Phoenix Sub Zero

by Michael Dimercurio

  “I’m hoping your Phoenix can take care of the Destiny.”

  “At least Sugar Kane knows more than Rocket Ron did about this guy’s tactics.”

  “Kane?”

  “David Kane, captain of the Phoenix. Crew calls him Sugar, a title I regret to say I thought up. Kane was a junior officer of mine back on the Archerfish.”

  “Small world,” Donchez said. He’d never heard of David Kane. “Your man Kane. Is he good?” “He knows his stuff,” Steinman said cautiously, knowing Kane wasn’t Donchez’s blood-and-guts kind of sailor. Kane was a politician, ever tuned to his own advancement—he’d always looked like he belonged on Wall Street wearing a $2,000 business suit rather than oily-smelling khakis on a nuclear submarine. But his squadron commanders and crew seemed to love him. Kane was a crowd-pleaser, adept at saying what his bosses and juniors wanted to hear. He was a new generation of captain, and Steinman wisely kept that to himself, knowing a single misinterpreted remark to the C.N.O could torpedo a career. Besides, Kane was good, he was just good in a self-serving kind of way.

  Traeps and Rummel returned by the stairs to the patio from the lawn by the lake. They were covered with snow.

  “You’d better check this out. Admiral.”

  Donchez held the faxed message Rummel handed him up to the porch light and read. It was from the Phoenix. The meat of the message dashed his hopes.

  SONAR DETECTED MULTIPLE DISTANT EXPLOSIONS ALONG BEARING LINE TO STRAIT OP SICILY. SUBSEQUENT TRANSIENTS BELIEVED TO BE HULL BREAKUP. USS PHOENIX REMAINS ON STATION EAST OF GIBRALTAR WITH NO FURTHER DETECTS.

  Donchez held out the message to Steinman.

  “Let’s get Barczynski,” he said. “We’ll have to come up with a story on this. I don’t want this UIF thing brought out, not till we kill him. Roy, I guess lost-sub cover stories are your responsibility. Sorry.”

  “I know, sir. We’ll have a statement ready for the morning. We’d better get going on the notifications. I guess I’d best visit Daminski’s wife myself.”

  “I’ll do that, Roy,” Donchez said. “He’ was one of my boys from the Dace. Maybe you could see to his XO and wardroom.”

  Steinman nodded, trudging back into the house.

  Donchez walked around to the front, where his staff car was parked, following the path made by Traeps and Rummel. The car’s engine was idling, the big black Lincoln bristling with antennae. The front door of Clough’s house opened and Barczynski came out, his overcoat thrown over his shoulders. After asking Donchez what was up, the look in Donchez’s eyes telling him the matter was grave, he read the messages, Daminski’s and Kane’s.

  “General, we’ve got this message going out to the second sub in the western Med. He knows how the enemy fight their ship and he’ll be ready.

  Sihoud and the Destiny will be on the bottom—”

  “Dick, I’d like to believe that. But I heard the skipper of Augusta was a damn good man. An expert at getting top performance out of a crew.”

  “He was one of the best,” Donchez said, thinking he ought to be, I trained him myself. “His professionalism shows in his last message, sir. He knew he was a dead man but he took the time to tell us how to beat the Destiny.”

  Donchez looked hard at Barczynski. “I want to declassify that Augusta sank. General. Tonight. We couldn’t keep a lid on it too long anyway, she’s due back in a couple weeks.

  It’ll give us a black eye if we let the next of kin celebrate New Year’s and wait on the pier and we tell them then she’s been gone since December. We sat on sinking news back when Stingray went down in ‘73 and the press and the families beat the hell out of us. And rightly so.”

  “Dick, we can’t be saying anything about the Destiny sub—”

  “We won’t. Steinman’s working on a story now. Augusta sank because of a faulty torpedo or a flooded main seawater system or any of a thousand things that can sink a submarine.

  It’s known to be a dangerous business. We’ve lost three nukes in the past, sir, we’ve done this before, I’m sorry to say.”

  “I don’t want any salvage divers coming up next week saying we lied.”

  “We won’t say where she sank. Besides, she’s down in 900 feet of water. It’ll take a while. By the time any salvage vultures are down there, we’ll have the Destiny on the bottom.

  Then they can dive for Sihoud’s bones.” He had to believe that.

