Piranha: Firing Point

Captain John Patton leaned over the port chart table aft of the periscope stand and frowned.

The deck trembled with the power of the main propulsion turbines. At flank speed, the screw turbulence caused the trembling to be transmitted to the huge thrust bearing and to the main motor, from there to the motor foundation to the hull. A couple more hours of shaking like this and the crew would experience severe fatigue.

Doing a sonar sweep at forty-one knots was like searching for a contact lens on a superhighway at eighty miles per. Every instinct he had screamed at him to slow down and clear the ship’s baffles.

Except that Admiral Henri’s op order prohibited him even from coming to periscope depth, since that would dramatically slow him down. And the restriction on periscope-depth maneuvers meant that he was driving blind, having no idea what was going on topside. Patton walked his dividers across the big chart display, the electronic points measured to twenty nautical miles. They were now officially in the East China Sea. If USUBCOM’s odd message had any validity at all, anyone waiting for them would be here, inside the protection of the Ryukyu Island chain. Why? Because everyone with a satellite television set knew where the American task force was. No one knew where it would go, but it had to make the turn at the southern island of Japan, south of Yakushima Island, and head on in. This would be the place to find anyone set up for an ambush.

He had to slow. But he also had to “sweep the sea” for the safety of the task force.

“Fuck this,” Patton said out loud, raising the eyebrow of tall, skinny Lieutenant Karl Horburg, the young officer of the deck standing on the conn, “Oftsa’deck, slow to ten knots and turn off reactor recirc pumps. Notify Sonar that we’re doing a baffle-clear maneuver. I want a good hard search at ten knots until I say to speed up again.”

Horburg held up the standing order message from the fleet commander, not saying a word.

“Yeah, I know,” Patton said, grimacing. “Baffle clear, OOD! Let’s go!”

Horburg in turn barked to his subordinate. “Helm, all ahead one-third, turns for ten knots, maneuvering stop all reactor recirc pumps! Sonar, Conn, slowing to ten knots, baffle clear!”

“One-third, Helm, aye, turns for ten, downshift recirc pumps to stop, maneuvering answers, one-third, turns for ten. Recirc pumps will be downshifted as reactor power permits.”

“Very well. Helm.” Horburg plucked a microphone from the overhead, the mike suspended by a coiled cord.

“Sonar, Conn, supervisor to control.”

“Conn, Sonar, aye,” a voice from the overhead speaker announced.

The helmsman called over his shoulder from his aircraft-style console, “Maneuvering reports all reactor circulation pumps at stop, all pumps coasting down, reactor in natural circulation.”

“Very well. Helm,” Horburg called.

Senior Chief Byron Demeers appeared behind Horburg on the conn, a bemused expression on his face.

“You notice the speed indicator?” Patton said, nodding to the ship-control panel.

“Yeah! This is great,” Demeers said, a rare smile cracking his features. The chief paused to take a swig of his omnipresent Coke bottle. “A real sonar search. How many minutes are you giving me when we steady on course? And where you turning first?”

“Take two minutes heading north, then two south,” Patton said in his don’t-argue-with-me voice.

“Come on. Skipper, give me three minutes each leg,” Demeers said. “Who knows? It could be the difference between finding someone and getting a medal or finding a torpedo in our hull and getting a posthumous medal.”

“Screw you. Senior Chief. Three minutes. No more.

Now, get back in your hole and find me a bad guy.”

Patton’s voice sounded irritated, but Horburg smiled, knowing the captain always sounded like that when he was amused.

The Annapolis coasted slowly down from forty-one knots to ten. She turned to the north, her BSY-4 sonar system straining to pick up a submerged contact. The nose-cone sonar spherical array, the wide-aperture hull array, and the thin-wire towed narrowband array were all tuned to the slightest noise of the ocean. These in turn fed the onboard supercomputer, the processors displaying, filtering, and analyzing the massive data gathered by the arrays, searching for the manmade noise— the needle in the haystack of nature’s acoustical background.

For 180 seconds, Byron Demeers added his own ears to the search, listening to each narrowband tonal bearing.

One was a group of clicking shrimp, the other a lonely whale, one a trawler in the distance, a fourth a fishing boat even farther away. The screen glowed brightly to the east, where one hundred ten ships of the convoy were bearing down on them at thirty-five knots.

They were putting so much noise in the water that the entire screen from bearing 085 to 095 was blued out with high-intensity broadband noise from the thrashing screws and plowing hulls.