Terminal Run

by Michael Dimercurio

  “Hey, Duke,” Pacino muttered, feeling odd calling an officer anything but “sir” as he had been required since he arrived at Annapolis. “What’s in the special ops compartment?”

  Phelps, who had seemed an easygoing youth with a sense of humor, frowned at Pacino. “This run it’s a Deep Submergence Vehicle, a DSV. Three spherical pressure hulls connected by two hatches. Goes to the bottom with SEAL commando divers and NSA spooks.”

  “NSA?”

  “National Security Agency. The electronic warfare thugs, the guys who eavesdrop on communications and fight off computer hackers. With the network-centric military, an electronic hijacker could disrupt the whole works, or worse, use our own guns against us. So the NSA guys have their own DSV to find ocean-bottom data highway cables and deep-sea server nodes on the sea floor. Since satellites can be subject to eavesdropping, a lot of the intel and sensitive com ms are passing through these undersea cables. So our guys go deep, find them, and tap into them. We’ve got half the world wired for sound. When the spooks are onboard, we’re just a bus for them. This run we get to forget them for once and do an actual submarine op. And by the way, since I opened my mouth, all that’s classified top secret, so not a word to anyone. That includes family, roommates, girlfriends, anyone, even other submarine officers. If you blab, you will find your door forced open by NSA guys in black suits and you’ll have a two-man room at Fort Leavenworth Military Prison. The Black Pig is a project boat, Patch, which means it’s top secret from the sonar dome to the propulsor shroud. Got it?”

  “Got it,” Pacino said, swallowing, starting to see why his father had never talked about what he did.

  Toasty O’Neal came into the room, and the XO glared up at

  him. “Nice of you to come, Toasty,” she grumbled. “We all cleared for this briefing?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said to her as he took the remaining open seat at the table.

  “Nav, you ready?” she asked Crossfield. The black navigator stood up and lowered the display screen against the long inboard bulkhead.

  “Yes, XO,” he said quietly.

  “Eng, call the captain,” Schultz ordered. Alameda nodded and grabbed a phone and buzzed Captain Catardi.

  “Sir, we’re ready for the op brief.” Alameda looked over at Pacino. “Yes, Cap’n, he’s here. Aye, sir.” She hung up and looked at Schultz. “He’s coming.”

  The XO passed around the coffeepot and everyone filled up. Captain Catardi came in the forward door. The room was silent as a church. Pacino expected the officers to stand as the senior officer entered, but they remained seated.

  “Good morning, Captain,” XO Schultz said formally.

  “Morning, XO, Eng, Nav, officers.” His coveralls were pressed and creased and he looked as fresh as if he’d been on vacation. His silver oak leaf collar emblems, dolphins and skull-and-crossbones capital ship command pin shimmered under the bright lights of the wardroom. He slipped into the captain’s chair at the end of the table. “Well, Navigator, let’s hear it.” Schultz poured Catardi a cup of coffee, and the captain took a long pull and sat back expectantly.

  “Good morning, Captain, XO, officers,” Crossfield began. Pacino wondered at the contrast between the chummy fraternal closeness of the crew with the formality of expression on and off watch. And not only the formality, but the unique language of the ship. At every turn Pacino found himself corrected when he said something wrong. Alameda had corrected him harshly when he had asked if he should close the door. “Never say ‘close’ on a submarine, nonqual. It sounds like the word ‘blow’ on an internal communication circuit, and ‘blow’ means we’re flooding and the OOD should emergency blow to

  the surface. You don’t ‘close’ the fucking door, you ‘shut’ it. Got it?”

  The display screen showed a chart of the Atlantic Ocean north of the equator, the Canadian coast on the left, the European landmass on the right. A blue line connected Groton, Connecticut, with a dot in mid-Atlantic labeled point november.

