Barracuda- Final Bearing

by Michael Dimercurio

  unified submarine command training center improved 688CLASS attack submarine control room simulator norfolk, virginia Adm. Michael Pacino looked up from the briefing table, the chart computer display on it showing Tokyo Bay.

  Comdr. Bruce Phillips, the commanding officer of the 688class submarine Greeneville walked in, looking tense.

  “Commander Phillips,” Pacino said, rising to his feet and shaking the younger man’s hand. “Good to meet you. I know you’re anxious to get on with it. I just want to let you know I want to see you succeed here. This isn’t a test to remove you from command, as the rumors have it. I just want to see how you fight your ship. Are you ready?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “The scenario we’ll be running is you against a Destiny II-class Japanese attack submarine outbound from Tokyo Bay. The Destiny is on the way to the deep Pacific to try and sink a US surface-action group. Your mission is to sink him before he can get by you and, obviously, to survive. Which won’t be easy, because the Destiny II is one of the best there is. Your USS Greeneville is an older 688class ship, but I’m convinced you can beat this guy.”

  “I’ll try, sir.”

  “I’ll be there only to observe. It’s your deal. Good luck.” The announcement came over the loudspeaker.

  “OWN SHIP IS USS GREENVILLE, SUBMERGED OPERATIONS, EIGHTY NAUTICAL MILES SOUTHWEST OF TOKYO BAY. IN THIS SCENARIO, HOSTILITIES HAVE BROKEN OUT BETWEEN THE U.S. AND JAPAN. OWN SHIP’S MISSION IS TO SINK OUTBOUND DESTINY NUCLEAR ATTACK SUBMARINE COMING OUT OF TOKYO BAY ENROUTE TO THE PACIFIC. BEGIN SIMULATION.”

  Admiral Pacino looked around. Something seemed wrong.

  He sensed it the moment he walked into the darkened control room. He tried to identify the source of his uneasiness but his thoughts were interrupted by the voice of the officer of the deck announcing, “The admiral is in the control room.”

  “Carry on,” Pacino said, looking up to the periscope stand where Comdr. Bruce Phillips presided over his battlestations crew. “Captain Phillips, please go ahead.” “Aye, Admiral,” Phillips said, turning away from Pacino to look at the control-room displays below him.

  The room was completely dark, rigged for black, lit only by the backwash of light from the firecontrol console screens and the instrument faces mounted on the ship-control console, the periscope stand and at various points in the overhead. As Pacino’s eyes adjusted to the darkness, he could make out the watchstanders crammed into a room the size of a small den. Three were in the ship-control station up forward, the seats and console arrangement looking like it had been transplanted from a 747 cockpit, except that instead of windows there were rows of instruments monitoring the nuclear submarine’s course, speed, depth, angle, engine speed and control surface positions. Two men sat in leather seats on either side of a central console crammed with rows of switches and knobs, each man holding a control yoke exactly like that of an airplane. Behind the console an older heavier man leaned forward, supervising the first two. To the left was a large wraparound panel where another crewman sat facing rows of dials and switches, two large monitor screens set in the panel dimly flashing system-status displays with diagrams of pipes and tanks.

  Behind the cockpit setup was the elevated periscope stand, the platform rising eighteen inches off the surrounding deck with polished stainless-steel railing enclosing it. The stand was called “the conn,” since the officer of the deck controlled the ship from the platform.

  The two stainless steel poles penetrating the stand were the periscopes, both useless since the sub was too deep to see anything but darkness. On the conn Captain Phillips and his officer of the deck, a young lieutenant, stood side by side, the lieutenant unconsciously mimicking the older captain’s stance and square-jawed squint at the room below.

  On the starboard side of the conn was a long row of consoles, each with a television monitor screen. The row was the attack center, where the machines figured out where the enemy submarine was and programmed weapons to take him out. When Pacino had commanded a submarine the consoles were called the firecontrol system, before the separate ship’s computers were linked and integrated, the row now part of a combatcontrol suite.

  Pacino looked at the displays on the console screens, surprisingly empty.

