Phoenix Sub Zero

by Michael Dimercurio

  Conversations in the room stopped. Nothing seemed to be happening, except the officers continued to stare at the computer videos.

  “Tawkidi, what the hell is going on?” Ahmed asked, careful to keep his voice down.

  “The coalition sub launched a torpedo at us. We were wrong about him not hearing us,” Tawkidi himself stared at the video screens, never looking

  at Ahmed or Sihoud.

  “And? Why did you shut down the reactor? Won’t the torpedo hit us?”

  “It might.” Tawkidi held his finger over his lips, silencing Ahmed. Ahmed finally saw Sihoud turn and look at him.

  “Status of the Dash Five?” Sharef glanced at the bulkhead chronometer.

  “Unit is warm, sir, bow cap open, emissions set at ninety decibels. Commodore, this is the only unit. If he shoots again, we have no more.”

  Sharef nodded, outwardly certain-looking, inwardly doubting one Dash Five on a journey like this would be enough.

  “Shoot tube eleven.”

  “Fire eleven … tube indicates normal shot.”

  “Turn the Dash Five to course one zero zero, increase the emission to 120 decibels.”

  “Turn inserted, sir, passing north, passing east, steady on one zero zero, emitted noise at 120 dee bee.”

  Another prolonged silence in the room. The ship was airless, hot and incredibly humid. Ahmed’s face and hair were soaked, the sweat filling his eyes. Suddenly he was acutely aware that there was a half-kilometer of seawater between him and the sky above.

  “Turn the Dash Five to one four zero and increase to 130 decibels,” Sharef ordered. The officer on the panel acknowledged, played with the computer, and reported his results.

  “Second torpedo launch from the target. Commodore.”

  “Commander,” Ahmed said to Tawkidi, “please tell us what’s going on without my having to beg you, if you please.”

  “The commodore launched an evasion device programmed to sound like this ship—the Dash Five—louder than this ship but otherwise identical. Meanwhile the propulsion plant is shut down and quiet and we drift silently while the Dash Five confuses the torpedoes.”

  “Aren’t you going to shoot back?”

  “First things first. Once the incoming weapons are fooled, we’ll shoot. Otherwise the enemy sub could steer the torpedoes and hit us. The commodore invented this tactic. It is brilliant, if untested.”

  Ahmed traded a glance with Sihoud. Sharef was using a combat tactic not invented by the Japanese—how good could it be?

  “Bearing rate to the incoming weapons?”

  “Constant bearing, sir,” al-Kunis reported, frowning.

  “That means the weapons are still coming for us. They haven’t picked up the decoy yet,” Tawkidi whispered.

  Ahmed felt a wave of nausea rise in his stomach and continue upward until a band tightened around his forehead.

  We’re dead, Ahmed thought.

  Daminski ripped off his one-earphoned headset and dropped it on the deck as he shouldered past the attack center consoles to the forward starboard corner of the control room. He grabbed the accordion door curtain separating control from sonar and pulled it open, the door ripped half off its track.

  “What the hell is going on?” his voice loud and razor sharp.

  “Nothing, sir. Afraid that’s the problem,” Hillsworth said to the sonar display screen. “Target One dipped below threshold signal-to-noise

  ratio. We’ve lost him.”

  “What about the one-fifty-four doublet?”

  “Gone. Maybe he turned to an aspect that shields the turbine generators. Bloke might be running, giving us his screw. The propulsor might interfere with the tonal reception.”

  “If he’s running you’d hear him on broadband.”

  “With a conventional screw, maybe. With this ducted water turbine, who knows? Why don’t you chase him down the bearing line? He might turn up.”

  “Okay, I’ll drive southeast.” Daminski turned to leave, then faced Hillsworth at the door, pointing his crooked finger in the Brit’s face. “Get on it. Chief. I want that son of a bitch back on this screen. Make damned sure you listen up for units one and two—they might pick up the target before we do.”

  Back in control, XO Danny Kristman handed Daminski his headset without a word. Daminski strapped it on.

