Barracuda- Final Bearing

by Michael Dimercurio

  “Well, Skipper, I hope you’re planning on taking both those cups’to the bridge with you. You’ll need them to dump the used coffee in when your body’s done with it.”

  Whatney had a point, he thought. He yawned and glanced at his Rolex, wondering why the hell he had neglected to sleep in the last twenty-four hours. Part of it was Abby’s visit.

  “What’s the status, XO?” he asked Whatney.

  “Well, sir, we’ve got enough exceptions to our rig-forsea to fill a three-inch-thick three-ring notebook. I don’t know that I’d ever recommend doing this, if not for your orders from Admiral Pacino.”

  “How bad is it?”

  “Here’s the rundown, Skipper,” Whatney said. “Starting aft, we have no main engines. Propulsion is on the emergency electric propulsion motor. The electric plant is only fair because we’re long overdue for a battery charge. The electrical turbines are as dead cold iron as the main engines, the steam plant is cold, the steam generators are in wet layup and the reactor is shutdown in the fiduciary range, completely nonvisible.”

  Phillips shook his head. Nonvisible reactor power meant that it would take days for reactor power to come up to the power range, unless they added enough reactivity to it that it might come up uncontrollably, little more than a fission bomb. All the publicity about reactors not being able to explode like atom bombs only applied to tame natural uranium cores in civilian industry.

  Navy cores were fueled with highly enriched bombgrade uranium, reactive enough to blow the hull fifty stories in the air and scatter enough radiation to wipe out a three-county area. The core designers called it a “prompt-critical-rapid-disassembly.” Phillips called it an explosion.

  “Anyway, the reactor plant is at about a hundred degrees.

  It’ll take a long time to warm it up to operating temperature. The pull-and-wait startup will take forty-five hours if we do it by the book, the plant startup another couple hours.”

  “Well, we won’t be doing it by the book, I can promise the engineer that.”

  “Eng won’t like that.”

  The engineer, Lt. Comdr. Walter Hornick, was a by the-book procedure man. He and Phillips had already had words about the reactor startup.

  “Fine, he’ll just have to deal with it. What about the forward systems?”

  “The combatcontrol system is in good shape, navigation systems are go, ship control is ready. The diesel generator is up and running so we’re divorcing from shorepower now. The only question is the reactor.”

  “Maneuvering watch stationed?”

  “Fully, sir. We’re ready to go.”

  “Tugs?”

  “Waiting at the mouth of the slip.”

  “Is the ship fully waterborne?” Phillips said, asking about the platform and blocks that had supported the submarine as it was slowly lowered into the Thames River at the manufacturing slip. Was the ship still resting on the blocks, or was it afloat?

  “Yes, Captain. The platform is two meters below the keel.”

  “Watertight integrity checked?”

  “Yes sir. We’re not leaking from any of the systems the yard worked on or from anywhere else.”

  “Have the engineer come up to the wardroom.”

  Whatney acknowledged and left. Phillips made another tall cup of chilled instant coffee and had halfway gagged it down when Chief Engineer Walt Hornick stepped into the wardroom. He grinned at Phillip’s coffee-drinking method as he poured himself a steaming cup of freshbrewed Columbian into a mug with the Piranha’s emblem painted on it, the ship’s symbol the inevitable toothy fish with the eyes of a menacing wolf.

  Hornick was tall, thin, too thin, mid-to-late thirties, with all his hair, a curly black mass. He looked much younger than his years, spoke gently, but what Hornick missed in the fire-and-brimstone area he made up for with cranial power, a brilliant Villanova graduate in mechanical engineering. Hornick had a memory that amazed Phillips, not only in his grasp of procedures and technical manuals but with his men, with the engineering plant’s history, with everything that crossed his desk. His style of giving reports, however, could send Phillips up a wall.

  Whatney had described it to Phillips one night in the manufacturing bay.

  “Skipper, don’t ever ask Hornick what time it is.”

  “Why not, XO?”

  “He’ll build you a watch.”

  Phillips’s and Hornick’s styles diverged in other areas.

