Phoenix Sub Zero mp-3

by Michael Dimercurio

  “Like the coffee, Mikey? It’s imported special from Colombia.”

  “It’s great. Admiral,” Pacino said, looking at Donchez, noticing that age had finally seemed to be catching up to his father’s old Academy roommate although his enthusiasm seemed undampened.

  “How’s it feel to be Admiral Pacino?”

  “I’m still a captain, sir. I’ve got a few months before I’m confirmed. If I’m confirmed.”

  “A few more months and you’ll be working on your second star. Aren’t many admirals these days wearing the Navy Cross. Which reminds me, you’re out of uniform without it.”

  Pacino glanced at his chest, the rows of ribbons four tall, the gold submariners’ dolphins presiding above the ribbons, the capital-ship command pin beneath, the ribbon for his Navy Cross absent. Although Donchez would disagree, Pacino had always considered the medal something of a consolation prize for surviving the sinking of the Devilfish.

  “You know. Admiral, I think I’d trade the star for a chance to keep command of Seawolf for another year. I don’t suppose you could arrange that …”

  “Navy’s got other plans for you, Mikey. Besides, commanding the Atlantic Fleet’s sub force will make you forget about the Seawolf. Besides, your replacement — —Joe Cosworth, right?— — will do okay and it’s time someone else got to drive the finest sub in the force. You can’t hog it for ever.”

  “I suppose so.” Pacino looked at the older man, wanting to ask him how the war was going but, imagining the answer to be painful, restrained himself.

  “Well, on to business. I heard Dr. Rebman packed it in. You saw the Vortex test? What did you think?”

  “Well, sir, on the positive side, there was nothing left of the target after the missile hit it. The explosion made a mushroom cloud— — I felt like I was on Bikini Atoll watching a nuclear test. There would be nothing left of an enemy sub after getting chopped up by a Vortex.”

  “I knew it. The torpedo is obsolete. The Vortex can blow a bad guy to hell before he even knows he’s been shot at. This will make the Russian Magnum torpedo look crude.”

  “Yes sir.”

  “Anything else?”

  “I assume you heard, sir. The Piranha sank. The Vortex blew up the launching tube on the way out.”

  “I know. And I also know you’ve thought of how to fix that problem.”

  “Excuse me, sir?”

  “That’s why I sent you down there. You’re a PhD. mechanical engineer. You probably scratched a couple of equations on an envelope and figured this whole thing out.”

  “Sorry, sir, but I just rubbernecked at the test like everyone else.”

  “Come on, Mikey. I know you hate the Vortex. It takes up damn near all your torpedo room and it’s too volatile, like sleeping with a grenade.”

  Pacino looked into Donchez’s eyes. His exact words had been “sleeping with a grenade with the pin pulled,” but Donchez had been close enough.

  “Mikey, with this weapon you don’t need a room full of fifty torpedoes. One shot does it. With six Vortex missiles you can kill six submarines, every time. In the old days you’d shoot horizontal and vertical salvos and hope like hell the target drove into the search cone. This thing doesn’t have a search cone— — the whole ocean is the search cone. Now tell me how to make the thing work.”

  “Equalize the tubes …” Pacino had, of course, thought about his answer ever since the test, figuring he might have such a confrontation with Donchez. He still hated the damn thing, though.

  “What?”

  “You’ve been launching a solid rocket in a closed-ended cylinder with tons of water at the muzzle end. The tubes are blowing up just like a gun barrel would if the bullet had too much gunpowder. Relieve the pressure at the aft end by piping the thing to sea pressure. When the rocket fuel ignites, instead of a pressure wave that ruptures the tubes, it blows steam out the relief piping and blasts out of the tube. Tube pressure stays within stress limits. It’s pretty obvious, I figured your design team had rejected it for some good reason.”

  “That’s all? Just open vent piping at the breech end?”

