Phoenix Sub Zero

by Michael Dimercurio

  had been left alone but the weapon loadout had been diminished from the previous fifty torpedoes to the present twenty-four, including the three loaded in the port bank tubes. It was a giant step backward.

  Pacino remembered his words to Donchez and again felt the older man’s disappointment at the failure of the Vortex weapons. In the shipyard’s haste the tubes and their launching systems remained functional and the weapons had been kept in the canned unreusable tubes in spite of Pacino’s insistence that the weapons be removed, the load of solid rocket fuel stored so close to the ship’s hull it made them vulnerable to a single torpedo hit. The detonation of the solid fuel would be even more violent than the warhead of a Nagasaki torpedo. Pacino shook his head as he moved” slowly forward to the end of the room, where the massive tubes met the hull steel.

  There at the forward bulkhead the tubes continued farther forward past the space where there had once been a water-round-torpedo tank, the newly formed void filled with the powerful hydraulic piping and controls needed to open the heavy muzzle doors of the tubes. A torpedoman with a headset had crawled down the accessway formed by interruptions of the piping to the hull, which had been stripped of its foam insulation so that the weld could be watched from the inside as the ship went deeper to test depth. Pacino got as close as he could without crawling down the accessway, shining a flashlight on the weld of the hull patch.

  “How’s it looking so far?”

  “No leakage yet, sir,” the torpedoman called.

  The torpedo chief, a young health nut named Riesen, stood with a headset at the forward local control panel. He looked aft at Pacino and called, “Going to 700 feet. Captain.”

  Pacino waved, the hull inclined, groaning and popping from the sea pressure. After reaching 700 feet the deck leveled while the weld was examined for leakage by the torpedomen.

  After holding for five minutes the ship went deep again to 800 feet, then to 900, until after forty minutes ship’s depth was 1,500 feet. Pacino observed the crewmen in the space, noticing their nerves showing, men tugging at collars that suddenly seemed too tight, faces turned upward as if trying to see the surface a quarter-mile overhead.

  “THE SHIP IS AT TEST DEPTH,” Vaughn’s Texas drawl rang out through the ship.

  There was a commotion from the hull patch. Pacino moved to see. Several small streams of water, probably pinhole leaks, were spitting water into the bulkhead of the local panel.

  “We’re getting some leakage here. Captain,” the torpedoman said. “Hard to tell exactly where but it’s definitely from the weld.”

  Pacino grabbed up a phone to control. “This is the Captain.

  Take her up to 400 feet.”

  The deck angled upward at a twenty-degree angle as Pacino climbed the stairs to the middle level and walked up the ramp of the passageway to control. Court was leveling off at 400 feet when Pacino made control.

  “Hull weld leaks,” Pacino said, anger at the shipyard rising in his gut.

  “You won’t be taking us back in,” Vaughn said. It was a statement, not a question.

  “No. We’re staying out. Mr. Court, no deeper than 600 feet unless I have the conn. Post it on the status board.”

  “Aye, sir.”

  “Goddamned Vortex tubes,” Vaughn said. “Piece of meat.” “You said it,” Pacino said. “Off’sa’deck, I’ll be in my stateroom. Proceed to point bravo.”

  In his stateroom Pacino splashed water on his face and changed into a black poopysuit with new dolphins and namepatch. He sank into the deep-cushioned high-back chair at the head of his conference table and shut his eyes for a moment. He took out a journal book entitled Captain’s Night Orders and scribbled a few paragraphs, stopping to buzz for coffee. The mess cook brought a steaming pot; Pacino dispatched him to take the night-order book to Court on the conn. He changed his mind about the coffee, climbed into his narrow bed and shut his eyes. He thought he should turn off the room lights but sleep sneaked up on him before he could get out of the bed to hit the light switch. It was a relief.

  Tuesday, 31 December eastern atlantic USS phoenix Houser had to shout over the roar of the emergency blow.

  “Secure the blow! All stop!”

