Phoenix Sub Zero

by Michael Dimercurio

  “Yeah.” Kane clicked his microphone. “Conn, Captain, lower the bigmouth and take us deep.”

  “Conn, aye,” rasped through the circuit. The deck plunged beneath them as the ship went down and accelerated to catch up with the Destiny.

  “Any chance an hour will make a difference. Senior?”

  “Who knows. Captain? We could try, but don’t count on anything.” “Dammit,” Kane said, already halfway to control.

  “Off’sa’deck, we got Target One back?”

  “Still looking, sir.”

  “Find him fast. I don’t need another Nagasaki surprise.”

  national security agency headquarters, fort meade, maryland building 427 secure communications center “We’re under three feet of snow already. General. How about you?”

  The secure-voice line took a second to process and unscramble the incoming signal so that Barczynski’s voice came over after a short

  delay. To Donchez the incessant pausing always felt like he was talking to someone angry who had to count to ten before speaking, and in this case it was appropriate. Barczynski was not pleased about the situation in the Labrador Sea.

  “I can’t even see as far as two feet of my back porch, but what I can see is drifting up to four feet. I barely made it home and I’m not going anywhere until this thing lifts. But, enough about the damn storm. What the hell’s going on with the Destiny and Sihoud? You’ve been promising me results for a week now.”

  Donchez had briefed Barczynski earlier about the first message from the Phoenix, the first good news since Seawolf had left the dry dock. This call was to update him on the second message and that Seawolf should be intercepting the Destiny within the next six hours. When Donchez finished, the general started an interrogation.

  “What chance does your Seawolf have against this Destiny?

  We know the UIF sub ran over two of your 688class boats. And didn’t they have the same weapons as Seawolf has now?”

  “You’re partly correct. General. I believe Seawolf will prevail. It’s invisible compared to a 688. And with the same weapons, the Phoenix was able to damage the Destiny badly enough that they could track it clear

  across an ocean without being detected, even though they themselves were badly hurt. The Mark 50 torpedo is a remarkable weapon.

  A salvo of three or four should put the Destiny on the bottom.”

  “Will Seawolf get there in time?”

  “Yes, sir.” He hoped.

  “What if by some circumstance that Scorpion missile gets launched? Can we shoot it down? Should we have some of Clough’s interceptors standing by?”

  “If the missile works as advertised, sir, it will have a radar-cloaking mechanism that will make it undetectable.

  It’s a stealth missile, it flies at 60,000 feet at Mach three.

  The only thing that could possibly give it away is the sonic boom, and coming in from Canada as it is, the terrain is unoccupied. We wouldn’t know until it crossed over populated areas that it was inbound, and even then it would be too late because it’s too hard to pinpoint. The only chance would be an interceptor that could shoot it down in the first six seconds of flight, while it’s on the solid rocket-fuel booster, and that’s only possible if you know exactly where the Destiny is. Only

  Seawolf or Phoenix knows that.”

  “That’s damned bad news, Dick. Why don’t your subs give us a clue where the Destiny is?”

  “They have orders to, General, but Phoenix can only talk on HF radio, which is frankly crappy—her normal comms were knocked out earlier—and Seawolf is probably still engaging.”

  “I hate to even think this, Dick, but do you think we ought to recommend city evacuations?”

  “No, General. You’d never get anyone out in time with this storm, and we’d kill a hell of a lot of folks from expo sure and panic. We can hope that the blizzard will make the bomb ineffective if it gets launched

  …”

  “Dick, make sure your guys get that sub. I’m not banking on any damn snowstorm. Stay on the line while I get President Dawson.”

  “Aye, aye, sir.”

  Donchez waited, knowing that either Pacino did his job or … He cut off the thought.

