

  “Hello?” Warner said.

  Well, would they? He thought. What would he do, fresh from the killing of an entire convoy?

  “Madam President, before I answer, I want to think this through. Can I have an hour?”

  “Twenty minutes.” “We’ll be landing soon,” Pacino said. “Can you video into my quarters?” That would be perfect, he thought.

  He’d be able to see her face and, even better, he could get Paully’s opinion, even call up Number Four, Jack Daniels, and see if he had any hard intelligence about the men who had managed to steal a submarine force.

  Red subs, Mikey. You’re up against the Reds.

  So be it, he thought. Red Rising Sun submarines, the most advanced in the world.

  “We’ll video you in, what, half an hour?”

  “Perfect, ma’am.”

  Warner and O’Shaughnessy clicked off without warning.

  Pacino walked back to the cabin, deep in thought.

  Paully White was there, concentrating on the widescreen.

  “What’d she say?” “You probably know more than I do,” Pacino said, sinking into the seat next to Paully.

  “Warner has another rapid deployment force,” White whined. “Now there’s suddenly time to get a Hawaiian convoy to the East China Sea. Where was that plan yesterday?”

  “Paully, never mind. I need you, now. We’ve got a war to plan.”

  “I’m ready. What’s on the list?”

  “Get Number Four Daniels on the horn. Ask what he has on the Rising Sun, and see if you can get him on the case to track down Admiral Tanaka. We’re going to need him. Then we’ll need to put Bruce Phillips from the Piranha on a video conference.”

  “Bruce will be well on the way to the East China Sea by now.”

  “That’s okay. But before you do anything else, we need to get Santa Fe and Annapolis the hell out of the zone.”

  “But aren’t they going in to see if they can find—”

  “I don’t care, Paully. They can’t win against a half dozen Rising Suns who know they’re coming. Tell them to get the hell out of the op area right now. When we go in, we’ll go in coordinated—Pegasus patrol planes, Blackboards, Seahawks, the 688’s, Bruce’s Piranha, the works. And we’ll sanitize that damned zone but good.”

  “ELF call signs, emergency periscope depth?”

  “Yeah, and tell them to withdraw at emergency flank.

  And don’t give me any backtalk about ruining reactors, Paully.”

  “Hell, no. Admiral. I’d tell them emergency flank even if you were quiet about it. Those boys are standing into danger.”

  “Hop to it, Paully. Bring’em out.”

  east china sea USS Annapolis, SSN-760

  “Conn, Radio, we’ve got the first letter of our ELF call sign.”

  ELF, Patton thought in frustration, extremely low-frequency radio waves, transmitted out of Lualualei Naval Radio Station off Maili, Oahu. Transmitting the ELF radio waves required tremendous power. An entire nuclear plant big enough to light up Baltimore had been built on-site at Lualualei just to power the massive antennae.

  The radio waves, unlike the higher frequencies, were able to penetrate the upper layers of the ocean and the earth’s crust. Unfortunately, the data rate was so slow, it would take ten minutes just to receive two alphabetical letters. Admiral Pacino had ordered that subs change their call signs to a single alphanumeric encrypted character, with a second letter thrown in as a confirmation, because he didn’t want to wait ten minutes to drag a submarine to periscope depth in an emergency.

  Patton had not been thrilled with the new system. The office of submarine captain was one of the last existing dictatorships in the world. At sea he was accountable almost to no one, receiving radio messages rarely, transmitting almost never. But with an ELF call si
gn, the brass could call him to periscope depth at any time of the day or night. It might take them twenty minutes to get the radio computer’s attention, but at that point they were required to come up and see what the Navy Com-Star satellite had to say.

  An emergency ELF call could mean a declaration of war, retasking, new rules of engagement, new orders, anything. Though Patton was sorely tempted to wait until the second or even third ELF call, buying himself time to try to detect an enemy submarine, he knew he had to come up. For all he knew, the convoy had been hit by an air attack instead of a sub assault, and there was a new mission waiting for him on the Comstar’s broadcast.

  “OOD, clear baffles and take her up,” he ordered.

  Five minutes later, he watched the television screen in the overhead. In the periscope view that Lieutenant Dietz was rotating in the hot-optics module, there was nothing there but sea and sky and a stark, ruler-straight horizon. There were no seagulls, no clouds, no aircraft, and no convoy ships.

  And there was Patton, hanging out at periscope depth like a sitting duck. An insistent nagging feeling entered him—he needed to continue the search, and quickly.

