Barracuda: Final Bearing mp-4

by Michael Dimercurio

  Kane said nothing. What the hell could you say to an admiral willing to cut his own throat?

  “Okay,” Pacino said, clapping his hands. “Now, let’s get this bucket of bolts positioned in the Oparea and go to work.”

  NORTHWEST PACIFIC

  JAPANESE OPAREA, TWENTY MILES EAST OF POINT NOJIMAZAKI

  USS BARRACUDA

  “Any activity?” Pacino asked Kane in the control room.

  Kane was looking up at the sonar display above the pos-two console.

  “Nothing.”

  “They’ll turn up.”

  “Hope so.”

  “How are the weapons?”

  “I’ve got all eight loaded with Mark 50s. All eight tubes have outer doors open, and the upper four have torpedo power applied. I can get four out within thirty seconds of contact.”

  “I’d think about warming up at least two more,” Pacino said. “If the gyro temps get too high you can always shut them down, but—”

  He realized he was interfering, doing what he swore to Paully he wouldn’t do. “I’ll be in my stateroom,” he said. Kane watched him leave, then looked over at the officer of the deck, Lt. David Voorheese.

  “Warm up the fish in five and six,” Kane ordered quietly, looking aft toward Pacino’s commandeered stateroom.

  CHAPTER 34

  NORTHWEST PACIFIC

  JAPANESE OPAREA, OFF POINT ERIMOMISAKI, HOKKAIDO ISLAND

  USS PIRANHA

  Comdr. Bruce Phillips walked into control wearing a multicolored cotton poncho, a dusty Hat-brimmed leather cowboy hat, faded tight jeans, cracked and dirty cowhide cowboy boots and a leather gunbelt with two pearl-handled Smith & Wesson revolvers protruding from the poncho. A hand-rolled cigar was clamped between his teeth, the dirt of a week smeared on his hands and unshaved face.

  “Sir,” Peter Meritson said, looking up at Phillips as he mounted the periscope stand, “your boots are violating the rig for ultraquiet. They’re clumping all over the place.”

  Phillips stopped his pacing and glared down at Meritson, the sonar officer crisply turned out in his pressed blue coveralls, flag patches on the sleeves, his hair perfect, his face a pleasant triangle that the girls went crazy for, his silver double bars and gold dolphin pin gleaming in the light of the control room, his shoes new black cross-trainers.

  For a full thirty seconds Phillips stared down hard at the younger man, then blew a smoke ring in Meritson’s face. He looked around the control room, the displays humming, the fans muted, the section-tracking team members murmuring to each other softly. He clumped into the sonar room, the sonar chief set up in the second control seat of the four-console row. He leaned over the chiefs shoulder. Master Chief Salvatore Gambini sat at the display, his full headset on, his bifocals poised on the end of his nose.

  Phillips clapped his hands on Gambini’s shoulder. Gambini was an older Sicilian, a full head of gray hair combed back on his scalp, his face open and fatherly, wrinkling into smile lines, his dark eyes the kind that penetrated. If he liked what he saw, his smile lines crinkled. If he didn’t, his face might as well have been embalmed.

  “How you doin’ today, Sal?” Phillips asked. He was not one to call a chief, or an officer for that matter, by his first name, but he had made a connection with Gambini that went beyond any professional relationship. Gambini’s file had been rich with detail, perhaps too rich, much of it entered by Admiral Donchez himself. Gambini was too old for the submarine business, having served in attack submarines for a long and distinguished career.

  He was now fifty-one and technically not physically qualified in submarines. He had had a bad heart attack during shore duty while teaching the kids out of high school the science of sound propagation and the BSY-2 combat-control system’s sonar suite. The result had been an emergency quadruple bypass, more than enough to cashier him from the service, except Gambini’s mind had been too valuable to lose. He had been assigned to the old Pacific Fleet Submarine Command HQ before the submarine force reorganization, before the Muslim war, serving as the command master chief to Comsubpac, the commander of the Pacific Fleet’s submarines. Admiral Donchez. He and Donchez had hit it off, talking over beers in a back street bar away from the base. Gambini and his wife Maureen were prominent at Subpac, giving frequent parties at their seaside home. It had been evident that the two of them were one of those rare married couples who were inseparable, two halves of one soul. At one of the Gambini parties Maureen had buttonholed the admiral and whispered in his ear about how much Gambini missed the submarines.

