Ohio Class

6

"Damn it, COB!" ST2 Roger Caswell wailed. "You can't do this to me! I'm getting married this Saturday!"

"I've got news for you, son," Master Chief Earnest O'Day said with an easy smile. "The Navy can do it to you… and, in fact, the Navy has done it to you. Saturday morning you're going to be saying farewell to the fleshpots of Bremerton and be on your way to Hawaii."

"Fare-well to all these joys," Moonie sang happily from the seat beside Caswell, "We sail at break of day-hey! — hey! — hey!" Several of the other men at the mess table joined in to the ragged rendition of "Anchors

Aweigh," shouting the final chorus of heys! loud enough to ring off the bulkhead.

"Shaddup, you screwballs," O'Day said, still grinning.

"But COB, it's not fair!"

"Fair," Ohio's Chief of the Boat said, "was not mentioned in your enlistment contract. That I guar-an-tee!"

Caswell looked down at the remnants of dinner— ham steak, mashed potatoes and gravy, pineapple, and green beans. He didn't feel much like eating anymore.

"Damn, isn't there something I can do, COB?" he asked. "Donny was telling me I might get special leave or something."

"Sick leave if you're sick, son. Compassionate leave if someone in your family died. Other than your soon-to-be-dead bachelor status, I don't see anyone dead here, do you?"

"No… "

"Well, then, there you are! Anyway, you know what they say. If the Navy wanted you to have a wife, they'd've issued you one with your sea bag!"

"The man's right, Cas," Rodriguez told him. "You got everything you need right here! You've got us!"

"You gonna climb into his rack with the kid, Rodriguez?" Moonie asked. "It'll be a fuckin' tight fit!" The others laughed.

"What do you expect?" Doc Kettering said. "Roddy has a big cock, and Cas has a tight ass!"

"How would you know?"

"I'm a Navy corpsman," Kettering said serenely. "Corpsmen know these things."

"I'm gonna sell tickets!" TM3 Dobrowski said. "Or take pictures!"

"Nah, the MAA'd just fuckin' confiscate 'em, man,"

Moonie said. "They don't want none of that homo-porno shit on the boat!"

"Aw, shut up, guys!" Caswell said. He looked at O'Day, his eyes damn close to tears. "COB, you gotta help me. I don't think Nina's going to understand!"

"If Nina has what it takes to be a good Navy wife," O'Day replied, "she'll understand. Or she'll learn to understand. Or you'll talk to her and make her understand. But you gotta realize, son… the needs of the Navy come first. Always."

Caswell was still feeling stunned — and completely blindsided. There'd been some scuttlebutt over the past couple of days about their sailing orders being moved up, that Ohio might be sent out on her deployment early, but he'd dismissed it as wild rumors, or as deliberate attempts by his shipmates to yank his chain. When the official word had come down from the exec this morning, however — that all leave and liberty would be cancelled as of 2400 hours Friday, and that the Ohio would be putting to sea by 0700 hours Saturday morning — it had felt like the end of the world.

At 1100 hours Saturday morning he was supposed to be at Our Lady of the Sea Catholic Church saying "I do," not standing sonar watch as the Ohio entered the Pacific Ocean.

Nina Dumont was the only daughter of a guy who'd made his fortune in Redmond's computer empire, and whose wife considered herself to be the rising star of Washington state's social elite. Mama and Papa Dumont were less than thrilled to begin with that their daughter was marrying a sailor, of all things… and an enlisted man at that, rather than an officer. Unthinkable!

Once they'd accepted the idea, though, they hijacked the wedding plans. Correction, Alice Dumont had hijacked the wedding; George had remained in his upstairs office, writing checks. Half of Redmond was supposed to be there this Saturday, and at the reception that afternoon. The cake, the flowers, the reception hall, the dinner — everything had already been ordered and at least partly paid for. Those damned, fancy engraved invitations had gone out a month ago. Jesus!

Nina's folks had been adamantly opposed to her marrying a sailor. Part of that had been due to the stereotypical sailor's image — a girl in every port, drunken carousing at topless bars on liberty, and all the rest — but part, too, had been aimed at the fact that a Navy wife faced long stretches, months at a time, when her husband was at sea and she was left home alone. No daughter of mine is going to be put through that! George Dumont had declared during one fiery encounter.

He'd won them over at last, though… or maybe what had won them over was Nina's announcement that she would elope with him if she had to. In any case, they'd accepted him, and now he called them "Mom" and "Dad."

