Piranha: Firing Point mp-5

by Michael Dimercurio

  “When?”

  “By the time we’re in the East China Sea.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I just do. Don’t worry about it, and never ask Colleen questions that start with the word ’when.’ But don’t forget, what’s motivating her is that she’s going into the op area with us. I think she wants that system up as much as we do.”

  * * *

  “Conn, Maneuvering, the electric plant is in a normal full-power lineup,” the speaker in the overhead announced. “Propulsion shifted to the propulsion-turbine generators supplying the AC main motor. Ready to answer all bells.”

  “I haven’t seen the engineering spaces yet,” Patton said, glancing up at a television display showing maneuvering, the nuclear-control room.

  “All that’s new too,” Pacino said. “I’ll get you aft once we’re down. Right now we’ve got a ship to submerge.”

  “How’s this going to work with the garbage barge overhead?”

  “Just pull the plug like you normally would. The barge has a sub-shaped hole in it. Once we go down, the barge will flood and sink, putting enough garbage in the Pacific to warrant a major clean-up operation. It’ll make the headlines, I’m sure, and they won’t be hauling garbage to the Midway Island incinerator for a while. So give me bad marks for the environment, but we’re the only ones who know the SSNX is at sea.”

  With a dead computer, a revolutionary sonar system, a man-machine interface that is untested, and a bunch of unknowns for a crew, all under the command of a captain fresh from the sinking of his last submarine, Patton thought, a sudden pang of insecurity sashing through him. He looked at Pacino, who seemed so sure of himself, so rock-solid certain, and smiled.

  “Helm,” Patton called to the lieutenant at the ship-control station, “submerge the ship to two hundred feet.”

  “Two hundred feet, aye. Captain,” the young officer acknowledged from across the cavernous room. “Opening forward main ballast-tank vents. No periscope cameras or sail camera on this submergence, sir. Forward vents indicate open. Taking the throttle to all ahead two-thirds, two degrees down on the bow planes.”

  The deck took on a slight angle, just barely perceptible, and the depth readout on Patton’s command-area console began to click off a few feet deeper.

  “The trick on this is to get deep fast enough to clear the barge as it sinks,” Pacino said. “You should try to get deep and then go twenty knots off your present course, evade to the south.”

  “Aye, Admiral.”

  “Sorry, didn’t mean to give you rudder orders, John. It’s just that we thought this out when we built the barge.”

  Patton nodded.

  “Opening aft main ballast vents,” the diving officer called. “Depth eighty feet. Down angle on the ship, down two degrees. Speed five knots, increasing to eight. Depth one hundred, one twenty, down angle five degrees.”

  “Officer of the Deck, take her to three hundred feet at ahead standard, clear datum to the south.”

  “Aye, sir,” a lieutenant standing behind the ship-control station said.

  For the next few minutes Patton watched as the ship departed the surface and sailed away from the barge.

  He decided to take the ship back to periscope depth to observe the barge sinking. Taking the scope, he ordered the ship back up, in time to see the barge, most of it submerged, sinking slowly stern down, the tug frantically disconnecting the tow line. Patton felt himself tapped on the shoulder.

  “John, we’re late, we need to get to Point Echo now.”

  “Lowering number two scope,” Patton called. “Helm, make your depth 850 feet, steep angle, all ahead flank.”

  “Emergency flank, John.”

  Patton squinted at the admiral, starting to feel less a king on a throne than an errand boy.

  “Helm, emergency flank.”

  The deck took a steep down angle, the hull groaning and creaking from the increased pressure of the deep.

  The deck began to vibrate, slightly at first, then more violently as the ship sped up. Patton craned his neck to look at the speed indicator. Sixty-six knots, over seventy-six miles per hour. He’d never gone this speed in a submarine before, and it was exhilarating. He walked to the chart display, using the electronic dividers, and calculated the time to Point Echo. It came out to two days, eighteen hours. He looked at his watch, then called to the officer of the deck.

  “Off’sa’deck, change ship’s time to Beijing time. That makes it zero five hundred Tuesday, November 5.”

  That meant their ETA was 2300 Thursday evening, November 7. And Pacino had said that he’d given the Dynacorp VP until Thursday to get the computer system up and running. Suddenly Patton felt dead tired.

