Attack Of The Seawolf

by Michael Dimercurio

  “In theory, yes, Mikey. In practice, it’s a piece of meat. The test units all flooded and sank just before liftoff. Plus, the capsule needs a ballasting system to keep it submerged and then to broach the unit when it’s time to light off the solid rocket motor. The ballast system takes up room that could be better used for the fuel and warhead. Like they say, you don’t get something for nothing. They had to reduce the fuel load and warhead size on those missiles. I’d advise against using them.”

  Pacino’s enthusiasm ebbed.

  “So what’s an ASWSOW?”

  he asked, turning the page.

  “Antisubmarine Warfare Standoff Weapon, built by DynaCorp. Brand new. Nice unit. A solid rocket booster fires the warhead away from you, with a range of about forty miles. Its name says ASW, but it can be used for surface targets too. Very powerful warhead, enough to sink a cruiser with one shot.”

  “What about the Mark 80 SLAAM?”

  “Beautiful, and only the Seawolfhas it… Have you ever been detected by a P-3 Orion patrol aircraft?”

  “I played rabbit for one a few times.”

  “You never got snapped up by one in the VA CAPES OP AREA? Never once been surprised?”

  “Not that I’ll admit to.”

  “Well, I have,” Donchez said, “and I always thought, goddamn, why can’t the sub force have something to launch at those damned ASW patrol planes?

  Those things are too damned good. In fact, the evidence suggests that’s how Sean Murphy got detected.

  An old Nimrod aircraft picked up on his periscope.”

  “You were telling me about the Mark 80.”

  “Mark 80 SLAAM, Submarine Launched Anti-Air Missile. The Seawolf has fifteen units tucked into the top of the sail. If you see an aircraft or helicopter, anything that flies, and it’s within ten thousand yards, you push a button on the periscope grip and one of those babies pops out of the water and flies right up the airplane’s tailpipe.”

  “If the 688-class subs had these the Tampa wouldn’t be tied up at Xingang now,” Pacino said.

  “So, Mikey, what’ll it be?”

  “I want some decoys. Admiral. You have any of the old Mark 36s?”

  “Decoys? What the hell do you want with decoys?

  Those things just take up torpedo-room space. You’ll be too quiet for the things to do you any good anyway.”

  “Admiral. I’m supposed to get a rattling, battle damaged submarine out of restricted waters, with a motivated enemy chasing her. At least with decoys I might confuse even a large surface force. Give me twenty Mark 36s and program them for the Los Angelesclass subs. And make them loud.”

  “We don’t even have the Mark 36s anymore, Mikey.

  But the Mark 38 is an improvement. Longer range.

  Has tonals at the same frequencies as a real 688-class, plus it can be programmed to make transient noises, like weapon launches, slamming hatches, rattles. It can drive a set-pattern, even wiggle like it’s doing Target Motion Analysis. But like I said, every decoy you take

  is one less torpedo you can carry. Not one ship has ever been sunk by a decoy. I suggest you fill up with Ow-sows and Mark 50s, not wimpy decoys.”

  “I don’t see it that way, Admiral,” Pacino said, shutting the binder.

  “You said it’s my ass, my call.

  Give me twenty Mark 38 decoys, fifteen Mark 50 torpedoes, fourteen Block III Javelins, all of them ship attack units, and one Ow-sow. And of course the fifteen Mark 80 SLAAMs.”

  “It’s your mission. I’ll radio ahead.”

  Donchez didn’t look pleased, Pacino thought, as he went forward to have the pilot radio Japan with the weapon load out Well, the OP was his, it would have to go by his plan. He was beginning to feel the selfconfidence of command returning to him. It felt damn good.

  yokosuka, japan, thirty miles south of tokyo yokosuka naval station, pier 4 USS seawolf 0305 local time

  Lieutenant Commander Greg Keebes woke up with a start. The sound of the curtain of his coffin-sized bunk being opened never failed to bring him crashing back to the reality of the submarine. In his year aboard the Seawolf, Keebes had yet to sleep through an entire night aboard, whether in-port as duty officer or at sea.

  “What is it?” he asked, rubbing his eyes. A petty officer in dungarees held out a radio-message board.

  Behind the enlisted sailor Keebes could see the chief torpedoman, who was also the duty chief for the evening, standing in the dimly lit passageway.

