Terminal Run mp-7

by Michael Dimercurio

  Best regards, John Patton.

  Pacino looked away from the note and stared off at the horizon. After all that had happened, how could he just leave behind this defeat and take on some undefined new project as Patton had asked? And what would his dead friends think if he just returned from the sinking of the Princess Dragon to shrug and come home and work on Ration’s project as if nothing had happened? We’d applaud, an unexplained alien voice in his head said, startling Pacino at the intrusion of a thought not his own. This had happened to him perhaps only three times, and each time that external voice had been correct. A shiver ran down his back as he heard the voice say the two words again.

  The next thoughts seemed as strange — the desire to get back to shore and leave this melancholy voyage behind. When he had first put to sea, there had been the weight of an anchor on his heart, and the circumnavigation had seemed the only way to heal, but now that he had paid his respects to his friends at the grave of the Princess Dragon, he no longer felt the need to sail on. Patton was offering him what he truly wanted in the first place.

  Pacino raised his hand to his long hair and brushed it out of his face, his gaze rising to the sail of the Hammerhead. Next to the American flag behind the officers on the bridge the Jolly Roger banner of the Unified Submarine Command flapped in the breeze, the flag he had designed after his father’s submarine went down. And as he looked at the skull and crossbones, he felt his heart beat stronger, the ache in his stomach receding for a moment, and the answer seemed to land in his mind. He would do it, he decided. He stood up. the letter in his hands.

  “I’m going to the Hammerhead, Lieutenant. But I don’t want to leave Colleen alone.”

  “I’ll stay here while you take the Zodiac, sir. Hammerhead has a sailboat crew standing by to take Colleen back to Annapolis. Once you’re aboard the Hammerhead, a helicopter will be called to evacuate you and transport you to an air base where there’s a supersonic fighter standing by. You’ll be in D.C. before sunset, sir.”

  Pacino nodded, his mind spinning as he found himself saying goodbye to the sailboat and climbing into the rubber boat. He started the engine and took in the painter, turning the boat to the submarine and bouncing over the waves to the sub, a glance over his shoulders at the majestic form of his sailboat.

  Several deckhands on the Hammerhead grabbed the boat and pulled him aboard. He was rushed to the hatch, with barely enough time to give Colleen a last look before he found himself in the weapons shipping hatch, the bright sunlight vanishing, replaced with the fluorescent dim glow of the overhead lights. The noise of the wind and the waves ceased, replaced suddenly by the soprano whine of four-hundred-cycle power and the deep baritone thrum of the air handlers. The electrical smell of the ship came into his nostrils, a brew of cooking oil, ozone, diesel fuel, cleaning solution, and amines, the perfume of it filling him with nostalgia. He stepped off the bottom of the ladder, shocked to see two straight rows of officers and chief petty officers. Someone shouted, “Hand, salute!” and the officers and chiefs saluted. Suddenly he was painfully aware of his beard and his mop of white hair and his old sweater and ratty windbreaker.

  * * *

  Ten hours later Pacino stood in the Pentagon E-Ring anteroom outside the office of the Chief of Naval Operations.

  4

  The run to the continental shelf would take ten hours. Once Piranha passed the six-hundred-fathom curve, the ship would submerge and continue to follow the track line to Point November, the point where the secret-classified chart ended and the top-secret chart began.

  At the turning point from the Thames River into Long Island Sound, Captain Catardi ordered a speed increase. The deck below the bridge had been rigged for dive, with all the line lockers shut and latched, the cleats rotated into the hull, and the hatch shut and dogged. The hull was clean and streamlined. With relatively open water stretching in front of them, the ship’s surface speed rose to thirty knots at all-ahead flank. The vessel’s top speed of forty-nine knots could only be achieved submerged, since the cigar shape of the hull was not efficient at cutting through the surface effect of the waves. The bullet-shaped nose plowed into the sea, the water curving smoothly down on either side of sail and rising back angrily up at the mid-deck, then spreading into a churning white wake a third of a ship length wide extending to the horizon behind them. The flow of the water was hypnotic. Pacino stared at it, watching the bow wave from the crow’s nest viewpoint of the bridge cockpit. Even more impressive than the sight of the wave was its noise, the jet engine roar of it deafening as it cascaded over the bow. The hurricane wind generated by their flank-run surface passage competed with the noise of the bow wave, the wind alone so loud that it would require a man to scream in the ear of a companion to be heard. The sustained shriek of the sea and the wind could lead to fatigue, but in Midshipman Pacino’s case, the noise was music, a song he had heard in his dreams but had lingered just beyond reach. The deck beneath his feet, a grating over the bridge access tunnel to the forward compartment upper level, vibrated violently from the ship’s fight with the bow wave, the trembling of the ship’s thirteen thousand tons testifying to the sheer horsepower pouring out of the propulsor.

