Attack of the Seawolf mp-2

by Michael Dimercurio

  “I don’t see it that way, Admiral,” Pacino said, shutting the binder. “You said it’s my ass, my call. Give me twenty Mark 38 decoys, fifteen Mark 50 torpedoes, fourteen Block III Javelins, all of them ship attack units, and one Ow-sow. And of course the fifteen Mark 80 SLAAMs.”

  “It’s your mission. I’ll radio ahead.”

  Donchez didn’t look pleased, Pacino thought, as he went forward to have the pilot radio Japan with the weapon load out Well, the OP was his, it would have to go by his plan. He was beginning to feel the selfconfidence of command returning to him. It felt damn good.

  YOKOSUKA, JAPAN, THIRTY MILES SOUTH OF TOKYO

  YOKOSUKA NAVAL STATION, PIER 4 USS SEAWOLF

  0305 LOCAL TIME

  Lieutenant Commander Greg Keebes woke up with a start. The sound of the curtain of his coffin-sized bunk being opened never failed to bring him crashing back to the reality of the submarine. In his year aboard the Seawolf, Keebes had yet to sleep through an entire night aboard, whether in-port as duty officer or at sea.

  “What is it?” he asked, rubbing his eyes. A petty officer in dungarees held out a radio-message board.

  Behind the enlisted sailor Keebes could see the chief torpedoman, who was also the duty chief for the evening, standing in the dimly lit passageway.

  Keebes pushed back the message board, climbed out of the coffin and put on his khaki pants and shirt, feeling desperately in need of a shower. As he buttoned his shirt he nodded at the petty officer to turn on the stateroom’s overhead lights. The bright white fluorescents flickered, then clicked to life. Keebes checked his watch — after three in the morning.

  “What is it, Deitzler?” Keebes asked the chief, a salty hovering, forty-five plus, his hair already gray, his face lined. What was it that made men get old so fast in the sub force? Had to be the atmosphere, the nuclear radiation, the food, or the stress. Or maybe the months at sea without a woman. Whatever, the fleet was full of old youngsters.

  “Sir, the base weapons officer is topside. He’s asking for you, and get this — there’s a crane and a lowboy loaded with cruise missiles and torpedoes waiting to be loaded. He wants to know why we’re not ready to load weapons. Did I miss something, sir?”

  Keebes ran his hands through his hair, wondering if the Navy bureaucracy had failed them again. Sea trials had been interrupted by the emergency orders to get the CO and XO stateside. But even so, the weapons tests weren’t scheduled for another month.

  And when the weapons tests did begin they were only to shoot dummies of torpedoes to test the torpedo tube ejection-mechanisms. The plan didn’t have them launching cruise missiles for months.

  “A little early to be loading dummies, if you ask me. Chief,” Keebes said, taking the message board from the radioman.

  “Sir, these are war shots not dummies. Not even exercise shots. What the hell’s up?”

  Keebes held up a finger as he read the message on the board, which had the answer to the chiefs questions:

  091857ZMAY

  IMMEDIATE

  FM CINCPAC

  TO USS SEA WOLF SSN-21

  SVBJ EMERGENCY SPEC-OP

  SCI/TOP SECRET — JAILBREAK

  PERSONAL FOR COMMANDING OFFICER PERSONAL FOR COMMANDING OFFICER

  //BT//

  1. PREPARE TO GET UNDERWAY FOR EMERGENCY SPECIAL OPERATION.

  2. NEW COMMANDING OFFICER EN ROUTE YOKOSUKA.

  3. EXECUTE WEAPONS LOAD OUT IMMEDIATELY TO SUPPORT TIMELY UNDERWAY.

  4. UNDERWAY TO COMMENCE IMMEDIATELY UPON ARRIVAL OF NEW COMMANDING OFFICER, APPROX 1000 LOCAL TIME TODAY.

  5. ADMIRAL R. DONCHEZ SENDS.

  //BT//

  Keebes looked up at Deitzler, handed the message board over to the chief and waited for him to finish reading it. Then: “Get on the Circuit One, Chief, and get the crew up. Station the weapons loading detail. Muster the officers in the wardroom and the chiefs in the crew’s mess. Whatever’s going on, we’ll know soon enough. In the meantime you brief the chiefs and get working on the load out and the pre-underway checklist.”