  Aft of the periscope pedestal were two plotting tables, one used for navigation, the chart showing Tokyo Roads, the small islands and the main traffic approach channel into Tokyo Bay. The ship’s position was marked with a glowing dot off the island of Inamba-Jima, barely over the hundred-fathom curve, very shallow water for a deepdraft submarine. The second table was crowded with two officers and an enlisted plotter, staring at a blank white sheet of tracing paper since there was no enemy to track.

  On the port side of the periscope stand were rows of navigation equipment. Set into the overhead were radio control panels, television screens, chronometer indicators, cables and valves. One of the television monitors between the ship control area and the attack center was dark, since it played the view out of the periscope. The second was above the middle firecontrol console display and was lit in red and lined with what looked like vertical scratches—the sonar display repeater. Pacino looked at the screen, which showed that the sea around them was empty.

  The crew seemed aware of him, yet was ignoring him, which gave him an odd feeling of being almost invisible.

  Pacino glanced around the room again, beginning to feel plugged into the tactical situation, at one with the sea and the ship, the warm feeling he had once felt in his own control room on the Seawolf, but the warmth stopped as he realized that never again would he command a nuclear submarine, a job now reserved for the young. He looked at the captain, Comdr. Bruce Phillips, and envied him.

  In stark contrast to Pacino, Phillips was short, with crewcut blond hair and a muscular build. The crewcut Pacino understood, since it was plain even in the dim light of the room that Phillips’ hair had been receding.

  Phillips had shaved it all off close to the scalp some weeks before, but it seemed to look more natural now that it had grown a sixteenth of an inch. Phillips was in his late thirties and single, the latter unheard of for a submarine captain with all the social obligations of the job.

  But then Phillips had never fit the type, Pacino thought. He wasn’t the conventional older, spare-tirecarrying family-man commanding officer. Phillips was independently wealthy, from an old Philadelphia Main Line family. The money, Pacino thought, might have been in part responsible for what made him different.

  He had a reputation for lack of caution, not so much uncaring as dismissive of safety regulations, impatient with bureaucracy, inattentive to fleet politics. The previous force commander, Adm. Dick Wells, had put it negatively to Pacino: “Phillips might at first seem like a good commander but he’s unreliable, inconsistent and has an attitude. He’ll screw something up and sink someday.

  He ran aground two months ago and the investigation is still ongoing. So far it looks like it was just bad luck, a double equipment malfunction, but bad luck follows sloppy sailors. I was going to recommend to the board of inquiry that we can him. There are too many good submarine officers out there to waste time on a marginal performer. Well, he’s your problem now.”

  “How did he get command in the first place if he’s so sloppy?” Pacino had asked.

  “Usual story. Inflated fitness reports, he knew somebody on the selection board for commander, kissed up to his squadron commander. He’ll snow you under until you look at the repair reports. His equipment is always breaking. His ship is dirty. When you ask him why, he just chomps on a cigar and squints at you.”

  Pacino wasn’t sure whether to buy Wells’s opinion, discard it, or see the same facts in a different light. Ten years before, someone on fleet staff might well have described Pacino himself that way. Except Pacino had never been sloppy; his equipment had been functional if not perfect, his decks tidy if not spotless, the Navy paperwork completed if not enjoyed. There was a distinction between bold and reckless. The
question was, which was Phillips?

  As if hearing his thoughts, Phillips squinted over at Pacino as he dug out a fat cigar from his khaki shirt pocket and put it in his mouth. He looked away to the sonar display, then reached for a phone. His voice was quiet, but Pacino picked up his conversation.

  “Sonar, Captain, I’m about to brief the battlestations crew. Interrupt me if you get a detect.” He put the phone back in its cradle and scanned the room, clearing his throat.

  “Attention in the firecontrol team,” he announced, his voice not deep but rock steady, grabbing the ears of every man in the room without having to shout. “Since the declaration of war with Japan on Friday the approach to Tokyo Bay has been clean. However, satellite photographic intelligence from an hour ago showed a Japanese Destiny Type-Two attack submarine getting underway from the Yokosuka piers. We suspect that his mission is to attack the USS Ronald Reagan carrier battle group outbound from Pearl Harbor. Our Op Order came in with the intelligence brief. Our mission is to sink the Destiny II immediately upon detection.”

