Barracuda: Final Bearing mp-4

by Michael Dimercurio

  “Paully, Russia’s money was an investment in a relationship with Japan. The Russians might try again now that the battle group is gone. They might try to escort in a convoy with Russian navy vessels, maybe even an Akula nuclear submarine.”

  “No way, sir. The Russian fleet is too poor to use the fuel to go to sea. They can’t send a submarine out, there’s no food for the crews. Admiral, don’t you read the Newsfiles? The Russian navy hasn’t paid their officers for three months, and their sailors — the ones who are left — have been working for free for six months. The sub-trained ratings were tilling fields to try to get food to be able to go to sea, and the harvest this year was squat. This is not about charity to Japan, Admiral. This is about yen and rubles and pounds and dollars. The Russians are too poor. That’s the reason they were helping the Japanese in the first place. Now that you sank their tanker they’ve got a great excuse to do nothing. ‘Hey, we tried but they sank our ship, and the water’s full of subs, so we can’t risk any more.’ Now the Russians can sit this out and still get credit for trying to help.”

  Pacino’s headache was worse, and he had no idea where Paully’s tirade was going. White’s tone would be considered disrespectful by some officers; Pacino was grateful for it. He was blessed with an aide who would tell him the truth without the sugar coating.

  “So don’t worry about the Sea of Japan. Leave the Pasadena there as insurance. Put your subs on the southeast, the Tokyo side.”

  Pacino sat back and rubbed his eyes. “Great. So we leave the west side alone. What about the Pacific side?”

  “Sir, your vectors show the eight sub force spreading out.”

  “Yes. They operate independently.”

  “I think we should wolfpack them in on the north and south corners of the Oparea. Two or three subs within ten miles of each other. One will serve as a tripwire for the other. If one gets attacked, the other can back him up from a different bearing. We know the Japanese can kill one of ours alone. Why not change the equation?”

  Pacino glared at White. “So you’re suggesting we rewrite the Approach and Attack manual, abandon forty years’ worth of nuclear submarine tactics, techniques that have been tested in the Bahamas test range in years of sub-versus-sub exercises, years of computer simulations against the Destiny class — abandon it all and go back to World War II U-boat tactics. Is that what you’re saying?” White said nothing. “Well?”

  “Yes sir. That’s my recommendation.”

  For the first time since Pacino came in with the eyepatch he smiled at Paully, then held out his hand. “Good. It’s a great idea. I’m going to call it Tactical Plan White. If it works I’ll make sure you get the credit for it.”

  “And if it fails, you’ll get to take the heat.”

  Pacino looked up. “If it fails it won’t matter.” He pushed the chart over to Paully. “Show me where you’d put the boats.”

  “Nine boats, eight with Pasadena holding down the Sea of Japan. That’s four packs of two, call them A, B, C and D. A and B start here in the southwest Oparea. C and D begin farther north. A and B move north and C and D come south down the coastline, linking up outside Tokyo Bay. By that time the Oparea is secured.”

  “There’s no D. Remember, we’re keeping Barracuda out of the wolfpacks. I want her center stage, right here. We’re going to be at periscope depth trying to run the show.”

  “That almost works out, sir. We could put the Buffalo, Albany and Boston up in the north, and Atlanta, Jacksonville, Charleston and Birmingham down south.”

  “The Yankees against the Rebs.”

  “Easy to remember, anyway.”

  Pacino grabbed the Writepad and began a tactical employment message. Each ship was given a position and a time to be there. The subs were to link up with their wolfpack partner in the Pacific, then enter the Oparea. Pacino wrote that each ship was to report to him using SLOT buoys, the one-way radio buoys that could be launched from a signal ejector at depth and would then rise to the surface and transmit, allowing the subs to stay deep.

  “What do you think?” Pacino asked Paully.

  “Transmitting, even SLOT buoys, is dangerous. The Japanese will be onto us.”