  Keebes hurried into the wardroom and called for one of the cooks to stoke up the coffee machine. A new captain, Keebes thought. An untested submarine. An emergency special operation. Terrific.

  CHAPTER 9

  FRIDAY, 10 MAY

  0047 GREENWICH MEAN TIME

  YOKOSUKA NAVAL STATION, PIER 4 USS SEAWOLF

  0947 LOCAL TIME

  Pacino knew he’d be too tense to sleep at his body’s normal time. His submarine would be long submerged in the darkness of the local evening before he slept again. Besides, he thought, it wouldn’t feel like he was an official submariner again until he had skipped a few nights of sleep. The feeling of fatigue had been as familiar and as comfortable as the deck shoes he used to wear at sea.

  Pacino couldn’t help feeling excited as he craned his neck to see the large dark shape ahead in the water next to the pier. When the car stopped, Pacino opened his door and stepped out, seeing the breathtaking size of the monstrous submarine lying in the water, waiting for him. The ship lay tied up at the end of the pier, her bow toward Pacino, her stern pointing away toward the waters of the channel.

  Donchez joined him on the pier.

  “What do you think of her, Mikey?”

  The ship was similar in lines to a 688 Los Angeles class submarine, but the scale seemed blown up. Her diameter was so big that the deck appeared almost flat at the crown instead of curving and cylindrical.

  The sheer sides of the sail jutted straight out of the deck, unadorned by fair water planes. The ship seemed to extend to the vanishing point; it had to be nearly three hundred and fifty feet long, Pacino thought. The fairing for the towed array extended longitudinally aft from the leading edge of the sail to the stern. The sail had a triangular fillet at the forward edge where it attached to the hull. The rudder protruded from the water far aft of the point where the water lapped the aft hull. Forward of the sail a large hatch was open, and further forward the hull sloped more steeply to the water, the bulbous bow rounder and broader than Devilfish’s. Eight doubled-up lines held the ship to the pier. Amidships, a gangway connected the ship to the concrete jetty. There were no shore power cables on the ship but a heavy gantry with thick cables had been retracted aft near the rudder. They must be steaming the engine room Pacino figured.

  Pacino realized Donchez had been waiting for an answer.

  “She’ll do, Admiral,” he said, trying to keep his voice flat. But Donchez must have seen through him.

  “Come on, Mikey. I’ll give you the rundown up here. I think you’ll find this crew will be motivated to support you, Mikey. I had my aide call the acting captain from the airport while we were on the way in — he gave him a few stories about you.”

  “Great. All I need is for this crew to know I got my last command shot out from under me.”

  “All he told them was what happened to the other guy, and that you got the Navy Cross.”

  “Whatever. Tell me about this ship, Admiral. Give me her secrets.”

  Donchez smiled.

  “Seawolf displaces 9,150 tons submerged. She’s forty-two feet in diameter — that’s why the pier is new. Her draft is so deep they had to dredge the channel so she could get out.”

  “Forty-two feet. Unbelievable.”

  “She’s 326 feet long from her sonar sphere to her propulsor. No screw, by the way. She’s got a water turbine propulsor. Much quieter. Very fast, although her acceleration is just a bit off, but that propulsor doesn’t cavitate like a screw, so you can give her full throttle and she’ll come up to speed quiet as a church mouse. Her test depth is 2,000 feet. Her hull has an anechoic coating, tiles made of foam that absorb active sonar pulses, kind of like a Stealth fighter’s radar absorptive material. She’ll do forty-five knots at one hundred percent power, more if you take her into the red. She has 52,000 shaft horsepower, and get this — this boat is quieter going full out than a Los Angeles sub at all-stop.”

&
nbsp; “Fifty-two-thousand shaft horsepower, and you’re telling me I’ll be quieter at all-ahead flank than Sean’s boat is hovering?”

