Phoenix Sub Zero

“Sir, the Vortex is still a damn good weapon system,” Pacino said figuring he could afford to be generous. “The problems can be fixed, but it’ll take the next generation of submarine to do it. You’re just ahead of the current technology.”

Donchez waved him off, his face a mask.

“Thanks for coming, Mikey.”

An hour later Donchez’s Falcon jet lifted off National’s southwest runway and headed for Norfolk Naval Air Station. Pacino poured himself a Jack Daniel’s over ice and shut his eyes. He felt badly for Donchez. A man who had been his father’s closest friend and who had played a big part in his own career, a man who had brought him back from deep black despair three years ago after Devilfish went down and put him in command of the Navy’s top-of-the-line attack submarine, the Seawolf.

The whiskey was good, but not good enough to make Pacino feel much better.

Chapter 9 Friday, 27 December

STRAIT OF SICILY

USS AUGUSTA

The ship was rigged for ultraquiet.

The fluorescent-light fixtures throughout the forward half of the ship were switched to red to remind the crew to tread lightly and maintain ship silence. The port side of the steam plant was shut down, including one main engine and the turbine generator as well as a half-dozen pumps serving that half of the propulsion plant. Reactor main coolant pump were running in superslow speed, reduced frequency, barely moving the water through the reactor core. The screw turned at bare steerage way, a mere thirty rpm, giving the ship just enough forward propulsion to maintain submerged depth control.

The watchstanders on duty were wearing headsets, all plugged into ship control phone circuits, while the ship wide PA system was locked out, its use having the adverse potential of being heard outside the hull. Hard-soled shoes were prohibited. The galley was shut down. A tray of cold cuts and a plate of white bread had served for evening rations, although the coffee machines still brewed at full power. Showers were secured. The evaporator, maker of pure water from seawater, was shut down. The ventilation system fans were on slow, the normal bass booming sounds of the ship almost silenced.

Behind the ship the TB-3 thinwire advanced towed array of the AN/BSY-1 Busy One sonar system trailed on a cable a mile-and-a-half long, the noise from the Augusta ahead distant and faint. The towed array’s electronic ears strained for noise, listening for the specific tonal

frequencies expected to be emitted from the Destiny-class submarine predicted by Daminski to transit the gap of the strait at any moment.

While the towed array searched for tonals, the spherical array in the ship’s nose cone, a steel ball fifteen feet in diameter covered with hydrophones, listened to the noise of the ocean, hearing broadband noise just as a human ear would. Backing up the spherical array were six hull arrays, large sets of hydrophones arranged on the skin of the ship, each somewhat disadvantaged by the interference of own-ship’s noise from within the pressure hull but useful all the same.

On the chart table in the cramped control room, the strait took up half of the large table, the illuminated crosshair of light, the “bug,” shining upward onto the chart surface, driven by the table’s servomotors in scale to the ship’s actual motion through the sea. For the last hour the bug had traced a bowtie pattern across the strait, a barrier search. Any shipping coming through the strait would be detected. For the Destiny submarine, the question was not whether it would be heard but whether Augusta would hear Destiny before Destiny heard Augusta — if the Destiny were heading west as Daminski maintained.

In the control room Lieutenant Commander Mark Berghoffer, ship’s engineer, presided as officer of the deck.

He paced the deck of the control room, stopping every few minutes at the chart table to ensure the ship held to the bowtie search pattern, then at the sonar repeater screen above the Position One console of the attack center’s firecontrol system, finally leaning over Ensign Jamie fernandez’s Pos Two screen, a god’s-eye-view of the strait with Augusta in screen center.