When they found out the wedding was off, he was dead meat. He wouldn't mind so much if it was just the elder Dumonts who cut him off. What was Nina going to say? Would she, could she, even understand?

Well, he had liberty tonight, and he was supposed to go over to the Dumonts' house for dinner with the three of them.

He would know the worst then.

Lieutenant Commander Gary Hawking pulled back gently — very gently — on the control yoke, bringing the Manta into level flight. He still considered it "flying," even though he was currently piloting the Navy's newest deep-diving submersible at a depth of over 2,700 feet.

Once a naval aviator, he thought, always a naval aviator.

Hawking had joined the Navy twelve years ago, and had two tours of flight duty under his belt. Upon completion of his last deployment, though, he'd had the offer to volunteer for something that sounded really interesting — research work on the XSSF-1 Manta. He'd volunteered, been accepted, and in short order was transferred to Pearl Harbor where the final tests on the Manta were being conducted.

His move to Hawaii, however, had been by way of Connecticut, and a training tour at the Navy's submarine school at New London.

Technically, now, he was both a Navy aviator and a submariner. He didn't have his dolphins yet, though. A submariner's coveted dolphins were awarded after six months in the boats, and after he'd passed his quals — his qualifying tests — covering every system on the submarine. Hawking's last six months had been spent shuttling between Pearl and the Naval Research and Development lab — NRaD — in San Diego. Technically a creature of both worlds now, of air and of deep water, he wasn't yet wholly comfortable with the latter, nor had he been completely accepted by the submarine community.

But that, he was convinced, would come, given time and patience. The Manta, this weird little SciFi hybrid, was going to prove her worth… and so was he.

The Manta, in fact, was more like a traditional aircraft than a submarine. The XSSF stood for "Experimental Submarine Fighter," and not, as some wags had it, for "X-Files Super-Science Fiction."

She looked like something out of a science fiction movie, though. Just over ten meters in length and two meters thick, the Manta looked like a squat and slightly flattened torpedo in prelaunch mode, its overall dimensions dictated by those of the Trident II D5 ICBM. With waterfoils folded, the Manta fit neatly if snugly into one of the launch tubes on board an Ohio-class boomer. Once ejected from the launch tube by a burst of compressed air, the Manta's aft section unfolded to create a downward-angled delta with a gaping forward intake.

Water entered the intake, was heated by power from an array of fuel cells, and squirted astern like the exhaust of a ramjet, which in effect the Manta was. The engineers were still tinkering with the craft's dynamics. Top speed was believed to be in excess of 100 knots, however. They hadn't pushed that particular design envelope very hard yet in the testing program. Hawking had only had the tough little delta-foil up to eighty knots.

The real advance, though, was in the use of negative buoyancy. Traditional submarines used ballast tanks to adjust their buoyancy, surfacing when the tanks were blown empty. The Manta did not have ballast tanks, however, and, like an aircraft, was heavier than the medium through which it "flew," remaining aloft by creating a difference in pressure between its upper and lower body surfaces. So long as it was moving at a speed of at least fifteen knots, the Manta flew; if it lost power or fell below that critical speed, it would sink… and somewhere in the dark and crushing depths below, it would be destroyed.

Hawking took some comfort from the knowledge that in an emergency his cockpit module could be ejected from the Manta, and that did possess the buoyancy necessary to take him to the surface.

How deep was the Manta's crush depth? That was still an unknown, though numbers cranked through NRaD's computers suggested that the hull — a fantastically tough composite of titanium and carbon weave— would withstand the pressures of depths down to a thousand meters. This afternoon, Hawking was deliberately testing those numbers. The bottom here off the southern coast of Oahu was about 820 meters down. He'd taken the Manta into a deep dive, allowing sensors planted along the hull to register the stresses they encountered.

At 810 meters—2,700 feet — the water pressure exceeded 1,200 psi — a full three-fifths of a ton squeezing down on each and every square inch of the Manta's hull.

Well, so far, so good. The hull was designed with a certain amount of give, actually becoming stronger as pressure increased. There was stress, yes… but it was nowhere near the red line yet. Affectionately, Hawking reached up and patted the curved surface of the canopy, inches above his head. Good girl. She was a sweet craft.

Outside the canopy it was the blackest of black nights. It might be mid-afternoon on the surface, but sunlight could not penetrate more than about a hundred feet through even the most crystalline of tropical ocean waters. Here, in the Abyss, it was night absolute. He had the forward light on, but there was nothing to illuminate here save flecks of muck like drifting stars, tumbling past the canopy.