  “Attention in control,” he snapped, “check fire tubes three and four. We’ve lost the contact because he’s running from the units. We are pursuing him out the strait. When we regain contact we’ll launch the

  second two units. Carry on.

  Helm, all ahead full, left two degrees rudder, steady course one four zero.”

  Daminski crossed his arms across his chest, waiting for sonar to redetect the contact. And waiting was not something Rocket Ron did well.

  “Battery’s low. Commodore.”

  By now the sweat pouring off Ahmed’s face had soaked the chest of the coverall he’d been issued by al-Kunis. He tried to tell himself it was the oppressive wet heat in the crowded tomb of the control room, but he was honest enough with himself to accept that fear accounted for much of the sweat. A fear made worse, far worse, by his inability to save himself with his own action. He tried to avoid Sihoud’s eyes; their violet irises contained no comfort, only mirrors of his own anxiety.

  “How much longer?” Sharef asked.

  “I’m showing zero. We’ve got to restart the power unit now or I won’t even have enough current to pull the control rods out of the reactor core.” The mechanical officer, Quzwini, was on the opposite corner of the room from Sharef and spoke in a hushed voice, almost a whisper, but his report cut through the room.

  “Sir, incoming torpedoes are speeding up,” al-Maari called from the sensor console beside Sharef.

  “Give me another minute,” Sharef said over his shoulder to Quzwini while concentrating on a screen.

  “Computer’s going down in twenty seconds, sir.”

  “Bearing rate?” Sharef asked al-Maari.

  “Zero, constant bearing, still driving toward us …” al-Maari said, straining to hear in his headset, his face suddenly vexed. “I’ve got a ping, sir. Both weapons are pinging.”

  “Commodore, I’ve got to restart the plant, now!”

  “Wait, Quzwini.”

  “The Dash Five has detected the pings … and is pinging back with the enhancer.”

  “Shutting down the computers now. Commodore.” “I said wait,” Sharef said sharply.

  “Sir—”

  “I’m getting severe cavitation from the torpedo screws,” al-Maari interrupted. “They’ve gone to maximum speed.

  Now I have a right bearing drift, increasing, sir. The torpedoes are drawing right. They’re going after the Dash Five decoy, both of them!”

  “Restart the reactor!”

  Ahmed felt a sigh of relief whooshing out of him—until the computer screens died and the lights went out and the remaining fans wound down. Five hundred meters underwater, the ship lost power.

  Friday, 27 December strait OF sicily USS augusta “Conn, Sonar, own-ship’s units one and two are active and homing.” Hillsworth’s report was calm, controlled. “We have return pings from the target bearing one four four. Unit range gates are narrow.”

  Daminski smiled, raising his hands as if he’d just made the saving tackle.

  “Attention in the firecontrol team. We’re not waiting for a solution. I’m putting two Mark 50s down the bearing line to the target, high-speed transit, run to enable 10,000 yards, active snake search. Firing point

  procedures, tubes three and four. Target One, horizontal salvo, one-half degree offset.”

  Daminski received the readiness reports and ordered the tubes fired. Hackle took the trigger to the firing position twice; twice the deck shuddered and the atmosphere in the room blasted its pressure pulse painfully into the ears of the watchstanders. Once the weapons were launched Daminski slowed the ship to five knots, hoping to hear the contact better in case it evaded
again. But Hillsworth had it nailed, both from the ping returns from torpedoes one and two and from broadband and narrowband contact. The UIF Destiny-class submarine was doomed.

  Daminski wondered for a moment if he should reload the tubes, all four now empty. Loading would create noise that could lead to the target hearing them well enough to put a counterfired torpedo down the bearing line. Leaving them empty, however, meant that he had nothing in his tubes to shoot a surprise contact, a second hostile submarine coming out of nowhere.

  The UIF had only one Destiny submarine. Their Victor His were bottled up in port and were either broken down or louder than was good for them. And there was no way this enemy ship would counterdetect the Augusta.

  This was why they paid him command pay, Daminski thought, and made a command decision—leave the tubes dry and reload later.