  “Off’sa’deck, proceed on course to Point Echo. I’m going to my stateroom. Don’t wake me, I’m getting an equalizer battery charge.”

  “Aye, Captain. PD time, sir?” The young lieutenant wanted to know when to slow and pop up to periscope depth to get their radio messages from the orbiting satellite.

  “Don’t come up. We’ll be running straight in.” A safe bet, he thought, since the supreme commander-in-chief was aboard. Who else would be sending them radio messages?

  Patton waved to Pacino, who was leaning over the chart display, and walked into the door to his stateroom from the aft bulkhead of the control room. At his table he found Byron Demeers drinking a Coke and brooding.

  “Byron. What do you think?”

  “Skipper, my head hurts. I feel like I’ve been sent back to school, and I don’t know anything. This Acoustic Daylight Imaging system, it’s more complicated than you can shake a stick at.”

  “The only thing I want to know about it is, will it work?”

  “Who knows?” Demeers said. “We’ll be in deep trouble if it doesn’t.”

  “What do you think of the ship otherwise?”

  “I’ll tell you what I think. It’s a piece of shit without an operational sonar system. The only thing this tub does is haul around my ears, and if I can’t use them, this thing is just a big 377-foot-long target.”

  “Oh, quit crying, you goddamned sonar girl,” Patton said. “And get out of here, I want some rack. You’d better sleep too, you’ve been up around the clock.”

  “No time. I’ve got to learn the Cyclops sonar system, or else you are going to be hurting.”

  Chapter 10

  Wednesday November 6

  PACIFIC OCEAN

  1,320 MILES SOUTHEAST OF NAHA, OKINAWA

  USS DEVILFISH, SSNX-1

  “I think it’ll work,” Colleen O’Shaughnessy said, staring at her panel in the computer room.

  “It has to be more than just a thought,” Pacino said. “This system can’t crash once we penetrate the op area and start looking for the Red force.”

  Colleen’s eyes flashed in anger. She looked up at him, taking a breath, her voice acid as she said, “If you want a guarantee, then give me two weeks to do the C-1 and C-9 tests. Otherwise, I guess you’ll have to live with the system as is, just like the rest of us. Besides, if the system has problems, I’ll be here to debug.”

  “Not good enough. Colleen. I need you to do whatever you have to do to get that system to be reliable. Our lives and the mission are depending on it. When it’s time to launch a torpedo, we can’t just call you up and ask you to fix it.”

  Colleen O’Shaughnessy looked up at the tall admiral.

  She had been up for three nights without sleep, ever since the ship left Hawaii underneath a garbage barge.

  “Looks like that’s your only choice.”

  “I’m telling you, it’s not good enough. It has to be absolutely bulletproof. Colleen. And it has to be that way by 1800 local tomorrow. You’ve got twenty hours.”

  “Why 1800? We don’t get to the op area until eleven p.m.”

  “We don’t get to the op area. I get to the op area, ship’s company gets to the op area. You get off at 1800. That’s when the personnel transfer goes down.”


  “What?”!

  “You’ll be donning scuba gear and locking out of the forward escape trunk when we’re at periscope depth. We’ll dive, and you’ll be picked up by an old tanker that will happen to be in the area at the time. I hate to make you leave the ship like that, but we can’t risk surfacing or even broaching the sail.”

  “Admiral, I’m coming on this operation. Scrub this personnel transfer or whatever you call it. I need to stay with the Cyclops. You and your country-bumpkin computer operators can’t do this without me.”

  “Colleen, I don’t have your father’s permission to take you into a hot operation area. Are you willing to get it from him in writing that you can penetrate the op area? And enter a war zone?”

  O’Shaughnessy’s voice rose a full three octaves as she made her attack. “What is this, Pacino? I’m an adult, I speak for myself. What are you doing, talking about my father? Are you just trying to cover for yourself because he’s your boss?”

  “Get a hold of yourself. Colleen,” Pacino said, his voice iron. “You’re a civilian and you’re not authorized in the op area. Furthermore, I have to go to your father, because he’s the only man in the Navy who outranks me right now. And I’ll tell you one more thing. If you were my daughter, I’d shoot any man who put your life in danger. You signed on to design the computer for this submarine, not fight it in combat.”

