Voyage of the Devilfish mp-1

by Michael Dimercurio

  Vlasenko complimented Katmonov on the lower two levels of his compartment, adding he was especially pleased with security. “Warrant Officer Danalov here is an asset to this vessel.”

  Katmonov and Danalov shared a quick look. “That is not what the admiral said,” from Danalov.

  “What did he say. Lieutenant?”

  “He wanted me to demote the Warrant Officer. He said Danalov should be disarmed. It seems Danalov put a pistol to the admiral’s head when the admiral was looking at the weapons. I don’t like the idea of an officer carrying a loaded pistol, sir. Neither did Danalov. But Admiral Novskoyy refused to hand over his weapon, a serious violation of Fleet Regulations, sir, particularly in the weapons spaces. I don’t know what I should do, sir. How do I tell an admiral he’s violating Fleet Regs?”

  “You don’t. Lieutenant. You tell me, I handle it.”

  He left them and made his way back to the second compartment’s main shaft and again stared at Novskoyy’s locked door. It occurred to him that he knew where there was an extra key to the door, but dismissed the thought. Don’t provoke the man on this trip — the admiral would soon be gone and the boat would again be his.

  Vlasenko turned away from the door and went to the ladder to the lower level, where he found Captain 3rd Rank Vladimir Ivanov standing ten meters aft in the passageway outside his stateroom door. Ivanov, normally the Operations Officer, was responsible for Weapons, Communications, Sonar and the ship’s tactics, but on this run he also became Acting First Officer when the second in command of the Kaliningrad took sick.

  Ivanov motioned to him, and Vlasenko walked aft down the passageway.

  “Good morning, sir. We have a problem. Two problems.”

  Ivanov was in his mid-thirties but seemed younger. He could drink vodka all night and was unofficially the ship’s number-one bachelor, usually not one to take life too seriously, but ever since he had assumed the duty of Acting First Officer when the ship had pulled out of Severomorsk he had seemed agitated and tense.

  “Go on, Ivanov.”

  “Technical problem first, sir. The multifunction transmitter cabinet is blowing fuses. It’s eaten two circuit boards for the signal drivers. We’re trouble-shooting it now, but I’m beginning to think the UHF to the satellite may be out of commission for some time.” Vlasenko shrugged. Routine trouble and they would soon be under the arctic ice cover where there would be no need to transmit to the satellite. Emergency systems could handle the communications if they needed a rescue.

  “Well, sir, that leads us to the second problem. Admiral Novskoyy… he wants the UHF systems of the multifunction antenna ready at all times, commencing now.”

  Son of a bitch, those were orders that should have originated with him, Vlasenko thought, not with a visiting flag officer.

  “I will talk to the admiral, Ivanov. Meantime, keep working on the problem. Are you going forward?”

  “Yes, sir. I expect I will be there until the equipment works. The admiral wants the gear to be up by this evening.”

  “Tonight? Did he say why?”

  “No, Captain. Just that I will be sorry if the equipment is not working by then.”

  Ivanov looked ready to deal with Novskoyy personally as he hurried up the ladder to the upper level. Vlasenko understood, but hoped the young headstrong Ivanov could keep his temper under control this run. He knew it wouldn’t be easy… not for any of them.

  Vlasenko, aborting the tour of the second compartment, headed aft to the nuclear control room. Nuclear control was really just a large waist-high computer console that wrapped around a right angle with an elevated platform behind it. The platform had a command chair reserved for the Chief Engineer, who was sitting in it and looking altogether regal.

  Captain-Lieutenant Mikhail Geroshkov plainly loved his job and little wonder. The propulsion plant of the Kaliningrad was far superior to any other in the fleet, for that matter was much more advanced than anything the Americans had, with their low-power density, water-cooled cores. The Kaliningrad had two reactors, each cooled by highly conductive liquid sodium. Pumps had no rotating parts and pushed the coolant through the loops using magnetism. It was very quiet. Vlasenko did not pretend to know much about nuclear power. The Russian fleet was split into two tracks — the seamanship officers, of which he was one, and the engineering corps that had the responsibility of running and repairing the plants.

  “Any problems with the plant?” Vlasenko asked Geroshkov.

  “So far, perfect. Captain.”

  “Computers working out okay?”

