Rolling his eyes at the pathetically slow speed of his encrypted satellite connection, Kelly leaned over and whispered to his executive officer, Lieutenant Commander Roberto Giannotti, “Go figure, Bobby. Two billion dollars’ worth of state-of-the-art submarine and it takes longer than it did to get my mail off AOL on a dial-up modem.”
Kelly looked every bit the submariner. Short and wiry, he seemed built for enclosed spaces. Standing next to him, his XO, a former linebacker at Annapolis, looked like a giant.
Glancing over at his CO, Giannotti whispered, “AOL? My grandfather uses AOL. Maybe I should just call you Gramps from now on.”
“Go fuck yourself, Bobby.”
“Copy that, sir.”
The crew sometimes referred to the captain and XO as Abbott and Costello, given their senses of humor and an excellent performance of “Who’s on First?” at a ship-wide talent show.
Both men were single, one by divorce, the other by choice.
Kelly sighed, standing in the middle of the control room illuminated by wall-to-wall multifunction flat screens. The compartment swarmed with the coordinated activity of pilots, navigators, electronics technicians, weapons experts, and even sonar technicians. Unlike prior submarines, the Virginia-class didn’t have a separate sonar room.
Petty Officer Second Class Marshon Chappelle, the boat’s most experienced sonar technician, abruptly looked up from his large green console.
“Conn, Sonar! New Contact! Bearing two-zero-niner!”
Kelly snapped his head toward the sonar stations along the port side, opposite the starboard combat control consoles. Missouri’s six-month mission was to guard the waters of the Indian Ocean from the edge of the Arabian Sea to the coast of Malaysia in a constant loop. At the moment, it cruised a course southwest of Sri Lanka, some five hundred miles southeast of the Vinson battle group operating in the Arabian Sea, near the coast of Mumbai, India. And that all meant that the Mighty Mo, a nickname the submarine shared with the legendary World War II Iowa-class battleship, should be all alone. No contacts except for the occasional humpback whale.
“Russian or Chinese?” Kelly asked.
Chappelle adjusted his headphones, narrowing his eyes in concentration — and under the curious stare of the four junior sonar technicians under his command. The native from Harlem, New York, finally replied, “Ah, neither, sir. It’s USS 1990, and it wants its dial-up system back.”
Several sailors broke into laughter, including Giannotti.
“All right. Knock it off,” Kelly said, shaking his head and turning back to the radio station. It was an old joke but one that served as a constant reminder of the worldwide communications bandwidth challenge the US Navy hadn’t yet figured out how to solve. Missouri—as well as all Virginia-class boats — had been designed with two high-data-rate satellite communication masts — one as backup. However, in order to use either one, it required Kelly to make prior arrangements with the Navy to task a satellite to focus a “spot beam” on its coordinates. As such, it was reserved for large data dumps or videos. For day-to-day ops, the commander had to rely on the quarter-century-old technology trickling down operational updates from NAVCENT.
“Chappy, I think you missed your calling,” Giannotti said, chuckling.
Although Kelly would never openly admit it, Petty Officer Chappelle was precisely where he needed to be. In his eighteen years of submarine service, the commander had yet to see anyone who could match the kid’s ear and instincts for sonar work.
One of the electronics technicians finally presented Kelly with a printout, which he read, then passed to Giannotti.
The XO frowned after scanning it. “Boss, I’m all for taking out terrorist camps, but why us? My sister is the XO on Champlain, and they’re a lot closer,” he said, referring to USS Lake Champlain (CG 57), a Ticonderoga-class missile cruiser escorting Vinson. “And my cousin is aboard Texas,” he added, referring to the Virginia-class submarine also escorting the carrier group. “Either can easily take the shot.”
“Tell me, Bobby, is there a vessel in the US Navy where you don’t have a relative?” he asked, though his own nephew, the son of his older brother, worked the engine room of North Dakota, another Virginia-class boat on station in Singapore escorting the John C. Stennis Carrier Strike Group.
The XO shrugged. “What can I say, boss? Big Italian family. And for what it’s worth, my uncle Gino, my mother’s brother, handles aircraft maintenance for one of the fighter squadrons on Vinson. Why don’t they launch an air strike instead of just burning fuel flying those damn CAPs,” he said, referring to the constant combat air patrol missions flown by carrier jets to protect the battle group.
Kelly shrugged. “Theirs not to make reply, Bobby. Theirs not to reason why.”
Giannotti sighed before whispering, “Except that now the entire civilized world will know where we are.”
“I know that. And we’re going deep and hauling ass toward the coast of Malaysia the moment it breaks the surface.” Dropping his voice a couple of decibels, Kelly added, “Besides, you want to get your own command in the near future, right?
Giannotti nodded.
“Well, this is the kind of stuff CO’s gotta handle without batting an eye, so, get rolling.”
It was no secret that Kelly had been grooming Giannotti for the job.
“Aye, sir,” he said, and walked over to Missouri’s pilot and copilot.
Until the Virginia class, all submarines were controlled by a combination of a helmsman, who steered the submarine with the rudder and managed the bow planes, and the planesman or outboard, who controlled the boat’s angle with the stern planes. They were supervised by the diving officer, as well as by the chief of the watch, who handled the submarine’s buoyancy. The Virginia class’s new generation of fly-by-wire controls replaced all four positions with just a pilot and a copilot, who took orders from the officer of the deck, who at the moment was Cmdr. Kelly. The dramatic change had been viewed as a bit of heresy by the submariner community, even by Kelly when he first transitioned from a Los Angeles — class sub. But after his third deployment in the Mighty Mo, traditional control rooms and periscopes now seemed like something belonging in a museum.
“Set depth to one-two-zero feet,” Kelly ordered. “Bearing zero-niner-zero. Ahead slow.”
Giannotti relayed the commands to the pilot and copilot. The former, a seaman in charge of the rudder and stern planes, read back, “Setting course zero-niner-zero, aye.”
“Setting depth one-two-zero, aye,” read back the copilot, a petty officer third class controlling the bow planes.
Next to them sat the reactor operator, who in a Virginia-class ship also handled the duties of the traditional throttleman. A petty officer second class, the RO read back, “Ahead slow, aye.”
While the pilots and RO did their thing, hands on their respective video game — like joystick controls, Giannotti stepped over to the combat control consoles and handed the firing order to the senior-most weapons officer, who validated it and began to key in the prescribed coordinates.
Kelly watched the well-drilled process in silence as the crew confirmed and executed the order to fire a single BGM-109 Tomahawk missile.
“Depth one-two-zero,” the copilot reported.
“Bearing zero-niner-zero,” the pilot said.
“Speed zero-four knots,” the RO confirmed.
Missouri, as well as all Block II Virginia — class boats, carried twelve Vertical Launching System (VLS) tubes. Eight housed BGM-109 Tomahawk missiles with an operational range of 1,550 miles and four carried MK 48 torpedoes to complement the four traditional torpedo tubes mounted on the bow.