  “I’ll be goddamned if I’m going to—”

  “Tomorrow. Eighteen hundred. You’ve got twenty hours. I suggest you use them.”

  O’Shaughnessy cursed at him, a word he never thought would come out of that pretty mouth. He shut the door and found himself looking at Paully White.

  “Can she deliver?” White asked.

  “All I can tell you, Paully, is what I think. And you know what? It doesn’t matter what I think. It matters what she thinks.”

  “Chilling thought,” White muttered, rolling his eyes.

  “Shut up, Captain,” Pacino said harshly. As he walked past him down the passageway to control and aft to their stateroom, White was left staring after him.

  * * *

  “Listen up, scumbags,” Lieutenant Commander Christopher Porter commanded, standing up in front of the crowd in the officers’ wardroom. “Sorry, Admiral, Captain, Captain White, Ms. O’Shaughnessy, I meant them,” Porter amended, suddenly realizing that his favorite way to start a briefing might not be appropriate with the brass.

  Porter’s position was the ship’s navigator, the new title a return to the old days, when the navigator was the lead tactical officer. The other officers were all gathered for a training session. A black, curving screen had lowered around them, an expansion of the eggshaped bubbles in the control room. The officers in the room had donned helmets, the eyepieces clear, but each one containing a filter to cause the image of the wall of the surface to seem three-dimensional. The lights lowered, and the screen shimmered with a yellowish light, the appearance of the acoustic daylight. A red form grew close on the yellow background, the form appearing three-dimensional in the glasses of Pacino’s helmet.

  “Identify,” Porter called.

  One of the junior officers spoke up. “Fish!”

  “Correct.” The picture changed as the fish went by, a more distant bluish blob floating into view. “Identify.”

  “Submarine contact,” another voice said.

  “Correct. Friend or foe?”

  The crowd watched for some time.

  “Bad guy, Nav. Rising Sun class.”

  “Wrong,” Porter said, seeming to enjoy the hapless supply officer’s confusion. “Anyone else?”

  “688-class American,” Patton spat out.

  “You cheated, Cap’n,” Porter said, smiling.

  “The hell.”

  “That’s okay, sir. Shows motivation.”

  “Let’s wrap, Navigator. The weapons brief is next, then the war plan brief. Anyone needing a cup of coffee, get it now. I don’t want anyone racking in here.”

  “Aye, sir.” The lights flashed back on, and the dark screen retracted into the overhead. Porter tapped a remote, and the wood doors covering a widescreen panel opened. “Gentlemen, weapons briefing.” Porter flashed the remote at the screen, and a profile view of the submarine came up, black lines on a white field, a naval architect’s plans. “Lead weapon in the attack is the Vortex Mod Charlie swimout missile. Speed of attack is three hundred knots, warhead is plasma, guidance is blue laser. The weapon is a thirty-six-incher, for tubes four or three. Range is forty to fifty miles. At max range, that’s a time of flight of ten minutes. There’s no evading this baby; it has a wide blue-laser search cone with a reattack mode. Questions on the Vortex?”

  Porter paused and scanned the room. When his eyes lingered on Colleen O’Shaughnessy, a pang of annoyance unexpectedly flashed through Pacino’s chest. He shot a look at Colleen, whose expression was a blank mask. He felt a moment of discomfort, realizing that he was jealous, which was absurd. After all, he was in his forties and Colleen was not even thirty yet. And even that meant nothing, because he was still trying to make sense of life after having lost Eileen.

  Yet he was honest with himself, he had to admit that he admired Colleen, liked her, found her attractive. And what sense did that make? What would she want with a dinosaur like him? What business did he have getting involved with a combat-systems vendor representative, who coincidentally just happened to be the daughter of the number one admiral in the Navy and Pacino’s boss?

  He glanced at Colleen one last time before concentrating again on the briefing. She seemed to sense him looking at her, and she turned with her large eyes on his, her expression a smoldering anger, still mad at him that he was kicking her off the ship before the battle came.

