“Well, why don’t you say, ‘Engineer, elevate reactor limits to 200 percent.* Then, when you’re ready to give it the gas, order the helm to go to emergency flank.” Phillips gave the order,
Hornick vanished aft, still puffing on the cigar. Phillips walked into control, briefing the O.O.D on what the engineer would be up to. As the ship accelerated to emergency flank, the velocity indicator passing forty-five, then fifty, fifty-five knots, on to 59.8, slowly increasing to sixty, topping out at 60.6 knots, the deck shook steadily. Everywhere that Phillips walked, the ship trembled, the vibration irritating but then, who cared as long as the ship could make the speed? He peered over the chart flat panel and calculated the time to the Oparea. With their newfound speed they would be in the Oparea in slightly over eighteen hours. Hornick showed up on the conn, the deck still trembling. “Anything you can do about the vibration, Eng?” Phillips asked. “Sorry, sir. I made sure it wasn’t the thrust bearing or the drive train. I think the shaking is from the Vortex missiles. Some kind of turbulence from hauling them through the water at the speed of a torpedo. Plus we’re unbalanced with the first one gone.”
“Think the shaking will hurt the ship?”
“The electronics should handle it,” Hornick said. “It’s the crew I worry about. Bad for crew fatigue.”
“this is the captain,” Phillips said into the circuit one microphone, his voice booming through the ship. “we ARE RUNNING FOR THE OPAREA AT EMERGENCY FLANK. YOU’LL ALL BE HAPPY TO KNOW WE’RE BREAKING A US SUBMERGED SPEED RECORD AT OVER SIXTY KNOTS. THAT IS WHAT IS RESPONSIBLE FOR THE DECK VIBRATIONS, WHICH COULD LEAD TO CREW FATIGUE. FOR THE NEXT EIGHTEEN HOURS ALL OFF-WATCH PERSONNEL ARE ORDERED TO THEIR RACKS. GET SOME SLEEP, GENTLEMEN. ONCE WE’RE IN THE OPAREA THERE WON’T BE MUCH SLEEP FOR ANY OF US.” Phillips clicked off, looked at Hornick, then at his watch. “Eng, I think I’m going to follow my own advice.”
“Aye, sir. I’ll be aft. I want to make sure the protection circuitry modifications go down okay.” Phillips was asleep within thirty seconds of hitting his pillow.
northwest pacific south OF shikoku island SS-810 Winged Serpent Tanaka walked into the crew messroom. All fourteen junior officers and Hiro Mazdai were now present. In a corner of the room the Second Captain displays rotated through the navigation, sensor, ship control and weaponsstatus panels. There was no one in the control room during the briefing—the Second Captain had complete control. While they were in the waters where Tanaka expected to see contact with the enemy submarines, he would need to brief his officers, and the sooner the better.
The officers stood at attention as he walked into the oblong room, its central feature the long narrow conference table. Tanaka waved the men to their seats and poured himself a cup of tea, then sat at the head of the table, consulted the notes on his personal computer pad, looked up.
“Officers, I will be brief. Item one—the history to date. The Three-class ships sent into the deep Pacific have experienced success. The surface-action groups being sent here have been attacked successfully. Three aircraft carriers and their associated ships have been put on the bottom. I believe few of the Destiny III submarines survived the encounters, the escort submarines are assumed to have sunk them. So at this point we have only Two-class submarines to defend the waters of the Home Islands.
“Item two—our history of encounters with the American attack submarines. The information received to date shows that the only submerged encounter between a Two-class ship and an American submarine was our own attack of the vessel that torpedoed the supertanker. Either the Americans are at a severe disadvantage or that ship was poorly trained. For now I want to remind each one of you that our success against the first American could have been more from luck or a bad day for the Americans than our own skill or ship quieting. So we will maintain absolute ship silence in our future encounters, and whenever we detect an American we will assume he has detected us.