  Donchez had used his powers, being the bureaucracy’s equivalent to a 500-pound gorilla, to reinstate Gambini’s submarine qualification. Gambini was entirely too senior to go back to sea, especially in submarines, but the reinstatement meant he could at least ride submarines to help train their sonar crews. Donchez would move on from Subpac to become the Chief of Naval Operations, and Gambini left HQ to stay home with Maureen when she was diagnosed with brain cancer. The doctors gave her only a few months to live. Gambini’s face became hollow, his clothes hung on him. The cancer progressed. Gambini was beside her night and day as she slowly slipped away, finally becoming a different person, no longer able to recognize her husband or their three children. It was a Thursday night when she came out of the coma long enough to look at Gambini, this time with recognition. She had gripped his hands, hard, just before she shut her eyes for the last time. The moment of lucidity had been so brief, so startling and unexpected, and so close to the end, that Gambini had said he wasn’t sure if it had really happened, but a nurse in the doorway had also witnessed it.

  After her burial Gambini had been lost. He couldn’t eat, sleep or work. On the rare occasions when he showed up at HQ he stared into space or put his head on his desk. Donchez’s replacement. Admiral Carson, had convinced Gambini to retire. The same year Donchez — then the number one admiral in the navy, the Chief of naval operations — on a trip to Pearl Harbor stopped over to see Gambini. One dinner with the man was enough — Donchez pulled the strings, and Gambini was sent back to sea as a sonarman, a trial assignment to the Piranha since the Piranha was a new construction ship not expected to spend much time at sea the first year of its commissioning. At first Gambini had been slow to adjust to shipboard life, but it had been a key that unlocked a vital part of himself from his prison of grief. Within four months of the assignment Gambini was back, almost. Weekends and holidays remained black times for the master chief, typically finding him on the ship, but the worst day was the first anniversary of Maureen’s death.

  When the ship was bumped up in readiness condition by Admiral Pacino, Gambini was supposed to be separated from ship’s company and assigned back to Electric Boat. Official Navy orders remained paper, even in the era of electronic communication. They had arrived by courier the week before Piranha was to sail for the Oparea. Comdr. Bruce Phillips had signed for them and promptly fed them into the shredder. Piranha sailed with one unauthorized enlisted man, the best sonar tech in the US Navy, possibly in the world.

  “Captain, I’m doing better today that I guess I have a right to,” Gambini said.

  “Master Chief, don’t feel guilty for feeling good. And if you have to feel any guilt, feel it for not finding me a Destiny target.”

  “Don’t you worry, sir, we’ll get him.”

  “What’s that on the display?” Phillips was not one of the submarine captains who knew it all, nor was he one who didn’t but claimed he did.

  “I’ve got six frequencies I’m looking for. Captain. The graphs, they’re the frequency tones that Destiny should put out.”

  “How do we know what he’s going to put out?”

  “Good question. Skipper. We don’t know and we god damned well should.”

  Phillips bit his lip. Not good. Usually a submarine they were searching for was catalogued with the tonals it put out and the transients it was known to put out. This data came from a sound surveillance done by a US sub that shadowed the new target sub
marine on its sea trials, listening and recording while the new sub went through its paces. Then, armed with the tonals the target emitted, later searches for that sub class could concentrate on just the tonals he put out, rather than guessing or looking at a whole range of frequencies. It was a paradox — to find a sub you had to know exactly what you were looking for. It was like walking through a dense forest and trying to identify a specific bird out of the noise of all the animals and insects and wind through the trees. If the bird’s song was known, finding it would be easy.

  “We had a sound surveillance of the old Destiny One class,” Phillips said.

  “Right. That’s what this is based on.”

  “So we never did one on the Two class.”

  “It was scheduled for the Barracuda to do this next month.”

  “That was crappy scheduling. Who left us with this bag of cow manure?”

