"Depth eighteen hundred, sir."
"Very well, proceed to nineteen hundred feet." It could be the last order he'd ever give.
"Eighteen twenty-five, sir."
McKee nodded. There were twelve people in the room outside the virtual eggshells. All twelve pairs of eyes were fastened to McKee, hoping for some kind of reassurance. He had none to give them. But image was everything, he thought. To prove the point, he pulled the last Cohiba from his pocket, clipped it with Diana's cutter, and lit it with his Greenville lighter. He felt as if he were standing on the gallows. He stared down at the cutter Diana had given him, thinking he should have listened to her months ago. But it was too late now.
"Eighteen-fifty feet, sir."
"Very well."
The floor setting of the torpedo, if it were an Adcap. Why the hell a Ukrainian submarine would carry an ancient American torpedo remained a mystery. He hadn't had time to think about it before, but there was nothing to do now but think.
"Conn, Sonar, torpedo range gating. It's within one thousand yards."
Half a mile, McKee thought. With a closing rate of just four knots, it would take six minutes for the torpedo to catch them.
"Eighteen seventy-five feet, sir."
The hull continued to groan from the depth. The popping of the hull frames sounded like the creaking of an old house in a storm.
"Sir, ship's depth—nineteen hundred feet."
McKee held his breath. A hundred feet below calculated crush depth, with Devilfish sailing at 200 percent reactor power. The designers and their margins of safety, he thought, were responsible for their survival so far. So help me God, he thought, if I live through this I will kiss the DynaCorp chief designer. On the lips.
"Conn, Sonar, we're getting odd noises from the torpedo."
"Sonar, Conn, report." Come on, what are you talking about?
"Captain, incoming torpedo is making popping sounds."
McKee paused. "Popping sounds," he prompted.
"Popping sounds, sir."
After all that, his tactics were failing. The torpedo had followed him deep. If Devilfish could go deeper than its calculated crush depth, so then could the torpedo.
"Pilot, depth nineteen-fifty."
"Nineteen-fifty, aye, sir. Taking her down."
A ripping, screeching noise sounded through the hull. The pressure was enough to smash them flat, an egg under a car tire.
"Conn, Sonar—"
An explosion threw McKee into the periscope pole. The lights went out. An alarm sounded loudly in the space, but the noise seemed muted to McKee as the room slowly rotated in a hazy red light. He could only croak out two words:
"Emergency blow."
"Pilot, emergency main ballast tank blow!" Petri shouted. Her voice sounded muted and dull to McKee, who now was looking at the deck plates of the conn's elevated periscope platform.
"Blowing forward, blowing aft, sir! Depth nineteen hundred."
McKee couldn't answer, his head pounding, blood in his mouth.
"Conn, maneuvering, reactor scram," the overhead speaker announced.
"Conn, Sonar, incoming torpedo detonated. Range was eight hundred yards."
"Depth fifteen hundred and rising."
"Officer of the Deck, damage reports." Petri's voice.
McKee tried to reach up to one of the handrails around the conn. His head was spinning. He hauled himself up, his mouth bleeding.
"Are you hurt, sir?" Petri's hand on his shoulder.
He waved her off. "I'm fine," he said.
The deck was angled steeply upward, twenty degrees, making it nearly impossible to stand.
"Captain, all spaces report no visible damage."
"Depth one thousand, sir."
He had to abort the emergency surface, he thought. The ship was out of danger, and they couldn't be seen in the area.
"Pilot, vent forward and aft, take off the angle, maintain depth below one five zero."
The pilot fought the depth, the speed of the ascent giving the control surfaces power to keep the vessel down, but the ship was slowing from the loss of the reactor.
"Depth eight hundred, angle up ten, sir."
"Keep us down."
"Depth six hundred, angle down two."
McKee pulled a microphone down from the overhead. "Maneuvering, Captain, status of fast recovery startup?"
"Conn, Maneuvering, fast scram recovery in progress, estimate full propulsion in two minutes."
"Depth four-fifty, sir, we're controlling it."
"Maintain four-fifty feet," he said.
