Tanaka reclined in his seat, recalling the rich history of submarines, when in the last great war the Nazi submarines would gather together to attack convoys. If one was too far away, the other boats might be better positioned — the old vintage boats too slow to chase a swift convoy, relying instead on positioning themselves in the paths of the surface ships. In addition to positioning, two boats had twice the torpedo loadout of one. Finally, if one were to come under attack, a second boat could vector in and counterattack out of nowhere. There was one case that came to mind when the destroyer Aggressive was closing in on the damaged German Untersee-boot U-458 to ram and sink her, and the undetected U-501 was submerged at a right angle to Aggressive’ assault, delivering three torpedoes to the attacking destroyer, breaking her in half and sinking her just a few hundred meters before she would have overrun the U-458. Both U-boats had escaped. So now the Americans were going to gang up for safety from the aggressions of the Destiny class.
Tanaka tapped through some sequences, coaxing the Second Captain to extrapolate the positions of the Winged Serpents sister ships, the Destiny IIs. The Three-class ships were virtually useless in a fight with a submerged enemy. Most of them were probably already sunk, dead and gone, their poor programming inadequate to the task of fighting a true antisubmarine-warfare attack-submarine. But the Two-class ships would be there patrolling the waters surrounding the Home Islands, preparing themselves with the same intelligence data that he had. He considered putting up a message to the other ships in his Two-class squadron but decided against it. The commanders knew what they were doing.
Tanaka closed out the lower display and dialed in the sonar computer-screened data, the computer looking for preset characteristics, filtering the ocean’s noise through the system’s knowledge of what the American submarines sounded like. The raw data coming in from the sea was voluminous and random, but a man-made ship made pure tones, tonals and specific transient rattles. Bangs and flow noises and squeaks. The computer could be used to filter out the meaningless clutter of the seas and look only for noises that matched pure tonals, the regularity of a screw thrashing through the seas, the noise of a hatch slamming, a sewage pump putting water overboard, a torpedo tube flooding. The Two class’ Second Captain combat control system had catalogued over ten to the fifth transient and tonal noises, and although that sounded like a lot it was a thousandth of a percent of the random noise of the sea.
With the Second Captain on the case. Winged Serpent could not fail. It would be, Tanaka thought, as if he were a Wild West gunman going up against blind men.
CHAPTER 30
Bruce Phillips leaned the captain’s chair far back in the dark of the wardroom, the large-screen flat panel displaying a classic Arnold Schwarzenegger movie, the bulging muscles of the protagonist exposed, tensing as his arm lifted a hefty weapon and he began firing a machine gun into a crowded city street. Phillips shoved a handful of popcorn in his mouth, listening to the comments of his wardroom as the bullets flew.
The phone rang from the conn. Phillips pointed the remote at the flat panel and the action froze, plunging the room into silence.
“Mindless violence,” Phillips muttered in mock disgust as he hoisted the phone to his ear. “Captain.”
“Offsa’deck, sir. We’re leaving the Aleutian Trench now, sir. We’re officially in the Pacific.”
Phillips looked over at the speed indicator, the readout showing forty-three knots, the deck vibrating slightly from the turbulence of the seawater flow over the Vortex tubes, particularly since the ship’s hydrodynamics had become uneven with the loss of the number-one Vortex unit.
“How long to go at flank?”
“Arrival in the northern quadrant of the Oparea is slated for thirty hours from now, sir.”
It wasn’t good enough, Phillips thought.
“Put this on the status board and pass it on to your relief, Mr. Porter — we won’t be coming to periscope depth until just before we penetrate the Oparea. And I want us running at flank until then, to hell with navigation errors. In fact, put that in the ship’s deck log, that I ordered us to blow off going to PD until we’re at the forty-fourth parallel. That gives us forty-three knots all the way. What’s that do to the time?”
“Takes it down to about twenty-six hours. Captain.”
Still not good enough.
“Off’sa’deck, send the engineer to the wardroom.”
He hung up the phone, clicked the remote and the bullets continued to fly on screen. He watched a few moments until he saw Walt Hornick’s head appear at the round red window to the centerline passageway, then got up and walked out into the brightness of the passageway.
“I’ll buy you a cup of coffee, Eng,” Phillips said, walking the engineer across the passageway to the opening to the crew’s mess. He poured the engineer a cup of fresh steaming coffee, a glass of bright red Kool-Aid for himself, the mixture so sweet he had to wince to choke it down. He steered Hornick to a dinette table in the far corner, pulled out two cigars, one for Hornick, one for himself. He noticed the engineer didn’t flinch this time as Phillips stuffed the stogie into his mouth and lit the end.
“Well, Eng, before we get into this I want to ask you a question.”
“Yes sir.”
“Have I ever meddled with your department? Micromanaged you? Given you rudder orders?”
“No, sir.” Hornick seemed confused.
“But I have given you goals to achieve, right? I’ve told you the big picture of what I’ve wanted and left it to you to get it done, right?”
“Yes sir.”
“How do you feel about that, Eng?”
“How do I feel about it, sir?”
“Yeah. How does that feel? I’m assuming you haven’t been treated like that before.”
“You’re right. Skipper, I haven’t. Captain Forbes before you was the ship’s real engineer. I just took orders from him and tried to satisfy him. He was never satisfied. I had a letter of resignation written, I was going to resign my commission and go into business with my father-in-law but Forbes left before I could submit it.”
“Where’s the letter now?” Phillips puffed and looked at the smoke drifting into the overhead.
“I tore it up after we did that emergency startup of the reactor, Skipper.”
Phillips looked at Walt Hornick, the slightest hint of a smirk on his face. “So how do you feel about this patrol?”
“I’m fully committed to the ship’s mission.”
“And how does your engineering plant relate to that mission, Eng?”
“Sir, we’re a steam-making service. You want RPM, we’re in business to give it to you.”
“Then I want to tell you about a problem I have.” Phillips withdrew his Writepad computer from his shirt pocket and put it on the surface of the dinette table’s checkered oilskin tablecloth. He clicked into the software, finally displaying a small chart of the northwest Pacific, looking down on the earth as if from low orbit.
“This is our position.” A small dot pulsed brightly east of the Kamchatka peninsula. “This is where we need to get to, here east of Hokkaido Island at latitude forty-four north. By the book that’s thirty hours away. I did my part by ignoring the regs to come to periscope depth every eight hours, so for the next twenty-six hours I’ll continue deep. I’m only allowed to ignore the PD requirements if I’m under the icecap. But I’m willing to risk the creeping nav errors in the inertial system to get there faster. It might be a stupid decision — it’s deep out here, but I could still hit a submerged peak at the Kuril Island Ridge as we cross the fiftieth parallel. But here’s the situation, Eng, I won’t lie to you. Admiral Pacino’s going into the Oparea with just a couple of submarines and he’s going to try to duke it out with the whole Maritime Self Defense Force’s Destinys.”