“Item three—the collected intelligence about American intentions. Mr. First will post the electronic chart display. We believe that the Americans will enter our close-in waters in pairs or threes. These are known as wolfpacks, although we may think of them as being more like frightened teenagers pairing up before going into a dark forest. This will prove most helpful to our tactics, because we will be more efficient at killing them. They will be clustered, so once we detect a pair we will shoot torpedoes at them both, putting down two with the work of sinking one. In addition we will know that all submerged contacts we see will be hostile, while the American commanders must keep in mind that another friendly submarine is nearby, which will make them hesitate when they launch their torpedoes. We believe they will split their force between north and south of our waters and work their way to Tokyo Bay in their attempt to sink our force. Then they could go up Tokyo Bay and cause some damage, making their position much stronger. We will concentrate on preventing that.
“I expect that their forces will arrive in two waves, one now, the second in three days as more of the Pacific ships arrive in zone. Our tactics will be to try to sink the initial task force, reload torpedoes, then rescour the zone for Americans. My intuition on this matter is, I believe, sound since I have spent more time in the vicinity of the gaijin than anyone here.
“That is all, men. If any one of you has questions, submit them to Mr. First and he will bring them to me.”
Tanaka left the room, his officers coming to rigid attention as he left. Mazdai hated that he was cold with the younger officers, Tanaka thought, but their generation was, he felt, soft, compromising. Perhaps he could get through to them by example. Perhaps his hatred of the Americans would be contagious.
Regardless, he was determined that the mission succeed.
northwest pacific twenty miles southeast OF point muroto-zaki, shikoku island USS Birmingham SSN695
Comdr. Robert Pastor had rigged the ship for ultraquiet three hours before crossing into the Japan Oparea. The rig was designed to maximize ship quieting so that the sonar system could more easily hear into the sea without the interference of noise made by the Birmingham herself.
Pastor walked through the ship from the shaft seals as far aft as a man could go to the goat locker forward, checking the rig, and found the wrong reactor circulation pumps running—the engineering officer of the watch had one, two, three and four on, when the pump combination three, four, five and six was much quieter. Forward, in one of the crew-berthing spaces, he had found a boombox going, the volume down but music pouring out of it anyway. One of the navigation technicians was trying to fix a spare electronic cabinet in the nav space aft of control, which Pastor immediately stopped, the crew prohibited from doing maintenance during the rig for ultraquiet.
Pastor, on sneaker-clad feet, was of medium height, slightly paunchy but with Midwestern good looks, a healthy hairline, a thick mustache, blue eyes clear and penetrating. His expression rarely changed from a glare or a smirk, the glare normal, the smirk a sign of approval.
Pastor had been in command for only a year and was still finding himself, his command style, but so far the ratings were good. He had passed Admiral Pacino’s attack-trainer test, having put an Akula Russian submarine on the bottom at the same time he was under attack by a destroyer unit of the Royal Navy—in Pacino’s wild scenarios anyone could be the bad guys. Pastor was considered a tough captain, a disciplinarian, a by the-book man so long as it made sense to go by the book. He was good to his officers, took them out for dinners, which came out of his pocket at a thousand dollars a shot, until Admiral Pacino ordered him to put those expenses on the ship’s account, telling him they were rewards for good performance. When Pastor had said that the men brought wives and girlfriends, Pacino had told him it was the least the captain could do for them in exchange for all their long hours and weeks away. Pastor had been thinking lately about what he would do when his command tour was over, something that every nuclear sub skipper asked himself. Command of an attack sub was the end of sea duty. The day they turned comma