The reactor was back within a few minutes. McKee gave the orders, taking the ship out of the area. Op order or not, he didn't want to be anywhere near the site of the Black Sea Fleet's sinking. He went to his stateroom and drafted a dry situation report on the sinking of the fleet. He took it to radio, went to the conn, ordered an excursion to periscope depth to transmit the report and obtain further orders. Strangely, orders came back immediately, telling them to get back to Norfolk at flank speed. He ordered Dietz deep, ordered flank, and returned to his cabin.
Under the spray of a shower he washed away the sweat of fear. Yet when he was clad in fresh coveralls, he felt no better. He was in his stateroom's command chair when Petri knocked and came in.
He looked up at her, his eyes glassy. He reached for a cigar from his desktop humidor, which was bolted to the desk to keep it in place during large angles. His hands trembled violently as he raised the cigar to his lips.
"Yes, XO?"
"Sir, I thought you did a great job."
McKee nodded, not sure how to take the comment. He tried to raise the lighter to his cigar, but his hands were shaking so badly he couldn't get a flame. Petri gently took the lighter and put the flame to his cigar while he puffed. When she was done, she put the lighter on the table. He felt his eyes water, and he looked up at her, wondering if his gratefulness was in his expression.
"Thanks, XO."
"No, sir, thank you. If it weren't for you, we'd be fish food."
McKee's eyes were suddenly heavy.
"If it's okay with you, XO, I think I'm going to get some sleep." He felt dead. He put his hands under the table so Petri wouldn't see them trembling.
"Good night, Skipper."
The door shut behind her. He sank into his rack and into darkness.
feet first and fill him in on the ships detected on the surface before coming above that depth. "And don't call me again." McKee dropped the phone to the carpeting and felt the blackness again, sinking deep into his bed. The bed tilted upward with the ship, then began gently rocking from the waves at periscope depth. McKee waited for the bed to tilt again as the ship went deep, but it kept rocking.
The phone buzzed again. He had to find the handset on the deck of the dark cabin.
"Captain. Now what?"
"Sir, there's flash traffic in the computer, marked personal for commanding officer."
A knock came at the door. The radioman was bringing in a WritePad computer with the radio message they'd received. McKee put the phone down and sat up in bed. The door creaked open, letting harsh white light into the room, silhouetting the radioman.
McKee took the computer and waved off the petty officer, then began to read. McKee had half expected this. The dry written situation report on the sinking of the fleet was certainly not enough for the flag officers. They'd want details. But strangely, the message required him to be in a dress uniform. That was ominous. They did that when they relieved a captain of command. McKee had done nothing that would warrant his sword being broken. He shrugged into coveralls and took the computer through the head to the far door that led to Petri's stateroom. He knocked. Her voice called him in.
When he opened the door, she was sitting at her
fold-down desk, working on some files, wearing her coveralls and socks, her hair down and spread over her shoulders. "Yes, Captain?"
"XO, we're being called to a videolink. Hope you brought se
rvice dress khakis with you."
Petri scanned the message, then smiled. "Brass want the gossip," she said. "They want to know what it felt like sinking that fleet."
Ten minutes later, they sat at McKee's conference table, made up with a green felt tablecloth. McKee wore a starched khaki jacket with its black shoulderboards, each bearing the three stripes of commander, his gold dolphin pin and his ribbons above his left pocket, the submarine capital ship command pin below the pocket. Under the jacket he wore a khaki shirt and a black tie. Petri had chosen the version of service dress that had pants rather than a skirt.
They sat at the side of the table facing the camera and videolink widescreen. When it came up, the camera rotated to face them, and the screen filled with several images. The main image showed Admiral Bruce Phillips in his Norfolk office. The other men were officers in service dress, but McKee didn't recognize them.
"Good evening, gentlemen," Phillips began, blinking momentarily at Petri, whose gender would mess up the official-sounding opening of the videolink. "This is a debrief of the sinking of the fleet." Phillips introduced everyone. One of the men was from Seal Team Seven, another from the Artificial Intelligence Command, another from Naval Intelligence.