  But just before she turned back to look at Porter, he could swear the corners of her eyes lifted, that she’d broken his gaze to avoid smiling at him. Guilt settled on him again, and he looked at his left finger where his Annapolis ring was. A year ago he’d removed Eileen’s wedding band, the inscription reading I’ll love you forever, and placed it on a ribbon around a photograph of her he kept by the bed of his Pearl Harbor headquarters bedroom, then switched the academy ring from his right finger to his left. An odd impulse took hold of him, and he suddenly pulled the class ring off the left finger and put it on his right. He looked up and saw Colleen had seen him make the switch. He tried to return his attention to Porter.

  “… Mark 52 range at eight to forty miles depending on transit speed and depth. Okay, now on to sensors.”

  “We’ve been over sonar in depth. Let’s review the OTH sensors. We have two over-the-horizon targeting sensors, the Mark 12 ‘Yo-Yo’ and the Mark 4 ‘Sharkeye.’ The Mark 12 Yo-Yo is dropped by a P-5 Pegasus patrol plane, is about ten feet in diameter, and pops out a small buoy that stays on the surface while the main body of it sinks to eight hundred to one thousand feet, whatever best listening depth is. The Yo-Yo pod is a sonar receiver much like our acoustic-daylight-imaging sphere in the nose cone, and anything detected is relayed up a cable to the buoy, which transmits the data by tactical datalink to the overhead Comstar satellite, then down to us at periscope depth. Using the Yo-Yo remote over-the-horizon targeting pod, we can receive sonar signals from fifteen hundred miles away. The Yo-Yo range is less than our own sphere, but it’s not bad. Detection on a submarine might be up to one hundred miles, but we’re counting on fifty.”

  “Now, the Sharkeye Mark 4. In the event the Yo-Yo isn’t available, such as when there are no P-5 Pegasus patrol aircraft available, we can use our own Mark 4 Sharkeyes. The Sharkeye is a pod like the Yo-Yo, except contained in the upper section of a Javelin cruise-missile body, replacing the warhead. On this run the ship is loaded with only two plasma Javelin cruise missiles. The other ten missiles in the vertical-launch tubes are rockets to launch the Mark 4 Sharkeye remote sonar pods. The Sharkeye has a detection range of about twenty-four to forty-eight miles, with the confidence interval set at thirty miles. We’re hoping we can use the
bigger, higher-definition Yo-Yos, but if something goes wrong, we’ll have our Sharkeyes.”

  “So that’s everything. Anyone need a break?”

  “Let’s take five,” Patton said, “then get back here for Admiral Pacino’s war briefing.”

  * * *

  “Gentlemen, we’re reconvened,” Porter said, bringing the afternoon training session to order.

  “Nav, the doors locked?” executive officer Walt Hornick asked.

  “Yes, XO.”

  “Everyone cleared for this? Only gold dolphin wearers in here?”

  Pacino looked around the room. Colleen O’Shaughnessy was absent, and he felt relief, then annoyance. He had to stop this. His feelings for her might jeopardize their working relationship. Plus, he had to keep his mind on the mission’s business.

  “Admiral, we’re ready,” Patton said.

  Glancing at the chart display, Pacino stood and addressed the officers.

  “Good afternoon, gentlemen.” He always began formally, an old habit. “This is the East China Sea. Marked in red is the position of the sinking of the initial RDF convoy, in the gap between Naze Island and Yakushima. The Naze-Yakushima Gap is directly on the great circle route from Oahu to Shanghai. Gentlemen, my theory is that the Rising Suns are lurking up here, in the gap.

  “Now, that’s not how I would defend the East China Sea against a convoy or against an attacking squadron of submarines. I’d spread out. But here is what the enemy is thinking — I’ll wait here at the doorway, and the convoy will come in there, since they’re in a big hurry to get to the mainland. Since my speed is faster than the convoy’s, and since I have a spy satellite overhead taking pictures of the surface ships, I know where they’re headed. Plus, Shanghai is the trouble spot, because the Red thrust objective is to split White China in two. So Shanghai is the key to the defense of the Whites. It’s top secret, but any dummy could guess that. Everyone with me so far?

  “Okay, so our Red force is clustered at the gap. Aren’t they afraid of us? Afraid a U.S. sub detachment will come to get them? Captain Patton, what do you think?”