Barracuda: Final Bearing mp-4

by Michael Dimercurio

  “No we’re not. I mean it, Shearson. I don’t care if you smash this thing on the deck, you get me to the Reagan.”

  TOKYO WAN THIRTY KILOMETERS WEST OF POINT NOJIMAZAKI

  SS-810 WINGED SERPENT

  Comdr. Toshumi Tanaka watched as the linehandlers cast off the lines from the Curtain of Flames and let the heavy manila ropes sink into the sea. The cleats on the deck of the Curtain of Flames had automatically released the lines now that they were at the mouth of Tokyo Bay and into the deeper waters of the Pacific. The Curtain of Flames barely had enough sense to put its rudder over to port to pull slowly away from Winged Serpent without smashing its stern into Tanaka’s ship. Tanaka watched as the Curtain of Flames steamed off to the southwest, on its way to intercept the closest American aircraft carrier battle group. Once again, the Three-class computer ship got the choicest mission, while Winged Serpent was to take station in the Sea of Japan to make sure the Russian shipping to supply the Home Islands was not interrupted.

  Tanaka boiled with frustration. The Sea of Japan was the last place he would put the Winged Serpent. Such a capable, well-trained crew aboard a magnificent submarine of the Maritime SDF should not be wasted on such a ridiculous mission. But he could let none of this attitude show on his face or in his manner.

  Besides, he would be too busy to think about it in a matter of minutes. They were at the dive point, time to get the ship submerged.

  NORTHWEST PACIFIC

  The F-14 bounced all the way down into its descent.

  Pacino looked back at the wings, both of them snapping so hard that he was sure they would break off at any minute.

  The altitude on the display board kept unwinding, now at 10,000 feet. The artificial horizon swirled and jogged as the wind tossed the aircraft. Pacino kept his eyes outside, trying to find the lights of the carrier.

  Shearson was on the radio to the Reagan, trying to put the plane down on the deck of the ship, which would be tossing on the high seas.

  The rain seemed to get worse as they passed below 5000 feet, the blasting noise of it louder than the jets.

  The altimeter continued to unwind, the artificial horizon still swirling. They were running on vapors, with fuel enough for one, maybe two passes.

  Pacino strained his eyes for lights and found nothing but the driving rain reflected in Shearson’s landing lights.

  The plane took a dramatic bump upward, Pacino’s stomach left in the footwells, then an equally impressive dive.

  Shearson’s nose pulled right, then left, then right again, then another bump up and a slam down. The jets outside were whining, then screaming as Shearson powered up, then whispering again as he throttled back. It occurred to Pacino then that he was going to die, and he had absolutely no control over the situation. This was entirely different from being shot at by a torpedo. At least then he had a submarine under his command, a horse beneath him, but now all he could do was ride, crash and drown.

  He glanced at the altimeter and saw that they were at 900 feet, lower than the requisite 1000 to see the carrier, and there was nothing ahead of them but rain shimmering in the landing lights. He looked ahead, straining to see the lights of the carrier. He tried to ignore the onset of vertigo as the plane took another thrashing, bouncing sideways and then up and down and up again.

  The odd feeling of flying with one wing down came, then became worse as it felt like he was hanging from his harness upside down in the plane. He kept trying to ignore the feeling, pounding on his helmet to see if that would help his inner ears, but it did nothing.

  They were too low and there was no sign of the carrier — he saw lights.

  “Brad! There! The carrier!”

  “I don’t—”

  “Fifteen degrees right!”

  “Roger,” Shearson said, turning the plane.

  The maneuver swirled Pacino’s inner ears. The rain continued to blast at them, the thickness of it in the landing lights making the tossing deck of the Reagan hard to see.

  Shearson continued to row the throttles, the engines throttling up and down, the wings dipping and twisting as the plane rolled to fight the storm. As the deck got closer, the plane lurched violently.

  “Port engine flameout!” Shearson called. “We’re on one engine. I’m going around!”

  “No, god damnit!” Pacino yelled. “Take this bitch in now!”