  Hornick was a straight arrow, the likes of which Phillips had never seen. In the week since Phillips had taken over Piranha, Hornick had repeatedly declined to go out for beer at the local strip joints. Some of the married men weren’t into that either, but Hornick seemed genuinely uncomfortable at the thought of discussing ship’s business in the company of exposed female breasts. Phillips, on the other hand, did his best thinking in that environment.

  “Well, Eng, how do you feel tonight?” Phillips felt his pockets for the stash of Cuban cigars but didn’t pull one out, knowing that Hornick would be annoyed by it.

  “I feel like I’m ready for bed. Captain. This whole startup has got me worried.”

  “You mean the emergency power range approach, the emergency heatup rates, the emergency steam-plant startup?”

  “Yes sir. The plant could blow the roof off. How then will we get to sea? This ship has been critical all of twice, once for the initial crit, once on sea trials, and even then we never got above 35 percent power.”

  “Yeah,” Phillips said, sinking into the leather-covered bench seat at the end of the table. An idea began to dawn on him. “What would you do, Walt? You’ll be a commanding officer in a few years if anyone listens to me. What would you do to start this ship’s reactor and steam plant?”

  It was another language for Hornick, another culture, to imagine that he was someone other than the ship’s engineer. He took a deep breath.

  “Well, sir, I’d—”

  “Tell you what, Walt. Here, sit down right here.” Phillips stood, walked to the end of the table and pulled out the end chair, the chair that was reserved for the captain.

  Hornick looked stricken at the thought of sitting in the captain’s chair.

  “Sit down, that’s an order.” Phillips pulled his silver oak-leaf insignia off his collar, pulled Hornick’s gold colored oak leaves off and traded, putting the full commander’s pins on Hornick’s collar, the lieutenant commander’s pins on his own. He pulled the pin off his left pocket, the anchor in a circle of laurel leaves, the capital ship command pin, and pinned it to Hornick’s pocket. Then he left the room, shut the door quietly and came in again.

  Hornick was embarrassed completely by Phillips’ role playing.

  “Sir, really—”

  “Sir? Captain, sir, you wanted to see me, sir? You remember me, sir, don’t you, the engineer? You wanted to talk to me, sir? About the reactor startup, sir? How should we do the startup, Captain?”

  Roger Whatney picked that moment to come into the room with a metal clipboard that held the radiomen’s Writepad encrypted computer notesheet, the one used for radio messages that were highly classified and needed to be electronically signed before they could be released to Phillips’ personal Writepad computer. Whatney took a look at Hornick in the captain’s chair wearing the accouterments of command, then over at Phillips wearing lieutenant commander’s insignia, and he pulled the radio Writepad back from Phillips and instead offered it to Hornick. He did not even do a suggestion of a doubletake.

  “Captain,” Whatney said to Hornick, “you’d better initial this and get to the bridge. Have you given the order to start the plant yet? By the way, the admiral wants us at full power in three hours, submerged and underway.”

  Another reason Phillips wanted Whatney aboard as his XO—the Brit could practically read his mind. Phillips and Whatney looked at Hornick, waiting.

  “Oh, all, right, sirs. Engineer,” Hornick said to Phillips! “perform an emergency approach to reactor criticality, when critical perform an emergenc
y heatup, then start the engine room with emergency warmups.”

  “Aye, aye, sir!” Phillips tossed Hornick a salute.

  Five minutes later Hornick was back aft wearing his proper uniform, as Phillips was swallowing the last dregs of the iced coffee. The navigator came in then, carrying a rolled-up larger version of the Writepad computer, this one big enough to display a chart. Lt. Comdr. Scott Court was a tightly wrapped Annapolis grad with a starched uniform, spit-shined shoes, his academy ring always in evidence. Phillips considered Court maybe the “greasiest” officer he’d ever met, the term a relic from the academy and used to describe men who oiled the wheels of their own political progress. Still, Court was friendly, confident, smart and even-handed with his department.

  But then Phillips had the feeling that if he were not Court’s superior officer. Court would not give him the time of day.

