Phoenix Sub Zero

by Michael Dimercurio

  Daminski flipped past the sonar search-plan to the blueprint of the enemy submarine. The ship was odd-looking to an American submariner’s eyes. It looked like a fat torpedo, rounded at the bow, cylindrical over its length with an abrupt tapered stern, the aft end having the strange X-tail rudder/stern plane combination with the even stranger ducted propulsor water turbine instead of a screw. But the strangest part of the ship was the sail, or fin, as the UIF forces called it. The fin height was nearly the same as the diameter of the hull, the structure poking up thirty-five feet.

  “As you can see, this vessel is radically different from our own

  designs, and a major departure from Russian designs as well.” Turner was lecturing now and obviously enjoying it.

  “Unlike our own philosophy, there is no spherical or bow sonar array. The bow is taken up with torpedo tubes like a World War II boat. The tubes are actually outside the pressure hull, containing canned weapons. So the tubes are one-shot deals and there’s no reloading and no reload machinery—makes the ship simpler and lighter with fewer pressure-hull penetrations. It’s got thirteen large-bore hundred-centimeter tubes and eight small-bore fifty-three centimeter tubes. Even with no reload Destiny can kill you twenty-one times over.

  “This ship is a double-hull vessel, great for taking torpedo hits without getting hurt. Plus, the inner hull is a simple cylindrical elliptical-headed pressure vessel. They’ve minimized hull diameter, the main drawback to a double-hull ship, by making ballast spaces fore and aft of the pressure hull. And get this, gents: the pressure hull with its four compartments has only one of them manned. The reactor and steam plants are so. automated that they run everything from the control room up front under the fin. There’s no shaft penetration to the hull because the propulsor is turned by an oil-enclosed AC motor—only electrical cables penetrate the hull. The motor is damned quiet, as is the low-speed propulsor.

  The reactor is liquid metal cooled with MHD pumps— whisper quiet, and

  there’s no reduction gearing since it’s electric drive. The turbine generators are reported to be screamers at a dual frequency at about 155 hertz. For sensors the ship has huge hull sonar arrays, damn near covering the whole hull. Her ears are a lot bigger than ours, which sort of makes up for the lack of a spherical array up forward.”

  Jamie Fernandez, the communications officer, raised his hand. Turner recognized the young ensign.

  “Sir, the Destiny-class—do we know the actual name of this particular ship? The Moslems don’t call it the Destiny, do they? And what do we know about the ship’s captain?

  How will he react when we approach him? What does the intelligence say?”

  “We don’t have data that specific—”

  “Those are bullshit questions, Fernandez,” Daminski’s voice boomed. “The answer is it doesn’t matter who the hell the captain is or what the hell they call their damned ship.

  Our job is to put it on the bottom.” Daminski looked at the officers. “Come on, let’s get our stuff together here. Go on, please, Mr. Turner.”

  Turner continued, finishing with the intelligence they did have about

  the ship—submerged tonnage, speed, depth capability.

  After another quarter-hour Turner finished and looked at Daminski.

  “Anything to add, sir?”

  “Just a couple things, Mr. Turner.” Daminski stretched and snapped his fingers for a cup of coffee. The engineer, tall lanky Mark Berghoffer, the Pennsylvania Dutch farmboy with the foghorn voice, leaped up, grabbed an Augusta coffee mug from the rack, splashed the hot brew into it and placed it before the captain. Daminski slurped loudly, then: “Here’s how I see it, guys. Feel free to jump in if I’m wrong. I think we can take this dude by sneaking up on him.

  Those big hull arrays will leave a hell of a baffle area in his stern, and the surface flow will be noisy from the propulsor.

  The ship itself is damned good, but I’m betting the crew is unfamiliar with their platform and they’re poorly trained.

  We’ve been at sea a hell of a lot more in the last six months than these people. Once we get a sniff of this guy we’re ordered to do a situation report. I’ll preload the damned thing in a radio buoy and poop it out the signal ejector so I don’t have to go to periscope depth in the middle of the approach.

  Then I’ll put out a horizontal salvo of four Mark 50s, wait for the detonations, then we go on to Naples for a night of beer, Italian food, and Italian women. Any questions?”

