Voyage of the Devilfish

CHAPTER 4

The staff car pulled through the gate of the COMSUBLANT compound and parked at the main entrance to the thirty-year-old main core of the building, a squat brick gymnasium. Beyond and above it the new glass-walled wing minimized the eyesore of the old core.

Pacino got out of the back seat of the car, feeling the chill of the December evening. The sky was black, no stars visible because of the glare of the floodlights. He and the lieutenant walked through the entrance, presenting their identification for entry. While he waited Pacino looked at a row of oil paintings on a far wall, each showing a different submarine class driving on the surface, going back to World War II ships. He lingered for a moment on the painting of the Piranha class. To its right was a painting of the newer Los Angeles class, a submarine the fleet considered a giant step backward in technology from the venerated Piranha’s. The Los Angeles boats had suffered from the budget crunches of the 1970s and early eighties, considered too expensive to build right.

The lieutenant led Pacino down a cinderblock corridor into an atrium of steel and glass that arched to the top of the new wing. After an elevator ride to the top floor Pacino found himself in the plushly carpeted outer office of COMSUBLANT, the admiral in command of the Atlantic Fleet’s submarines. Immediately he was led in by the receptionist, and both the receptionist and lieutenant quickly left, leaving Pacino alone with the admiral.

Pacino walked up to the massive oak desk made from timbers of a Navy frigate that had fought in 1812, removed his cap, came to attention. “Commander Pacino, USS Devilfish, reporting as ordered, SIR.”

The bald man at the desk looked up, a slow smile spreading over his thin face, the white-capped teeth near-perfect beneath his graying mustache. He stood up, looking slim in his dress blues with rows of ribbons splashing color over gleaming gold dolphins and endless gold braid on the sleeves. He gripped Pacino’s hand in a firm handshake.

“Mikey!” He stepped around the desk and put an arm around Pacino’s shoulders, guiding him back to the door.

“I’d offer you a drink but we need to get down to the Top Secret Conference Room.”

“Hello, Admiral,” Pacino said, “Sir. Uncle Dick.”

Donchez looked Pacino over, opened the door and led the way back down the corridor to the elevator. “Mikey, you look great. How’s Squadron Seven treating you?”

“Fine, sir,” Pacino said, somewhat uncomfortable. Donchez had stayed in touch over the years but Pacino had kept a certain distance. Partly to avoid giving the impression of having connections with the brass but also because Donchez reminded him too much of good days gone by, and of the awful day Donchez had broken the news of Anthony Pacino’s loss at sea with the Stingray. As Donchez had climbed the bureaucratic ladder of the Navy he had become more distant. Finally, as a three-star admiral in command of the fleet, they almost never saw each other.

“I heard about how you kicked ass today,” Donchez said in the elevator, pulling out one of his cigars. “Good job. It’s good to see a Piranha beat a Los Angeles like that. I liked the balls you showed getting away from that torpedo. Not many left in the force think like that.”

“Thank you, sir,” Pacino said, relieved.

“How’s Hillary and your son?” Probably sore as hell, Pacino thought, both on the pier waiting for him to disembark from the boat. “Both fine, sir. Tony wants to be a race driver, zooms around the house yelling vroom. Drives his mother crazy, I think she wanted a girl…”

Donchez said, “Maybe he’ll drive a sub when he grows up.”

As the elevator doors opened to a sub-basement Donchez led the way down a hall to another security scanner and sentry, through the door and another hall with a blast door at the end. He hit a large panel and the solid steel door slowly swung open with the hum of a powerful motor. Another hall had four doors set off of it, with one double door under a sign reading FLAG PLOT. They went in one of the doors labelled TS CONF RM 1. The room had a large wood table in the center, big enough to seat over a dozen people with another dozens seats against the wall. Pacino sat at the briefing table, remembering he’d been briefed in this conference room when Devilfish deployed to the Mediterranean earlier in the year. Admiral Donchez sat across from him, and finally spoke.

