Piranha: Firing Point mp-5

by Michael Dimercurio

  “Of course not,” Patton said, glancing at Demeers. “I always walk onto garbage barges and take command of the submarine underneath. Down ladder!” he said, lowering himself down, Demeers following him.

  Once they were down, the sentry started laughing until his belly hurt. They’d had a lottery to see who’d get to admit the captain. It had been worth every second.

  At the bottom of the ladder, Patton found a crowd, officers and chiefs lining an immaculate wood-paneled passageway, all at attention, a chief blowing a bosun’s whistle, something out of a square-rigger navy movie.

  Patton looked at the men in their khaki uniforms, his head spinning. Then he heard a familiar voice, the voice of the man who had made his career: “Welcome aboard the USS Devilfish, Captain Patton. Are you ready to take command of the first ship of the SSNX-class?”

  Slowly Patton pivoted to look at the tanned, white-haired admiral. A smile came to his lips as his heels snapped together, his body becoming upright, the salute stiff at his forehead. Pacino waved a return salute, then reached out to shake his hand. The admiral’s grip was fierce and tight, and Patton returned it.

  “Admiral. Sir. It’s good to see you.”

  “Blood and Guts John Patton,” Pacino said, his smile growing even wider. “It’s damned good to see you again. We here, all of us, cheered when the news came in that you’d survived. Are you hurt, are you okay?”

  “I’m fine, sir, physically anyway. But I lost—”

  “Don’t worry about that, John,” Pacino said quickly. “Not now. We’re here for the change-of-command ceremony. Gentlemen, attention to orders.” Pacino pulled out a single sheet from his coverall pocket and handed it to Patton. “Captain, you may read your orders.”

  Patton squinted at the page and began to read. “From, Chief of Naval Personnel, to, Captain Jonathan George S. Patton IV, U.S. Navy, subject, permanent change of duty, reference, U.S. Navy regulations, et cetera. Paragraph 1, Captain Patton hereby ordered to report to and take command of USS Devilfish, SSNX-1, en route a classified-operation area in the Pacific Theater. Paragraph 2, Captain Patton shall report to the Supreme Commander-in-Chief, U.S. Pacific Military Forces, Admiral M. Pacino, for duty until specifically detached by said commander. Paragraph 3, these orders effective immediately as of today, 4 November.”

  Patton looked up at the row of officers, and the group broke into applause. He swallowed hard, the lump in his throat as big as a fist.

  * * *

  The captain’s stateroom was cavernous compared to the old 688-class cubbyhole. It had a bunk that could sleep two, with a full instrument readout and phone station accessible from the bunk. It could be folded up by day, and the space transformed into a high-tech office.

  Nearby was a desk with a high-backed leather swivel chair. At a large conference table, the captain’s place faced a soffit above the stateroom door entrance where a row of widescreen televisions was placed. Above the central widescreen was a camera for videoconferencing.

  Pacino noted, “We had the lockers stocked with uniforms in your size. We’ll go to control in a few minutes. Before we do, why don’t you have a seat, John?”

  Patton sank into the swivel chair at the head of the table. A sense of unreality flooded him as the deck rolled beneath his feet. Ocean waves were rocking the boat, a submarine that he’d just been given command of. A ship that he didn’t know the first thing about, and here was the admiral-in-command of the entire Pacific military forces sitting him down at his conference table to ask him the question of the hour, which was, what the hell happened out there?

  “So, John, are you sure you’re okay? No burns, bruises, cuts, concussions?”

  “They checked me out at Yokosuka, sir. I had some burns to my shins and knees and hands, but it’s about as serious as sun poisoning. Byron and I — Senior Chief Byron Demeers, my sonar chief — were dehydrated and suffering from exposure, but nothing a bottle of spring water and a cheeseburger wouldn’t solve.”

  Pacino grinned at Paully White, shaking his head. “So, what happened? Did you ever detect the Rising Sun? Or the torpedo?”