  “I’ll tell them to program coded SLOTS with prewritten messages. Then at midnight and noon they’ll put them up, and on the Barracuda we’ll know what’s going on.”

  “Coded slots?”

  “Code 1 means ’no contact,’ code 2 means ’pursuing contact,’ code 3 means ‘I’m under attack’ and code 4 means ’we sank a Destiny’.”

  “Not much meat there, Admiral.”

  “We can’t micromanage the skippers. We just need to know if they’re still alive.” Pacino modified the message, then attached the electronic file depicting his marked-up chart. “Too bad we lost the USUBCOM authenticators when the Reagan sank. Now our people will just have to trust it’s us sending the message.”

  “No, sir. We’ll have access to Barracuda’s authenticators. They’ll have everything we had on the Reagan.”

  Pacino nodded, sent the order. The Writepad transmitted the files to the megaserver in orbit, which relayed the data to the Navy’s western Pacific Comstar communications satellite and from there to the subs nearing the Oparea. “Time to go, Paully. You got everything?”

  “I’m loaded. The chopper is waiting on the aft deck. You want to say goodbye to the ship’s captain? He asked me to tell you he sends his luck. Hugs and kisses, all that good shit.”

  “No time.”

  Pacino pulled out his waterproof bag, which was a carbon fiber canister with a gasketed screw top. He rolled up and stowed the chart pad and the Writepad inside, along with the uniform he’d come with and some new ones. He still had his solid gold dolphin pin and his admiral’s stars from the uniform he’d been wearing when the battle group was attacked.

  “Let’s go.”

  They walked down the crowded passageways of the Mount Whitney, their wet suits creaking and squeaking. The ship’s halls were busy with cables and junction boxes and pipes, but nowhere near as crowded as a nuclear submarine. The surface ships wasted space and volume everywhere, so much so that it was hard for Pacino to walk their passageways without thinking of the waste, but soon he would be aboard the Barracuda and it would all fall into place — But would it? He felt a dread come into him then, settling onto his spirit like a carrion bird on a carcass. Suddenly the war seemed to become sinister and alive, a beast too big for him, and for the first time in memory he felt unequal to the task.

  In the past he’d taken his abilities to the limit. On the Devilfish he had once been faced with sinking under the polar icecap with a dying nuclear submarine or trying to emergency blow through ice a hundred feet thick. He had had nothing to lose in aiming for the ice — either his crew would have died if he did nothing, or they had a chance, however slight, to live if he took a huge risk. It hadn’t been a choice. Now, his decisions would affect several thousand men with several thousand families, and maybe even the nation. If he prevailed, America would again be the big kid on the block. If he lost, the US would go the way of Napoleon’s France or Hitler’s Germany or Sihoud’s United Islamic Front of God. The pressure was too much, he could feel it crawling down his throat, a cold claw on his heart. Every decision would inevitably send men to their deaths.

  He tried to tell himself to stop such thoughts and calm down, but the battle coming up in the next hours would determine a judgment of his entire life. Before, at sea, in command, he had coped with the pressure by simply telling himself that he knew his crew had taken risks to come to sea with him and that they trusted him. And that if he lost, he lost his ship and his men and that was it. But there were other ships, other captains, other days for them to fight. Here now, in the Pacific outside of Japan, there was only himself and his fleet, two-thirds of it late, the other third already committed by an overly aggressive commander-in-chief who might relent when he confronted her — but who might not. And this battle was not just for his life, his
crew’s, his ship, it was for a whole fleet of ships, his country’s future. If he blew this… Pacino knew he would be sailing into darkness, not only blind but dumb, not able to tell his ships his orders unless they came out of the depths to hear him—

  Paully’s voice interrupted, his words focused on the irrelevant, the nurse who had attended Pacino when he was injured, Paully, of course, unaware of Pacino’s thoughts. “Admiral, you really should take a few minutes with Nurse Eileen. She tended to you when you were out of it!”

