Phoenix Sub Zero

“Keep listening for this asshole. Chief.”

“As ever, sir,” Hillsworth said, strapping his headset back on.

Daminski left sonar, shutting the door gently this time, and walked down the passageway to the amidships ladder, to the middle level. He ducked into the wardroom, which was packed with the ship’s officers, took his place at the head seat at the leather-covered table and waved at the navigator and operations officer. Lieutenant Commander Tim Turner, to begin the briefing.

Turner was of medium height, his most noticeable feature his oddly coifed hair — odd for a thirty-three-year-old— moussed nearly vertically from his forehead in imitation of a current rock star. His face made him look ten years younger than he was, but the baby face and outgoing, amiable personality covered an explosive temper. The only time the Augusta crew had seen evidence of that temper was when Daminski had pushed him too far, yelling in the lieutenant commander’s face over a problem with the routing of the radio messages. Turner had blown up, telling Daminski where he could shove the message board. Surprisingly, Daminski had backed off, apologized, and walked away. It almost seemed Daminski had been deliberately trying to get Turner to lose control, just to see where that boundary was for future reference. Ever since then the two men had gotten along very well.

“Good afternoon, gentlemen,” Turner said. “This briefing is SCI top secret, code name: Early Retirement. Everybody cleared for this, Jamie?”

“Yes sir,” the communications officer said, checking the room’s attendees against his clearance list.

“Okay. A few hours ago we received a flash transmission to intercept the United Islamic Front Destiny-class submarine, reported to be in this area.” Turner pointed to a chart he’d taped to the wall, showing an ellipse drawn in the eastern Mediterranean basin between Cyprus and Crete. “Our mission once we detect and classify the contact is twofold.

First, we transmit a message to the CINC that the Destiny is there. Then,” Turner said, “we sink it.” Turner tapped the chart again. “We’re heading out at flank speed. In another two hours we’ll slow to ten knots to lower our own ship’s noise to do a large area sonar search. The handouts Jamie’s passing to you are the details of the sonar search-plan with the Destiny’s tonals and SPL results. Also in the handout is a print of the Destiny-class nuclear submarine.”

Daminski flipped past the sonar search-plan to the blueprint of the enemy submarine. The ship was odd-looking to an American submariner’s eyes. It looked like a fat torpedo, rounded at the bow, cylindrical over its length with an abrupt tapered stern, the aft end having the strange X-tail rudder/stern plane combination with the even stranger ducted propulsor water turbine instead of a screw. But the strangest part of the ship was the sail, or fin, as the UIF forces called it. The fin height was nearly the same as the diameter of the hull, the structure poking up thirty-five feet.

“As you can see, this vessel is radically different from our own designs, and a major departure from Russian designs as well.” Turner was lecturing now and obviously enjoying it.

“Unlike our own philosophy, there is no spherical or bow sonar array. The bow is taken up with torpedo tubes like a World War II boat. The tubes are actually outside the pressure hull, containing canned weapons. So the tubes are one-shot deals and there’s no reloading and no reload machinery — makes the ship simpler and lighter with fewer pressure-hull penetrations. It’s got thirteen large-bore hundred-centimeter tubes and eight small-bore fifty-three centimeter tubes. Even with no reload Destiny can kill you twenty-one times over.

“This ship is a double-hull vessel, great for taking torpedo hits without getting hurt. Plus, the inner hull is a simple cylindrical elliptical-headed pressure vessel. They’ve minimized hull diameter, the main drawback to a double-hull ship, by making ballast spaces fore and aft of the pressure hull. And get this, gents: the pressure hull with its four compartments has only one of them manned. The reactor and steam plants are so. automated that they run everything from the control room up front under the fin. There’s no shaft penetration to the hull because the propulsor is turned by an oil-enclosed AC motor — only electrical cables penetrate the hull. The motor is damned quiet, as is the low-speed propulsor.

The reactor is liquid metal cooled with MHD pumps— whisper quiet, and there’s no reduction gearing since it’s electric drive. The turbine generators are reported to be screamers at a dual frequency at about 155 hertz. For sensors the ship has huge hull sonar arrays, damn near covering the whole hull. Her ears are a lot bigger than ours, which sort of makes up for the lack of a spherical array up forward.”

Jamie Fernandez, the communications officer, raised his hand. Turner recognized the young ensign.