  “Neither one. Admiral. I’d slowed down to about five knots, I was in the zone where the surface group went down, and we were doing a max-scan sonar search. Senior Chief Demeers can tell you more about the search plan, but we were at battle stations and maximum sensitivity on the wide-aperature array, hitting broadband spherical hard, and streaming both towed arrays with the onion out, and we heard exactly nothing. Zero point zero. The next thing we knew, an explosion blew us to hell. I was tossed off my feet, and I ordered an EMBT blow. Someone lived long enough to hit the chicken switches, and up we went. Next thing I knew, there were flames and smoke everywhere. By the time I could get to the officers to see if they were alive, the flames had engulfed the room. I ran forward to see if Byron was alive, and when I found him, I pulled him up to the bridge tunnel. By then the entire upper level was on fire, and we went up the tunnel, and the ship began sinking. Byron saved my life — he pulled me out of the ship and put me on the raft — and the rest is history. The first I knew that I’d been attacked by a sub and not by some reactor casualty was when we were floating on the raft and a periscope popped up, and it was no American or European Union technology. It just looked at us for a few seconds.”

  “What did you do?” Paully White asked.

  “What could I do? I flipped it off.”

  Patton looked in astonishment as the officers laughed, exchanging looks and shaking their heads.

  “What’s so funny?” Patton asked. “A hundred and thirty men died on my ship, it was my responsibility, and now it’s gone and so are the men.”

  Pacino instantly sobered up. “Sorry, John, you’re right. We didn’t mean any disrespect. It’s just that you did what all of us here wished we could have done— give the bird to the Red force commander. Anyway, let’s continue the tour. Maybe by the time we’re aft. Captain Stephens will have the reactor in the power range.”

  Patton followed the admiral out of the stateroom thinking that somehow he had just passed one more test, this one as important as the first had been, back in Norfolk so many years ago.

  * * *

  Patton stood in the control room, trying not to rubberneck.

  It was absolutely huge. Huge and beautiful and open, designed by a master craftsman and submariner. In the center of the room was a raised periscope stand not entirely different from the one on the Annapolis, except that it was twice the size. In fact, the room could house four 688-sized control rooms, it was that big. At the aft end of the periscope stand was the captain’s command station, a console covered with displays, phones, cameras, and keypads. Aft of the console were the two side-by-side navigation plotter tables, but there all resemblance to his 688-class ended. On the port forward control-room corner was a ship-control station, but instead of a cockpit panel with four men, there was a deep leather seat where one man alone drove the ship, the console surrounding him with displays, a joystick between his knees, a throttle lever at his left.

  Next to the ship controller, more toward the centerline, was a console for the ship systems, taking the place of the old ballast-control panel. On the port wall were a series of consoles, navigation aft, radio equipment just forward of that, then the repeater equipment for electronic countermeasures, then a sonar panel, then the weapons-control panel leading up to the ship control station.

  The starboard bulkhead was the strangest part. Lined along it were five stations unlike any Patton had seen on a nuclear submarine before. They were five-foot-diameter eggs that one stepped into, and the canopy over head was made of a black substance that formed a hemisphere above the person’s head. A leather-lined structure was inside, not truly a seat but a sort of padded rail to lean against. On the rail were a helmet and gloves.

  “What are these stations?” Patton asked the admiral.

  “Battlecontrol stations,” Pacino said. “You’ll get inside one — the forward one is VR zero, whic
h is yours.

  Once you’re in, you lean against the rail and put on the helmet and gloves. The canopy comes down around your head. What you’ll see is a three-dimensional environment surrounding you, with a spatial relationship to your contacts. When we come to periscope depth, the computer makes your world look like your head is above water and the ships are all around you. This models the universe around the ship, and is linked to a computer called the Cyclops, a new Dynacorp wonder subsidiary. The VP of Cyclops is aboard now. I’ll introduce you to her.”

  “Her?”

  “Right, Colleen O’Shaughnessy.”

  “O’Shaughnessy — any relation to Big Boss?”

  “The old man’s daughter. Sharp cookie too.”

  “Can you show me this battlecontrol system in action?”

  “No. It doesn’t work, not even in demonstration mode.”

