Voyage of the Devilfish

“Sir, this is the kind of sub you’re thinking of. It carries I.C.B.M’s, SLBM’s we call them, stands for Submarine Launched Ballistic Missiles. These boats are officially called FBM’s, Fleet Ballistic Missile submarines. We just call them boomers. We only have about thirty of them. They’re not under our operational control — they work directly for the President when they’re at sea. They just hide, waiting for orders to launch nuke missiles at the enemy strictly on orders from Washington.” Donchez stepped back to the original photo. “But these ships here, the fast attack boats, are our business here at SUBLANT. No missiles, just torpedoes. Their main mission is antisubmarine warfare, since the best way to catch a submarine is with another submarine. But they’re useful for missions of covert surveillance too — subs are nearly invisible, and on sonar, and they can hide beneath thermal layers. Surface ships, airplanes and choppers are just no match for a submarine that wants to hide.

“Let me put it this way,” Donchez said, “the ballistic missile subs, the boomers, are like one of your monster bombers. Same mission — drop lots of nukes and get in quietly without the enemy knowing you’re there.” Tyler nodded.

“Fast attack boats, they’re like your fighter planes or interceptors. Attack subs are designed to sink surface ships, like in World War II. Now we have smart torpedoes that can pursue a surface vessel to the ends of the earth, and we’re working on some anti-ship missiles that we can launch at a surface target. If we’re up against any kind of surface ship we can either let the water in the bottom or let the air out the top.” Donchez was on a roll and liking it. He led the general past the Marines into the blast door and slammed it shut. It took some thirty seconds to lock the latches on the door, and Tyler found himself in a cavernous room with walls twenty feet tall, each wall lined with back-lit charts of the oceans, each chart full of marks and circles and lines.

“This is Flag Plot, sir. Has nothing to do with flags, by the way. Admirals are called flag officers because they fly their flags on ships when they’re aboard. Like your staff car has flags on the fenders. This is the admiral’s plot room, so it becomes Flag Plot. The admiral in command here is in command of the Atlantic Fleet’s submarines but also owns the Mediterranean and the Arctic Ocean beneath the polar icecap.” Donchez saw a momentary flicker of interest from the general at the mention of the polar icecap.

“See that chart there, sir? Arctic Ocean, north pole at the center… we’ve got a boat up there right now trailing a new Russian attack sub under the ice.” Donchez pointed to the chart, which showed a blue X next to a red X, both inside a wobbly circle labelled as the permanent icepack.

“We spend a lot of time trailing their boats. We can get away with that because we’re quieter than they are; it’s harder for them to hear us. And every sub has a blind spot astern of it. We call it the baffles. The screw and engines block out the ocean noises to the rear of the ship, and most sonar gear is located in the nosecone of the sub. So if you’re good, you can sneak up on another sub and just follow him in the cone of silence behind the screw. That boat there,” Donchez said, pointing to the blue X near the north pole, “is driven by my old Annapolis roommate. He’s in trail of a new Russian boat called the VICTOR III. Whenever they launch a new one we try to trail them on their sea trials and see how the new boat does, spy on their exercise torpedo shots, observe their tactics. Since an attack submarine is invisible it can do things no one will ever know about. Anyway, that’s the idea.” Enjoying his audience, Donchez went on, “The Atlantic plot here shows a number of blue X’s alone. Those are boats on independent operations. Those red X’s with the blue X’s off the coast are Russian boats being trailed by our attack units. To date no Russian has ever gotten us in trail. How do we know? We check. We’ll have one of our attack boats try to sneak up on another of our boats to see if there’s a Russian hiding there in the baffles. We call it delousing.” The general stopped Donchez. “What about that big expensive sonar network you people put on the ocean floor for detecting enemy submarines? Doesn’t that do all this without having all these big-money attack-boats out there?”

“You’re thinking of SOSUS, the underwater sound surveillance system. It is expensive and it’s good. But not good enough or accurate enough for us to kill a sub even with a huge nuke weapon. Look here.” Donchez returned to the Arctic Ocean polar projection chart. “See the green line?” A green line went from a dot north of Norway’s coast to a point near the red and blue X’s near the north pole.