McKee looked up at Phillips, who was sitting in a high-backed leather chair behind an oak table, his white officer's cap with the scrambled eggs on the surface, the traditions of the Navy forbidding a hat on a table unless the owner had been to the North Pole—an old rule designed to keep hats off tables, until nuclear sub officers who'd been under ice began to toss hats on tabletops. Phillips had a crewcut that masked his receding hairline over an ordinary round face. If met on the street, Phillips wouldn't gather a second look, one of the reasons he had gone into weight training, his arm muscles bulging out of his shirt. McKee had served for Bruce Phillips several years before, when Phillips was in command of the Seawolf-class ship Piranha and McKee had been his navigator. The two men had been friends, as much as they could be separated by their rank and station.
"Gentlemen, please stand by while I patch in the Chief of Naval Operations."
McKee held his breath. Admiral Pacino's listening to his briefing was unprecedented. Pacino was the number one admiral in the Navy and reported to the Secretary of War and the President. He could kill a career with one shake of his head. McKee felt his armpits melting. A portion of the screen blinked, jumped, then focused on Admiral Michael Pacino, a gaunt, hard-looking man with white hair and dark eyebrows, a deep tan, emerald green eyes surrounded by crow's feet and a thin face. The admiral looked barely older than McKee, yet had something in his eyes that made him seem like a very old man. His look was an intense mask
of concentration, his brows low over his eyes. He wore a tropical white uniform shirt with his four stars and gold anchors on gold shoulderboards, his eight rows of ribbons over his pocket, a dolphin pin and fleet command pin barely in screen view.
"Evening, people," Pacino said in a deep, scratchy voice. "I asked Admiral Phillips to let me eavesdrop on the debrief before our audience with the President in the morning. Please go on with the briefing as if I weren't here."
Yeah, right, McKee thought in a mental grimace, but keeping his face neutral.
Phillips continued, "Commander McKee, could you take ten or fifteen minutes to describe in detail the operation? Start to finish."
McKee briefed the op, his sentences crisp and complete, from the flank run south to the outrunning of the Severodvinsk's torpedo shot.
When he was done, Phillips looked at him closely. "So, Commander McKee. You had highly classified orders to speed to the South Atlantic, then an emergency action message to sink the Black Sea Fleet, is that correct?"
"Yes, Admiral." An alarm bell was ringing, but McKee couldn't put his finger on the trouble.
"You sank the fleet, shot down an ASW chopper and the fleet-screen submarine, right?"
"Yes, sir."
"And you were fired on by the submarine? A Mark 48 Adcap torpedo?"
"Yessir."
"Did you see any survivors in the water?"
"None." McKee had already gone over all this.
"Did you find that or the Mark 48 a, well, an anomaly?"
"Yes, sir. But we were too busy trying to evade it. There was no time to analyze the situation." Something was wrong. A comer of Phillips' mouth was raised, just slightly. Pacino was smiling.
"Well, Admiral," Phillips said, apparently addressing Pacino. "Looks like the scenario was written better than we thought."
Scenario? McKee thought, glancing at Petri, whose eyes were wide, looking back at McKee.
"Commander McKee," Phillips said, "the operation was an exercise. The Alpha code word information is a category of Release Twelve devoted to system testing. The operation was a test of how fast we could scramble a submarine to intercept a fast-transiting offensive fleet, of how well we could attack a surface action group with a lone sub, of how our command-and-control system functions, and how the crew would function under this kind of pressure. It was even a test of fleet administration—we had let you go on leave to who knows where and suddenly Devilfish was sent to sea. It was a test of what we'd do, let the XO take the ship out and insert the captain later by chopper. And it was a great success, although we were worried that having you briefed solely by a computer would take away a lot of the realism, especially since there was no 'context' to the scenario."
A smoldering anger was building inside McKee, but he kept his face absolutely flat.
"Then the scenario began to come apart—we didn't think you'd approach close into the sinking
hulls, and we had no corpses, a major discrepancy, and the Severodvinsk submarine was a decommissioned Los Angeles-class with a Severodvinsk noise-spectrum generator. The torpedo was a Mark 48 Adcap with a Magnum noisemaker, but we figured that would be revealed late in the scenario."