nd of the sub over to someone else was a dark day in the lives of most skippers, not unlike giving a daughter away at a wedding. They would be proud to have done a job well, the ship, like the daughter, an accomplishment, but now someone else would be in charge of her. Pastor saw nothing that interested him after command, not in the Navy’s bureaucratic quagmire in Washington, not in the shore-training commands, not in the surface navy. A new program had been commissioned to allow sub skippers to take command of a deepdraft oiler or supply ship as a stepping stone to commanding an aircraft carrier, from which a man could make flag rank. But that would take another fifteen years of going to sea on surface ships. Besides, Pastor now had two lovely daughters, six and eight, growing up in a world that was becoming more bizarre by the minute, and Pastor was beginning to think that all the sea duty, all the time away from home was beginning to affect the girls. Pastor shook his head and brought himself back to the supervision of the ship’s rig for ultraquiet. As he walked the ship he switched lights in the spaces from bright white to red—the red lights kept awareness for the rig foremost in the crew’s minds. In the goat locker, the chief’s quarters, he found a grizzled, veteran chief taking a shower. He felt like killing the man. The rig specifically prohibited showers, laundry and cooking, all of which made unnecessary noise. It didn’t matter how hot and sweaty the men got, the rig was the rig. Pastor chewed the chief out as quietly as he could, then continued on his rounds. He returned to the control room. “Weapon status,” Pastor asked the young officer of the deck, an academy grad named Mark Strait, who was the sonar officer. “Sir, we’ve got all four tubes loaded. One and two are flooded with outer doors opened, torpedo power applied and units warmed. Units in three and four have been powered down from before. We’ll shift in another hour.” The maximum readiness rig specified open tubes, weapons powered up with their gyros spinning, ready to fire at any time. That way if Pastor found a target they could program the torpedo in seconds and launch. The only trouble was that the torpedoes could not remain powered up for more than an hour at a time or the gyros would overheat, and sometimes in the middle of tracking a target the outer doors would have to be shut, the weapons powered down, the alternate tubes opened to sea and their torpedoes spun up. The operation could take ten or fifteen minutes, which meant that long without the ability to shoot at the target. Pastor leaned over the central firecontrol display, the one known as position two, selecting it to line-of-sight mode. The way he figured it, he would have all of one minute to identify the target, put its bearing into firecontrol, set the bearing and assumed range into the torpedo, and fire before the target knew he was there. Maybe less. Birmingham was not a new boat, and the newer Improved 688class ships were much quieter, but then if Pastor felt his ship shouldn’t be here in the Oparea, ready for combat, he wouldn’t be in command of her. Admiral Pacino would replace him with someone willing to take the risk and fight. Pastor looked over at pos one, the console furthest forward, selected it to geographic plot mode, a God’s-eye view of the sea, showing the coastline of Japan, their wolfpack partner ahead and to the east, the USS Jacksonville, the two submarines steaming on a parallel course up the coastline searching for Destiny submarines. The Jacksonville was the same vintage as the Birmingham, both at the tail end of their service lives. Pastor stepped to pos three, the third console aft, and selected it to line-of-sight mode with the target selected as the Jacksonville, just so that he could see where not to put a torpedo in case things got confused. That done, the firecontrol system was as good as it was going to get with no hostile contacts. Satisfied with the status of the control room. Pastor moved on into the sonar room through the forward starboard door of control. Sonar was lit with blue fluorescents, its screens multicolored displays, the room’s light ghostly after the red of the control room. In charge of sonar was Petty Officer Hazelton, a skinny curly-haired farm boy from Iowa who loved to torture city kids with stories of butchering pigs at pig roasts, his stories of behind-the-barn sexual encounters equally lurid. In spite of his youth and odd interests, Hazelton knew the sonar suite. And Pastor, a sub captain who believed that sonar was the center of the submerged universe, knew more sonar acoustic physics and equipment knobology than many chiefs.
“Permission to take a console,” Pastor asked Hazelton, the formality in reference to the fact that Hazelton was in charge in sonar, and even the ship’s commanding officer needed to ensure that taking a console would not interfere with the sonar search. Hazelton replied in the affirmative, handing Pastor a headset. Pastor strapped it on, adjusted the microphone and looked down on his dual-screen console display. The upper screen was selected to the waterfall display of short-and medium-time broadband noise. It was a way of “seeing” what the ship’s spherical array heard, but with this display the user could listen to all directions at once and look back in time to compare this second’s noise with last second’s, this minute’s noises with the minute before.
