Phoenix Sub Zero

Pacino leaned on the wooden handrail of the Diamond and stared out at the shimmering blue-green sea; with the sun rising over the Bahamas to the east, the sleeping Andros Island behind him to the west, the scene could have been pictured in a travel agent’s vacation brochure. The Tongue of the Ocean autec submarine test range was one of the few submarine facilities in the world with such splendor, but it had been chosen for advantages unrelated to the beaches and the transparent Bahamian waters. The facility had been chosen because it was a bathtub of deep water surrounded by a ledge of shallows and islands — the shallows ensured that no prowling opposition submarines could spy on the tests, yet the tongue, the bathtub of deep water, was sufficiently broad that sub-versus-sub exercises could be held without fear of running out of room. The entire bathtub was instrumented with a three-dimensional sonar system linked to a Dynacorp Frame 90 supercomputer capable of immense data storage and rapid processing. Nearby Andros Island was worthless as a resort because, except for Andros Town, it was a rock resembling the surface of the moon, if the moon had scrubby undergrowth. On the shore facing east toward Tongue of the Ocean, Dynacorp’s Sound Surveillance Systems subsidiary had set up a compound, a small town housing the technicians, naval officers, engineers, scientists, and salvage divers needed to run the test facility. Other than a weekly plane from Palm Beach, the island was isolated from the world, which the Navy saw as another benefit. Pacino had spent two nights on the Dynacorp compound with nothing to do but drink in the prefab building used as an officers’ club. He was glad to see the test finally get underway; it was time to get back to the Seawolf. There was much to do and little time to do it, including getting the ship out of the drydock and ready for the first manned live firing of the Vortex missiles.

And to turn over command of the ship to her next captain, he reminded himself, a thought he did not want to face.

Giving up Seawolf would feel like giving up his son … “Captain Pacino,” Dr. Rebman’s voice called, “you might want to see this from inside.”

In a covered deck space behind the pilothouse a command center had been rigged in what had been the crew’s mess.

Behind Pacino, through several large windows installed in the bulkhead, a dozen men could be seen peering into eight oversized video monitors. Pacino walked into the space, almost immediately breaking into a sweat, the air conditioning inadequate to keep up with the men and the video screens and the heat of the Caribbean sun. On the forward bulkhead, four of the monitors showed the interior of the gutted target submarine Bonefish, one camera in the rear of the boat pointing forward, another forward pointing aft, one showing the topside deck looking aft toward the conning tower, one below the deck level; the only thing discernible inside the empty boat were the strings of temporary lights and the pallet of batteries that powered them. Every bulkhead, console, valve, pipe, and cable had been removed from the old boat so that the hull could be seen. Bonefish had no engines but did have a rudimentary depth-control system. Her forward motion would be controlled by a tug with a cable to Bonefish’s bow, the tugboat expendable and under command from the Diamond. The video signals from the cameras were obtained remotely in the Diamond’s control space using telemetry.

The camera’s video data was transmitted along fiber-optic lines to a telemetry module inside the remote-controlled tugboat. The cameras would roll aboard the Bonefish even after missile detonation and the sub was on her way to the bottom.

The scientists intended to study how the ship sank, what the hole looked like, how the ship died when the Vortex hit it, all in an attempt to judge the effectiveness of the warhead.

The remains of the hull would be salvaged and evaluated by materials experts. The 3D sonar data would be evaluated and presented, showing the path of the weapon, whether the unit had been stable after launch, whether its trajectory to the target had been straight and controlled or serpentine and reckless.

Not all the data was coming from the target. The firing ship was also under the eyeballs of the Dynacorp technicians.

Two of the screens showed flickering images of the interior of the