  The navigator pointed to the display. “The chart depicts our PIM coming out of Groton toward Point November. We have a detour on the way to the Indian Ocean, a major operation that needs to be done before we leave the Atlantic. Somewhere in the Atlantic is the U.S. robotic hunter-killer sub Snare. Many of you remember our last exercise with her.” The wardroom filled with angry murmurs, the ship’s officers resentful of the tactics of the automated submarine. “Quiet, please. Apparently something has gone very wrong with the Snare. She’s out of communication and will not respond. In the other services, the standard operating procedure with an automated combat node that is not responding to orders is to send the unit a self-destruct signal. That is not possible in this case, because Snare carries a nuclear reactor, and a self-destruct could spread enough curies of radioactive waste to kill a moderate-sized ecosphere, not to mention the warheads of the plasma weapons, which would not only be hazardous to the environment but would be quite a prize for an enterprising salvage team to obtain for a terrorist group. So that’s where Piranha comes in. We’re the destruct system. Our mission is to find Snare and put her down, at a location we will report to squadron so they can salvage any un detonated warheads and clean up the nuclear mess from the reactor.”

  The wardroom erupted as several junior officers shot questions at Crossfield and others commented to themselves.

  “Peace, gentlemen,” Crossfield said. “We have no intel on this submarine’s position, and it’s a damned big ocean. So we’restarting at Point November and doing an outward spiral search. At some point squadron will give us an intel update, with some data on the Snare’s position, and we’ll vector in on it.”

  Pacino studied the plans of the robotic submarine opponent,

  fascinated. Crossfield detailed the robot ship’s capabilities, emphasizing that the ship was expected to be quiet and unpredictable. And that was when Catardi chimed in.

  “There’s more news here, officers,” he said, his face a grave mask of concern. “Since the Snare is out of control, the assumption being made by ComSubDevRon 12 is that it has become paranoid. Any attempt to approach it may result in an attack. As of this moment we are to assume that Snare is a hostile combatant. It may have even been able to find out that we were sent to kill it. If so, while we’researching for it, it’ll be searching for us. This robot could be in our baffles with open torpedo tube doors, getting ready to put us on the bottom.”

  The room was silent for a moment.

  “That is all,” Crossfield said. “XO?”

  “We’ll have a tactical meeting in the wardroom every afternoon watch at thirteen hundred, starting today,” Schultz said. “Other than that meeting, you and your men have orders to get as much rest as possible. We will be rigging for a modified ultra quiet with the only exception the galley. I want this crew tiptoeing, no stereos, no heavy maintenance, and no bullshit. Everyone got that?”

  The officers nodded.

  “That’s all I have, Officers.” Catardi stood and left, and Schultz dismissed the wardroom.

  Pacino was still staring at the display when the officers filed out of the room and Crossfield turned off the computerized image. Alameda snarled at him, bringing him back to the present. “Mr. Pacino, this may be a war operation, but I recommend you get working on your diving officer qualifications. You’reno good to us unless you can stand a watch on your own.” She opened a safe and handed him a Write Pad computer. “Diving officer manual is loaded aboard along with the standard operating procedures. You need to know all of that cold before you go on watch at noon. You’ll be diving officer under instruction on my watch section I recommend you don’t screw it up.”

  Alameda’s radio beeped. “Engineer,” she said into it.

  “Yes sir, on the way, sir.” She frowned at Pacino as she left the room. He took a deep breath and turned on the computer and began studying the main ballast system.

  One deck below, Lieutenant Alameda knocked on the captain’s stateroom door.

/>   “You called, sir?”

  Catardi was reclining in his command chair. “Yes, Eng. I just wanted your opinion on our young midshipman,” he said, looking up at her. Alameda froze, wondering if a reprimand was coming. Could the captain know her thoughts about the midshipman?

  “He seems a quick study. Captain, and motivated besides,” she said, hoping she was not blushing. “And he seems to take the punishment of being a nonqual in stride—I’ve yet to see him complain. Even after he was put up to kissing the starboard main engine last night.”

  “You’re pretty tough on the kid, Eng.”

  “Yes, sir. Should I ease up on him?”

  “No,” Catardi said, looking off into the distance. “Let’s see what he’s made of.”

  Relief flooded her. She cleared her throat. “Aye aye, sir. Anything else, Captain?”

  “That’ll be all, Eng.”