  Pacino kept walking. His headache was pounding harder. “Admiral, I think she’d feel real bad if you just jumped into a helicopter without thanking her.”

  “You’re right,” Pacino said finally. As they walked by sick bay Pacino stopped. “I have a migraine. I’m going to grab some aspirin or something before we get in the chopper. You wait here.”

  Pacino walked into the door to sickbay. Lt. Eileen Constance was doing computerwork in her office. She wore her regulation whites, her face tanned with no makeup, her hair long and blonde. She had been a nurse for eight years, most of it on the hospital ships, but she had wanted to be a flight surgeon and had put in for medical school. Her application to the University of Florida had been accepted and she was only waiting here on the Mount Whitney as a nurse until med school commenced in the fall. Pacino had learned about her career ambitions while flat on his back in sickbay after recovering from the eye surgery. When they had removed his bandages he had seen her for the first time and felt his heart sink. She was too beautiful, out of his league. It hurt just to look at her.

  “Hi, Eileen, thought I’d stop by and say thanks. I appreciated…”

  She looked up, apparently surprised. “Admiral.” She stood up. “How is the eye? You look like you’re in pain.” She put her hand on his forehead.

  “Headache.”

  She gave him two pills and a bottle of spring water.

  He swallowed, his eyes on her. He moved closer to her, knowing he shouldn’t. She smiled up at him.

  “Well, since you just came to say goodbye, I’ll say good luck. Be careful on the personnel transfer… and give them hell.”

  “Thanks.”

  “And come back in one piece, okay?” She paused. “Do you think we’ll ever see each other again?”

  Paully’s knock came at the door. “Time to go, Admiral.”

  “Tell them to start the engines,” Pacino shouted through the door.

  “I’ve got to go,” Pacino said.

  “Please be careful, Michael.” His first name from her lips, when no one called him anything but “sir” or “admiral” or “Patch” or Donchez’s “Mikey” sounded strange but wonderful.

  The sound of the helicopter’s jet engines spooling up could be heard dimly through the bulkheads, the noise swelling as the turbines whined, moaned, screamed. The sounds of the rotors came next, the chopper starting the main rotor.

  Paully knocked again. “Chopper’s ready, sir.”

  Pacino turned back to Eileen, grabbed her shoulders, pulled her close and kissed her. In a way it seemed absurd, a cliche, the warrior off to war, kissing his woman goodbye. Well, hell, so be it.

  He pulled away. “Bet on it, I’ll see you again.”

  He stepped out the door to the passageway, shutting it behind him. Paully followed him to the aft helodeck, and as they opened the watertight door to the helodeck Pacino noticed his headache was gone.

  He stepped into the Sea King helicopter and sat by the hatch, looking at the ship. Paully waved orders at the pilots and the rotor outside roared, the chopper shaking with the power of the rotating blades. The helicopter lifted off the deck, climbed to the southeast and then turned and sped away, the Mount Whitney vanishing far below.

  CHAPTER 26

  WM NORTHWEST PACIFIC

  Pacino pulled his mask off his neck, spat into it and rubbed the spit across the lens until it squeaked. Satisfied with the antifogging technique, he pulled the mask back down over his face and let it dangle at his throat.

  He clamped the regulator into his mouth and tasted the coppery air from the tanks on his back. The regulator worked. He spat it out, the rubber taste lingering.

  “Okay,” he said to Paully White, “you got your waterproof bag?” Pacino checked his as Paully confirmed his own items on the checklist.

  “Yeah.”

  “Tanks?”

  “Check.”

  “Regulator functional?”

  “Yes.”

  “Gage?

  “Full.”

  “Weights?”

  “Tight.”

  “Mask?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Flippers?”

  “Tough to put on with all the other equipment.”

  “Let’s get this thing on the hump.”

  “Sirs! Drop zone in two minutes,” the chopper copilot shouted back. The Barracuda was four miles ahead, only its periscope mast protruding from the water. Pacino checked the Rolex, knowing the ship had been submerged at periscope depth, hovering motionless, for the last fifteen minutes, since he and White had been late getting off the deck of the Mount Whitney.

