Phoenix Sub Zero

by Michael Dimercurio

  “Commodore, to save time and accomplish the mission,” Sihoud said, standing, “Colonel Ahmed requests permission to load the warheads.”

  “Permission granted, Ahmed. Please go blow your head off.”

  Tawkidi helped him back to his stateroom, where he collapsed into his bed, his face gray with pain and fatigue.

  “Commander, bring in the doctor and ask him to bring his damn drugs.”

  “Yes, sir. Try to rest.”

  The injection took him away from the hard surface of pain and delivered him to sleep, but not before he imagined a hundred thousand faces of innocent children imploring him not to launch the missiles.

  western atlantic point bravo hold position, 500 nautical miles east of long island USS seawolf Pacino didn’t know which would be worse … have the technician wire in the new circuit and the whole crew would know what his idea was, or wire it in himself and have the crew wonder why the ship’s captain would be wiring up his own work. Either way it would seem unusual, unprecedented.

  Captains didn’t usually get their hands dirty, nor did they even authorize the kind of changes Pacino wanted much less think of those changes themselves. But this was not something he wanted shared with the crew. It would be a disservice to them for him to wear his doubts and fears on his face … a crew stood on the foundation of their captain’s confidence. And anyone who knew about this circuit, Vaughn on down, would see that his confidence had come close to running out … No, that wasn’t really true. The circuit was a contingency.

  Just in case. His Seawolf would take the Destiny because it was quieter, faster, and more capable than the 688s that had been put on the bottom. He was trying to reassure himself, but a voice said your weapons are the

  same as the 688’s.

  Tired of his own internal debates, Pacino assembled the rotary switch to the front of a metal box, checking the installation from the front. He terminated the wires to the switch and ran the cable through a hole in the top of the box, the cable shield fitting through a coupling that screwed into the hole. He coiled the cable and tie-wrapped it together so he could carry it, putting it in the canvas tool bag with the cordless drill, the tie wraps, the wire-pulling rope, the screw driver and the wire-insulation remover. He looked over the wiring diagram one last time, realizing that he had memorized the page where he had decided to tie into the hardwired actuation circuitry.

  He packed the materials into a storage cabinet. Its installation would have to wait until the midwatch, when the crew’s mess would be empty. He set his alarm for 0300, turned off the overheads and climbed into his rack, the file open on his stomach. It was a file marked sci top secret— early retirement, given to him by Admiral Donchez, the neatly typed pages bound in a paperback binding. Pacino began reading the thick report, starting at the beginning with all known information about the Destiny-class submarine. A hundred pages later Pacino began to wonder if Seawolf really had any kind of chance against the new machine. An other hundred pages completed the Destiny information, the long section on the computer system both enlightening and confusing.

  At 0100 the O.O.D called and asked permission to take the ship to periscope depth to get their radio traffic from the satellite. Pacino gave him permission, feeling the deck angle upward, the level-off, then the gentle rocking of the deck in the waves from the surface. After a few minutes, the ship went deep again, the hull groaning as it took on the load of the seawater pressure, leveling off at 550 feet, the deck once again steady. Ten minutes later a rap came at the door as the radioman brought the message board. Pacino scanned it— nothing from Steinman or Donchez. Hurry up and wait, he thought. He signed the routine messages, sent the board out with the radioman and returned to his report.