“You want to know what you’re doing here,” he said, shrugging out of his dress-blue jacket. His white shirt had cloth shoulder epaulettes with three stars and anchors, and Pacino realized he was still in his khakis, the oily smell of the submarine still in the fabric.

“We have an emergency, Mikey. We need the best Piranha-class submarine we’ve got to go on an urgent OP. Up north, under the polar icecap.”

Pacino felt excitement at an emergency operation, mixed with some disappointment at the timing. Devilfish had spent the last six months on a deployment and had been scheduled for a month of “stand-down” — R and R for the crew. He glanced at his watch — the date on the Rolex’s dial showed the number 13, and abruptly he realized that it was the anniversary of his father’s death on the Stingray. In the rush of battle with Allentown and the flush of victory afterward he hadn’t realized. With the realization now came grief, an old friend, and guilt.

“Admiral, Devilfish has been submerged over 230 days this year. My men have barely had a chance to say hello to their families. Over 120 days without surfacing. Admiral—”

“Sorry, Mikey. You and yours are it.” His tone turned chillier. Donchez dimmed the room lights and pulled a computer keyboard off a shelf on the wall and set it on the briefing table. He hit a key, starting a computerized slide show on the far wall, a television projection driven by a computer display. The COMSUBLANT emblem dissolved into a projection map of the north pole.

“A chart of the Arctic Ocean,” Donchez said. “You’ve been there a few times. The boundary of the ice zone is shown in green.”

The chart slowly zoomed in to the Russian northern coast. A city named Severomorsk was highlighted in red.

“As you know the Severomorsk Naval Complex is a major shipbuilding facility, ammunition depot and command center for the Russian Northern Fleet, including the biggest and most capable arm of the Navy, the Submarine Force.”

The screen changed to a view of the Severomorsk complex. Pacino could tell by the odd slanting lines through the photograph that it was a shot from a spy satellite. On a clear day a satellite could peer over from its path to get side-angle photos like this. The perspective made it much more valuable than the usual God’s-eye-views satellites provided. It was like being there. Clearly visible in the photograph was a giant drydock filled with scaffolding and equipment and the dots of workers. The dock’s immensity could be told from the tiny trucks parked along the security barrier. Cranes on rail wheels surrounded the scaffolding in the dock lowering massive pieces of equipment into place.

“The old Cold War is over, but submarine-building continues and at a fast pace. We’ve been watching during the past few years as one particular class of submarine has been built. The lead ship of the class is almost ready to get under way. It happens to be the newest, most advanced attack submarine in the world, at least so far as we know.”

“Not much of it to see,” Pacino said, thinking the OP probably involved trailing the new Russian submarine under the polar icecap.

The screen changed and Pacino blinked hard. The same perspective but now the clutter had been removed and a behemoth of a submarine was clearly visible in the dock. Her lines were graceful. She would be very fast. The boat had a teardrop-shaped sail forward, not the sheer-sided fin of American boats but a gently sloped bubble leaning forward. Far aft, where the long hull of the boat finally tapered to the screw, a pod shaped like a long teardrop was mounted on top of the rudder fin. Aft of the rudder was a shroud. None of the screw blades was visible.

Pacino looked at the ship in frank envy, wondering what it would be like to drive.

“This is the OMEGA-class Russian fast-attack submarine.” The picture changed to a blueprint of the ship, streamlined, her nose and tail sections elongated elliptical curves. Inside the lines of her shape was a second long shape.

“Double hull,” Pacino said, and stood up and walked to the screen to look at the drawing up-close. He concentrated on the gap between inner and outer hull. The Piranha and Los Angeles submarines were single-hull ships. A hole in the skin of an American sub punctured the “people tank,” flooding the ship. A puncture in the skin of the Russian sub would do no real damage. The only disadvantage of the doublehull ship was weight, the extra metal and water would slow the ship down.

