Voyage of the Devilfish mp-1

by Michael Dimercurio

  Michael Pacino shut his eyes, rubbed his temples and imagined a God’s-eye-view of the sea. What would he do if he were the “enemy.” He opened his eyes, moved off the elevated periscope stand, nudged aside Lieutenant Stokes, grabbed two solution guess-knobs and twisted in a guess-solution. “Keep that in,” he told Stokes, whose expression betrayed he thought Pacino’s solution flawed. For the next thirty seconds Pacino really sweated. Two sonar bearings came in and lined up vertically. His solution was dead on. He punched Stokes’ massive shoulder and pointed to the computer console. Stokes just shook his head.

  “Weps, steer the first fired unit to course one seven five,” Pacino said to Weapons Officer Bahnhoff on the firing panel. “Steer the second to one eight zero.” He looked over Bahnhoffs shoulder as he programmed the firing panel with the steercommands; the firing panel talked digitally to the torpedo-room console, which relayed the instructions to the tubes, which passed on the steercommands through a neutrally buoyant wire the size of a stereo-speaker cord, snaking out the tube to the ocean beyond through twenty miles of wire to the units. The units heard the order and turned to the south, listening to their pings. One unit got a ping return in its search-cone almost immediately.

  “Detect,” Bahnhoff announced, smiling at Pacino. “Unit one… detect. Homing, unit one. Go, baby, go.” The first fired unit had heard three returns in a row, deciding that Target One was a valid target. The torpedo sped up to 50 knots, its attack speed. The faces of the control room crew lit up in anticipation.

  “Unit two, detect,” Bahnhoff said happily. “Detect. Lost it… Come on, sweetheart. Detect. Acquisition, unit two. Captain, we’ve got him.”

  “Conn, Sonar,” Pacino heard through his headset, the volume suddenly loud. “Torpedo in the water, bearing two three five!” Target One had finally returned fire.

  “Helm,” Pacino ordered, “all ahead flank. Maneuvering cavitate. Diving Officer, depth fifteen hundred feet, 35 degree down angle.”

  Four ominous BOOMS shook the ship as its main reactor-coolant pumps were switched to fast speed. Aside from a torpedo launch, the check valves in the coolant piping made the loudest noise the Devilfish could make. The deck began to vibrate as the ship came up to flank speed, 35 knots, her dual main engines shrieking far aft in the engine room, her screw spinning wildly and cavitating — boiling up sheets of angry, noisy bubbles of steam in the ocean.

  Pacino looked to the forward bulkhead at the ship control panel’s gages. The control team was three men seated at controls, two in front on either side of a central console and one in the middle to supervise the other two. In the port seat was the stern planes man, who put his control yoke to full dive.

  Two hundred feet aft the huge control surfaces, driven by high-pressure hydraulics, went to the dive position, forcing the submarine to a down angle. Her speed, and the fairwater planes in a diving position on the sail, nosed her down into a steep 35-degree dive. Every man at battle stations held on to keep from falling to the forward bulkhead. The hull of the submarine groaned and popped as seawater pressure increased with the depth. No matter how many years a man spent at sea, submerged, the sound would always be eerie, ominous, Pacino thought.

  “Loss of torpedo-control wires, units one and two. Captain,” Bahnhoff said, not yet registering that the target had counterfired. He was so caught up in his two torpedo hits that he didn’t realize it.

  “Torpedo room. Conn,” Pacino ordered over a hand-held microphone he had grabbed, “cut the wires to tubes one and two, shut the outer doors and drain tubes.”

  Suddenly the deck levelled out at 1500 feet, test depth, her deck still vibrating as 30,000-shaft horsepower blasted her through the water at flank speed.

  “Conn, Sonar,” Pacino’s headset crackled, “incoming torpedo now bears two three three. Slight right bearing drift. It’s range-gating.” Outside the hull they could hear a high-pitched pinging that got louder, more frequent, more insistent. The torpedo knew exactly where they were. And Pacino knew his only chance was that by going flank speed he might draw out the chase long enough to make the torpedo run out of fuel.

  “Maneuvering, Captain,” he said into a mike, “unload the turbine generators as much as possible and load the battery. I want every ounce of steam we have going to the main engines. And raise T-AVE to 520 degrees — you’ll have to override the cutback.”

  A speaker in the control room overhead boomed harshly through the previous quiet.

  “UNLOAD THE TG’S, LOAD THE BATTERY, MAXIMIZE MAIN ENGINE STEAM, T-AVE TO 520 AND CUTBACK OVERRIDE, CONN, MANEUVERING, AYE.”