  The rushing noise of the high-pressure air ceased as the chief of the watch pulled the blow levers back down. The engine order telegraph chimed as its needle rolled to the stop position, maneuvering’s answer needle rotating to stop in answer.

  “Mark your depth.”

  “One three five five,” the diving officer said, his voice neutral.

  “Captain, I say we rock her out with the screw, doing full ahead, then astern. The ballast tanks are full of air now. It’s got to be the suction from the mud that’s keeping us down.”

  Mcdonne frowned. “The emergency blow more than filled the tanks, it should have spilled a lot of high-pressure air out the vents and into the muck or sand. That should have done it.”

  “Might be a rock or obstruction forward,” Kane said.

  “Let’s try a backing bell first and give it a full minute before going forward.”

  “What speed?”

  “Back full.”

  “Aye, sir. Helm, all back full.”

  The engine order telegraph chimed again. The deck began a slight vibration, the tremble growing to a shaking force. To Kane it felt like an earthquake. The deck began to tilt into a port list, then inclined forward, the inclinometers showing the angle to be two degrees port, three degrees down, the slope of the deck sounding small but exaggerated

  greatly by human perception, the few degrees enough to roll pencils off tables and slide books to the deck. The second hand of an old-fashioned brass chronometer ticked slowly around the clockface as the shaking of the hull became more pronounced.

  Kane was about to order Houser to put on the full bell when the ship lurched.

  “Keep backing down.”

  The deck angled further downward, and with the ship bottomed out, that meant the stern was rising, the ballast tanks’ air pulling the stern up. The ship lurched again, this time violently, sending Kane into the number-two periscope, and the deck fell away beneath him to a large down angle. He glanced at the inclinometer, which shook its bubble at around thirty degrees.

  “Keep it up, Houser,” Kane ordered, a shot of adrenaline hitting his midsection, his heart beating hard. The deck angled further up until he could stand it no more. “Okay, cut it.”

  “Helm, all stop!”

  The ship’s speed indicator still showed zero but it didn’t work in the astern direction.

  “Bubble forward with the EMBT blow,” Kane said.

  Mcdonne glared at Kane, but Houser made the order.

  Once more the chief reached into the overhead and put the forward lever up to the blow position. The high-pressure air bottles blew into the forward ballast tanks.

  “High-pressure banks are coming down, sir,” the chief said.

  “Secure the blow,” Houser ordered, shrugging to Kane.

  “Houser, put on a one-third bell and get your planes to full rise.”

  “Aye, sir. Helm, all ahead one-third. Dive, full rise fairwater and sternplanes.”

  Kane and Houser hunched over the ship-control station watching the depth meter as the ship was ordered ahead.

  There was a good chance, Kane thought, that he was doing nothing except driving her back into the mud of the bottom, but with a down angle that steep he couldn’t keep driving her back. There was no control going backward, the water and screw forces on the stern planes, made them

  unreliable.

  The ship could go full vertical, spill all the air out of the ballast tanks and sink back to the bottom like an arrow stuck in mud, and the steam plant would shut down on them, the gravity-draining systems good only for forty-five-degree angles.

  They would be stuck forever on the bottom, forced into a sub-escape from test depth—a certain death. The deck trembled again, just slightly, the needle on the ship’s speed indicator climbing o
ff the zero peg up to one knot, then two.

  The fairwater plane angle indicator showed the control surfaces mounted on the sail were tilted to thirty-five degrees of rise, the stern plane meter showing forty degrees of rise. The down angle of the deck very suddenly leveled and tilted upward, the speed indicator needle picked up to four, then six, then ten knots. The deck continued into its up angle, past thirty degrees, up to forty.

  “Take control, Houser, and use ship’s speed to fight the buoyancy!”

  “Dive, bubble less than five degrees; helm, all ahead full, steady as she goes. Chief of the watch, vent all main-ballast tanks. Dive, bring her up to 500 feet.”

