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degrees west. With McKee's sprint at flank speed, he approached the equator in the wee hours of July 30.
McKee had reset the ship's clocks to Zulu time. Three days after they'd sanitized Norfolk Harbor, the "jet lag" was still making him tired. He climbed into his bunk in his boxers and T-shirt, after a long day of training the men and officers. Fire drills, flooding drills, tactical drills, reactor plant casualty drills. They'd been doing them whenever they did not interfere with the ship's southeastward progress. And McKee was exhausted. The job of training these men was much bigger than he'd imagined. The veterans were too few. It was unrealistic of him to take all these kids to sea and expect them to know their ship on the first time out. So drilling eighteen hours a day was McKee's way to get the crew where they needed to be.
McKee had planned on six more days of drills before they reached the South Atlantic hold position. He was hardly prepared for the phone call that buzzed him awake at 12:20 a.m.
"Captain," he said.
"Officer of the Deck, sir," Dietz said, getting right to the point. "Sonar reports multiple warships bearing one six five. Chief is indicating that they are Ukrainian. Ten warships, sound like deep-draft vessels, with fifteen merchants—cargo ships or troop transports or merchant vessels. Contacts are distant, sir, far over the horizon. Our target motion analysis range is being done now, but the computer is putting out a very-long-range number. Over a hundred miles."
McKee sat up, rubbing his head. "How far are we from the equator?"
"One hundred and ten miles, sir."
"Is it possible these guys are crossing the equator? Or at a hold point at the equator?"
"Chief Cook thinks they're at a hold position at or close to the equator, sir."
"Good. Station your section tracking party and slow to fifteen knots. Track the contacts and see if they have a holding pattern or a random zigzag while they're holding. And, OOD?"
"Yes, Captain."
"If this is the Black Sea Fleet, it's possible they are waiting for a submarine asset to catch up to them. Maybe even our friend from Port Norfolk. If that's the case, he's on the same great circle route we are. So keep up a max scan looking for him."
"Aye-aye, Captain. I'll talk with Cook."
"One more thing. Rig ship for ultraquiet. Shut down the port side of the engine room."
"Ultraquiet with port down, aye, sir."
"Wait a minute, OOD. Line up and prepare the Mark I Predator UAV. At sunrise we'll man bat-tlestations and have Cyclops fly it over the surface force to confirm our targets, and to identify. We can't use satellite intelligence to backup the UAV—the software is down hard."
"Line up and prep the Mark I Predator unmanned aerial vehicle, aye, Captain. I'd recommend we keep the power off the unit until zero five hundred local, sir. Otherwise it'll overheat."
"Very well. Put in a wake-up for me at five-thirty."
"Good night, sir."
McKee hung up, debating with himself whether to grab a few hours of precious sleep or pace the control room. If he slept, with Dietz in control, he'd wake refreshed at five-thirty or earlier if something major happened. If he paced the control room he'd give the impression of being nervous and afraid, never a good image to project. That decision made, McKee rolled over and sank into a dreamless sleep.
Early the next morning the word was passed on the phone circuits in the rigged-for-ultraquiet submarine that the captain had called battlestations. The fact that the midwatch had detected the presence of a convoy a hundred miles down their great circle route had been circulated by the messenger of the watch, and even the men sleeping after the evening watch were shaken awake with the news. So when the phone circuits lit up with the word to man battlestations, the men were already up and dressed. The watchstanders filed into the control room within seconds of the order rather than the expected two to three minutes. All of them except Dietz and Judison seemed nervous, perhaps even afraid. The navigator and XO both wore frowns, war faces. McKee suspected that for them this morning's watch would be about revenge and the ghosts left behind on the bottom of the VaCapes Op Area.
Captain Kelly McKee had slept well since last night's call. He'd climbed into starched and creased
black Nomex coveralls, the word mckee embroidered over his left pocket, his solid gold dolphins pinned above and his capital ship command emblem pinned below. On his collars were pinned the silver eagles of his new rank, Navy captain. On his left shoulder was an American flag patch. His right shoulder was missing the customary ship's unit patch, the ship's rechristening too sudden to support making a new patch.