  “We have him slowing from seventy-seven clicks to ten, Admiral.”

  “Very good, Nav.”

  Chu waited, staring at his panels and yawning.

  “Well, sir? Aren’t you going to shoot him?”

  Could it be that they had been detected? Chu was torn—he wanted desperately to know if they could hear his ship, and if so, at what range. That would be a priceless piece of information. Yet the mission was too important to risk his vessel during the very first encounter with the Americans. It would eviscerate his command structure—since he did not have a real replacement— and it would discourage his force.

  If he sank the 688, it would be over for the American effort They would know they were defeated then, wouldn’t they? They would back away from Red China and let the Whites fell, and his plan—and it was Mai Sheng’s plan also, he admitted to himself, her idea to get the Rising Suns—would succeed. He could return home, marry Mai, perhaps have children, and rebuild the PLA Navy once its coastline was again part of the one unified China. He needed to get on the SNN World Report that he had not only sunk the American surface force but had killed their escort submarines too.

  Unbidden, the dream of his father returned to him.

  You must hurry, young warrior, for they are coming, and they are strong. That had to be the meaning of the dream, he thought. He had to strike hard and fast, and deter the West from coming in for a rematch.

  Because one thing was certain—he could continue to win only if his tubes were full of weapons. He was down thirty weapons, only eighteen left, and he didn’t know how the other subs had fared; they could be even lower.

  The far east cork force, the Volcano and the Tsunami, should be fully loaded out, he knew, but the Lightning Bolt and the Thundercloud could be out of torpedoes, for all he knew. And if the West came back with another deployment of ships and equipment, he would sink only a fraction of them, and eventually he would be defeated.

  It had to be now. Detection-distance question be damned, he thought “Open the bow door to tube eight,” Chu said to Chen Zhu on the weapons panel. “Lock in target parameters to weapon eight.”

  “Door coming open, sir. Target parameters set.

  Weapon is ready.”

  “Shoot eight in swimout mode in three, two, one, mark.”

  “Eight is away,” Chen said.! “Bow camera confirms unit eight swimout,” Xhiu reported.

  “Very good. Watch it, Nav.”

  “Aye, Admiral,” Xhiu said crisply. Chu stared at the display showing his face, smiling to himself at the navigator’s improvement. Xhiu seemed to be getting his sea legs, Chu thought.

  Now they had only to wait.

  The radioman came running into the room with Patton’s Writepad computer. Patton had no sooner slipped on his reading glasses than his jaw dropped open.

  041811ZNOV13 FLASH FLASH FLASH FLASH FLASH PLASH FLASH FLASH FLASH FM COMUSUBCOM TO USS ANNAPOLIS SSN760 SUBJ URGENT MISSION RETASKING SECRET SECRET SECRET SECRET SECRET SECRET SECRET SECRET BT// 1. (S) IMMEDIATE REPEAT IMMEDIATE EXECUTE. 2. (S) ABSOLUTE URGENT YOU CLEAR DATUM OP AREA ASAP ASAP ASAP. 3. (S) DISENGAGE ALL SEARCHES, ALL ENGAGEMENTS, NO EXCEPTIONS. 4. (S) CLEAR DATUM AT EMERGENCY FLANK REPEAT EMERGENCY FLANK, ESCAPE VECTOR SOUTHEAST IF POSSIBLE, SECONDARY ESCAPE VECTOR NORTHEAST. 5. (S) RENDEZVOUS POINT BRAVO HOLD POSITION NORTH LAT 30DEG 00MIN00SECONDS EAST LONG 135DEG00MIN00SECONDS.

  SOUTH OF OSAKA, JAPAN. RENDEZVOUS TIME COORDINATE 071200ZNOV13 OR EARLIER. 6. (S) UPON EXIT OP AREA SEND SITREP VIA SLOT BUOY EVEN IF NO NEWS. 7. (U) ADMIRAL M. PACINO SENDS. BT//

  The words were out of his mouth even before he reached paragraph five: “Emergency deep! Emergency deep! All ahead full! Right full rudder, steady course one two zero! Dive, make your depth eight hundred feet, steep angle!”

  All hell broke loose. Dietz snapped the periscope grips to the up position and lowered the scope with the hydraulic control ring. The helmsman dialed in full on the engine-order telegraph. The planesman put his stern planes on full dive until the ship took on a ten-degree down angle. The shipwide circuit one PA system blared out, “Emergency deep! Emergency deep!” all through the ship. The engine-order telegraph answering bell rang as the answer needle climbed to full speed. The deck tilted dramatically downward, and the depth indicator on the ship-control console began to spin—60 feet, 80, 100, 120, then deeper.