  Kane glanced at the analog depth indicator. It was unwinding rapidly, the deck’s up-angle still at nearly forty degrees, the air in the ballast tanks trying to rocket the ship upward in an uncontrolled emergency surface. The ballast-tank vents indicated open on the ballast panel, trying to let the seawater back in and the air out. The speed indicator climbed, fifteen knots, twenty, until the speed of the ship overcame the huge buoyancy forces, as if the submarine had changed from blimp floating upward to airplane, buoyancy no longer as important as the water force on the control surfaces.

  The deck angled back down to level, the shaking calming. The depth needle slowly climbed from 650 feet to 500, the speed needle stopping at twenty-five knots.

  “Bring her slow, officer of the deck. Ten knots, see if the ballast tanks still have air in them.”

  The ship slowed as Houser made the order, the depth steady. Kane brought speed down all the way to five knots, with no change in depth. The ballast tanks were again flooded.

  “Shut the vents.”

  “All vents shut, sir.”

  Kane looked at the panel. All seemed healthy enough to drive home. He felt his heart slowing back down to normal.

  “Very well,” Houser said. “Captain, ship’s course is two nine zero, depth 500. I recommend we come shallow and communicate.”

  As far as the surface commanders knew, Kane thought, they were dead, a debris field on the bottom. Houser was right. It was time to tell the world that Phoenix was back.

  “Houser, get the chief radioman in here. I want the gear checked before we go above the layer. We took a hell of a beating. And find Sanderson and tell him I want to know sonar’s status. And the firecontrol chief, Gessup, get him up here too. And Jensen, to see how the nav electronics are doing. Once we get the electronic systems functional we’ll come up and send the brass the word on us and the Destiny.”

  “Then what, sir?”

  “What’s Doc think about the injured? A week make a big difference?”

  “You’re not thinking about Norfolk, are you?” Houser asked. “I’ve been with Ives in the mess. Those guys need help fast. Your call, Cap’n, but if this bucket of bolts belonged to me I’d hightail it for someplace damned close.

  Scotland or Liverpool or Rota.”

  “It will depend on the electronics, Houser,” Kane said. “If the ship is healthy enough to make it transatlantic I’ll take the injured off with a chopper and drive the boat home—this girl’s going to need a dry dock after what she’s been through. A pier at Faslane does her no good. And we’re out of the fight anyway with no torpedoes. But if we have no sonar and no firecontrol, I won’t risk the trip.”

  Kane looked down at the dead computer screens of the attack centers, suddenly knowing that the vital but vulnerable electronics were probably total wrecks. It would seem a miracle that the reactor plant and steam plant were online, but three decades before, when Admiral Rickover himself designed most of the propulsion plant of the USS Nautilus, the propulsion systems had been absolutely bulletproof, forsaking the then electronic technology of vacuum tubes for magamps, giant iron cores being the state-of-the-art in the late 1930s. Since 1954, vacuum tubes had given way to transistors, then integrated circuits and finally microprocessors.

  Still, the nuclear plants had stuck with magamps, the speed controller on a motor-generator the size of a refrigerator even though the same controller would take up the space of a fingernail if done with a microprocessor. The nukes had kept the old-fashioned bulletproof

  systems, forsaking most microelectronics except the reactor’s safety systems—which had triple redundancy anyway—even though the designers were pressing hard to save every cubic foot of volume aboard. Those decisions now seemed rational, since after a five-g crash against the bottom, the reactor systems had been restarted without a flaw while the ship’s more modern computer systems forward might never function again.

  Sanderson arrived first, looking haggard. Senior Chief Radioman Binghamton limped in with a splint on his knee.