  “Admiral Pacino, sir. He decided he wanted the surveillance done by a Seawolf class instead of one of the newer 688s. But Barracuda was the only Seawolf in the Pacific, and we were still unavailable at Electric Boat and in the wrong ocean.”

  “So what is this graph?” Phillips pointed to the screen. On the graph the trace of the incoming sound looked like a fat lopsided finger pointing upward. “This one is looking for fifty-eight to sixty-two cycles per second.”

  “There’s a spike there. That’s a tonal coming in. What is it? Is that him?”

  “No. That display is trying to catch Destiny’s electrical grid. If his sound signature is like the Destiny I class, he puts out a sixty-cycle tonal that comes from his grid frequency. Problem with that one is that we put the same tonal out there, so it’s hard to tell if that’s my ship or the bad guy’s ship. Every once in a while I pick up this phone and call the boys back in the teapot, and they shift our electrical grid’s frequencies around. If the spike moves, that’s not a Destiny, just the Piranha.”

  “Did you call on that one?”

  “Just before you came clomping in with those shit-kickers.”

  “What happened?”

  “The nukes changed their frequency and my tonal spike moved with it.”

  “Okay, so that’s not him. What about this one? 155 cycles. There’s a hump on that one.”

  “A hump but not a spike, sir. The system looks out at the ocean, and not the whole ocean, just a slice of it, and looks for this one frequency. The ocean’s so full of noise that there’s noise at every frequency. The sounds in this range are more concentrated in the middle of the frequency gate, that’s all.”

  “I don’t know, it looks like it’s growing.”

  The hump in the center of the graph from 153 to 156 cycles per second was growing taller. Gambini watched it, slurping coffee from one of the dirtiest coffee cups Phillips had ever seen. Phillips leaned over, watching it.

  * * *

  Aft, in the control room, Lieutenant Meritson stood before the attack center on the starboard side of the conn, hands on his hips, looking up at the sonar display screen. Meritson, in addition to being this watch’s officer of the deck, was the ship’s sonar officer. He squinted hard at the screen center, at the frequency graphs that Gambini was examining in sonar. Meritson frowned at the graph, watching the spike in the center grow. “Chief of the Watch,” he said quietly, not moving his gaze from the sonar screen.

  “Sir?”

  “We got a phone talker set up in every space?”

  “Yes sir. It’s part of the rig for ultraquiet.”

  “Good. Get on the phones to every phone talker. Get them awake. On their feet. Get a report from every watchstander. I mean it, I’m gonna need those guys in about two minutes.”

  “Aye, sir.” The chief of the watch spoke into his boom microphone, sounding irritated. “All spaces. Control. All watchstanders report status of rig for ultraquiet.” The chief listened as his phone talkers reported in one by one. “They’re all alert, Officer of the Deck. What’s on your mind?”

  “Chief, in about one minute the captain’s going to come crashing through that door and he’s going to man battlestations.”

  * * *

  In sonar, Phillips glared hard at the screen, dumping his old cigar and finding a new one, this one as homespun as the previous stogie. He lit it, not with his lighter but with a wooden match, in keeping with his 1859 El Paso outfit.

  “Captain?”

  “Yes, Master Chief?”

  “I think we’ve got a bite on the line. Be careful that you don’t spook him, okay, sir? It would be nice to set the hook.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “I think that… is new sonar contact Sierra One, possible submerged submarine.”

  Phillips felt a chill crawl up his spine, shivering in the air conditioning of the compartment.

  “Is this him?”

  “I think so.”

  “Destiny II?”

  “I think so.”

  “Any bearing?”

  “I’m getting a weak signal. Don’t do anything yet. I’m shifting to the forward beam.”

  “The end beam is terrible. You’ll just pick up our noise.”

  “No, not the end beam, just a more forward-looking one. Hold on.”

  “I’ll be right back. I’ve got things to take care of. Master?”

  “Yes, Captain?”

  “Set the hook. I want this son of a bitch.”

