Barracuda: Final Bearing mp-4

by Michael Dimercurio

  For some minutes neither man said a word. Phillips looked out the window at the thick trees, their frozen branches waving in a cold wind.

  “You ever heard about the Vortex missile?” Pacino asked, looking out his own window.

  “Excuse me, sir?” Phillips moistened his lips, wanting a cigar but knowing it would not be proper unless his superior offered to let him smoke. All the more reason to be away from the top brass, he thought.

  “The Vortex antisubmarine missile, invented four years ago for the Seawolf class,” Pacino said. “The program was abandoned last year.”

  “I haven’t heard the term, sir.”

  Pacino nodded. “I was involved early in the program, I keep forgetting its classification. When I worked on it the Vortex name alone was classified secret. The program was compartmented, limited distribution, codeword stuff. Anyway, Admiral Donchez came up with the concept — an underwater weapon that’s a hybrid rocket and torpedo. It’s solid-rocket fueled, blue-laser guided. Warhead is seven tons of Plasticpac explosive with a plasma yield equivalent to the effect of a small battlefield nuclear device.”

  “An underwater rocket? With seven tons of Plasticpac?”

  Pacino paused, looking at Phillips. “You wouldn’t happen to have any cigars, would you?”

  Phillips grinned and pulled out two long Honduran cigars from his jacket pocket. “Sorry they aren’t Cuban,” he said, and passed the cigar cutter to Pacino, then his lighter, the emblem of the USS Greeneville worn by use. The back of the limo filled with mellow smoke.

  “Anyway, the missile worked well. I was at a Bahamas test-range exercise when the Vortex made its preop trial. The firing ship was an instrumented 637-class attack sub, gutted of equipment with the Vortex launcher installed. The target sub was an old diesel boat similarly instrumented.”

  Phillips glanced at Pacino, squinting through the smoke. Pacino seemed sad, or nostalgic, or both.

  “What happened?”

  “The missile worked perfectly. Blew the target sub to iron filings. The blast made a water-vapor mushroom cloud that rained down on us for five minutes. I was deaf for three days.”

  “So why haven’t we in the fleet heard about this miracle missile? It sounds like a silver bullet.”

  “Because the Vortex blew up the firing ship as well. There was nothing left of her. The solid-rocket fuel over-pressurized the tube and the launcher burst open. The rocket exhaust blew the firing platform in half.”

  “Bad day after all.”

  “Yeah, you could say that.”

  “So why don’t you launch this beast like a ballistic missile — propel it out the tube and then light off the rocket motor?”

  “It’s unstable. Spins around, the rocket motor goes off and water forces tear it apart. It needs the whole tube length for guidance.”

  Phillips looked at Pacino, wondering why the admiral was going on about a dead-end weapon program. When Phillips tamped out his cigar in the ashtray, the car had pulled up to a fenced-in gate. A large sign read DYNACORP INTERNATIONAL — ELECTRIC BOAT DIVISION. Pacino put down his window and passed out a bar-coded identification card to the guard, and Phillips reached into his wallet and handed over his own ID.

  “State your business please,” the guard said.

  Pacino did and the car drove through the gate and around several small buildings, approaching a wide tall structure that was blue in the haze of distance. As they drew closer to the building a large sign loomed overhead: NUCLEAR SUBMARINE MANUFACTURING FACILITY— fast attack boat department. The car stopped a final time. Pacino grabbed his white hat and climbed out of the car. Phillips got out, pulling his black overcoat collar up against the wind.

  From a door in the monolithic wall a short man in a double-breasted suit walked out, a uniformed naval officer following behind him. The man in civilian clothes had a goatee and mustache, his jowly face hanging down below the knot of a blue-patterned tie. The officer behind him wore a black reefer jacket with the four-striped shoulder boards of a navy captain. He was tall with graying cropped hair, an expression of distaste carved into the wrinkles of his face.

  “Gentlemen,” the civilian called heartily from forty feet away. “Glad you could make it!”

  “Who’s this guy?” Phillips mouthed to Pacino.

  “Rebman, Doug Rebman,” Pacino whispered back, “the Dynacorp vice-president of attack-sub shipbuilding. He’s hard to take but he knows his stuff.”

  “And the captain?”

