“Item two — our history of encounters with the American attack submarines. The information received to date shows that the only submerged encounter between a Two-class ship and an American submarine was our own attack of the vessel that torpedoed the supertanker. Either the Americans are at a severe disadvantage or that ship was poorly trained. For now I want to remind each one of you that our success against the first American could have been more from luck or a bad day for the Americans than our own skill or ship quieting. So we will maintain absolute ship silence in our future encounters, and whenever we detect an American we will assume he has detected us.”
“Item three — the collected intelligence about American intentions. Mr. First will post the electronic chart display. We believe that the Americans will enter our close-in waters in pairs or threes. These are known as wolfpacks, although we may think of them as being more like frightened teenagers pairing up before going into a dark forest. This will prove most helpful to our tactics, because we will be more efficient at killing them. They will be clustered, so once we detect a pair we will shoot torpedoes at them both, putting down two with the work of sinking one. In addition we will know that all submerged contacts we see will be hostile, while the American commanders must keep in mind that another friendly submarine is nearby, which will make them hesitate when they launch their torpedoes. We believe they will split their force between north and south of our waters and work their way to Tokyo Bay in their attempt to sink our force. Then they could go up Tokyo Bay and cause some damage, making their position much stronger. We will concentrate on preventing that.”
“I expect that their forces will arrive in two waves, one now, the second in three days as more of the Pacific ships arrive in zone. Our tactics will be to try to sink the initial task force, reload torpedoes, then rescour the zone for Americans. My intuition on this matter is, I believe, sound since I have spent more time in the vicinity of the gaijin than anyone here.”
“That is all, men. If any one of you has questions, submit them to Mr. First and he will bring them to me.”
Tanaka left the room, his officers coming to rigid attention as he left. Mazdai hated that he was cold with the younger officers, Tanaka thought, but their generation was, he felt, soft, compromising. Perhaps he could get through to them by example. Perhaps his hatred of the Americans would be contagious.
Regardless, he was determined that the mission succeed.
CHAPTER 32
Comdr. Robert Pastor had rigged the ship for ultraquiet three hours before crossing into the Japan Oparea. The rig was designed to maximize ship quieting so that the sonar system could more easily hear into the sea without the interference of noise made by the Birmingham herself.
Pastor walked through the ship from the shaft seals as far aft as a man could go to the goat locker forward, checking the rig, and found the wrong reactor circulation pumps running — the engineering officer of the watch had one, two, three and four on, when the pump combination three, four, five and six was much quieter. Forward, in one of the crew-berthing spaces, he had found a boombox going, the volume down but music pouring out of it anyway. One of the navigation technicians was trying to fix a spare electronic cabinet in the nav space aft of control, which Pastor immediately stopped, the crew prohibited from doing maintenance during the rig for ultraquiet.
Pastor, on sneaker-clad feet, was of medium height, slightly paunchy but with Midwestern good looks, a healthy hairline, a thick mustache, blue eyes clear and penetrating. His expression rarely changed from a glare or a smirk, the glare normal, the smirk a sign of approval.
Pastor had been in command for only a year and was still finding himself, his command style, but so far the ratings were good. He had passed Admiral Pacino’s attack-trainer test, having put an Akula Russian submarine on the bottom at the same time he was under attack by a destroyer unit of the Royal Navy — in Pacino’s wild scenarios anyone could be the bad guys. Pastor was considered a tough captain, a disciplinarian, a by-the-book man so long as it made sense to go by the book. He was good to his officers, took them out for dinners, which came out of his pocket at a thousand dollars a shot, until Admiral Pacino ordered him to put those expenses on the ship’s account, telling him they were rewards for good performance. When Pastor had said that the men brought wives and girlfriends, Pacino had told him it was the least the captain could do for them in exchange for all their long hours and weeks away.
Pastor had been thinking lately about what he would do when his command tour was over, something that every nuclear sub skipper asked himself. Command of an attack sub was the end of sea duty. The day they turned command of the sub over to someone else was a dark day in the lives of most skippers, not unlike giving a daughter away at a wedding. They would be proud to have done a job well, the ship, like the daughter, an accomplishment, but now someone else would be in charge of her. Pastor saw nothing that interested him after command, not in the Navy’s bureaucratic quagmire in Washington, not in the shore-training commands, not in the surface navy. A new program had been commissioned to allow sub skippers to take command of a deepdraft oiler or supply ship as a stepping stone to commanding an aircraft carrier, from which a man could make flag rank. But that would take another fifteen years of going to sea on surface ships. Besides, Pastor now had two lovely daughters, six and eight, growing up in a world that was becoming more bizarre by the minute, and Pastor was beginning to think that all the sea duty, all the time away from home was beginning to affect the girls.
Pastor shook his head and brought himself back to the supervision of the ship’s rig for ultraquiet. As he walked the ship he switched lights in the spaces from bright white to red — the red lights kept awareness for the rig foremost in the crew’s minds. In the goat locker, the chief’s quarters, he found a grizzled, veteran chief taking a shower. He felt like killing the man. The rig specifically prohibited showers, laundry and cooking, all of which made unnecessary noise. It didn’t matter how hot and sweaty the men got, the rig was the rig. Pastor chewed the chief out as quietly as he could, then continued on his rounds. He returned to the control room.
“Weapon status,” Pastor asked the young officer of the deck, an academy grad named Mark Strait, who was the sonar officer.
“Sir, we’ve got all four tubes loaded. One and two are flooded with outer doors opened, torpedo power applied and units warmed. Units in three and four have been powered down from before. We’ll shift in another hour.”
The maximum readiness rig specified open tubes, weapons powered up with their gyros spinning, ready to fire at any time. That way if Pastor found a target they could program the torpedo in seconds and launch. The only trouble was that the torpedoes could not remain powered up for more than an hour at a time or the gyros would overheat, and sometimes in the middle of tracking a target the outer doors would have to be shut, the weapons powered down, the alternate tubes opened to sea and their torpedoes spun up. The operation could take ten or fifteen minutes, which meant that long without the ability to shoot at the target.