Piranha: Firing Point

Now we’re using the background noise just like your eyeball uses background light to see. The background noise of the ocean’shines’ all around us, and when it hits an object, the object reflects the sound or blocks the sound or focuses the sound, just as an object reflects and changes light waves so that your eye can interpret the reflected light waves as the representation of a spacial object “Same thing here. The ocean’s background noise hits an object, say, a target submarine. The object changes the way the background noise hits our receiver, just as an object you see changes the light that hits it so your retina senses the change. Even if a target submarine is floating with no machinery on, its density difference from the water causes the background noise to go around it, be blocked by it, or be focused. It creates a sound’image’ that our computers interpret and represent in three dimensions. Let me tell you, it’s a computer hog. It takes more data processing than any computer in history has ever tried to deal with, and the challenge is getting it to go fast enough to represent the real world.

Then it has to distinguish between long range and close range and represent it to you so you can comprehend it, there on the virtual-reality stations in the control room.

“Once Colleen gets it going, I’ll show you. You can ‘see’ a dolphin swimming by a half mile away. A supertanker on the surface looks like a big blob of a supertanker.

A target submarine image looks like a submarine.

John, there’s no more waterfall displays or graphs of frequency against time, no more frequency-bucket integration, no more putting tea leaves at the bottom of the sonar chiefs teacup. Now you can see the enemy just like a fighter pilot can see the other plane in a dogfight. Of course, most of the time they’ll be so distant that you’ll just see a dot, but if they were to get close, the contact would look like a sub.”

“I can’t believe this. Is this for real? Seeing the enemy?”

“We’ve been working on this for decades, and only now are the computers capable enough to manage it.

Of course, Cyclops isn’t really capable yet, but it will be soon.”

“When?”

“By the time we’re in the East China Sea.”

“How do you know?”

“I just do. Don’t worry about it, and never ask Colleen questions that start with the word’when.’ But don’t forget, what’s motivating her is that she’s going into the op area with us. I think she wants that system up as much as we do.”

“Conn, Maneuvering, the electric plant is in a normal full-power lineup,” the speaker in the overhead announced.

“Propulsion shifted to the propulsion-turbine generators supplying the AC main motor. Ready to answer all bells.”

“I haven’t seen the engineering spaces yet,” Patton said, glancing up at a television display showing maneuvering, the nuclear-control room.

“All that’s new too,” Pacino said. “I’ll get you aft once we’re down. Right now we’ve got a ship to submerge.”

“How’s this going to work with the garbage barge overhead?”

“Just pull the plug like you normally would. The barge has a sub-shaped hole in it. Once we go down, the barge will flood and sink, putting enough garbage in the Pacific to warrant a major clean-up operation. It’ll make the headlines, I’m sure, and they won’t be hauling garbage to the Midway Island incinerator for a while. So give me bad marks for the environment, but we’re the only ones who know the SSNX is at sea.”

With a dead computer, a revolutionary sonar system, a man-machine interface that is untested, and a bunch of unknowns for a crew, all under the command of a captain fresh from the sinking of his last submarine, Patton thought, a sudden pang of insecurity Sashing through him. He looked at Pacino, who seemed so sure of himself, so rock-solid certain, and smiled.

“Helm,” Patton called to the lieutenant at the ship-control station, “submerge the ship to two hundred feet.”

“Two hundred feet, aye. Captain,” the young officer acknowledged from across the cavernous room. “Opening forward main ballast-tank vents. No periscope cameras or sail camera on this submergence, sir. Forward vents indicate open. Taking the throttle to all ahead two-thirds, two degrees down on the bow planes.”

The deck took on a slight angle, just barely perceptible, and the depth readout on Patton’s command-area console began to click off a few feet deeper.

“The trick on this is to get deep fast enough to clear the barge as it sinks,” Pacino said. “You should try to get deep and then go twenty knots off your present course, evade to the south.”

“Aye, Admiral.”

“Sorry, didn’t mean to give you rudder orders, John.

It’s just that we thought this out when we built the barge.”

Patton nodded.

“Opening aft main ballast vents,” the diving officer called. “Depth eighty feet. Down angle on the ship, down two degrees. Speed five knots, increasing to eight.

Depth one hundred, one twenty, down angle five degrees.”

“Officer of the Deck, take her to three hundred feet at ahead standard, clear datum to the south.”