Threat vector

by Michael Dimercurio

  "Bingo. But what about the Virginia!"

  "Virginia?" McKee said in disgust. "You named a fast attack submarine Virginia? What's that all about? Virginia is a battleship name. Or a cruiser name. Or a ballistic missile sub's name. I'm not going to sea in an attack sub named goddamn Virginia. You're going to have to do much better than that."

  Patton's voice sounded peeved. "What the hell are you talking about? It's been named Virginia for four years. The whole program is based on this name."

  "It's a stupid name," McKee repeated. "It's not the name of a combat submarine, and I'm not taking command of it with that name."

  Pattern's face remained locked in a dark frown. His arms crossed over his ribbon-covered chest.

  "Just for the sake of argument, McKee, what would you name the ship?"

  "A name with a real tradition in the fast attack business. The USS Hammerhead."

  "Hammerhead, huh?" Patton said, frowning. He seemed to come to a decision. "And that's it, that's your only beef?"

  "I didn't say that. What did you load me up with?"

  Patton sighed. "NSSN carries twenty-six room-stowed weapons. We gave you twenty Mark 58 Alert/Acute torpedoes, two Mark 23 Bloodhound underwater surveillance vehicles, and four Mark 17 Doberman ATTs—don't ask, I'll tell you about them in a minute—with the vertical launch system loaded out with two Mark 5 Sharkeye sensors, two mark 94 Predator unmanned aerial vehicles, and eight Vortex Mod Delta antiship underwater missiles."

  "Crew?"

  "We've got a full precommissioning unit—"

  "Not good enough. Get Kiethan Judison up here—he's the XO. And get Bryan Dietz here, too. He'll be the navigator. I want Senior Chief Cook— you just promoted him, whether you know it or not—for sonar, and Master Chief Morgan Henry for radio. Harry Daniels will be the pork chop, I want Toasty O'Neal for electrical division, and Dick Van Dyne for weapons, and if there's anyone else awake at Portsmouth Naval Hospital from the Devilfish, you bring them here too."

  "Anything else?" Patton asked, exasperated but beginning to warm to McKee's style.

  "Two things. I want you to instruct Judison to go to my house and bring something up with him. The photo on my study's wall."

  "Good-luck charm?"

  "You might say that, sir."

  It was the first time McKee had called Patton "sir" since he'd arrived at the staff plane.

  "Okay. What's number two?"

  "What the hell is a Mark 17 Doberman ATT?"

  "Come with me, my son," Patton.said, wrapping his arm around McKee's shoulders and walking him toward the NSSN assembly building, "and I'll tell you all about it."

  "One last thing I forgot to ask, Admiral."

  "Jesus! What now?"

  "I'll need a straw broom. To hang from the masthead when we come back."

  Patton stared at him and broke into the widest grin McKee had ever seen on that cold face. "You got it, Kelly. You got it."

  seen, the deck of the middle level where the control room was located was lowered by eighteen inches, with the upper level deck higher by the same amount. That made the headroom in the control room seem strange to submariners from previous generations of ships. The ship-control station forward, which had been designed for a single diving officer/helmsman up front, had been opened up to allow a two-seater console, for a pilot and copilot, with a relief pilot roving the room. The command console, a small station on the SSNX's conn corner, had been located in the center of the room and expanded. Gone were the eggshell canopies of the SSNX Cyclops battlecontrol display system, replaced by cubicles with doors, each three feet square and ten feet tall for virtual-reality display of the battlespace.

  The Cyclops system was improved, although the programming had not caught up with the hardware. The engineering spaces were simplified, designing in greater power density with fewer, more automated components. The sensors for acoustic daylight imaging were improved, able to identify friend or foe without the need for over-the-horizon confirmation. The system allowed the use of Mark 94 UUVs, remote unmanned underwater vehicles for reconnoitering a bay or anchorage or cubic space of ocean without the need to drive the ship into the area.

  In all, Admiral Patton had maintained to Captain Kelly McKee, an SSNX captain should be able to step aboard and take immediate command with a

  few hours to brush up by reading through the computer files.

