Piranha Firing Point

by Michael Dimercurio

  Patton waved to Pacino, who was leaning over the chart display, and walked into the door to his stateroom from the aft bulkhead of the control room. At his table he found Byron Demeers drinking a Coke and brooding.

  “Byron. What do you think?”

  “Skipper, my head hurts. I feel like I’ve been sent back to school, and I don’t know anything. This Acoustic Daylight Imaging system, it’s more complicated than you can shake a stick at.”

  “The only thing I want to know about it is, will it work?”

  “Who knows?” Demeers said. “We’ll be in deep trouble if it doesn’t.”

  “What do you think of the ship otherwise?”

  “I’ll tell you what I think. It’s a piece of shit without an operational sonar system. The only thing this tub does is haul around my ears, and if I can’t use them, this thing is just a big 377-foot-long target.”

  “Oh, quit crying, you goddamned sonar girl,” Patton said. “And get out of here, I want some rack. You’d better sleep too, you’ve been up around the clock.”

  “No time. I’ve got to learn the Cyclops sonar system, or else you are going to be hurting.”

  WEDNESDAY NOVEMBER 6 pacific ocean 1,320 miles southeast of naha, okinawa USS devilfish, SSNX-1

  “I think it’ll work,” Colleen O’Shaughnessy said, staring at her panel in the computer room.

  “It has to be more than just a thought,” Pacino said.

  “This system can’t crash once we penetrate the op area and start looking for the Red force.”

  Colleen’s eyes flashed in anger. She looked up at him, taking a breath, her voice acid as she said, “If you want a guarantee, then give me two weeks to do the C-1 and C-9 tests. Otherwise, I guess you’ll have to live with the system as is, just like the rest of us. Besides, if the system has problems, I’ll be here to debug.”

  “Not good enough. Colleen. I need you to do whatever you have to do to get that system to be reliable.

  Our lives and the mission are depending on it. When it’s time to launch a torpedo, we can’t just call you up and ask you to fix it.”

  Colleen O’Shaughnessy looked up at the tall admiral.

  She had been up for three nights without sleep, ever since the ship left Hawaii underneath a garbage barge.

  “Looks like that’s your only choice.”

  “I’m telling you, it’s not good enough. It has to be absolutely bulletproof. Colleen. And it has to be that way by 1800 local tomorrow. You’ve got twenty hours.”

  “Why 1800? We don’t get to the op area until eleven p.m.”

  “We don’t get to the op area. get to the op area, ship’s company gets to the op area. You get off at 1800.p>

  That’s when the personnel transfer goes down.”

  “What?” ! “You’ll be donning scuba gear and locking out of the forward escape trunk when we’re at periscope depth.

  We’ll dive, and you’ll be picked up by an old tanker that will happen to be in the area at the time. I hate to make you leave the ship like that, but we can’t risk surfacing or even broaching the sail.”

  “Admiral, I’m coming on this operation. Scrub this personnel transfer or whatever you call it. I need to stay with the Cyclops. You and your country-bumpkin computer operators can’t do this without me.”

  “Colleen, I don’t have your father’s permission to take you into a hot operation area. Are you willing to get it from him in writing that you can penetrate the op area?

  And enter a war zone?”

  O’Shaughnessy’s voice rose a full three octaves as she made her attack. “What is this, Pacino? I’m an adult, I speak for myself. What are you doing, talking about my father? Are you just trying to cover for yourself because he’s your boss?”

  “Get a hold of yourself. Colleen,” Pacino said, his voice iron. “You’re a civilian and you’re not authorized in the op area. Furthermore, I have to go to your father, because he’s the only man in the Navy who outranks me right now. And I’ll tell you one more thing. If you were my daughter, I’d shoot any man who put your life in danger. You signed on to design the computer for this submarine, not fight it in combat.”

  “I’ll be goddamned if I’m going to—”

  “Tomorrow. Eighteen hundred. You’ve got twenty hours. I suggest you use them.”

  O’Shaughnessy cursed at him, a word he never thought would come out of that pretty mouth. He shut the door and found himself looking at Paully White.

  “Can she deliver?” White asked.

  “All I can tell you, Paully, is what I think. And you know what? It doesn’t matter what I think. It matters what she thinks.”

  “Chilling thought,” White muttered, rolling his eyes.