  “Very well, sir. I was skeptical at first but they make this operation very efficient.”

  Vlasenko watched the screens for a while, wishing he shared Geroshkov’s optimism about the computers. “Did the admiral happen to come back here?”

  “No, sir. Why would he?”

  “No reason. I’m going forward. The spaces look shipshape.”

  Vlasenko had intended to confront Admiral Novskoyy over the admiral’s giving direct orders to his men, but on reaching the upper level of the second compartment a messman indicated the admiral was in his stateroom sleeping. Well, he’d check out the control compartment and wait to confront Novskoyy after figuring out exactly what he would say. He didn’t want to start a war aboard his own ship. Still…

  CHAPTER 8

  TUESDAY, 14 DECEMBER, 1014 EST

  WESTERN ATLANTIC OCEAN

  40 NAUTICAL MILES NORTHEAST OF NORFOLK, VIRGINIA

  Commander Jon Rapier started his walk through of the submarine, ensuring the ship was rigged for sea. This had always been Pacino’s duty — the captain insisted on seeing every corner of the boat himself. But today he had asked Rapier to do the walk through and had remained in his stateroom. Something was definitely wrong with him. Rapier thought. The last two years had been tough with home life and navy life seemingly at cross purposes. But even during the stormiest times Pacino had kept a sense of humor. This run was different. Something had changed the captain and it seemed to be much more than any family squabble.

  In his stateroom Rapier had changed into his underway uniform, a one-piece cotton overall with his name sewn above the right pocket. He strapped on his khaki belt and radiation dosimeter, pinned his dolphins on, got into his at-sea boots, left his stateroom and walked forward along the central passageway through operations-compartment upper level and down narrow stairs to the middle level, then turned left to officers country. Each “stateroom” occupied by three officers was six-by-six feet, with two chairs and two fold-down desktops, a few lockers recessed into the fake wood panelling and three “coffins,” racks shaped like drawers in a morgue except each had a side-entrance curtain and a reading light. The coffins were stacked three high in the staterooms, four high for the enlisted men. Those high-ranking enough got coffins to themselves; many hot-racked, shared a coffin with someone on a different watch section. That still left about twenty men who had to make a rack on top of the torpedoes in operations lower level. At the aft end of the officers-country passageway was the wardroom, about twenty-by-fifteen feet with a table in the center. At the aft end was the door to the small pantry, which further aft opened into the main galley. The wardroom was used as a dining room, tactical-planning room and end-of-watch reconstruction room. One of the largest open areas aboard, the crew’s mess, could seat about thirty men. The starboard bulkhead was painted with a mural of two square-rigged ships sailing on a stormy sea.

  The central columns were covered with hemp rope spiralling around, with brass lanterns at the top. The forward bulkhead had a mirror framed in more hemp rope. The leather bench seats and tablecovers were done up in blue. The deck was tiled in blue and white. Actually the mess looked more like a cheap fish house than a combat submarine. Never mind. Rapier told himself, at least the crew liked it. At the aft end of the crew’s mess was the Trash Disposal Unit room. The TDU was a vertical torpedo tube used to eject compacted trash through a ball valve at the hull. The garbage was sealed in
plastic and weighted with lead bricks so no floating waste would give away their position.

  By the TDU room was a steel ladder to the lower level that Rapier slid down. Rapier’s inspection now took him through the gyro room below the crew’s mess, to the Auxiliary Machinery room, then the torpedo room. In each space he made sure there was no unsecured equipment that could get damaged if the ship took on a severe angle or suddenly went into a roll. He lingered in the torpedo room, a long wide space built for weapon storage. A central aisle threaded between the waist-high storage table for the upper tubes. The port and starboard tables were packed with Mark 49 torpedoes, each painted green and stencilled with white block letters— MOD B HULLBUSTER. At the centerline were the experimental Mark 50’s, painted glossy red and stencilled HULLCRUSHER and looking long and graceful and fast. Forward of the weapon-storage area was the central-torpedo local-control panel, where the torpedo chief flooded and drained tubes and where the weapons could be moved from the panel with powerful hydraulic rams. On either side of the local control panel were the tubes themselves, canted outward from the centerline because the torpedo room was amidships. Since the torpedoes were socalled smart weapons, it no longer mattered in which direction they were launched… they would turn toward the target impact point by themselves. The tubes were embedded in water tanks, which were piped to the ship’s high-pressure air-system. Air pressurized the water tank, which was open to the aft end of the torpedo tube. The pressurized water pushed the weapon out of the tube, flushing it out. No air bubbles would escape to allow them to be detected. On each tube’s inner door hung a sign, WARSHOT LOADED.