  McKee stood on a platform level even with the middle deck of the submarine at the point of the nose cone, where the DynaCorp sign-making facility had draped a huge conformal banner reading ssn-780, uss hammerhead. Two more banners were erected on the port and starboard flanks, covering huge block letters that spelled ssn-780 Virginia. There was a speaker's lectern set up there, with microphones. Below him on the floor of the mammoth building, the crew had been assembled, the members of the previous Virginia precommission-ing personnel unit pulled from their homes by state troopers and military police. Next to them were the half-dozen survivors of the Devilfish well enough to come up to Groton on Patton's staff plane, including Judison and Dietz—both looking as if they were walking through a dream.

  In a ceremony marked by briefness, McKee read his orders and pronounced the ship rechristened the Hammerhead. He didn't think that his first emotion on hearing that name echo throughout the NewCon building would be one of disappointment, but as he looked down from the platform all he saw were ninety pairs of uncomprehending eyes, some of the officers and enlisted men wondering why the ship was being renamed. He tried to shake it off, forcing himself to smile at the crowd as he hoisted up the Dom Perignon '01 and smashed it as hard as he could against the steel plate epoxied beneath the banner at the exact center of the elliptical nose cone, cemented in place to keep the hard

  glass of the bottle from damaging the fiberglass of the bow. The bottle exploded into a shower of foam and bubbles, wetting him and the podium.

  The crew dispersed to the building's offices, leaving McKee standing stupidly on the platform by himself. Even Patton had already left, leaving minimal orders behind. McKee had his weapon loadout information and the data disks about the NSSN, including where the ship was deficient, mostly in the command and control system. And the crew. And the war plan. And the rules of engagement. And of course, any scrap of goddamn intelligence of where the enemy was.

  Or, for God's sake, who the enemy was.

  Patton's forces suspected that the bad guys were the Ukrainians, perhaps one of the Severodvinsk units attached to the Black Sea Fleet. They had the means and the opportunity, Patton's intel briefing noted.

  McKee looked around one last time, then pulled the banner off the nose cone. The parachute-size material fell to the deck far below. He put a tube of solvent to the squares of epoxy holding the steel plate, let the epoxy melt, and pulled off the plate, tossing it to the floor of the temporary platform along with the hard copy of his orders, and walked down the steps to the NewCon building floor.

  He glanced at his watch. It was one in the morning. Next the lateral translation platform would be moved to the other end of the building and the submarine would be lowered into the water of the western half of the NewCon building. He could stand here and watch it in exhaustion or he could

  do the sensible thing and go into the low-bay complex to one of the VIP bunk rooms and sleep until six in the morning. By then the hull, which would have been moved a mere inch per minute, would be halfway into the water. He could even sleep until seven or eight, when the ship would be closer to its surfaced draft mark. The crew would embark at 0900. He should do the sensible thing and get some sleep.

  But Kelly McKee, standing a few feet away from the submarine he'd just been given command of, remained standing and watching her as she inched away from the christening platform. At first he was just going to watch for a few minutes, but then decided to stay by the ship until it was time to embark. There would be time to sleep when this operation was over.

  It was then that he realized that the feelings he felt now were aki
n to those of a man in love, and his fixed stare at the ship was much like that of a lover at his beloved.

  MERGED CONTACT, SEARCH AREA TO INCLUDE ELIZABETH RIVER, THIMBLE SHOAL CHANNEL, NORFOLK TRAFFIC SEPARATION SCHEME, TO LIMITS OF VACAPES OPAREA AS DELINEATED IN COMUSUBCOM OPPLAN 2200 REV 4 DATED 11/22/17.

  4. (TS) RULES OF ENGAGEMENT: UPON DETECTION OF ANY HOSTILE SUBMERGED CONTACT, USS HAMMERHEAD AUTHORIZED ANY REASONABLE EMPLOYMENT OF SHIP'S WEAPONS AT DISCRETION OF COMMANDING OFFICER TO DESTROY HOSTILE CONTACT.

  5. (TS) UPON SANITIZATION OF VACAPES OPAREA, USS HAMMERHEAD SHALL DEPART VACAPES OPAREA FOR SOUTH ATLANTIC AND PURSUE UKRAINIAN BLACK SEA FLEET BATTLE FORCE EN ROUTE WATERS OFF URUGUAY. BLACK SEA FLEET SHALL BE ENGAGED IF REQUIRED TO PROVOKE HOSTILE SUBMARINE CONTACTS.

