Voyage of the Devilfish

CHAPTER 3

Directly astern of the port side of the Devilfish’s control room, in the centerline passageway of the upper deck of the operations compartment, Pacino sat in his stateroom facing a fold-down desk and a stack of paperwork — shovelling the currency of the Navy’s overweight bureaucracy being the price Pacino had to pay for operating their prize possession, the Devilfish. He had been up most of the night chasing the Allentown, and now the combination of paperwork and the ship’s gentle side-to-side motion was making him drowsy. He had called for coffee and had just taken his first sip when the bridge speaker-box hissed and crackled to life.

“CAPTAIN, OFF’SA’DECK, SIR.”

Pacino flipped a toggle switch and spoke into the communication console between his desk and a table at the opposite wall.

“Captain.”

“CAPTAIN, OFF’SA’DECK, SIR. RADIO REPORTS RECEIVING AN IMMEDIATE MESSAGE FROM COMSUBLANT, SIR. IT’S MARKED PERSONAL FOR COMMANDING OFFICER.”

“Anything else?”

“YESSIR. CONTACT SIERRA FOURTEEN, OUTBOUND TANKER, IS PAST CLOSEST POINT OF APPROACH AND OPENING AT TEN THOUSAND YARDS. NEW CONTACT, SIERRA FIFTEEN, OUTBOUND MERCHANT VESSEL, HEADING OUT OF THE NORFOLK TRAFFIC SEPARATION SCHEME, RANGE TEN MILES, BEARING DRIFT RIGHT.”

“Off sa’deck. Captain aye. Keep an eye on him, he may not see us. Where’s the Allentown?” Pacino had given orders to get ahead of her and run flank speed into Norfolk. The victor got the best spot on the pier with no waiting. The loser waited until the pier crew was done mooring the first boat.

“ALLENTOWN S ASTERN, CAPTAIN, OUTSIDE VISUAL. RADAR HAS HER AT BEARING ZERO NINE FIVE, RANGE 25 MILES.”

Pacino smiled. “One more thing,” he said. “You got the Jolly Roger flying up there?”

“YESSIR. FLYING TALL AND PROUD, SIR.”

“Captain aye.”

Pacino flipped off the toggle switch, leaned back in his chair and yawned. At ten feet square the captain’s stateroom was by far the largest private space on board. Pacino’s desk was beside the entrance door, a fold-down stainless steel sink behind it. Against the far wall a table and two chairs folded into a bunk. The aft wall had a display of remote instruments showing ship’s course, speed and depth, a TV monitor that could be patched into the periscope or a VCR, and a door to the stainless steel-panelled bathroom Pacino shared with the XO.

The only decoration on the stateroom’s imitation wood Formica panelling was a large flag in a mahogany frame with a glass cover — a grinning white skull and crossbones, the Jolly Roger.

Whenever the Devilfish got under way or returned from a mission, another Jolly Roger flapped in the breeze next to the American flag. The crew enjoyed the flagrant violation of U.S. Navy Regs. Every month Pacino received a memo from Squadron Seven staff not to fly the flag, and he always posted it on the bulletin board outside the crew’s mess. He suspected the Squadron Seven Commodore knew it had more than a passing significance for Pacino and let him get away with it. At fifteen, Pacino had enjoyed a week of fishing at a hideout cabin in Wyoming with his father and then Commander Richard Donchez. Once, while trading sea stories with Donchez over a fire, Pacino senior had commented wistfully about what a kick it would be to sail into Norfolk after a big mission with a Jolly Roger flying from the sail. Years later, on a rare day of liberty for plebe midshipmen, Pacino had found the flag in a dusty antique store and bought it to give to his father as a Christmas present when he returned from the deployment of 1973. For years after the sinking, Pacino had not been able to bring himself to remove the flag from its gift-wrapped package. Once he finally did, seeing the old skull and crossbones seemed to fill just a little of the void his father’s watery death had left inside him. The flag seemed to capture the spirit of what his father had been — a courageous submarine officer, a seafarer, a leader, a warrior. Sometimes Pacino found it draining to stare at it for too long. Usually, it was his source of strength. He still hoped one day to do something to make up for what had happened to his father…

A knock sounded at the door. Pacino opened it and the Radioman of the Watch handed him a metal clipboard with a radio message printout.

Pacino shook his head as he read the message. What could be so urgent that he’d be pulled off the ship with only a two-hour transit left of her trip? Even if the brass were unhappy enough with his illegal emergency-blow tactic to relieve him of command they’d still let him drive in and see his replacement standing on the pier with the commodore. It made no sense.