  Phillips looked around the room, put the cigar in his teeth and gave the rest of his speech talking around the cigar.

  “Let me remind you all of the Destiny II’s armament.

  He is probably carrying the new model of Nagasaki torpedo.

  It’s a dozen tons of weapon, goes seventy-five knots compared to our forty, has an endurance of an hour and can sink us if it detonates within a hundred yards of our hull. There will be no outrunning that son of a bitch. So let’s stay alert and put this guy on the bottom before he hears us. Officer of the deck, rig ship for ultraquiet. That’s all, folks. Carry on.”

  Pacino put on a spare headset to listen in on the control-room conversation. He couldn’t have said it better, he thought, looking up at the sonar repeater set high in the overhead of the conn above the middle firecontrol console. The trace coming down the screen was new.

  “Conn, Sonar,” crackled in Pacino’s ear from the sonar supervisor, who manned the watch in the closetsized sonar room forward of control. “New sonar contact on broadband sonar bearing zero one five, designate Sierra One.”- “Sonar, Captain, aye,” Phillips snapped, squinting.

  Pacino looked at the navigation display, realizing that bearing 015 pointed to the outbound traffic separation scheme from Yokosuka. Phillips met his eyes for a moment, nodded.

  “Conn, Sonar, new contact Sierra One is operating on the surface, loud wake noises, no turn-count from his screw.” “Captain, aye,” Phillips said, looking at the bearing line of the contact on the sonar screen set into the overhead above the conn. “Why no turn-count?”

  “Sir, the screw appears to be a turbine-type screw, ducted propulsor. Contact is tentatively classified as a warship, submarine type. Destiny class, running on the surface. Conn, Sonar, we now have an increase in signal.

  Contact is putting out transients.”

  “Is it possible he’s submerging?”

  “Captain, Sonar, yes.”

  “Let’s designate contact Sierra One as Target One, Destiny Il-class attack submarine.”

  Phillips barked orders to the firecontrol team— weapon presets for the torpedoes in tubes one and two, speed changes, depth changes, calling for the bearing rate to the target. The ship settled down to a momentary quiet as the sonar and computer gathered data on the outbound Japanese submarine.

  Pacino glanced quickly at the chronometer display above the firecontrol consoles, his experience telling him to turn now to get the second leg on the target, to zig zag the opposite direction and see how the direction to the contact, his bearing, changed. Pacino ached to give the order himself, when finally Phillips called out! “Helm, right fifteen degrees rudder, steady course east.

  Sonar, turning to the north.”

  “Helm, aye, my rudder’s right fifteen, passing two eight zero.”

  “Conn, Sonar, aye,” the sonar supervisor’s anxious voice crackled in Pacino’s headphones. “Captain, you’re pointing the target, sir.”

  “I know fix that, god damnit,” Phillips said.

  Pacino made a mental note to talk to Phillips about two things—that pointing the ship toward the contact when the range was unknown could cause a collision, and was a violation of fleet regulations, and second, that he’d better get his crew used to violating fleet regs, because in wartime the only rules were the ones the captain made up along the way. Obviously the sonar chief hadn’t figured that out, but it was Phillips’s job to prepare him. But then, how would he himself as a submarine skipper, the way he was six years ago, perform under the harsh light of an admiral’s eye? Perhaps the same as Phillips, perhaps worse.

  “Conn, Sonar, loss of contact! Target One has shut down, last bearing zero one eight.”

  “Dammit,” Phillips mumbled. “What the hell happened?”

  Phillips’s executive officer hurried into the room. Lt.

  Comdr. Roger Whatney, Royal Navy, was on exchange while an American was second-in-command of a Trafalgarclass sub, all part of a pilot program to bring the two English-speaking nuclear submarine navies into a closer cultural alignment, one of Pacino’s innovations since taking over the reorganized fleet. Whatney was short and slight enough to make Phillips look a giant. He was quick to smile, easy going, his enthusiasm a trademark.

  Today, however, he looked deflated, haggard. He stood next to Phillips.