  The next section was a collection of profiles of the crew members. The section on Commodore Abbas Alai Sharef was full of interesting details, the most ominous the sinking of the Sahand in 1988. Pacino didn’t even remember that operation—he’d been at sea on his XO tour at the time, under the polar icecap trailing a Soviet Akula-class submarine that had just sailed out of Severodvinsk shipyard on its Arctic Ocean sea trials. That mission had gotten hairy enough that a three-sentence report on the radio message board about the U.S. Navy attack on the Iranian fleet had seemed insignificant. But the attack, conducted in reprisal for Iranian boarding and strafing of merchant ships in the Persian Gulf, did in retrospect seem an overreaction. The file included a Time magazine report as well as the article from the New York Times. Not very much detail in the open media, but a paragraph from a Naval Intelligence

  target evaluation estimate revealed that the Sahand had taken the hit hard with only a handful of survivors. Sharef had been one of them, which was bound to make him a fighter with a particular hatred where the U.S. Navy was concerned. Pacino found another fact even more disturbing, that Sharef had no family, no wife, no children. Nothing that would whisper in his ear to survive to fight another day. The sort of man who would fight to the death. But then, many of the Islamic fighters were like that, believing death in battle to be a firstclass ticket to heaven. Pacino finished the section on Sharef and continued through the gossip sheet with the first officer, Captain al-Kunis, all the way to the file on the known junior officers—necessary since any one of the officers might assume command if Sharef died.

  By the time Pacino finished the report it was 0230. He decided to start his wiring modification early, rolling out of bed and slipping into his shoes. He took the canvas bag from the locker and left through his stateroom’s door to the middle level’s central passageway. A long walk to the aft bulkhead, where it doglegged to starboard at the hatchway to the reactor compartment’s shielded tunnel. Pacino stopped there, considering the hatch to the nuclear spaces, the bulkhead and heavy hatch good for the full pressure of the outer hull; just in case the forward part of the ship flooded and took the ship down, the aft compartments could still survive until the main hull steel failed and crushed. Pacino moved into the hatch, reaching out his hand with eyes shut to a point on the bulkhead of the forward compartment, then keeping

  his hand there while he climbed back into the forward compartment passageway. The spot on the bulkhead was immediately next to the hatch at chest level. It was a bad location, too easily noticeable by the traffic going into the aft compartments, but it would have to do.

  Pacino pulled out the drill and made two small holes in a bracket bolted into the bulkhead, then mounted two new brackets to the heavier steel bracket and bolted the new switch box to the bracket, the box now secured to the bulk head, where Pacino had reached for it from the other side of the hatch. It felt secure. The cable run came next as Pacino pulled the wiring up from the box into a cable run going up ward and into the overhead with a couple hundred other cables. The cable run would not be a problem. He ran the cable into the overhead and turned it forward toward the bulkhead to the ESM room, the electronics-filled room used for interception of radio and radar signals on the surface.

  The space would be abandoned during the submerged run.

  Pacino drilled a hole in the bulkhead where it met the over head and threaded the cable through it, a long job since there was a hundred feet of the cable. A few tie wraps to keep the cable in place with the other cables, and this part of the installation was done.

  Pacino turned to examine his work. It looked professional but too new. He hadn’t thought about that. He reached up into the overhead and found

  several hard-to-reach places that hadn’t been well-cleaned by the crew after the dust and mess of the shipyard, and brought out a handful of grease and dust and dirt. He smeared it lightly on the cables, taking away their new shiny look, and put some on the sides of the switch box. Then some on the front, which he promptly wiped off with a cloth. The switch and box now looked like they’d been with the ship since the shipyard period. Pacino took a small yellow tag from the box and scribbled on it, then attached the tag to the switch. The tag said ooc, out of commission, the tag alerting the crew that the gear
didn’t work so not to bother operating the switches. He stepped back and looked at it, dissatisfied. The yellow tag drew attention to the switch—better to leave it untagged. He re moved the tag and walked forward along the passageway to the door to ESM.

  He listened at the door for a few moments, then entered the combination to the door lock and went in, the bag left in the passageway in case one of the electronics techs were there, but the room was deserted. Pacino pulled in the tool bag and shut the self-locking door behind him. The room was little more than a cubbyhole with two padded control seats and walls stacked with electronic equipment racks.