  “Right. Did I tell you the story of her acoustic tests? She was supposed to run through the instrumented sonar array at the Bahamas acoustic test site, and the DynaCorp crew radioed her asking what she was waiting for, that she was behind schedule. Seawolf radioed back that she had already gone through the test area. DynaCorp called back and said that was impossible — they hadn’t heard anything. Fact is, when they analyzed the tapes, the only way they could determine that the ship had passed through the sonar range was that a hole of quietness went by — during her run the ocean’s noise actually disappeared for a moment to be replaced by total quiet. When the boat moved on, the ocean noise returned. This ship is so damned quiet it is actually an acoustic hole in the ocean. And that ain’t all. Her reactor’s coolant system uses natural circulation up to fifty percent power, no circulation pumps. That’ll get you up to thirty-three knots with no pumps. The loudest machinery aboard, and we don’t need it until we go over thirty-three knots. Not only that, but we’ve completely rethought the engine room layout. The maneuvering reactor control room is aft at the shaft seals, where it’s nice and cool. It’s in a special compartment so that even if there’s a major steam leak, the maneuvering crew has a full thirty seconds to isolate it remotely. Makes more sense than having the crew roasted.”

  “What else? You’re a regular encyclopedia, Admiral.”

  “About this baby, I am. Okay, you don’t see any fall-water planes on the sail. This boat uses bow planes up forward for better depth control. The sonar system is the BQQ-5E advanced BAT EARS suite, with the advanced hull array and the supersensitive spherical array forward. There’s even a baffle-viewing sonar in the lower rudder, although so far it doesn’t work. The combat-control system is the ANBSY-2 Mark II advanced firecontrol system, a master computer that links sonar and navigation and keeps records of everything you do at sea. The control room is in the middle level deck so you have the ship’s full width for the room. Still a bit cramped, though. You’ve got the type20 periscope. The forward escape trunk is set up to lock out ten men at a time, more if they squeeze together. That will come in very handy when you’re locking out the SEALs. And as I already told you, you’ve got fifty room-loaded weapons and eight torpedo tubes. Well, that’s about it. You ready to meet your crew and take a look inside?”

  “Hell, Admiral, lead on.”

  Donchez stepped onto the gangway and saluted the American flag flying aft on the deck, then saluted the sentry.

  “Request permission to come aboard,” Donchez barked.

  “Granted, sir. Welcome aboard. Admiral.”

  Pacino repeated the ritual. As he stepped off the gangway onto the spongy anechoic-tiled deck of the Seawolf he felt like he’d come home again. He followed Donchez toward the amidships hatch, the weapon-shipping hatch. As Donchez lowered himself down the ladder and disappeared Pacino took a look around the harbor, a habit from the old days, when he would look one last time at the world before vanishing into a steel pipe that would take the world away. When he found the rungs of the ladder and stepped into the massive hull, he smelled the smell, the unique smell of a submarine. He shut his eyes for a moment and drew the air in, savoring the smell like a wine expert lingering over the bouquet of a familiar vintage. The smell defied description, but Hillary had once tried to analyze it during one of her rare visits to his old boat — she had correctly identified diesel oil, lubrication oil, cooking grease, cigarette smoke and sweat. But she also had said there was something else there that she couldn’t identify. Pacino hadn’t told her, but what she couldn’t label was the smell of raw sewage from the sanitary tank vents, flavored with ozone from the high-voltage electrical equipment.

  As Pacino’s feet hit the deck the Public Address Circuit One system crackled with the voice of the topside sentry:

  “COMMANDER IN CHIEF, UNITED STATES PACIFIC FLEET, ARRIVING! CAPTAIN, UNITED STATES NAVY … ARRIVING.”

  Pacino and Donchez were standing at the base of the ladder to the amidships hatch, which was in a narrow passageway. The walls, the bulkheads, were paneled in dark grain wood. Pacino reached out and touched it — it wasn’t imitation Formica paneling but honest-to-god mahogany wood. The passageway extended forward for about seventy or eighty feet. A few feet down the passageway Donchez stood talking to an officer who wore starched cotton khakis and the emblems of a lieutenant commander on his collars, with gold dolphins over his left pocket and a key with a braided chain around his neck. The duty officer. The man’s nametag read KEEBES; of medium height, in his mid-thirties, the most prominent thing about him his severe crewcut and horn-rimmed glasses. Pacino, thinking back to Donchez’s briefing, recalled that Keebes was the navigator and acting captain.

  “Mikey, this is Lieutenant Commander Greg Keebes. Mr. Keebes is a Seawolf plank owner. Mr. Keebes, this is Captain Mike Pacino, the man we’ve been telling you about. He’ll be taking command as soon as you’re ready.”