  “Where the hell did he go. Coordinator?” During battlestations Whatney would become the firecontrol coordinator, responsible to Phillips for the target’s firecontrol solution. For the duration of the battle Whatney would cease to be called “XO”—shorthand for executive officer and would be simply “Coordinator.”

  “We lost the target, sir? Looks like he pulled the plug and went silent.”

  “Here’s your headset. You look like crap.”

  “Thanks, Captain. A close encounter with pneumonia.”

  Phillips bent over the officer at the firecontrol console and spun the knobs set into the horizontal skirt of the panel. The lines on the display rotated and wiggled. “Coordinator, I’m thinking of putting a torpedo down the bearing line to his old position.”

  “Sir, loss of contact was two minutes ago. At his range, he could drive off-track before the torpedo got there even if he didn’t hear it. And if he did, we’re done for.”

  “Yeah, you’re right. Sonar, any detect?”

  “Captain, Sonar, no.”

  The room waited for the outbound Japanese sub to come closer, for him to get louder. Pacino watched the chronometer, thinking that he was probably going thirty-five knots at a range of sixty miles, with a detection range to the Destiny pessimistically at five miles, meaning it could be well over an hour before he got this far out. What would he do if he were in command. Drive in closer, he thought.

  “Helm, left ten degrees rudder, steady course zero one eight, all ahead standard. Attention in the firecontrol team. We’ve lost Target One when he submerged. Present intentions are to get closer to him, get a quick detect, then drive off the bearing line to get a one-minute range, then fire a Mark 50 selected to immediate enable. After weapon launch we will clear datum to the south at flank and monitor the situation on the caboose array and the towed array endbeam. Carry on.”

  Gutsy, Pacino thought. This would be interesting. The time on the chronometer unwound for ten minutes until sonar called on the headsets.

  “Conn, Sonar, reacquisition Target One, bearing zero one one.”

  “Helm, left three degrees rudder, steady course three zero zero. Commencing leg one when steady. Coordinator.

  You’ve got thirty seconds.”

  “Aye, sir.”

  “Sir, steady course three zero zero,” the helmsman called from the ship-control panel.

  “Mark leg one, Coordinator.” Phillips tapped the soggy-ended cigar against his leg. Thirty seconds later the bearings were coming into the firecontrol screen and forming a rough line down the display.

  “Got a curve, sir, recommend ma
neuver,” Whatney said.

  “Helm, right ten degrees rudder, steady course east.”

  Pacino waited, wondering how long it would be before the outbound Destiny heard them, wondering how long it would take a Japanese commander to put a torpedo in the water.

  “Come on. Coordinator, you’ve got thirty seconds when steady.”

  “Steady course east, sir.”

  “Very well. Helm.” Phillips’s face seemed to be relaxing, lost in the situation, now seemingly unaware of Pacino’s observation.

  “Weps, confirm torpedo settings tube one.” The weapons officer sat at the far right console, the panel replete with function keys and a large silver lever.

  “Tube one, outer door open, weapon warm, immediate enable set, medium speed active snake—”

  Whatney interrupted. “Gotta curve, Captain, and a firing solution, range seven thousand yards, target speed thirty knots, target course one nine zero. Recommend immediate launch.”

  “Firing point procedures, tube one,” Phillips called.

  “Ship ready,” the lieutenant next to Phillips reported.

  “Weapon ready,” the weapons officer said.

  “Solution ready,” from Whatney.

  “Shoot on generated bearing,” Phillips commanded, shoving the cigar into his mouth.

  “Set,” the officer at the middle firecontrol panel called, sending the target solution to the torpedo.

  “Standby,” the weapons officer said from the weapons console, taking the large silver trigger all the way to the left.

  “Shoot,” Phillips ordered.

  “Fire!” the weapons officer said, his voice excited as he pulled the trigger to the far right.

  Nothing happened. Pacino now realized what had been wrong when he had first walked into the room.

  The crew around him seemed not to notice.

  “Tube one fired electrically. Captain,” the weapons officer said.

  “Unit one, normal launch,” sonar reported. “Unit is active.”

  “Let’s get out of here, Coordinator. Sonar, prepare to monitor the caboose array, we’re putting the target in the baffles. Helm, all ahead flank, right ten degrees rudder, steady course south.”