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GOOD HUNTING AND TAKE CARE.

Pacino took his last breath as the compartment around him imploded in slow motion, the wave of water and crushing steel coming at him like a huge thrusting piston. Blood and icy seawater filled what had been the Stingray’s control room.

* * *

The headquarters building of Commander Submarines U.S. Atlantic Fleet, COMSUBLANT was a massive brick building in an old northwest section of Norfolk, Virginia. The building looked drab and squat, a ghetto gymnasium that seemed half swallowed by the earth. The complex was surrounded by two high chain-link fences with spiral wound razor wire on top. A guard house was perched at the only entrance, manned by two armed Marines. Inside the building a stainless steel-walled elevator descended to the Flag Plot room sixty feet below the basement level. Inside the elevator was Air Force Brigadier General Herman Xavier Tyler, who wore a blue uniform with an orange tag clipped to his pocket, black block letters proclaiming “VISITOR.” Tyler’s general stars were brand new from his recent promotion from Offut Air Force Base’s Strategic Air Command Headquarters. Tyler’s youthful looks tended to rob him of an air of authority, in spite of his steady frown and whitewall haircut, the hair clipped tight to his head. Tyler was enroute to a briefing on the submarine force, a necessary level of knowledge for his future staff duty when he would be shoulder-to-shoulder with Navy officers. The elevator stopped and the doors opened slowly, revealing a hall with framed photographs on the painted cinderblock walls. Two Marines with M-16’s guarded a large steel door at the end of the hall. The door slowly swung open and the Marines came to attention as a naval officer in khakis stepped out. General Tyler noticed that the steel door was solid and almost a foot thick, with an elaborate spring and counterbalance system to help open it. Several latches showed on the door, each latch over two inches thick. It was a blast door, the general thought. The Flag Plot room must be hardened against all but a direct hit from a nuclear weapon. The naval officer stepped closer, stretching out his hand. He had the same silver oak leaves that a lieutenant colonel in the Air Force would wear on his collars. For a moment the Air Force general tried to recall what the Navy called that rank. As the officer got closer the general saw pilot’s wings over his left pocket. The officer was slim, in his early forties, with most of his head bald. His only hair, once dark but now mostly gray, was tightly trimmed above his ears. The officer walked with a swagger, as if he was carrying a ceremonial officer’s sword at a parade. When he reached the general he flashed a wide smile of unnaturally white straight teeth and held out his hand.

“General Tyler? I’m Commander Dick Donchez, COMSUBLANT Intelligence. Welcome to Flag Plot. The admiral sends his regrets but asked me to show you the operation here.”

General Tyler took a moment to look at the gold pilot’s wings on Donchez’s chest, and noticed they weren’t wings at all, but two strange scaly fish facing an old fashioned Uboat-type conning tower. Submarine dolphins, he remembered. Odd to show dolphins as scaly. The two men started walking down the narrow hall toward the blast door when Donchez stopped short at a framed picture of a submarine running on the surface, the cylindrical cigar-shaped hull plowing through a white wake, a fin-shaped conning tower atop the cigar with horizontal fins sticking out of it.

“Before we go in, sir,” Donchez said, “it might help to explain a few things. Have you ever worked with the submarine force before?”

“I was on a staff with a few submarine guys at SAC Headquarters in Omaha, the strategic targeting team, but I really never knew them,” Tyler said, looking at the submarine picture.

“Well, let’s start with this, then. Newspapers call these boats hunter/killer subs. We call them fast attack submarines. We have about fifty of them, all nuclear, all incredibly quiet and all very fast. None carries nuclear weapons.”

The general looked surprised. Every modern submarine he had visualized had a bellyful of intercontinental ballistic missiles. Donchez took him to a photograph further down the hall. This picture also depicted a submarine on the surface, but this one had a long flat back behind the conning tower and looked bigger.

“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.”