Phoenix Sub Zero mp-3

by Michael Dimercurio

  “You never told me what the big rush was about. Another phone call from your Uncle Dick?”

  “Did you see the news about the Augusta?”

  She sighed. He noticed the crinkle at the bridge of her nose that only came when she was disgusted or angry or confused … or deeply frightened.

  “I saw it. It was awful. All those men drowned. All because of a shipyard mistake. And now you’re rushing the yard to finish up, and the same thing could happen to you. Why are you in such a hurry?”

  “I can’t believe Rocket Ron is dead,” he said, ignoring the question. “God, I’ll miss him.”

  “Rocket Ron? You didn’t even like him! I lived through a year of pure hell when you were his engineer. You were ready to drain his brake fluid one day, remember, you came home at noon in the middle of the week, swearing at the Rocket—”

  Pacino smiled at the memory.

  “Yeah. I knocked back half a fifth that day.”

  “I had to put you to bed. What was it he said that set you off?”

  Pacino was no longer in the room but back in his state room on the Atlanta, the ship he had been assigned to seven years before as engineer. The captain had been Rocket Ron.

  A surprise reactor-board inspection team had come aboard, worked the ship over for two grueling days, then left giving the ship an “Above Average” rating, the highest mark they ever gave, a cause for a major celebration. Rocket had opened the stateroom door holding the board’s report.

  Pacino had smiled in anticipation of Rocket’s congratulations.

  “The board said the radioactive spill-drill team didn’t decontaminate the man in the tunnel,” Daminski said.

  “He frisked out clean— ― the drill monitor screwed up—”

  “I don’t want to hear your excuses, Pacino.” Daminski pointed his finger in Pacino’s face, an eighth of an inch from Pacino’s nose. “Your god damned team fucked up and it’s because you failed to train them. If I can’t count on you to do that what the hell can I count on you for?”

  Daminski went off then, slamming the door behind him.

  Pacino stared after him, astonishment giving way to fury. He found his car keys and left the ship. He sped home, went into the house and was blind drunk by the time Janice arrived home. After that he remembered nothing until the next morning, when he felt like a pile-driver hammer was smashing into his head at each heartbeat.

  On the boat that morning he found Daminski in the control room talking to a chief. When he finished, Pacino started in, knowing he was taking his career into his hands.

  “Captain, you were out of line yesterday. That spill team—―”

  Daminski interrupted, his voice quiet. “I know. Patch. And I’m sorry I hollered at you. You did an excellent job and you should be proud of yourself.”

  Daminski turned, his shoulders stooped, and walked into his stateroom.

  Pacino didn’t know which bothered him more, the chewing out or the aftermath of contrition. Not that it mattered now, he thought, looking at his wife’s eyes. She still waited for an answer.

  “I don’t remember,” he said.

  “But I still want to understand,” she continued. “You never liked him and now you’re full of grief. What do you know that I don’t know?”

  “We all spent that whole tour on the Atlanta hating Daminski and bitching every second about what a hardass he was and how miserable he made our lives. But when he left it was all the crew could do to keep their eyes dry. At that change of command there was a real sense of loss. See, Daminski, somehow, made us bigger than we were. He challenged the man in every sailor and officer aboard. The best was never good enough for him. We used to say that heaven would regret the day he died, because he’d chew Saint Peter’s butt for the gates of heaven showing dust and improper maintenance. And now that he’s gone I look back and I see that he was a sort of second father to every man he ever commanded. A stern sonofabitch of a father, but underneath, he really cared.”

  “Great,” she said. “So what’s the big rush for you?”

  He was about to tell her when it suddenly seemed a bad idea. He shouldn’t have told Emmitt Stevens, except that Emmitt needed some real motivation. Janice had nothing she could do with the truth except worry.

  “It’s nothing, Jan. Just more Navy bullshit. You were right the first time, a call from Uncle Dick. He can’t stand to see the Seawolf in the dock. And who am I to argue with him? I was the one who told him I wanted to take her to sea one last time before I was relieved. This is probably his Christmas present to me. I’ll be back in an hour.”