  Pacino strained to check out the speed indicator. Thirty-five knots and steady. He watched to see if he was getting a bit more speed from the reactor but it was no good. The incoming torpedo would be at the hull at any minute. The torpedo pinged louder. Pacino looked at the geographic plot, then at Position One on the fire-control screens. Position-One’s officer was trying to get a solution on the torpedo, but without maneuvering the ship it was all a guess. The weapon could be five thousand yards away or five hundred.

  “Conn, Sonar,” Pacino heard in his headset, “torpedo still incoming, range-gate narrowing. Within one thousand yards.” Pacino shook his head. He’d gotten two hits on the enemy, so what? The enemy weapon was zooming in at over 50 knots and Devilfish was only doing 35. That put torpedo-impact less than two minutes away. Pacino looked toward the rear of the control room at the ship’s framed Jolly Roger flag with the Devilfish’s motto sewn above and below the grinning skull and crossbones of the pirate flag. The motto read:

  IF YOU AIN’T CHEATIN’ YOU AIN’T TRYIN’

  Every watchstander in the control room of the Devilfish had frozen, waiting for torpedo-impact. The sound of the torpedo’s screw was now louder, huge fingernails scraping a giant blackboard. While Pacino stared at the flag, and its motto, an idea came to him. He mounted the periscope stand and called to the Chief of the Watch at the portside ballast-control panel: “Emergency blow the forward group.”

  “Blow forward, aye,” the chief said, his tone betraying how odd he thought the order. Nonetheless, he reached for one of two large levers, hit its plunger and pushed it up to the stop.

  Immediately a sudden loud roar filled the control room, the sound of ultrahigh-pressure air roaring into the ship’s ballast tanks and blowing out the water. Dense fog filled the room, condensation from the leakage around the blow valve. Visibility shrank to less than a foot. The chief grabbed a small lever and pulled it to the right, sounding the alarm throughout the ship for an emergency surface.

  OOH-GAH, OOH-GAH, OOH-GAH. It was not the submarine’s klaxon horn of John Wayne movies. The alarm was generated electronically and sounded like it came from a cheap video arcade game amplified to a distorted, earsplitting volume. The chief pulled a hand-held microphone from the panel: “SURFACE, SURFACE, SURFACE.”

  Pacino shouted over the violent roar of the emergency blow system: “Chief, emergency blow aft.”

  “Emergency blow aft, aye sir. Blowing aft.” The noise got worse, the roar louder than a torpedolaunch, and instead of a quick crash it was a sustained kind of scream. The fog in the room grew thicker. The ship-control party pushed their faces close to the panels to read their gages. In the Devilfish’s main ballast tanks, filled a moment before with seawater, high-pressure air forced the seawater out. The tanks went dry fifteen seconds after the aft-system blow, and suddenly Devilfish was hundreds of tons lighter. Nothing would keep her submerged for long now.

  “Secure the blow,” Pacino ordered. The room went quiet again, only the sound of the pinging and torpedo screw could be heard. The depth gage clicked once, twice, several times. The fog began to disperse. The deck floated upward, becoming steeper a degree at a time.

  Pacino’s voice reverberated throughout the ship on the circuit-one microphone: “This is the captain. We are emergency blowing to the surface to try to avoid the torpedo. We may get lucky — if it’s like ours the weapon will be programmed not to
go above a ceiling. If we can get shallow fast enough and above the ceiling we may be able to get away from it.”

  The deck inclined up and up, 20 degrees, 25, to 45 degrees. The sternplanesman held full dive on the stern planes. Without the planes on dive the boat would certainly have been vertical. The ship’s speed indicator showed 40 knots.

  Pacino was hanging from a stainless steel rod above the number-two periscope. The depth gage reeled off the depth—750 feet… 500 … 300. Devilfish was rocketing to the surface. Pacino glanced at the sonar repeater. He might evade the torpedo but he might have made things worse — once they punched through the thermal layer, if there was any kind of shipping above it was about to get 4500 tons of nuclear submarine rammed into it at 40 knots. The force of such a collision would surely sink both vessels.

  * * *

  The USS Diamond was an ugly surface ship, a typical salvage vessel. She was the range-safety ship for the day’s highly realistic submarine-versus-submarine torpedo-shot exercise. Her sonar showed Devilfish had gotten off the first two shots, the USS Allentown had been slow to get off a counterfire but had nearly sunk Devilfish. Both of Devilfish’s torpedoes had hit their mark, but as the Allentown”s torpedo zeroed in on the Devilfish the sonar officer on the Diamond pulled off his headset and shouted, “Devilfish is emergency-blowing, bearing north.”