  An hour into the flank run, a dolphin jumped out of the water at the bow and vanished back into the sea, then returned, his passage a vision of speed. Soon the dolphin was joined by a second one, but after a few minutes they grew bored and disappeared.

  Pacino had remained the junior officer of the deck when the maneuvering watch was secured and the surface-transit underway watch section was stationed for the long haul to the dive point. Captain Catardi sat on the top of the sail, dangling his feet into the bridge cockpit, watching Pacino conn the submarine. An hour later, Catardi ordered the flying bridge rails disassembled, and he vanished down the hatch into the access tunnel to the deck thirty-two feet below Pacino’s boots. For the next four hours, Pacino kept the watch with an annoyed Lieutenant Alameda and the lookout behind them, who had his own cubbyhole hatch coming out of the sail.

  Behind Pacino the periscopes rotated, one the property of Crossfield, the navigator, the scope rotating to take visual fixes at the bearings to the landscape navigation aids. The second belonged to one of the junior officers, the contact coordinator, whose function was to concentrate on the shipping in the seaway and help Pacino avoid a collision. Further aft of the periscopes the radar antenna rotated slowly in constant circles, reaching out to the coastline and seeing ahead, the blips on its screen the merchant ships far at sea, the navigator and contact coordinator sharing the display hood down in the control room. Further aft of the radar mast, the telephone pole of the AN BRA-44 BIGMOUTH antenna was bumped a few feet out of the sail. Pacino looked around at the seascape, the lush green coastline, the greenish blue of Long Island Sound, the rushing bow wave, and the white of the wake washing by the hull and flowing to the rudder. He raised the binoculars to his eyes and searched the seaway ahead for other vessels, but other than the occasional sailboat, they were alone in the sea. Another hour into the surface run Pacino realized he was as happy as he could ever remember feeling. The vibration of the deck in his boots and the scream of the wind and sea in his ears were the most romantic sensations he’d felt in his life.

  He looked over at Alameda’s hard face, half obscured by the bill of her ball cap and her binoculars. He had attempted to penetrate Alameda’s gruff attitude, without success — his father’s words in one of his E-mails coming back to Pacino that some people would hate him for reasons perhaps even they didn’t understand, and to leave them be. He had been more successful with Wes Crossfield, the serious navigator, who had gone over the charts and line handling commands with Pacino before the underway. It was strange, that the entire ship was divided between these two officers, Alameda running the aft half with the engineering spaces, Crossfield responsible for the operation of the tactical half, the forward spaces with the torpedoes and electronic control and sensor areas. The department heads reported to Catardi a
nd to his second-in-command, the executive officer, called the universal Navy nickname of “XO.”

  Piranha’s XO was Lieutenant Commander Astrid Schultz, a tall, slim blond woman with brown piercing eyes and a no nonsense toughness. She had smiled a greeting to Pacino in the wardroom before he came to the bridge, shaking his hand. The junior officers seemed to be terrified of her, but she had a den mother quality beneath her toughness.

  The junior officers had been hurling insults and inside jokes at each other, the easy camaraderie of the ship making it seem like Pacino had stepped into a fraternity house where each officer, chief, and enlisted sailor knew and appreciated the virtues and flaws of the other crew members, the crew working together like a single organism. Pacino had heard his father talk about it, but had never quite believed that eighty people from such varying backgrounds could get along so well, welded into a pipe for weeks and months at a time. Pacino wondered what other words of truth from his father he had rejected.

