Voyage of the Devilfish mp-1

by Michael Dimercurio

  Stokes drained the last of the coffee and stowed the cup, then heard the communication box boom out, “BRIDGE MANEUVERING, REQUEST TO SPIN THE SHAFT TO KEEP THE MAIN ENGINES WARM.”

  “Maneuvering, Bridge,” Stokes replied laconically into his microphone. “Spin the shaft as necessary.”

  “SPIN THE SHAFT AS NECESSARY, BRIDGE, MANEUVERING AYE.”

  What was the holdup for getting under way. Stokes wondered in his fatigued impatience. The sun was starting to climb in the cold December sky. It was time to get this damned bucket of bolts to sea. The enlisted phone talker nudged him. The captain was emerging from the operations compartment hatch, climbing out on deck into the sun. As Pacino crossed the gangway to the pier below. Stokes clicked the P.A. Circuit One ship wide announcing system microphone and gave the crew a dose of his accent. “DEVILFISH, DEPARTING!”

  Commodore Benjamin Adams was waiting on the pier. Actually he was a Navy captain but was addressed by his station in life as commanding officer of the submarine squadron, just as Pacino was called captain when he was only a commander. Adams was a paunchy balding man in his fifties, with a gravelly voice, a brisk manner and a dry sense of humor. Pacino walked up and saluted. Adams smiled and returned the salute.

  “Well, Patch, you all set for this mysterious mission of yours?”

  “Yes sir,” Pacino said, pleased to hear his father’s nickname applied to him.

  “You want to let me in on what you’re doing on this run?” It was not unusual for squadron commodores not to know the mission of one of his squadron’s ships. When in port the ships came under Adams’ administrative control. Once at sea the submarine commander answered only to COMSUBLANT. Since submarines were under orders to maintain radio silence at sea a submarine captain was essentially on his own when submerged.

  Pacino made a zipping motion over his lips. Adams nodded.

  “Okay, Patch. Wherever the hell you’re going, good luck.”

  “Thanks, Commodore. Request permission to get under way, sir.”

  Adams looked over at Devilfish. “Your tugboats late?”

  “No sir.”

  “No tugs?” Adams asked, knowing the answer.

  “No tugs, sir.”

  “No pilot?”

  “No pilot, sir.”

  “Get under way. Captain. And I guess this is it till January. Oh, Patch, no pirate flag this time. Right?”

  “Right, sir.” There was an awkward silence between the two men, friends separated by the gulf shaped by their respective jobs.

  Adams shook Pacino’s hand. “Well, good luck again, Patch. And good hunting.

  Pacino walked across the gangway, again struck by how different this day’s underway was from his father’s.

  “DEVILFISH, ARRIVING.”

  Pacino walked forward to the leading edge of the sail, climbed up the steel ladder rungs set into the flank of the sail 25 feet up to the bridge. Stokes and the phone talker were crammed into the small cockpit of the bridge. Aft, poking his head from a trapdoor, a clamshell, was the enlisted lookout. In the crawlspace between the bridge and the lookout cockpit was another enlisted-man phone talker, shoehorned into a tight black hole with no view and no breeze. His job was to act as back-up in case the bridge communication box failed. Whenever the OOD gave a speed or rudder order, the phone talkers simultaneously relayed it to phone talkers in the control room below.

  Pacino climbed to the flying bridge at the top of the sail behind the bridge cockpit. Steel handrails, temporarily screwed into the top of the sail, were set up above and behind the bridge cockpit. Standing there, Pacino could see for miles. He checked his watch.

  “Offsa’deck, let’s lose the gangway.”

  A crane on the pier pulled the gangway off Devilfish’s hull. Pacino nodded to Stokes. “Let’s go.”

  Stokes took the bullhorn and shouted down to the lifejacketed men on the deck and on the pier, “Take in line one. Take in line two.” The linehandlers on the pier pulled the heavy lines from the bollards and tossed them to the linehandlers on the boat. The ship’s bow started moving away from the pier, the current pushing her away.

  “Take in three. Take in four.” Stokes leaned over the starboard side of the sail, looking aft at the linehandlers. As the pier sailors tossed the thick lines to the boat’s linehandlers, he picked up his microphone.

