Terminal Run

by Michael Dimercurio

  coldness of it making her shiver. She knew the boy’s father would want to know what had happened, so she drafted an Email and sent it to John Patton, for him to relay to Pacino. She returned to sickbay and waited next to the boy and tried not to think about whatever it was her husband was doing, but from what she knew as head of Cyclops, this probably involved the SSNX, and it probably involved whatever submarine had sunk Anthony Michael, because short of taking care of that, there was no force on earth that could keep Pacino from his injured son’s side.

  Captain Lien Hua sat quietly at a table in what looked like the officers’ mess of a ship. The photographs on the bulkhead were pictures of submarines on the surface, making it clear this was not a surface ship. He’d been captured by an American submarine, and after Zhou’s orders to fire on the American survivors, this was the worst possible place to be.

  The door opened, and two tall, overfed Americans led in Leader Zhou Ping. He seemed pale, but had no bruises, so the Americans must have beaten him on his back. Zhou’s eyes did not seem haunted, and the thought occurred to Lien that Zhou was in a trance or drugged, but his eyes seemed clear enough. The door shut, and Zhou sat down.

  “How are you, Captain?”

  “Did they beat you? Their torture of me involves making me wait for the beating.”

  “They have not beaten me. Their captain and first officer brought me into their stateroom.”

  “You spoke to them?”

  “They spoke to me. They will be repatriating us to the Peoples Republic as soon as arrangements can be made. A rendezvous with a surface ship is being arranged. A helicopter will remove us from this submarine and take us to the deck of the destroyer. We will wait there for a PLA Navy helicopter to pick us up and take us to one of our own ships from Battlegroup Three, which has left the Bo Hai to get us.”

  Lien stared at his first officer. “They’reletting us go, just

  like that? After you fired shots at their countrymen? Do they know you did that?”

  “The second-in-command of their ship Leopard, the one we sank, woke up and told them everything. I confirmed it to them.”

  “You what?”

  “It doesn’t matter, sir. They are still repatriating us.”

  “So they say. We will see. Meanwhile you have confessed to war crimes.”

  Zhou shrugged. “That is accurate. That is what I committed, Captain. I owe you an apology. Captain. It was wrong of me to relieve you. And even more wrong to have shot at the Americans.”

  Lien said nothing at first, then said haltingly, “What do you mean Battlegroup Three was in the Bo Hai?”

  “We lost, Captain. The Americans sank Battlegroup Two. Beijing ordered Three to return, and the PLA has pulled back from the Indian frontier. I saw a BBC news file. The Premier made a statement.”

  Lien frowned as the crew served them dinner. Zhou ate tentatively, but cleaned his plate. After Zhou finished, Lien tasted the food, then ate.

  “We’re down from PD, Captain,” Officer of the Deck Vicker son said over the phone. “Pad computer’s on the way to you.”

  “It’s here,” Pacino said from the torpedo room console. He hung up and stroked the portable unit to his E-mails. There were two, one from Colleen, the other from McKee, both routed through Patton. Pacino opened up Colleen’s, his hands shaking, but when he read it his face fell and a darkness clouded his mind. He could barely concentrate on the message from McKee, which reluctantly agreed to keep the aircraft away from Snare’s rendezvous point, but insisted on them orbiting a hundred miles to the west as a last resort. He handed back the computer to the messenger and returned to his work with the ship’s medical officer, a lieutenant surgeon assigned

  to the ship—yet another oddity, that since Pacino had left the Navy, doctors had been assigned to submarine crews.

  An hour later, he sat back and called the executive officer’s stateroom.

  “Assemble the officers and chiefs in the wardroom,” he said flatly.

  Ten minutes later, the men who ran the SSNX stood in the large wardroom, the chairs around the table filled, all eyes on Pacino. He poured himself a cup of coffee and sat at the head of the table.

  “I’ve got a few words for you all,” he said, looking up at his crew. “The word just came from Patton and McKee—the aircraft are withdrawing. It’s up to Devilfish and the Tigersharks now.” He took a pull from the cup and went on. “I know you are all concerned about the employment of the Tigersharks, and so am I. The weapon is a killer, officers, and if it detects something in the water, it will tear its heart out, whether that detect is the firing ship, an enemy, a surface ship, or even another Tigershark. For the last twenty-four hours I’ve worked on finding a fix to this, and the problem is just too big. I’ve put a bandage on the problem by researching all the work done to date on carbon-processor depressants, and I’ve selected one for use on the Tigersharks while we launch them.”

