Voyage of the Devilfish mp-1

by Michael Dimercurio

  A knock sounded at the door. Pacino opened it and the Radioman of the Watch handed him a metal clipboard with a radio message printout.

  132045ZDEC

  IMMEDIATE IMMEDIATE IMMEDIATE

  FM COMSUBLANT NORFOLK VA

  TO USS DEVILFISH SSN-666

  SUBJ SMALL BOAT TRANSFER COPY CONSUBRON 7 NORFOLK VA REF (A) COMSUBLANT SUBEX 13DEC

  CONFIDENTIAL CONFIDENTIAL CONFIDENTIAL PERSONAL FOR C.O.//PERSONAL FOR C.O.//PERSONAL FOR C.O.

  BT//

  1. SMALL BOAT TRANSFER WITH USS DEVILFISH WILL BE EXECUTED AT MOUTH OF THIMBLE SHOALS CHANNEL AT COORDINATE 12 OF REF (A) AT 1630 EST.

  2. TRANSFER SHALL REMOVE COMMANDING OFFICER CDR. M. PACINO FOR TRANSPORT TO COMSUBLANT HEADQUARTERS FOR MEETING WITH COMSUBLANT.

  3. ADMIRAL R. DONCHEZ SENDS.

  BT//

  Pacino shook his head as he read the message. What could be so urgent that he’d be pulled off the ship with only a two-hour transit left of her trip? Even if the brass were unhappy enough with his illegal emergency-blow tactic to relieve him of command they’d still let him drive in and see his replacement standing on the pier with the commodore. It made no sense.

  “XO,” Pacino called over his shoulder through the wall to the XO’s stateroom. Rapier tapped on the door and entered through the bathroom between the two rooms.

  “XO, better get the small-boat transfer-team ready to go. The boat will meet us at the entrance to the channel.”

  “Who are we transferring on? Or off?”

  “Me. You’ll be acting captain of the Devilfish. Be careful with her.” Rapier frowned. “What’s up, skipper? Is this about your emergency surface? You think the brass are pissed off?”

  “I guess we’ll see,” Pacino said.

  * * *

  The topside crew of the Devilfish caught the lines of the 40-foot boat maneuvering alongside. The submarine and the transfer boat cruised at 5 knots, just enough to maintain steering. The boat was winched in tight, touching the Devilfish’s steel curvature. Pacino, in a heavy green canvas parka and flaming orange lifejacket, moved close to the edge of the sub’s treacherously sloping cylindrical hull and grabbed the outstretched arm of one of the sailors in the small boat. When he had been pulled aboard, the transfer boat took in its lines and slowly pulled away from the submarine. Dimly Pacino heard the P.A. Circuit One announcement booming over the submarine’s bridgebox, “DEVILFISH, DEPARTING.”

  The boat’s diesel motor throttled up, its wake turning to white foam as it accelerated away. Pacino stood at a rail and looked back at the Devilfish, still going dead slow ahead. The ship was graceful and powerful, her black cylindrical hull so low to the water that she was practically submerged even when rigged for surface. The water climbed smoothly up nearly to the forward hatch as the ship picked up speed and drove by the small boat. The conning tower was placed far forward, near where the hull started its slope down into the water. The sail was a beautifully crafted 25-foot-tall fin shaped like a long teardrop in cross section, vertical on its leading and trailing edges, curved on top. Two officers with green parkas and binoculars stood on the bridge, the cockpit at the top of the forward part of the sail. Behind them a ten-foot-tall stainless steel flagpole flew the American stars and stripes and the stark black and white of the Jolly Roger. Coming out of the sail were two horizontal fins, “fairwater planes,” shaped much like a jet airplane’s horizontal tail surfaces. Rising high out of the sail, looking like two telephone poles, were the periscopes. The forward one was a simple and rugged World War II-era device. The one aft was a high-tech radar-invisible mast that was part-periscope, part-video camera, part-electronic countermeasures device, part-radio receiver. Further aft of the periscopes was an even taller, slimmer telephone-pole mast — the BIGMOUTH multifrequency radio antenna. Behind the sail the hull extended far aft, smooth and cylindrical, until it sloped slowly into the water. The aft slope was much gentler than the forward slope, the hull gradually lowering into the sea. After a long gap of water the rudder jutted out of the water, shaped like an airplane’s vertical tail. The only surface characteristics visible were white draft marks on the rudder. Devilfish displaced 4500 tons, was 292 feet long and 32 feet in diameter. Her screw was submerged and invisible in the water.