  CHAPTER 35

  NORTHWEST PACIFIC

  JAPANESE OPAREA, FORTY-FIVE KILOMETERS EAST-NORTHEAST OF POINT NOJIMAZAKI

  SS-808 ETERNAL SPIRIT

  The Eternal Spirit sailed at a keel-depth of 200 meters, speed ten kilometers per hour. Her crew, a dozen officers of the Japanese Maritime Self Defense Force, comprised some of the best in the squadron. The commanding officer, Comdr. Soemu Toyoda, was a Tokyo graduate and widely regarded as the flotilla’s captain to beat. His ship had been neck and neck with the Winged Serpent for the flotilla’s battle quality award, something Toyoda coveted.

  Toyoda was reading in his stateroom’s bed, the reading lamp the only illumination in the room. The report he was studying was an evaluation of the Destiny II class versus the Destiny III class, the leadership of the MSDF trying to decide the future of the force. Toyoda was forty-five years old and had spent his entire career at sea in submarines, first in the Harushio-C diesel boats built by Mitsubishi and Kawasaki, the ships streamlined and formidable-looking on the outside but crippled by the lack of a nuclear reactor. Batteries and a stinking sulfury diesel were no match for a nuclear power plant.

  Toyoda had been an engineering consultant for the construction of Japan’s first nuclear submarine, the Destiny class. At first the project had been exciting, Japan taking the next step in the technology curve, although the project had required the nation to take the next step, the embracing of nuclear technology for the military. After Hiroshima and Nagasaki were bombed by nuclear weapons at the end of the war with America in 1945, the very idea of using nuclear science was repugnant to an entire generation of Japanese. But one generation gave way to another, the younger generation tired of hearing about the holocaust of nuclear destruction. This generation had felt responsible for Japan’s emergence into the world scene as an economic contender. Products labeled “Made in Japan” went from being scorned to being state of the art. The generation after them went further, not happy with economic prominence but intent on economic domination, taking over one world market after another until the trade sanctions by the West had put a stop to that ambition. But a generation’s ambition couldn’t be turned off like a switch, and within two decades a desire to rule the world’s markets had given way to an unspoken desire to rule the world itself. Full circle.

  The Destiny submarine had been launched and found to be better than expectations. The ship was built for export sale, Japan five years before intent on meeting the spirit of its military-banning constitution if not the letter. But when the trade war escalated, Japan realized the West was more enemy than ally, and it stood alone with t
he might of Russia and the two Chinas facing it to the west, the new regime of terror in India, and the country’s leadership had called on engineers like Toyoda to manufacture its own military hardware. Admiral Tanaka — Akagi Tanaka, not his arrogant social misfit son Toshumi — had asked Toyoda to take a building-yard assignment to command the first Destiny II-class submarine, built by Japanese for Japanese in the Yokosuka shipyard. The ship was named the Eternal Spirit and was world class. More than world class, a world beater.

  Toyoda took the ship to sea on its initial sea trials. A week later he wrote a memo to the elder Tanaka that with a supersub like the Destiny II, Japan could again rule the seas. In the next five years the yards had pumped out Destiny IIs as if war were imminent. Toyoda had been pleased, watching the Maritime Self Defense Force move from a second-rate navy to a killer force.

  It was two years before that the development divisions of the MSDF made their most crucial mistake. Toyoda sat back against the fluffed-up pillows of his bed, continuing to contemplate the report. Two years ago the hull of the Divine Firmament was ripped open and the command module compartment amputated except for a few meters, just enough to contain the cabinets of a new computer system designed by a prominent research scientist named Onasuka, a biocomputer pioneer who took the previous technology of the Destiny II ship control system, the Second Captain, and modified it.

  The Second Captain was already in the forefront of computer technology, able to run the ship in the absence of the crew for routine straight-line steaming, but was not able to fight the vessel in combat. It was a layered neural network floating on a conventional distributed control system. Onasuka took the neural network and replaced the upper functions with parallel processors, multiplying the processing speed by a factor of ten thousand, with the use of biological DNA soup processors. The soup processors were composed of genetic material taken from the brain stems of small animals and cultured into the liquid soup that functioned as a biological process-control module. It was revolutionary and radical.