  Battle lanterns, large flashlights in waterproof boxes, came on, barely holding back the thick darkness in the control room. Ahmed felt the evening meal trying to rise in his throat. He forced it back down, the taste bitter.

  “Ship control,” Sharef said, his voice commanding and sharp from the forward starboard corner of the control room, “have you got depth control?”

  The ship control officers at the console stared at a row of old-fashioned electrical instruments illuminated by the battle lantern behind them. How the instruments worked, Ahmed could only guess; perhaps they had their own battery pack behind the panel. Ahmed considered Sharef’s question in the dim room surrounded by helpless navy officers and blank screens. A loss of depth control would mean that they were … sinking.

  “Hydraulic backups are functional, Commodore,” a very young officer said from the left seat of the two. “Depth 510 meters, negative depth rate. Air bottles are fully charged.”

  “Keep the ship above 800 meters with air bubbled to the negative tanks, but minimize air use. Keep the angle zero within seven degrees.”

  “Yes sir.”

  Sharef checked his chronometer in the light of a battle lantern.

  Ahmed considered asking what was going to happen but thought better of it when he saw Sharef glaring at him in the dark airless space. Sharef leaned over the dead chart table and drummed his fingers on the horizontal videoscreen glass.

  Ahmed checked his own watch, wondering how long the ship would float in the sea, powerless, while the coalition submarine and its torpedoes were out there, searching for them. Daminski frowned at the report from sonar, his eyes meeting Kristman’s. Ron Hackle, the weapons officer at the firing panel, turned around and joined in the silent conference of consternation.

  “Say again, Sonar,” Daminski said slowly, trying to think.

  “Captain, Sonar, the first two own-ship units are at the bearing to Target One, active pinging range gates so narrow that the torpedoes are within a hundred yards of the target.

  But that situation continues. The torpedoes sound like they’re in reattack.”

  “Ron, what’s that mean to you?” Daminski asked the weapons officer.

  “The units are on top of the target, sir. They should be detonating. Instead they’re going into reattack.”

  “Why the hell would two units go into reattack?”

  Daminski leaned over the firing panel to look at the Pos Four display of data from units three and four, which were still attached by thin electronic wires to the torpedo tubes and from there to the firecontrol computer. It was unfortunate that he had had to cut the wires on units one and two in order to line up the tube banks to shoot three and four; the data from one and two would likely solve this problem.

  “What do the units say?”

  “Still on the run to enable,” Hackle said.

  Daminski turned to the conn and mumbled to himself.

  “Units one and two on top of the target and going into reattack mode. Reattack mode. Which means they lost the target and are turning to find it again. But they keep pinging, so they reacquire the target, but then lose it and go into reattack again.”

  Daminski paused and looked at Kristman. “Why would a unit go into reattack?”

  “Bad proximity sensor,” Kristman said slowly.”The unit hears the target, homes on it, but can’t detect an iron hull or doesn’t hit the hull directly, so it swings back around for an other approach. Goes into reattack.”

  “One unit with a bad proximity sensor, okay. Two weapons? I don’t think so. What if the sensor is good? Why would it go into reattack?”

  “Blip enhancer? Or active countermeasures?”

  “What?”

  “The target could broadcast an active sonar ping that matches the incoming sonar pulse, with a frequency shift, timed to fool the torpedo’s range gate.”

  “Like sending a return back early so the weapon thinks he’s closer than he is.”

  “It’s possible.”

  “Take a hell of a computer and a sonar system to do that,” Daminski

  said. “And a damned quiet boat. Even then, it might work against one weapon, but against two? Or four?”

  “What if we switched off the active on units three and four? That way they can’t get confused.”

  “Do we have the signal-to-noise ratio we need to switch them to passive sonar mode?”

  “Hillsworth’ll know.”

  “Sonar, Captain, have we got enough SNR to switch units three and four to passive search mode?”

  “Captain, Sonar, yes.”

  “Do it.”