  Before she could question him he left the room, went out of the house to the beach and started walking in the surf, wondering what Rocket Ron really said to Saint Peter.

  Chapter 15

  Sunday, 29 December

  STRAIT OF GIBRALTAR

  Ahmed stood in the crowded control room. The screens, as before, were filled with cluttered patterns of light and color.

  Four of them in the sensor area were devoted to what appeared to be graphs with curves tracing contours across horizontal axes, the curves forming mountains and valleys that wiggled slowly as he watched.

  Commodore Sharef was hunched over the displays.

  Sihoud was not in the room, preferring instead to stay in his stateroom and study the tactical maps of the North African Atlas Front. It was difficult for Sihoud to stay in the control room when the information presentations were indecipherable and the officers too busy to tell him what was going on.

  As for Ahmed, he was suspended far below the surface in this iron lung driven by men he had no experience with, had no control over and had no reason to trust other than that they wore a uniform similar to his own. He felt a trickle of sweat fall down his forehead and into his eye. He turned away, wiping the stinging eye, and leaned over the computer-driven plotting table to look at the plot between the shoulders of two mid-grade and one junior officer. The plot showed the contour of the narrowing sea-lane between Spain and Morocco, depth shown by the shade of blue — darker in the center of the channel, lighter as it neared the shoreline — a pulsing red mark located a few kilometers east of the narrowest part of the strait.

  “What’s the red mark?”

  Commander Tawkidi answered, his eyes remaining on the plot.

  “Another submarine. Los Angeles-class American, like the last one we encountered.”

  “What are we going to do?”

  “We?” And at that moment Commodore Sharef spoke, his voice loud.

  “Commander, a moment please.”

  Tawkidi held up a hand to Ahmed and walked to Sharef at the plotting table.

  Sharef’s voice was low now. “The American is at the limit of our sensors. Navigator. I propose we shoot now, before he has a possibility of detecting us. The torpedo will come onto his sonar screens before he knows we are in the area and force him to run west into the strait. There’s a chance that a navigation error could cause him to wreck but he will certainly be hit.”

  Tawkidi looked down at the sketchpad Sharef had been doing calculations on. “Sir, the hostile sub is over ninety kilometers distant. That is almost outside the range of the weapon. It can only cover 180 kilometers at search speed, 140 at attack velocity.”

  “But if we launch at search speed, seventy clicks, and are lucky, the weapon will approach close to the 688 sub before it is detected. The best case is perhaps twenty kilometers range before the 688 hears the torpedo. The 688 runs, the torpedo locks on and speeds up to attack speed and runs at 130 clicks toward the target. If the target runs at his maximum speed of seventy clicks the torpedo intercepts and kills the target twenty minutes later, with a total run of 115 kilometers, well under the 140 limit. I agree that’s the best case. Now, if detection range is poor at, say, thirty-five kilometers, the torpedo intercepts and kills the target with a run of 135 kilometers, still well below the 140. And that assumes he detects the torpedo and starts a high-speed run away from the weapon. If he is not good e
nough to hear our unit, the relative intercept speed is even higher. It is a good risk.”

  “And if he counterfires?”

  “After the launch we’ll drive off the track by five kilometers, then delouse. Once we’re shut down, an incoming torpedo will not detect us.”

  “A delouse without a Dash Five? I don’t think those tactics will—”

  “At this long range it will do. And if it does not we will have time to restart.”

  Tawkidi scribbled on the pad. “Sir, torpedo-run time to the target is about an hour and twenty minutes. We can’t stay shut down that long. We only had forty minutes last time.”

  “The battery did not have a full charge. It will last longer, perhaps an hour, now that it has had a deep discharge and the full-current recharge. We’ll wait twenty-five minutes prior to the delouse and restart before we fully drain. Is that satisfactory?”

  “Aye, sir. We’re ready to shoot.” Tawkidi knew when to say yes.

