Barracuda- Final Bearing

by Michael Dimercurio

  Pacino stared at the Writepad, then saved the message and pushed the Writepad aside. Warner had a prearranged meeting with Prime Minister Kurita. It wouldn’t matter if the entire US submarine force arrived on December 27, it would be too late. Modern warfare happened very fast, with information flowing almost faster than it could be generated. Twenty years before, Pacino might have been given two weeks or a month to get ready for the blockade. Look at how long the army had had to prepare for Desert Storm in Saudi Arabia, dragging equipment and men into the desert for six months before the shooting started with the Iraqis. Look at how long the air force had taken to set up for the bombing of Chah Bahar, Iran. Three weeks to assemble the bombers and plan the mission. The invasion of southern Iran had taken two months. But now the world political stage called for immediate victory. Battles were no longer exclusively in the hands of the generals and admirals, the politicians were deeply involved. And yet that wasn’t new… hadn’t Jimmy Carter tried to micromanage the failed Desert One rescue of American hostages in Iran? Hell, it went all the way back to World War I, the only obstacle to the commander in chief taking tactical command being his information-and-command systems.

  In the past the speed of information flow had mostly limited the president to the back seat, the field commanders in wartime making the immediate decisions.

  But now here he was taking rudder orders from the president when he should be given a free hand. He’d been unable to convince her to use the most elementary fighting tactic, the massing of force against the enemy.

  Wadsworth hadn’t been helpful, and all Dick Donchez could do was tell him to follow his orders or he would be fired.

  “We ready to reconnect?” Pacino asked the group.

  They nodded. “Turn it back on.”

  Pacino looked up at the screen. “Madam President, we’ll engage the MSDF submarines and report back in forty-eight hours.” “Good luck. Admiral,” Warner said, holding her palm up to Wadsworth, who obviously wanted to say something.

  The connection was cut off at the other end, the presidential seal appearing, then the screen went blank.

  “Cut it,” Kane said into a phone. “Go deep and flank it.”

  The deck inclined, downward this time, to a steep ten degrees as the ship dived for the depths.

  Pacino stared at the chart for a moment, then told Paully to present the plan one last time. Pacino barely listened, the plan rolling through his head at every waking moment. By the end of the presentation Kane and Pacino had no changes to make. The submarines would deploy as he’d indicated.

  east china sea forty kilometers southwest OF Mlyanoura dake island SS-810 Winged Serpent Comdr. Toshumi Tanaka flashed his fingers over the keyboard of the Second Captain console set up in his stateroom. The upper console displayed the navigation chart, showing their progress from the Sea of Japan through the Korea Strait southeast through the East China Sea past the southern tip of Kyushu. In a few more kilometers they would emerge into the Pacific on the southeast side of the Home Islands. The nav display also projected the Winged Serpent’s future track, following the coastline separated by seventy kilometers, northeast toward Tokyo Bay, where off the mouth of the bay south of Point Nojimazaki a replenishment ship would take station at anchor. The Chrysanthemum would be standing to, looking like an old rusty tanker flying a Liberian flag, her name painted in English in uneven rust-obscured block letters. But all resemblance to a merchant tanker ship would end there. If Winged Serpent had not gained contact on the American submarines by then he would continue up along the coast of the Home Islands until he reached the Shibotsu-jima island at the far north point of Hokkaido Island. There he would turn the ship back southwest and patrol farther from the coastline, 150 kilometers distant, steadily working his way deeper into the Pacific until he had contact. Nothing could stop him now. The orders had taken for ever to come but finally he was at sea doing what he was born to do.

  Unrestricted submarine warfare against all units of the American navy.