“XO,” Pacino called over his shoulder through the wall to the XO’s stateroom. Rapier tapped on the door and entered through the bathroom between the two rooms.

“XO, better get the small-boat transfer-team ready to go. The boat will meet us at the entrance to the channel.”

“Who are we transferring on? Or off?”

“Me. You’ll be acting captain of the Devilfish. Be careful with her.” Rapier frowned. “What’s up, skipper? Is this about your emergency surface? You think the brass are pissed off?”

“I guess we’ll see,” Pacino said.

The topside crew of the Devilfish caught the lines of the 40-foot boat maneuvering alongside. The submarine and the transfer boat cruised at 5 knots, just enough to maintain steering. The boat was winched in tight, touching the Devilfish’s steel curvature. Pacino, in a heavy green canvas parka and flaming orange lifejacket, moved close to the edge of the sub’s treacherously sloping cylindrical hull and grabbed the outstretched arm of one of the sailors in the small boat. When he had been pulled aboard, the transfer boat took in its lines and slowly pulled away from the submarine. Dimly Pacino heard the P.A. Circuit One announcement booming over the submarine’s bridgebox, “DEVILFISH, DEPARTING.”

The boat’s diesel motor throttled up, its wake turning to white foam as it accelerated away. Pacino stood at a rail and looked back at the Devilfish, still going dead slow ahead. The ship was graceful and powerful, her black cylindrical hull so low to the water that she was practically submerged even when rigged for surface. The water climbed smoothly up nearly to the forward hatch as the ship picked up speed and drove by the small boat. The conning tower was placed far forward, near where the hull started its slope down into the water. The sail was a beautifully crafted 25-foot-tall fin shaped like a long teardrop in cross section, vertical on its leading and trailing edges, curved on top. Two officers with green parkas and binoculars stood on the bridge, the cockpit at the top of the forward part of the sail. Behind them a ten-foot-tall stainless steel flagpole flew the American stars and stripes and the stark black and white of the Jolly Roger. Coming out of the sail were two horizontal fins, “fairwater planes,” shaped much like a jet airplane’s horizontal tail surfaces. Rising high out of the sail, looking like two telephone poles, were the periscopes. The forward one was a simple and rugged World War II-era device. The one aft was a high-tech radar-invisible mast that was part-periscope, part-video camera, part-electronic countermeasures device, part-radio receiver. Further aft of the periscopes was an even taller, slimmer telephone-pole mast — the BIGMOUTH multifrequency radio antenna. Behind the sail the hull extended far aft, smooth and cylindrical, until it sloped slowly into the water. The aft slope was much gentler than the forward slope, the hull gradually lowering into the sea. After a long gap of water the rudder jutted out of the water, shaped like an airplane’s vertical tail. The only surface characteristics visible were white draft marks on the rudder. Devilfish displaced 4500 tons, was 292 feet long and 32 feet in diameter. Her screw was submerged and invisible in the water.

Pacino remembered the first time he had seen her in a drydock, she had looked huge and fat with no water to hide beneath. The tail section was complicated, with another rudder under the ship, horizontal fins — sternplanes — and the screw aft. The screw was a spiral-bladed shape with ten long curving blades, each looking like a scimitar sword, the hub of the screw extending far aft of the junction of the blades and the hub. A long tube extended from the skin of the ship aft to a horizontal tail fin, the sternplane and further aft beyond the screw. It was a fairing for a towed sonar array the ship could pull several miles behind her.

Pacino could stare for hours at the Devilfish. Aboard the transfer boat he imagined the salt breeze of the wind on his face on its bridge, the snapping of the flags behind him, the hum of the rotating radar mast aft of the flags… He felt his grip on the rails tighten, hoping he wasn’t being relieved of command. It wasn’t his career he worried about but the thought of never driving the submarine again, never feeling her deck vibrate beneath him as she plowed through the sea at flank speed.

As he watched, the Devilfish shrank into the distance so that all that remained was the vertical fin of the sail and the horizontal fins of the fairwater planes, forming a cruciform shape against the backdrop of the land beyond.

When the small boat landed at a jetty it was almost like being awakened from a dream. Pacino took one last look into the distance and stepped onto the dock. As he did a lieutenant came to attention and saluted, her hair pulled up into a tight bun under her oddly shaped female officer’s cap. Pacino saluted back and followed her to a black staff car. He didn’t ask what was going on. He would know soon enough.