It was an eerie and somewhat unsettling feeling. It felt like he was flying at night, with the drifting debris serving as a poor substitute for stars. And yet, inches above his head, over half a ton of water for every square inch of his body lay waiting, held back by the high-tech plastic of the low, bubble canopy. If the bubble gave way, he would be dead before his nerve endings had time to react to the blast of infalling water.

He checked his sonar. A transponder signal was giving him a steady, pulsing beat, three hundred meters away and slightly to the left. He pulled the yoke again, nudging it to port.

The Manta had been envisioned as the world's first fighter submarine — a one-man, maneuverable craft that could "fly" far and fast from the parent boat, reconnoiter approaches to ports or shallow waters, identify potentially hostile targets such as mines, undersea sensor arrays, or enemy submarines, and even kill those targets with the high-speed microtorpedoes she carried in her bow. Someday, such fighters might provide an aircraft carrier with ASW defense, or protect conventional submarines from enemy subs. For now, the program was testing the feasibility of deploying them out of the missile launch tubes on board a converted Ohio-class boomer… in a sense turning the Ohio into a submarine carrier.

Science fiction indeed.

The target was less than a hundred meters ahead. He still couldn't see a thing through the murk. All his light revealed was a gray and shapeless emptiness alive with dancing motes of crud.

The bottom warning sounded, and he pulled the fighter's nose up slightly, slowing her. He thought he could see a thicker texture to the gray now, ahead and below… but it was still almost impossible to make out what he was actually seeing.

And then, out of nowhere, a shadow emerged from the gray, a cliff towering above his tiny craft, to his left.

His jaw dropped. That's it! Incredible!

Slowing now to just below the speed necessary to stay level, he let the Manta drift along the cliff's side. Almost as an afterthought, he tapped the touch-screen controls, switching on his port lateral lights.

Details sprang into sharply shadowed relief… black metal coated in slime… antiaircraft guns pointed skyward from clumsy looking, antique mounts… stanchions and railings and even deck cleats clearly visible. Ahead and just above him, he could make out faded white letters and numerals painted five feet tall… the legend I-401.

He'd found her.

Hawking touched another point on the control screen, which set the portside automatic cameras running. He'd promised Dr. Henson he'd record the site if he found it.

Correction. When he found it. He was the best there was, and the Manta was pure magic. There'd never been the slightest doubt.

Well, the dive transponder had helped.

The Manta was drifting down past the hull of a true leviathan, a Japanese submarine sunk off the coast of Hawaii sixty-three years before.

And what a submarine! The I-400 class, designated Sensuikan Toku by the Imperial Japanese Navy, had been a monster in her day… four hundred feet long and forty high, with a displacement of 3,530 tons and a crew of 144. She was the largest submarine ever to sail the world's seas until the advent of the ballistic missile submarines of the 1960s. There'd been four of the monsters all together — the I-400 and I-401, plus two slightly smaller vessels, I-13 and I-14. Launched in 1944, they'd been incorporated into Submarine Squadron One, under the command of Captain Tatsunosuke Ariizumi.

Hawking had studied up on his target before making the dive. The I-401 was of special interest to him because she was, in fact, a submersible aircraft carrier, a radical concept that had, fortunately, entered the war too late to affect its outcome. I-400 and I-401 had each carried three disassembled M6A1 torpedo bombers, while the smaller I-13 and I-14 each had carried two.

The Japanese had called the Aichi floatplanes Seiran. Various authoritative sources Hawking had consulted translated the name as "Mountain Haze." Equally authoritative sources translated the name as "Storm from a Clear Sky."

His money was on Storm from a Clear Sky, an apt enough name for the sleek little aircraft, given the manner in which it was to have been used. The I-400 subs had fuel tanks capacious enough to give them a range of 37,500 miles — one and a half times around the world without refueling, and this ten years before the advent of the nuclear-powered Nautilus. The Imperial Japanese Navy strategic planners had considered using the Sensuikan Toku—the name simply meant "Special Submarine" — to stage air raids against San Francisco, New York, or Washington, D.C.

That would have been a nasty surprise in the final year of the war. "Air Raid, Pentagon… This is no drill…. "

Eventually, though, Vice Admiral Jisaburo Ozawa, Vice Chief of the IJN General Staff, had settled on a truly chilling concept, designated Operation PX. SubRon One's ten-plane armada would be employed to launch a biological warfare attack against U.S. population centers along the Pacific Coast, delivering "payloads" of rats and insects infected with bubonic plague, cholera, dengue fever, typhus, and other germ warfare agents developed and tested at the infamous General Ishi's medical laboratory at Harbin, in Manchuria.