A noise was shown with a spot of light, the brightness in proportion to the strength of the sound. As time went on, the noise heard at that instant moved down the screen to be replaced by new display traces, the noises falling down, a noise of a ship drawing a vertical line down the waterfall of the random-noise display. The lower screen was a number of graphs, the vertical axis of each graph sound intensity, the horizontal axis the frequency. The ship was searching for specific tones put out by the Destiny II-class, the intelligence tipping them off to search for a signature around 150 hertz, most probably generated by the ship’s turbine generators. Pastor slouched deep into the leather of the seat and listened to the various traces down the display, investigating each one for a man-made sound, selecting a narrowband processor on the traces he couldn’t confirm as biologies, as fish. He trained the cursor to the bearing of the Jacksonville, the trace very slight on the waterfall display. He could just make out her screw turning if he concentrated on it. The Jacksonville would be more detectable on narrowband, but as long as he knew she was there, there was no sense wasting narrowband processing time on the friendly sub. Whenever Pastor operated a sonar console he thought about his family. He wasn’t quite sure why, except that perhaps it was that the sounds of the ocean sounded like his wife’s stomach when she was pregnant, the lazy Friday nights spent with him lying with his head in her full lap, her perfume caressing him, the sounds of her abdomen soothing him, the occasional kick of the baby pressing against his ear. The first child had almost killed Carol, the emergency C-section taking place at the last minute, the surgeon losing Carol’s heartbeat, spending endless minutes trying to revive her. Pastor had stood in the operating room, wearing his scrubs, openmouthed behind the surgical mask as they carted away his newborn baby daughter from the room, the baby’s mother clinically dead. Over and over they tried to start her heart but all they could see was the flat line of the heart monitor. Pastor, trained to handle pressure, had not been up to seeing his wife lying there dead, her abdomen cut open. Finally a nurse realized he wasn’t part of the team and had ushered him out of the room, and it was like he had been drinking all night—his memory trace just stopped. He never lost consciousness but it was almost as if the mental pain had been too much for him. He came to an hour later in a waiting room outside intensive care. He stood, as if lost, and asked about his wife. At first the nurse looked at him blankly, then waved him to a room. Carol’s face was as hollow-eyed as a corpse, her skin as white, her hair wild, but when she opened her eyes and looked at him she had never seemed more beautiful to him. He had hugged her as hard as he felt she could handle, tears of relief coming from his eyes, shaking as he felt her hand patting his back. She had said only two words—”the baby?”—and Pastor had stood upright, at a loss. He had never asked about the child, and had kissed Carol’s cheek and said the baby was fine. He practically ran from the room to see the child, a normal and healthy seven-pound girl, short brown hair curled around her sleepy eyes. The baby accounted for, Pastor hurried back to Carol, but she was out cold and would not wake up for a day an
d a half, and when she did she remembered nothing, not even asking him about the child. After that episode with tiny Adrianne, Pastor was unwilling to try again, but she had insisted, and two years later he had sweated out another pregnancy with Carol, this time twins. But that pregnancy had gone sour, too, one of the twins dying in utero, requiring them to induce labor, endangering the life of the healthy fetus. The living newborn was ten weeks premature, tiny, struggling for life. Carol had trouble coping, the dead twin constantly on her mind. As Darlene grew up, her name given her before birth, Carol insisted she saw an apparition of the dead twin Danielle. It had been a tough year, the first after Darlene was born, but that was five years ago, and it had been over a year since Carol had seen the apparition of Danielle playing with her living twin. Pastor had wanted Carol to get psychiatric help but she wouldn’t hear of it. At least things were calming now, Pastor thought. He moved the sonar electronic cursor over to a new trace and listened hard. The groan of a whale could be heard in the distance, the sound eerie, surreal, echoing through the depths of the sea. Pastor continued his search, wondering if they would ever detect anything in the Oparea. The size of this chunk of ocean was huge in square miles, an area the size of California and Nevada combined, and so far there had been exactly nothing. The officer of the deck in the control room turned the ship in a baffle-clearing maneuver to train the spherical array on the ocean that had been astern of them, in the blind spot behind the screw, although Pastor had ordered them to “drag the onion,” deploy the teardropshaped AN/T-47 caboose array that was designed to look aft, but he agreed with the O.O.D’s decision since the caboose was crude and small, only a supplement to occasionally turning the ship to see behind them. But for ten minutes after the turn there was still nothing. The O.O.D returned to base course and followed the coastline to the northeast. The sea was absolutely empty. Aside from the Jacksonville, there was no one there.
Barracuda- Final Bearing Page 31