  Patton’s breath caught. He didn’t want to sound stupid in front of the admiral, but he was astounded that the ship was on an operational mission without a fire-control system.

  “Excuse me, sir? It doesn’t work? How are we going to fight these subs?”

  “We don’t, not until Colleen finishes her coding. The system is down hard until she does.”

  “Okay,” Patton said doubtfully.

  Pacino had already shown him the aft spaces of the forward compartment middle level, the staterooms of officers’ country and the wardroom. They had started in the upper level, where the crew’s berthing spaces were, and the galley. The control room had been the first tactical space Patton had seen. Pacino took him forward into sonar, on the starboard forward exit to control, where five seats were placed behind an L-shaped line of consoles.

  The room was empty of watchstanders.

  “Shouldn’t there be someone here?” Patton asked.

  “They will be.”

  “Let me guess, sir. Sonar doesn’t work.”

  “Correct, it’s tied into Cyclops. If the Cyclops computer is down, so is sonar.”

  On the other side of a central passageway were radio and electronic countermeasures. Located forward, the computer room spanned the full width of the ship, a bite taken from the port side by the stairway and the electronic-countermeasures room. Sitting at a console with a deep seat and a number of displays was a crewman typing furiously into the keyboard. He paused to look at it, then cursed, then more typing, another look, another curse. The crewman had normal underway coveralls on, but a long black-haired ponytail.

  “Colleen? We have a visitor,” Pacino said.

  A woman stood from the console, not a tall woman, but beautiful and very well built. She stood, an annoyed look on her face, and extended her hand to Patton.

  “Captain Patton, I assume,” she said with a quick smile, her voice unexpectedly deep.

  “Colleen, I’ve heard you’re working on the Cyclops. Any prediction on when you’ll be done?”

  O’Shaughnessy turned to Pacino, smiling at him.

  “He’s worse than you said he’d be Admiral. Not only did he get the’when’ll it be fixed’ question out in the first minute, but it was his first question. Jesus, did they separate you two at birth. Captain? Admiral Pacino comes in here no less than once an hour to ask that same question. Now, please forgive my rudeness, but this sub is a hunk of scrap metal unless I can get this working. Now scram!”

  “Don’t say scram,” Pacino said. “That means’shut down the reactor’ in sub talk.”

  Patton watched as Colleen mimicked the words as they came out of Pacino’s mouth. Mimicking a three star admiral. Then he looked at Pacino, and realized that something was going on between the two of them, something more than just business. Patton turned to leave behind the admiral.

  “Good luck, Ms. O’Shaughnessy,” he called.

  “Colleen, please.” She was already lost again deep in her world.

  “She’s a beauty,” Patton said, “isn’t she?”

  “I hadn’t noticed,” Pacino said.

  On the lower level was a machinery space aft, a middle area with a central passageway, a stores room to port, more berthing spaces to starboard, and the torpedo room forward. This room put the one on the Annapolis to shame. There were weapons crammed in everywhere on hydraulic rams, the room barely allowing him to get forward to the torpedo console.

  “Two 21-inch tubes on the bottom, two 36-inchers on the top. The room holds forty-eight 21-inch weapons or thirty-four of the 36-inch large-bore missiles. Our loadout this run is mostly 36-inch Vortex Mod Charlie missiles, with two tube-loaded Mark 52 21-inch Hullcracker torpedoes and two room-stored Mark 52s.”

  “Vortex missiles?” Patton asked. “Why haven’t I heard of them?”

  “Because they’re classified secret, of course. I’ll tell you more about them later, but they’re a small version of the solid-rocket-fueled mod bravo we employed in the Japanese blockade. The weapon does a swimout on an oxidized-fuel propulsion module, then at fifty knots the control fins pop out and the solid fuel ignites, and the missile travels to its target at three hundred knots. It doesn’t have the range of the old mod bravo, but if we’re in close, we can get a kill.”

  “For the SSNX, what’s close?”

  “On your 688 the most distant sonar contact you could hear, a submerged target, came at what, twenty to forty miles?”

  “Yessir.”

  “For the SSNX, that’s close. We can detect a submerged contact eighty or ninety miles away.”

