Phoenix Sub Zero

Lieutenant Commander Tom Schramford, U.S. Merchant Marine Academy Class of ‘84, now chief engineer of the USS Phoenix and this watch’s officer of the deck, barked the order to the helmsman to put on ten degrees right rudder and order up all ahead two thirds and steady on course south.

Satisfied that the ship was turning, Schramford picked up a phone mounted on the overhead at the periscope platform and pressed a toggle switch. Fifteen feet forward, the buzzer rang next to Captain Kane’s rack.

Kane’s eyes opened and he reached for the phone beside his rack, the buzzing noise from the conn halting as he answered.

“Captain.”

Tom Schramford’s voice seemed close in his ear; Kane could almost feel the engineer’s breath against the side of his head, whistling into his ear as the younger officer said the dozen words that pumped adrenaline into Kane’s system and catapulted him from the rack: “Sir, we’ve got a submerged contact bearing east. You’d better come to control.”

“Man silent battle stations,” Kane said. “Spin up the idle Mark 50s.” He hung up on Schramford’s acknowledgement.

He slid into his poopysuit in one smooth motion, slipping his feet into docksiders left at the foot of the rack, tightening his belt as he pulled a brush through his hair and splashed a handful of water on his face from the tiny basin under the mirror on the bulkhead, toweling off and tossing the towel into the sink before going through the door to control. He could feel the dozen pairs of eyes on him, the men in the section tracking team looking for decisions.

He stepped up on the periscope platform, scanned the room for data, simultaneously listening to Schramford’s report.

He took in the ship’s position in the channel, the bearing and bearing rate to the contact, the lack of a 154-hertz tonal — odd — and the faint broadband detect on a pump jet propulsor. After a moment, while the battle stations crew manned the attack-center consoles of the CCS Mark II firecontrol system and the manual plots, Kane stepped into the portal to sonar and looked in on Sanderson. The senior chief nodded at Kane and turned back to his console. Kane scanned the consoles, from Sanderson’s going forward, seeing for himself that no tonals were appearing in the frequency gates, just the intermittent broadband streak on the waterfall display from the array in the nose cone.

Schramford tapped him on the shoulder. “Captain, battle stations are manned. We’ve been steady on course south for almost three minutes. The bearing rate is in, and the Mark II, Ekelund calculation and Hewlett-Packard all agree — range to the contact is 64,000 yards.”

“What? That’s over thirty miles. That’s got to be a record for a submerged broadband detect with no tonals … Target course?”

“Two seven zero. He’s driving due west for the strait.”

“What’s the firecontrol speed?”

“It’s out of line, sir. We must need another leg.”

“Why?”

“His speed is showing up as forty knots. Too high for the Destiny without him making a lot more noise and sending out a few tonals. We’re just getting a lousy speed solution with the data this intermittent and the contact that distant.” “Wait a minute,” Kane said, looking over the Pos Two operator of the Mark II console. The screen’s dots — FIDUS, fixed interval data units, sent over electronically from the BQQ-5 sonar — were lining up straight as a ruler. Kane reached out for the speed knob on the board beneath the screen and dialed in a more reasonable target speed, down to fifteen knots. The dot stack, the neat vertical line, skewed into a messy “>” sign, the bottom portion of the data representing the leg when the ship was on course north, the top portion after the maneuver, the data during the maneuver useless and out of alignment. The target motion analysis, the TMA, could have been done poorly but one maneuver had been north, the second south, with the target coming in from the east — supposedly yielding an ideal solution that should have been good enough to fire on and score an easy hit.

Kane dialed the speed higher without looking at the target-speed readout. He turned the knob until the dot stack was back in line, going nearly vertical. The target speed readout Said 41.4 KNOTS.

“That’s no submarine,” Kane said, bolting for the door to sonar.

“What?” Schramford stared after him.

Kane slid the curtain aside and looked into Senior Chief Sanderson’s eyes, ready to tell him the target was going too fast, too silently to be a submarine. Sanderson’s mouth was already open to speak. “Cap’n, we’re doing TMA on a fucking torpedo!”

Chapter 16 Sunday, 29 December

STRAIT OF GIBRALTAR

Kane turned and shouted to the helmsman.

“Right full rudder, all ahead flank, steady course west!”

He made the periscope stand in three big steps, grabbed the microphone and tried to keep his voice level. “Maneuvering, Conn, cavitate.”

“CAVITATE, CONN, MANEUVERING, AYE,” the overhead speaker replied.