  USS seawolf Executive officer “Lube Oil” Vaughn stood inboard of the attack-center consoles, his headphones on, a clipboard with a sketchpad in his hands. He nodded at Pacino, announcing that battle stations were manned. The control room was shrouded in red light, its beam-to-beam width made crowded and small by the two dozen watchstanders, the plots manned, the attack-center-console seats filled, phone talkers dotting the room. The high whining sound of the console screens was augmented by the whispers of conversation, the three-word communications that made the battlestations crew a single organism, at one with the machinery of the ship. The ventilation ducts boomed through the space, their bass note creating the tense atmosphere of expectation of the unknown. The brass analog chronometer read 0402. “Target One bears 351, range 24,000 yards. Own-ship speed twenty knots pointing the contact at course north, depth 500 feet.” Vaughn leaned over the pos two console of the BSY-2.

  “Contact course approximate at 180, speed ten to twelve knots.” “Very well, XO,” Pacino said, taking it in while climbing the conn platform and putting on his headset. “XO, call up Hobart aft and tell him to load the slot buoy number one into the aft signal ejector. Weps, status of the tubes?”

  “Port bank tubes dryloaded with Mark 50s,” Scott Court reported from the far aft console, the weapons-control panel.

  “Spin up two, four, six, and eight, flood and open outer doors. Set

  submerged target presets, high-to-medium passive snake pattern.”

  “Aye, sir. Torpedo power coming on, one through four.” “Attention in the firecontrol team,” Pacino said to the room. The quiet conversations stopped. Those watchstanders who weren’t at visual displays turned to look at Pacino. “As soon as the torpedoes warm up we will be launching a horizontal salvo at Target One. We’ll reload immediately and fire off another salvo. We’ll continue until Target One is on the bottom or counterfires. In the event of a counterfire I will run but I’ll keep shooting. Carry on.”

  In the sonar room Jesse Holt frowned at the narrowband frequency buckets and keyed his mike. “Conn, sonar, new contact, partially masked by Target One, bears 354, range distant. Contact is a submerged warships, possible American 688 class.”

  Confusion clouded Jeff Joseph’s face as he acknowledged into his boom microphone, “Conn, aye.”

  “A 688 class at the same bearing as the Destiny,” Vaughn said in frustration. “The Phoenix, the ship who trailed the Destiny all the way here.” “We’re early,” Pacino said, angry at the interruption to the firing-routine. “Phoenix was supposed to be out of the area when we got here, but we’re an hour early.”

  Pacino looked at the navigation chart. The strait was a narrow corridor of seaway going north and south. At the south, Seawolfs position was marked as a black dot. Farther north, an orange mark denoted the Destiny, the target. Somewhere north of the Destiny, the Phoenix sailed, unaware that they were in the line of fire. If Pacino went ahead with the torpedo shot, he risked hitting the friendly, the Phoenix. If he waited, the Destiny might launch the adhesive plutonium bomb at D.C. He felt like a policeman ready to shoot at a bad guy, suddenly finding out the villain had a hostage.

  “We could hold our fire and wait for her to get out of the way.” “No,” Pacino said. “We’re going ahead with the attack. If Phoenix’s sonar is good enough to hear the Destiny, then it’ll be good enough to hear the incoming Mark 50 torpedoes.

  And when she realizes Mark 50s are coming in, she’ll get off the track or hover so the Doppler filter won’t see her.

  It’s worth the risk …”

  It sounded like a rationalization, and from the looks on the faces of Vaughn and Joseph, it must have sounded that way to them too.

  “Torpedoes in tubes two, four, six and eight are warm, self-checks complete,
all tubes flooded, two and four outer doors open.” Court spun

  his chair to look at Pacino. “We’re ready to fire. Captain.”

  Pacino, on the conn, felt the weight of command on his shoulders, a three-ton barbell. Here, in front of his crew, he was about to endanger—or worse—another U.S. submarine.

  But to fail to launch the torpedoes would allow the Destiny to launch its doomsday weapon. If he had told Donchez to order Phoenix out of the way an hour earlier … His face denying his feelings, Pacino ordered: “Tube two. shoot on generated bearing.” “Set.” Vaughn said.

  “Standby.” Court said, pulling the long firing trigger to the three o’clock position.

  “Shoot!” Pacino commanded.

  “Fire!” Court pulled the firing trigger to the fire position.

  A short hiss sounded before a violent boom roared through the ship. Pacino’s eardrums slammed from the pressure pulse as the firing ram one level below vented to the ship.