  “Okay, Dick. Do it your way.”

  Donchez got into the car, Rummel at the door ready to shut it.

  “And, Dick—”

  “Yes, General?”

  “I’m very sorry.”

  “So am I, sir. So am I.”

  virginia beach, virginia Myra Daminski blew out a breath of exhaustion as she sat at the kitchen table, the kids finally, after a long fight,

  in bed and quiet. She sipped at the coffee, the milk she’d dumped in it making it a chocolate-brown color. The sudden glint of a policeman’s cruiser lights from outside the dining room window didn’t surprise her—it was the Friday night between Christmas and New Year’s, and the neighborhood parties were in full gear, the music blaring from the house across the street. Someone had probably complained. She flipped through a book, finally finding the page, the one all about comfort in confusion over a trying, or dying, marriage. The doorbell rang. Annoyed, she marked the page, put the book down, and walked through the hallway while straightening out her thick black hair.

  She opened the door, expecting to see people who’d come to the wrong house for the party, but stared into the pressed uniform of a Virginia state police trooper, behind him two men in dark uniforms, the driveway blocked by a large black car behind the trooper’s cruiser. She turned on the outside light and immediately saw that the men in black uniforms were navy officers.

  “Mrs. Daminski? I’m Admiral Dick Donchez. Could we come in?”

  She opened the door wider, the men came in.

  “I just made a pot of coffee, come on into the den, have a seat.” She ran into the kitchen, reaching for the coffeepot.

  “Ma’am, I think you’d first better listen to the admiral,” Fred Rummel said.

  Myra Daminski looked up, her hands on the island countertop.

  “It’s about the Augusta,” Donchez said, his voice deep, gravelly. “Two hours ago the ship went down in the Mediterranean during an exercise with another submarine. We have reason to believe the entire crew was lost. I’m sorry …”

  Myra’s eyes glazed over. Donchez wondered if she was registering the news.

  “We headed down from D.C. as soon as we could. I’m the Chief of Naval Operations. Ron was an old hand on my former submarine Dace. He was a fine officer and a good friend of mine. I can’t tell you …”

  The words seemed to rush over her. A lump formed in her throat as she wondered if the letter she had written him had gotten to the ship before it sailed from Sardinia. She hoped it hadn’t and would be returned to her.

  “What happened?”

  “We’re not sure yet. We’re doing everything possible to find the crew.

  If any survived we’ll know in a few hours. We’ll be taking a deep submergence vehicle down tonight. But I don’t want you to get your hopes up, Mrs. Daminski. The other sub in the exercise radioed that it heard hull breakup noises on sonar.”

  Myra looked up to see her son Joe in his pajamas, standing in the foyer at the base of the stairs.

  Later, in the staff car, Donchez looked out the window at the dark trees, thinking about Myra Daminski’s reaction—or lack of reaction—and the tears of the boy. Mrs. Daminski had been rocking him in a big chair in the den when they had left. Myra’s face was, well, set. Stoic? perhaps.

  For the next half-hour Donchez himself was lost in memories.

  Daminski arm-wrestling in the wardroom, Daminski drinking beer at a ship’s softball game, Daminski arguing with the burly torpedoman Betts, Daminski teaching the younger officers the torpedo-tube interlocks. The first time he heard Betts call him Roc
ket Ron, and the way the crew took up the name, Donchez trying to put a stop to it, the nickname a violation of military discipline but finally giving up as the moniker stuck. The day Lieutenant Daminski showed up in Donchez’s XO stateroom to ask for emergency leave to see his dying father, the tough macho lieutenant suddenly seeming vulnerable, almost stuttering.

  Daminski’s wedding to his first wife, an event for all the ship’s officers, the wardroom ganging up on the strutting Daminski and carrying him kicking and fighting to the pool and dumping him in, Daminski sputtering to the surface, a grin on his face as he climbed out and ran after his attackers, his once starched service dress whites soaked. The weeks of shock Daminski went through when the marriage foundered the next year, the junior officer burying himself in his work.