  “Shut up, Captain,” Pacino said harshly. As he walked past him down the passageway to control and aft to their stateroom. White was left staring after him.

  “Listen up, scumbags,” Lieutenant Commander Christopher Porter commanded, standing up in front of the crowd in the officers’ wardroom. “Sorry, Admiral, Captain, Captain White, Ms. O’Shaughnessy, I meant them,” Porter amended, suddenly realizing that his favorite way to start a briefing might not be appropriate with the brass.

  Porter’s position was the ship’s navigator, the new title a return to the old days, when the navigator was the lead tactical officer. The other officers were all gathered for a training session. A black, curving screen had lowered around them, an expansion of the eggshaped bubbles in the control room. The officers in the room had donned helmets, the eyepieces clear, but each one containing a filter to cause the image of the wall of the surface to seem three-dimensional. The lights lowered, and the screen shimmered with a yellowish light, the appearance of the acoustic daylight. A red form grew close on the yellow background, the form appearing three-dimensional in the glasses of Pacino’s helmet.

  “Identify,” Porter called.

  One of the junior officers spoke up. “Fish!”

  “Correct.” The picture changed as the fish went by, a more distant bluish blob floating into view. “Identify.” “Submarine contact,” another voice said.

  “Correct. Friend or foe?”

  The crowd watched for some time.

  “Bad guy, Nav. Rising Sun class.” “Wrong,” Porter said, seeming to enjoy the hapless supply officer’s confusion. “Anyone else?”

  “688-class American,” Patton spat out.

  “You cheated, Cap’n,” Porter said, smiling.

  “The hell.”

  “That’s okay, sir. Shows motivation.”

  “Let’s wrap, Navigator. The weapons brief is next, then the war plan brief. Anyone needing a cup of coffee, get it now. I don’t want anyone racking in here.”

  “Aye, sir.” The lights flashed back on, and the dark screen retracted into the overhead. Porter tapped a remote, and the wood doors covering a widescreen panel opened. “Gentlemen, weapons briefing.” Porter flashed the remote at the screen, and a profile view of the submarine came up, black lines on a white field, a naval architect’s plans. “Lead weapon in the attack is the Vortex Mod Charlie swimout missile. Speed of attack is three hundred knots, warhead is plasma, guidance is blue laser. The weapon is a thirty-six-incher, for tubes four or three. Range is forty to fifty miles. At max range, that’s a time of flight of ten minutes. There’s no evading this baby; it has a wide blue-laser search cone with a reattack mode. Questions on the Vortex?”

  Porter paused and scanned the room. When his eyes lingered on Colleen O’Shaughnessy, a pang of annoyance unexpectedly flashed through Pacino’s chest. He shot a look at Colleen, whose expression was a blank mask. He felt a moment of discomfort, realizing that he was jealous, which was absurd. After all, he was in his forties and Colleen was not even thirty yet. And even that meant nothing, because he was still trying to make sense of life after having lost Eileen.

  Yet he was honest with himself, he had to admit that he admired Colleen, liked her, found her attractive. And what sense did that make? What would she
want with a dinosaur like him? What business did he have getting involved with a combat-systems vendor representative, who coincidentally just happened to be the daughter of the number one admiral in the Navy and Pacino’s boss?

  He glanced at Colleen one last time before concentrating again on the briefing. She seemed to sense him looking at her, and she turned with her large eyes on his, her expression a smoldering anger, still mad at him that he was kicking her off the ship before the battle came.

  But just before she turned back to look at Porter, he could swear the corners of her eyes lifted, that she’d broken his gaze to avoid smiling at him. Guilt settled on him again, and he looked at his left finger where his Annapolis ring was. A year ago he’d removed Eileen’s wedding band, the inscription reading I’ll love you forever, and placed it on a ribbon around a photograph of her he kept by the bed of his Pearl Harbor headquarters bedroom, then switched the academy ring from his right finger to his left. An odd impulse took hold of him, and he suddenly pulled the class ring off the left finger and put it on his right. He looked up and saw Colleen had seen him make the switch. He tried to return his attention to Porter.

  “… Mark 52 range at eight to forty miles depending on transit speed and depth. Okay, now on to sensors.