  Keebes said he had a course plotted but only to point Alpha.

  “Our track past the dive point isn’t on the clearance message. Too highly classified.”

  “I’ll brief the officers once we’re underway, Nav,” Pacino said. “You’ll be able to plot the track as soon as we’re at sea. Now I’d like to take a look around at this boat before I take command.”

  Keebes led the way forward.

  “This whole deck is devoted to crew living,” Keebes said.

  “Officers’ country is on the port side. Four large staterooms and a head, and the wardroom. Starboard is the chiefs’ quarters aft and the crew’s mess and galley forward.”

  At the end of the passageway, Pacino found himself standing next to a curving metal bulkhead. The shape of the surface seemed spherical. A round hatch was set into the side of the sphere.

  “Forward escape trunk,” Keebes said. “It can lock out a dozen men at a shot. We use it for commando insertions, diver ops, that kind of thing.”

  Keebes proceeded to a ladder leading down to the next level, lowered himself down the ladder and Pacino followed.

  “Sonar and firecontrol computer room,” Keebes said. He opened a door on a starboard bulkhead.

  “Sonar display room. Sonar’s come a long way since the original Q-5. We’ve got two towed arrays; the hull one has six bulges isolated from internal noise, the spherical array is bigger, with more hydrophones, more sensitivity.”

  Keebes pushed through the door leading aft into a room the full forty-two-foot width of the submarine.

  Pacino whistled. The room looked absurdly open and comfortable to Pacino’s eyes, accustomed as they had been to the old Piranha-class’s cramped control spaces. The center of the room was taken up with the periscope stand, the conn, an elevated platform built around the wells for two periscopes set side-by-side.

  At the aft end of the conn was a display console housing repeater panels for the sonar set and the firecontrol computer as well as the red handset of a NESTOR satellite secure-voice radio system. Beside the radio gear was the underwater telephone console.

  In the port forward corner of the room were the ballast-control panel wrapping around from port to forward, and next to it the ship-control panel, a set of three control seats situated around airplane-style controls. The panels performed similar functions to their ancestors on previous ship classes, but the level of computerization had progressed enormously — the panels had almost no hardware instruments, only computer video screens where the ship’s combat computer displayed the faces of the instruments the crew would configure.

  “Looks like something out of a sci-fi flick,” Pacino said, staring at the ship-control console.

  “We still haven’t gone all the way to computer ship control — the planes and rudder and ballast systems are still controlled manually by the four-man ship-control team instead of by the computer,” Keebes said. “NAV SEA still isn’t comfortable with
computers driving the boat. Their mentality is still in the 1940s. Why pay for all these computers if it still takes four men to take the ship from periscope depth to test depth? But one step at a time, I suppose.”

  Keebes moved to the starboard side of the room, where a long row of firecontrol computer consoles were set up. Instead of three displays, there were five.

  “The combat control system is the BSY-2/Mark II. A lot like the old CCS Mark I of the 688 and 637 classes, just more capabilities. Ties into the nav computers, so it automatically writes records of any combat encounters. The input from the hull, spherical, and towed arrays is integrated pretty well into this beast. Target acquisition and tracking are simplified. Weapons can be programmed from any of the panels. Works well.”

  “Let’s get to the lower level,” Pacino said.

  They went down the aft-stairs to the lower level.

  “Aux Machinery,” Keebes said. “Emergency diesel lives here.”

  Pacino tried not to look too impressed by the sheer size of the diesel engine. It dwarfed the engine he’d had on Devilfish.

  “Torpedo room has space for fifty weapons. We’ve got eight torpedo tubes. Like earlier classes the tubes are amidships. These are canted outward ten degrees.”

  Pacino followed Keebes through the torpedo room, walking the narrow aisle beside the tall racks of the weapons. He looked back at the room from the forward end, impressed by the huge size of the ship. The Mark 50 torpedoes and the Javelin cruise missiles were twenty-one inches in diameter and twenty-one feet long, graceful, sleek weapons.

  “Want to see the engineering spaces, sir?”

  Pacino looked at his watch, conscious that every moment that passed was another chance for Sean Murphy and his crew to die. Still, as commander of the rescue mission, he’d better have a mental picture of every aspect of the Seawolf, no matter how abbreviated.