  Pacino remembered the first time he had seen her in a drydock, she had looked huge and fat with no water to hide beneath. The tail section was complicated, with another rudder under the ship, horizontal fins — sternplanes — and the screw aft. The screw was a spiral-bladed shape with ten long curving blades, each looking like a scimitar sword, the hub of the screw extending far aft of the junction of the blades and the hub. A long tube extended from the skin of the ship aft to a horizontal tail fin, the sternplane and further aft beyond the screw. It was a fairing for a towed sonar array the ship could pull several miles behind her.

  Pacino could stare for hours at the Devilfish. Aboard the transfer boat he imagined the salt breeze of the wind on his face on its bridge, the snapping of the flags behind him, the hum of the rotating radar mast aft of the flags… He felt his grip on the rails tighten, hoping he wasn’t being relieved of command. It wasn’t his career he worried about but the thought of never driving the submarine again, never feeling her deck vibrate beneath him as she plowed through the sea at flank speed.

  As he watched, the Devilfish shrank into the distance so that all that remained was the vertical fin of the sail and the horizontal fins of the fairwater planes, forming a cruciform shape against the backdrop of the land beyond.

  When the small boat landed at a jetty it was almost like being awakened from a dream. Pacino took one last look into the distance and stepped onto the dock. As he did a lieutenant came to attention and saluted, her hair pulled up into a tight bun under her oddly shaped female officer’s cap. Pacino saluted back and followed her to a black staff car. He didn’t ask what was going on. He would know soon enough.

  CHAPTER 4

  MONDAY, 13 DECEMBER, 1920 EST

  NORFOLK, VIRGINIA

  COMSUBLANT HEADQUARTERS

  The staff car pulled through the gate of the COMSUBLANT compound and parked at the main entrance to the thirty-year-old main core of the building, a squat brick gymnasium. Beyond and above it the new glass-walled wing minimized the eyesore of the old core.

  Pacino got out of the back seat of the car, feeling the chill of the December evening. The sky was black, no stars visible because of the glare of the floodlights. He and the lieutenant walked through the entrance, presenting their identification for entry. While he waited Pacino looked at a row of oil paintings on a far wall, each showing a different submarine class driving on the surface, going back to World War II ships. He lingered for a moment on the painting of the Piranha class. To its right was a painting of the newer Los Angeles class, a submarine the fleet considered a giant step backward in technology from the venerated Piranha’s. The Los Angeles boats had suffered from the budget crunches of the 1970s and early eighties, considered too expensive to build right.

  The lieutenant led Pacino down a cinderblock corridor into an atrium of steel and glass that arched to the top of the new wing. After an elevator ride to the top floor Pacino found himself in the plushly carpeted outer office of COMSUBLANT, the admiral in command of the Atlantic Fleet’s submarines. Immediately he was led in by the receptionist, and both the receptionist and lieutenant quickly left, leaving Pacino alone with the admiral.

  Pacino walked up to the massive oak desk made from timbers of a Navy frigate that had fought in 1812, removed his cap, came to attention. “Commander Pacino, USS Devilfish, reporting as ordered, SIR.”

  The bald man at the desk looked up, a slow smile spreading over his thin face, the white-capped teeth near-perfect beneath his graying mustache. He stood up, looking slim in his dress blues with rows of ribbons splashing color over gleaming gold dolphins and endless gold braid on the sleeves. He gripped Pacino’s hand in a firm handshake.

  “Mikey!” He stepped around the
desk and put an arm around Pacino’s shoulders, guiding him back to the door.

  “I’d offer you a drink but we need to get down to the Top Secret Conference Room.”

  “Hello, Admiral,” Pacino said, “Sir. Uncle Dick.”

  Donchez looked Pacino over, opened the door and led the way back down the corridor to the elevator. “Mikey, you look great. How’s Squadron Seven treating you?”