  Keebes pushed back the message board, climbed out of the coffin and put on his khaki pants and shirt, feeling desperately in need of a shower. As he buttoned his shirt he nodded at the petty officer to turn on the stateroom’s overhead lights. The bright white fluorescents flickered, then clicked to life. Keebes checked his watch—after three in the morning.

  “What is it, Deitzler?” Keebes asked the chief, a salty hovering, forty-five plus, his hair already gray, his face lined. What was it that made men get old so fast in the sub force? Had to be the atmosphere, the nuclear radiation, the food, or the stress. Or maybe the months at sea without a woman. Whatever, the fleet was full of old youngsters.

  “Sir, the base weapons officer is topside. He’s asking for you, and get this—there’s a crane and a lowboy loaded with cruise missiles and torpedoes waiting to be loaded. He wants to know why we’re not ready to load weapons. Did I miss something, sir?”

  Keebes ran his hands through his hair, wondering if the Navy bureaucracy had failed them again. Sea trials had been interrupted by the emergency orders to get the CO and XO stateside. But even so, the weapons tests weren’t scheduled for another month.

  And when the weapons tests did begin they were only to shoot dummies of torpedoes to test the torpedo tube ejection-mechanisms. The plan didn’t have them launching cruise missiles for months.

  “A little early to be loading dummies, if you ask me. Chief,” Keebes said, taking the message board from the radioman.

  “Sir, these are war shots not dummies. Not even exercise shots. What the hell’s up?”

  Keebes held up a finger as he read the message on the board, which had the answer to the chiefs questions:

  091857ZMAY

  IMMEDIATE

  FM CINCPAC

  TO USS SEA WOLF SSN-21

  SVBJ EMERGENCY SPEC-OP

  SCI/TOP SECRET—JAILBREAK

  PERSONAL FOR COMMANDING OFFICER PERSONAL FOR

  COMMANDING OFFICER

  //BT//

  1. PREPARE TO GET UNDERWAY FOR EMERGENCY

  SPECIAL OPERATION.

  2. NEW COMMANDING OFFICER EN ROUTE YOKOSUKA.

  3. EXECUTE WEAPONS LOAD OUT IMMEDIATELY TO

  SUPPORT TIMELY UNDERWAY.

  4. UNDERWAY TO COMMENCE IMMEDIATELY UPON

  ARRIVAL OF NEW COMMANDING OFFICER, APPROX

  1000 LOCAL TIME TODAY.

  5. ADMIRAL R. DONCHEZ SENDS.

  //BT//

  Keebes looked up at Deitzler, handed the message board over to the chief and waited for him to finish reading it. Then: “Get on the Circuit One, Chief, and get the crew up. Station the weapons loading detail.

  Muster the officers in the wardroom and the chiefs in the crew’s mess. Whatever’s going on, we’ll know soon enough. In the meantime you brief the chiefs and get working on the load out and the pre-underway checklist.”

  Keebes hurried into the wardroom and called for one of the cooks to stoke up the coffee machine. A new captain, Keebes thought. An untested submarine.

  An emergency special operation. Terrific.

  CHAPTER 9

  FRIDAY, 10 MAY

  0047 GREENWICH MEAN TIME

  yokosuka naval station, pier 4 USS seawolf 0947 local time

  Pacino knew he’d be too tense to sleep at his body’s normal time. His submarine would be long submerged in the darkness of the local evening before he slept again. Besides, he thought, it wouldn’t feel like he was an official submariner again until he had skipped a few nights of sleep. The feeli
ng of fatigue had been as familiar and as comfortable as the deck shoes he used to wear at sea.

  Pacino couldn’t help feeling excited as he craned his neck to see the large dark shape ahead in the water next to the pier. When the car stopped, Pacino opened his door and stepped out, seeing the breathtaking size of the monstrous submarine lying in the water, waiting for him. The ship lay tied up at the end of the pier, her bow toward Pacino, her stern pointing away toward the waters of the channel.

  Donchez joined him on the pier.

  “What do you think of her, Mikey?”

  The ship was similar in lines to a 688 Los Angelesclass submarine, but the scale seemed blown up. Her diameter was so big that the deck appeared almost flat at the crown instead of curving and cylindrical.