“The inner hull of the OMEGA is titanium,” Donchez said. “Strongest submarine-hull material in the world. Outer hull is plate carbon steel. The annulus, the ring, between inner and outer hull is about fifteen feet on the top and bottom, about twenty-five feet on the sides. That’s twenty-five feet of water a torpedo would have to blast through to get to the interior.” Pacino looked at the blueprint’s end-on drawing. The inner hull was cylindrical while the outer hull was oval shaped. The annulus was filled with tanks and air bottles and batteries and piping, all leaving more room inside the pressure hull.

“Omega’s 656 feet long,” Donchez went on, “Eighty-two feet wide, longer and fatter than our Trident. A Trident sub — which I consider to be a giant underpowered hog to drive — is eighteen thousand tons submerged. This ship is sixty thousand tons submerged.”

“She’ll be slow,” Pacino said.

“A lot faster than a Piranha,” Donchez said.

“What?”

“It has twin-reactors, each liquid-metal cooled. We’re guessing about three thousand megawatts between the two of them. Pretty big when you think that the Three Mile Island plant is only twelve hundred or thirteen hundred megawatts. That gives her about six hundred thousand horsepower at the screw.”

“Six hundred thousand shaft horsepower? Jesus.” Pacino thought a moment. “There’s no way a conventional screw could accelerate a boat like that with that kind of horsepower. The screw would cavitate, just spin in a cloud of steam.”

He was thinking of the lectures at the Academy… a rotating screw blade in seawater created a low pressure area on one side of the blade, high pressure on the other. The high pressure pushed the ship while the low-pressure side sucked the ship forward. But if the pressure got too low the vacuum effect would form bubbles of steam, which would shriek as they collapsed in the high pressure of the sea away from the screw. The noisy bubble effect was called cavitation, the blades making cavities in the liquid water…

“No cavitation,” Donchez said. “No screw, for that matter. She’s got a ducted propulsor. She’ll do forty-five knots easy. Maybe fifty.” Pacino looked at the blueprint. Under the shroud aft of the rudder were what looked like several rows of turbine blades. The submarine had essentially a water-jet propulsor. It would be quiet and efficient and fast.

“If she can do fifty knots,” Pacino said, “she could outrun a Mark 49 Hullbuster torpedo. Not that it matters. I doubt even a Hullbuster would do much damage to her hull, not with steel over water over titanium.” He shook his head. “Well, even if this thing is fast, it must take an hour for her to get up to speed.”

“Look at the bow section,” Donchez said. Pacino saw torpedo tubes going forward to the nose of the ship. And a sphere of equipment at the very tip of the inside of the nosecone.

“No,” Pacino said, “not polymer injection…”

“Yes, polymer injection. Enough for ten minutes. She’ll squirt a layer of polymer out the nosecone, make the skin slippery and she’ll just glide through the water like a ghost. She’ll accelerate fast enough to leave her paint behind.”

“Polymers won’t work in arctic-temperature water—”

“I hate to tell you this, Mikey, but it works down to 28 degrees Fahrenheit.”

“Why don’t we ask Congress to buy us a few of those?”

“Not funny, kid,” Donchez said, checking his watch.

“Let’s finish. This guy can dive to 7500 feet, and with the way titanium flows before it ruptures he can probably go down to 10,000 feet for a few minutes. That’s over six times deeper than you can go, Mikey. And yes, our Hullbuster torpedoes would implode from sea pressure at that depth. He’s armed with conventional 53-centimeter torpedoes, the new 100-centimeter Magnums and SSN-X-27 nuclear warhead land-attack cruise missiles — that is, if they’re cheating on the treaty and still loading cruise missiles…”

You ain’t cheatin’, you ain’t tryin’, Pacino thought.

“And the 100-centimeter Magnum torpedoes can pursue at sixty knots for sixty nautical miles with a nuclear warhead. And even if you can evade one, it just drives back to the point where it thinks you should be and detonates. It doesn’t have to get close to kill your delicate little hull with a nuclear explosion. Meanwhile the OMEGA submarine is running like hell using his polymer system and avoids damage.

