Phoenix Sub Zero mp-3

by Michael Dimercurio

  “Aren’t there two versions of the Hiroshima?”

  “Sea-launched and aircraft-launched, yes.”

  “Same missile?”

  “No, the sea-launched device is designed to be ejected from a submerged tube launcher on a sub, so it has a water proof capsule— — that doesn’t change the characteristics of the missile, but this version must start its trip at zero velocity at sea level, so its booster rocket stage is much bigger. The air-launched version’s solid rocket booster is tiny by comparison.”

  “Warheads the same size?”

  “No, the air-launched version has a bigger warhead capacity since it’s got the lighter rocket. Six thousand kilos for the air-launched, only 3,500 for the sea-launched version.”

  “How heavy is this dirty dust-bomb’s warhead?”

  “Let’s see …” The colonel searched his data. “We never added this up.” He scratched two columns on a pad, flipping through a large binder, adding up the second column of weights.

  “There are a few components I’d be guessing at as far as mass is concerned, sir, but within a few percent, this warhead is about three metric tons. That’s 3,000 kilos, give or take a few hundred.”

  “Where did they put the operational warheads?”

  “We think they took them to the Mediterranean coast at Kassab.”

  Destiny’s base, Donchez thought. With two warheads sized for a sea-launched weapon system that needed to be within 1,900 miles to hit its target. And Destiny had broken out of the Med and was last detected heading west.

  He stood, he’d heard enough. He didn’t need the raw data, surprising the colonel, who had intended to go through the whole briefing. Apparently, Donchez thought. Colonel Parker was not used to people believing his interpretations.

  “Thank you. Colonel. You’ve been most helpful.”

  He and Rummel were only twenty feet down the hallway when an Army sergeant called out to them.

  “Admiral? Admiral Donchez? Flash message for you, sir, relayed from Norfolk Naval Communications Center about four minutes ago. A Captain Brandt is standing by to answer questions on it, if you’ll come with me to the phone room.”

  Donchez accepted the metal clipboard with the message and read while walking to the phone center. Captain Brandt, the commander of Navcom, was on hold on a white phone offered him by a corporal.

  “Donchez here. Brandt, what is this?”

  “That transmission just came in on HF, Admiral. Our direction finders didn’t get an accurate bearing, but we think it came from the North Atlantic. The sender would appear to be the USS Phoenix”

  “How do you know?”

  “We asked him to authenticate with the most recent edition of the code book. He answered correctly from code book number 547. That code book was only put aboard the Phoenix.”

  “Thanks, Captain.” Donchez handed the phone back. “Where’s the communication facility?”

  Within four minutes Donchez was scratching out a message to go to the Seawolf. Two minutes after that the message was transmitted, with a copy of Phoenix’s message sent to Pacino.

  “Fred, get an emergency meeting with Barczynski and his staff.”

  “That won’t be easy, sir,” Rummel said, a phone in his ear. “They’re all snowed. The streets aren’t plowed, we’ve got over eighteen inches of drifted snow in some sections of Maryland. If we leave here we might not make wherever we’re going. And forget about a chopper. No one’s flying, they’re all grounded. They’ve got zero visibility with gusting forty-five-knot winds at the Pentagon helipad. Washington National’s closed, so is Dulles, Andrews, BWI, Suburban—”

  “Sounds like we’re hunkering down here. We could have picked a worse place to get snowed in. Every communication system we’d ever need is right here. What about getting them on a conference call?”

  “We’ll get a few. Barczynski and Clough have secure phones. The others, I don’t know.”

  “President still in Key West?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “Well, get going on setting up a secure phone connection to Generals Barczynski and Clough, and have the White House operator get the president ready a half-hour after we start with the general.”

  Donchez wandered toward the building entrance, back through the layers of security checkpoints, until he reached the lobby with its large plate-glass windows. Outside the storm raged, the road covered, the snow falling nearly horizontally. He pulled out a Havana and flicked his Zippo, glaring at a security guard who looked like he might tell Donchez there was no smoking inside.