  She shut the stateroom door behind her. Catardi stared at nothing for a few moments, remembering his younger days, back to a time when the nine most frightening words in the English language were, “Captain Pacino wants to see you in his stateroom.” If the youngster had a tenth of the old man’s character, he’d make one hell of a submariner, Catardi thought.

  The sun had long vanished over the horizon and the drydock floodlights had come on, their glow shining in the half-closed blinds of Michael Pacino’s dockside office. The only other light in the room came from a reading lamp, casting a pool of dim yellow on the scattered sketches on the oak library table. To the side, Pacino’s pad computer had five programs open, calculating hydrodynamic friction functions and thrust curves, with a drafting program showing a three-dimensional rotating diagram of the tail of the SSNX submarine.

  Pacino had been in the office since before dawn, immersed in his idea for the torpedo evasion ship alteration. There was really nothing to come home to, not with Colleen still working out of her D.C. offices as her testimony before Congress continued. He leaned back in his seat for a moment, thinking of her, and realizing guiltily that he hadn’t been much of a husband to her since the sinking of the cruise ship. Since Pacino had sailed to the Princess Dragon gravesite, he had felt more like himself, but he still had to make up the year to Colleen. That would have to come later, he chided himself, the beeping of his computer at the end of a complex calculation returning him to the problem at hand. He was bent over the display, barely aware of the office door coming open. Assuming it was one of the shipyard engineers, Pacino kept concentrating on the computer until he could reach a stopping point, when he heard the female voice from the doorway.

  “They told me I could find you here. You working the swing shift or just putting in day shift overtime?”

  Pacino stared up at his wife, dumbfounded, imagining for a moment that his thoughts of her had conjured her up. She was dressed in a dark suit that accentuated her slender form and her long legs, a string of pearls her only jewelry other than her wedding ring. As usual after not seeing her for weeks, she startled him with her beauty. Her raven-black hair swept to her shoulders framing a beautiful face, with strong cheekbones, large brown eyes, a perfect nose, and a smiling mouth with red lips curving over movie-star teeth. For the thousandth time, he realized he didn’t deserve her as a wife, but the guilt he’d felt a moment before evaporated in his excitement at seeing her. He stood up so fast his chair tipped and crashed behind him. He hurried to her and swept her into an embrace. She laughed in surprise but returned his kiss, then pushed him away.

  “You must be feeling better,” she said breathlessly. “I thought maybe I could steal you away for dinner and you could tell me about what you’reworking on.”

  “I thought you were in D.C. for the next month,” he said.

  “I am. But today is Friday. I don’t have to be back until Sunday night.”

  They found a cozy restaurant a half hour from the shipyard, and caught up in a secluded booth. Pacino told her about the sailing trip, Patton’s submarine, and his orders to run the torpedo evasion program and the Tigershark project. Colleen put her fingers to her lips, waving him to silence.

  “We’ll talk about that when we’re back in your office,” she said. “Tell me about Janice’s call and Anthony.”

  Pacino recited his ex-wife’s conversation verbatim, including Janice’s facial expressions. Colleen’s ability to read Janice’s mind from a distance was uncanny.

  “So, are you worried about Anthony Michael?” Colleen asked.

  Pacino refilled their wineglasses and thought about it. “I never wanted him to go into the submarine force,” he admitted. “But it might do him good to make this one deployment.”

  Colleen nodded. “There’s nothing wrong with him,” she said. “He’s only in trouble all the time because he’s an innovator —like his father.”

  Pacino shook his head. “I don’t want him wasting his life chasing mine, trying to be a younger version of me. I want him to find his own way. If he’s doing this because it is all he’s ever wanted, I’ll give him my blessing. But I’m not convinced this is his destiny.”

  “You said he’s under the command of Rob Catardi, who you trained on the Devilfish. What kind of skipper is he?”

  Pacino stared into the distance for some time, lost in the past. “He’s the best there is,” he finally said.

  “Then don’t worry,” Colleen said. “Anthony will be fine, and he’ll learn something.”

  A look of doubt crossed Pacino’s face.