  There were none. The briefing broke up. Daminski sat in the end seat for some time, finishing his coffee, staring at the intelligence profile of the Destiny-class, and thinking about fernandez’s questions: who was the Destiny’s captain?

  And what the hell did they call the ship? And what would Destiny’s captain do if he detected their approach? Questions for which Daminski had no answers, and felt he should have.

  arlington, virginia pentagon e-ring joint staff special compartmented facility Admiral Donchez glared at the air force security guard at the fortified entrance to the joint-staff headquarters. Even the navy’s number one admiral had to produce his ID card, his Pentagon bar-coded SCIF-access card, and have the photo-images on the cards compared to his face by two on-watch sentries before he could gain access. At last the sentries admitted Donchez into the maze of corridors leading to a large briefing room. Before Congress had mandated this joint service fever, this room had been the War Room, the information presentation facility for presidents and cabinet members and congressmen and generals. Now that the post-cold-war world’s threats were different, the joint staff

  had gutted and remodeled the room, making it look more like a movie set than the old functional war room. The joint staff briefing room was large but so packed with computer consoles as to seem cramped except for the table in the center of the room. The black table was ten feet wide and sixty feet long, the surface illuminated by a hanging contraption in the shape of a large racetrack shining fluorescent light down on the slick marble surface. The room’s north and south walls were electronic wall charts, their images driven by the computer consoles on the east and west walls. Off to the side of the large briefing table was a smaller table, seating only twelve, where the chairman of the Joint Chiefs liked to have his meetings. The entire facility was a SCIF, special compartmented information facility, built to elaborate specifications that attempted to prevent eavesdropping. These included the prohibition against windows or ventilation ducts leading to the rest of the building; the computer consoles were networked only with each other and to a barrier computer. Only the barrier computer was allowed to communicate with the outside world through sanitized phone lines and data cables. The barrier then scanned incoming data to ensure that it was virus-free. A second computer system was devoted solely to monitoring the barrier, making sure its integrity was maintained. Every phone in the room was a secure-voice unit, all passing through the modules of the barrier computer.

  All this seemed fine for tactical or war-fighting strategy meetings, but JCS chairman General Rod Barczynski also favored the room for

  administrative meetings. Thirty-five years of living and fighting in tanks had made the general uncomfortable with rooms with windows and curtains and wood tables. Donchez could understand but still felt odd discussing, say, the latest uniform change in the war-fighting environment of the joint-briefing facility. Except, of course, this morning’s briefing was no administrative function.

  Barczynski wanted answers. Dick Donchez’s career had been filled with sessions like these. To Donchez, success was not a matter of avoiding failure but of making the right decisions and taking the correct action when staring failure in the face.

  Behind Donchez were his commanders-in chief—John Traeps, the CINC naval forces Mediterranean, and Kenny Mckeigh, the CINC naval forces Atlantic—as well as his aide Fred Rummel. Vice C.N.O Watson was minding the store in Flag Plot. Donchez sat at the table across from the general and his staff, Donchez’s CINCS seating themselv
es beside him. He looked up at Barczynski.

  “Afternoon, General,” Donchez said. “Having a good vacation?”

  Donchez referred to Barczynski’s penchant for getting outdoors away from D.C. on weekends and holidays.

  Being at work on the Christmas holidays, war or no war, was not his

  style.

  “I’ve had a lot better, Dick,” the general said.

  The general’s physical appearance made him seem an unlikely character to be in command of the nation’s military.

  He was a large man, his barrel chest presiding over an equally broad paunch, but somehow Barczynski didn’t seem fat, just big. Someone seeing him at the grocery store would think him a boilermaker or a longshoreman. He had a habit of taking off his uniform jacket and rolling up his shirtsleeves, and when he did his thick forearms bulged from the shirt. Barczynski had a way of looking a man in the eyes with disarming directness, especially when asking—rarely ordering—that an action be taken, his eyes smiling, the laugh lines coming, as if to say I know you can do this, will you help me out? Those eyes also had the ability to get the truth from subordinates trying to cover their trails, and tails. They could also mesmerize bosses, disarming opponents.