  The sun slipped lower in the western sky as the hour approached 1800. Alameda’s relief for OOD watch arrived in the bridge cockpit, a junior grade lieutenant named O’Neal, his first name unknown, the crew simply calling him “Toasty.” He was a tall, light-complected blond Academy grad, shy and easygoing, but awarded the Bronze Star for bravery the previous summer. O’Neal relieved Alameda, the hostile chief engineer vanishing into the access tunnel. O’Neal turned to Pacino and told him that he could go below, since there was no junior officer of the deck for the evening watch.

  “If it’s all the same to you, sir, I’d like to stay on watch until we submerge.”

  “We don’t pull the plug until midnight, Mr. Pacino. You’re welcome to stay, but you’ll miss evening meal.”

  “That’s okay, sir. But call me Patch.”

  “I’m Toasty. Good to have you aboard.” He raised his binoculars and searched the horizon, silent for some time. Finally he spoke again. “So. You going subs like your old man?”

  “I’m going to see how this run goes. I’m probably going to be all thumbs in a submarine.”

  O’Neal laughed. “Jesus, you do a back-full ahead-flank underway without tugs, making those slacker DevRon 12 line handlers wet their pants, you put the ship dead center of the channel right under the nose of the squadron commodore, and you wonder if you’ll be any good at this? There isn’t an officer aboard who could have done that. Hell, I don’t think the captain could do that.”

  Pacino’s face flushed. “Shiphandling is one thing,” he said, the binoculars at his eyes, staring ahead to the dimming horizon. “Being a competent submariner is another.”

  “The engineer seems to think you’re a natural.”

  “Alameda? That’s strange. She treats me like garbage.”

  “She just doesn’t have much use for nonquals. Once you’ve earned your dolphins she’s okay, but until an officer or enlisted is qualified in submarines, she figures they are breathing her department’s air — she owns the atmospheric control equipment — and drinking her department’s water.”

  “Well, she had me fooled.” Pacino raised the binoculars to his eyes, the two falling silent, and there was only the roar of the bow wave and the stretch of seawater from horizon to horizon.

  Piranha sailed on, making way for the continental shelf as the sun set astern.

  All too soon the watch neared an end as the control room called up that the ship was thirty minutes from the dive point.

  “Stand up,” O’Neal ordered Pacino. “Take a last look around and take in a last breath of fresh air.” Pacino complied, watching O’Neal. “This will be your last look at the surface with your naked eyes and the last real air for weeks, so savor it.” Pacino did, aware that he was taking part in a ritual practiced for generations. “Now, crouch down in the access tunnel and hold the flashlight.” O’Neal reached up on the port side and rotated a metal plate on a hinge until it was horizontal above his head, partially blocking the starlight, the plate latching with a click. Another plate on the starboard side came up, a third aft, and the fourth forward. The last clamshell hatch shut out the stars completely and made the cockpit disappear. Their perch was now faired into the smooth upper surface of the sail.

  Pacino lowered himself down the ladder into the red lamp lit vertical tunnel and paused to watch O’Neal come down and grab the upper hatch and slam it shut on the seating ring. He wheeled the dogging mechanism clockwise, and the metal claws unfolded and locked the hatch in place. Pacino then continued down until he emerged from the dim tunnel into the red-lit upper-level passageway. O’Neal followed, turning a switch to plunge the access tunnel into darkness. Then he pulled shut the lower hatch and dogged it the same way. Pacino clicked off the rig for dive checklist. The final item, the drain valve, was checked shut by O’Neal.

  The two walked in the dim red lights to the control room on the middle-level deck, which, unlike the upper level, was completely dark. The instrument panel of the enclosed ship control station was the only illumination in the forward part of the space. In the darkness Pacino could barely make out the silhouette of a man wearing a bulky helmet standing behind a console, Ensign Breckenridge.

  “Sir,” Pacino reported, “bridge and sail rigged for dive by Mr. O’Neal and checked by me.”

  The two reassumed the watch. Pacino was ushered to the chair at the command console and instructed to put on the Type 23 periscope helmet.