  “Fine, sir,” Pacino said, somewhat uncomfortable. Donchez had stayed in touch over the years but Pacino had kept a certain distance. Partly to avoid giving the impression of having connections with the brass but also because Donchez reminded him too much of good days gone by, and of the awful day Donchez had broken the news of Anthony Pacino’s loss at sea with the Stingray. As Donchez had climbed the bureaucratic ladder of the Navy he had become more distant. Finally, as a three-star admiral in command of the fleet, they almost never saw each other.

  “I heard about how you kicked ass today,” Donchez said in the elevator, pulling out one of his cigars. “Good job. It’s good to see a Piranha beat a Los Angeles like that. I liked the balls you showed getting away from that torpedo. Not many left in the force think like that.”

  “Thank you, sir,” Pacino said, relieved.

  “How’s Hillary and your son?” Probably sore as hell, Pacino thought, both on the pier waiting for him to disembark from the boat. “Both fine, sir. Tony wants to be a race driver, zooms around the house yelling vroom. Drives his mother crazy, I think she wanted a girl…”

  Donchez said, “Maybe he’ll drive a sub when he grows up.”

  As the elevator doors opened to a sub-basement Donchez led the way down a hall to another security scanner and sentry, through the door and another hall with a blast door at the end. He hit a large panel and the solid steel door slowly swung open with the hum of a powerful motor. Another hall had four doors set off of it, with one double door under a sign reading FLAG PLOT. They went in one of the doors labelled TS CONF RM 1. The room had a large wood table in the center, big enough to seat over a dozen people with another dozens seats against the wall. Pacino sat at the briefing table, remembering he’d been briefed in this conference room when Devilfish deployed to the Mediterranean earlier in the year. Admiral Donchez sat across from him, and finally spoke.

  “You want to know what you’re doing here,” he said, shrugging out of his dress-blue jacket. His white shirt had cloth shoulder epaulettes with three stars and anchors, and Pacino realized he was still in his khakis, the oily smell of the submarine still in the fabric.

  “We have an emergency, Mikey. We need the best Piranha-class submarine we’ve got to go on an urgent OP. Up north, under the polar icecap.”

  Pacino felt excitement at an emergency operation, mixed with some disappointment at the timing. Devilfish had spent the last six months on a deployment and had been scheduled for a month of “stand-down” — R and R for the crew. He glanced at his watch — the date on the Rolex’s dial showed the number 13, and abruptly he realized that it was the anniversary of his father’s death on the Stingray. In the rush of battle with Allentown and the flush of victory afterward he hadn’t realized. With the realization now came grief, an old friend, and guilt.

  “Admiral, Devilfish has been submerged over 230 days this year. My men have barely had a chance to say hello to their families. Over 120 days without surfacing. Admiral—”

  “Sorry, Mikey. You and yours are it.” His tone turned chillier. Donchez dimmed the room lights and pulled a computer keyboard off a shelf on the wall and set it on the briefing table. He hit a key, starting a computerized slide show on the far wall, a television projection driven by a computer display. The COMSUBLANT emblem dissolved into a projection map of the north pole.

  “A chart of the Arctic Ocean,” Donchez said. “You’ve been there a few times. The boundary of the ice zone is shown in green.”

  The chart slowly zoomed in to the Russian northern coast. A city named Severomorsk was highlighted in red.

  “As you know the Severomorsk Naval Complex is a major shipbuilding facility, ammunition depot and command center for the Russian Northern Fleet, including the biggest and most capable arm of the Navy, the Submarine Force.”

  The screen changed to a view of the Severomorsk complex. Pacino could tell by the odd slanting lines through the photograph that it was a shot from a spy satellite. On a clear day a satellite could peer over from its path to get side-angle photos like this. The perspective made it much more valuable than the usual God’s-eye-views satellites provided. It was like being there. Clearly visible in the photograph was a giant drydock filled with scaffolding and equipment and the dots of workers. The dock’s immensity could be told from the tiny trucks parked along the security barrier. Cranes on rail wheels surrounded the scaffolding in the dock lowering massive pieces of equipment into place.