  “Shift colors!” An air horn at the base of the cockpit blasted an earsplitting shriek for eight seconds, announcing that the warship was no longer pierbound. Simultaneously the American flag was struck on deck, a bigger American flag raised on the temporary flagpole behind Pacino, and on the other lanyard next to the American flag, the Jolly Roger was raised to flap proudly in the breeze. On the pier. Commodore Adams smiled in spite of himself.

  Pacino climbed down into the bridge cockpit with the Officer of the Deck and the Junior Officer of the Deck.

  “Flying bridge clear. Off’sa’deck,” he said to Stokes.

  “Raise the radar mast, rotate and radiate.” Stokes passed orders to the control room, and above and behind them the radar hummed and squeaked as it rotated, helping the control room crew below navigate out of Norfolk. Both periscopes rotated furiously, taking visual fixes as the navigator, an Irishman named Christman with red hair and temperament to match, directed them out.

  “BRIDGE, NAVIGATOR,” the bridge communicationbox rattled, “100 YARDS TO TURNING POINT. NEW COURSE, ZERO EIGHT ONE.”

  “Navigator, Bridge aye,” Stokes drawled into the microphone.

  Pacino looked at the sky and the sea. The wind was stiff and cold, numbing his windward left cheek. The sky was a deep blue with white clouds in layer-thin wisps. The sun was bright but cold and low on the horizon. The southern mouth of the Chesapeake Bay was choppy in the wind. The water looked a dirty green, small whitecaps on every wave. Pacino looked through his binoculars down the channel after the next turn and saw a merchant tanker lumbering down toward them, inbound to Norfolk’s” international terminal.

  “BRIDGE, NAVIGATOR, MARK THE TURN TO COURSE ZERO EIGHT ONE.”

  “Helm, Bridge, right fifteen degrees rudder, steady course zero eight one,” Stokes ordered. Pacino nodded.

  “Helm, all ahead standard,” Stokes called into his microphone.

  “Off sa’deck, shift pumps,” Pacino said, “we’re about to haul ass.” The ship began to react to the speed increase of 10 knots, the bow wave rising over the bow until the hull forward of the sail started to get wet and the wake aft to boil white.

  Stokes spoke into his microphone: “Maneuvering, Bridge, shift reactor main coolant pumps to fast speed.”

  “SHIFT REACTOR MAIN COOLANT PUMPS TO FAST SPEED, BRIDGE, MANEUVERING AYE … BRIDGE, MANEUVERING, REACTOR MAIN COOLANT PUMPS ARE RUNNING IN FAST SPEED.” Stokes acknowledged. He looked at Pacino, standing beside him on the crowded bridge.

  “Flank it, OOD,” Pacino said, training his binoculars again on the inbound merchant ship and the Thimble Shoals Channel beyond.

  “Helm, all ahead flank,” Stokes ordered.

  “ALL AHEAD FLANK, HELM AYE … BRIDGE, HELM, MANEUVERING ANSWERS ALL AHEAD FLANK.”

  The bridge box sputtered with Rapier’s voice: “BRIDGE, XO. CAPTAIN TO THE IJV PHONE,” requesting that Pacino pick up the UV phone circuit, a more private line than the P.A. speakers.

  “Captain,” Pacino said into the handset.

  “XO, sir,” Rapier said. “Recommend we keep the speed down in the channel, sir. Last time we flanked it we got a speeding ticket from the Coasties. Max speed in the channel is 15 knots.”

  “The Coast Guard has their priorities, we’ve got ours, XO.”

  “Your hide, sir.”

  The bow wave climbed up the hull until it was breaking aft of the sail. The water stream climbed the sail itself, spraying the bridge officers. The hull vibrated beneath them with the power of the ship’s main engines, two steam turbines driving a huge reduction gear and the single spiral-bladed screw. The wake boiled up astern. The wind blew i
n the officers’ faces, making communication possible only through screaming. Devilfish rocked in the waves, five degrees to port, then back to starboard. The periscopes rotated, the radar mast whistled as it spun in circles, the flags crackled in the wind and the bow wave roared. Usually the sounds of getting under way filled Pacino’s soul with a near-pure contentment. Today, all he could think about was his father, and a Russian admiral that had put him on the bottom.