  He would paint the sea bottom with their blood. He would remain at sea until the food was gone, and beyond, until the last Nagasaki had been launched and had hit its mark. Then he would sail only for the rendezvous with the Chrysanthemum, reloading torpedoes, food and bottled water. He would give the crew and his officers twenty-four hours with the replenishment ship’s prostitutes, comfort women, and they would be back ready for battle. The thought of indulging himself with a comfort woman did not cross his mind. He could only focus on one thing—righting a wrong. The lower console of the Second Captain was a text display of intercepted radio messages from the Americans, with some probable decodings. They weren’t assured of being correct. Many times the names for things came through but numbers were problems. Typically numbers, such as the latitudes and longitudes of positions, were double or triple encrypted. The first encryption was electronic, converting the raw-form message into meaningless electronic symbols that were then sent over the radio circuits. A second encryption could be done with the radio transmission itself, in which several dummy messages could be transmitted at once on separate frequencies, the real message cut into the text of the various dummy messages so that the actual radio transmission jumped frequencies, the receiver on the other end decoding all half-dozen messages and discarding the portions of the dummy messages that had no meaning, retaining only the vitals of the actual message. Even then a third encryption could be done at the point of receipt, where numbers that came out of the system were altered by the message reader. A one could become a three, a four a six, with a constant added on or multiplied with the “raw” number. Sometimes numbers were subtracted. Sometimes they were inverted and the nearest whole number used, sometimes multiplied by pi, then the third decimal figure the result of the convolution. This could go on to the point of absurdity, but in any case there had been so many cases of latitude and longitude distortion from messages that were broken that Tanaka no longer trusted them. It was the verbal content of the messages that intrigued him. The term “wolfpack” recurred several times. Tanaka reclined in his seat, recalling the rich history of submarines, when in the last great war the Nazi submarines would gather together to attack convoys. If one was too far away, the other boats might be better positioned—the old vintage boats too slow to chase a swift convoy, relying instead on positioning themselves in the paths of the surface ships. In addition to positioning, two boats had twice the torpedo loadout of one. Finally, if one were to come under attack, a second boat could vector in and counterattack out of nowhere. There was one case that came to mind when the destroyer Aggressive was closing in on the damaged German Untersee-boot U-458 to ram and sink her, and the undetected U-501 was submerged at a right angle to Aggressive’ assault, delivering three torpedoes to the attacking destroyer, breaking her in half and sinking her just a few hundred meters before she would have overrun the U-458. Both U-boats had escaped. So now the Americans were going to gang up for safety from the aggressions of the Destiny class.

  Tanaka tapped through some sequences, coaxing the Second Captain to extrapolate the positions of the Winged Serpents sister ships, the Destiny IIs. The Three-class ships were virtually useless in a fight with a submerged enemy. Most of them were probably already sunk, dead and gone, their poor programming inadequate to the task of fighting a true antisubmarine-warfare attack-submarine. But the Two-class ships would be there patrolling the waters surrounding the Home Islands, preparing themselves with the same intelligence data that he had. He considered putting up a message to the other ships in his Two-class squadron but decided against it. The commanders knew what they were doing. Tanaka closed out the lower display and dialed in the sonar computer-screened data, the computer looking for preset characteristics, filtering the ocean’s noise through the system’s knowledge of what the American submarines sounded like. The raw data coming in from the sea was voluminous and random, but a man-made ship made pure tones, tonals and specific transient rattles. Bangs and flow noises and squeaks. The compu
ter could be used to filter out the meaningless clutter of the seas and look only for noises that matched pure tonals, the regularity of a screw thrashing through the seas, the noise of a hatch slamming, a sewage pump putting water overboard, a torpedo tube flooding. The Two class’ Second Captain combat control system had catalogued over ten to the fifth transient and tonal noises, and although that sounded like a lot it was a thousandth of a percent of the random noise of the sea.

  With the Second Captain on the case. Winged Serpent could not fail. It would be, Tanaka thought, as if he were a Wild West gunman going up against blind men.

  aleutian trench, boundary OF THE bering sea AND THE pacific ocean USS Piranha Bruce Phillips leaned the captain’s chair far back in the dark of the wardroom, the large-screen flat panel displaying a classic Arnold Schwarzenegger movie, the bulging muscles of the protagonist exposed, tensing as his arm lifted a hefty weapon and he began firing a machine gun into a crowded city street. Phillips shoved a handful of popcorn in his mouth, listening to the comments of his wardroom as the bullets flew. The phone rang from the conn. Phillips pointed the remote at the flat panel and the action froze, plunging the room into silence. “Mindless violence,” Phillips muttered in mock disgust as he hoisted the phone to his ear. “Captain.”