  A dispersion glue bomb, Donchez thought. With enough radioactivity to kill a city. He looked at the raging blizzard, wondering what effect, if any, the snow would have on the plutonium-dust killer. It might be the only thing that could save Washington, if Washington was the target.

  Phoenix might track the Destiny. But it was up to Michael Pacino to take this son of a bitch out.

  Chapter 29

  Friday, 3 January

  WESTERN ATLANTIC

  POINT BRAVO HOLD POSITION, 500 NAUTICAL MILES EAST OF LONG ISLAND

  USS SEAWOLF

  While a phone rang in General Barczynski’s Fairfax, Virginia, residence, the phone next to Pacino’s bunk buzzed, both phones attempting to convey the same information.

  Five minutes after the phone buzzed, the local time just after midnight, Pacino stood in the control room with a crowd of officers, the North Atlantic chart out, the position of the Phoenix plotted with a bright blue dot, an orange navigation tape strip showing a straight line from Gilbratar in the Med to the Labrador Sea. As the message from Donchez had indicated, the chart plotter had drawn a red circle 1,900 miles around Washington, a blue one around Boston, a green one around Halifax, Nova Scotia, a purple one around Toronto.

  The blue dot was inside all the circles, the circle surrounding the southernmost city, Washington, ending halfway up the Davis Strait between Greenland and Newfoundland almost to the Baffin Bay.

  Pacino read the messages again. He could hardly believe it. Destiny, if it turned north, would be in the marginal ice zone by the afternoon. And it would definitely turn north, since it had come so far north already. If Donchez was right about the Hiroshima-missile theory, the Destiny had been in range of the northeastern cities for some time, at least a day.

  Which seemed to go against the whole idea. If the Destiny was coming to throw up these Hiroshima missiles, why hadn’t it already fired them?

  And what the hell was the Phoenix doing? Here’s a ship that gets almost blown away, shoots every damned torpedo in the inventory, and then follows the Destiny into the Atlantic.

  Whoever her skipper was, he was either very brave or very stupid, and probably some combination of the two.

  Pacino didn’t stop to think what he would have done in the same situation, knowing that he probably would have trailed the Destiny, but scoffing at the idea that he’d be dumb enough not to save a torpedo for himself.

  It didn’t answer one question that nagged at him — if the Destiny had been so damned elusive in the Med, what had changed to allow a damaged 688 to track her clear across the North Atlantic? Pacino started to wonder if the UIF wanted them to track the Destiny, that maybe it was a decoy, and the cruise missiles were somewhere else, but the headache that came from that line of thought pounded between his temples until he decided to save it for later.

  “O.O.D, do you have a course from the navigator?” The chart was not encouraging. The point bravo hold position was designed to stage Seawolf for an interception in mid-Atlantic, not the Labrador Sea. They’d have to go northeast to get around the point of Newfoundland, then turn to the northwest to go up the Davis Strait. That was over 1,300 nautical miles, almost thirty hours at flank speed. They wouldn’t catch up to the projected Destiny position until the next day in the morning watch. By then, anything could happen.

  It might already be too late, Pacino thought.

  “Yes, Captain,” Scott Court said from the conn. />
  “Proceed at flank until we’re within 100 miles of the Phoenix position. But get ready to come to PD in the next half-hour. There’s something I want to say.”

  “Aye, aye, sir. Helm, right five degrees rudder, steady course zero five zero, all ahead flank. Dive, make your depth five five zero feet.”

  Pacino picked up the microphone, deciding to do a quick brief of the crew before he tagged out the loudspeaker system.

  “Attention all hands, this is the captain. We’ve just gotten a message from COMSUBLANT that our target, the Destiny, is identified and located north in the Labrador Sea. We are now departing the point bravo hold position and driving up at flank to intercept. Sometime in the next two days we will engage the Destiny and try to sink him. I urge all hands to get what rest they can in their next off-watch period, because once we get into the Labrador Sea I will right the ship for ultraquiet and man battle stations.” Pacino paused, wondering if he should say something more personal, feeling he’d fallen short of the famous World War II submarine skippers’ speeches to their crews, inspiring words of wisdom for the men to take into battle with them, words to tell grandchildren decades later, but he wasn’t a poet. “That is all. Carry on.” He put the microphone back into its cradle, thinking about what the crew thought, how they would react.

