Phoenix Sub Zero

Captain Michael Pacino stepped down the tight ladder to its landing in the gyro control space, jogging left to the door to the torpedo room. In his early forties, slim to the point of gauntness, and tall, Pacino’s six-foot-two height made him duck as he cleared the stair landing. His hair, once black, was streaked with early shades of gray at the temples. His eyes were a penetrating blue-green, the skin around them wrinkled from years of squinting out periscopes. He wore cotton khakis, the only insignia the eagles on his collars, the submariner’s dolphin pin over his left pocket and a round brass capital-ship command pin beneath the pocket button.

His jaw clenched as he walked into the room, making him appear angry or intensely determined.

Pacino looked at the room, fighting back a sense of deja vu, the voices of the past loud in his ears. The USS Piranha was identical to his former command, the Devilfish, every detail matching the memories he had tried hard to forget— the layout, the paint colors, the cramped interior, the poorly arranged control room, even the smell, that odd moisture of oil and diesel exhaust and ozone and sweat, edged with battery acid. Pacino couldn’t help wondering what his Devilfish looked like at that moment — had the old girl imploded from the depths, or had she flooded completely through the open bridge hatch as she sank in 11,000 feet of freezing Arctic Ocean seawater? Had she come to rest on the ocean bottom keel down, or heeled over miserably, or was she perhaps vertical, her tail impaling the sandy bottom like a spear stuck in the ground? The questions were always ringing in his mind, but never more insistently than now that he was in Devil fish’s sister ship, the submarine class leader and prototype, the Piranha, Richard Donchez’s old command from the early seventies.

Somehow it was appropriate to test Donchez’s Vortex missile from the ship that he had once commanded so long ago, back when Pacino’s father—Donchez’s friend and academy roommate—was alive and in command of the Stingray one pier over. The present intruded on Pacino’s thoughts when his tour guide, a tanned lieutenant commander, introduced the weapon-test director.

“Dr. Rebman, this is Captain Michael Pacino, the skipper of the Seawolf, the submarine that will be doing the next Vortex test with a manned submarine when this test is complete. Dr. Rebman is from the Dahlgren weapons lab, he’s the Vortex program manager.”

Rebman was a dark chubby man wearing an expensive gray suit, the clothes seeming out of place in the surroundings of machinery and equipment. He had a mustache and goatee, perhaps an attempt to minimize his fleshy lower face but which made him look rather devilish and ridiculous all at once. When told Pacino commanded the Seawolf, Rebman’s face lit up with delight.

“Captain! Wonderful to make your acquaintance! I was just asking about you and the Seawolf. How is the Vortex tube installation going?”

Pacino shook the limp sweating hand. He did not smile.

“The shipyard is behind schedule,” Pacino said, his voice toneless. “The Vortex tubes have some problems.”

Rebman frowned. “Maybe I should come over after the test firing and take a look. Would you show it to me?” “I suppose,” Pacino said, looking around the torpedo room at the port side where the Vortex missile tube had been installed. The tube had replaced both port torpedo tubes and extended aft from the forward bulkhead to the rear bulkhead of the room and beyond, the laundry space ripped out to accommodate the massive weapon. The sheer size of the missile was one reason Pacino and the crew of the Seawolf disliked the system — just one Vortex tube on the Piranha had taken over the lower level. On Seawolf, the three-tube launching system had hogged most of the starboard torpedo room, taking up space that could have stored twenty-five weapons. Seawolf’s normal fifty-weapon loadout had been cut in half, only to make space for three weapons that tended to blow up their launching tubes. Pacino shook his head, then looked at Rebman, who for the last minute had been giving a passionate lecture on the Mod Bravo and how it would be different and how it would revolutionize submarine, warfare.

“Don’t you agree. Captain, that just one 300-knot underwater missile would be all you’d need to sink an underwater adversary?”

“Dr. Rebman, if you’re really interested in what I think, here it is. We rarely kill a bad guy with just one shot. Combat isn’t like that. And it would be nice, if it’s not asking too much, if the missile could be launched without blowing up the launching platform.” Rebman’s face tightened. “Well, I’m going back to the Diamond. Good luck, Dr. Rebman.”