  “Well,” a Boston accent said from behind him, “I’m ready to hear the junior officer of the deck’s report.”

  “Mark the sounding,” Pacino called into the Type 23 helmet’s boom mike. The display came up, a breathtaking three dimensional view, as if Pacino’s head were back up on the sail.

  “Six five four fathoms!” O’Neal’s voice replied.

  “Captain,” Pacino said, gulping, hoping he’d remember all that O’Neal had taught him. “Ship is on course one one zero at all-ahead flank making three zero knots. Ship is rigged for dive by Chief Cavalla and checked by Mr. Breckenridge, sail rigged for dive by Mr. O’Neal and checked by me. We are two minutes from the dive point, sir, with ship’s inertial navigation tracking the GPS nav sat confirmed by the navigator with a stellar fix. The diving officer is stationed. We hold no surface contacts by visual or sonar. Sounding is six hundred fifty-four fathoms. Request permission to submerge the ship, sir.” Pacino breathed, hoping he hadn’t forgotten anything.

  “Very well. Junior Off’sa’deck,” Catardi said. “Submerge the ship to one five zero feet.”

  “Submerge the ship to one five zero feet, JOOD aye, sir.” Pacino waited, breathing heavily, his heart hammering again.

  “Thirty seconds to the dive point!”

  “Very well, Quartermaster.”

  “Mark the dive point!”

  “Diving Officer.” Pacino called, his voice steady despite his nerves, “submerge the ship to one five zero feet!”

  The diving officer sat in the ship-control enclosure, a station resembling a heavy jet cockpit with two seats, a central console, and consoles surrounding the seats. The diving officer was a chief petty officer in charge of the torpedomen, a burly woman named Marshall. She acknowledged, her voice growling back, “Submerge the ship to one five zero feet, Diving Officer, aye, sir.” She picked up the 1ME microphone and her voice rang out throughout the ship. “Dive! Dive!” She reached into the overhead for the lever to the diving alarm.

  Pacino jumped, startled at the sound of the diving alarm horn howling a deep OOOOOOOOOOH-GAAAAAAH just above his head.

  “Dive! Dive!” the chief’s voice announced a second time.

  “Helm, all ahead two-thirds,” the chief called. She had control of speed during the diving evolution, O’Neal had said.

  “All ahead two-thirds, aye, easing throttle to ahead two thirds, indicating turns for ahead two-thirds,” the helmsman called.

  “Very well,” the diving officer said. “Opening forward main ballast tank vents.”

  “Train the periscope to zero zero
zero relative,” Toasty O’Neal whispered to Pacino. He did and saw an odd sight, four geysers of water screaming vertically up out of the bullet nose. “Now call, ’Venting forward.’”

  “Venting forward,” Pacino said.

  “Venting forward, aye, sir,” the chief said. “Opening aft main ballast tank vents.”

  Pacino turned his view to look aft and witnessed the same phenomenon of an eruption of water from the aft hull, four fire hoses pointed upward. The venting was so violent that it took thousands of gallons of water upward with the air, he thought.

  “Venting aft.”

  “Venting aft, aye, sir. Rigging out the bow planes. A moment passed. “Bowplanes extended and locked. Helm, take control of your bow planes.”

  “Bowplanes tested, tested sat,” the helmsman said.

  “Helm, ten degrees dive on the bow planes.”

  “Ten degrees dive, aye, my bow planes are down ten degrees.”

  Pacino watched as the bullet nose of the bow burrowed deeper into the water, the geysers now submerged, some vapor still shooting up through the waves, until there was nothing forward except ocean. He trained his view aft, at the waves rising up the cylinder of the hull. The hull peeked out only between waves, then vanished under the water.

  “Decks awash,” Pacino called.

  The aft hull exposed itself one last time, then was under, the white wake smothering the vessel. “Hull submerged.”

  “Hull submerged, aye, sir. I have the stern planes stern planes tested in rise, tested in dive, stern planes tested sat, I have the bubble, sir, and stern planes to ten degrees dive. Proceeding to ten-degree down bubble. Flooding depth control one to the halfway mark, flooding commenced. Tank at five zero percent, hull valve shut, backup valve shut.”