Rapier checked the tubes, found them dry, their interlocks functional. He nodded to Chief Robertson, who sat at the local control panel. He then called control to tell them he was going to look into the battery compartment below the torpedo room. He lifted the hatch and peered down. The space was three feet high, thirty feet long, twenty feet wide. Once inside, a person would be lying on top of the batteries. Entry required removal of all metal objects on the body to avoid shorting the cells, each of which was the size of a household’s water heater and full of sulfuric acid. Satisfied, Rapier stood, lowered the hatch and left the torpedo room.
Rapier knew the nuclear spaces aft would be ready. Chief Engineer Matt Delaney’s troops, the nukes, always were more squared away than the operations and weapons sailors, at least they thought they were. He crossed the centerline passageway to the captain’s stateroom and knocked. No reply. He opened the door and saw Pacino sitting at the table, staring into space.
“Sir?” Pacino focused and looked at Rapier. “I’ve completed my tour. The ship is rigged for sea, sir. No major discrepancies.”
“Very well, XO,” Pacino said, his voice a monotone.
“Anything else, sir?”
Pacino shook his head, and Rapier got out of there. Clearly the captain had a lot on his mind.
As the door shut gently and Rapier’s footsteps faded down the ladder to operations middle level, Pacino shook off memories of his father and the Russian admiral somewhere out there… He got up from the table and made his way forward into the control room to the navigation alcove. Even at flank speed they would not be able to dive until mid-afternoon because the continental shelf was some 150 miles east of the Virginia coastline. The Devilfish, after all, was designed for submerged speed… on the surface she could only do 20 knots because of the need to fight the bow wave. Pacino checked his watch impatiently, and began to calculate the time it would take to get to the marginal ice zone north of Iceland.
Twenty minutes later the wardroom table was crowded with officers around the table, some clasping their hands together on the blue leather cover, some doodling on spiral notebook pages. Executive Officer Rapier took his seat to the right of the chair near the end reserved for the captain. Navigator Ian Christman stood at the corner of the room at a curtain. Christman had two modes of operation: frantic or sleepy.
Pacino walked into the room, accepted a cup of coffee, sat at the head of the table and waved at Christman.
“Go ahead, Nav.”
Christman stepped into the pantry, the small closet between the wardroom and galley, shut its outer door and threw the bolt. He shut both wardroom doors and locked them, sealing the room. Back in the corner of the room by the captain’s chair he drew the curtain aside, revealing an Arctic Ocean chart and a blueprint of the Russian OMEGA submarine, both stamped TOP SECRET. He turned to the men in the room and pointed to the chart.
“Gentlemen, this is the Arctic Ocean, and this is the Russian OMEGA-class attack submarine.” Christman loved a dramatic opening. “Our mission this run is to find this son-of-a-bitch, just completed this week and now submerged for sea trials. Once we find it we get an SPL and bring it home to the geniuses at COMSUBLANT for analysis. The plan is a little complicated so listen up. Our sonar search has a problem… no boat has ever heard the OMEGA before. Our tonal search gates are configured for the AKULA class. We hope the propulsion-plant configuration is at least similar…”
“Yo, Nav,” Stokes interrupted to Christman’s annoyance. The contrast between the hyper Christman and Stokes’ southern calm made for constant friction between them. “If we can’t hear this bad boy with our tonal gates, how do we’xpect to snap his ass up? We could sail right by him’n’ never know he’s there.”
Hick or not, he’d made a crucial point, Pacino thought.
Christman frowned at him. “The truth is that we may never find him during our allotted mission time. But we may get a hint of him from a careless transient noise. We may get lucky and detect a torpedo exercise… several other Russian attack submarines in the area, each of which will be detectable in our search gates. Or we could get a radio message from COMSUBLANT that he’s been detected by SOSUS. Not likely, I admit. SOSUS won’t be much use for a quiet contact, and this far north the position uncertainties could put a good detect in a thousand square mile area. Our last card is PHOTOINT. You know, satellite surveillance. Maybe we can pick up a surfacing with an infrared scan from the polar orbit KH-17.”
“Odds are,” Stokes drawled, “this here boy won’t be surfacing at all. Why would he?”
“Might not, but then, if there’s one thing we’ve learned about the Russians, it’s that they’re unpredictable.”
Even Stokes had to nod at that.
“Our track is marked in black, taking us to our search position here. We’re scheduled to transit under the ice in three days. Our search position grid is located at the operation area where COMSUBLANT expects the OMEGA to be doing its sea trials.”
Christman pointed to an area marked in red far north of the bananashaped island of Novaya Zemlya.
“As you can plainly see, it’s a large area and not much help to us in finding the OMEGA. Okay, so much for the search phase. Now, assume for a moment that we have a good detect on the OMEGA. This is where we start the SPL. I hate to break this to you first-tour officers but against the Russians, an SPL is a hell of a lot different than the exercise we did against Billfish in the Med. We’ll be less than five yards away from the Russian’s hull, circling him and recording him. And unlike our exercise with the Billfish, the Russian is not under orders to be nice and control his course and speed for us. He could go nuts at any moment, smash right into us and breach the hull. Or worse, shoot at us.”
Pacino cut in. “This next is Special Compartmented Information, Top Secret — Tophat. A few years ago one of our boats, a Piranha class, ran into a Russian attack sub during an SPL. The Russian launched two warshot 53-centimeter torpedoes at her. A nasty way to end a northern run…”
“What happened, Cap’n?” Brett Fasteen, the Electrical Officer, asked.
“Our boat had gone to flank, and by luck it managed to avoid running into an icepressure ridge. One torpedo was a dud, the other ran out of fuel after a twenty-minute pursuit. But let me tell you, twenty minutes is a long time to spend on the business end of a Russian warshot torpedo. The commanding officer hung up his dolphins after that run.”
Pacino looked around the room. If there had been any lingering doubts about the importance and the danger of this OP, they had disappeared. And they still didn’t know the half of it…
Pacino, in his stateroom, looked at the briefing sheets of the OMEGA that Donchez had sent over before Devilfish got under way, thought about that other half… somehow avenging his father’s death by confronting and destroying Novskoyy, the man who had sent him to the bottom, the man who Donchez had told him was on the OMEGA. But how? How…? Fantasy took over… If he could collide with the Russian, maybe the OMEGA would shoot first. If a torpedo was screaming in at them, no one would question the captain’s order to fire back, the only problem would be evading the Russian torpedo—
An insistent buzzing sound broke him out of his farfetched reverie. Farfetched…? It was the phone from the Conn.
“Captain,” Pacino said, sweat pouring off him.
“Offsa’deck, you asked for a wakeup call, sir.”
“Thanks. I’ll be out on the Conn in a few minutes.” He stretched, ran hot water on his face and looked in the mirror. He’d let his beard grown on this run. Normally he didn’t do that… it made his face look too much like his father’s. Good, this was the time for it.