Piranha: Firing Point

“Aye, sir,” a lieutenant standing behind the ship-control station said.

For the next few minutes Patton watched as the ship departed the surface and sailed away from the barge.

He decided to take the ship back to periscope depth to observe the barge sinking. Taking the scope, he ordered the ship back up, in time to see the barge, most of it submerged, sinking slowly stern down, the tug frantically disconnecting the tow line. Patton felt himself tapped on the shoulder.

“John, we’re late, we need to get to Point Echo now.”

“Lowering number two scope,” Patton called. “Helm, make your depth 850 feet, steep angle, all ahead flank.”

“Emergency flank, John.”

Patton squinted at the admiral, starting to feel less a king on a throne than an errand boy.

“Helm, emergency flank.”

The deck took a steep down angle, the hull groaning and creaking from the increased pressure of the deep.

The deck began to vibrate, slightly at first, then more violently as the ship sped up. Patton craned his neck to look at the speed indicator. Sixty-six knots, over seventy-six miles per hour. He’d never gone this speed in a submarine before, and it was exhilarating. He walked to the chart display, using the electronic dividers, and calculated the time to Point Echo. It came out to two days, eighteen hours. He looked at his watch, then called to the officer of the deck.

“Off’sa’deck, change ship’s time to Beijing time. That makes it zero five hundred Tuesday, November 5.”

That meant their ETA was 2300 Thursday evening, November 7. And Pacino had said that he’d given the Dynacorp VP until Thursday to get the computer system up and running. Suddenly Patton felt dead tired.

“Off’sa’deck, proceed on course to Point Echo. I’m going to my stateroom. Don’t wake me, I’m getting an equalizer battery charge.”

“Aye, Captain. PD time, sir?” The young lieutenant wanted to know when to slow and pop up to periscope depth to get their radio messages from the orbiting satellite.

“Don’t come up. We’ll be running straight in.” A safe bet, he thought, since the supreme commander-in-chief was aboard. Who else would be sending them radio messages?

Patton waved to Pacino, who was leaning over the chart display, and walked into the door to his stateroom from the aft bulkhead of the control room. At his table he found Byron Demeers drinking a Coke and brooding.

“Byron. What do you think?”

“Skipper, my head hurts. I feel like I’ve been sent back to school, and I don’t know anything. This Acoustic Daylight Imaging system, it’s more complicated than you can shake a stick at.”

“The only thing I want to know about it is, will it work?”

“Who knows?” Demeers said. “We’ll be in deep trouble if it doesn’t.”

“What do you think of the ship otherwise?”

“I’ll tell you what I think. It’s a piece of shit without an operational sonar system. The only thing this tub does is haul around my ears, and if I can’t use them, this thing is just a big 377-foot-long target.”

“Oh, quit crying, you goddamned sonar girl,” Patton said. “And get out of here, I want some rack. You’d better sleep too, you’ve been up around the clock.”

“No time. I’ve got to learn the Cyclops sonar system, or else you are going to be hurting.”

Chapter 10 Wednesday November 6

PACIFIC OCEAN

1,320 MILES SOUTHEAST OF NAHA, OKINAWA

USS DEVILFISH, SSNX-1

“I think it’ll work,” Colleen O’Shaughnessy said, staring at her panel in the computer room.

“It has to be more than just a thought,” Pacino said.

“This system can’t crash once we penetrate the op area and start looking for the Red force.”

Colleen’s eyes flashed in anger. She looked up at him, taking a breath, her voice acid as she said, “If you want a guarantee, then give me two weeks to do the C-1 and C-9 tests. Otherwise, I guess you’ll have to live with the system as is, just like the rest of us. Besides, if the system has problems, I’ll be here to debug.”

“Not good enough. Colleen. I need you to do whatever you have to do to get that system to be reliable.

Our lives and the mission are depending on it. When it’s time to launch a torpedo, we can’t just call you up and ask you to fix it.”

Colleen O’Shaughnessy looked up at the tall admiral.

She had been up for three nights without sleep, ever since the ship left Hawaii underneath a garbage barge.

“Looks like that’s your only choice.”

“I’m telling you, it’s not good enough. It has to be absolutely bulletproof. Colleen. And it has to be that way by 1800 local tomorrow. You’ve got twenty hours.”

“Why 1800? We don’t get to the op area until eleven p.m.”

“We don’t get to the op area. / get to the op area, ship’s company gets to the op area. You get off at 1800.

That’s when the personnel transfer goes down.”

“What?”! “You’ll be donning scuba gear and locking out of the forward escape trunk when we’re at periscope depth.

We’ll dive, and you’ll be picked up by an old tanker that will happen to be in the area at the time. I hate to make you leave the ship like that, but we can’t risk surfacing or even broaching the sail.”