  “Offsa’deck, sir.

  We’re leaving the Aleutian Trench now, sir. We’re officially in the Pacific.” Phillips looked over at the speed indicator, the readout showing forty-three knots, the deck vibrating slightly from the turbulence of the seawater flow over the Vortex tubes, particularly since the ship’s hydrodynamics had become uneven with the loss of the number-one Vortex unit. “How long to go at flank?”

  “Arrival in the northern quadrant of the Oparea is slated for thirty hours from now, sir.” It wasn’t good enough, Phillips thought. “Put this on the status board and pass it on to your relief, Mr. Porter—we won’t be coming to periscope depth until just before we penetrate the Oparea. And I want us running at flank until then, to hell with navigation errors. In fact, put that in the ship’s deck log, that I ordered us to blow off going to PD until we’re at the forty-fourth parallel. That gives us forty-three knots all the way. What’s that do to the time?”

  “Takes it down to about twenty-six hours. Captain.” Still not good enough. “Off’sa’deck, send the engineer to the wardroom.” He hung up the phone, clicked the remote and the bullets continued to fly onscreen. He watched a few moments until he saw Walt Hornick’s head appear at the round red window to the centerline passageway, then got up and walked out into the brightness of the passageway. “I’ll buy you a cup of coffee, Eng,” Phillips said, walking the engineer across the passageway to the opening to the crew’s mess. He poured the engineer a cup of fresh steaming coffee, a glass of bright red Kool-Aid for himself, the mixture so sweet he had to wince to choke it down. He steered Hornick to a dinette table in the far corner, pulled out two cigars, one for Hornick, one for himself. He noticed the engineer didn’t flinch this time as Phillips stuffed the stogie into his mouth and lit the end. “Well, Eng, before we get into this I want to ask you a question.”

  “Yes sir.”

  “Have I ever meddled with your department?

  Micromanaged you? Given you rudder orders?”

  “No, sir.” Hornick seemed confused. “But I have given you goals to achieve, right? I’ve told you the big picture of what I’ve wanted and left it to you to get it done, right?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “How do you feel about that, Eng?”

  “How do I feel about it, sir?”

  “Yeah. How does that feel? I’m assuming you haven’t been treated like that before.”

  “You’re right. Skipper, I haven’t. Captain Forbes before you was the ship’s real engineer. I just took orders from him and tried to satisfy him. He was never satisfied. I had a letter of resignation written, I was going to resign my commission and go into business with my father-in- law but Forbes left before I could submit it.”

  “Where’s the letter now?” Phillips puffed and looked at the smoke drifting into the overhead. “I tore it up after we did that emergency startup of the reactor, Skipper.” Phillips looked at Walt Hornick, the slightest hint of a smirk on his face. “So how do you feel about this patrol?”

  “I’m fully committed to the ship’s mission.”

  “And how does your engineering plant relate to that mission, Eng?”

  “Sir, we’re a steam-making service. You want RPM, we’re in business to give it to you.”

  “Then I want to tell you about a problem I have.” Phillips withdrew his Writepad computer from his shirt pocket and put it on the surface of the dinette table’s checkered oilskin tablecloth. He clicked into the software, finally displaying a small chart of the northwest Pacific, looking down on the earth as if from low orbit. “This is our position.” A small dot pulsed brightly east of the Kamchatka peninsula.