  Sharef’s voice grew loud in the tight room. “All watchstanders, a moment please. We have classified the submerged contact as another 688-class American. To avoid an attack I intend to fire a single weapon now at long range, move off the track, and shut down propulsion with a delouse maneuver. When the 688 is on the bottom we will proceed into the Atlantic. We will warm up a second weapon and keep it standing by in case. Questions? Very well. Weapons officer, open tubes nine and eight to sea and warm up the weapons, report when ready to fire. Deck officer, maneuver the ship to the south. I don’t want to approach the target any closer than we are now.”

  “Aye, Captain. Ship control, one degree right rudder, steer course south.”

  For what seemed a long time to Ahmed nothing happened but the flashing of displays on the weapon-control screens.

  The room’s only noise was the humming of the computers and the low growl of the air handlers. After several minutes the torpedoes were warm.

  “Range to the target?” Sharef requested.

  “Ninety-one kilometers,” Lieutenant Commander Mamun, the weapons officer, reported from the weapons panel.

  “Shoot tube nine.”

  The deck shook as the heavy Nagasaki torpedo left the ship for its distant target.

  “Ship control, right five degrees rudder, steer course north. Reactor control, prepare to insert a delouse.”

  Sharef walked to the sensor-console area and looked at the two banks of console displays devoted to the target submarine.

  Nothing had changed — they apparently had not heard the launch. The next two displays on the neighboring console were monitoring the torpedo on its slow-speed approach to the submarine far over the horizon. Now there was nothing to do but wait the forty-five minutes or hour until the two machines detected each other. One would run, the other speed up and chase. When the hunter had killed the prey, the passage to the Atlantic would be wide open and then it would be time to think about how they would assemble the Scorpion warheads in the Hiroshima missiles. And once that problem was solved, all that remained was to get within range of Washington and fire the missiles. Sharef briefly wondered whether he would ever get Hegira back to base after the missiles had done their job. Better not to think of that, he told himself.

  Meanwhile, ten kilometers to the west, the Nagasaki torpedo drove on toward its target.

  USS PHOENIX

  Edwin Sanderson was a big man, frequently asked how he stood being confined in a submarine. He wasn’t exactly flabby but was well on his way to developing a gut, standard issue for chiefs in the submarine force. Too many second helpings of bacon and eggs, too few exercise sessions in the torpedo room. His hair was now more gray than black. His gray penetrating eyes tended to show red after hours of staring at the sonar consoles. When he was angry many a senior officer had backed down to him. When off-duty or drunk or amused he could crack a grin that made the face radiate goodwill around him. His wife joked that it was his infectious smile that had charmed her into his orbit, but that if she had seen his anger when they were courting she would never have married him.

  As for whether he felt confined in the sub, in truth he was more at home at sea — his routine restricted to the sonar display room, the sonar equipment space, the chief’s quarters and the crew’s mess — than at his Ghent home. His home life was enjoyable, he had a pretty wife, now showing some weight on her previously thin frame, two sons, one in high school, the star center on the basketball team, the other in junior high who hadn’t quite found himself. It wasn’t that Sanderson didn’t enjoy being in port, it was just that his wife and sons seemed to own the house, and he was a frequent visitor. Home was a busy port, he was a cargo ship that pulled in from time to time. The family welcomed him when he’d return from a run at sea, but after two days he felt like he was underfoot. Life had led him to the sea and made him a chief then, and he loved it.

  At sea the actions of the men around him seemed centered on him. The ship to him was a giant mobile ear, built so that sonarmen could listen to and interpret the sounds of the sea, most of them random, others manmade and sinister. The rest of the vessel, her reactor and steam plant, her control room, her weapons, even her crew were all subordinate to the task of listening to the sea. This submarine, built for a dozen select sonarmen, was more his, he felt, than the captain’s.

  After all, he was the chief sonarman, the one man declared by the Navy to be the best aboard at listening to that symphony of sound in the sea, best at leading the men who would listen under his instruction, best at attending to and fixing the monstrous ear and the surrounding equipment, best at directing the young officers who drove the ship in a way that would make his equipment listen optimally.

  His title said it best — Senior Chief Sonarman Sanderson.