  The first torpedo had already left the tube, the submarine fading far behind as its engine started and the propulsor began spinning. Fifteen seconds later the second torpedo was fired from the ship, then a third

  and a fourth. All four weapons hurled through the near-freezing ocean northward toward the target, all in high-speed transit waiting for the signal from their internal computers to slow down and begin listening for the sound signature of the target.

  In the control room Pacino waited while the torpedo-room crew reloaded the tubes. It would take some five minutes before the hydraulic rams had positioned the last torpedo and the gyros were powered up. During the wait, he looked at the sonar waterfall-display monitor, watching the dim traces of the torpedoes as their bearings merged with the bearing to the target.

  And to the bearing of the Phoenix … CNFS hegira The headache was much worse. Commodore Sharefwas beginning to think it was psychosomatic, the result of his conflicting feelings about the missile-launch. Whatever the cause, he had never felt pain this severe, the sharp screaming behind his eyes enough to prevent concentration on anything but the pain. But he had to rise above it … Tawkidi lowered the periscope. “Open water overhead, Commodore. We’ll have a clean shot here if we hurry.”

  “Status of tube one?” he asked Tawkidi.

  “Flooded, bow cap open. Missile power is on and read back of target parameters and route milestones complete.

  The missile is ready for a programmed one-minute countdown but we need to slow down to bare steerage way.”

  “Ship control, dead slow ahead, four clicks.”

  “Four clicks, sir.”

  “General Sihoud, are you ready for us to begin the one-minute countdown?” “Start the countdown,” Sihoud said. “It is time for us to deliver our revenge.”

  Sharef tried not to make a face.

  “Commander, commence one-minute countdown,” Sharef ordered, feeling the onset of dizziness in addition to the headache.

  “Countdown commencing, sir, at launch minus sixty seconds, in automatic. Ship’s speed meets launching parameters.

  Now at launch minus fifty seconds and the missile is satisfactory.”

  Another minute, Sharef thought, and it was over … then withdraw to the north, take the ship under the permanent ice pack, sail up around the northern tip of Greenland and back to the North Atlantic to the Med. And

  from there, home.

  The traces forming on the sensor-control consoles heralded the incoming American torpedoes. The Second Captain system monitoring the sensor inputs began to understand the meaning of the sounds and became alarmed. The buzzing of the annunciator on the panel broke the silence in the room. Tawkidi saw the alarm first and turned to Sharef, who had joined him at the panel.

  “Incoming torpedoes, sir. At least four of them. We don’t see the launching platform—” “General Sihoud,” Sharef said urgently, “we must break off the countdown and evade—” “We, Commodore, we must complete the launch, then evade these weapons …”

  USS phoenix “Conn, sonar, we have reacquisition. Target one, bearing one seven four. Contact has slowed, his signature is much quieter now.”

  “Conn, aye,” Kane said, peering over the pos-one console.

  Kane glanced up at the chronometer. The digital numerals read out 0814 zulu time, which would be 0414 local time. In another half-hour Kane would clear datum to the north.

  Whoever Steinman and Donchez had sent would be coming from the south to attack the Destiny. It was just as well, he thought. His crew was bone

  tired—the ones still alive. The crew and ship were ready to go home. The boat would need about a year in the dry dock, maybe two if the shipyard moved up their next scheduled overhaul. Which meant that this would be his last trip with Phoenix. He had a year before being slated for relief, something that had seemed sufficiently distant that he had not given it much thought, but now it was becoming obvious that he was approaching one of the crossroads in his career. He had to decide what his future plans were. Should he remain in the Navy or leave for civilian life? With no more sea duty the equation came down to which desk job. He still felt he was too young to say goodbye to the sea, but—

  “Conn, sonar, multiple torpedoes in the water! Bearing south!”

  USS seawolf It seemed forever for the second batch of Mark 50s to warm up. If the ship had gone into combat without the Vortex tubes and had the old four Mark 50 tubes on the starboard side, the second volley of four torpedoes would have gone out immediately after the first. The ship could have a weapon out every forty-five seconds until all fifty were gone. Now there could be only twenty-four launched, in uneven batches of four at five-minute intervals. But he had cursed the Vortex system enough, Pacino thought.