  Rapier checked the tubes, found them dry, their interlocks functional. He nodded to Chief Robertson, who sat at the local control panel. He then called control to tell them he was going to look into the battery compartment below the torpedo room. He lifted the hatch and peered down. The space was three feet high, thirty feet long, twenty feet wide. Once inside, a person would be lying on top of the batteries. Entry required removal of all metal objects on the body to avoid shorting the cells, each of which was the size of a household’s water heater and full of sulfuric acid. Satisfied, Rapier stood, lowered the hatch and left the torpedo room.

  Rapier knew the nuclear spaces aft would be ready. Chief Engineer Matt Delaney’s troops, the nukes, always were more squared away than the operations and weapons sailors, at least they thought they were. He crossed the centerline passageway to the captain’s stateroom and knocked. No reply. He opened the door and saw Pacino sitting at the table, staring into space.

  “Sir?” Pacino focused and looked at Rapier. “I’ve completed my tour. The ship is rigged for sea, sir. No major discrepancies.”

  “Very well, XO,” Pacino said, his voice a monotone.

  “Anything else, sir?”

  Pacino shook his head, and Rapier got out of there. Clearly the captain had a lot on his mind.

  As the door shut gently and Rapier’s footsteps faded down the ladder to operations middle level, Pacino shook off memories of his father and the Russian admiral somewhere out there… He got up from the table and made his way forward into the control room to the navigation alcove. Even at flank speed they would not be able to dive until mid-afternoon because the continental shelf was some 150 miles east of the Virginia coastline. The Devilfish, after all, was designed for submerged speed… on the surface she could only do 20 knots because of the need to fight the bow wave. Pacino checked his watch impatiently, and began to calculate the time it would take to get to the marginal ice zone north of Iceland.

  * * *

  Twenty minutes later the wardroom table was crowded with officers around the table, some clasping their hands together on the blue leather cover, some doodling on spiral notebook pages. Executive Officer Rapier took his seat to the right of the chair near the end reserved for the captain. Navigator Ian Christman stood at the corner of the room at a curtain. Christman had two modes of operation: frantic or sleepy.

  Pacino walked into the room, accepted a cup of coffee, sat at the head of the table and waved at Christman.

  “Go ahead, Nav.”

  Christman stepped into the pantry, the small closet between the wardroom and galley, shut its outer door and threw the bolt. He shut both wardroom doors and locked them, sealing the room. Back in the corner of the room by the captain’s chair he drew the curtain aside, revealing an Arctic Ocean chart and a blueprint of the Russian OMEGA submarine, both stamped TOP SECRET. He turned to the men in the room and pointed to the chart.

  “Gentlemen, this is the Arctic Ocean, and this is the Russian OMEGA-class attack submarine.” Christman loved a dramatic opening. “Our mission this run is to find this son-of-a-bitch, just completed this week and now submerged for sea trials. Once we find it we get an SPL and bring it home to the geniuses at COMSUBLANT for analysis. The plan is a little complicated so listen up. Our sonar search has a problem… no boat has ever heard the OMEGA before. Our tonal search gates are configured for the AKULA class. We hope the propulsion-plant configuration is at least similar…”

  “Yo, Nav,” Stokes interrupted to Christman’s annoyance. The contrast between the hyper Christman and Stokes’ southern calm made for constant friction between them. “If we can’t hear this bad boy with our tonal gates, how do we’xpect to snap his ass up? We could sail right by him’n’ never know he’s there.”

  Hick or not, he’d made a crucial point, Pacino thought.

  Christman frowned at him. “The truth is that we may never find him during our allotted mission time. But we may get a hint of him from a careless transient noise. We may get lucky and detect a torpedo exercise… several other Russian attack submarines in the area, each of which will be detectable in our search gates. Or we could get a radio message from COMSUBLANT that he’s been detected by SOSUS. Not likely, I admit. SOSUS won’t be much use for a quiet contact, and this far north the position uncertainties could put a good detect in a thousand square mile area. Our last card is PHOTOINT. You know, satellite surveillance. Maybe we can pick up a surfacing with an infrared scan from the polar orbit KH-17.”