  “Off’sa’deck, I’ll be in my stateroom drafting a message to go out in the next PD.”

  “Aye, sir.”

  Pacino moved out of control to the inner sanctum of his stateroom, took a blank message form out of his drawer and stared at it for some time, the chart of the Labrador Sea now engraved in his mind.

  CNFS HEGIRA

  Comdr. Ibn Quzwini felt closer to death than at any time in his forty years. It was obvious that the work in the ballast tank would have suited itself better to the younger officers, but he was now third in command, the mechanical officer, the man who knew the ship’s systems better than anyone aboard. The ballast-tank work could not proceed without him. Still, it might have to if he succumbed to the cold and the exhaustion.

  The tank was a frightening place to be, even in the dry dock. Quzwini had had to enter it in the Japanese construction yard just before the dry dock was flooded. He had been slated to be the last man in the tank to ensure that no shipyard worker had left tools in the tank that could cause rattles when submerged, that all the pipe supports were installed correctly, that nothing was forgotten. In those days just before the war, his only cares were that the ship be received from the Japanese in the best possible condition.

  There were no thoughts about dying in combat or firing a missile that would kill several million people, such a thought could fill his stomach with acid. Better not to think it. Even in that shipyard entry, the ballast tank had been a horrible place, the size of it intimidating, with no platforms to stand on, only the structural framing in the space to be climbed up.

  Now that the ship was submerged with the ballast tank full of rank-smelling compressed air, being in the tank was terrifying. If one of the tank vents came open, the tank would flood and kill the tank crew, although it was more likely that someone would fall from one of the tubes to the hull below or that one of the heavy loads would break a restraining chain and crush the man beneath it. Worse than the tank’s inhospitable geometry was its temperature, the air in side at zero degrees centigrade, cold enough to cause their breaths to form clouds of vapor. The alternating pattern of waiting and heavy exertion caused the men to freeze and then sweat, the next wait making the sweat a super coolant.

  They all might die of exposure long before they died of falling or being crushed.

  Quzwini, as he had for the last five hours, suppressed further thoughts about the lack of safety in the tank and returned to the task at hand, the lifting of the metal patch cut from the upper half of the number-one tube. The metal of the patch had been altered with the attachment of three lifting eyes, each connected to the hooks of a high-capacity chainfall. With three lifting lugs set up high in the tank at a structural hoop of steel, the tank crew winched the heavy hatch upward. It could go only one-and-a-half meters up before it hit the bottom of tube six above. It took them an hour to lift the patch that meter and a half, the patch rising in one centimeter increments, infinitesimally slow. When the patch clunked against the bottom of tube six, the chainfalls were locked, and the heavy warhead of the Hiroshima missile readied to be withdrawn. Pulling off the nose cone was slow, agonizing work, the connecting bolts tight from the factory.

  It took an hour until the conventional warhead was ready to be removed.

  Colonel Ahmed screwed a lifting eye into the top of the warhead, his hands shaking from the cold. With another chainfall he cranked the warhead out, lifting it into a shadow left by one of the harsh incandescent temporary bulbs. The men moved aft to rig the old warhead back to the pressure hull so that it could be replaced with the new warhead. The transfer went slowly, with two chainfalls attached to the warhead, one pulling it aft while the forward chain was slackened, keeping the warhead level. The open part of the tank between the aft heads of the tubes and the forward bulkhead of the command module was a problem. The free flood was only five meters long, but those five meters had no supports except for a cross of steel tubular beams, one horizontal, one vertical. The warhead was rigged all the way down to the bottom of the hull, then aft to the frame at the command module, then hoisted vertically up to the hatchway in the centerline. The maneuver through the free-flood portion of the tank took over an hour. By the time the hatch was winched open to accept the obsolete warhead, the tank work was eight hours behind schedule — it had taken ten hours to get this far, and the work had been estimated by Ahmed to take two. The men tapped on the hatch, the signal to come shallow to depressurize the tank so that they could come back into the hull after an hour at lower pressure.