  “Well, it’s more than that. I did do a few calculations—” Pacino looked at Donchez, who smiled. “The vent piping would need to be fullbore, the diameter of the entire tube. Instead of a launching tube you need a launching duct with the missile in the forward end. On missile launch the exhaust gases pass out of the aft end of the duct and out the pressure hull, and rocket thrust carries the missile out the duct.”

  Donchez leaned back. “The Vortex program is saved—”

  “Not exactly. Admiral. The tubes already take up half the torpedo room. The duct tube extensions would take up an other thirty feet of length, with three-foot inner diameters. That’s a hell of a lot of space. There’s no room aboard. You’ll have to design a whole new class of submarine to hold these pigs, because on the LA-class, with the duct work there won’t be room for reactors or people or electronics. The Vortex is just too damned big.”

  “Or we could put the tubes outside,” Donchez said.

  “Yeah, and take the hit in speed and sound emissions. We spent hundreds of millions making Seawolf the quietest sub marine that technology could build, and now you’re going to put a bunch of tubes and pipes and supports and valves top side to put out flow-induced resonances. For the fleet of submarines we have, it just doesn’t make sense.”

  “I suppose you’re right, Mikey. I’m sorry we called you out over the holiday,” the old man said heavily.

  “Sir, the Vortex is still a damn good weapon system,” Pacino said figuring he could afford to be generous. “The problems can be fixed, but it’ll take the next generation of submarine to do it. You’re just ahead of the current technology.”

  Donchez waved him off, his face a mask.

  “Thanks for coming, Mikey.”

  * * *

  An hour later Donchez’s Falcon jet lifted off National’s southwest runway and headed for Norfolk Naval Air Station. Pacino poured himself a Jack Daniel’s over ice and shut his eyes. He felt badly for Donchez. A man who had been his father’s closest friend and who had played a big part in his own career, a man who had brought him back from deep black despair three years ago after Devilfish went down and put him in command of the Navy’s top-of-the-line attack submarine, the Seawolf.

  The whiskey was good, but not good enough to make Pacino feel much better.

  Chapter 9

  Friday, 27 December

  STRAIT OF SICILY

  USS AUGUSTA

  The ship was rigged for ultraquiet.

  The fluorescent-light fixtures throughout the forward half of the ship were switched to red to remind the crew to tread lightly and maintain ship silence. The port side of the steam plant was shut down, including one main engine and the turbine generator as well as a half-dozen pumps serving that half of the propulsion plant. Reactor main coolant pump were running in superslow speed, reduced frequency, barely moving the water through the reactor core. The screw turned at bare steerage way, a mere thirty rpm, giving the ship just enough forward propulsion to maintain submerged depth control.

  The watchstanders on duty were wearing headsets, all plugged into ship control phone circuits, while the ship wide PA system was locked out, its use having the adverse potential of being heard outside the hull. Hard-soled shoes were prohibited. The galley was shut down. A tray of cold cuts and a plate of white bread had served for evening rations, although the coffee machines still brewed at full power. Showers were secured. The evaporator, maker of pure water from seawater, was shut down. The ventilation system fans were on slow, the normal bass booming sounds of the ship almost silenced.

  Behind the ship the TB-3 thin-wire advanced towed array of the AN/BSY-1 Busy One sonar system trailed on a cable a mile-and-a-half long, the noise from the Augusta ahead distant and faint. The towed array’s electronic ears strained for noise, listening for the specific tonal frequencies expected to be emitted from the Destiny-class subm
arine predicted by Daminski to transit the gap of the strait at any moment.

  While the towed array searched for tonals, the spherical array in the ship’s nose cone, a steel ball fifteen feet in diameter covered with hydrophones, listened to the noise of the ocean, hearing broadband noise just as a human ear would. Backing up the spherical array were six hull arrays, large sets of hydrophones arranged on the skin of the ship, each somewhat disadvantaged by the interference of own-ship’s noise from within the pressure hull but useful all the same.