On March 26, 1945, however, Operation PX had been cancelled on the orders of General Yoshijiro Umezu, Chief of the Army General Staff. "Germ warfare against the United States," Umezu had declared, "will escalate into war against all humanity."

And so the IJN's planning staff had shifted their sights to another possibility — a sneak air attack against the Panama Canal. If the Gatun Locks could be destroyed, Gatun Lake would be emptied, blocking the canal for months and seriously delaying the redeployment of elements of the U.S. Atlantic Fleet to the Pacific, where they would be employed in the inevitable invasion of the Japanese home islands.

Hawking added a bit of forward throttle and gained altitude, skimming past the conning tower and banking to port in front of the forward end of her 115-foot hangar. He could see something fallen on deck along the port side forward… probably the boat's enormous hydraulic crane… or possibly it had been lowered and stored that way. The I-401 had an eighty-five-foot pneumatic catapult extending from the hangar door to the bow. Reportedly, the submarine aircraft carrier could surface and all three torpedo bombers could be assembled, armed, fueled, and launched within forty-five minutes. Those floatplanes could land alongside after their mission was complete and be hauled aboard by that crane; likely, though, their raid against the Panama Canal would have been a one-way flight. Kamikaze.

But, of course, the raid against the canal had never come off. During the summer months of 1945, some three thousand ships of the United States Navy began closing in on the Japanese home islands in preparation for Operation Olympic, the invasion of Japan. The Panama Canal raid had been cancelled, and the four submarines of SubRon One were redeployed for an operation closer to home — Operation Arashi, or "Mountain Storm." I-13 was sunk en route, but the remaining three rendezvoused at the embattled Japanese base at Truk and prepared for a raid against the U.S. fleet at Ulithi, scheduled for August 17. The eight Aichi aircraft were painted with fake American markings, to let them get in close.

History caught up with the I-401, however, when the atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and, on August 15, the Emperor broadcast his order to surrender. By the end of August, the I-401 and her consorts were under American command.

Under skeleton American and Japanese crews, all three had been conned across the Pacific to Hawaii, where they'd arrived in January 1946 to a spectacular welcoming celebration. In March, however, it was decided to dispose of the captured supersubs… reportedly because the Russians were demanding access to them. I-401 had been scuttled, sent to the bottom here off Kalaeloa Harbor, and here she had rested for over six decades, until the slowly corroding hulk had been discovered by accident by a deep-sea research team in 2005. On subsequent dives, they'd attached the sonar locator transponder, and several research teams had visited her since in deep submersibles or with robotic underwater vehicles.

Hawking completed his circuit of the I-401's upper works, noting how the conning tower was offset some seven feet to port off the centerline, while the long hangar was offset two feet to starboard to compensate. That monster, he decided, must have been a bitch to maneuver, with a sharper turning radius to starboard than to port.

The I-401 was decades ahead of her time, anticipating, in some ways, the Ohio-class conversion and the use of on-board submersible fighters like the Manta. Ohio's new mission, as he understood it, was similar in many respects to that of the I-401—to take the war to the enemy's coast.

A series of sharp chirps sounded from his console — a message alert. Radio didn't work across more than a few meters of water, and the various new phone systems using sound transmitted through the water were still unreliable at great depth. The chirping signal was unambiguous, however. Surface at once.

Pity. He'd hoped to make several circuits of the sunken behemoth, but if he didn't take the Manta to the surface at once, he could expect a real ass-chewing from Captain Hargreave and the submersible test bed facility brass at Pearl Harbor. Maneuvering well clear of the I-401, he took a last look at her vast and shadowed bulk receding into the night once more, then cut in full power to the Manta's thrusters and pulled back on the yoke. Nosing high, he began to angle up toward daylight, just over half a mile overhead.

Piloting the Manta, he reflected, involved one important difference from traditional flight. With an airplane, as his flight instructor at Pensacola had always said, "Whether or not you take off is optional; landing is mandatory." In other words, if you got off the ground, you would be coming back down again, one way or another.

With the Manta, though, it was just the opposite.