“And finally, the OMEGA has a thicker anechoic coating than previous classes. The coating does to sonar pulses what a stealth bomber does to radar pulses — absorbs them without reflecting them. In addition to quieting the submarine, any torpedo going active would not hear a return sonar ping from her hull.”

“This boat is fucking invincible—”

“Damn near. Mikey, we need to get a recording of this boat’s sound-signature. And I want you to get it.”

An SPL, Pacino thought. Sound Pressure Level. Obtained by putting an American attack submarine about ten feet away from a Russian submarine and using sophisticated recording equipment to record the different sounds and tonals from each bearing. In effect, a map of the target ship’s radiated noise. Each Russian submarine class made different noises. Machinery rotated at a particular speed, created a distinctive note like a tuning fork’s pure tonal frequency. Each class had a few tonals that American sonars could detect and classify from miles away. The only way to get an SPL recording was to drive right up to less than a tenth of a shiplength away and maneuver around the target without him finding out that he was being recorded — literally driving circles around the target submarine. There was always, both Pacino and the admiral knew, the risk of collision. Pacino looked up at Donchez, who had been studying him.

“Sir, the Russians are laying down their cruise missile nukes before the U.N. Someone must have forgotten to tell the shipyard that the Cold War is over. Or maybe they’re finishing this thing to provide jobs.” He was just testing.

“We know what we see. Commander.” Donchez stood up, his face stony. “Come on back to my office. I’ve got something to show you.”

Back in the admiral’s office Pacino sat in a deep easy chair and accepted a cigar from Donchez’s humidor. The sky outside the plate glass windows was dark. Pacino’s watch said it was almost eight in the evening. His stomach growled. Donchez’s head was stuck in a safe, looking for something. Finally he found it. Pacino picked up Donchez’s lighter, a worn Zippo with the emblem of the USS Piranha, SSN-637, lead ship of the class. Donchez had commanded her years before. Pacino lit the cigar and tasted the smooth smoke on his tongue. When the admiral sat back in his chair, his expression was dark. He flipped Pacino a bound report marked “SECRET” in black letters on the binding.

“What’s this?” Pacino asked.

“It’s been more than twenty years, Mikey,” he said. “It isn’t declassified yet. The report on the loss of the Stingray.” Donchez’s tongue was thick.

“Admiral, why are you showing me this?” Pacino felt like he did the day he was a plebe and Donchez had come to the Officer of the Watch’s office and told him his father was gone.

“It’s exactly what I told you that day. I wrote that.”

“Yes, sir?”

“And it’s all bullshit, pure bullshit.” Donchez’s voice wavered.

“What do you mean?” His old, faint suspicions at the time reviving.

“Mikey, that report as written would suggest that your dad screwed up. Didn’t turn the ship in time to inactivate the hot-run torpedo. Didn’t set material condition in time.” Donchez looked down at his desk and continued softly.

“Commander Anthony Pacino was the best damned combat submarine officer I ever knew. Except for one.” He looked back up at Pacino, who said nothing. “Patch Pacino did not die in the Atlantic Ocean. And he didn’t die from his own damned torpedo. Patch Pacino was a hero, which are in short supply, especially these days. The USS Stingray was on a top-secret operation under the polar icecap. She was getting an SPL of a VICTOR III.”

Donchez walked over to a wood cabinet and opened twin doors, revealing a large television monitor. He took a VCR tape out of the safe and inserted it in the VCR deck below the monitor. Pacino shivered from the cold of the office, which only a moment before had felt comfortable. He watched as the TV picture went from fuzz to focus on a minisubmarine hanging from several cables. A submersible. The cables lowered the submersible into the sea. Donchez began a commentary, his voice noticeably hoarse.

“This is a submersible that was used by Doctor Robert Powell of Woods Hole. The guy who went down to the Titanic and the Bismarck. Well, he also took this baby down to the Thresher, our sub that sank in ‘63. The submersible was designed to dive to Russian submarine wrecks and recover data. It has three spherical pressure hulls, its own manipulator arms and thrusters, and a remotely piloted vehicle, an eyeball. It can carry a video camera into tight spots.”