  The sheer sides of the sail jutted straight out of the deck, unadorned by fair water planes. The ship seemed to extend to the vanishing

  point; it had to be nearly three hundred and fifty feet long, Pacino thought. The fairing for the towed array extended longitudinally aft from the leading edge of the sail to the stern. The sail had a triangular fillet at the forward edge where it attached to the hull. The rudder protruded from the water far aft of the point where the water lapped the aft hull. Forward of the sail a large hatch was open, and further forward the hull sloped more steeply to the water, the bulbous bow rounder and broader than Devilfish’s. Eight doubled-up lines held the ship to the pier. Amidships, a gangway connected the ship to the concrete jetty. There were no shore power cables on the ship but a heavy gantry with thick cables had been retracted aft near the rudder. They must be steaming the engine room Pacino figured.

  Pacino realized Donchez had been waiting for an answer.

  “She’ll do, Admiral,” he said, trying to keep his voice flat. But Donchez must have seen through him.

  “Come on, Mikey. I’ll give you the rundown up here. I think you’ll find this crew will be motivated to support you, Mikey. I had my aide call the acting captain from the airport while we were on the way in—he gave him a few stories about you.”

  “Great. All I need is for this crew to know I got my last command shot out from under me.”

  “All he told them was what happened to the other guy, and that you got the Navy Cross.”

  “Whatever. Tell me about this ship, Admiral. Give me her secrets.”

  Donchez smiled.

  “Seawolf displaces 9,150 tons submerged.

  She’s forty-two feet in diameter—that’s why the pier is new. Her draft is so deep they had to dredge the channel so she could get out.”

  “Forty-two feet. Unbelievable.”

  “She’s 326 feet long from her sonar sphere to her propulsor. No screw, by the way. She’s got a water turbine propulsor. Much quieter. Very fast, although her acceleration is just a bit off, but that propulsor

  doesn’t cavitate like a screw, so you can give her full throttle and she’ll come up to speed quiet as a church mouse. Her test depth is 2,000 feet. Her hull has an anechoic coating, tiles made of foam that absorb active sonar pulses, kind of like a Stealth fighter’s radar absorptive material. She’ll do forty-five knots at one hundred percent power, more if you take her into the red. She has 52,000 shaft horsepower, and get this-this boat is quieter going full out than a Los Angeles sub at all-stop.”

  “Fifty-two-thousand shaft horsepower, and you’re telling me I’ll be quieter at all-ahead flank than Sean’s boat is hovering?”

  “Right. Did I tell you the story of her acoustic tests?

  She was supposed to run through the instrumented sonar array at the Bahamas acoustic test site, and the DynaCorp crew radioed her asking what she was waiting for, that she was behind schedule. Seawolf radioed back that she had already gone through the test area.

  DynaCorp called back and said that was impossible-they hadn’t heard anything. Fact is, when they analyzed the tapes, the only way they could determine that the ship had passed through the sonar range was that a hole of quietness went by—during her run the ocean’s noise actually disappeared for a moment to be replaced by total quiet. When the boat moved on, the ocean noise returned. This ship is so damned quiet it is actually an acoustic hole in the ocean. And that ain’t all. Her reactor’s coolant system uses natural circulation up to fifty percent power, no circulation pumps. That’ll get you up to thirty-three knots with no pumps. The loudest machinery aboard, and we don’t need it until we go over thirty-three knots. Not only that, but we’ve completely rethought the engine room layout. The maneuvering reactor control room is aft at the shaft seals, where it’s nice and cool.

  It’s in a special compartment so that even if there’s a major steam leak, the maneuvering crew has a full thirty seconds to isolate it remotely. Makes more sense than having the crew roasted.”

  “What else? You’re a regular encyclopedia, Admiral.”

  “About this baby, I am. Okay, you don’t see any fall-water planes on the sail. This boat uses bow planes up forward for better depth control. The sonar system is the BQQ-5E advanced BAT EARS suite, with the advanced hull array and the supersensitive spherical array forward. There’s even a baffle-viewing sonar in the lower rudder, although so far it doesn’t work. The combat-control system is the ANBSY-2 Mark II advanced firecontrol system, a master computer that links sonar and navigation and keeps records of everything you do at sea. The control room is in the middle level deck so you have the ship’s full width for the room. Still a bit cramped, though. You’ve got the type20 periscope. The forward escape trunk is set up to lock out ten men at a time, more if they squeeze together.

  That will come in very handy when you’re locking out the SEALs. And as I already told you, you’ve got fifty room-loaded weapons and eight torpedo tubes. Well, that’s about it. You ready to meet your crew and take a look inside?”