  Vermeers interrupted. “Depressants, sir? You’re drugging them?”

  “Exactly,” Pacino said. “The Tigershark processors are not unlike animal brains. And just like sedating a grizzly bear, we’ll be drugging the Tigersharks with only their lower functions on-line. They’ll have the processing power to keep themselves alive, and to maintain depth in a neutral buoyancy hover until the sedative wears off, at which point they will wake up. By then we’ll be out of the area, and whatever comes into their sensor radius will be attacked.”

  Pacino clicked a remote, and a display flashed up on the screen. “I’ve sketched out the approach of the Snare to the rendezvous point. We’ll start along his point of intended motion, his PIM, to the east, and we’ll deploy Tigersharks as if

  they’re stationary mines. They won’t have propulsion, so we’ll have to stop, hover, launch, and move gently out of the way to make sure our wake does not spin or capsize the torpedo. We’ll lay these units left and right of the Snare’s PIM, then withdraw further to the west. As we move out of sensor range of the eastern Tigersharks, they will be waking up, because we don’t want to overdose them, so we’re only giving them enough of a sedative to allow us to clear the area. We’ll withdraw to a point twenty miles to the west of the westernmost Tigershark, which will be deployed here, ten miles west of the rendezvous point. We’ll hover here, rigged for ultra quiet on battery power alone with the reactor scrammed. This ship will not be putting out tonals or transients from reactor re circ pumps, steam turbines or generators, air handlers or anything else. The only systems that will be on-line will be the cooling units for the Cyclops sonar suite, the Cyclops system itself and its displays, and minimal ship’s lighting. Atmospheric control will be off, the ventilation systems will be secured, and it will be damned hot in here, but we will be quieter than a hole in the ocean until we kill the Snare and we’ve accounted for every Tigershark either detonating or flooding itself and sinking to its crush depth. At that point, and only then, will we start up the reactor, return ship systems to nominal, and do a battle damage assessment to the east. Any questions?”

  Rick Bracefield, the absurdly young-looking chief engineer, raised his hand as if in a classroom.

  “Yes, Eng,” Pacino said patiently. “Sir, with the reactor and steam systems secured, how will we evade a Tigershark detecting us or a Mark 58 launched by the Snare?

  Pacino frowned, annoyed at how obvious the answer was. “We’ll make sure the ship is pointed so that the threat vector is astern, on the edge of the baffles, and if we detect a torpedo in the water we’ll activate the TESA, the torpedo evasion ship alteration.” Pacino stopped as he saw the downcast looks of the engineer and weapons officer. “What?”

  “Captain, the shipyard never completed the TESA,” the engineer admitted.

  “And we haven’t wired it up, sir, because we’ve never figured out if it’s a weapons system or a propulsion system,” the weapons officer, Elaine Kessler, said.

  “Clear the room,” Pacino ordered, his angry tone bringing the officers to their feet. “Everyo
ne out but the XO, the engineer, and the weapons officer.”

  The officers left, tiptoeing out of the room. The remaining three officers acted like family dogs caught stealing steak off the dinner plates.

  “In twenty seconds I’m walking out that door and returning to the torpedo room,” he said in quiet fury. “In ten hours, however the three of you decide, the TESA evasion system will be fully functional, and I don’t care if we have to surface to make a ballast tank entry, that system will work. I want an update every thirty minutes from you, XO, and that update had better not contain the words ‘impossible’ or ‘too late.” Does everyone have that? You will succeed or I’ll have your commissions, assuming we live through this mission. Questions—XO, speak up.”

  “Sir,” Vermeers said tentatively, “perhaps we should change the mission. It’s suicide without the TESA, and we may not have it running in time. Sir, hear me out. It’s not just wiring it up so the solid rocket motors ignite in the correct sequence at the right time, it’s the Cyclops ship-control system. The Cyclops time constant could kill us, Captain. If the computer doesn’t control the bow planes with the right response rate, those solid rocket motors going off could plunge us down to crush depth in a second. Or we could rocket out of the sea and break in half smashing back down to the waves.”