“Last year we decided to try to find the Stingray’s wreck under the polar icepack. Instead of using a sidescan sonar from a survey ship we had to cut holes in the ice, drop a sonar probe down and listen. For a year we came up with nothing. We drilled, dropped and listened at hundreds of sites. Finally we found it, made an icecamp and sent the submersible down.”

The TV picture showed an encampment in the arctic, tents and Quonset huts gathered around lifting-derricks. It also showed the submersible being dropped through a deep hole in the ice.

“We found the Stingray’s remains under 11,500 feet of very cold water. The initial shots on this tape were taken from the remote swimmer camera that was sent to the interior of the hull’s wreckage. This shot is of the bow compartment.”

The inside of the Stingray was all wreckage, mangled pipes and pieces of steel. Pacino tried to speak but his voice was gone, his throat thick.

“This is the operations compartment,” Donchez continued as the view shifted. It was like staring into an open coffin, Pacino thought, wondering why Donchez would subject him to it.

“We did find something recognizable here.” The light from the remote eyeball’s floodlight wavered as it swam by a grotesquely bent frame. An object came into view slowly, then focused. It was a baseball cap, the thread embroidery still plainly legible above and below the submarine dolphins: USS STINGRAY SSN-589.

Pacino felt a sudden exhaustion, like a shock wave.

The TV view shifted to an outside shot. “This was taken with the video on the main cameras of the submersible,” Donchez said. The disembodied sail came into view with sand in the background, one fairwater plane buried in the sand. “The sail was ripped away from the main hull by hydrodynamic forces. Part of the hull was flattened like a wing. The hull hit the bottom at nearly a hundred miles an hour. Back aft you can see that the hull, instead of flattening like the forward parts, was accordioned. The conical hull was forced inward, compressing the smaller part of the cone into the larger part. The force required to do this was immense. Here’s the bow compartment, which didn’t crush like the rest of the hull. It was equalized with sea pressure.”

The video shot showed the rounded bow compartment, the torpedo doors rusted at the far point of the hull’s nosecone. The shot showed the hull coming around. Soon the flank of the bow was in the picture, a gaping hole in it. Donchez stopped the tape at the shot of the hole in the hull. “Mikey, you’ve got a Phd in mechanical engineering. You tell me, was this an explosion inside or outside the hull?”

Pacino slowly rose from his seat and walked to the TV. His back was wet with cold sweat, his khaki shirt stuck to his back. He pointed to the star-shaped fingers of the jagged edge of the ten-foot-diameter hole.

“These points of the hole go in, not out. It was an external explosion. Stingray was gunned down, wasn’t she. Admiral,” Pacino said, a statement, not a question. No more guessing or wondering now.

Donchez barely nodded.

“Why was this kept secret? Why was it covered up—”

“Mikey, you’ve been up north. You know about the game. At the time it seemed the thing to do. Should we have whined to the U.N.? What would we say to Congress when they demanded to know how in hell a Soviet could sneak up on one of our best and put it on the bottom? What would become of our northern surveillance? How could we tell the world that we knew what they’d done when the SOSUS network that discovered it was highly secret?”

Pacino said nothing at first, then: “So why have you decided to show this to me? After all these years?”

Donchez turned off the TV and pulled out the VCR tape. In the heavy silence that followed he opened his safe, returning the sinking report and the VCR tape, at the same time removing a purple file folder. He slammed the heavy door of the safe and spun the tumbler, finally turning to face Pacino, whose face was tight with anger at the scene of the Stingray’s control room. He slapped the purple folder on the desk in front of Pacino.

“Open it.”

Pacino did. Inside, staring back at him, was the face of a man in a Russian Navy uniform, four stars on his epaulettes. Thick graying hair hung over a dark face, lined by the years yet still commanding. The eyes seemed to stare off into the distance, slightly narrowed.

