Piranha: Firing Point

The same happened with the second Destiny III and the third. By then the Nimitz-class carrier Abraham Lincoln was bow down, only her massive brass screws showing above the water. When Patton found the fourth Destiny III attacker, he had only one torpedo left, and fired it at the final submarine, expecting this one to shoot back.

One torpedo was not enough. The Destiny came to the surface, wounded. Patton watched through the crosshairs of his periscope, waiting for a hatch to open, crewmen to come out, but there was no sign of life. More curious than angry, he ordered Tucson to surface, and he and a landing party of his officers boarded the Japanese submarine, packing 9mm automatics and MAC-11 machine pistols. With an acetylene torch Patton carved his way into the vessel. On the Tucson, one of his officers filmed the boarding from the periscope video camera.

He went down a ladder to an empty submarine. The entire forward compartment was tiny, holding only three decks of computer consoles. It turned out the ship was unmanned, computer-driven. Patton returned to Tucson, took the Japanese sub in tow, picked up survivors of the Lincoln task force, and sailed to meet an oceangoing tug.

On the way back to Pearl, the tug reported seeing flames coming from the open fin hatchway of the Japanese sub. When it stopped, it found that the computer onboard had executed a self-destruct sequence. The contents of the forward computer cabinets had burned to ashes. After all that trouble, the Pearl naval experts learned nothing about the computer system.

The periscope video film was released by the Navy to the media. The film replayed on every television screen, and soon pictures of John Patton forcing his way into the Japanese submarine made the covers of every newspaper and magazine, paper and electronic. Patton became an instant icon, his name synonymous with dagger-in-teeth courage.

Only John Patton himself knew the truth. He had been burning with curiosity and just wanted to meet face-to-face the men who’d downed his task force.

When the Tucson went into a drydock modernization program, Pacino pulled Patton off, sparing him the dull reality of the shipyard. He was handed command of his second submarine, the USS Annapolis. The chance of a second sub to command was extremely rare in Pacino’s navy, and this was the ultimate compliment.

Now here he was, in the center of it all, once again guarding a surface task force, this one so huge as to dwarf the Lincoln carrier group. The Annapolis was steaming at flank, making forty-one knots on the improved hydrodynamic seven-bladed screw. There was one major problem with this, though.

Searching for an enemy submarine required that the searching platform be quiet. And steaming at all-ahead flank was anything but quiet, making sonar reception much more difficult. True, the Annapolis was as close to a brand-new submarine as any captain could ask. The ship had been completely gutted on its shipyard overhaul, and was now fitted with a new quiet screw and new whisper-quiet electric drive. The clanking reduction gear and geared propulsion turbines had been ripped out, replaced by electrical propulsion turbines powering a massive but quiet AC motor driving the screw’s shaft.

The reactor had likewise been removed and replaced by a Dynacorp S10D 200 megawatt thermal nuclear power unit, increasing shaft horsepower from 35,000 to a whopping 70,000, raising the ship’s top speed to 41 knots, a speed previously attainable only by the venerable but prohibitively expensive Seawolf-class. In addition Annapolis had also had its battlecontrol system — sonar and fire-control — ripped out and replaced with an ultramodern BSY-4 system previously available only on the Seawolfs. An additional shipwide computer network had been installed, complete with video systems, giving Patton instant information in his stateroom about the status all over the ship.

Patton had just completed a tour of the vessel, timed to coincide with an hour before watch change. He’d gone back as far as the shaft seals in the aft compartment forward to the chief’s quarters. The ship was amazing, her 6,900 submerged tons, 362 feet of hull packing twenty-six Mark 52 Hullcracker torpedoes, ten Mark 80 SLAAM submarine-launched antiair missiles, and ten vertically launched land-attack and ship-attack Javelin cruise missiles in the vertical tubes in the bow. The ship had the latest radar-invisible periscopes, the latest communication suite and antennae, and the most modern electronic detection systems ever installed on a submarine, as modern as the last remaining Seawolf hull. The ship was sleek and clean and combat ready.

But that was not enough to succeed in this situation.