Phoenix Sub Zero

Pacino regarded Stevens, the older man gray at the temples, his hair combed back swoopingly up over his ears and under the hardhat. Stevens was an EDO, engineering-duty type, one of the crack whiz kids at MIT in the naval architecture program when Pacino was there trying to start his master’s work, Stevens worldly and wise when Pacino was still trying to find the bathroom. Pacino wondered how much he could tell Stevens, then decided that in spite of security, if the shipyard commander knew what was up he might get the ship out faster, or better.

“You heard about Augusta!”

Stevens expression changed in a flash. “Rocket Ron.

Yeah, I heard. The yard that did him last. New Hampshire, is standing by. Shipyard commander might get his chops busted. Rumor has it that it wasn’t a weapon problem. Some sort of depth-control trouble from the depth-indication panel they put in last spring. From what I heard, the depth indicator showed him shallow when he was deep and he plowed into the bottom and ripped open the hull.”

“Emmitt. Rocket didn’t go down from a faulty depth gauge. And the reason

Seawolf is going out in such a hurry is because of Rocket Ron. We’re going to take care of the problem that put him on the bottom.”

As the calls from the admiral rang in Stevens’s head, the urgency to abandon the dock work was now apparent.

“Jesus. Patch, listen, I … we’ll have you out of here in no time. Buttoned up and good as new. Better. We’ll be flooding the dock by Tuesday.”

“Emmitt, I know I shouldn’t even have to say this, but I will anyway. This conversation never happened.”

“Absolutely.” Stevens had already turned to get the yard forces mobilized.

“And, Emmitt.” Stevens turned. “We flood the dock tomorrow at sundown. By Tuesday it may be too late.”

“That’s impossible.”

Pacino just stared.

“Tomorrow. Right. COMSUBLANT says Tuesday, Pacino says Sunday. Fine, Patch, you got it.”

Fifteen minutes later the shipyard workers appeared from nowhere, swarming over the vessel. Ten-story-tall cranes on wide rail tracks rolled up, their alert horns wailing in the dawn. The dock loudspeaker blared. Workers in the dock below shouted at each other. Pacino, satisfied, nodded and walked to the gangway.

WESTERN MEDITERRANEAN

STRAIT OF GIBRALTAR

USS PHOENIX

The western basin of the Mediterranean narrowed to a corridor eighty miles wide and 200 miles long at the entrance to the strait at Gibraltar where southwestern Spain reached out but did not quite reach Tangier in Morocco. The basin looked like the head of a seahorse — at least, it did after one had stared at the chart long enough — the island of forming the horse’s eye, Gibraltar forming the point of its nose. The long-pointed snout, the narrow corridor, was filled with shipping, now mostly military cargo vessels transporting supplies to the Coalition Third Armed Force along the Atlas Mountain Front in northern Algeria. Lurking beneath the surface ten miles east of Gibraltar was the U.S. nuclear submarine Phoenix, waiting in search of the Destiny-class submarine. Farther to the east, two U.S. destroyers cruised the blue water, both streaming towed array sonar systems, both hearing nothing. Between the destroyers and the Phoenix four Orion P-3 patrol turboprops flew back and forth from Barcelona to Algiers, laying a barrier of passive listening sonar buoys, monitoring the buoys for manmade noise and doing low flyovers with the magnetic anomaly detectors energized, seeking the Destiny.

Farther east, just west of the islands of Sardinia and Corsica, Viking S-3 carrier-based jets cruised the sea, dropping their own sonobuoys and. streaming their own MAD probes. So far all forces had come up with exactly nothing. It was as if the Destiny sub marine had dissolved in the saltwater after her attack on the Augusta.

At her barrier search point. Phoenix was sailing slowly east at two knots, bare steerage way. The Flight I Los Angeles-class submarine was quite similar to Augusta, so much so that a civilian might wander the ship for hours without being able to tell the difference. But Phoenix, commissioned back in 1981, was thirteen years older than the Improved-Los Angeles-class submarine Augusta, and since she was from the original flight of SSNS in the 688 class, she had no vertical launching tubes up forward for the Javelin cruise missiles and her depth-control planes were mounted on the sail while Augusta’s had been installed for ward as bowplanes. With her older BQQ-5D sonar system and outdated CCS Mark II firecontrol system. Phoenix was practically in a different class than the Augusta with her BSY-1 coordinated combat system. In addition, Augusta had had advanced technology-quieting, making her noise signature a small fraction of Phoenix’s. But even though Phoenix was an old girl, she was still, in the hands of Kane’s crew, capable and formidable, as long as she would never be called on to fight an Improved-L.A.-class.