  “The old Cold War is over, but submarine-building continues and at a fast pace. We’ve been watching during the past few years as one particular class of submarine has been built. The lead ship of the class is almost ready to get under way. It happens to be the newest, most advanced attack submarine in the world, at least so far as we know.”

  “Not much of it to see,” Pacino said, thinking the OP probably involved trailing the new Russian submarine under the polar icecap.

  The screen changed and Pacino blinked hard. The same perspective but now the clutter had been removed and a behemoth of a submarine was clearly visible in the dock. Her lines were graceful. She would be very fast. The boat had a teardrop-shaped sail forward, not the sheer-sided fin of American boats but a gently sloped bubble leaning forward. Far aft, where the long hull of the boat finally tapered to the screw, a pod shaped like a long teardrop was mounted on top of the rudder fin. Aft of the rudder was a shroud. None of the screw blades was visible.

  Pacino looked at the ship in frank envy, wondering what it would be like to drive.

  “This is the OMEGA-class Russian fast-attack submarine.” The picture changed to a blueprint of the ship, streamlined, her nose and tail sections elongated elliptical curves. Inside the lines of her shape was a second long shape.

  “Double hull,” Pacino said, and stood up and walked to the screen to look at the drawing up-close. He concentrated on the gap between inner and outer hull. The Piranha and Los Angeles submarines were single-hull ships. A hole in the skin of an American sub punctured the “people tank,” flooding the ship. A puncture in the skin of the Russian sub would do no real damage. The only disadvantage of the doublehull ship was weight, the extra metal and water would slow the ship down.

  “The inner hull of the OMEGA is titanium,” Donchez said. “Strongest submarine-hull material in the world. Outer hull is plate carbon steel. The annulus, the ring, between inner and outer hull is about fifteen feet on the top and bottom, about twenty-five feet on the sides. That’s twenty-five feet of water a torpedo would have to blast through to get to the interior.” Pacino looked at the blueprint’s end-on drawing. The inner hull was cylindrical while the outer hull was oval shaped. The annulus was filled with tanks and air bottles and batteries and piping, all leaving more room inside the pressure hull.

  “Omega’s 656 feet long,” Donchez went on, “Eighty-two feet wide, longer and fatter than our Trident. A Trident sub — which I consider to be a giant underpowered hog to drive — is eighteen thousand tons submerged. This ship is sixty thousand tons submerged.”

  “She’ll be slow,” Pacino said.

  “A lot faster than a Piranha,” Donchez said.

  “What?”

  “It has twin-reactors, each liquid-metal cooled. We’re guessing about three thousand megawatts between the two of them. Pretty big when you think that the Three Mile Island plant is only twelve hundred or thirteen hundred megawatts. That gives her about six hundred thousand horsepower at the screw.”

  “Six hundred thousand shaft horsepower? Jesus.” Pacino thought a moment. “There’s no way a conventional screw could accelerate a boat lik
e that with that kind of horsepower. The screw would cavitate, just spin in a cloud of steam.”

  He was thinking of the lectures at the Academy… a rotating screw blade in seawater created a low pressure area on one side of the blade, high pressure on the other. The high pressure pushed the ship while the low-pressure side sucked the ship forward. But if the pressure got too low the vacuum effect would form bubbles of steam, which would shriek as they collapsed in the high pressure of the sea away from the screw. The noisy bubble effect was called cavitation, the blades making cavities in the liquid water…

  “No cavitation,” Donchez said. “No screw, for that matter. She’s got a ducted propulsor. She’ll do forty-five knots easy. Maybe fifty.” Pacino looked at the blueprint. Under the shroud aft of the rudder were what looked like several rows of turbine blades. The submarine had essentially a water-jet propulsor. It would be quiet and efficient and fast.

  “If she can do fifty knots,” Pacino said, “she could outrun a Mark 49 Hullbuster torpedo. Not that it matters. I doubt even a Hullbuster would do much damage to her hull, not with steel over water over titanium.” He shook his head. “Well, even if this thing is fast, it must take an hour for her to get up to speed.”

  “Look at the bow section,” Donchez said. Pacino saw torpedo tubes going forward to the nose of the ship. And a sphere of equipment at the very tip of the inside of the nosecone.