Phoenix Sub Zero mp-3

by Michael Dimercurio

  The sonar tech slumped into his control seat, his eyes shut, then suddenly sat up straight again and looked to the ASW officer.

  “Mr. Quaid! I’ve got three traces of torpedoes. American Mark 50 torpedoes. They’re all at attack velocity.”

  Quaid leaned over the console, frowning.

  “Where’d they come from?”

  “Must have been launched by the Phoenix and we didn’t pick them up when they were slow in transit, or maybe they were passive circlers.”

  “Maybe Phoenix will get her revenge yet.”

  “Too bad it’ll be posthumous,” the tech mumbled.

  “Too early to call that. What’ve you got?”

  “Multiple weapons, look like they’re several miles apart, all of them homing toward the same spot at once.”

  “Good, maybe we’ve got a chance for at least one hit. Let’s set up a sonobuoy field inside the triangle of the torpedoes and hope for the best.”

  * * *

  Sharef knew the order he had to give.

  Computers were wonderful, supercomputers even better, and the Second Captain system was everything a submarine could ever want, marking control of the ship and the sensing of the seas around the ship easy and natural; the system conquered the task of blending man and machine into one organism, mating the human instincts and reflexes of the machine, until the interface between them blurred to the point that the entire ship was an extension of his well-trained crew. But could a mere box of integrated circuits be trusted to drive them from harm without any human supervision?

  The question was now more than academic — the procedure called for Sharef to turn command over to his computer counterpart and let go.

  He was surrounded by incoming high-speed torpedoes bearing down on the Hegira from three directions. If Sharef withdrew along the wrong course he might evade a distant torpedo at the cost of driving into a close one. When the bearings to the torpedoes were known and plotted, conventional wisdom dictated the submarine commander drive his ship in a direction that would bisect the largest angle between the bearings to the weapons. But that would be suicide if the ship drove into the closer of the incoming torpedoes. Range to the torpedoes was crucial information, but doing target-range analysis, wiggling the ship in long slow maneuvers, was not possible with only seconds to impact with a close torpedo. The ship’s sonar systems, with the exception of the ventriloquist SCM sonar countermeasures suite, were entirely passive listeners — pinging an active sonar to find torpedo range was just not an option.

  The Destiny-class submarine designers had known she would someday be outnumbered, and expected if the sub ever got into combat that several weapons would be vectored in at her from other submarines, from aircraft, from surface ships. The Destiny was conceived as a one-ship fleet, and as such was required to have the computer systems made capable of fighting multiple threats from multiple bearings.

  The standard operating procedure in the case of multiple inbound torpedoes from around the compass was simple. But Sharef still did not like it. The procedure called for turning his ship over to the Second Captain, which would do course target range analysis by driving the ship through a rapid wiggle, perhaps an S-curve, then, having a feel for the torpedo ranges, calculate the ship’s best course to evade, even if it meant driving almost head-on into the most distant weapon.

  It required an act of faith, the one quality Commodore Sharef had a severe shortage of, cynicism setting in on the day of the Sahand sinking. But Sharef was no fool, and valued his ship and his crew and his mission, and he gave the order. He shared a momentary look at his first officer, Captain al-Kunis, who had remained silent through the entire day’s combat as his function required — he could not participate by UIF regulations and Islamic tradition — the second-in-command’s lot in life was to stand beside the commanding officer, remain silent and be ready to take over if the captain fell. Until that moment he would not involve himself, only observe. But it was clear that al-Kunis felt Sharef’s thoughts about total trust in the Second Captain system, the doubt in the first’s eyes a dark shade.

  “Deck officer, engage the Second Captain in ship-control mode.”

  “Ship control, engage the second,” Tawkidi ordered the ship-control console operators. Sharef watched as the operators keyed in the system, their training anticipating the order and the functional menu screen already called up on their displays, the ship a single keystroke from computer control.

  Sharef grabbed a handhold set into the side of the plot table just as the Second Captain took command and put the rudder over. The deck inclined rapidly to the left as the computer threw the ship into a violent maneuver. The ship shuddered.