  And they worked wonders with the press, who loved him. There were rumors that when he retired he could win a presidential nomination. He was one of few officers able to weld a caring attitude for his men with a relentless commitment to the mission at hand. Officers and enlisted men alike would do things for Barczynski that they would never agree to do for anyone else, taking the unglamorous missions, hardship tours, the

  army’s dirty jobs. As a way to reward the men who worked hard for him, he was fond of building esprit de corps by throwing keg parties; wherever he had been assigned in his career he could always be found after hours in the officers’ club, usually with a Heineken in each giant fist, surrounded by younger officers. But his physical appearance and beer diplomacy masked a penetrating insight and a tactician’s mind unrivaled by most military academicians.

  Donchez himself had enormous professional and personal respect for Barczynski as well as liking him as a friend and fellow officer, the two senior officers friends for the past several years. But even so, Donchez was wary of the army officer because he felt he was short on understanding of navy operations. Barczynski’s working knowledge of the fleet had come from joint-command operations during which he’d come back with a distaste for carrier battle groups, the navy’s starting offense. Over the last few years Donchez had convinced Barczynski of the utility of submarines, the usefulness of seal team commandos, the gunboat diplomacy of Aegis cruisers, the punch of an amphibious assault by a bat talion of Marines, and the value of sea-launched Javelin cruise missiles, but the general still balked at Donchez’s insistence that carrier air wings were worth their price tag, the general more comfortable with land-based air force fighters and bombers, which he’d been familiar with since his West Point graduation. Donchez had continued to press, and Barczynski had grudgingly gone along with the navy chief’s tactical recommendations, but as far as carrier battle

  groups were concerned, they were something that Barczynski tolerated rather than supported.

  Barczynski looked at Donchez now and started in abruptly. “Dick, what’s this I hear about Sihoud getting away? I thought your seals were there to stop that. Do you know how tough it was to get Dawson to buy in on this assassination thing? We promised him results. So far we’ve got nothing.”

  “Sir, I’m not sure what you might have heard from your sources. The missile attack did fail and the seals missed Sihoud’s departure from the bunker—he must have taken off before the Javelins hit, because the seals verified that nothing was left. We believe Sihoud made an escape on a Firestar fighter that flew out over the Med and dropped him off at a submarine. The UIF’s Destiny-class submarine.”

  Donchez showed him the photos.

  “This Destiny sub. It’s a diesel boat, right? Your guys can find it and kill it?”

  “I’m afraid it’s a nuke, sir. Japanese built, state of the art, although it’s just an export-level unit—God help us if the Japanese ever decided to make their own wars with their own hardware.”

  Barczynski was not amused. “Go on. Admiral.”

  “The ship is run by Egyptians, Iranians, Iraqis and Libyans. We believe they are not very well trained, not operating as a smooth team—”

  “You’ve got a bunch of your subs in the Med to get this guy, right?”

  “We’ve got two front-line units, both Los Angeles-class attack submarines, one guarding Gibraltar at the mouth of the Med, the other sweeping the eastern basin to the west looking for the Destiny sub. We’ve got a few dozen antisub marine patrol aircraft in the air, some of them from the Reagan battle group. We’ll get him.”

  “Where’s he going? What’s he doing?”

  “We think he’s hiding from us for a while, then he’ll re deploy with one of his theater commanders, probably North Africa. But we’ll get him … Sihoud’s a dead man.”

  “I hope so, Dick. The president wanted to know what happens after Sihoud is gone. Sihoud’s got three damned good field generals, the theater commanders. Even with him gone Bobby Kent at CIA thinks the generals can still run a pretty good war.”

  Donchez handed over a file, the cover of it busy with classification

  stamps and banners.

  “That’s Operation Early Retirement Phase Two, General.

