Phoenix Sub Zero

“Tawkidi gave the orders to the officers seated at the weapon panels, then looked at Sharef. “You think we should use our only evasion device?”

At that moment Ahmed and General Sihoud walked into the room.

“Warm up the Dash Five evasion unit,” Sharef said, looking at the visitors. “We need it.”

USS AUGUSTA

Daminski concentrated on bearing one one zero, the selected spherical array broadband beam. The sounds of white noise were piped into his earphones, the sounds of the ocean a slushy mix of rushing sounds from the waves, distant schools of dolphins, hissing from shrimp, the rumble of ocean floor and perhaps Daminski’s inner ear itself, the noise from the sea much like the inside of a conch shell held to the skull. He was about to rip the earphones off for a few moments when his shoulder was tapped.

The radioman of the watch stood behind Daminski’s high-backed seat holding a clipboard. “Your draft contact message, Captain. O.O.D said you wanted to load a message into a slot buoy.” slot was shorthand for submarine-launched one-way transmitter, a baseball-bat-sized buoy that could be put out of a signal ejector, float to the surface and transmit a UHF message to the satellite without requiring the sub to come up to periscope depth.

Daminski knew this was cheating but so be it. He had been ordered to send a detailed contact report when he detected the Destiny. Before the encounter the Pentagon wanted to know that Destiny’s location had been pinpointed and reported so that if anything went wrong, they would know where to send the next unit to sink the UIF submarine.

Orders to transmit were an incredible burden on a submarine trying to sneak up on an adversarial contact. Transmitting a contact report meant going up to periscope depth in the middle of a shipping lane, putting up the bigmouth antenna, and transmitting a message that might take five minutes to write, confirming the position of contact and all the other bullshit data the sidelines officers wanted: signal-to-noise ratio, first detected frequency, target bearing and range, target course and speed, on and on. The ship would take needless minutes and make unnecessary noise ascending to periscope depth, transmitting, and descending again before the attack could be started.

But then, orders were orders, which was why Daminski had decided to cheat, writing a contact report in advance, anticipating contact and preloading the message in a slot buoy that he could launch from test depth with no more interruption of the attack business than the push of a button, then get on with sinking the UIF submarine. After all, the only thing the topside sailors really needed was the information that

Augusta had contact at the approximate position and that the attack was underway. Anything else they could find out when it was over.

Daminski scratched a few lines on the clipboard:

DATE/TIME: TRANSMISSION LOG AT DETECTION OF UHF BUOY

FLASH FLASH FLASH FLASH FLASH FLASH PLASH FLASH

FM USS AUGUSTA SSN-763

TO CINCNAVFORCEMED

SUBJ CONTACT REPORT

SCI/TOP SECRET — EARLY RETIREMENT

//BT//

1. CONTACT REPORT FOLLOWS.

2. POSITION APPROXIMATE IN STRAIT OF SICILY LATITUDE NOVEMBER THREE SEVEN DEGREES ONE THREE MINUTES LONGITUDE ECHO ONE ONE DEGREES TWO ONE MINUTES, MODIFIED BY POSITION OF UHF BUOY.

3. COMMENCING ATTACK.

4. FURTHER DETAILS TO FOLLOW.

//BT//

Daminski reread the message. He especially liked “commencing attack.”

“Show it to the officer of the deck, then code it into the slot buoy. I want that buoy loaded in the signal ejector in five minutes.”

“Aye, sir.” The radioman took the clipboard and vanished.

Daminski strapped his earphones back on and turned to the console. He was interrupted again, this time by Chief Hillsworth.

“Captain, I think you’d better check this,” he said, punching keys on

Daminski’s touch pad. The lower waterfall display of the broadband spectrum blinked out, replaced by several graphs of sound intensity against frequency. The graph with 154 hertz in the center looked like a child’s sketch of twin peaks.

“A doublet,” Daminski said, “right where the old SPL said it would be, minus one cycle. Good thing we opened the gates, right. Chief?”

“We’d have found it anyway, Cap’n.”

As the men watched, the twin hills on the graph grew in height, the hills becoming mountains, then columns, then spikes. No fish or natural phenomena made frequencies that pure. The tonals were manmade. It was a machine. A submarine.

“Nice nipple erections on that freak bucket, eh. Chief?”