He glanced around the control room. The room was filled with men, and even with the air-conditioning in high gear, the normally cold room was slightly stuffy. McKee had an odd feeling, finally realizing that with the periscope stand, the "conn," removed, there was now no railed-in elevated poop deck where he could pace and look down on his watchstanders. The center of the room, where the conn should have been, was now taken up with his command console with two chart tables between it and the ship-control area with open space aft where officers could stand and observe the overhead projections of the photonics sensor views on the large tilted flat-panel widescreens that ringed the room's overhead. The displays could also show the two-dimensional output of the Cyclops system, the navigation charts, or the video monitor outputs of one of the ship's cameras. McKee bit his lip. He would still function, but it wasn't instinctive. Making matters worse was that instead of having his own virtual-reality console, he would have to don what looked like a fighter pilot's helmet without the visor. The inside contained two rubber eyepieces that put the output of the Cyclops system into both
eyes, making him see into the virtual battlespace in three dimensions. He'd be isolated from his control room even though he'd be standing at his command console. There was a function that would allow him to have one eye see his control-room watchstanders from a small camera mounted on the side of his helmet. Aside from the difficulty of interacting with his crew, he'd look ridiculous. And what about the intangible interaction, the expression on the captain's face? He'd spent years training his facial expressions so the crew could see his confidence or anger or concentration. That alone could make the difference in battle.
But then, he reminded himself, he hadn't liked the Devilfish control room at first either. But after a year aboard, he'd known he couldn't go back. He put the battlestations helmet on the console, plugged in its interface cord, and looked up at the watchstanders.
"Attention in the fire-control team." He had decided to do his war brief as a speech to the watchstanders as soon as battlestations were manned. There was always a speech by the captain to tell the watchstanders his intentions and decisions, but this speech would turn into a full-scale briefing, and with the watchstanders on their feet and tense, he was guaranteed to have their full attention.
"As you are all aware, we have multiple sonar surface-ship contacts over the horizon. By all indications onboard, these ships are warships, and they are Ukrainian. Senior Chief Cook believes we have found the Black Sea Fleet. The ships of this surface task force are distant, over the horizon, now at
thirty-eight miles. The contacts are doing a diamond-shaped zig pattern, a shape they've followed all night. We believe they will continue to follow that pattern.
"We do not have satellite intelligence to confirm this, unfortunately, because our software isn't able to receive the data, so we're limited to onboard and offboard sensors."
He had a vertical launch system tube loaded with a Mark 94 Predator UAV unmanned aerial vehicle as well as a Mark 5 Sharkeye acoustic daylight over-the-horizon sensor. Between the two of them, he had the eyeballs to determine himself the contents of the entire battlespace. Or, as Petri might have said in a lighter moment, We don't need no stinking satellites.
"We'll launch the Mark 94 Predator UAV as soon as it's ready to go, and monitor the surface force. If the Predator escapes detection, we'll keep it
up for the next phase of the battle. As soon as the Predator's up, we'll launch the Mark 5 Sharkeye over the horizon acoustic daylight pod. That way we'll have subsurface intelligence at the same time we have an aerial view. We'll put the Mark 5 on the other side of the task force by about fifteen miles, since we believe it will start to proceed south once it completes the rendezvous with the submarine. I have a concern that our launch vehicles will give us away and that either by radar or by seeing the smoke trail the surface force will know we're here. This is why I've chosen to launch now, when we're still almost eighty thousand yards away, which will minimize visual detection of the launch.