  He sat now at the aft display console of the BQQ-5D sonar set, the seat just forward of the sliding curtain to the control room, where he could see the other consoles and talk to the officer of the deck in control without using the speaker system or the cumbersome boom microphone. As usual, he was dressed as if they had just pulled into the Norfolk carrier piers: starched khakis, his submarine dolphins gleaming above two rows of ribbons and his boomer pin, his nametag shining over his right pocket, his chief’s emblems new, his shoes shining. He always dressed this way at sea, never opting for the relaxed coveralls and sneakers of shipmates.

  Some said it was because in his khakis he retained his authority, his formality, while in a poopysuit he would become just another crewman. The closest to a friend Sanderson had, a first-class petty officer named Smoot, insisted that the khakis were more comfortable to the chief, but Sanderson himself knew the first reason came the closest. In his more mellow moments he realized he had a streak of arrogance about him, but he maintained even to himself that it was a selfless arrogance born out of service to his country—after twenty-six years in the Navy he was the best sonarman on the god damned east coast. If he had limits they were only that he had to use the aging BQQ-5D sonar suite instead of the advanced BSY-1 of the Improved-688 boats, and that he was sailing aboard an older 688 submarine instead of a much quieter 688-1 class. But even so, he would pit his ship and his sonar against any in the fleet ― —if exercises meant anything he and the Phoenix were a match for any warship afloat or submerged.

  Sanderson regarded the waterfall display of the Q-5 through squinted eyes. His fingers moved across a touch pad and called up the TB-23 thin-wire towed array, selecting the beam going transverse across the array that looked east-west now that the ship was headed north. Any intruder sailing into the strait from the western basin would first show up on that beam, long before the broadband spherical array heard it. The question was, were they searching for the right frequencies? Captain Kane had referred to a 154 hertz double tonal, something from the message from the sunken Augusta, but the information was tainted ― —after all, how good could tactical data be from a crew that had gotten their butts shot to the bottom of the Med?

  It did not occur to him that what happened to Augusta cou
ld happen to the Phoenix. He could not, after all, afford even to consider this.

  He dialed up the athwartships beam’s frequency gate, spanning from 148 to 158 hertz, waiting to see the double tonal of the Destiny submarine. He stared at the graphs for two minutes, three, four. There was no doublet.

  Frustrated, he flipped the display back to the waterfall broadband display of noise versus bearing, putting north in the center of the tube. The detected noises at an instant were shown by bright dots, each direction except the astern “baffles” heard all at once. The data of that instant dropped down as the next second of data flashed up, and then both data lines dropped again as the next sound information came in, making the screen traces fall downward, earning the display its name. The display was split into three pieces. The top trace was only twenty seconds from the top to the bottom, where the data dropped from view. The middle section was five minutes deep, taking a set of data 300 seconds to drop from view. The bottom area was the long history trace, displaying the last half-hour of waterfall data. The displays were an ingenious means of interpreting sound data because most of the ocean’s noise was random and would go from north to southeast to west instantaneously. The display of this random noise would resemble snow on a TV screen, but a manmade noise, a ship, would continue to generate noise from a single bearing, the continuing bright traces forming a vertical line at the bearing of the sound emission.

  Sanderson blinked at the short-time display at the top, concentrating on the bearings to the east. As he watched a slight trace appeared at 087, then winked out. Shrimp or whales farting, Sanderson thought, but kept watching. A moment later the trace returned. The five-minute-history display showed the two traces at a consistent bearing — east.

  “Sonar, Conn,” Sanderson’s earphone buzzed. “Coming around to the west in one minute.”

  “Conn, Sonar, no,” Sanderson said into his mike, leaning over the console. “Ted, get Smoot up here fast,” he ordered Seaman Worster. “Joe, select the athwartships beam of the thin-wire and dial up the high freqs. Bill, you take the next lower buckets. Red, you take the 200 sector with a single bucket looking for the 154.” Sanderson had put the sonar crew onto the new trace, trying to squeeze every bit of data from it the computer could process.