Phoenix Sub Zero

by Michael Dimercurio

  Schramford was an older officer who, although he had his hands full with the chief engineer job, still stood watch at least four times a week and was one of the ship’s better tactical minds. He disappeared, presumably to check the chart and whisper on the phone to the captain. Sanderson put his headset back on and rotated the cursor ball set into the console panel to the direction of the noise, which was intermittent but getting stronger.

  He tried to block out the sound of the whining of the video screens and the roar of the air handlers, reduced now with the rig for ultraquiet. He projected his consciousness out into the sea, thinking of himself as being at one with the ocean, a thought that his buddies in the chief’s quarters—the goat locker—would ridicule as having come from California, but the thought still helped him detect the target, or whatever it was that was making the faint trace at 087, now 088. As Sanderson listened he heard a slight undulation in the sound, a flushing sound. He listened for a few more seconds, then opened his eyes, thinking he knew what he’d heard.

  He got up from his seat and scanned the six screens of the other consoles, seeing the picture develop on the sonar traces at each individual frequency. Smoot entered with Seaman Worster.

  “What’s up. Chief?”

  “Listen to this. Let’s see if you hear the same thing I did.”

  Smoot, a tall thin man in his thirties with black hair and a mustache and goatee, pulled on a headset and shut his eyes, weaving slightly on his feet from fading sleep. After a moment he opened his eyes wide and scanned the consoles, then met Sanderson’s eyes.

  “Pump jet propulsor.”

  Sanderson smiled, then looked up to see Schramford’s face.

  “Sir, we’ve got a submerged contact, bearing zero eight eight, distant, with a pump jet propulsor. You can maneuver back to the south and make sure you turn to the right. I don’t want to lose this guy in the baffles.”

  “You got it. Senior.”

  “Captain know yet?”

  “He will in ten seconds.”

  Lieutenant Commander Tom Schramford, U.S. Merchant Marine Academy Class of ‘84, now chief engineer of the USS Phoenix and this watch’s officer of the deck, barked the order to the helmsman to put on ten degrees right rudder and order up all ahead two thirds and steady on course south.

  Satisfied that the ship was turning, Schramford picked up a phone mounted on the overhead at the periscope platform and pressed a toggle switch. Fifteen feet forward, the buzzer rang next to Captain Kane’s rack.

  Kane’s eyes opened and he reached for the phone beside his rack, the buzzing noise from the conn halting as he answered.

  “Captain.”

  Tom Schramford’s voice seemed close in his ear; Kane could almost feel the engineer’s breath against the side of his head, whistling into his ear as the younger officer said the dozen words that pumped adrenaline into Kane’s system and catapulted him from the rack: “Sir, we’ve got a submerged contact bearing east. You’d better come to control.”

  “Man silent battle stations,” Kane said. “Spin up the idle Mark 50s.” He hung up on Schramford’s acknowledgement.

  He slid into his poopysuit in one smooth motion, slipping his feet into docksiders left at the foot of the rack, tightening his belt as he pulled a brush through his hair and splashed a handful of water on his face from the tiny basin under the mirror on the bulkhead, toweling off and tossing the towel into the sink before going through the door to control. He could feel the dozen pairs of eyes on him, the men in the section tracking team looking for decisions.

  He stepped up on the periscope platform, scanned the room for data, simultaneously listening to Schramford’s report.

  He took in the ship’s position in the channel, the bearing and bearing rate to the contact, the lack of a 154-hertz tonal—odd—and the faint broadband detect on a pump jet propulsor. After a moment, while the battle stations crew manned the attack-center consoles of the CCS Mark II firecontrol system and the manual plots, Kane stepped into the portal to sonar and looked in on Sanderson. The senior chief nodded at Kane and turned back to his console. Kane scanned the consoles, from Sanderson’s going forward, seeing for himself that no tonals were appearing in the frequency gates, just the intermittent broadband streak on the waterfall display from the array in the nose cone.

  Schramford tapped him on the shoulder. “Captain, battle stations are manned. We’ve been steady on course south for almost three minutes. The bearing rate is in, and the Mark II, Ekelund calculation and Hewlett-Packard all agree—range to the contact is 64,000 yards.”

  “What? That’s over thirty miles. That’s got to be a record for a submerged broadband detect with no tonals … Target course?”