  “How? What did you do?”

  “Sonar’s completely different on this ship. We don’t have a wide-aperture array or a spherical array, not since the redesign. We use a system called ADI, for Acoustic Daylight Imaging.”

  The two men climbed the aft ladder back to the middle level, and walked back to the control room.

  “How does it work?”

  “Easy to explain, hard to engineer it and implement it, even harder to connect it to a computer and make the readout meaningful. In the past we used broadband sonar, just listening to the ocean, all frequencies, all the white noise. Worked great on surface ships, since they’re so loud you hear them a hundred miles away. And it worked great on the first-and second-generation Soviet subs too, because they were clanking train wrecks. But once the third-generation Soviets came out, we switched to a combination of broadband sonar and narrowband, using towed hydrophones on long cables, and the hydrophone array was a couple hundred feet long, capable of hearing very selected frequencies a long way away, as long as it was connected to a damned good computer. The limiting factor was the computer.”

  They were back in control, and Pacino leaned against the elevated periscope-stand handrails. Patton sat down in the command seat on the port aft part of the periscope stand.

  “As the computer got better, detection range didn’t. Then the Destiny-class Japanese subs came out, and they were too silent to pick out at a distance with our narrowband processors. The Seawolf-class ships did pick them up, because they were much quieter and had better narrowband towed arrays. But with ships out there like the Rising Sun, narrowband is proving to be old technology. And we suspect that the next generation of enemy sub may employ an active quieting system, deliberately putting out noise that exactly matches a sub’s machinery, but phase-shifted so that it cancels out the machinery noise. John, we’re ten years away from enemy subs being so quiet that they match or beat the Seawolf or SSNX classes, and with active quieting they will actually be more silent than the ocean around them. Invisible.”

  “So what next. Admiral?”

  “ADI, acoustic daylight imaging. It’s a quantum leap in sonar, John. We’re changing the way we think about sonar as a sensor. In the past we tried to listen with it. We tried to listen for very specific noises, but that’s not good enough. Now we don’t listen anymore, we see. Sonar is no longer an ear, it’s an eyeball. It works like this. The ocean is full of background noise. Waves. Fish. Shrimp. Whales groaning. Wind. Storms. The occasional lava from an underwater volcano. But it’s everywhere. Up
till now we’ve tried to ignore the background noise and pick the needle out of the haystack. Not anymore. Now we’re using the background noise just like your eyeball uses background light to see. The background noise of the ocean ’shines’ all around us, and when it hits an object, the object reflects the sound or blocks the sound or focuses the sound, just as an object reflects and changes light waves so that your eye can interpret the reflected light waves as the representation of a spacial object.”

  “Same thing here. The ocean’s background noise hits an object, say, a target submarine. The object changes the way the background noise hits our receiver, just as an object you see changes the light that hits it so your retina senses the change. Even if a target submarine is floating with no machinery on, its density difference from the water causes the background noise to go around it, be blocked by it, or be focused. It creates a sound ’image’ that our computers interpret and represent in three dimensions. Let me tell you, it’s a computer hog. It takes more data processing than any computer in history has ever tried to deal with, and the challenge is getting it to go fast enough to represent the real world. Then it has to distinguish between long range and close range and represent it to you so you can comprehend it, there on the virtual-reality stations in the control room.”

  “Once Colleen gets it going, I’ll show you. You can ‘see’ a dolphin swimming by a half mile away. A supertanker on the surface looks like a big blob of a supertanker. A target submarine image looks like a submarine. John, there’s no more waterfall displays or graphs of frequency against time, no more frequency-bucket integration, no more putting tea leaves at the bottom of the sonar chiefs teacup. Now you can see the enemy just like a fighter pilot can see the other plane in a dogfight. Of course, most of the time they’ll be so distant that you’ll just see a dot, but if they were to get close, the contact would look like a sub.”

  “I can’t believe this. Is this for real? Seeing the enemy?”

  “We’ve been working on this for decades, and only now are the computers capable enough to manage it. Of course, Cyclops isn’t really capable yet, but it will be soon.”