  Shearson didn’t answer, just kept on the glide slope, the plane swaying as he tried to keep it on the descent with just one engine. Almost there. Pacino could see the lights dancing in the shimmering rain, until he noticed the numbers on the island were wrong, all wrong. He glanced down at the instrument panel and saw the artificial horizon and nearly choked. He shouted into the intercom, “Brad, we’re upside down! You’re coming in upside down!”

  Shearson pulled the plane through a two-g maneuver, as much as he could do with a single engine. Pacino’s head spun.

  It took almost fifteen minutes for Shearson to set up and approach again, this time the artificial horizon showing them right side up.

  “Admiral, we’re showing zero fuel. I’ve only got one engine. If we lose it on the glide slope we’re going down. Okay. Here we go.”

  The deck of the carrier floated toward them, ghostly in the rain, the lights dancing around them as they approached in the storm. Shearson goosed the starboard engine, it screamed for a moment, then died. Pacino didn’t need to be told. They were out of fuel on the final approach to the deck, the plane now one big glider. At least, he thought, they wouldn’t catch fire. Shearson had come in high, with the thought of the low fuel situation in mind.

  Pacino saw the deck of the carrier flying toward them. The right wing dived for the deck, caught on the surface and disintegrated. The remainder of the jet rolled, the deck coming toward the cockpit. By the time the canopy smashed into the steel of the deck, Pacino had already lost consciousness.

  USS RONALD REAGAN

  “Admiral Donner, sir, the news isn’t good.”

  “Go ahead.”

  MacK Donner, vice admiral, USN, was the commander of the carrier action group and the Japan operational theater. His official title was Pacific Force Commander, but in the acronyms and abbreviations that the Navy lived by, he had become merely the Pacforcecom. He was of medium height, balding, with remarkably smooth skin for a fifty-five-year-old. His round baby face always wore a pleasant, open expression.

  He was a capable mariner, an empathetic leader, a decent tactician and a better than average politician. Most importantly, Mac Donner knew his weaknesses, both in relation to dealing with his people and to deploying his equipment. With a decent team surrounding him, Mac Donner was a winner. With an average team, the odds were not so good. But Donner listened and his sailors and officers loved him, which was more than most leaders could say.

  As the ship’s captain spoke, Donner watched his eyes. The ship’s commanding officer, Capt. Robert Petrill, was low key and professional, with an underlying toughness.

  Donner was in his stateroom, a cavernous room with three portholes on the 0–4 level, a large head with a shower and a conference table. The room was almost spartan in its neatness, not a single paper or disk on any horizontal surface. The lights were on low, as it was just after midnight local time. The ship was taking twenty-degree rolls and twenty-five degree pitches, the waves outside mountainous. Donner wore khakis, his three stars gleaming on the collars, the only neat thing about the uniform after a long day.

  “The pilot is dead. His name was Brad Shearson. Know him?”

  “No. What about Admiral Pacino?”

  “Out cold in sick bay. Doc thinks he’ll pull out of it. A concussion and some scrapes and lacerations.”

  “I want to be notified as soon as he comes to.”

  “Aye, sir.”

  * * *

  Four decks below, Pacino opened his eyes and grabbed the sleeve of a corpsman.

  “Get me Donner. Now.”

  CHAPTER 15

  DYNACORP IN
TERNATIONAL, ELECTRIC BOAT DIVISION

  GROTON, CONNECTICUT

  “Even the boss used a limo to get to EB from the airport,” McDonne said. “This chopper is going to raise eyebrows. Congress will accuse the Navy of joyriding.”

  “Ask me if I give a goddamn.”

  The admiral had given orders, Murphy had commandeered the supersonic SS12 and several jet helicopters, and he had used them to follow those orders.

  The chopper made the approach to the Electric Boat helipad, the pad lit with bright lights. The sun wasn’t due to come up for another forty-five minutes. Murphy intended to see what the place was like during the slowest part of the day, immediately before the dayshift started.

  He walked swiftly into the manufacturing building, the security captain alongside them. Murphy came through the main door in the manufacturing bay and walked swiftly along the length of the hull until he came to the working crew. In the center of the men was Capt. Emmitt Stephens in oil-stained blue coveralls and a hardhat.