  “Two seven zero. He’s driving due west for the strait.”

  “What’s the firecontrol speed?”

  “It’s out of line, sir. We must need another leg.”

  “Why?”

  “His speed is showing up as forty knots. Too high for the Destiny without him making a lot more noise and sending out a few tonals. We’re just getting a lousy speed solution with the data this intermittent and the contact that distant.” “Wait a minute,” Kane said, looking over the Pos Two operator of the Mark II console. The screen’s dots—FIDUS, fixed interval data units, sent over electronically from the BQQ-5 sonar—were lining up straight as a ruler. Kane reached out for the speed knob on the board beneath the screen and dialed in a more reasonable target

  speed, down to fifteen knots. The dot stack, the neat vertical line, skewed into a messy “>” sign, the bottom portion of the data representing the leg when the ship was on course north, the top portion after the maneuver, the data during the maneuver useless and out of alignment. The target motion analysis, the TMA, could have been done poorly but one maneuver had been north, the second south, with the target coming in from the east—supposedly yielding an ideal solution that should have been good enough to fire on and score an easy hit.

  Kane dialed the speed higher without looking at the target-speed readout. He turned the knob until the dot stack was back in line, going nearly vertical. The target speed readout Said 41.4 KNOTS.

  “That’s no submarine,” Kane said, bolting for the door to sonar.

  “What?” Schramford stared after him.

  Kane slid the curtain aside and looked into Senior Chief Sanderson’s eyes, ready to tell him the target was going too fast, too silently to be a submarine. Sanderson’s mouth was already open to speak. .”Cap’n, we’re doing TMA on a fucking torpedo!”

  Sunday, 29 December strait OF gibraltar Kane turned and shouted to the helmsman.

  “Right full rudder, all ahead flank, steady course west!”

  He made the periscope stand in three big steps, grabbed the microphone and tried to keep his voice level. “Maneuvering, Conn, cavitate.”

  “CAVITATE, CONN, MANEUVERING, AYE,” the overhead speaker replied.

  The deck trembled and heeled over to a fifteen-degree angle with the vortex from the turn, the ship sliding into a violent snap roll, ship control becoming difficult as the angle increased and the rudder began acting like a diving plane.

  “Helm, ease your rudder to right five degrees.” The ship still shuddered through the turn, a small sonar display above the helmsman lighting up as the screw cavitated, boiling off sheets of steam as the men in maneuvering opened the throttle wide to one hundred percent reactor power.

  “Right five degrees, helm aye, maneuvering answers ahead flank, passing course two six zero, ten degrees from ordered course.” The helmsman then reversed the rudder, fighting the gyrocompass, the deck angling crazily to the other side, then leveling off. “Steady two seven zero, sir.”

  “Chief of the watch, call on the phone circuits, torpedo in the water.’ “Aye, sir.”

  Kane fought his way through the battle stations bodies to the navigation plot. Schramford had the last range on the torpedo plotted as well as their position. The blue dot denoting the torpedo seemed perilously clo
se in scale to the mouth of the channel.

  Kane felt the deck vibrating beneath his feet, the twin main engines putting out maximum speed. The Phoenix had been in a drydock overhaul two years before for a nuclear refueling. The core had been removed through a gaping hull cut and replaced with the General Electric S6G-Core-3. The new core had a thermal output almost twice the power of the Core-2 that had previously powered the ship, the doubling of thermal power seen at the shaft as an increase from 35,000 to 47,400 horsepower. After all that, the additional power was good for only an additional five knots on account of parasitic drag—even if screw power had doubled, the counterforce from skin friction would have quadrupled. But an extra five knots were worth the $10 million investment, Kane thought, when a Nagasaki torpedo—manufactured at Toshiba with the highest quality—was running up your ass.

  The speed indicator read out thirty-nine knots. Kane measured on the chart, looked up at Mcdonne, who was rubbing red eyes while strapping on his headset.

  “This fish can go seventy knots. Why was it only doing forty?”

  “Trying to sneak up on us, or still on its run to enable. Or maybe it hasn’t detected us yet.”

  “That’d be a trick, with us flanking it through a snap roll.

  If it can’t hear us by now it wouldn’t hear a train wreck.”

  Kane pulled on his boom microphone and single earphone and spoke into it. “Sonar, Captain, any changes in the torpedo sound signature?”