We'll evade to the east and approach the task force from the northeast. In addition, the launch vehicles will circle around to approach from the south, opposite the missile flame trails. The Mark 5 pod will be instructed to fly fifty miles east, then a hundred miles south, then fifty miles west, turn to the north and slow down, then put the pod down fifteen miles south of the convoy position. We'll program the Predator aerial vehicle the same way, except we'll have it fly in after circling around counterclockwise. "Now, in addition to the acoustic daylight pod and the Predator aerial vehicle I intend to launch one Mark 23 Bloodhound UUV. Because the Mark 23 is an Alert/Acute torpedo body with the warhead taken out and the sound surveillance module jammed in, unavoidably it's going to sound like a torpedo. For that reason I considered not using it at all. If the surface force or their submarine pal realize there's a torpedo coming in, they'll immediately be alerted we're here and they'll reconfigure to a maximum ASW dispersion—you might even say that the surface force will go absolutely batshit looking for us." There was a nervous titter in the room. "None of us here want that, and as you all know, one of our orders is 'Remain undetected.' At the same time, people, I don't want to be blind, so I've decided to send out a Bloodhound in a decreasing spiral at ultraslow speed. The circular motion of the Bloodhound around the task force will avoid any high inbound Doppler return from a high-frequency active sonar. The Bloodhound should hear any tonals the submarine is putting out if the submarine is below the thermal layer, and I
intend to keep the Bloodhound circling for the duration of the attack.
"Control of the Predator aerial vehicle will be by software programming. I don't want to talk to the UAV at all and put out radio frequency transmissions, not even highly secure EHF. We want to be listening only, with passive sensors. That goes for the Bloodhound in passive-listening sonar, the Predator with visual and infrared and radar receivers only, and the Sharkeye—which is receive-only anyway. If we do have to steer the Predator, we'll absolutely minimize our EHF transmission. In addition, there will be no communication to the satellite overhead at any time during this attack. We will be as stealthy as is possible.
"Now listen up. This may be the only chance I get to tell you people this. Once we launch the Predator, the Bloodhound, and the Sharkeye, we'll be in a tactical situation, and the only thing I want to think about is where to put the next weapon, not clueing watchstanders in to the reasons I'm doing things. Do I have everyone's attention?"
Other than the sound of the ventilation ducts and the whine of the Cyclops system, he could have heard a pin drop. The whites of every eye were turned toward him, the only calm faces in the house belonging to Judison and Dietz.
"Good. Now it is my intention to confirm the identity of the surface force as Ukrainian. Once that is done, we will be attacking the task force, per my orders at the start of this emergency mission as part of the payback we're dealing out after the
Princess Dragon went down. However, there are a lot of ships, and we don't have a lot of weapons."
McKee flashed his fingers across a display on his console, and a long list of weapons flashed up on the display in the starboard comer of the room.
"It looks like a lot, but with our loadout of four antitorpedo Dobermans, two vertical-launch aerial surveillance Predators, two Bloodhound underwater surveillance vehicles, and two vertical-launch Mark 5 Sharkeyes, we only have twenty Mark 58 Alert/Acute torpedoes and eight Mod Delta Vortex missiles. That's twenty-eight weapons going against twenty-five surface contacts and a submarine, and we have to have at least four torpedoes and four Vortex missiles dedicated to the sub. Anything less could mean we can't box him in, and if I have a choice, I want all my weapons aimed at the enemy submarine. Everyone here needs to understand this—we don't care about the surface ships. We want the surface task force to turn back to the Ukraine so we have more weapons for the sub. We are attacking the surface force to draw the sub's fire, to make him show himself. If he shows up in our sensors, we will break off the attack against the surface ships and try to kill the sub.
"Now, we may not see the sub for a while, so if our offboard sensors have reported all the intelligence we need and we still haven't seen the sub, we'll do a time-on-target attack on the combatants. So far we think the surface ships have ten combatants—destroyers, cruisers, an aircraft carrier, a chopper carrier—and fifteen assorted cargo ships, troopships, amphibious assault ships, and maybe a
command-and-control flagship. We'll target the high-value warships first, but we're going to try to identify the command-and-control platform and spare him. Now, you're probably asking yourself why the old man would want to spare the C-and-C flagship. The reason is, if we let the admiral in command of this fleet watch his ships sinking, he may give up and turn around and bring this war fleet back to the barn. We'll target the ten warships with Mark 58 Alert/Acute torpedoes with the attack planned so that every one of the ten will take a torpedo hit at the same moment in time—we don't want any of them alerted or doing evasive maneuvers, and we don't want any to survive and turn on us and do an antisubmarine search. We want to kill them in the same instant, not wound them or kill some and leave some unharmed. Everybody got that? So that's ten Alert/Acutes gone. Our loadout will go down to ten Mark 58s and eight Vortex Mod Deltas, leaving six more Mark 58s we can shoot and four Deltas before we hit our reserve battery for the sub.