  “This is where we need to get to, here east of Hokkaido Island at latitude forty-four north. By the book that’s thirty hours away. I did my part by ignoring the regs to come to periscope depth every eight hours, so for the next twenty-six hours I’ll continue deep. I’m only allowed to ignore the PD requirements if I’m under the icecap. But I’m willing to risk the creeping nav errors in the inertial system to get there faster. It might be a stupid decision—it’s deep out here, but I could still hit a submerged peak at the Kuril Island Ridge as we cross the fiftieth parallel. But here’s the situation, Eng, I won’t lie to you. Admiral Pacino’s going into the Oparea with just a couple of submarines and he’s going to try to duke it out with the whole Maritime Self Defense Force’s Destinys.”

  “You know that for a fact, sir?”

  “We got an intel brief at the last periscope depth. Pacino called for our position and everyone else’s and ordered the initial task force of subs into the Oparea. Only seven ships, not counting the Pasadena in the Sea of Japan. Which means he needs some serious help.”

  “Wow.”

  “Which means I need to deliver Piranha into the Oparea now, not twenty-six hours from now. So, do you have any . . recommendations, Eng?” Hornick had come a long way since Phillips had arrived at Electric Boat. He smiled slightly, his eyes slits against the smoke of his cigar clenched between his teeth. “As a matter of fact I’ve been working up something for you.

  Skipper. I think I can do better than the forty-three knots we’re doing now. We’re seeing a lot of drag from the Vortex tubes out there in the potential flow field around the hull. But we have a hell of a lot of unused reactor power. I did some research into the design calculations of the power train, from the propulsor to the thrust bearing through the reduction gears to the main engine rotors and casing, including the journal bearings. I followed the design upstream through the steam headers to the steam generators, and back the other way through the condensate system, looking at pumps and maximum flow rates. The steam generators’ ability to put out dry steam at rates greater than designed was catalogued in the files, and I took it back into the main coolant loop to the core, looked at core metal temperatures and control rod binding at this age in core life.” Phillips hadn’t the slightest idea what Hornick was talking about. He had just asked him what time it was, and Hornick was building him a watch. “And?”

  “And, sir, I found out that the power plant is designed for conditions at the end of its life, thirty years from now, when the core is full of fission-product poisons, the metal is neutron embrittled, the steam pipes have some slight stress corrosion cracks, the condensers have tube leaks, the feed pumps have seal leaks, the main coolant piping is slightly clogged with corrosion products, the steam generators have lost 5 percent of their tubes and the generator’s chevron moisture traps are eroded and half gone. So that running the ship at 100 percent reactor power will be safe thirty years from now, the designers limited us up front.”

  “So, are you saying you have some kind of, what? Hidden reserves of power?”

  “Sir, by
my calculations we could take the core to 200 percent power with some modifications authorized by you.”

  “Like what?”

  “I can run in battle-short mode long enough to reset the trip points for the nuclear instruments. That way the plant won’t trip out until it sees 230 percent power. We’ll be raising average coolant temperatures to get better power from the steam, which isn’t all that safe but it will work. Also, I’ll have to restrict access to the aft compartment, we’ll have much higher radiation readings.”

  “Will we have permanent damage to the core?”

  “Yes, sir,” Hornick said as if it were obvious. “We’ll have some slight fuel-to-coolant leaks, fuel-element failures, and main coolant radioactivity will escalate by a factor of ten to twenty. You won’t be able to walk through the tunnel without your hair standing on end. And when this mission is over we’ll have to shitcan the reactor and decontaminate the entire reactor compartment and every piping system inside it. Other than that, nothing should break. We’ll be able to double thermal power going to the turbines.”

  “How does all that relate to velocity?”

  “Well, sir, doubling shaft horsepower won’t double ship speed. With parasitic drag, to double velocity would require you to quadruple your power. So by doubling power we’ll only have 41 percent more speed. That’s about sixty-one knots.”

  “You’re kidding me, Eng.”

  “We won’t know till I crank it, sir, but hell, I say go for it.”

  “Admiral Rickover will spin in his grave.” The father of the nuclear navy, Phillips knew, was such a stickler for reactor safety that he would probably haunt the ship. “Sir, his tomb was empty three days after he died.” Phillips laughed. “Okay, Eng. What the hell order do I give you to make all this happen?”