  “Captain, he’s in the baffles and we’ve lost broadband,” Sanderson’s voice announced, his annoyance clear through the circuitry. “I’m trying to get a look at the end beam of the towed array now and we’ve been listening hard to the caboose unit.”

  “Captain, aye.” To Mcdonne: “If he goes forty or forty-one or forty-two knots to our thirty-nine, with his range at thirty miles, he may run out of fuel before he catches us. He could keep this tail chase going for days if he had the fuel.”

  “Sonar, Conn,” Kane said to his mike, “any detection of the torpedo?”

  “Conn, Sonar, wait.”

  In the sonar display room Sanderson put his face in each console screen, keeping his eyes on it for less than a second, then moving on to the next. “Captain, we tentatively hold the torpedo on the caboose unit broadband.” The tail end of the TB-23 towed array had been modified to hold a neutrally buoyant teardrop-shaped broadband hydrophone array added for situations like this when the sonar crew would need to track something in the astern baffles, but the unit was small, its output difficult to interpret, its reliability suspect. “We don’t have anything on the towed array end-beam. There are no detectable tonals. And we can’t give it a turn-count with the pump jet propulsion. Until the weapon goes active it’s impossible to see if it’s closing, unless you want to wiggle the array, and I don’t recommend doing TMA on the torpedo.”

  Kane was thinking he’d just heard the longest speech the ordinarily taciturn senior chief had ever given. He checked the chronometer bolted above the attack center, the red numbers reading 2039, almost 9:00 p.m. zulu time. The torpedo had been first detected just twelve minutes before. Kane turned to Mcdonne, who stood between the attack-center consoles and the conn’s elevated periscope platform.

  “XO, if that weapon sped up to seventy knots when we went to flank, how long to intercept?” Kane waited. The question translated to: If that torpedo knows we’re here, how long do we have to live?

  Mcdonne looked over the H-P computer and down at his own distance-time slide rule.

  “Sir, fifty-eight minutes to intercept from detection point.

  That’s fifty minutes from now.”

  Schramford looked up from the aft sector of the conn, where he’d been peering over the tactical plot. “Captain, I think I can give you an extra six minutes. That would be an other four miles down the line, maybe enough to make this torpedo run on fumes.”

  “Another six minutes, Eng? What’re you talking about?”

  “We’ll take the core to the design limit, maybe further. I might get another couple thousand horsepower at the screw.

  We’ll overpower the core, take average temperature to 530 or 540, pick up the grid on the battery—”

  “Don’t waste time telling me, for God’s sake,” Kane said.

  He’d skipped the engineer tour, serving as a weapons officer and navigator, thinking of himself as more a tactician and a leader and a seaman than a technocrat, privately referring to all things related to

  the mysterious reactor plant as “neutron shit.”

  “You’re the engineer, get back there. I relieve you of the deck. Get Houser up here to replace you.”

  Schramford was gone, announcing that the captain had the deck and the conn. Kane now thought about Daminski’s last message. The fleet commander would need to know that the enemy might be trying to break out into the Atlantic, and if the worst happened—the admiral would need to know.

  “Get a slot buoy ready, XO. Copy this for coding into the buoy.”

  Mcdonne spoke on his mike to radio, then looked up at Kane. “Addressee, cdmcnavforcemed. Priority, flash. Subject, contact report.” Mcdonne’s pen flashed over his clipboard.

  “Message:”One, position approximate at—’ “

  Mike Jensen, the navigator, spoke up from the port plotting table: “Two miles east of the narrows at Gibraltar.”

  “Copy that, XO?”Two, USS Phoenix detected single incoming Nagasaki torpedo from the east at long range on faint broadband, no tonals. Estimated time of torpedo intercepting Phoenix, 2130 zulu. Am now

  attempting to outrun UIF weapon. Three, request ASW aircraft vectored to this position to ensure Destiny does not break out of Med enroute Atlantic. Four, due to suspicion that Destiny unit is westbound, intend to mine exit of Gibraltar with salvo of Mark 50 torpedoes in circular passive patterns, ceiling settings set to avoid damage to surface shipping. Five, Phoenix reports negative, repeat negative acoustic advantage against Destiny class. If we survive Nagasaki and if passive circle Mark 50s fail to hit Destiny, intend to clear datum for Faslane, Scotland and reload. Six, Commander D. Kane sends.’ Got it? Code it in, flood and launch.