  When Donchez was done remembering, he turned his thoughts to what he had to do. Somewhere in the Med the UIF Destiny submarine lurked, a ship quiet enough to escape the detection of an Improved-Los Angeles-class sub’s BSY-1 sonar system, so quiet when its reactor was shut down that it didn’t register over the own-ship noise of the LA-class. The Destiny had the acoustic advantage, a nasty situation in which the opposition sub was quieter than the U.S. boat. That situation had never arisen in the old days, even with the Russians—American subs had always been quieter, stealthier—undl the Russians had built the Omega-class attack submarine, the one Donchez had spent so many nights worrying about until he had sent Devilfish to find it.

  And its then commander Pacino hadn’t been able to hear the Omega until he was directly beneath it, the Omega surfaced at the polar icecap.

  There was only one American submarine quieter than an Improved-Los

  Angeles-class, and that was the Seawolf.

  And there was perhaps only one submarine captain who was in the same league as Rocket Ron Daminski, and that was Captain Michael Pacino, Seawolf’s captain. Pacino was due to rotate off, accept his first star and replace Roy Steinman as comsublant. And Seawolf lay in a shipyard drydock as the Vortex tube installation finished, the yard just now getting a high-priced work order to reverse course and rip the tubes out after the failure of the system in the Bahamas.

  “Fred, get me Pacino on scrambled satellite voice. He should be home in Sandbridge Beach. Then get me Stevens.”

  “Stevens, the NNSY shipyard commander?”

  “Yes.” He waited.

  “Pacino.” Pacino’s voice was distorted through the scrambled voice circuit.

  “Mikey? It’s Dick. I’m afraid I have some bad news.”

  Atlantic Breakout Saturday, 28 December portsmouth, virginia norfolk naval shipyard graving dock 4

  Captain Michael Pacino stood at the railing of the dock and stared down at the mess.

  Several tons of ugly scaffolding hid most of the wide hull of the Seawolf. The mass of equipment staged at the ship’s starboard flank obscured most of that side of the ship. A platform with handrails had been placed on top of the conning tower. Forward, the plastic sonar dome had been removed, the large sphere of the BSY-2 Advanced batears sonar looking bare and exposed. Scaffolding had been erected around the equator of the sphere. The deck of the ship that was visible was a bright green, the color of the inorganic zinc primer put on the sandblasted hull. Hoses and temporary ducts snaked into the hatches. A large hole, a hull cut, gaped forward starboard, part of the work for the Vortex tubes.

  Although the ship had been committed to the drydock solely for the insertion of the Vortex tubes, a drydock availability came around so seldom that the shipyard had not been able to resist taking advantage of the opportunity to invade the ship for other projects. The sonar hydrophone changeout project was an example, an alteration not scheduled for another two years but put into motion now since it might be difficult to schedule later. And as usual, once the main work was complete it would probably be some minor target-of-opportunity alteration that would delay the vessel from leaving the dock.

  Pacino’s mouth was set in a tight grimace. Seeing his ship in the dock filled him with a kind of gut pain. The ship be longed at sea, not under the hands of a thousand uncaring shipyard workers. The sun had risen above the surrounding buildings, the dirty old brick of them still dark on this Saturday morning, the morning after Augusta went down, the morning after Rocket Ron went down. Pacino tried to push back the thought even as he began to think it. After seven, and no sign of shipyard activity. Pacino glanced at his watch, saw the approaching shadow and looked up to see Captain Emmitt Stevens, the shipyard commander, turned out in starched khakis, gleaming white hardhat, spit-shined shoes. Pacino turned and gave him a halfhearted salute.

  Stevens looked ready to take a bite out of Pacino.

  “Captain,” Stevens said, “another dock availability ruined by the ops guys.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Once again one of my schedules is blown to hell by comsublant. I got a call from Admiral Steinman last night.

  The brass wants your boat out pronto. Immediately if not sooner, I think Steinman’s words were. I’ll be damned, Patch. We had a lot to do on this work order, and now we’re just doing a

  hurry-up-button-it-up-and-get-her-to-sea for some god damned exercise for Steinman. All I hear are complaints from you guys that your ships don’t work. Well, dammit, this is why.”

  Pacino regarded Stevens, the older man gray at the temples, his hair combed back swoopingly up over his ears and under the hardhat. Stevens was an EDO, engineering-duty type, one of the crack whiz kids at MIT in the naval architecture program when Pacino was there trying to start his master’s work, Stevens worldly and wise when Pacino was still trying to find the bathroom. Pacino wondered how much he could tell Stevens, then decided that in spite of security, if the shipyard commander knew what was up he might get the ship out faster, or better.