  “Relax, Michael. I’m his stepmother—I know. When I met him he was a skinny high school kid. I watched him his plebe year at the Academy, saw him get tougher, and watched him grow into an upperclassman. He’s his own soul—there are shadows of you in him, but he’s unique. Let him go, Michael.”

  “Thanks, Colleen. For being a good stepmother to him. He’s the better for having had you in his life.”

  She just stared at the table for a long moment.

  Back in the office, Colleen looked over his sketches.

  “So, you want the full briefing?” Pacino asked.

  “Tell me everything,” Colleen said.

  “In theory, it’s simple. We cut the stern of the SSNX to allow inserting two dozen solid-fueled Vortex engines.” The Vortex missile was an underwater solid fueled rocket that traveled at three hundred knots and steered itself by rotating its nozzle. Although it was called a missile, some physicists called it a supercavitating torpedo, because what allowed it to go such extreme speeds was that its nose cone boiled the water to steam vapor, and the vapor bubble eventually completely enclosed the missile so that the rocket thrust could carry it through the water at the speed of a private jet. “When the con trolroom hits the switch, twenty-four large-bore rocket engines ignite and the ship gains enough thrust to get up to a hundred and fifty knots.”

  “That’s not enough. The latest supercavitating torpedoes go three hundred.”

  “So the ship has to eliminate skin friction. This is where it gets more complex.” Pacino riffled the pile on his desk for a sketch. “We run dry piping headers through the ship connected to the high-pressure air system and through valves to the main steam system. At first the high-pressure air banks blow plugs out of the hull surface nozzles. Air covers the skin of the ship, through these ring headers. As the air blankets the surface of the hull, the ship begins to lose skin friction. As the air banks go dry, the main steam system comes on-line to replace the air, and the boiler output dumps into the headers. That will last until the thrust is gone from the Vortex engines. According to the program, as the air banks go dry, ship velocity is up to two hundred ninety-eight knots, and as the steam takes over, we get an additional eight knots. And we maintain that for over twenty seconds, with an acceleration time-to-velocity of—”

  “It won’t work.”

  “—say, that’s not good, that will put internal acceleration at over ten g’s. Dammit, we’ll mangle the crew with that level of acceleration.”

  “It won’t work.”

  “I�
��ll work on the acceleration calcs—”

  “You’re not listening!”

  “What?” Pacino asked. “What did you say?”

  “I said it won’t work.”

  “I know—the acceleration’s too much.”

  “That’s not why,” Colleen said, frowning. “First, the Vortex engines will melt the propulsor, the rudder, and the stern planes How will you control the thrust angle?”

  “We can’t mount the engines on gimbals,” Pacino said. “It would make the system too complex. And I planned on the stern section melting away.”

  “Great—so your aft ballast tank is vaporized, your control

  surfaces are burned away—there’s nothing to control the ship’s angle. You’ll zip to the surface and come back down, losing your speed, and get hit with the incoming torpedo, or you’ll plunge to crush depth, or worse, corkscrew through the water and kill the crew from being put into a seven-thousand ton blender.”

  “We’ll control attitude with the bow planes

  “It won’t work, Michael,” Colleen said, agitated. “You can’t use the gigantic hydraulics and the slow response of the bow planes to control the ship.”

  Pacino nodded. “I think I see what you mean. We’ll have to lock the bow planes at zero angle, then use small trim tabs on them, or upper and lower spoilers, hooked to a dedicated pneumatic system or a separate high-pressure hydraulic mechanism. That would move fast enough to control the ship’s angle.”

  Again Colleen shook her head. “The sensors and the computer control won’t have the speed to control the ship. The time constant’s too long. By the time the computer senses a down angle and sends the signals to correct for it, you’re a hundred feet deeper than crush depth.”

  Pacino frowned. He had met his wife in a drydock much like the one the SSNX lay in now, laboring over the same hull, when she had come to fix the computer system installed by her company. He remembered her calm, relentless competence and the lionhearted way she had insisted on going to war in the East China Sea with the SSNX when the Cyclops battle control system was still failing. He’d listened to her then, and he would listen to her now.