Attack of the Seawolf

Pacino couldn’t help feeling excited as he craned his neck to see the large dark shape ahead in the water next to the pier. When the car stopped, Pacino opened his door and stepped out, seeing the breathtaking size of the monstrous submarine lying in the water, waiting for him. The ship lay tied up at the end of the pier, her bow toward Pacino, her stern pointing away toward the waters of the channel.

Donchez joined him on the pier.

“What do you think of her, Mikey?”

The ship was similar in lines to a 688 Los Angeles class submarine, but the scale seemed blown up. Her diameter was so big that the deck appeared almost flat at the crown instead of curving and cylindrical.

The sheer sides of the sail jutted straight out of the deck, unadorned by fair water planes. The ship seemed to extend to the vanishing point; it had to be nearly three hundred and fifty feet long, Pacino thought. The fairing for the towed array extended longitudinally aft from the leading edge of the sail to the stern. The sail had a triangular fillet at the forward edge where it attached to the hull. The rudder protruded from the water far aft of the point where the water lapped the aft hull. Forward of the sail a large hatch was open, and further forward the hull sloped more steeply to the water, the bulbous bow rounder and broader than Devilfish’s. Eight doubled-up lines held the ship to the pier. Amidships, a gangway connected the ship to the concrete jetty. There were no shore power cables on the ship but a heavy gantry with thick cables had been retracted aft near the rudder. They must be steaming the engine room Pacino figured.

Pacino realized Donchez had been waiting for an answer.

“She’ll do, Admiral,” he said, trying to keep his voice flat. But Donchez must have seen through him.

“Come on, Mikey. I’ll give you the rundown up here. I think you’ll find this crew will be motivated to support you, Mikey. I had my aide call the acting captain from the airport while we were on the way in — he gave him a few stories about you.”

“Great. All I need is for this crew to know I got my last command shot out from under me.”

“All he told them was what happened to the other guy, and that you got the Navy Cross.”

“Whatever. Tell me about this ship, Admiral. Give me her secrets.”

Donchez smiled.

“Seawolf displaces 9,150 tons submerged.

She’s forty-two feet in diameter — that’s why the pier is new. Her draft is so deep they had to dredge the channel so she could get out.”

“Forty-two feet. Unbelievable.”

“She’s 326 feet long from her sonar sphere to her propulsor. No screw, by the way. She’s got a water turbine propulsor. Much quieter. Very fast, although her acceleration is just a bit off, but that propulsor doesn’t cavitate like a screw, so you can give her full throttle and she’ll come up to speed quiet as a church mouse. Her test depth is 2,000 feet. Her hull has an anechoic coating, tiles made of foam that absorb active sonar pulses, kind of like a Stealth fighter’s radar absorptive material. She’ll do forty-five knots at one hundred percent power, more if you take her into the red. She has 52,000 shaft horsepower, and get this-this boat is quieter going full out than a Los Angeles sub at all-stop.”

“Fifty-two-thousand shaft horsepower, and you’re telling me I’ll be quieter at all-ahead flank than Sean’s boat is hovering?”

“Right. Did I tell you the story of her acoustic tests? She was supposed to run through the instrumented sonar array at the Bahamas acoustic test site, and the DynaCorp crew radioed her asking what she was waiting for, that she was behind schedule. Seawolf radioed back that she had already gone through the test area. DynaCorp called back and said that was impossible-they hadn’t heard anything. Fact is, when they analyzed the tapes, the only way they could determine that the ship had passed through the sonar range was that a hole of quietness went by — during her run the ocean’s noise actually disappeared for a moment to be replaced by total quiet. When the boat moved on, the ocean noise returned. This ship is so damned quiet it is actually an acoustic hole in the ocean. And that ain’t all. Her reactor’s coolant system uses natural circulation up to fifty percent power, no circulation pumps. That’ll get you up to thirty-three knots with no pumps. The loudest machinery aboard, and we don’t need it until we go over thirty-three knots. Not only that, but we’ve completely rethought the engine room layout. The maneuvering reactor control room is aft at the shaft seals, where it’s nice and cool. It’s in a special compartment so that even if there’s a major steam leak, the maneuvering crew has a full thirty seconds to isolate it remotely. Makes more sense than having the crew roasted.”

“What else? You’re a regular encyclopedia, Admiral.”