  “Emmitt Stephens, superintendent of shipbuilding. As SUPESHIPS he has the unpleasant duty of hanging around with Rebman, but he got my Seawolf to sea from a drydock in four days when it would take a normal mortal four weeks. He’s the best.”

  Rebman led them around the corner of the facility to an elevated platform overlooking a jetty four stories below. Phillips stopped dead in his tracks. Pacino looked over at him and smiled.

  “Never seen the Seawolf class before, Phillips?”

  Beyond the railing of the platform a submarine lay next to a narrow jetty, the hull bounded closely on either side by the protruding concrete structures. The ship was tremendously large, looking absurdly wide and fat. The hull was a flat black, the surface of it covered with foam tiles for quieting against active sonar pings.

  The conning tower, the sail, jutted straight up over the cylindrical hull, a triangular fillet joining the front of the sail to the ship below.

  “She’s huge,” Phillips gasped. “I mean, she’s at least ten feet wider in diameter than my Greeneville.”

  “Meet the USS Piranha,” Pacino said. “SSN23, third — and last — in the Seawolf class. Named after the original Piranha that Dick Donchez commanded in the 1970s. She’s forty-two feet in diameter. She displaces over nine thousand tons, makes way on twin turbines cranking out fifty-two thousand shaft horsepower. The nuclear reactor is natural circulation cooled up to 50 percent power, that’s thirty-two knots without reactor circulation pumps. Bruce, this submarine is quieter going full out than your old Greeneville is at idle.”

  Pacino continued on, and before Phillips realized it, a half-hour had gone by, and he realized that something was different about the submarine. Where a few minutes before the hull had been black and unmarked, there was now a distinct white waterline mark circling the hull. He looked again, and noticed that the white line was rising further from the water.

  “What’s going on?”

  “Dr. Rebman, please explain,” Pacino said.

  “We’re lifting the hull out of the water,” Rebman said. “For Admiral Pacino’s ship alteration. We call it the Pacino ship-alt, Admiral.”

  “Lifting the hull out?”

  “The ship is resting on blocks much like those on the floor of a drydock. This is a special jetty, Commander. The blocks touching the underside of the ship’s hull are connected to a large metal platform, and beneath that we have steel columns about one meter in diameter. The columns are threaded and connected to motors below. There are twenty of them, and when we turn the motors, the columns turn and lift the platform out of the water, an inch at a time. Once the platform is out of the water the whole assembly can be moved into the assembly building. It allows us to move a submarine from its waterbome condition to inside the manufacturing bay in about four hours. That same operation to get a sub into drydock would take two to three days.”

  Phillips looked down at the jetty and saw that the sub had emerged from the water by another foot while they were talking.

  “Let’s go into the conference room, gentlemen,” Rebman said. “We’ll have a window view there. You can still see the ship coming out of the slip and into the building.”

  The four men walked inside to a hallway and then into a windowed room, one set of plate glass looking out over the jetty, where the Piranha was still quietly coming vertically out of the water, the other looking into the cavernous expanse of the manufacturing building. Phillips chose a seat where he could swivel his chair and see first one view, then the othe
r. Rebman doused the lights and started a disk presentation on the projection-screen wall.

  “Commander Phillips, this presentation is for you as commanding officer of the Piranha. We put together this briefing about the Vortex missile, which I’m sure you’re not aware of, when we moth-balled the program. Now the program is back.”

  Phillips looked to Pacino, who had a single finger over his lips, then watched the film on the Vortex program, observing computer views of the innards of the missile. He saw the missile test in the Bahamas when the missile was fired from one sub to see if it could hit the other. The screen view showed the explosion of the target boat as seen from the surface. The camera obviously had shaken as the shock wave hit, the enormous mushroom cloud rising from the sea as if a great beast had climbed out of the ocean, then the spray was raining back down again as the cloud dispersed. The target was obliterated, but then the film showed the slow-motion cameras depicting the inside of the firing ship, the film capturing the firing tube as it blew open, the flames pouring violently out of the tube, the screen going black as the recording camera was vaporized by the hot gas exhaust. A graphic came up, showing a cartoon of the missile in the tube and how the tube exploded, then widened to show how the rocket exhaust melted through the hull while the tremendous gas volume blew the hull open just as the missile had blown open the tube. In the cartoon the firing sub broke in half and drifted to the ocean bottom. After a few more words describing the final moneys spent on the missile program, the disk went blank.