  “Here’s the chart display, Captain. You wanted to go over it?” “Have a seat, Scotty,” Phillips said to Court, again sprawling into the end bench. Court put the navigation display on the table. The chart showed the Thames River in the vicinity of Groton and New London, its approach into the Fisher’s Island Sound through the Race and into Block Island Sound, and from there into the Atlantic.

  “We’ll be towed out along this track. I’m trying to figure out where to submerge on the diesel,” Phillips told him.

  “How much room do you want, sir?”

  “At a keel depth of eighty feet snorkeling, it would be nice to go down to 150 feet if some traffic came by—”

  “You’d have to secure snorkeling and run on the battery while starting up the reactor. Captain.”

  “It wouldn’t be pretty, but even if the engineer is running a main feed pump on the diesel and we have to pull the plug to go deep, he’d just stop the pump and stop the steam draw. Hornick could recover from that, don’t you think?”

  “Skipper, thank God we’ve got Walt back here. I doubt anyone else could handle this.”

  “Okay, 150 feet, with a margin of another 150 feet, that’s 300 feet or fifty fathoms.”

  “That’s shallow, sir.”

  “Fine, sixty. Where’s the sixty-fathom curve?”

  Court touched a software function key and danced with the software until the depth curve he sought highlighted itself. “Right here. Captain.”

  “No way, that’s too far out. Give me fifty fathoms… not much better, but that’s the deal… Weather holding up?” Phillips was sneaking Piranha out of town under the cover of darkness and an overcast sky, all the better to keep the watchful eye of the overhead Japanese Galaxy satellite from looking down at them.

  “Both good and bad, sir. It’s started to snow, hard.

  They’re calling for a foot of snow, and then it’s going to turn to freezing rain and sleet. The snowstorm will keep us hidden from the Galaxy upstairs, but visibility is closing down on us and that makes this trip doubly dangerous.

  We’ll have trouble seeing the merchant traffic, and they’ll have problems seeing us.”

  “Maybe we should keep the tug longer, stay on the surface and run the diesel until the reactor’s warm.”

  “I don’t know, sir. The Galaxy machines can see an infrared heat trace through heavy clouds, maybe even through this storm. I like the idea of getting down under as soon as we can. I liked even more the idea of getting the reactor plant up fast.”

  “I may spend some time aft with Walt when we’re starting up.”

  “Sir, please don’t. That’ll just slow him down. Walt likes precision and plans. You being back there isn’t part of his… plan.”

  Phillips smiled. “You’ve been hanging with Walt for a while, now, right, Scott?”

  “Sir, Walt is different but he’s damned good. You tell him what you want, and once he agrees he delivers. He’s not your typical military type.”

  “Is there a typical type?”

  “My wife thinks so. She says all my friends and I are walking military robots.”

  “What do you think?”

  “I think we wear uniforms and are trained to behave certain ways, and on the ship we’re a team, but the test is when we’re up against a situation we haven’t been trained for, and we go on our own. That’s when I think we’ll prove that we’re about as far from robots as you can get.”

  “Is that good or bad?”

  “Captain, it could go either way.”

  “Guess I should get to the bridge. Is the pilot here?”

  “On the tug, sir. It’s waiting for us in the river.”

  “Let’s get the hell to sea.”

  northwest pacific 585 nautical miles east-southeast of yokohama USS Ronald Reagan Pacino had asked for Donner to come into flag plot, away from the bridge and other ears, so he could talk to him about how they would work together on the blockade. Once that was done he’d assemble the submarine operations people in a room and take over from the submarine operations officer. Then he’d get on with Sean Murphy and go over the fleet deployment. It was already 1000 and Pacino had a mountain of work to do before noon.

  The worst of the typhoon had passed through during the night. Pacino had spent the storm in his rack, the motion of the ship, which made him seasick when he was up, had the opposite effect on him when he was lying down. The waves had actually rocked him to sleep and he had slept beyond his wakeup notice, but no one had cared. No one but Donner even seemed to know he was on board. With the storm, the accident with the F-14, the sedative and the jet lag, Pacino had needed the sleep. He had awakened feeling so much better that for a moment he almost forgot about Brad Shearson, but the memory of their flight came back and landed on his conscience with a resounding thump. If he had waited a day the kid would have lived.

