Phoenix Sub Zero

“Sir, the Destiny-class — do we know the actual name of this particular ship? The Moslems don’t call it the Destiny, do they? And what do we know about the ship’s captain?

How will he react when we approach him? What does the intelligence say?”

“We don’t have data that specific—”

“Those are bullshit questions, Fernandez,” Daminski’s voice boomed. “The answer is it doesn’t matter who the hell the captain is or what the hell they call their damned ship.

Our job is to put it on the bottom.” Daminski looked at the officers. “Come on, let’s get our stuff together here. Go on, please, Mr. Turner.”

Turner continued, finishing with the intelligence they did have about the ship — submerged tonnage, speed, depth capability.

After another quarter-hour Turner finished and looked at Daminski.

“Anything to add, sir?”

“Just a couple things, Mr. Turner.” Daminski stretched and snapped his fingers for a cup of coffee. The engineer, tall lanky Mark Berghoffer, the Pennsylvania Dutch farmboy with the foghorn voice, leaped up, grabbed an Augusta coffee mug from the rack, splashed the hot brew into it and placed it before the captain. Daminski slurped loudly, then: “Here’s how I see it, guys. Feel free to jump in if I’m wrong. I think we can take this dude by sneaking up on him. Those big hull arrays will leave a hell of a baffle area in his stern, and the surface flow will be noisy from the propulsor. The ship itself is damned good, but I’m betting the crew is unfamiliar with their platform and they’re poorly trained. We’ve been at sea a hell of a lot more in the last six months than these people. Once we get a sniff of this guy we’re ordered to do a situation report. I’ll preload the damned thing in a radio buoy and poop it out the signal ejector so I don’t have to go to periscope depth in the middle of the approach. Then I’ll put out a horizontal salvo of four Mark 50s, wait for the detonations, then we go on to Naples for a night of beer, Italian food, and Italian women. Any questions?”

There were none. The briefing broke up. Daminski sat in the end seat for some time, finishing his coffee, staring at the intelligence profile of the Destiny-class, and thinking about fernandez’s questions: who was the Destiny’s captain?

And what the hell did they call the ship? And what would Destiny’s captain do if he detected their approach? Questions for which Daminski had no answers, and felt he should have.

ARLINGTON, VIRGINIA

PENTAGON E-RING

JOINT STAFF SPECIAL COMPARTMENTED FACILITY

Admiral Donchez glared at the air force security guard at the fortified entrance to the joint-staff headquarters. Even the navy’s number one admiral had to produce his ID card, his Pentagon bar-coded SCIF-access card, and have the photo-images on the cards compared to his face by two on-watch sentries before he could gain access. At last the sentries admitted Donchez into the maze of corridors leading to a large briefing room. Before Congress had mandated this joint service fever, this room had been the War Room, the information presentation facility for presidents and cabinet members and congressmen and generals. Now that the post-cold-war world’s threats were different, the joint staff had gutted and remodeled the room, making it look more like a movie set than the old functional war room. The joint staff briefing room was large but so packed with computer consoles as to seem cramped except for the table in the center of the room. The black table was ten feet wide and sixty feet long, the surface illuminated by a hanging contraption in the shape of a large racetrack shining fluorescent light down on the slick marble surface. The room’s north and south walls were electronic wall charts, their images driven by the computer consoles on the east and west walls. Off to the side of the large briefing table was a smaller table, seating only twelve, where the chairman of the Joint Chiefs liked to have his meetings. The entire facility was a SCIF, special compartmented information facility, built to elaborate specifications that attempted to prevent eavesdropping. These included the prohibition against windows or ventilation ducts leading to the rest of the building; the computer consoles were networked only with each other and to a barrier computer. Only the barrier computer was allowed to communicate with the outside world through sanitized phone lines and data cables. The barrier then scanned incoming data to ensure that it was virus-free. A second computer system was devoted solely to monitoring the barrier, making sure its integrity was maintained. Every phone in the room was a secure-voice unit, all passing through the modules of the barrier computer.