  Pacino glared at the three officers, wondering what he could do to get this can’t-do attitude erased from their personalities.

  “You three and your men get this system working. If you fail, the mission won’t change, and I will deploy the ship exactly as if I’m counting on the TESA. So this is literally door die.” He narrowed his eyes at them, trying to look even angrier

  than he felt. “Get out,” he said quietly, but all three stood as if bolted to the deck. “Get out! Get the hell out!” he roared, and the three of them scurried out, bumping into each other and the doorjamb.

  Pacino shook his head, hoping their fear of him would help them overcome their failure to imagine the system working. One thing was certain—he would not spare the ship. Novskoyy was coming with a bellyful of cruise missiles and torpedoes, and Pacino would stop him, even if it cost him the ship and every life aboard.

  Victor Krivak pulled the interface helmet off and wiped the sweat out of his hair.

  “Wang,” he called. “We have one hour. I want you to pack our things and wait with them underneath the access hatch. And put on a wet suit. I’ve decided not to surface the ship when we rendezvous with Amorn and Pedro. That way it may make it back to the Chinese.”

  “What is this last thing you’re going to be doing before we meet Amorn?”

  “Nothing. It is nothing.”

  “I’d like to stay aboard and see if I can help One Oh Seven recover,” Wang said. “You can go ahead.”

  Krivak considered the request, then nodded. “Fine. Just help me pack the things I brought, and get my wet suit ready.”

  Wang smiled, happy as a child. “Right away, Victor.”

  “Captain, battle stations are manned,” Jeff Vermeers reported.

  Michael Pacino stood on the conn, wearing the wireless one-eared headset with a boom microphone, looking down on his untrained crew, most of them on the same wireless circuit with him.

  “Very well. Weapons Officer, mark status of all tubes.”

  “Sir, tubes one through four are dry-loaded with Tigershark Mark 98s, with processors loaded and sedated.”

  “Very well. Navigator?”

  “Sir,” the navigator replied, “ship is at the launch point of Tigershark unit one.”

  “Very well. Attention in the firecontrol party,” Pacino said, amazed at how it felt to give the order. “Firing point procedures, tube one, Tigershark one.”

  As the Cyclops system barked out the first Tigershark torpedo, Pacino called over the medical officer. “Sixty minutes before it wakes up, right?” he asked quietly.

  “Yes sir. You have one hour to get away from it.”

  “Let’s hope that sedative works. XO, status of the TESA system?”

  “Still working on it, Skipper. We should know by the time the Snare comes.”

  “XO, if I have to hit that TESA chicken switch, and it doesn’t work, I’m going to fucking strangle you, the weapons officer, and the engineer to death before the incoming torpedo gets us.”

  Vermeers swallowed. “If I could be relieved as firecontrol coordinator, sir, I’ll see to the work on the TESA.”

  “Excellent, XO. Navigator, relieve the XO as firecontrol coordinator.”

  Pacino glanced down at the geographic plot display of the Cyclops system, showing them the deployment point of the first Tigershark.

  “Sir,” the navigator said, “we’re at the firing point for Tiger shark two.”

  Pacino nodded, and the weapons left the ship one by one as Devilfish withdrew to the west. After an hour of launching and withdrawing, there was nothing to do but shut down the ship and wait for Krivak and the Snare.

  “Maneuvering, Captain,” Pacino said over his headset. “Insert a full reactor scram and rig ship for reduced electrical.”

  As the air handlers wound down and the ship became stuffy, Pacino couldn’t help wondering if the ship would ever be started up again. He cautioned himself to remain positive, but it was damned hard to do with a minimally functional ship and crew going up against the best submarine in the world, while

  his only son lay in a deep coma and was not expected to live. Was that why Pacino was taking so many risks? he asked himself harshly. Was this a death wish?

  No, his mind shouted. The only death he wanted was Alexi Novskoyy’s. And that of the USS Snare.

  26.