  We’ll take out each of the theater commanders. CIA agrees with my staff that once the lower echelon generals are out of the picture—”

  General Felix Clough, U.S. Air Force, walked in. Air Force chief of staff Clough was young to be a general, even in the Air Force. Most of his academy classmates were still colonels, some majors. Clough had a round face, made academic-looking by his wire-rimmed glasses. Like Barczynski, he was a broad-framed man, though taller than the JCS chief, but on Clough the paunch looked more like fat than Barczynski’s muscle. Clough had come up the Air Force’s ranks first as a nuclear missile silo commander, then as a scientist. He had met Barczysnki twenty years before at a seminar and the two had for some reason hit it off, the Air Force allowing Clough to be Barczynski’s liaison officer for several assignments. Donchez had nothing against Clough personally, but at the Pentagon Clough was his worst nightmare, an Air Force general officer with a doctorate who thought he knew all there was to know about military systems.

  For Clough, life was simple: Trident submarines were wasteful and easily replaced by Air Force silos and B-2 bombers. Carrier air power existed only because of pork-barrel politics and was clearly inferior to

  long-range, stealthy, fast and lethal Air Force fighters. The Marine Corps was. redundant, its functions easily replaced by the Army, the Air Force and the Navy doing its unglamorous but utilitarian function of transporting troops to the battlefields. Donchez suspected it was Clough who had coined the “self-lickingicecream-cone” term concerning aircraft carrier battle groups, “missile silos lost at sea” for Trident submarines and “the Navy’s army” for the Marines. Unfortunately Clough had Barczynski’s ear.

  Donchez continued as Clough sat down. “The lower-echelon generals,” Donchez said, glancing pointedly at Clough, “once killed, will drain the UIF Combined Armed Forces of so much talent that defeat should be nearly immediate.

  The battlefields will be chaos—” “They usually are,” Barczynski said. But the point wasn’t lost on Donchez—the Army general had been in battlefields before, in Vietnam and Iraq, risking his life, while Donchez … though not by his choice … had not.

  “Sir, once the Navy’s seals knock out Generals Ben Abbas, Ramadan, and lhaffe this war will be a mop-up.”

  Clough smiled at Donchez.

  “Well, at least your people will get to do something over there.”

  Screw you, Donchez thought as he returned Clough’s smile.

  “Dick, that should be it. Let me know about Sihoud.”

  �
��Aye, aye, sir,” Donchez said, standing.

  “Oh, one thing,” Clough said to Barczynski while waving Donchez to a seat. “Didn’t you want to ask Admiral Donchez about the testing of the Vortex missile? I heard that the Navy’s doing a live fire with two submarines tomorrow.”

  Donchez took a deep breath, sitting back down, wondering what business of Clough’s the Vortex missile could be, except that it had a track record of failure that Clough could use against the Navy.

  “I thought this was a war briefing. General Barczynski, or I would have brought the videos and charts and graphs of the Vortex program.”

  Barczynski put both hands up, as if to separate Donchez and Clough. “Hold on, hold on. Dick, what’s the deal with this live firing exercise? This Vortex is going to kill some one if I read these reports right.”

  Donchez’s jaw clenched. He already had had to answer for the failed operation to kill Sihoud, and now Clough was kicking him when down,

  dragging out the Vortex program.

  It would have been easier to tolerate if the Vortex had been someone else’s brainchild, but it was Donchez’s personal dream, his legacy to the Navy. And so far the program had been one problem after another. Donchez opened his brief case and took out a folder, thinking back over the last two years and the long road to the Vortex’s operational test.

  “General, here’s the short course on the Vortex missile program. After we had that unfortunate incident under the polar icecap a few years ago when we lost the Devilfish, we wanted to develop an antisubmarine weapon that would be as effective as the old Russian Magnum, the big 100-centimeter nuclear-tipped torpedo. We were somewhat disappointed in the Mark 50, frankly, although it did well against the Chinese fleet during Operation Jailbreak back when Seawolf liberated the Tampa. But those were surface ships we were firing at, not submarines. The ASW standoff weapon, the Ow-sow, also used against the Chinese, was a big break, but it turned out to be a surface ship killer, not that effective against a sub. In the meantime the opposition submarines were getting faster. The Japanese Destiny-class, for example, can do damned near forty-seven knots and the mark 50 only about fifty. On a good day, the Destiny submarine can run long enough in a tail-chase so that a Mark 50 runs out of fuel, effectively outrunning our torpedo.”