  On the chart table in the cramped control room, the strait took up half of the large table, the illuminated crosshair of light, the “bug,” shining upward onto the chart surface, driven by the table’s servomotors in scale to the ship’s actual motion through the sea. For the last hour the bug had traced a bowtie pattern across the strait, a barrier search. Any shipping coming through the strait would be detected. For the Destiny submarine, the question was not whether it would be heard but whether Augusta would hear Destiny before Destiny heard Augusta — if the Destiny were heading west as Daminski maintained.

  In the control room Lieutenant Commander Mark Berghoffer, ship’s engineer, presided as officer of the deck.

  He paced the deck of the control room, stopping every few minutes at the chart table to ensure the ship held to the bowtie search pattern, then at the sonar repeater screen above the Position One console of the attack center’s firecontrol system, finally leaning over Ensign Jamie Fernandez’s Pos Two screen, a god’s-eye-view of the strait with Augusta in screen center.

  Commander Ron Daminski, never one to sit on the sidelines, had been camped out in sonar ever since arrival at the strait. Sonar chief Bruce Hillsworth, clad in his Royal Navy sweater with the embroidered submarine dolphins on the breast, had grimaced in disgust, finally putting the intruder to work. Daminski sat at the forward console of the four panels, wearing a set of headphones, his hands resting near a touch keypad. Hillsworth, also wearing headphones, hovered over him, directing Daminski to flip through the computer displays, occasionally having Daminski adjust the cursor ball to a particular bearing to listen to the broadband noise. The other three display consoles of the BSY-1 sonar system showed graphs of noise intensity versus frequency, searching through the frequency gates for the expected tonals of the Destiny-class target. Chief Hillsworth scanned the frequency buckets, allowing each frequency search to integrate over five minutes, more if there were a spiking frequency, but so far every tonal gate had shown nothing but random noise.

  The ocean around them was empty.

  Daminski looked at the broadband display as a bright line traced its way down the short-time screen. He squinted at the trace, moving his hand over the cursor ball, moving the spherical array beam to the bearing of the trace. When the cursor line was superimposed over the trace, Daminski shut his eyes and listened.

  All he could hear was the frantic sound of the snapping of shrimp. He turned and looked at Hillsworth, face wrinkled in frustration.

  “Just a bunch of fish getting it on.”

  “Don’t worry, Cap’n. He’ll come. And when he does, we’ll hear him.”

  “Let’s hope we hear him before he hears us,” Daminski said, returning to his sonar search.

  CNFS HEGIRA

  The normally open control room was jammed with the majority of the ship’s officers. The room was dominated by the circular periscope platform with the observation seat that could rotate on a circular track during periscope exposure.

  Now at depth, the control seat was folded down into a compact box with a cushion on top, the box serving as the captain’s command seat.

  Commodore Sharef had called battle stations for the passage through the strait, bringing twelve men into the packed room. He stood at the computer chart display table. He was the battle stations attack officer, as tradition demanded. First officer al-Kunis stood next to him, acting as the battle coordinator, responsible for the functioning of the entire team.

  On the periscope stand was Commander Omar Tawkidi, the navigator and third in command, who was stationed as deck officer. Lieutenant Commander Aby Haddad, the ship’s senior watch officer, was the junior deck officer. Reporting to the four senior officers were the main functions of weapons control, ship control, reactor control, and sensor control. At each of the stations two officers sat at the Second Captain console displays, except at sensor control, where four officers scanned the computer analyzed data coming in from the large hull arrays and the gyrostabilized linear towed array.

  As the ship approached the mouth of the strait Commodore Sharef ordered the ship to dead slow ahead, just enough velocity to keep the towed array from dragging. He and al-Kunis took up positions in the sensor-control corner, watching the displays of the sonar system.

  “Anything?” Sharef asked Sublieutenant al-Maari, the sensor-control officer at one of the displays. The sublieutenant turned toward Sharef, the young man’s earphones half-removed from his right ear. He shook his head and returned to his display.

  “Deck officer, put in a Second Captain delouse.”

  “Yes, sir,” Tawkidi said, turning to the ship-control console.

  “Ship control, ten clicks and prepare for a delouse. Reactor control?”

  “Reactor is ready,” the mechanical officer reported.