  “Weapons officer, status of the Mark 50s in one and two?”

  “Ready in all respects, sir,” Lieutenant Commander Chris Follicus intoned from the weapons-control panel at the end of the line of fire control consoles. Follicus, a chunky man with thick eyeglass lenses that made his eyes appear large and liquid, was sharp and quick, some would say glib. Kane had started to think of the weapons officer as something of a bullshit artist.

  “Set both for medium-speed run to enable, passive low-speed circular search patterns, ceiling one five zero feet, search depth 400 feet, active homing on acquisition. Tube one unit will orbit 5,000 yards from launch at bearing zero eight five, tube two 10,500. And make tubes three and four ready in all respects.”

  Kane waited for Follicus to make the presets, then climbed the steps to the conn platform.

  “Attention in the firecontrol team,” Kane announced, two dozen pairs of eyes locking onto him. “We’re sprinting away from a torpedo launched by the Destiny submarine, but confidence is high that we can outrun this thing.” Right, he thought. Until it speeds up to seventy knots and cuts us to pieces. “While we’re running I intend to put out some weapons of our own. We don’t know where the Destiny is, except that it’s east of us in the Med’s western basin. I believe this torpedo shot is an attempt to get by us and break out into the Atlantic.” God knows why, he thought, and how would he prove it if asked by the admiral? He had no answer. “So to counter the Destiny’s outchop we’re going to fill the gap at Gibraltar with Mark 50 torpedoes set for circular searches. If he comes out while the Mark 50s are still alive he’ll get hurt bad. On the plots, I want the orbit points and shutdown times of these weapons plotted and kept up to date so we can plan the weapon deployment. That’s all, carry on.”

  There was a brief lull in the action while Kane waited for Follicus to run th
e weapons’ confirmation of the presets. It was only a matter of seconds but seemed an hour. The stark reality of it was only now reaching Kane that inside an hour he might be dead on the bottom of the Strait of Gibraltar. If he could act he could almost forget that, but

  waiting was hell. During that wait the thought intruded that he should live as if today were the last day of his life, a notion he had always sarcastically met with the comment If today’s my last day on earth I’m buying a Porsche Turbo on credit and driving it to Atlantic City. On the business end of a Nagasaki torpedo, the remark no longer seemed so witty.

  Kane’s contact message was relayed at highest priority through the eastern Atlantic communications satellite to cincnavforcemed’s headquarters at the old Sixth Fleet compound in Naples, Italy. The navforcemed watch officer, a mustang lieutenant, held a secure phone to his ear, and while waiting for Admiral Traeps scratched a tactical message to the airborne antisubmarine forces in the western basin directing them to Gibraltar.

  Four P-3 Orion ASW patrol turboprops received the navforcemed flash transmission. One ignored the order, already departing station, low on fuel and empty of sonobuoys, its replacement enroute from Sigonella. The remaining three throttled up, climbed and headed west, reaching their destinations and cruising back toward the dark water of the strait. The moon had been full but had vanished behind dull unremarkable clouds that seemed to boil up from nowhere and everywhere. The first four-engined plane shut down the two inboard turbines and feathered the props, swooping low over the water sixty nautical miles east of the narrowest point of the strait, turning slowly as it steadied on a southern course,

  leveling its wings and slowing further until it almost seemed suspended over the water. Silently, at five-second intervals, the cylindrical sonobuoys fell out of the underside of the fuselage, plunking into the water in a neat row, the splashes lost in the powerful thrumming of the props.

  A few moments later, twenty miles west of the first plane, the second P-3 arrived on station, dropped a load of sonobuoys and circled back around. The third took station off Tangier at the opening of the mouth of Gibraltar, laying its sonobuoy field just as the USS Phoenix passed under it. The buoys laid, the P-3s orbited the drop points at sufficient distance that the buoys’ sonars would not be impaired by the noise of the planes’ engines but not so far that radio reception would be impacted. They settled into north-south elongated orbits parallel to the sonobuoy fields, cruising close enough to the surface so that their MAD probes could reach down into the sea in search of anomalies in the earth’s magnetic field, the iron hull of a submerged submarine able to focus magnetic lines of force just as a lens bends light waves. The MAD probes detected nothing, but that wasn’t unusual since the probes were useful only at extremely short range.