  Binghamton was a shaved-headed muscular Mr. Clean, missing only the earrings and the height, barely five-foot-four in shoes. He was a man of many styles, able to shift from humorous and encouraging coach to tough authoritarian. Not. one enlisted man or officer called him “Bingy” to his face, not since his first week onboard when several radiomen and one chief had found themselves slammed into bulkheads with Binghamton’s large face in theirs. He was fond of giving advice, especially to those who didn’t want it, like Mcdonne. But it was a given that every man aboard loved Binghamton, with the exception of Edwin Sanderson. Kane had made Binghamton chief of the boat, the ranking enlisted man, a move that Mcdonne pretended to disagree with since both men believed they were the experts at leading the crew.

  On this run Binghamton had been in an upbeat mood, the word coming down that he would soon make master chief or warrant officer. But now

  Binghamton’s face was full of anger.

  He kept his silence until Kane was ready. Electronics Mate First Class Edwards arrived, a worried look on his bearded face.

  “Where’s Gessup?” Kane asked, referring to the firecontrol chief, the man he wanted to tell him the status of the firecontrol system.

  “He was getting a cup of bug juice in the crew’s mess,” Edwards said, “when he just keeled over. Doc says he’s got a concussion but he looked like my daddy did when he had his stroke—”

  “Okay. Edwards, hang in there.” Kane looked at the assembled men. “The reactor is up and we’re on the way home, at least for now. I need to know if we can remain submerged and I want to send a message about the Destiny. Radio first. What’s the status, Senior?”

  “It’s hosed, Captain. Every cabinet. I’m cannibalizing components from every system trying to get one up. I think I can get one UHF transceiver going through the bigmouth antenna, but the crypto gear has shit the bed. Anything you say, you better count on the enemy hearing.”

  “What about a slot buoy?”

  “All broken to hell. Not one working, and they can’t be repaired—no

  spares.”

  “How long till you’ll be ready to send a message?”

  “Ten minutes, but that doesn’t mean the bigmouth will work. All I can do is wait till we’re ready to transmit.”

  “Okay, Senior. Get to it. I’ll write the message when you’ve got a functional system. Sanderson, what about sonar? The Destiny is still out there, and I’d just as soon not get ambushed by him again. And I don’t want to get rammed by some stupid supertanker when we go up above the layer.”

  “I need time, Captain. I’ve got some bad cards that need replacing, and I need to check every hydrophone—”

  Kane frowned, knowing Sanderson was a perfectionist, and that there was no time for perfection.

  “Screw that. Senior Chief. Change out the bad cards, skip the loop check and bring the system up. I don’t care if it’s reduced status or broadband-only. I want ears and I want them now.”

  “I’ll do what I can. Captain, but I can’t promise—”

  “Quit bitching and get it done, Sandy.” This was from Binghamton.

  Sanderson’s face turned red, but he stomped off to the for ward sonar equipment space.

  “Edwards, firecontrol?”

  “Bad disk drive, sir. We’re putting in the spare now and
it checked out okay. Already switched a dozen cards, doing another dozen now. When we’re done the computers will be damn near brand-new. Only thing stopping us is if the spares are bad. We have no more spares, though. If one of these circuit boards dies, that’s it. That puts us into an initialization in about an hour after we reload, a half-hour to reload the modules. That’s firecontrol up in normal mode in ninety minutes, but it ain’t any good without sonar.”

  “Get going. Nav?”

  Mike Jensen, the navigator, had come in when Edwards was talking. Jensen was one of the superstar mid-grade officers, a tall broad-shouldered and handsome black man who had graduated in the top five percent of his Academy class and had been a runner-up for Rhodes scholar before he did physics work at Stanford. His face was swollen and lumpy, making him look more like a boxer than an academic, his right arm in a sling with a splint formed by an inflated tube.

  He seemed to be struggling against his pain, one of his trademarks his refusal to take any medication or drugs, not even aspirin or coffee. He had probably turned down the prescription painkillers, Kane thought.

  “The GPS Navsat looks like it lived. Its self-check put out a few bugs that we’re looking at but it’s showing the same position it did just before we got hit. The ESGN inertial navigator is dead and gone for good. Wiped the ball. But as the quartermasters say, a pencil, a calculator and a compass can do about as good.”