  Pacino found the cable he’d fed in from the outside and pulled the cable across the room to the forward bulkhead, cut a hole in that wall and tie-wrapped the cable into the already cable-crowded overhead, then rubbed it with dirt as before. He decided to check the radio room before

  he fed the cable through; it was deserted as well. He fed in the cable, then looked around ESM for telltale signs of his trip.

  Radio was a bigger version of ESM, not a space designed to look pretty or offer comfort. He duplicated his actions from ESM, but instead of running the cable forward, took the cable down to the deck at the forward outboard bulkhead, then drilled a hole in the deck. He fed the cable through the deck to the level below, checked his work again, then left and went to the lower level torpedo room, usually a room booming with activity but now silent since it was doubling as a bunking space. The lights were switched to red to dim the space’s usual glare, and the room resonated with snoring. No one was awake to confront him. He climbed onto the top of the outboard Vortex tube, the metal cold and hard, the space minimal between tube and overhead, and found the cable let down from the deck of the radio room. Slowly he fed the cable forward in the overhead, his back aching as he tied the cable up into the overhead with a thousand other cables, finally climbing back down onto the narrow deckplates at the forward part of the room, turning the cable toward the centerline until he had fed it above a long panel that ran athwartships. He opened the panel cover, reached up into the overhead and pulled the wire down into the interior of the panel. From the outside of the panel, no one could tell he had made this unauthorized alteration. Back inside the panel he found the circuit board he’d been looking for, traced the wiring to a relay panel and hoped the wiring was in accord with the technical manual. He grabbed the

  wire insulation remover and clipped a power wire going to relay R141 set into the aft wall of the panel, then tested the wire for voltage—it was dead. Pacino stripped the insulation off, crimped on terminals at either end and terminated each end on the screws of a small termination block he pulled out of the tool kit. He pulled the cable he’d wired in, screwing its terminations onto the new terminal block. The work was finished but for tie-wrapping the new cable so it was out of the way. He checked the wiring one last time, satisfied that it looked like it would work.

  He wished he could test it, but he’d need another body to hit the switch while he watched the R 141 relay, and the relay output would have to be jumped so it wouldn’t feed the circuit further downstream. Testing the circuit would be more risky than its installation. It would have to do as it was. Pacino hoped no one would be going into the panel. He screwed the panel closure devices shut, tucked the bag into his grease-covered poopysuit and hurried back to his stateroom.

  Remarkably, no one had seen him.

  Now all he could hope for was that he’d never need to use the switch, but that if he did, it would work.

  Thursday, 2 January north atlantic CNFS //ŁG//?A Sharef needed Tawkidi’s help getting from bed to his conference table.

  “I seem to be getting weaker,” Sharef said.

  “The doctor said the broken rib was infected and so was your eye. Hasn’t the medicine been working?”

  Sharef didn’t want to answer the question. He felt like his body wanted to shut down and die. Awkward timing.

  Rakish Ahmed and General Sihoud entered without knocking.

  “Knock before you come into the captain’s stateroom,” Tawkidi snapped at Ahmed, and by implication at Sihoud.

  “We’ve come to brief the commodore on the ballast-tank work,” Ahmed said. “We can skip that if you have trouble with our protocol.” “Continue, Colonel,” Sharef said, wanting to get the briefing over with.

  “What we estimated to be a ten-hour job in the tanks is becoming more a sixty-hour job. With rest periods and time for the body to recover from the pressurization we would need six days.”

  “We don’t have six—”

  “I know. Commodore. That is why I have cut the missile work down to

  installation of only one Scorpion warhead into tube number one.”

  “That leaves only one missile,” Tawkidi pointed out. “Is there enough radiation from a single missile?”

  “More than enough,” Ahmed said.

  “But there will be no redundancy. If something goes wrong with missile number one there is no backup.”

  Ahmed looked at him. “Nothing will go wrong.”

  “Where are you now. Colonel?” Sharef said.

  “The Scorpion warhead has been rigged into the forward head on the middle level, just outside the door to the ballast tank. The door is cut open but for now is sealed with putty.