Negative buoyancy meant that the fighter sub was guaranteed to sink when it entered the water; getting back to the surface at the end of the mission was the worrisome part. If the engine or power plant gave out on him, the Manta would nose over and begin a one-way descent to the bottom once more… and he would get to test the ejection/surface escape system. That system, he was all too aware, had never been tested in an operational XSSF-1; there were only two test bed models available, and they were too damned expensive to lose in a test of the ejector system.

Minutes passed, however, and all of his readouts stayed green. He kept a particularly sharp eye on the hull stress sensors; as the outside pressure was relieved, the hull tended to flex and expand slightly—"unpacking" was what the engineers called it. If there was going to be a problem, this would be the time.

But as more minutes passed and the waters above began to show a faint tinge of luminous blue, it became clear that, once again, the Manta had passed her quals with flying colors. At thirty meters he could see the surface as a dancing pattern of blue and green. At ten meters he could see the hull of the Dolores Chouest, his mother ship, off to starboard.

Moments later he brought the sub level and rode the canopy through the surface, breaching in a burst of white spray, and he felt the craft's heavy roll with the ocean's surface swell. Dolores Chouest rode just ahead, already positioning herself to take him aboard up her docking well aft.

The Dolores Chouest was an ungainly looking vessel, with bright red hull and buff-painted superstructure, her bridge mounted far forward, above her bow, and with side-by-side stacks amidships. Aft, her stern was split in a deep U, with a lift designed to raise small submersibles out of the water. The Dolores Chouest, a civilian vessel under long-term charter to the Navy, had originally been configured to serve as a support vessel for DSRV rescue submersibles, but was now serving as the mobile home base and mother ship for the XSSF-1 as she completed her sea trials.

"Manta, Dolores," crackled over his radio headset. "We have you in sight. Welcome home."

"Copy that, Dolores. Spread your legs, I'm coming in!"

"Roger that, big boy. Please be gentle."

Docking the Manta wasn't as simple as cutting the engine and drifting up to a dock, with sailors ready to toss him a line. As soon as he cut power, he would begin to sink, so he had to carefully gauge his approach, coming in under power just barely fast enough to stay afloat. To help him maintain his critical speed, the Dolores was motoring away from him at ten knots. As he made his docking approach at fifteen knots, his actual closing speed was only five. At the last moment he touched the screen control to fold the fighter's water-foils and increased speed slightly to compensate.

The docking maneuver was almost blatantly phallic, with the torpedo-shaped Manta sliding in between Dolores's open "legs."

It wasn't quite the same as a trap on a carrier deck, but it would do. A landing on board an aircraft carrier required touching down and trying to snag, or "trap," one of the arrestor cables stretched across the deck, while simultaneously giving the aircraft full throttle just in case the arrestor hook missed and the aviator needed to fly off the deck again to make a second pass.

A signal light flashed on, indicating he'd crossed the threshold and was over the platform. He cut power then and drifted forward another few feet, before striking the thickly padded fender and coming to rest.

Sailors waiting to either side jumped down onto the platform, making the Manta fast with lines secured to her recessed hull cleats. In another few moments, as Hawking continued powering down the submersible's systems, the lift began hauling the Manta completely out of the water.

A chief boatswain's mate cracked the canopy, sliding it back, as Hawking unstrapped his harness and climbed— a bit unsteadily — out of the cockpit. After over two hours in the ocean's depths, the tropical mid-afternoon sun was dazzling.

Someone handed him a pair of aviator's sunglasses.

"Thanks," he said, donning them. "Why the early recall?"

"We're headed back to Pearl, Commander," the chief said with a lopsided grin. "Looks like you're deploying early."

"Early? Where?"

"Yup. Word just got passed down. The Ohio is putting to sea Saturday morning. The brass wants a final top-to-bottom check of the Manta before she gets here on the seventh."

"Jesus! So the boomer gets here in one week instead of three! Is that any reason to haul me off the bottom? I wasn't done yet!"

"You know the Navy, sir," the chief said. "Hurry up and wait!"

Typical. Probably some junior officer back at headquarters had seen the orders and assumed the recall meant now.

It wasn't really a problem. He'd have time for sightseeing on the I-401 hulk another day. In the meantime Dolores Chouest had throttled up to twelve knots and was making her way back toward Oahu with a rolling gait. They should put in back at Pearl sometime late tonight… and that might mean a chance to call Kathy. He hadn't been expecting to see her before the weekend. Sweet.

He patted the Manta's dripping hull with a grin, before starting forward toward his quarters. If he was lucky, he might be able to enjoy the docking maneuver for real tonight.