  The man was shouting orders at the controller of the bridge crane high above, the team standing on the scaffolding at the hull where the next Vortex missile tube was about to be lifted and set. The atmosphere was tense, the bay coiled like a spring.

  McDonne and Murphy stood in the chill of the bay watching Stephens work. Fifteen minutes slipped into a half-hour, then forty-five minutes. Finally, the missile launcher had been lifted up to its position on the flank of the hull and welded into place.

  Murphy counted. There were five launchers on the starboard side. He walked under the Piranha hull to the port side until he was hemmed in by equipment and looked up. There were five launchers done on the port side. When he returned to McDonne he found a commander standing next to McDonne, his khakis bulging with arms of a stripjoint bouncer. The commander and McDonne saluted, Murphy returning it.

  “Commander Phillips, sir. Bruce Phillips.”

  “So this is your ship. When’s she going to sea?”

  “Dayshift will be putting her back in the water. My crew is ready to go now. Ship systems will take a day to line up—”

  “Line them up at sea,” Murphy said.

  “Sir, the pre-critical checklist alone would normally take a week. This reactor’s only been in the power range twice.”

  “Phillips, get Piranha to sea this evening.”

  “I can’t start the plant that fast. It’ll take fifty to sixty hours. Anything faster could make the reactor run away.”

  “Take the ship to sea shutdown. I’ll get a tug to take you into the sound. Your core will be cold iron. Go ahead and do your pull and wait startup in the river and the sound until you get to the fifty-fathom curve.”

  “What good will that do?”

  “It’ll keep your infrared signature cold. We’ll put some cellular phone calls out in the local area that your ship is a target for a live torpedo-firing exercise.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “If we can convince the Japanese satellites that the tug is towing your hull to sea so you can be a target, they won’t know you’re coming.”

  “What difference does that make?”

  “It might keep you from being targeted before you can get to the Japan Oparea. And maybe they won’t do a lot of thinking about what those bulges are on your hull.”

  “And how am I supposed to get out to the Oparea with a dead reactor?”

  “I recommend you submerge the ship when it’s dark, with the diesel on the AC buses using the snorkel mast. That way your infrared signature will be minimal and the Galaxy satellite that’s orbiting directly overhead won’t see a hot reactor submarine going to sea, one with a lot of suspicious bulges on the hull, one that is definitely a Seawolf class. If they don’t know you’re coming, they can’t get to you early.”

  “If I’m going into combat in the Oparea, why should I worry about what’s out there?”

  “Because Admiral Pacino wants all ten Vortex missiles in the Oparea, not three, not one, ten. Get there quietly. Undetected.”

  “Is this your idea or Admiral Pacino’s?”

  Murphy looked at Phillips and lied. “Pacino’s. I don’t have it in writing but he gave it to me on a secure VOX transmission on the way to the forward deployed carrier air group.”

  Phillips looked up at the Piranha. “Okay, we’re getting underway tonight. Anything else?”

  “I’ll check back with you this evening.”

  “If you call after sundown you won’t get me. I’m not transmitting anything to anyone once I toss off the lines. You want me, send me a message on the broadcast but don’t expect an answer.”

  “How will you be going to the Japan Oparea?”

  “Under the polar icecap.”

  Murphy was impressed. “Good luck. Come on, McDonne.”

  They walked away. Murphy stealing a last glance at Emmitt Stephens, now joined by Commander Phillips, as they worked the crew loading the Vortex missile into the tube they had just erected onto the hull.

  NORTHWEST PACIFIC

  USS RONALD REAGAN

  “Well, Admiral, welcome aboard the USS Ronald Reagan. We don’t have many VIPS who crash-land to get here.”

  “Mac, how long has it been?”

  “About five years. Patch.”

  Pacino was set up in his visiting admiral’s stateroom, certainly not as glorious as Donner’s, but with two portholes, a civilian-sized bed, a small round four-piece conference table and a head that was more impressive than anything ever built into a US submarine. It would be damned hard to leave it to go to one of the battle group’s submarines. Particularly given the comfort of the stateroom’s bed, where Pacino had been ordered to stay until the doctor gave him a follow-up examination.

