Phoenix Sub Zero

Commander Ron Daminski, never one to sit on the sidelines, had been camped out in sonar ever since arrival at the strait. Sonar chief Bruce Hillsworth, clad in his Royal Navy sweater with the embroidered submarine dolphins on the breast, had grimaced in disgust, finally putting the intruder to work. Daminski sat at the forward console of the four panels, wearing a set of headphones, his hands resting near a touch keypad. Hillsworth, also wearing headphones, hovered over him, directing Daminski to flip through the computer displays, occasionally having Daminski adjust the cursor ball to a particular bearing to listen to the broadband noise. The other three display consoles of the BSY-1 sonar system showed graphs of noise intensity versus frequency, searching through the frequency gates for the expected tonals of the Destiny-class target. Chief Hillsworth scanned the frequency buckets, allowing each frequency search to integrate over five minutes, more if there were a spiking frequency, but so far every tonal gate had shown nothing but random noise.

The ocean around them was empty.

Daminski looked at the broadband display as a bright line traced its way down the short-time screen. He squinted at the trace, moving his hand over the cursor ball, moving the spherical array beam to the bearing of the trace. When the cursor line was superimposed over the trace, Daminski shut his eyes and listened.

All he could hear was the frantic sound of the snapping of shrimp. He turned and looked at Hillsworth, face wrinkled in frustration.

“Just a bunch of fish getting it on.”

“Don’t worry, Cap’n. He’ll come. And when he does, we’ll hear him.”

“Let’s hope we hear him before he hears us,” Daminski said, returning to his sonar search.

CNFS HEGIRA

The normally open control room was jammed with the majority of the ship’s officers. The room was dominated by the circular periscope platform with the observation seat that could rotate on a circular track during periscope exposure.

Now at depth, the control seat was folded down into a compact box with a cushion on top, the box serving as the captain’s command seat.

Commodore Sharef had called battle stations for the passage through the strait, bringing twelve men into the packed room. He stood at the computer chart display table. He was the battle stations attack officer, as tradition demanded. First officer al-Kunis stood next to him, acting as the battle coordinator, responsible for the functioning of the entire team.

On the periscope stand was Commander Omar Tawkidi, the navigator and third in command, who was stationed as deck officer. Lieutenant Commander Aby Haddad, the ship’s senior watch officer, was the junior deck officer. Reporting to the four senior officers were the main functions of weapons control, ship control, reactor control, and sensor control. At each of the stations two officers sat at the Second Captain console displays, except at sensor control, where four officers scanned the computer analyzed data coming in from the large hull arrays and the gyrpstabilized linear towed array.

As the ship approached the mouth of the strait Commodore Sharef ordered the ship to dead slow ahead, just enough velocity to keep the towed array from dragging. He and al-Kunis took up positions in the sensor-control corner, watching the displays of the sonar system.

“Anything?” Sharef asked Sublieutenant al-Maari, the sensor-control officer at one of the displays. The sublieutenant turned toward Sharef, the young man’s earphones half-removed from his right ear. He shook his head and returned to his display.

“Deck officer, put in a Second Captain delouse.”

“Yes, sir,” Tawkidi said, turning to the ship-control console.

“Ship control, ten clicks and prepare for a delouse. Reactor control?”

“Reactor is ready,” the mechanical officer reported.

“Ten clicks,” the ship-control officer reported.

“Engine stop. Reactor control, commence delouse,” Tawkidi called.

The term delouse was handed down from old Soviet tactics, which the UIP’s Combined Naval Force had inherited with the Victor III submarine acquisitions. It referred to the Russian tactic of an attack submarine escorting a ballistic-missile submarine out of port. To ensure that no lurking American attack submarines were trailing the ballistic-missile ship, the Russian attack-escort sub would perform a detailed antisubmarine search of the sea in the vicinity of the ballistic-missile ship, an attempt to “delouse” her. The tactic had lived on in the Destiny-class, in which the Yokogawa Second Captain computer was able to perform a self-delouse by shutting down the entire propulsion plant, allowing the sonar systems to hear unimpeded by own-ship’s noise.