  “Tubes two and four ready, sir.”

  “Firing-point procedures, tubes two and four,” Pacino commanded, listening to the sequence of reports as the battlestations team did their individual interlocking jobs.

  Within ten seconds the tube launched and the smash of high-pressure air clanged throughout the ship, and fifteen seconds after that tube four sent its torpedo out into the sea. Pacino’s ears rang as Court announced that tubes six and eight were ready.

  The launch litany was repeated for those two tubes, making eight torpedoes sent down the line to Target One.

  “Mr. Court, get the port bank reloaded ASAP. Sonar, captain, what’s the status of Target One?”

  “Impossible to say. Captain,” Holt’s voice said through the intercom circuit. “He’s completely masked by the Mark 50s. We have zero bearing separation. I’m calling loss of contact on Target One.”

  “Conn, aye. Watch for a counterfire.”

  Vaughn looked up at Pacino from the desk in front of the attack center.

  “I don’t know. Skipper. It’s not like this guy to take four torpedoes and not shoot back. Maybe we should clear datum on general principles.”

  “Hold on, XO. Phoenix launched a whole room against this guy. Granted only three fish locked on, but he still lived.

  I want to unload as many weapons his way as I can. Court, what’s the status?”

  “Still loading, sir.”

  Still, Pacino thought, Vaughn was right. And he hadn’t mentioned the fact that Pacino had put the ship in a launching position so that the torpedoes were transiting down the line of sight. If he’d planned it he would have driven off the track so that the bearing to the torpedoes in transit would be separated from the target bearing, allowing him to monitor both during the attack. But there had been no time for that. Still, it was a tactical failure. Pacino wondered if they’d even be able to hear a counterfired Nagasaki torpedo through the noise of their own Mark 50s. At this point, it came down to how good Petty Officer Holt’s ears were.

  CNFS hegira “The torpedoes could get here any moment. General. We must evade. And counterattack. Then we can shoot your Scorpion, there will be plenty of time …”

  Colonel Ahmed looked at General Sihoud, hopeful that he would finally

  put t
he insubordinate commodore in his place, but to his disappointment Sihoud nodded, finally realizing he had no choice if they were to launch the missile and survive.

  “Very well. Commodore. Evade the weapons and shoot back at the intruder. But be quick about it.”

  “Tawkidi, abort the launch, evade to the north and warm up the Nagasakis in tubes ten and twelve,” Sharef said, thankful for at least a brief reprieve.

  “Ship control,” Tawkidi ordered. “Emergency ahead, depth 400 meters, turn to course north. Sublieutenant al-Maari, power up the weapon in tubes ten and twelve. Sensor control, do we have a function report from the Second Captain on the SCM evasion sonar?”

  Sublieutenant Rouni, on the sensor console, flipped through several graphic screens on the Second Captain display.

  The longer he took, Sharef thought, the more certain it was that the SCM ventriloquist modules were down. Sharef might not even have thought to check, based on how heavily the aft damage had been from the initial American torpedo.

  The deck rolled from the maneuver, then inclined downward.

  Sharef found his dizziness returning, the tilting pitching deck starting his fall. He had toppled halfway to the deck before Tawkidi caught hold of him. Sharef thought himself fortunate to have the devotion of someone as dedicated and capable as Tawkidi, as well as Quzwini and the rest of the men. For an instant he wondered if he were becoming delirious, all of this gushing thought about his crew members. The aftereffects of his concussion? Great thing, to be in command of a submarine under attack by multiple torpedoes, with the commander getting a fuzzy mind. He hoped Tawkidi would watch and know the proper moment to take over if he had to. And that if he did, he would stand up to Sihoud. He could not do any more coaching now. Either his crew had the character and the training to fight their way out of this mess, or they died.

  “Negative function SCM, Commander. It’s dead. We’ll have to evade on speed alone.”

  “Commodore, we could insert a delouse and hope for the best, but I think I’m just going to run north. There’s plenty of navigational room, and all the weapons are coming in from one bearing, astern to the south. And there’s no need to engage the Second Captain in ship-control mode.”