  CHAPTER 7

  TUESDAY, 14 DECEMBER, 1100 GREENWICH MEAN TIME

  ARCTIC OCEAN

  BENEATH THE POLAR ICECAP

  In the winter, the polar ice almost reached the northern Russian coast. An icebreaker had to clear the way for the fleet submarine Kaliningrad to get under way, and now it proceeded at full speed under the icecap. Admiral Alexi Novskoyy unpacked his duffel bag into the spacious lockers of the commanding officer’s quarters. Captain 1st Rank Yuri Vlasenko had been surprised by Novskoyy’s arrival on the pier, saying he had not had time to arrange conveniences for an admiral and his staff. Novskoyy had waved the protests aside. There would be no staff, just himself. Vlasenko had quickly given over his captain’s stateroom, where the admiral was now settling in.

  A knock came at the door of the outer room of the stateroom suite, which led to the second-compartment passageway.

  Novskoyy shut the lockers and unlocked the outer room door.

  Standing in the passageway was Captain Vlasenko, dressed in his underway uniform of olive green tunic over pants tucked into boots. Novskoyy waved him into the suite, pointed to a seat and locked the door after him. Vlasenko was a short but powerful man, a champion wrestler at the Marshal Grechko Higher Naval School of Underwater Navigation. His shoulders were so big that his uniforms required special tailoring. Now in his late forties, he was losing a little of his muscle tone. His once blond hair was now grayish silver and wrinkles surrounded his eyes.

  Vlasenko stared for a moment at Novskoyy’s hip, where the admiral wore a gleaming leather belt, a shining holster and a fleet-issue semiautomatic pistol. Just as on the Leningrad, Vlasenko remembered, feeling the bile rise. The man affected airs like the American general he’d read about what was his name? Patton, wore pearl-handled revolvers like a fancy cowboy… “Sir,” he began, “I came to invite you on an inspection of the ship.”

  Novskoyy smiled slightly at Vlasenko. Why would his old subordinate offer to parade him through the ship he had designed himself? All the credit belonged to him. Vlasenko was the captain only as a result of his benevolence.

  “No, I have no time for a tour. I have urgent fleet work, Captain. And besides, I know this ship better than any man alive, including you. I will assume — I will demand — that it is combat ready. Your job. Captain. Dismissed.”

  Vlasenko stared at the admiral, managed to nod and leave. As he stood in the passageway, he heard Novskoyy lock the door from the inside. Vlasenko tried to fight down his anger. Declining a ship tour with the captain was an insult, a violation of protocol for a visiting admiral. Vlasenko wondered just what this trip meant. Kaliningrad’s original agenda of machinery tests for sea trials had been cancelled by Novskoyy the moment he had come onboard. Taking an untested vessel under the icecap for a mission was not only unprecedented, it could be suicidal. And Novskoyy was acting like he was in command of the submarine. Vlasenko felt like a First Officer instead of ship’s captain. He concentrated on the ship’s inspection. Novskoyy’s ride wouldn’t last long — in a week or two he would go back to fleet HQ, leaving him in command of the most modern nuclear attack submarine in the Russian Northern Fleet. At least an inspection would get him out of his closet of a stateroom to where he could talk to the men, the kind of walk around that the arrogant Novskoyy would never bother with.

  Vlasenko walked out of the First Officer’s stateroom, now that Novskoyy had appropriated his own suite, and moved along a narrow passageway lined by bleached panelling toward the starboard side of the vessel that terminated at the main shaft, the fore-and-aft running upper-level passageway. At the intersection was the ladder to the main escape pod, an enormous 7-meter-diameter titanium ellipsoid. The Kaliningrad, so automated that a relatively few enlisted ratings were required aboard, was manned by 18 officers, 13 warrant officers and 16 enlisted men. In an emergency the main escape pod, accessed from the second compartment upper level, would be able to evacuate about 30 of the ship’s 47 men. The rest would use the control-compartment escape pod, which was designed for 18 men. But many of the Kaliningrad’s missions were under ice, where an escape pod was useless.