  “Odds are,” Stokes drawled, “this here boy won’t be surfacing at all. Why would he?”

  “Might not, but then, if there’s one thing we’ve learned about the Russians, it’s that they’re unpredictable.”

  Even Stokes had to nod at that.

  “Our track is marked in black, taking us to our search position here. We’re scheduled to transit under the ice in three days. Our search position grid is located at the operation area where COMSUBLANT expects the OMEGA to be doing its sea trials.”

  Christman pointed to an area marked in red far north of the bananashaped island of Novaya Zemlya.

  “As you can plainly see, it’s a large area and not much help to us in finding the OMEGA. Okay, so much for the search phase. Now, assume for a moment that we have a good detect on the OMEGA. This is where we start the SPL. I hate to break this to you first-tour officers but against the Russians, an SPL is a hell of a lot different than the exercise we did against Billfish in the Med. We’ll be less than five yards away from the Russian’s hull, circling him and recording him. And unlike our exercise with the Billfish, the Russian is not under orders to be nice and control his course and speed for us. He could go nuts at any moment, smash right into us and breach the hull. Or worse, shoot at us.”

  Pacino cut in. “This next is Special Compartmented Information, Top Secret — Tophat. A few years ago one of our boats, a Piranha class, ran into a Russian attack sub during an SPL. The Russian launched two warshot 53-centimeter torpedoes at her. A nasty way to end a northern run…”

  “What happened, Cap’n?” Brett Fasteen, the Electrical Officer, asked.

  “Our boat had gone to flank, and by luck it managed to avoid running into an icepressure ridge. One torpedo was a dud, the other ran out of fuel after a twenty-minute pursuit. But let me tell you, twenty minutes is a long time to spend on the business end of a Russian warshot tor
pedo. The commanding officer hung up his dolphins after that run.”

  Pacino looked around the room. If there had been any lingering doubts about the importance and the danger of this OP, they had disappeared. And they still didn’t know the half of it…

  * * *

  Pacino, in his stateroom, looked at the briefing sheets of the OMEGA that Donchez had sent over before Devilfish got under way, thought about that other half… somehow avenging his father’s death by confronting and destroying Novskoyy, the man who had sent him to the bottom, the man who Donchez had told him was on the OMEGA. But how? How…? Fantasy took over… If he could collide with the Russian, maybe the OMEGA would shoot first. If a torpedo was screaming in at them, no one would question the captain’s order to fire back, the only problem would be evading the Russian torpedo—

  An insistent buzzing sound broke him out of his farfetched reverie. Farfetched…? It was the phone from the Conn.

  “Captain,” Pacino said, sweat pouring off him.

  “Offsa’deck, you asked for a wakeup call, sir.”

  “Thanks. I’ll be out on the Conn in a few minutes.” He stretched, ran hot water on his face and looked in the mirror. He’d let his beard grown on this run. Normally he didn’t do that… it made his face look too much like his father’s. Good, this was the time for it.

  Now 160 nautical miles northeast of Norfolk, Devilfish was still running on the surface but she was rigged for dive, the watch already transferred from the bridge to the control room. Lieutenant Stokes, the Officer of the Deck, hugged the number-two periscope on the raised stand, slowly rotating it over the horizon.

  Pacino walked now into the control room. In the forward end sat the four men who drove the submarine. Two seats were stationed behind a large panel with a console in between. Each seat had a steering wheel in front. One seat was positioned behind and between the two seats. The panel wrapped around to the left side where the Chief of the Watch sat. Actually it looked much like the cockpit of a large airplane. The left “pilot’s” seat was the fairwater planes man, whose job was to control the horizontal fins on the sail. In the right seat was the helmsman, who steered the ship with the rudder and controlled the sternplanes, the horizontal fins in the far rear of the vessel. The seat behind them was the Diving Officer, charged with the ship’s angle and depth; he supervised the two planesmen and the Chief of the Watch on the left wraparound panel. The Chief of the Watch’s panel controlled the various tanks in the ship, the ballast and weight distribution and the hovering system.