"So we'll sit back and watch the combatants sink. The next phase of the battle should begin then if I'm guessing right, and that is the appearance of the escort submarine to break up our assault on the surface fleet. If there is a Severodvinsk escort sub here, he should come roaring out at us the instant he hears the first torpedo shot." At least, McKee thought, he hoped so.
"If we don't detect the sub at that point, we need to make a decision. If the troopships and cargo ships do not withdraw to the north, we'll start to
target them one at a time until the admiral in command gives up and goes home. The one-at-a-time strategy will also give the submarine time to get pissed off and come at us. We'll shoot a troopship or cargo ship every twenty minutes until they withdraw or until they're all sunk, using up to six Mark 58s. If the sub still doesn't show, we'll fall back, shadow what's left of the surface force, and let a day or two pass. If it's a few days later and there's no sign of the sub and the flagship is still driving south with the remaining troopships, we'll put them all on the bottom, save two weapons for the sub, and head home after calling for backup. I sincerely doubt that will happen.
"Everyone clear on this plan?" McKee looked out over the watchstanders. Judison nodded. So did Dietz. His XO and navigator had this down. Dick Van Dyne looked cool, but the other junior officers looked white and embalmed. It would get worse for them, McKee thought.
"Very well. Carry on. XO? A word please?"
McKee turned away from the watchstanders, Judison walking up close. "Yes, Captain?"
"Those Mark 17 Dobermans. Do they work?"
Judison shrugged. "Onboard documentation says they will."
"But we don't have the software to control them."
"Right."
"Can we patch them into the VR consoles and steer them manually?"
"Yessir. Odds are slim we'd ever hit anything."
478 Michael DiMercurio
McKee gave Judison an appraising look. "You practiced it, didn't you?"
The executive officer, formerly McKee's navigator, stared at the deck plates. "Yessir, I did."
"And?"
Judison looked up, his face red, and spoke for once in a quiet voice. "I never connected. Own ship took the torpedo every time, straight up the poopchute."
McKee put on his war face. "I played football in high school. Quarterback. We came from behind to win state champs my senior year. On a crazy flea-flicker play that never once worked in practice. You get my drift?"
Judison's face's red color eased, and he grinned. "Yessir. Loud and clear, sir."
"Good. Attention in the fire-control team. Prepare to launch our three offboard sensors."
While the crew busied themselves with the sensor launch, McKee watched Judison, wondering if the XO had any idea that McKee had never played football in his life.
dred feet below the surface—but at that point the water hovered a fraction above freezing for salty seawater, a mere twenty-eight degrees Fahrenheit. The sounds from the cold, deep water rarely were able to penetrate the line of demarcation into the warm layer, instead bouncing back down to the cold water. Similarly, sounds from above the layer rarely were able to penetrate deep, reflecting off the surface of the layer, like light on mirror. Three hundred feet below the layer depth, a twenty-one-foot projectile moved through the water like a swift shark. The skin of the machine was rubbery, like that of a dolphin. It moved by virtue of a pump jet propulsor, from water being sucked into two indented ducts on the skin and taken deep within the inside of the body and being moved aft by the vanes of an ultraquiet water pump impeller. The water was ducted out of a central nozzle at the far aft end, the underwater version of a jet.
The gas turbine, driven by the combustion of high-temperature gases resulting from a spark in contact with the peroxide self-oxidized fuel, made a rhythmic noise at a primary frequency of its rotation. In addition, there were harmonic frequencies put out at multiples of the rotational speed of the turbine as well as the natural frequency vibration of the whole machine from the disturbance of the vibrations of the turbine. But along the skin were twin hydrophones—noisemakers—that put out noise in exact opposition to the turbine noise, phase-shifted one-half wavelength so that the transmitted noise exactly canceled the turbine noise. This combination was called "active quieting."
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