  Vlasenko continued forward through the main shaft, past the galley and messroom on the port side to the officers’ lounge, a large parlor with video equipment, books and easychairs. Vlasenko remembered how cramped the Leningrad had been by comparison. Well, these officers were a different generation, raised on peacetime, however uneasy the peace. He felt more than years separated him from them. He had seen more combat than he’d ever wanted. Witnessing the sinking of the American submarine… the Stingray… under the icecap by the Leningrad had been a shock. He had been the Weapons Officer under this same Admiral Novskoyy. He himself had actually pressed the firing key that sent the torpedoes out to the American vessel that day far in the past but never forgotten. He had tried to rationalize it… Novskoyy had ordered it, backed up with the threat of his service pistol… It never quite worked. He still had nightmares. And now, decades later, Novskoyy once again was a presence looming over him. As he was about to leave the lounge he was outraged to note that the door to the captain’s stateroom suite that opened into the lounge had been stitch-welded shut. A brand new submarine and this man comes onboard and welds a door shut. Why?

  Vlasenko reentered the main shaft, turned left to go forward, passing the other door to Novskoyy’s stateroom. He couldn’t help trying the knob. Locked. What the hell was Novskoyy hiding? He moved to the forward bulkhead of the second compartment, a watertight boundary between the compartments. One compartment could flood and still allow the ship to survive; if two compartments flooded it was more serious but the ship might still survive. The second compartment was designed to be the most survivable — no weapons that could explode, no seawater pipes that could rupture, no oil lines or tanks that could catch fire, no heavy equipment that could jump out of their foundations. And so it was chosen to contain the huge main escape pod. Vlasenko ducked to pass through the automatically closing watertight hatch to the first compartment — the weapons spaces. He inhaled, relishing the smell of the ozone from the electrical cabinets in the first compartment’s upper level that housed cabinets of electrical and computer gear for the communications and navigation equipment. It was the high-voltage cabinets that spewed ozone, with a smell particular to a submarine since the ventilation system could not quickly disperse it.

  Vlasenko now doubled back to the hatch to the second compartment, where a narrow, steep stairway led to the middle deck. He climbed down, and the whole environment changed. This was the middle level torpedo-tube space, the home of the three 100 centimeter tubes and the Magnum nuclear-tipped torpedoes. The immense size of the weapons was a shock. The torpedoes were the size of the minisubmarines used in World War II by the Japanese, and they were the fastest underwater weapons in the world, able to go nearly 110 kilometers per hour. With their huge girth, they also had tremendous endurance; they could go on at attack-velocity for over an hour, covering over 100 kilometers. No submerged adversary on earth could outrun a Magnum. The Magnum torpedoes were painted glossy black, gleaming and deadly in the bright lights of the compartment. Over the red-taped barricade warning of the nuclear torpedoes’ radioactivity, Vlasenko reached out and put his hand on the smooth cool surface of the topmost weapon. Immediately a cold pistol barrel nudged his neck.

  “Turn around very slowly and put your hands behind your head.” Vlasenko did, and stared into the face of Warrant Officer Dmitri Danalov, chief of security aboard, his heavy mustache nearly obscuring his upper lip.

  “Captain
!” he said, lowering his pistol and holstering it in his wide shiny black leather belt. “No offense, sir, but no one touches one of the nuclear weapons without me knowing about it.”

  Vlasenko waved off Danalov’s apology. “No, no, what you did was proper. I commend you for it.”

  “The admiral wouldn’t agree, sir…”

  “The admiral? Novskoyy was here?”

  “He was looking over the Magnum an hour ago.”

  “Did he say anything? About the Magnum?”

  “Yes, in fact, he did. He said he hoped the scientists who designed them knew what they were doing.”

  Vlasenko stored the comment. “Warrant, I’m going to the lower level. Want to come?”

  “I’d better. Captain. I don’t want my torpedo officer killing you if you surprise him.”

  They made their way to the ladder to lower level, the area with the six 53-centimeter tubes. Following Vlasenko down the stairs, Danalov was impressed at how fit Captain Vlasenko looked at forty-eight, then remembered he had been a champion wrestler at Marshal Grechko Higher Naval School of Underwater Navigation.

  The men now reached the base of the stairs, where young Senior Lieutenant Vasily Katmonov, the Torpedo Officer, came to attention.

  “Is there something I can do for you. Captain?”

  “No, just wandering the ship.” Vlasenko looked around at the space. It was clean and fresh looking. The lower-level compartment was the home of the six 53-centimeter conventional tubes and their 53-centimeter torpedoes. The weapons lay on two large racks with hydraulic rams to maneuver them into the tubes. These torpedoes were painted a dull black, as sinister looking as the Magnums above.