Phoenix Sub Zero

There was a brief lull in the action while Kane waited for Follicus to run the weapons’ confirmation of the presets. It was only a matter of seconds but seemed an hour. The stark reality of it was only now reaching Kane that inside an hour he might be dead on the bottom of the Strait of Gibraltar. If he could act he could almost forget that, but waiting was hell. During that wait the thought intruded that he should live as if today were the last day of his life, a notion he had always sarcastically met with the comment If today’s my last day on earth I’m buying a Porsche Turbo on credit and driving it to Atlantic City. On the business end of a Nagasaki torpedo, the remark no longer seemed so witty.

* * *

Kane’s contact message was relayed at highest priority through the eastern Atlantic communications satellite to CINCNAVFORCEMED’s headquarters at the old Sixth Fleet compound in Naples, Italy. The NAVFORCEMED watch officer, a mustang lieutenant, held a secure phone to his ear, and while waiting for Admiral Traeps scratched a tactical message to the airborne antisubmarine forces in the western basin directing them to Gibraltar.

* * *

Four P-3 Orion ASW patrol turboprops received the navforcemed flash transmission. One ignored the order, already departing station, low on fuel and empty of sonobuoys, its replacement enroute from Sigonella. The remaining three throttled up, climbed and headed west, reaching their destinations and cruising back toward the dark water of the strait. The moon had been full but had vanished behind dull unremarkable clouds that seemed to boil up from nowhere and everywhere. The first four-engined plane shut down the two inboard turbines and feathered the props, swooping low over the water sixty nautical miles east of the narrowest point of the strait, turning slowly as it steadied on a southern course, leveling its wings and slowing further until it almost seemed suspended over the water. Silently, at five-second intervals, the cylindrical sonobuoys fell out of the underside of the fuselage, plunking into the water in a neat row, the splashes lost in the powerful thrumming of the props.

A few moments later, twenty miles west of the first plane, the second P-3 arrived on station, dropped a load of sonobuoys and circled back around. The third took station off Tangier at the opening of the mouth of Gibraltar, laying its sonobuoy field just as the USS Phoenix passed under it. The buoys laid, the P-3s orbited the drop points at sufficient distance that the buoys’ sonars would not be impaired by the noise of the planes’ engines but not so far that radio reception would be impacted. They settled into north-south elongated orbits parallel to the sonobuoy fields, cruising close enough to the surface so that their MAD probes could reach down into the sea in search of anomalies in the earth’s magnetic field, the iron hull of a submerged submarine able to focus magnetic lines of force just as a lens bends light waves. The MAD probes detected nothing, but that wasn’t unusual since the probes were useful only at extremely short range.

While the P-3s had been turning toward Gibraltar, two pilots and a sonar tech climbed into the Seahawk LAMPS III antisubmarine helicopter on the rolling aft deck of the Burke-class destroyer John Warner and ran through the laminated startup checklist in record time, the twin turbines whining and then howling to idling revs, the clutch catching and spooling up the main rotor. The chopper shook as the rotor passed through several resonance points, then steadied as the blades sped up to idling revolutions. The pilot’s radio headset crackled, a distorted voice from the Wamer’s combat information center, the pilot’s reply competing with the roar of the turbines and the beating of the main rotor as the Seahawk lifted off the deck, the bull’s-eye painted on the dark surface barely visible in the overcast night as the Warner shrank below and astern. Thirty miles south, an identical helicopter turned west and soon joined the first, the two units ready to drop dipping active sonar sets at the first sniff from one of the P3s.

* * *

Two hundred feet beneath the surface, between the farthest sonobuoy field to the east and the central field, the Destiny-class submarine Hegira picked up speed, her ship-control console’s display of gyrocompass bearing showing a course of 278, west northwest.

Commodore Sharef frowned, the unexpected tasting sour in his mouth. The close pass of the antisubmarine warfare turboprop plane to the west ahead of them glowed angrily red on the display screens of the second sensor console, the other screen showing the approach of a helicopter’s rotors.