  From below came the sound of dishes falling out of a cabinet and shattered on the galley deck. As suddenly as the first maneuver, the Second Captain shifted the rudder, the deck rolling back to starboard, one man at the reactor-control consoles thudding to the deck, sheepishly crawling back into his control seat. The deck then leveled and steadied, the ship’s S-curve complete. Sharef looked at the ship-control console and saw that the ship was driving up northwest, heading 262 degrees true, almost exactly between the torpedo at 194 and the one at 330. Those fish must be roughly at equal ranges, Sharef thought, which made sense, because the range at which a torpedo could detect them should be a constant. Then again, the chart also told a story, the land too close to allow the Second Captain to drive them back east, which was also part of the computer’s evasion routine.

  Now under Second Captain control, there was little to do but wait and monitor the system for gross failure. The Second Captain would continue to monitor the weapons, perhaps even sending the ship suddenly into another maneuver to test for range or to check on a weapon coming in from astern in the main sonar’s blind spot. As yet there had been no torpedo sonar pulses showing up on the sensor displays, but then evading three torpedoes was not like running in a tail chase from one. The SCM ventriloquist was again enabled in automatic, but it would be useless trying to fool three torpedoes at once. And the system would not do well against a weapon closing in on them from an angle.

  Sharef became aware of the officers looking at him, searching his face for signs of confidence or despair, trying to see if their captain saw hope or defeat. Sharef knew the psychology of his men, the same as any crew. A crew without hope could not function. But his face had made him a liar, because just as before he had felt it was not yet time to die, he had a sensation that perhaps now it was.

  Chapter 19

  Sunday, 29 December

  WESTERN ATLANTIC USS PHOENIX

  Lieutenant Commander Thomas Schramford had been Phoenix’s chief engineer for almost three years. Before that he had served as an engineering-division officer on the Hartford in each of the aft divisions — electrical, reactor and mechanical — then rotating to the new construction submarine Tampa while she was built at Dynacorp’s Electric Boat’s Groton yards. While spending his two years watching Tampa progress from a single hoop of structural HY-80 to a fully fitted-out combat submarine he learned the 688-class in such detail that every cable, valve, microelectronic processor, pipe and panel were engraved in his memory. On the wall above the engineering officer of the watch’s desk was a large print of the piping and instrumentation systems of the plant, from the core’s main coolant piping to the last condensate pump pressure control valve. As part of studying for the engineer exam, Schramford had to be able to reproduce it from memory, and he still could. If need be he could have started up the reactor from memory — in spite of the fact that Operating Instruction 27, Normal Reactor Startup, was over 120 pages long, not including the steam plant startup procedures.

  Of all the men aboard, Schramford was one of few in the aft compartment who had escaped serious injury or loss of consciousness from the collision with the bottom — the others who remained conscious were dazed or trapped under bodies or equipment. He was conscious but his mind was dulled with pain from striking his groin on something, the terrible
ache ballooning up through his abdomen. He clamped his eyelids shut and bit his lip, trying to fight the pain, but for some time the pain won, and after seconds or minutes or hours the ache eased but continued throbbing, sapping his strength.

  The ship was quiet, the roar of the turbines gone, the air handlers shut down, the reactor inert. There on the deck of the maneuvering room, Schramford found his thoughts turning to the reactor core. The ship had been steaming full out just before the loss of all electrical, and the reactor went from over 150 percent power to zero. But nuclear reactors never just turned off. The radioactivity of the core remained after the bulk of the reactions were stopped, adding tremendous heat to the coolant loop, in this case heat equivalent to running the core at fifteen percent power without cooling.

  Uncooled, that power would soon melt the reactor, possibly find its way out the bottom of the pressure vessel and then eat through the hull itself.