  The pilothouse, in a near-panic, put the rudder over hardright to head south and away from the submarine emergency-blowing to the surface. The wake boiled up at Diamond’s stern as she tried to run from the area. The offwatch crew gathered at the fantail aft to catch sight of the sub about to come screaming out of the depths.

  Suddenly the sea directly astern of the retreating Diamond exploded, a tower of foam leaping in a column from the water. Following the foam, a streamlined nose leaped from the ocean. Almost in slow motion, the rest of the cylindrical shape came out of the sea, black on top, dull red on the bottom. In less than a second the massive three-hundred-foot-length of 32-feet-diameter steel shape came roaring out of the water at a 50-degree angle, jumped completely out of the sea, a spray splashing over the salvage ship as the submarine’s huge brass screw became momentarily exposed. The behemoth fell crashing back to the water, a tidal wave coming over the transom of the Diamond, soaking the men at the rail and nearly washing one overboard.

  As the Devilfish bobbed in the water in a field of white foam and angry bubbles, most of the drenched Diamond crew cheered in appreciation… it wasn’t every day they saw a submarine so blatantly break the rules and win. One soaked chief petty officer turned to another: “The captain of that sub is going to pay for that stunt with his dolphins.” The other shook his head. “No he ain’t. That there’s the Devilfish — she cheats at ever’thang. Gets away with it, too.”

  * * *

  Abruptly the angle came off the ship, throwing Pacino into the back of the Diving Officer’s seat. Although he and his crew had won, he couldn’t shake a sobering thought: Would the tactic have worked against a real Russian torpedo? He relinquished the periscope to Officer of the Deck Lieutenant Brayton and spoke to the crew.

  “We seem to have been successful in evading the torpedo. We’ll have to wait and see if the Diamond confirms a kill for us on Target One. Carry on. Helm to Maneuvering, switch main reactor coolant pumps to slow speed. All ahead one third, right fifteen degrees rudder, steady course two seven zero. XO, secure from battle stations.”

  Near Pacino on the periscope stand a speaker came to life, static sputtering out of it. Pacino stooped down and turned up the volume. It was a human voice booming through the depths.

  “Deep… deep… deep… coming up… echo…” It was the underwater telephone, the UWT, an active sonar system that transmitted voices instead of pings or pulses. The coming-up call indicated another submarine was coming up to periscope depth or to surface.

  “Put the scope on it,” Pacino said. The Officer of the Deck turned the periscope over to Pacino and waited for the USS Allentown — their opponent this afternoon — to surface.

  Pacino’s mission had been to sneak up on the attack submarine and fire a Hullbuster shot without being detected. But even being tipped off beforehand hadn’t helped the Allentown, Pacino thought. She didn’t even know the Devilfish was there until the Hullbusters went active.

  Commander Henry Duckett of the Allentown had been Michael Pacino’s old squad leader when he was a plebe at the Naval Academy. Duckett had, in fact, made life miserable for Pacino, to the point of nearly hazing him out of Annapolis. But today Duckett commanded the Allentown, a new Los-Angeles-class attack submarine. And today, the Devilfish, the older Piranha-class attack boat, had snuck up on her, scored two hits and evaded a 50-knot attacking torpedo. Not too shabby, Pacino thought.

  The UWT sputtered to life again: “Devilfish, this is ALLENTOWN. Over…” Pacino recognized the voice. Duckett. He turned the periscope back over to Brayton and picked up the microphone, hit a toggle switch and spoke, his voice that echoed back at him sounding like the voice of a giant bouncing off the ocean floor.

  “Allentown, this is Devilfish. One in, over.”

  “Allentown’s surfacing. Captain,” Brayton reported from the periscope.

  “Devilfish, this is Allentown… report Uniform Whiskey Mike… I say again… report Uniform Whiskey Mike… over.”

  “her!” Pacino snapped to Rapier.

  “Uniform Whiskey Mike” was NATO code for “you missed me.”

  “It’s bullshit, Cap’n. We kicked his ass,” Rapier said.

  “Allentown, this is Devilfish,” Pacino said into the microphone, “negative Uniform Whiskey Mike, repeat, negative Uniform Whiskey Mike. Duckett, I hit you fair and square. Twice.”

  “Captain, look at this,” the Officer of the Deck said from the periscope. Pacino took the scope as the OOD mumbled! “Low power on the horizon, bearing two three zero.” On the television periscope-repeater Pacino’s crosshairs were centered on the sail, the conning tower, of the USS Allentown. And sticking in one side of Allentown’s sail and out the other was one of Pacino’s torpedoes that had impaled the rear part of the sail.