  6. (TS) UPON ENCOUNTER HOSTILE TRAFFIC AND PRIOR TO ENGAGEMENT, USS HAMMERHEAD SHALL POP SLOT BUOY SIGNAL NUMBER ONE (1) PER COMUSUBCON OPPLAN 2200 SAME REVISION. UPON COMPLETION OF ENGAGEMENT USS HAMMERHEAD SHALL CONTACT COMUSUBCOM BY MOST EXPEDITIOUS MEANS WITH SITREP TO FOLLOW. IN THE EVENT NO HOSTILE TARGETS DETECTED, USS HAMMERHEAD SHALL REPORT BY SLOT BUOY SITREP AT TWELVE (12) HOUR INTERVALS.

  7. (U) REMAIN UNDETECTED.

  8. (U) GOOD LUCK AND GOOD HUNTING, KELLY.

  9. (u) admiral john patton sends.

  i/bt/i

  McKee read the message four times. Though he probably couldn't explain it to Judison or Dietz, it was clear to him that his mission was to pause— not stop—in the VaCapes Op Area and check to make sure the hostile sub was truly gone, then head south to the equator and catch up to and sink the Black Sea Fleet. The hostile sub was obviously long gone—it had no reason to remain in the VaCapes, not now that the SSNX was scrap metal. With no acoustic daylight sensors to find it, the hostile sub was invisible, mission accomplished, and the Black Sea Fleet would be unmolested all the way to Uruguay. And to find the Ukrainian sub, he needed to find the Ukrainian fleet.

  The trouble with this mission—more troublesome than finding the Ukrainian sub—was that the crew was mostly a precommissioning unit, a group of men with very little at-sea experience. The construction stage had been expected to take three to six years, and the group was seasoned with a very small cadre of experienced submariners expected to teach the "nubs," the "air-breathers" who didn't know potable water from potty water. The real leadership of this crew were the men he'd brought in from the Devilfish. Between him and those seven officers and chiefs, they would have to take the ship into battle and damn the torpedoes.

  McKee picked up the phone to the control room forward of his stateroom and buzzed the officer of the deck. Van Dyne's voice came over the circuit.

  "Get the XO and navigator to my stateroom in ten minutes, and have the galley send up two pots of coffee and three cups."

  "Aye-aye, sir," Van Dyne acknowledged.

  McKee wondered at the rush of pleasure he got from hearing that, from feeling the deck's slight vibration under his feet, from seeing the navigation chart with the flashing dot indicating their position, from the smell of the ship, the deep bass growl of the ventilation ducts, and the weirdness of how amazingly great the coffee tasted at sea—if hot dogs were better in a ballpark, there was nothing like coffee served four hundred feet beneath the Atlantic. All this was healing him, changing him back into the man he'd been before the trouble had begun.

  "Captain?" Judison's voice said.

  "Come on in, XO," McKee called, the feeling coming to him that calling Judison by Karen Patri's name and Dietz by Judison's name was extremely strange. There would be a lot of strange feelings on this run, McKee thought.

  "Man . . . battlestations!" the Circuit One PA system announced throughout the ship.

  Captain Kelly McKee stood aft of his command console in the control room. The commander's chair had been unbolted from the deck plates and stowed away in the fire-control stowage locker. McKee had tried it a few times but found that he was too tense to sit in it, and in point of fact did not want his officers of the deck sitting down during their watches. Sitting down during a 3-a.m. OOD

  midwatch during an uneventful submerged transit was an invitation to sleep on watch.

  Hammerhead was eighty miles east-northeast of Norfolk, driving due south until they could accomplish the first part of the mission, the sanitization of the VaCapes Op Area. McKee pulled out a Cohiba torpedo and tapped it against his cheek. The large cigar, fragrant in its cellophane wrapper, was begging to be smoked, but he put it back in his coverall pocket and waited for the crew to arrive in the control room. When they were manned up, with Dietz as the battlestations OOD, McKee addressed the room:

  "Attention in the fire-control team," he said. The watchstanders grew quiet. "Our first mission is to ensure the hostile sub that sank Princess Dragon is no longer in the VaCapes Op Area or in the vicinity of Hampton Roads. In my opinion this is going to be a formality. The hostile sub left long ago. But we will make sure, and every watchstander is to make the assumption that the hostile sub is in the area until we prove otherwise. Our orders are specific that we use whatever weapons will kill this guy the instant we detect him. And that's what we'll do.