  Pacino looked out the starboard windows at the horizon, the sea calm now that the storm had ceased. The sky was overcast, but the glare from the brightness was giving Pacino a headache. The other ships of the battle group steamed in formation, the beauty of it breathtaking, the precision, the guns and missiles and radars of the sleek surface ships a powerful display of naval might.

  Looking at them, Pacino for the first time felt that the blockade might work out. He turned away from the starboard window and looked at flag plot, a room the size of the bridge on the deck above. The room’s windows were as panoramic as the bridge’s, the floor space taken up with plot tables and conference tables. Now that charts and papers were replaced by Writepads, the room’s broad tables were somewhat out of use. In Pacino’s experience on submarines, which were so cramped for space and volume that the eye never focused on a distance more than fifteen feet away, the openness and wide view from flag plot seemed luxurious, almost sinful.

  Finally Admiral Donner came in, dressed in fresh working khakis with no decorations on his uniform other than his surface warfare pin and his three silver stars.

  “Morning. I see you’re still with us. How do you feel?”

  “Better. After last night anything is better.”

  “Good. Listen, you’d better take a look at this. Seems things are picking up steam.”

  Pacino squinted in the glare to see the writing on Admiral Donner’s Writepad.

  “Warner wants to start the blockade tonight,” Donner said.

  “But we’re not in position yet. We’ve got another twelve hours of steaming to get us within fifty miles of Honshu, and that’s just the east side of the islands. We have to get the Sea of Japan task group on the other side of the islands to interdict shipping from the west.

  That’ll take at least another day—”

  “President Warner has maps, she knows where we are and the timing of getting in close. Admiral Wadsworth is working on it with her.”

  Wadsworth strikes again, Pacino thought.

  “Mac, what the hell is this? We can’t set up a blockade that fast. What kind of a blockade would that be?

  By this evening the Sea of Japan will still be wide open.”

  “I thought something like this might happen, Patch.
I sent your submarines on ahead a few hours before you landed, if that crash on the deck can be called a landing.

  I should have told you when you were up on the bridge last night but I figured once you talked to Paully White, the sub-operations officer, you’d come back up here to the bridge to scream about it. But you were down until now.”

  Pacino realized he should have checked in and met the submarine-operations officer, the man aboard the carrier who was responsible for the tasking of the two submarines traveling with the battle group. But he had been too exhausted and sick to go below and had left it for today. Once again Pacino cursed the fact that he wasn’t in command of a submarine anymore. On the sub, his information network surrounded him. Now here he was, his information screened by Donner, who kept him in the dark to avoid his anger, hiding behind an operations officer when he was supposed to be as heavy in planning the operation as Donner was. He would have to work on Donner, Pacino thought, deciding to get in touch with Sean Murphy as soon as he left the bridge.

  The Hawaii subs, the Pacific Fleet submarine force, should be well on its way by now, he thought.

  “You detached my submarines without informing me, Admiral. I’d appreciate it if you’d keep me in the god damned loop. Sir.”

  “Sorry, Patch, but don’t forget, technically those submarines are under the operational control of the battle group, and since I’m the force commander they report in to me.”

  “No, Admiral, those ships were to out-chop to my command. I’m the USUBCOM force commander, and as of last night those ships are under my op-comm.” The jargon meant the ships left the battle group and got a new boss, Pacino, the evening he arrived on the carrier.

  “Okay, Patch, fine. They’re your boats and under your command. Okay? It’s just that you had a hell of a night with the accident and the sedative, and the doc thought you might be down for a while, which you were, and we were steaming as before.”

  “Where are my ships?”

  “The Pasadena and Cheyenne have been running at flank all night. They’ll be in the western Oparea, in the Sea of Japan, by the time the blockade starts.”

  “Mac, we may be in a hurry to play this ball game, but why would we agree to kick off with only two players on the god damned field? The whole point of a blockade is to be visible. That takes surface ships. No blockade is credible with subs alone. And the Japan Oparea is crawling with their Destiny-class ships. With our boats running in there at flank speed, they’ll be eaten alive.”