  We entered the tank and drilled into tube one. The high explosive is removed. We are ready to cut the section of tube in the next ballast-tank entry. The cut-out should take the entire ten hours. The third entry will be devoted to insertion of the Scorpion warhead and rewelding on the patch. The missile will be fully tested with the warhead in place, including electronic readbacks from the missile to the weapon-control processor and back.”

  Sharef nodded. “Yes, I can see you’ve got a good idea how to finish. But finishing is three-quarters of the work, Colonel. Meanwhile the ship has to proceed at sixty-five clicks to maintain depth control because of the ballast tank.

  Let me show you what that rate of speed has done for us.”

  Tawkidi, on cue, rolled out a polar projection chart showing their great circle route, originally taking them into the North Atlantic. Their position was marked with a heavy dot.

  A range circle was drawn around Washington, D.C. The dot looked very close to the range radius.

  “As you can see, we are only 200 kilometers from the range circle around Washington, D.C. If we continue at this speed for the thirty hours you’ve said it will take to do your work, that is almost another 2,000 kilometers, putting us into the middle of the Labrador Sea. We will be unable to continue, we will run out of ocean. I have planned this track to keep this mission stealthy, so do not suggest turning south along the U.S. east coast. Such a track would take us into heavy shipping lanes and highly patrolled operational areas, and the range of the Hiroshima missile does not need us to get closer. In addition, Colonel, mission success is based on the Hiroshima coming out of the arctic north, from a

  bearing the Americans would not suspect as being a threat axis. It will look like a Concorde or supersonic private jet coming over the pole from Europe, if it shows up on radar at all, and we have to assume that the radar cloaking may not be perfect.”

  “Commodore, I agree. Do not turn south. You cannot slow down until we can reflood the ballast tank. Turn to the north as you have always intended and proceed up the Davis Strait between Greenland and Canada’s Baffin Island.”

  “We will be out of range 1,200 kilometers after the turn to the north. Moreover, the marginal ice zone begins here, north of the Greenland tip. The permanent ice pack is here, well before the range mark. I would say we have a thousand kilometers from the base of the Davis Strait before we run out of open water.”

  “We will not need the additional time at speed. Commo dore. Thirty hours, 2,000 kilometers, with 1,000 more to use if we need it going north. If we get to the permanent ice pack line at—where is that?—the Baffin Bay, we’ll reverse course and turn back to the south.”

  Ahmed had come up with the ans
wer Sharef had wanted to tell him in the beginning, but he had the impression that if he had proposed it Ahmed would have argued to turn south. Patrolling in the Baffin Bay’s marginal ice zone, for weeks if they needed to, was safe. Secluded and safe. The

  Americans and Canadians would not find him there, he believed.

  “That brings up my second concern. Colonel. The matter of our speed. Not only does it consume distance quickly, it risks our detection. The faster we go, the louder we are, the more likely we are to be detected. The monitors of my Second Captain system show a rupture of the outer hull in the aft ballast tank. That creates a flow-induced resonance—the hole whistles in the water flow.”

  “So?”

  “So we could be tracked. I am not just concerned with the distance we cover, and I have not been overly worried about the increased noise levels in mid-Atlantic, but as we get closer to the continent of North America I would very much like to reduce speed.”

  “We are on a rest period now. We will not go back into the ballast tank for another seven hours. If we hurry that up it will be hazardous for your officers helping me in the tank.

  And we can’t flood the tank because we would have to seal the hatch by welding it shut, and welding it would take hours, and cutting it open again would take more hours. We would waste time.”

  “The hatch is sealed now with the plastic sealant? We could partially

  flood the tank up to the base of the hatch.

  With the tank half full I should be able to take some of the speed off.”

  “I have no objection.”

  “Commander Tawkidi, do you think you will be able to vent the tank to raise the level up to the hatch and allow us to slow?”