  “You heard about Augusta!”

  Stevens expression changed in a flash. “Rocket Ron.

  Yeah, I heard. The yard that did him last. New Hampshire, is standing by. Shipyard commander might get his chops busted. Rumor has it that it wasn’t a weapon problem. Some sort of depth-control trouble from the depth-indication panel they put in last spring. From what I heard, the depth indicator showed him shallow when he was deep and he plowed into the bottom and ripped open the hull.”

  “Emmitt. Rocket didn’t go down from a faulty depth gauge. And the reason

  Seawolf is going out in such a hurry is because of Rocket Ron. We’re going to take care of the problem that put him on the bottom.”

  As the calls from the admiral rang in Stevens’s head, the urgency to abandon the dock work was now apparent.

  “Jesus. Patch, listen, I … we’ll have you out of here in no time. Buttoned up and good as new. Better. We’ll be flooding the dock by Tuesday.”

  “Emmitt, I know I shouldn’t even have to say this, but I will anyway. This conversation never happened.”

  “Absolutely.” Stevens had already turned to get the yard forces mobilized.

  “And, Emmitt.” Stevens turned. “We flood the dock tomorrow at sundown. By Tuesday it may be too late.”

  “That’s impossible.”

  Pacino just stared.

  “Tomorrow. Right. comsublant says Tuesday, Pacino says Sunday. Fine, Patch, you got it.”

  Fifteen minutes later the shipyard workers appeared from nowhere, swarming over the vessel. Ten-story-tall cranes on wide rail tracks rolled up, their alert horns wailing in the dawn. The dock loudspeaker blared. Workers in the dock below shouted at each other. Pacino, satisfied, nodded and walked to the gangway.

  western mediterranean strait OF gibraltar USS phoenix The western basin of the Mediterranean narrowed to a corridor eighty miles wide and 200 miles long at the entrance to the strait at Gibraltar where southwestern Spain reached out but did not quite reach Tangier in Morocco. The basin looked like the head of a seahorse—at least, it did after one had stared at the chart long enough—the island of forming the horse’s eye, Gibraltar forming the point of its nose. The long-poi
nted snout, the narrow corridor, was filled with shipping, now mostly military cargo vessels transporting supplies to the Coalition Third Armed Force along the Atlas Mountain Front in northern Algeria. Lurking beneath the surface ten miles east of Gibraltar was the U.S. nuclear submarine Phoenix, waiting in search of the Destiny-class submarine. Farther to the east, two U.S. destroyers cruised the blue water, both streaming towed array sonar systems, both hearing nothing. Between the destroyers and the Phoenix four Orion P-3 patrol turboprops flew back and forth from Barcelona to Algiers, laying a barrier of passive listening sonar buoys, monitoring the buoys for manmade noise and doing low flyovers with the magnetic anomaly detectors energized, seeking the Destiny.

  Farther east, just west of the islands of Sardinia and Corsica, Viking S-3 carrier-based jets cruised the sea, dropping their own sonobuoys and. streaming their own MAD probes. So far all forces had come up with exactly nothing. It was as if the Destiny sub marine had dissolved in the saltwater after her attack on the Augusta.

  At her barrier search point. Phoenix was sailing slowly east at two knots, bare steerage way. The Flight I Los Angeles-class submarine was quite similar to Augusta, so much so that a civilian might wander the ship for hours without being able to tell the difference. But Phoenix, commissioned back in 1981, was thirteen years older than the Improved-Los Angeles-class submarine Augusta, and since she was from the original flight of SSNS in the 688 class, she had no vertical launching tubes up forward for the Javelin cruise missiles and her depth-control planes were mounted on the sail while Augusta’s had been installed for ward as bowplanes. With her older BQQ-5D sonar system and outdated CCS Mark II firecontrol system. Phoenix was practically in a different class than the Augusta with her BSY-1 coordinated combat system. In addition, Augusta had had advanced technology-quieting, making her noise signature a small fraction of Phoenix’s. But even though Phoenix was an old girl, she was still, in the hands of Kane’s crew, capable and formidable, as long as she would never be called on to fight an Improved-L.A.-class.