  “That was two years ago,” Dr. Rebman said. “We thought the missile program could not go on. We put ten production missiles in a warehouse, archived the records and let the program die. Then Admiral Pacino called me. His idea to revive the Vortex missile is key to the alterations we will be doing to the Piranha. And that, Commander Phillips, is where you come in.”

  “What the hell are you doing to my ship?” Phillips heard himself ask.

  “It’s not quite your ship yet, Bruce,” Pacino said, “but I’m glad you already feel possessive about her.”

  Pacino then went to the white wall, pointed his finger and traced a shape on it. As he did, the electronic white board turned his finger motion into a drawing, his finger acting as the chalk. The resulting shape was a submarine hull.

  “Bruce, we know the Vortex missile needs to be launched from a tube to be stable. We also know it blows up missile tubes. What we want to do,” Pacino said as he drew a small cylinder on the outside of the sketch of the sub hull, “is put the launching tubes on the outside of the sub. They will have blow-off caps at the aft end. When the missile launches, the outside tube won’t blow up because the rupture cap at the back blows off and the missile leaves through the tube. The tube opens up at both ends and still acts to guide the missile in its first few milliseconds of travel. The missile leaves the external tube and moves on to the target. The sub then discards the tube and it falls to the bottom of the sea.”

  “Let me get this straight,” Phillips said. “You’re going to put these tube launchers on the outside of my hull?”

  “Right.”

  “That’s going to be noisy. It’ll ruin the shape of the ship. All that work making the Seawolf class hydrodynamic and whisper quiet is down the drain. This tub will whistle and rattle and moan at cruising speed. An enemy boat will hear us coming five nautical miles away.”

  “Bruce, remember your failure in the simulator the other day? It was inevitable, though I didn’t tell you so at the time. Your torpedoes had to miss. The only thing that would have helped was a Vortex missile. If you’d had one, the Destiny you attacked would have been dead.”

  “So would I when the Vortex blew up in the tube.”

  “Exactly, which is why they’ll be on the outside of your hull, not the inside. The open-ended launching tubes with blow off caps will keep the hull from rupturing. The problems with the Vortex are, we believe, fixed.”

  “Admiral, you mentioned them in the plural. You said they’d be on the outside of my hull. So do I get more than one?”

  “I’m having ten of them put on the exterior of your hull. If we ever go up against Scenario Orange, you’ll have ten silver bullets.” Phillips looked into Pacino’s eyes, then exhaled and looked out the window at Piranha, now completely out of the water, the hull still drying in the cold breeze, the monster being moved slowly through the open door of the manufacturing facility.

  “Admiral?”

  “Yes?”

  “You figure ten are enough?”

  * * *

  The massive hull of the Piranha lurked high above and behind the four men as they walked parallel to the hull to the east end of the bay. Phillips looked up at the black-painted cylinder dwarfing them. It was hard to believe that, with the ship this big on the outside, it would feel small on the inside.

  By the time they reached the bow section, Phillips could see the racks with the stacked cylinders on them, the stenciling clear from fifty feet away reading MOD BRAVO VORTEX. The men stopped near a weapon-loading tractor bed.

  “Let’s roll one of the missiles out,” Pacino said.

  One of the weapon-handling crewmen assembled two men to roll out the nearest Vortex. It took a few minutes, and during the wait Phillips saw the giant door of the facility begin to close, plunging the interior into gloom until his eyes adjusted to the overhead halogen lamps. Finally the weapon dolly pulled out one of the Vortex canisters. It was huge, almost four feet in diameter and fifty feet long.

  “And how do you plan on putting ten of these things on the outside of the Piranha?” Phillips asked.

  “You’re going to look like you’re wearing a bandoleer,” Pacino said.

  “Amazing.”

  “Admiral Pacino?” a young civilian asked, winded from trotting across the facility floor.

  “I’m Pacino.”

  “Sir, an Admiral Donchez called and said he needed to see you at the White House within the hour.”

  Pacino looked startled. “Thanks. Emmitt, how soon can you be, done with the alterations to the Piranha?”

  “It’s a month of work. Admiral.”