  “We’ve been over sonar in depth. Let’s review the OTH sensors. We have two over-the-horizon targeting sensors, the Mark 12 ‘Yo-Yo’ and the Mark 4 ‘Sharkeye.’ The Mark 12 Yo-Yo is dropped by a P-5 Pegasus patrol plane, is about ten feet in diameter, and pops out a small buoy that stays on the surface while the main body of it sinks to eight hundred to one thousand feet, whatever best listening depth is. The Yo-Yo pod is a sonar receiver much like our acoustic-daylight-imaging sphere in the nose cone, and anything detected is relayed up a cable to the buoy, which transmits the data by tactical datalink to the overhead Comstar satellite, then down to us at periscope depth. Using the Yo-Yo remote over-the-horizon targeting pod, we can receive sonar signals from fifteen hundred miles away. The Yo-Yo range is less than our own sphere, but it’s not bad. Detection on a submarine might be up to one hundred miles, but we’re counting on fifty.

  “Now, the Sharkeye Mark 4. In the event the Yo-Yo isn’t available, such as when there are no P-5 Pegasus patrol aircraft available, we can use our own Mark 4 Sharkeyes. The Sharkeye is a pod like the Yo-Yo, except contained in the upper section of a Javelin cruise-missile body, replacing the warhead. On this run the ship is loaded with only two plasma Javelin cruise missiles. The other ten missiles in the vertical-launch tubes are rockets to launch the Mark 4 Sharkeye remote sonar pods. The Sharkeye has a detection range of about twenty-four to forty-eight miles, with the confidence interval set at thirty miles. We’re hoping we can use the bigger, higher-definition Yo-Yos, but if something goes wrong, we’ll have our Sharkeyes.

  “So that’s everything. Anyone need a break?” “Let’s take five,” Patton said, “then get back here for Admiral Pacino’s war briefing.” “Gentlemen, we’re reconvened,” Porter said, bringing the afternoon training session to order.

  “Nav, the doors locked?” executive officer Walt Hornick asked.

  “Yes, XO.”

  “Everyone cleared for this? Only gold dolphin wearers in here?”

  Pacino looked around the room. Colleen O’Shaughnessy was absent, and he felt relief, then annoyance. He had to stop this. His feelings for her might jeopardize their working relationship. Plus, he had to keep his mind on the mission’s business.

  “Admiral, we’re ready,” Patton said.

  Glancing at the chart display, Pacino stood and addressed the officers.

  “Good afternoon, gentlemen.” He always began formally, an old habit. “This is the East China Sea. Marked in red is the position of the sinking of the initial RDF convoy, in the gap between Naze Island and Yakushima.

  The Naze-Yakushima Gap is directly on the great circle route from Oahu to Shanghai. Gentlemen, my theory is that the Rising Suns are lurking up here, in the gap.

  “Now, that’s not how I would defend the East China Sea against a convoy or against an attacking squadron of submarines. I’d spread out. But here is what the enemy is thinking—I’ll wait here at the doorway, and the convoy will come in there, since they’re in a big hurry to get to the mainland. Since my speed is faster than the convoy’s, and since I have a spy satellite overhead taking pictures of the surface ships, I know where they’re headed. Plus, Shanghai is the trouble spot, because the Red thrust objective is to split White China in two. So Shanghai is the key to the defense of the Whites.

  It’s top secret, but any dummy could guess that. Everyone with me so far?

  “Okay, so our Red force is clustered at the gap.

  Aren’t they afraid of us? Afraid a U.S. sub detachment will come to get them? Captain Patton, what do you think?”

  “I don’t think they’re losing a minute of sleep over it,” Patton said in a ringing voice.

  “Why, John?”

  “Because they put us on the bottom before we even knew we had company. Men, I was going five knots, dead slow, trying damn hard to hear a Rising Sun class that I knew was out there. Next thing I know, I’m on the deck and the ship is on fire, and my coveralls are flaming, and my sonar chief drags me out of the hatch and throws me on a raft and I’m looking at a fucking periscope. Does everyone understand this? These Rising Suns are badasses. They kicked the shit out of us, and they think they can do it again.”

  “Well put. Captain.” Pacino smiled. “We’re not a threat to these guys. The 688s are toys.”

  “What about the Piranha, the Seawolf class?” Chris Porter asked.