  "Step one, we'll warm up two Mark 58 Alert/ Acute torpedoes in tubes one and two with the tubes flooded, equalized with the muzzle doors open. Step two, we'll load and prepare a Mark 17 Doberman ATT antitorpedo torpedo even though we don't have the software to run it. If we need to use it, we'll have to guide it in manually, and let me tell you, gentlemen, that's a goddamn long shot. If we need to use a Doberman, every watchstander

  is ordered to pray as hard as he can until we have contact, and I'm dead serious."

  McKee paused, deciding to light the cigar after all. He unwrapped the darkly fragrant torpedo of tobacco, the feel of it magical in his hand.

  "Step three, we'll load and program a Mark 94 UUV an unmanned underwater surveillance vehicle. The Mark 94 will be my hydrophone on a leash. I'll drive it all the way through Norfolk Harbor in ultraquiet mode. If there's anything there more noisy than a sailboat, we'll have a lock on it. Step four, in ten minutes a P-5 Pegasus patrol plane will be overflying Hampton Roads from Norfolk Naval Air Station, and he'll drop two Mark 12 Yo-Yo pods, one on the west side of the Bay Bridge-Tunnel, one on the east side. We'll monitor the Mark 12 acoustic daylight output by streaming the passive high-data-rate UHF wire while we're deep. Between the Mark 12s and the Mark 94, Port Norfolk will be nailed down.

  "Step five, anything we detect we have to classify. It won't do anyone any good if we launch a plasma torpedo at a container ship. I will definitely get docked command pay that week."

  The watchstanders chuckled politely. McKee had clipped off the end of the cigar and raised his USS Devilfish lighter, firing up the tip.

  "Let's say we classify a target as a hostile submerged target. Step six. We shoot his ass with the Alert/Acute Mark 58 torpedoes, with very carefully inserted settings so we don't blow up a bridge or send a torpedo into a beach house. And finally, gentlemen, step seven—if the hostile sub shoots at

  us, we'll quick-reaction-launch the Mark 17 Dober-man antitorpedo torpedo, with Mr. Dietz driving it. If it's passive we'll run like hell to maximize our distance from it, and if it's active we'll shut down to give it zero Doppler return. If luck is with us, Mr. Dietz bags himself a torpedo and a place in your hearts. If it's a bad day, Dietz misses but doesn't live long enough to experience your anger."

  McKee tossed off the last while puffing the Co-hiba to full flame, the billowing cloud of smoke rising to the overhead.

  "Any questions on today's operation? Good. Very well. Watchstanders, carry on. Mr. Van Dyne? Are you ready to line up my tubes?"

  For the next five hours, McKee scoured Port Norfolk. The unmanned underwater vehicle did laps around Hampton Roads inside the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel, then came outside and swam through the VaCapes Op Area, finding nothing of note except the Hammerhead herself. The Mark 12 Yo-Yo pods had been dropped from the P-5, revealing the same intelligence. Unhappy with the result, McKee c
alled for more Mark 12s for the eastern area of the VaCapes Op Area, but a square of ocean the size of the state of Maine was empty of a hostile submerged contact.

  Although McKee had expected to find nothing, he wasn't prepared for his disappointment at the news. He began to realize that there was a certain bloodlust rising in him, far out of proportion to his own personal losses. He'd practically slept through the entire crisis. Troopers like Dietz and Judison

  and Petri had done the suffering, and they should have had the desire for revenge. But McKee noticed that every time his mind brought up Petri's name, the desire for vengeance grew stronger. The hostile sub's attack had almost killed her, and now he would do anything, including violate his orders, to put the bastard down. It had become personal inside the space of a few hours. So be it. The enemy sub's commander had better be damn good, McKee thought, or he would be damn dead.

  McKee had originally planned to rendezvous with the Black Sea Fleet where he had met the mockup force during the exercise, far south in the Atlantic. He sprinted toward the equator, dutifully sending his situation reports at twelve-hour intervals, but now they all just said "Situation nominal." So far no radioman had indicated they were getting any ELF signals calling them to periscope depth. And McKee had avoided periscope depth. It was good for the occasional correction to the ship's inertial navigation unit, grabbing a fix off the global positioning system satellite, but the NSSN had the UGM universal gravity module for deep ocean navigation, sensing the bottom's varying gravitational field, and an advanced passive bottom contour navigation system. The two of them made the need for excursions to periscope depth almost a thing of the past.

  McKee's navigational plot had taken them along the great circle route, duplicating the path of the Devilfish to the South Atlantic. The great circle route crossed the equator at longitude twenty-five