  “How’s Brad Shearson?”

  “They left that news for me to tell you, Patch. I’m real sorry. Shearson didn’t make it.”

  Pacino looked up at Donner. Another life lost from his orders. He said something to Donner but couldn’t remember it. He was dimly aware of the doctor coming in and injecting him with a syringe, and darkness closing in on him despite his fighting it.

  USS PIRANHA, SSN-23

  ELECTRIC BOAT DIVISION, GROTON, CONNECTICUT

  “Any questions?” Phillips asked the assembled crew in the ship’s mess, all of them dressed for December weather, the heat in the room making their parkas that much more uncomfortable.

  “Sir,” a chief asked, “how long to get to the Japan Oparea?”

  “Going under ice, maybe two weeks, maybe less.”

  “I’ve been stuck under the ice before. Captain, back on the Chicago. It wasn’t great.”

  “Well, it’s not gonna happen to us. Next.”

  “Yes sir,” Lt. Pete Meritson said. Meritson was the sonar boss and the most senior of the junior officers.

  Phillips said that Meritson had the sweetest disposition and the most pleasant face, that it was a shame that he wasn’t selling used cars — he’d have made millions.

  Meritson was more than a pleasant presence on board the Piranha. His intellect was penetrating. With the modern sonar systems now being installed on the Seawolf class, it was more common that the “bull” lieutenant, the most senior and trusted of the junior officers, be a sonar officer than the main propulsion assistant to the chief engineer. In this case Meritson was the man for the job. He had been an electrical engineer at Cornell with a specialty in electronic communications, the major that was sailing so many graduates into the highest paid engineering jobs as the Writepads and cellular phones became as common as telephones had been in the previous century. But he had chosen to join the Navy, without the service paying a nickel of his education, just up and sauntered into a Navy recruiting office one day, spent three months in an officer-training program and a year in nuclear-power training and sub school, and scarcely a year after graduation was a submarine officer. The enlisted men joked that he was possibly the only one aboard who had paid for his own schooling, and was still doing “hard time” on
board the submarine when he could be out making money.

  “Go ahead, Meritson.”

  “Sir, what exactly are we going to do when we get there?”

  Phillips looked around the room as if wondering if it were secure enough to say what he needed to say.

  “Gentlemen, the only reason I’m going to answer that question is that when we’re done here we’re going to sea.”

  Phillips called the chief of the boat over, the COB, Chief Hanson, a torpedoman, a country boy. “COB,” Phillips said, “collect all the cellular phones, every god damned one of them.” Cellular phones were controlled more carefully than anything else aboard, the submarine force becoming security crazed after several SEAL operations had proved that the subs’ cellular phones were giving away too much. Only official ship’s phones were allowed aboard. Anyone caught with their own cellular unit lost it to the COB until the ship made port again.

  “Okay, here’s the deal. Just before the executive officer and I reported aboard we ran a special simulation against a Destiny II-class submarine, trying to sneak up on the SOB. Guess what? No matter what we did, we lost.”

  Phillips let that sink in for a moment. “Now, that was with an improved-688 class, but Seawolf ships are only marginally better against the Destiny. Let’s face a fact, gents — if we could buy Destiny II submarines we’d fill our piers with them and sell off these 688s and Seawolfs to the highest bidder. They’re that good. But we’ve got something that can neutralize even a Destiny.”

  Phillips paused for effect. “The Vortex missiles we’re carrying like a bandoleer are the ultimate antisubmarine weapon.” As long as they didn’t blast their rocket exhaust through the hull, he thought. “Which means we’re the cavalry. If the sub force goes up against the Destiny ships in combat, and I hope to hell they don’t, we’ll be there to put them down.”

  “Skipper,” said Roger Whatney, the Royal Navy executive officer in RN sweater with its soft epaulets and lieutenant commander’s stripes, the star missing, a loop of braiding replacing it, “if there are more than ten Destiny subs we could be in for trouble.”