  “Ten clicks,” the ship-control officer reported.

  “Engine stop. Reactor control, commence delouse,” Tawkidi called.

  The term delouse was handed down from old Soviet tactics, which the UIP’s Combined Naval Force had inherited with the Victor III submarine acquisitions. It referred to the Russian tactic of an attack submarine escorting a ballistic-missile submarine out of port. To ensure that no lurking American attack submarines were trailing the ballistic-missile ship, the Russian attack-escort sub would perform a detailed antisubmarine search of the sea in the vicinity of the ballistic-missile ship, an attempt to “delouse” her. The tactic had lived on in the Destiny-class, in which the Yokogawa Second Captain computer was able to perform a self-delouse by shutting down the entire propulsion plant, allowing the sonar systems to hear unimpeded by own-ship’s noise.

  At the reactor-control console the mechanical officer inserted the command shutting down the reactor, dropping control rods into the liquid metal cooled core until the unit went subcritical and ceased heating the circulating liquid metal. The magnetohydrodynamic coolant pumps cut off, halting the liquid sodium flow, the conductive sodium acting as an emergency cooling system, keeping the core from melting from its residual heat. In the next compartment aft, the turbine generators spun down, their steam from the boilers now lost. Large automatic cutoff valves then shut, isolating the steam headers. The condensate and feed pumps in the lower level shut down next. The electrical power grid, responding to the loss of power input from the turbine generators, began drawing current from the battery in the farthest aft compartment until the ship was running on battery power alone. The Hegira’s main machinery silent, the ship coasted submerged, her computer system straining to hear the sounds of the ocean, the signal-to-noise ratio now dramatically improved as the submarine drifted in the strait 400 meters deep.

  All but the smallest thousandth of a percent of the ocean’s noise was meaningless, random noise or biologies — fish.

  And what nonrandom noise the computers did hear was inevitably merchant shipping. The merchant ships outnumbered the warships five hundred to one. There was the occasional warship, detected at long range from a bottom bounce, but rarely a submarine, since submarines accounted for less than one of every fifty of the world’s warships. Most submarines were short-range diesel boats designed for coastal defense. It would be odd to find a nuclear submarine as the first detection of the patrol, if this strange mission could be called that.

  Sharef inserted several keystrokes, a new trace coming up on the screen in white, this trace the anticipated noise of a Los Angeles-class American attack submarine. The traces on the five-and ten-minute histories, with own-shi
p’s noise subtracted out, were fairly similar to the expected white curve. The curves would never completely coincide, but just the slightest similarity was usually enough to classify the target. In this case the data was evident.

  “Definite contact. Commodore,” Tawkidi reported from one of the display consoles farther forward. “Seven-bladed screw, no cavitation, high-pressure, high-flow pumps, electrical turbine tonal at sixty-one cycles. The contact is submerged, bearing three one zero. Range is distant. The detection may be a surface bounce — —we’ve got a good sound channel down to 700 meters.”

  Sharef glanced at the ship’s chronometer. It had taken twelve minutes to integrate the sonar data to find the submarine waiting for them. The one disadvantage of the Hegira’s power module was its small battery. With the tremendous load of the Yokogawa Second Captain supercomputer and minimum ventilation loads, the battery could only last for a twenty-minute delouse.

  “Battery power, reactor control?” Sharef asked.

  “Twenty percent remaining, sir.”

  Sharef frowned. “How long?”

  “Maybe another five minutes, sir,” the mechanical officer reported. “Then we’ll have to bring the reactor back up.”

  “Deck officer, can you keep the contact once we restart the plant?”

  Tawkidi frowned over the sensor consoles, the other four watchstanders there concentrating on the screens, al-Kunis and Sharef’s presence making the area crowded.

  “Yes, I believe so. Commodore. The computer has a definite trace now. The contact, as distant as he is, will stay within a few degrees of the bearing of initial contact. We can work with that, sir.”

  “Very good. Restart the reactor and maneuver the ship for a range on the target, then prepare for torpedo attack.”