  The ship’s designers had planned for such an emergency; the emergency cooling system, XC as it was abbreviated, was a brilliant set of pipes, valves and a seawater tank that could cool the core using the trick that hot water rises and cold sinks— — natural circulation. No moving parts. Had it been lined up, Schramford would have had no worries, but it had been locked out in its configuration for at-sea operation, the procedure designed to prevent an inadvertent XC initiation when at power, since an unintended cold-water injection into a critical reactor could cause a core runaway.

  But now, with no flow and no XC, the reactor vessel would be stewing, its temperature rising, certainly boiling the coolant. Once the water was driven from the core and replaced with steam, the fuel would melt and the ship would die.

  Schramford’s mind, groggy and full of pain, filled with three words— — Three Mile Island.

  Schramford slowly climbed to his feet and searched the darkened space for an emergency air-breathing mask, finally retrieving one from an overhead cubbyhole. He strapped it on, the black rubber straps a spider across his face until his chubby features poked into the Plexiglas face mask. He reached up to plug in the hose, clipped the regulator to his belt and breathed in. Almost immediately his head cleared, and his first thought was that this was a bad sign. The atmosphere was contaminated, the scrubbers and burners and oxygen bleed gone since they had hit bottom. It could be worse … the battery might be dumping toxic clouds of chlorine gas into the ship or one of the weapons might be leaking fuel. A Javelin cruise missile rocket motor burning would fill the boat with hydrogen cyanide, in which case Schramford and the crew would already be dead.

  As engineer, Schramford was responsible for acting in this miserable situation. He heard in the background the damage-control code he had drummed into his junior officers and chiefs since his first day aboard: Save the ship, save the plant, then save the men … Surrounded by men struggling to breathe the ship’s poor air, he knew his duty was to the ship first. He pulled a battle lantern from the bulkhead, disconnected his mask hose and hurried forward to the ladder and down one level, juggling the lantern in one hand while descending and trying not to get tangled in his air hose. A large man, he had little enough wind as it was without dashing down a ladder holding his breath. He plugged in at a middle level manifold and puffed for a few seconds, then unplugged and ran into the portside hatch to the reactor-compartment tunnel, unlatching the heavy door as he went and plugging in his hose as soon as he arrived.

  There in the tunnel was the primary-valve station for the valve-op system and several XC valves. Schramford opened a toolbox and took out a large wrench and tugged off the large antileakage cover from a XC-9, then put a special ratchet wrench on the valve stem and pulled on it with all his strength until the valve finally moved. He kept cranking until the valve opened completely, dumping the pressure off the top of another valve deep in the radioactive reactor compartment. When that valve came open the hot-leg water could flow up to the seawater exchanger and the cold leg could flow down. Schramford found the seawater valves to the tank, opened all four and sagged against the bulkhead to regain his strength. Through the thick shielded bulkhead he could hear the forceful flowing noises in the XC piping, and then the boiling of seawater in the heat-exchanger tank as the core gave up its heat. The core protected, Schramford could now equip his crew with air masks, then head forward to see to the captain. Once the ship’s force were outfitted in masks he could restart the reactor and the skipper, he hoped, could get them the hell out of there.

  PORTSMOUTH, VIRGINIA

  NORFOLK NAVAL SHIPYARD GRAVING DOCK 4

  The sun dipped beneath the line of maintenance buildings and warehouses lining the dock. The drydock floodlights had been lit for a half-hour, only now noticed as the daylight faded. Captain Michael Pacino stood at the lip of the dock leaning on the rusted handrails and looked down on his ship. The dock was finally empty of equipment other than a few manlifts, the Seawolf now mostly intact and looking like an ungainly whale in a huge dry bathtub. The blue light of welders’ arcs flashed in his eyes on the ship’s starboard flank, the flickering reflected against the sheer side of the dock as the six men welded along the seam of the Vortex-missile hull cut. The work replacing the curving piece of steel plating to cover what was earlier the gaping hole of the hull cut was only in its first hour; the HY-100 steel of the hull was almost two inches thick. Even with the half dozen men welding, it would be dawn on the next day, Monday, before the weld would be completed, and another several hours before the X-rays were taken and evaluated.

  The X-rays of the weld would probably show several imperfections that would call for grinding out and rewelding.