  “Increase the angle. Dive,” Patton commanded.

  “Twenty-degree down angle on the ship, Sternm-planesman,” the diving officer said.

  “More!”

  “Down thirty-five degrees!”

  The deck became a steep ramp, the ship hanging by its tail, the forward part of the control room almost fifteen feet lower than the aft part. The depth indicator kept spinning—200 feet, 250, 300, the numbers rolling faster as the ship picked up speed. The speed indicator climbed through 15 knots, on to 20, then 25. Soon the depth read 750 feet, and the deck began to level off as the diving officer pulled them out of the plummeting dive.

  “Sir, steering course one two zero,” the helmsman barked. “Answering all ahead full.”

  “All ahead flank,” Patton commanded. Stepping up to the conn, he found the coiled cord to the microphone that announced in the nuclear control room, called maneuvering.

  “Maneuvering, Captain, all ahead emergency flank!”

  Emergency flank meant they would be burning out their brand-new reactor, taking a ten-million-dollar plant to two hundred percent power and frying the aft spaces with high radiation. The crew would be ordered out of the reactor compartment tunnel and aft compartment unless absolutely necessary for ship safety. At emergency flank he’d be able to make speed in the high forties, maybe even fifty knots. He watched the speed indicator as it climbed to forty-one knots, normal for a flank bell at 100 percent reactor-rated power.

  “Captain, Maneuvering, all ahead emergency flank, aye, resetting battle-short switch and resetting reactor-protection limits.”

  “Conn, aye,” he replied. Now that things were calming down in control, the crisis was switched to the nuclear-control room. For the next five minutes eight men would be sweating, trying to bring the reactor to a state as close to meltdown as it could achieve. Throughout the ship high-radiation alarms would start to go off, since the nuclear shielding was not designed to handle such a level. The deck began to tremble with the power of the emergency flank bell. Every ounce of shaft horsepower went to the screw. The speed indicator climbed slowly from 41 knots to 43, 45, 46, finally settling at 49.5 knots.

  He’d doubled horsepower, and had added only nine lousy knots. That was because the drag of the water outside the skin of the ship had quadrupled. And in fact, the power to the main turbines hadn’t really doubled, since some of the power intake was lost to heat leaks and thermal inefficiencies. Still, to trash a ten-million-dollar power unit to make nine extra
knots seemed extreme.

  Absolute urgent you clear datum op area asap asap asap.

  The term “clear datum” was submarine-speak for “get the hell out of there as fast as you can.” It was the equivalent to “retreat” for the Marine Corps, rarely used, and if it was, it meant there was ship-threatening trouble out there. Pacino was damned serious.

  Patton leaned over the chart, watching the ship’s position dot as his vessel ran for the Ryukyu Island chain, the entrance to the Pacific. It had been a hell of a day.

  The violent explosion caught him completely by surprise.

  The sonarmen of the submarine Annapolis never heard the Mod 11 Nagasaki torpedo trying to catch up to them.

  The Nagasaki had been approaching the Annapolis when the ship was at periscope depth, and when the ship went deep and sped up, the Nagasaki had found itself in a tail chase. The onboard computer automatically up-shifted the propulsor speed to fast, accelerating the unit to maximum attack velocity of eighty-five clicks, all of five clicks slower than the Annapolis. The weapon had closed to within a half kilometer, but as the target sped up, the distance began to open. The torpedo fell behind six hundred meters, then seven hundred, growing to a kilometer.

  Minute after minute clicked off. At two kilometers’ distance the weapon’s onboard computer’s calculations showed that the unit would run out of fuel within thirty seconds, and when it did, the target would escape.

  A software interlock clicked in at the low-low fuel tank level. The gas turbine’s combustion chambers flickered off as the fuel went dry. Before the slowing turbine could drain the coil, changing from a generator to a motor, the software interlock took the turbine out of the circuit, and the torpedo plowed on with only the superconducting coil spinning the AC motor-driven shaft. But the coil had already been running low, which had brought on the gas turbine, and now with the electricity voltage dropping, the torpedo knew it was seconds from shutting down.

  In tactical attacks, the weapon programming instructed it to self-destruct rather than just sink. The odds were that a close torpedo detonating could inflict as much damage as a direct hit, especially when the torpedo was a plasma weapon.