  “Hell, Admiral, lead on.”

  Donchez stepped onto the gangway and saluted the American flag flying aft on the deck, then saluted the sentry.

  “Request permission to come aboard,” Donchez barked.

  “Granted, sir. Welcome aboard. Admiral.”

  Pacino repeated the ritual. As he stepped off the gangway onto the spongy anechoic-tiled deck of the Seawolf he felt like he’d come home again. He followed Donchez toward the amidships hatch, the weapon-shipping hatch. As Donchez lowered himself down the ladder and disappeared Pacino took a look around the harbor, a habit from the old days, when he would look one last time at the world before vanishing into a steel pipe that would take the world away. When he found the rungs of the ladder and stepped into the massive hull, he smelled the

  smell, the unique smell of a submarine. He shut his eyes for a moment and drew the air in, savoring the smell like a wine expert lingering over the bouquet of a familiar vintage. The smell defied description, but Hillary had once tried to analyze it during one of her rare visits to his old boat—she had correctly identified diesel oil, lubrication oil, cooking grease, cigarette smoke and sweat. But she also had said there was something else there that she couldn’t identify. Pacino hadn’t told her, but what she couldn’t label was the smell of raw sewage from the sanitary tank vents, flavored with ozone from the high-voltage electrical equipment.

  As Pacino’s feet hit the deck the Public Address Circuit One system crackled with the voice of the topside sentry:

  “COMMANDER IN CHIEF, UNITED STATES

  PACIFIC FLEET, ARRIVING! CAPTAIN,

  UNITED STATES NAVY … ARRIVING.”

  Pacino and Donchez were standing at the base of the ladder to the amidships hatch, which was in a narrow passageway. The walls, the bulkheads, were paneled in dark grain wood. Pacino reached out and touched it—it wasn’t imitation Formica paneling but honest-to-god mahogany wood. The passageway extended forward for about seventy or eighty feet. A few feet down the passageway Donchez stood talking to an officer who wore starched cotton khakis and the emblems of a lieutenant commander on his collars, with gold dolphins over his left pocket and a key with a braided chain around
his neck. The duty officer. The man’s nametag read KEEBES; of medium height, in his mid-thirties, the most prominent thing about him his severe crewcut and horn-rimmed glasses. Pacino, thinking back to Donchez’s briefing, recalled that Keebes was the navigator and acting captain.

  “Mikey, this is Lieutenant Commander Greg Keebes.

  Mr. Keebes is a Seawolf plank owner. Mr. Keebes, this is Captain Mike Pacino, the man we’ve been telling you about. He’ll be taking command as soon as you’re ready.”

  Keebes said he had a course plotted but only to point Alpha.

  “Our track past the dive point isn’t on the clearance message. Too highly classified.”

  “I’ll brief the officers once we’re underway, Nav,” Pacino said.

  “You’ll be able to plot the track as soon as we’re at sea. Now I’d like to take a look around at this boat before I take command.”

  Keebes led the way forward.

  “This whole deck is devoted to crew living,” Keebes said.

  “Officers’ country is on the port side. Four large staterooms and a head, and the wardroom. Starboard is the chiefs’ quarters aft and the crew’s mess and galley forward.”

  At the end of the passageway, Pacino found himself standing next to a curving metal bulkhead. The shape of the surface seemed spherical. A round hatch was set into the side of the sphere.

  “Forward escape trunk,” Keebes said.

  “It can lock out a dozen men at a shot. We use it for commando insertions, diver ops, that kind of thing.”

  Keebes proceeded to a ladder leading down to the next level, lowered himself down the ladder and Pacino followed.

  “Sonar and firecontrol computer room,” Keebes said. He opened a door on a starboard bulkhead.

  “Sonar display room. Sonar’s come a long way since the original Q-5. We’ve got two towed arrays; the hull one has six bulges isolated from internal noise, the spherical array is bigger, with more hydrophones, more sensitivity.”

  Keebes pushed through the door leading aft into a room the full forty-two-foot width of the submarine.

  Pacino whistled. The room looked absurdly open and comfortable to Pacino’s eyes, accustomed as they had been to the old Piranhaclass’s cramped control spaces. The center of the room was taken up with the periscope stand, the conn, an elevated platform built around the wells for two periscopes set side-by-side.