  The repairs could take till midafternoon Monday. The confirmation X-rays would take them to Monday night, and only then would the men be out of the dock. And only then could the ship be painted.

  The ship looked almost foolish in the dock with the bright green paint of the inorganic zinc primer coat turning the sub into a cartoon character. There were always the inevitable chants of the crew about “we all live in a green submarine” until the yard got its paint gear loaded in the dock and could paint on the intermediate and final coats. The ship would gleam a menacing black on the upper surface, a dull red anti-barnacle coating on the bottom, the line between black and red ruler-sharp as if detailed out by the best body shop in town. Without paint, the ship would be so covered with rust that seawater valves and torpedo-tube doors would start to hang up. The salty seawater would literally begin eating the hull. The paint job would take another full day, delaying Seawolf until Wednesday morning.

  There was just not enough time. Pacino needed to be underway sooner. He pulled a walkie-talkie radio from his belt and called the ship. The duty officer came up almost immediately. Pacino ordered him to call for the shipyard commander to come to the dock. Maybe there was still a way, Pacino thought.

  The welding continued, the blue flickering light of it forming dancing spots in Pacino’s vision. The sun had vanished by the time Emmitt Stevens’s shipyard pickup truck drove up and he got out, his hollow face set.

  “Captain,” Stevens said. “Ship supe says we’ll be painting by this time tomorrow. We should be able to flood the dock Wednesday.”

  “No.”

  “Look, Patch, I know you want out, but—”

  “Emmitt, the weld will be done by dawn. As the last bead is in place I want the dock flood valves opened. Seawolf will be at sea by sunrise.”

  “You can’t do that! What about X-rays and repairs?”

  “How good are the welders?”

  “Come on. Patch, that’s HY-100. It doesn’t weld like mild steel. Even with the best welders on the coast we’ll have two dozen flaws, that’s if we’re lucky. The repairs will take half a day, the retests another half day and the paint job most of Wednesday—”

  “Skip the X-rays and the repairs. There won’t be any paint job. We’ll go to sea green.”

  “Mike, listen to me. You’re making a big mistake. I can’t guarantee a weld like that without tests. You coul
d spring a leak the first time at test depth— — a bad one— — and we’d never hear from you again. And that’s not all— — the weld could be fine for the first ten excursions to test depth, but the eleventh could be fatal. Or it could be fine in warm water, but diving into colder temperatures could make a flaw brittle-fracture. It could go with no warning, no chance to emergency blow. You’re risking your neck, your crew’s necks.”

  In the drydock floodlights Pacino’s eyes focused on a sight far from the dock below.

  “Wrap the welds and flood the dock. My crew will be ready to go by 5:00 a.m.”

  Stevens sighed. “You got it, Patch. Jesus, though, good luck.”

  Pacino didn’t answer.

  EASTERN ATLANTIC

  CNFS HEGIRA

  Commodore Sharef didn’t need to see the updated displays to know that the Hegira was about to take a torpedo hit. The torpedo that had been ahead of them to the west had started out too close. Its intercept speed, combined with the ship’s initial closing velocity, had caught them. The computer initially predicted impact at four point five minutes after initial detection. The update was tracking.

  Sharef turned away from the displays and stepped to the forward bulkhead of the room to where Rakish Ahmed and Sihoud were standing. Ahmed had borrowed a crewman’s jumpsuit. Sihoud had reclaimed the silk shesh he had been wearing when they had picked him up, the rip in the garment’s hem now sewn up. Sharef idly wondered who had done the sewing. Hard to imagine the Khalib himself doing a seamstress’s job. Sihoud’s dagger gleamed on his belt. In spite of the general’s inspiring size and presence, Sharef felt it was a charade. His instincts told him the general was frightened. Not that fear was dishonorable, because if there was a time to feel it, this was it. Had he not been nearly killed on the Sahand, it might have been different, but he had seen the deaths the enemy missiles had brought, and the idea that the same could happen to these men now filled him with a resolve that precluded fear.