  CHAPTER 27

  USS BARRACUDA

  Capt. David Kane sat at his stateroom’s large conference room table. The captain’s cabin on the Seawolf class was done perfectly, he thought. A large rack, a conference table that could comfortably seat a half-dozen men, a large leather swivel chair that could roll between the conference table and his desk, the wheels of the chair locked unless he pushed the travel button.

  Set into a soffit in the centerline bulkhead were four widescreen video monitors, the first monitoring the navigation display of the ship’s position, the islands of Japan in the upper right corner, the boundary of the Oparea flashing yellow, now only a hundred nautical miles to the northeast. The second display showed a view of the control room in one window, the maneuvering room aft in the other. The third was also a split-screen view, the left half selected to the view out of the type-20 periscope, the sea quiet, nothing to see but the dividing line between the waves of the deep blue ocean and the light blue sky, the right half of the screen displaying the broadband sonar waterfall screen that showed the ocean empty of other ships within the audible range of the BSY-2 combat system. The screen could also display the combat-control system’s dot-stacker computer display, useful when they were trailing an enemy submarine — the captain could look up and see the solution to the target with a glance, eliminating a hundred phone calls a day when in trail.

  Kane was showered, shaved and dressed, the arrival of the Pacific Force Commander announced on a flash message he had gotten from the Mount Whitney the night before. He was particularly bothered by this, the arrival of a meddling admiral onboard his submarine, turning his command of one of the newest Seawolf-class submarines from independent action to little more than a flagship. The arrival of an admiral at sea was always bad news, he thought. His authority as commanding officer would be under constant scrutiny and evaluation in front of his observant crew. In his own memory every time one of his commanders had taken aboard an admiral, that admiral had become a sort of proxy captain.

  The captain of a ship was one of the world’s last dictators, but in the world of instantaneous communications the surface-ship captains were no longer fully in charge. They took their orders by the ream from the carrier captains, from the battle-group commanders, from Pentagon bureaucrats, even from the president. But submarine commanders were different. They were submerged below the sea where radio signals couldn’t penetrate — except for slow, uncertain and rarely used extremely low frequency signals — in a tactical employment in which they were prohibited from talking and listening. Sub skippers were chosen for their abilities to operate independently, they were where there was no boss, no appeal, no help. The ultimate authority aboard was with the skipper. The ship was his ship.

  But if a captain of a sub were a god, an admiral was some kind of celestial being that pulled the god’s strings. Crew mem
bers stared at his stars, awed by a force considered more powerful than the ship’s captain. And when an admiral was seated next to the captain, and the captain spoke, he was as often as not met with a “huh?” as the subordinate stopped looking at the admiral. A flag officer could only be considered bad news. And in this case, Adm. Michael Pacino was doubly bad news. Kane had rescued Pacino in the Labrador Sea from the wreckage of the Seawolf, but by that time he was unconscious, never recovering until months later in the hospital, long after Kane had ceremoniously scuttled the Phoenix. But Kane had heard rumors and stories about Pacino, the folklore that Pacino had lost his first ship, the Devilfish, in the Arctic Ocean under the cover of an airtight top-secret classification. There was something about that that bothered Kane, particularly since it had been Donchez who had always protected Pacino, and Kane had never approved of Donchez.

  Pacino was not only an unknown, he was a commander of unprecedented power in the reorganized submarine force. Before the reorganization, the force had been split between Atlantic and Pacific fleets, each running a very different navy, the cultural gap as wide as the one between New York and Honolulu. Pacino had been named by Admiral Donchez, then the chief of naval operations, as head of the newly formed Unified Submarine Command, which sacked Comsublant and Comsubpac, the admirals in command of the Atlantic and Pacific fleets, uniting the organizations under his single command. And the fleet seemed to align itself to Pacino like iron filings to a magnet.