Phoenix Sub Zero

The deck trembled and heeled over to a fifteen-degree angle with the vortex from the turn, the ship sliding into a violent snap roll, ship control becoming difficult as the angle increased and the rudder began acting like a diving plane.

“Helm, ease your rudder to right five degrees.” The ship still shuddered through the turn, a small sonar display above the helmsman lighting up as the screw cavitated, boiling off sheets of steam as the men in maneuvering opened the throttle wide to one hundred percent reactor power.

“Right five degrees, helm aye, maneuvering answers ahead flank, passing course two six zero, ten degrees from ordered course.” The helmsman then reversed the rudder, fighting the gyrocompass, the deck angling crazily to the other side, then leveling off. “Steady two seven zero, sir.”

“Chief of the watch, call on the phone circuits, torpedo in the water.”

“Aye, sir.”

Kane fought his way through the battle stations bodies to the navigation plot. Schramford had the last range on the torpedo plotted as well as their position. The blue dot denoting the torpedo seemed perilously close in scale to the mouth of the channel.

Kane felt the deck vibrating beneath his feet, the twin main engines putting out maximum speed. The Phoenix had been in a drydock overhaul two years before for a nuclear refueling. The core had been removed through a gaping hull cut and replaced with the General Electric S6G-Core-3. The new core had a thermal output almost twice the power of the Core-2 that had previously powered the ship, the doubling of thermal power seen at the shaft as an increase from 35,000 to 47,400 horsepower. After all that, the additional power was good for only an additional five knots on account of parasitic drag — even if screw power had doubled, the counterforce from skin friction would have quadrupled. But an extra five knots were worth the $10 million investment, Kane thought, when a Nagasaki torpedo — manufactured at Toshiba with the highest quality — was running up your ass.

The speed indicator read out thirty-nine knots. Kane measured on the chart, looked up at Mcdonne, who was rubbing red eyes while strapping on his headset.

“This fish can go seventy knots. Why was it only doing forty?”

“Trying to sneak up on us, or still on its run to enable. Or maybe it hasn’t detected us yet.”

“That’d be a trick, with us flanking it through a snap roll.

If it can’t hear us by now it wouldn’t hear a train wreck.”

Kane pulled on his boom microphone and single earphone and spoke into it. “Sonar, Captain, any changes in the torpedo sound signature?”

“Captain, he’s in the baffles and we’ve lost broadband,” Sanderson’s voice announced, his annoyance clear through the circuitry. “I’m trying to get a look at the end beam of the towed array now and we’ve been listening hard to the caboose unit.”

“Captain, aye.” To Mcdonne: “If he goes forty or forty-one or forty-two knots to our thirty-nine, with his range at thirty miles, he may run out of fuel before he catches us. He could keep this tail chase going for days if he had the fuel.”

“Sonar, Conn,” Kane said to his mike, “any detection of the torpedo?”

“Conn, Sonar, wait.”

In the sonar display room Sanderson put his face in each console screen, keeping his eyes on it for less than a second, then moving on to the next. “Captain, we tentatively hold the torpedo on the caboose unit broadband.” The tail end of the TB-23 towed array had been modified to hold a neutrally buoyant teardrop-shaped broadband hydrophone array added for situations like this when the sonar crew would need to track something in the astern baffles, but the unit was small, its output difficult to interpret, its reliability suspect. “We don’t have anything on the towed array end-beam. There are no detectable tonals. And we can’t give it a turn-count with the pump jet propulsion. Until the weapon goes active it’s impossible to see if it’s closing, unless you want to wiggle the array, and I don’t recommend doing TMA on the torpedo.”

Kane was thinking he’d just heard the longest speech the ordinarily taciturn senior chief had ever given. He checked the chronometer bolted above the attack center, the red numbers reading 2039, almost 9:00 p.m. zulu time. The torpedo had been first detected just twelve minutes before. Kane turned to Mcdonne, who stood between the attack-center consoles and the conn’s elevated periscope platform.

“XO, if that weapon sped up to seventy knots when we went to flank, how long to intercept?”

Kane waited. The question translated to: If that torpedo knows we’re here, how long do we have to live?

Mcdonne looked over the H-P computer and down at his own distance-time slide rule.

“Sir, fifty-eight minutes to intercept from detection point. That’s fifty minutes from now.”