  Michael Pacino stood on the conn of the Devilfish, his coveralls drenched in sweat in the steaming control room. The room was airless and stuffy, the enclosing of a high-temperature steam plant in the pipe of a submarine only a good idea in the presence of a massive and redundant air-conditioning plant. There was nothing to do but stand and sweat and wait for the first Tigersharks to wake up. If the situation did not go well, the units would begin circling in wider diameter circles until they detected the SSNX, and chased him. Or homed on the other Tigersharks. If the Snare showed up late, it would be a disaster—the Tigersharks would all have chased each other or run out of fuel and shut down, and the torpedo room of the Devilfish was completely empty. Not only was the SSNX defenseless, but among the deadly threats to her were her own weapons.

  Pacino stared down on the geographic plot, the God’s-eye view of the sea showing the position of the launched Tiger sharks, their own position, and the track of the Snare. Come on, Pacino thought, get to your rendezvous position.

  “Conn, Sonar,” Pacino’s headset crackled. Finally, he thought. “We have multiple transients to the east, sir.”

  “Sonar, Captain, classify,” Pacino ordered.

  “Conn. Sonar, torpedo engine startups.”

  “Very well. Sonar. Do you correlate to the bearings of the Tigersharks?”

  “Conn, Sonar, yes. Also, we have a distant diesel engine and twin four-bladed screws, from a light surface vessel.”

  “Very well, Sonar.” Pacino looked over at Justin Westlake, the navigator, who had taken Vermeers’s function as Pacino’s number two while the XO supervised the repair of the TESA system. “Could be the rendezvous yacht,” Pacino said.

  Westlake, a thirty-two-year-old, tall, soft-spoken black officer with wire-rimmed glasses and a nasal Chicago accent, nodded. “He’s late, Skipper.”

  “Sonar, Captain, anything on the two five four hertz Snare tonal?” Pacino flipped through the command console’s sonar display to the narrowband processor.

  “Conn, Sonar, we’re getting a slight peak on the towed array, but it’s early to call.”

  “That’s him,” Pacino said to Westlake.

  “I agree with sonar, Captain, that peak is too broad to call yet.” Westlake said.

  “I know that’s what the system says, Nav, but I’m telling you, that’s him.”
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  “If that’s the case, then the Tigersharks should be homing on him by now, sir, and we have nothing.”

  “Wait for two minutes,” Pacino said. “I’m telling you, that’s him. Sonar, Captain, report beam of narrowband detection on the two five four.”

  “Captain, Sonar, the two five four is selected to beam seven, which is seeing bearings zero eight five and one six five.”

  “To the east, Nav,” Pacino said. “That’s him.”

  “Conn, Sonar, we have Tigershark engines bearing east, speeding up.”

  Pacino smiled. “Sonar, you have any solid rocket engines yet?”

  “Conn, Sonar, no—correction, yes, sir! We have solid rocket ignition. Tigersharks have something, sir!”

  “One, bring the ship to missile firing depth,” Victor Krivak ordered. “Fifty meters keel depth. Slow to five knots.”

  The deck angle increased as the Snare rose from the deep cold.

  “Show the char! again, same scale as last time, with superimposed range circles.”

  The ship’s position was flashing right at the intersection point of the Javelin IV missile range circle to Washington and Philadelphia. “Raise the scale. One, until display width is one hundred miles.” The chart grew until he could see that the point in the ocean depicting the ship was slightly east of the range circles, too far by five miles from the target objective. He wanted to slow early and come above the layer, and launch the missiles once he was certain there was no one else in the area, and to make sure the chartered yacht was at the rendezvous point. When the ship came above the thermal layer into the shallows, where the water was much warmer, he commanded the computer to seek diesel engine noises. The chart flashed to the bearing of the twin diesels. The yacht that Amorn and Pedro had hired was exactly where he’d ordered it to be. An excellent sign.

  “One, display missile status and targeting.”

  The display for the cruise missiles came up on the display, showing missile one targeted to the White House. Krivak considered changing the coordinate from the center of the White House residence to the West Wing, where the President and her staff would likely be, but Admiral Chu wanted the symbol of the presidency destroyed. It seemed a waste. He debated deleting the Philadelphia missile’s target so that he could add the West Wing, but Chu wanted the Independence Hall vaporized. It was a bit odd, but then it was a client request. Krivak left the targets set as he had originally set them, and monitored the display as the missile gyros started up.