  Hackle’s fingers flashed over the panel, stabbing variable function keys, changing the display to a new menu showing torpedo presets. In the menu he changed the search mode from active to passive, programming the second-fired units to search for the target by listening only rather than pinging active and listening for the return.

  The men in the room were quiet, waiting for the second pair of torpedoes

  to enable, to begin their search for the target.

  The wait took several minutes. Daminski stood behind Hackle and Kristman, wondering what the hell he’d do if the second units went into reattack.

  Sharef had stared at his wristwatch on and off for the last ten minutes. Every time he did Ahmed watched him, waiting for the commander to do something. But nothing happened.

  Sharef’s thoughts would have confused Ahmed. Sharef was thinking about the Persian rug in his stateroom, about its intentional imperfection. The imperfection that had been woven into it as a symbol of mankind’s humility before Allah, who was insulted by the thought of human perfection.

  And to Sharef, the imperfection of the Hegira was her battery, a battery much too small to allow the ship to hide under the acoustic curtain of a delouse maneuver. But unlike the rug, the submarine’s imperfection would have consequences.

  It might end up killing them all. Maybe that would please Allah, Sharef thought, a bitterness edging his thoughts. He looked at his watch and up to see Ahmed staring at him. He flashed the air force officer a humorless smile. Ahmed frowned.

  The deck sloped ominously downward, the ship in a dive.

  Sharef had ordered the man at the ship controls to let the ship dangle and not fix the angle unless it threatened to exceed seven degrees, but even a quarter degree was detectable to Ahmed, and one degree set off alarms in his mind that the ship was sinking. Five degrees felt like a ramp. With the deck at a five-degree dive, the forward end of the room was a half-meter lower than the aft end.

  Finally Sharef moved behind the ship control consoles and spoke to the youngster in the left seat. The order made little sense to Ahmed: “Bubble one and three, bring it up at point five per second, start your flood at a hundred, maintain thirty to twenty-five meters.”

  “Yes, sir. Bubbling one and three now.”

  A muffled sound of rushing air could be heard for a few seconds.

  “Quzwini, lay below to the auxiliary diesel panel and prepare to snort.”

  The mechanical officer turned over the power plant consoles to a lieutenant and hurried out of the room. Ahmed searched the patches o
f dark and glare for Commander Tawkidi, finding him at the sensor console area leaning on one of the stations.

  “Now what. Commander?”

  “We’re coming up to periscope depth to restart the reactor.”

  “Why don’t we do that deep?”

  “Battery’s dead. We need electricity. Once we get near the surface we’ll put up the snort mast and let the diesel engine breathe. The diesel generator will give us enough current on the grid to restart the reactor plant.”

  “Oh. But it will be loud, won’t it? Will the enemy hear us?”

  “Yes. But that is the commodore’s decision.”

  The deck leveled off, then began inclining the opposite direction, the aft end sinking. The boat drifted upward, the deck continuing its slow oscillations. Ahmed felt his frustration intensify at how ridiculous it was to have lost power and drift in the sea at the most critical moment, when they were under attack by an enemy submarine. If they survived this madness he intended to ask Sihoud to have Sharef fired.

  Two decks below, in the aftmost bulkhead of the command module in the equipment room. Commander Ibn Quzwini took a seat at the auxiliary

  diesel console, his battle lantern lighting the dead gauges. His walkie-talkie radio on his belt squawked.

  “Quzwini, raise the snort mast.”

  Quzwini took the cover off a hydraulic control valve, careful to keep any leakage inside the cover from spilling on the deck. He grabbed the knob of the valve lever and pushed it up and to the right, then locked it into position. A hiss and a thunk sounded from the overhead as the high-pressure hydraulic oil forced the snort mast out of the fin and extended it high over the hull.

  Ten meters above the command module, the submarine’s fin neared the surface in an attempt to reach the air, to bring it into the ship to feed the hungry diesel. The snort mast, a pipe with a water-sensing valve at the top, pointed to the waves, finally broaching the surface and extending toward the night sky.

  “Control, Quzwini, snort mast is up.”

  “Depth is two seven meters.”