  “Good point, Navigator. Any theories? No? Here’s mine. The SSN-23 is in just as much trouble as the 688s, because he’s using the old narrowband-broadband detection methods against a target whose tonals we don’t know. If the Piranha knew what it was looking for, life would be simple. Just set the frequency gate to pick up a 237 hertz tonal and wait for it to fall into your lap.

  But we don’t know what tonals these guys put out.”

  Pacino took a drink of water, looking into the eyes of the men around him, an old trick to gauge his audience.

  “So my plan is to use acoustic-daylight sonar to the maximum extent we can. At zero hour ten P-5 Pegasus patrol planes will fly out of Kagashima to drop the first load of twenty Yo-Yo remote-sonar sensors. We’ll be hanging out at periscope depth to receive the signals.

  We’ll spend a lot of our time at PD this run, guys. With the Yo-Yos out there, we’ll use our intelligence of the location of the six Rising Suns to call in torpedo strikes.

  I’m putting the twelve 688s of the Pacific Fleet here at Point Echo with us. Yes, they’re loud and relatively vulnerable, but I brought them out here for their torpedo rooms. With twelve subs, each carrying 26 Mark 52 torpedoes, I’ve got 312 torpedoes I can vector into the target locations. That will be like a bunch of bees buzzing around them.

  “Now, the Rising Suns have good torpedo countermeasures, according to the tapes we’ve gotten from the Maritime Self-Defense Force. They have four pods that detach from the X-tail aft that sound just like a Rising Sun, just louder. Each pod inflates a foil balloon that acts as a sonar reflector. Guaranteed to confuse a torpedo.

  But like I said, they have only four apiece, so we run the bastards out of decoys. Then they have a ventriloquist sonar, an active system in the tail that puts out fake sonar returns to the incoming torpedo, throws it off. They can evade one weapon, maybe two at once, but not a dozen.

  “Now, even though I’ll be putting out torpedoes from our vintage 688s, the main weapon will be Piranha’s Vortex Mod Bravo battery, ten weapons, all long-range.

  If it’s a good day, Bruce Phillips aboard the Piranha fires six Bravos and this war is over. If it’s a bad day, some or all of us take plasma torpedoes on the chin. No guarantees.

  Next resort after Piranha are the Vortex Mod Charlies we carry, the smaller, shorter-range Vortex, or Vortex-Lite, if you will. We’ve got mor
e of them than the Piranha has Mod Bravos, but with their shorter range, we’ll have to go in deeper in the op area to get them on target.

  “In general, gentlemen, I’m optimistic, but here is my list of worries. One, the Rising Suns have antiair missiles.

  If they detect the P-5 Pegasus patrol planes, they might shoot them down, and with them, our Yo-Yo remote OTH sensors. If that happens, I’ll blow the wad on the Mark 4 Sharkeyes, but if I only detect some of the Rising Suns, we’ll be in trouble. I’ll have to send in Piranha to shoot what we see, and risk that it may be shot at by the Rising Suns we don’t see.

  “Next worry, that we look out here and don’t find any Rising Suns. If I missed my guess, the boats are dispersed.

  If that’s the case, we’ll deploy and redeploy Yo-Yos until we see them. At some point we may need to draw their fire. Not a popular option, and the only way to do it is with the Devilfish, because everyone else is blind. If they take us down when we do that, the operation is over and the convoy goes in without us.” “What? The convoy goes in anyway?” Porter asked.

  “Exactly. The Rising Sun weapon loadout is 48 weapons per sub, total of 288 units. We lost a total of 110 ships. Say that’s about 120 weapons. That means they have about 148 or so torpedoes left. We would draw their fire with a convoy until there are no more torpedoes.”

  “But they have enough to take down the lion’s share of the second convoy,” Porter protested.

  “Look, I didn’t suggest this. It’s just what General Baldini will do. I know that guy. He’s bullheaded, and he’s been known to do frontal attacks on brick walls.

  Maybe he’ll gamble that the Red force spent more than 120 weapons on 110 kills, and that he can at least get half his men in. Half of a 400,000 man force is better than none, or so Bull Baldini thinks.

  “There is one consolation here,” Pacino continued.

  “According to the Japanese, the maximum speed of the Mod II Nagasaki torpedo is only 46 knots. A 688 can outrun a torpedo in a tail chase, which I suspect is what happened to the Annapolis. But you can’t run from a torpedo you didn’t detect, so our sonar system is key.