Phoenix Sub Zero

Daminski looked at the speed indicator, wondering how he could go faster.

“Off’sa’deck, status of the signal ejectors?”

“Mark 21s loaded, ejectors ready.”

“Launch fore and aft.”

“Aye, sir.”

The two signal ejectors pushed out baseball-bat-sized noisemakers, one of them set to blow a large cloud of bubbles to confuse active sonar, the second programmed to make loud broadband noise, much like that made by the ship’s screw as she plowed through the water at maximum speed.

“Get me the engineering officer of the watch on the JA,” he said to Kristman. Kristman grabbed a phone handset and barked into it, then held it to Daminski. “EOOW, unload the turbine generators and pick up the loads from the battery. Take the mode selector to battleshort, then open the throttles to 150 percent power, you hear me? And take T-ave to five twenty, that’s right. Repeat that back … and listen, be damned sure you don’t lose an AC bus — the last thing I need is to lose a main coolant pump. Do it.”

He handed the phone back to Kristman, who nodded approvingly.

Daminski glared at the speed indicator, which slowly climbed from thirty-eight knots to forty-two. Daminski had given orders that might breach the fuel elements and melt the core, and all he had gotten from it was four lousy knots.

Parasitic drag, he thought abstractly. Daminski climbed the periscope platform and grabbed a sheet of paper from the navigator’s pad, scribbling on it for a few seconds, then pausing. For a few moments he put his hand into his coverall suit and fingered the letter from Myra, then shook his head and finished writing. He looked for Kristman and called the executive officer to the conn periscope platform, away from the men at the attack-center consoles. He pulled the XO close.

“Danny, send for a radioman with a slot buoy. Have him code this in quickly. Load it forward.” Kristman reached for a phone, intercepted the radioman entering control and gave him the paper without reading it. The young radioman left in a hurry.

The next item on his mind was the tubes. He still might be able to get off a counterfire, even without a solution on the target.

“Weps, what’s the status?”

“Sir,” Hackle’s voice seemed higher than usual, with just a suggestion of a tremble. “One and two are dryloaded. Mark 50 power is on, self-checks still in progress. Recommend flooding tubes and opening outer doors.”

“Flood one and two and open the outer doors.” “Sir,” Kristman said, touching Daminski on his shoulder, “we’ll have to slow to shoot the units. Twenty knots, maybe twenty-five.”

“Do you really think they’ll have a problem?” Augusta’s tubes were located far aft of the bow and were canted outward ten degrees, making the torpedoes leave the ship at an angle. At forty-two knots of forward velocity the weapons would get so much side force from the slipstream that they might bend or break. The standard operating procedure declared nonemergency launches be made under twenty knots — like a warshot torpedo launch was ever routine … “You heard about the flank-bell launch from Trepang, didn’t you? One torpedo broke in half. The second one did fine. But those were exercise shots without warheads. You bust a warshot in half, it’ll blow the compartment wide open.”

“Our Arab friends might already have taken care of that. I’m more worried about the health of the torpedoes. A broken Mark 50 won’t kill a target very well.” Daminski faced the attack center. “Weps, what’s the god damned status?”

“Outer doors open one and two, self-checks complete, ready to fire. Except for the solution, sir.”

Daminski leaned over the Pos Two panel and changed the mode from the dot-stacker to line-of-sight, an odd configuration showing two rowboats, one at the bottom representing own-ship, the one at the top the target. Daminski put the bearing of the target due astern at bearing 520, with a range of 20,000 yards, course northwest heading out of the strait.

“There, now you’ve got a solution. Keep that in.”

“Conn, Sonar, we’re getting active sonar from one of the torpedoes.”

“What’s the range gate look like?” The range of a torpedo could be guessed by how often it pinged active sonar. Long ping intervals meant the receiver had to wait to get a return ping over a large distance, rapid pings meant the torpedo needed to wait only seconds for the ping return and was close. The more rapid the pings, the closer the weapon.

“Ping interval is prolonged. Range is probably two thousand to three thousand yards.”

A nautical mile, Daminski thought. He was a mile to a mile and a half ahead of the weapons. He was going forty-two knots. Allowing for a fifty-knot torpedo — no, he’d give it fifty-five knots — that meant he had between four and seven minutes till the torpedoes caught up.