  “Off sa’deck, line up the periscope still camera. We need a few pictures of this for posterity,” Pacino said.

  “Lined up, sir,” the OOD replied.

  Pacino moved up to the UWT transmitter: “Allentown, this is Devilfish. I say again, negative Uniform Whiskey Mike… advise you to check your sail… it’s got a Hullbuster sticking clean through it…”

  Duckett’s aggrieved voice was recognizable in spite of the UWT distortion: “Devilfish this is Allentown. Cheaters never prosper. Out.”

  Pacino keyed his mike.

  “Allentown, this is Devilfish. Old budd, don’t you know? YOU AIN’T CHEATIN’, YOU AIN’T TRYIN’. Devilfish out.”

  * * *

  The Allentown rolled in the gentle swells on the surface. Her Officer of the Deck stood in the cramped bridge cockpit at the top of the sail and scanned the horizon with his binoculars. The ship was stopped, waiting for its opponent the Devilfish to head toward the traffic-separation scheme outside of Thimble Shoals Channel. The sun was low on the horizon, the Atlantic air cool and fresh after two weeks submerged. Lieutenant Ron Graves, the OOD, picked up a microphone at the forward lip of the cockpit. “Control, Bridge, raise the radar mast and bump up the Bigmouth antenna.”

  The communication box crackled with static and a loud distorted voice said, “BRIDGE, CONTROL, RAISING RADAR AND BIGMOUTH.”

  The OOD replaced the microphone and again trained his binoculars on the shrinking form of the Devilfish as she sailed to Norfolk. He waited for the thunks of hydraulics raising the masts from the sail, but all he heard was a brief grinding noise from aft. He dropped his binoculars and turned to look behind him. Neither mast had risen. He was about to call the control room again when the bridge communication box sputtered to life.

  “BRIDGE, CONTROL, CAPTAIN TO THE BRIDGE.”

  “Captain’s coming up. Bridge a
ye.”

  The OOD wondered how the skipper could know so soon that something was wrong. He stepped to the far starboard side of the cockpit and hinged up the deck grating to the access tunnel, which plunged down thirty feet to the deck. Captain Henry Duckett hauled his bulky frame up the tunnel with surprising speed. Large and solid, Duckett was large enough to force his men to duck into side rooms whenever he walked down the ship’s narrow passageways. Solid enough to make the offensive line of the Allentown’s inter-squadron football team the terror of the fleet piers. He was also not known for his sweet temperament. Now he pushed the OOD out of the way, leaned far out over the starboard lip of the bridge and peered aft.

  “I’ll be god damned.” He shouldered past Graves and climbed back down the access tunnel. “Damned fiberglass sails.” His voice floated upward. “Goddamned Pacino.”

  “Good afternoon to you too, sir,” OOD Graves said, looking down at the retreating form of his captain, then leaned over the starboard side of the cockpit to see the current source of Duckett’s foul mood. Not ten feet behind him, protruding horizontally from the fiberglass flanks of the black sail, was the stern of a Mark 49 Hullbuster torpedo, its propulsor blades still spinning. There would be hell to pay.

  CHAPTER 2

  MONDAY, 13 DECEMBER

  SEVEROMORSK NAVAL COMPLEX, NORTHERN RUSSIA

  CONSTRUCTION DRYDOCK

  The Severomorsk Naval Complex near Murmansk on the Russian northern coast was the size of a city. Within its barbed wire fence and concrete barriers were two sprawling shipyards, repair yards, submarine and surface-ship operating bases, a weapons depot and the many buildings of Northern Reel headquarters. It was drab and massive. Shipyard workers crowded the walkways. Sailors and naval officers were almost as numerous. In the submarine building yards a half-dozen gigantic buildingways and drydocks were centers of frantic activity, three shifts a day, seven days a week. The largest construction drydock, Building Dock 4, was over 500 meters long and 20 meters deep. A six-story building could have been built in Dock 4 without rising above the rim. The dock was pumped dry of the brackish channel water. Nestled in the dock was a submarine, the first ship of the Project 985 class of attack vessels. Outside the security building for the dock two men met and shook hands. The first was a barrel-chested man in a long greatcoat, the red epaulettes on his shoulders showing four gold stars. His head was covered by a fur cap also displaying four stars. The second was bundled in a long overcoat with a suit and tie showing at the collar of the coat. The shipyard workers avoided him.