  Quzwini was dismayed that there would be another ten-hour session in the tank to get the new warhead in, then another ten-hour entry to weld up the tube patch and the command-module hatch. With ten hours between entries, it would take forty hours to finish the work. And even then there was no guarantee the warhead switchout would work.

  Once he was back in the hull, he stayed on the deck of the forward head, his frozen hands in his crotch, rocking the pain away, hating the thought of going into that ballast tank again.

  The ten-hour rest period passed all too soon. Colonel Ahmed called the tank crew to help him pull the new Scorpion warhead from the lower level to the middle level, and from there into the ballast tank and to the forward tip of tube one, retracing the path that the old warhead had gone. The tank was much colder on this entry, the surrounding water becoming icy as the ship got farther north. Not that it mattered much, he thought, as his mind was growing as numb as his body.

  USS PHOENIX

  “Norfolk Navcom Center, this is Whiskey Four Bravo, over.” Kane waited for twenty endless seconds before calling again. “Norfolk Navcom, this is Whiskey Four Bravo, over.

  The Phoenix’s call sign for the third of January, W4B, was another meaningless and random collection of alphanumerics dictated by the code book, which seemed ridiculous to Kane, given that he was transmitting in the clear. He called again on the airwaves and waited again, feeling the deck rock gently beneath his feet as the ship rolled in the swells at periscope depth. Finally, after the fifteenth callup, the Navcom Center came back, much clearer this time.

  “WHISKEY FOUR BRAVO, THIS IS NORFOLK NAVCOM, READING YOU FIVE BY FIVE, OVER.”

  “Roger, Navcom,” Kane said slowly, “Navy Blue to follow, over.”

  “ROGER NAVY BLUE, STANDING BY, OVER.”

  “Navy Blue as follows: One, Lone Ranger position five nine degrees five eight minutes twelve seconds November, five four degrees ten minutes eight seconds whiskey. Two, Tonto is still with us and has just turned to the north on course three four five. Three, he has been making a great deal of noise, perhaps building something. Four, interrogative, when will cavalry arrive, break. Bravo tango. I say
again. Navy Blue as follows …”

  Kane repeated the message and listened as Navcom read it back, the message ungarbled. He was about to order the ship deep when Navcom came back. At first he expected them to ask him to authenticate another test signal as they had the first time, but that wasn’t it.

  “WHISKEY FOUR BRAVO, THIS IS NORFOLK NAVCOM CENTER WITH A MESSAGE FROM THE GODFATHER. MESSAGE READS, DEPART VICINITY BY ZERO FIVE HUNDRED LOCAL TIME SATURDAY FOUR JANUARY, REPEAT, DEPART VICINITY BY ZERO FIVE HUNDRED LOCAL ON SATURDAY. COME HOME, BREAK, BRAVO TANGO, OVER.”

  Binghamton crinkled his nose in disgust. “The Godfather? What the hell was that all about?”

  “The cavalry,” Kane said. “This must be from Admiral Steinman or Donchez himself. We’re being relieved on station by somebody they figure will get this guy.”

  “Navcom, this is Whiskey Four Bravo, copied your last. Will attempt a final report at zero four thirty local Saturday. Bravo tango. Whiskey Four Bravo, out.”

  Kane looked at his watch. “Saturday morning is a long way away. No telling what this guy could do in that time.”

  “Whoever’s coming. Captain,” Binghamton said, “is taking so long because they needed to hear from us before they could be sent. It was our message that started the cavalry up the hill. That ought to make our day.”

  Kane could only think about bodies in yellow plastic bags stored in torpedo tubes.

  CNFS HEGIRA

  Sharef sat at the head of his conference table, cradling his aching head in his hands, the flashing lights coming from his blind eye, the eye that was filled with glass shards. He heard the knock at the door, immediately straightening in his chair.

  “Sir,” Tawkidi said from the doorway, “more problems with the tubes. I just came from the middle level. The tank crew has reentered the ballast tank, they are falling farther behind schedule. All they have managed to do so far is withdraw the old warhead. The Scorpion warhead is going into the tank with them now.”