McKee felt like a fool. "Admiral, at the risk of looking like an idiot, I can tell you right now, we had no idea. And I fought the ship to the limits, sir. We overpowered the core and took the ship down to nineteen hundred fifty feet, below theoretical crush depth."
"We know you tried, Kelly. We got a transmission of telemetry at your first periscope depth."
"A transmission? I didn't authorize a transmission," McKee said, then bit his lip.
Phillips gave McKee a gentle, almost sorrowful look. "We had the ship wired, Commander. The cameras used by the Cyclops and all the Cyclops battle-recording data were tied into a hard-drive memory module rigged to a burst transmission when you came up."
"But what about my violating the ship 's operating limits?" McKee knew he sounded even more foolish, but he needed to know. Something was snapping inside him, and he was finding he no longer cared how he looked.
"We had a safety module inserted into Cyclops. If you tried to overpower the core or take the ship below test depth, the computer would simulate the readings as if it were responding to you, but meanwhile would keep the ship inside limits. You never went over a hundred percent power or deeper than
fifteen hundred feet, Kelly. It just seemed like you did. Cyclops had a noisemaker brought onboard before the ship sailed—to simulate the creaking noises of the hull. And we had a safety monitor onboard. The surgeon general, Lieutenant Kurko-vic? He's a surgeon assigned to USubCom. He's also submarine-qualified. He was our observer, and had orders that if Cyclops' safety module failed, he'd tell you about the exercise."
"But the fleet, the chopper, how—"
"A question for the Artificial Intelligence Command," Phillips said, and a Navy captain, one of the other faces, began talking about the programming of the robot fleet, each ship a mothballed U.S. Navy ship, painted, modified, and equipped with the robotics to allow them to sail in fleet formation to the South Atlantic. The only problem that cropped up was the submarine. The mockup Severodvinsk had had mechanical trouble and was trying to catch up to the fleet when McKee attacked it, making it arrive on scene much later than the scenario demand
ed.
McKee listened, his face a mask, until Phillips brought the meeting to a close. The room crashed into silence. McKee kept staring at the wall. The phone buzzed. McKee let it ring.
"Sir?" Petri, looking at him.
"You get it." Disgust in his voice.
"XO," she said. She listened, then cupped the phone to her shoulder. "OOD wants to go deep and get back on PIM at flank."
McKee looked at her in disgust. "Fine. Deep. Flank. Chase PIM."
THREAT VECTOR 91
Petri stared at him for a moment, then spoke into the phone. "Captain orders deep and flank, return to PIM." She put the phone down.
"Sir?"
"Leave me alone."
When the door shut behind her, McKee continued staring at the stateroom bulkhead.
way, with black hulls of submarines tied up on either side. McKee walked solemnly down the pier to the senior officer parking lot. He tossed his bag into an aging Porsche and cranked the motor. He was barely aware of arriving home to a two-story house set in one of the dozens of residential subdivisions behind the beachside resort complex of Virginia Beach.
He walked up to the door and said to the computer microphone, "I'm home." The door unlocked itself and opened, the lights coming on. As McKee stepped in, the house was quiet. There was a smell here, he thought, standing in the foyer. It was Diana's smell, a pleasant mixture of her perfume, her shampoo, her hair, her skin. Here, in her universe, the submarine and the Navy were gone, and there was just her. He walked into the front room he'd taken for his office, glancing at the e-mails sent to the house, much of it junk, the bills all taken care of by the electronic banking system. He looked over at the wall, where a picture of them hung, the wedding picture they'd both loved, McKee in a starched choke-collar white dress uniform, lieutenant's shoulderboards on his shoulders, Diana ravishing in a low-cut gown. Her generous breasts and small hips and straight long blond hair and shimmering deep blue eyes were all part of what had drawn him to her, but there had been so much more beyond the physical—her intelligence, her humor, her serious approach to her family, her joyful acceptance of his, her planning for the baby, even her explosive temper. Suddenly he missed her. And God knew the Navy had nothing for him any-
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