  “You know what I’m going to say, don’t you, Emmitt?”

  Capt. Emmitt Stephens smiled, resigned. “Yes, sir. You want the work done in a week with Piranha out of here on her own power. I’ll see to it.”

  Pacino shook his hand, then Rebman’s and waved Phillips to walk with him.

  “What was that about a week, sir?” Phillips asked.

  “Emmitt Stephens can work miracles. There’s no reason you should have to wait a month to get your boat ready. I want you on the way to the Pacific by this time next week.”

  “Why, sir? What’s going down?”

  “Let’s just say I have a bad feeling.”

  “One week. I can’t believe it.”

  “Neither can I,” Pacino said. “I was just going to ask him to get it done in two. Good thing I kept my mouth shut.”

  “What’s this White House business about. Admiral?”

  “I’ll find out in an hour. Bruce, don’t be a stranger. I consider you my first line commander. Don’t let me down out there.”

  Pacino clapped him on the shoulder and vanished out the corner door into the winter air. Phillips looked back up at the tail of the Piranha looming over his head, thinking about the admiral who had called him the best.

  He let his gaze roam over the Piranha’s massive hull, and felt a mix of awe and near-sensual pleasure.

  CHAPTER 10

  WASHINGTON, D.C. THE WHITE HOUSE

  Pacino was ushered into the Oval Office and led to a seat on a wide sofa next to Richard Donchez.

  The room seemed much smaller than it had appeared on television. The desk was the same, the couch and chair arrangement the same, even the fireplace looked familiar, but the combination in reality was so close as to seem claustrophobic, although that could have come from the crowd in the room.

  Pacino recognized Vice President Al Meckstar, the dark-haire
d Hispanic-looking boy of politics, his looks deceptively youthful. Now in his early forties, Meckstar had joked he would dye his temples gray if that would lend him more credibility. Meckstar sank into the sofa opposite Pacino and Donchez, next to Secretary of State Phil Gordon. Gordon was thin, a marathon runner who had joined government directly out of Harvard, although little of his education or elite background seemed to have rubbed off on him. His eternal smile and joking cheerfulness were so thick as to seem affected but they were not. His political instincts were matched by none; his success at State was eerie. Someone had remarked that Gordon could have been a time traveler back from the future armed with detailed history books, so accurate were his intuitions about foreign heads of state.

  At the end of the opposite couch Steve Cogster, the National Security Advisor, stretched his awkwardly long legs. Cogster was an oddball. Donchez had once told Pacino he did not trust him. Impeccably turned out in a pinstriped suit, imported silk tie, and sparkling wingtips, Cogster was as tall as Pacino, with thinning blond hair, slightly buck teeth, and oval-shaped lenses in wire-framed glasses. Cogster was famous for his soft-spoken arguments in public, coupled with his flaming Emails and memos so caustic his own staff had nicknamed him “the Blowtorch,” passing his acerbic E-mails throughout State. Even Donchez had received a few winners at NSA. It was rumored that Phillip Gordon kept a file of Cogster’s most acidic memos and passed them around Friday afternoons.

  Some said that Gordon even had some of them framed in his office and only took them down when Cogster or the president visited him at State.

  Donchez had once remarked that Cogster would not be a good man to have as an enemy, but having him as an ally did not seem particularly beneficial either. The Blowtorch was just that, best to stay out of the flame path.

  In the end chair, near the fireplace, the director of the CIA sat with his legs crossed, his pale hairy flesh exposed over sagging socks. Boswell Famesworth Leach III was bald, his face was red, his teeth either capped or false, his manner earnest. But Donchez had once characterized him as a snake. There were too many backs in Washington bearing Leach’s knives, Donchez had said. Leach seemed to be the one person in government that Donchez loved to hate. Leach never signed his name, only used his initials, “BFL.” Donchez had indicated to Pacino that Leach’s intelligence estimates were usually inaccurate — not because of the failings of the CIA itself, since the information and analyses coming into Leach’s office were sound, but because Leach was so arrogant that any intelligence assessment that didn’t fit his predetermined notions would be rewritten to fall into line with his world views. Nonetheless, his intel assessments had been oddly correct in recent months, which had prompted Donchez to tell Pacino that “BFL” stood for “Blind Fucking Luck.”