“This is Admiral Alexi Viktoryvich Novskoyy, Supreme Commander, Russian Northern Fleet. A reactionary hawk who still wants to bring back the old discredited Soviet Union, when he and his ilk were riding high.”

Pacino waited.

“He is also the man who murdered Patch Pacino.”

Pacino looked at the photograph, stunned, his eyes finally rising to look into Donchez’s face.

“You know this for a fact?”

“Alexi Novskoyy, commanding officer, fleet submarine Leningrad, a VICTOR III attack submarine, the only VICTOR III, I might add, from 1973 to 1976. He was the new construction commanding officer. Awarded Hero of the Soviet Union medal in 1973 for classified action. In the Arctic Ocean. That’s him, there’s no doubt.”

“And now? That was a long time ago—”

“The new Omega submarine got under way three hours ago, Mikey,” Donchez pointed to the folder. Pacino put the photo of Novskoyy aside and looked at the satellite photo beneath, a God’s-eye-view looking directly downward that showed the huge Omega submarine angled away from her pier and pulling out.

“What do you see?”

“Sub getting under way. One last line on the pier. Topside crew getting ready to pull the line in. Two cranes on the pier. Probably one for shorepower cables and one for the gangway.”

“What else?”

“Car on the pier. Limousine. Flags on the fenders. Stars on the flags.” Pacino looked up. “Admiral’s limo.” Donchez nodded. “And how many stars?” he said, offering a magnifying glass. Pacino studied the photo with the glass. “Four stars.”

“Correct. And do you see flags flying on the OMEGA?”

“Yes. Northern Fleet Banner. Russian flag. Commissioning pennant.”

“And?”

“And a flag with stars on it. Four stars.” Pacino looked into Donchez’s eyes. “Admiral Novskoyy’s on board?”

“Bingo. Novskoyy’s on board the OMEGA. The mission, as we understand it, is a one-week trip under the icepack. Sea trials. And the admiral is along to see how his baby performs. He designed the OMEGA himself.”

Pacino sat back in his chair. Suddenly he understood the urgency of the OP. And for him in particular. The son-of-a-bitch who’d killed his father was aboard—

Pacino jumped as the phone rang. Donchez nodded at it.

“It’s for you, Mikey.”

Pacino shook his head. How would Donchez know who the phone was for?

“Pacino here.”

“Captain, XO here.” It was Rapier. “They said you were in a briefing but they put me through anyway.”

“Go ahead,” Pacino said, looking at Donchez.

“Sir, we’re moored at berth 7.1 took the liberty of bringing on shorepower and ordering the reactor shutdown… Something very strange is going on here. The squadron sent over some guys from the tender with about ten forktrucks full of food. They’re loading it aboard right now.”

Pacino stared at Donchez, who returned his look. “Yes, XO. What else?”

“Arctic gear, sir, four pallets. Squadron wants to load that on, too, in the ship’s office and the fan room. I told them to hold off until we talked. There’s also a truck here with five torpedoes. They’re painted red instead of green. Tender says they’re a new weapon system. Mark 50 torpedoes. They call them Hullcrushers. Squadron Weapons Officer is here and wants permission to load them aboard. I said hell no. Sir… you got any orders for me?”

Pacino didn’t hesitate. “XO, you have permission to load weapons and Arctic supplies. And notify the crew that all liberty and leaves are cancelled. We sail at dawn tomorrow. While you’re at it, request a clearance message from COMSUBLANT for transit—”

“Sir, I’m holding the clearance in my hands right now. I suppose you’ll be letting me know what’s up?”

“It’s a secure phone,” Donchez broke in.

“XO, Devilfish will be getting under way for a classified OP tomorrow morning. You can let the crew know they won’t be home for Christmas.”

He broke off the connection before Rapier could protest. Donchez pulled his long cold cigar out of the ashtray and lit it, looking out the plate glass window to a plaza across the street where construction vehicles had been parked for the night.

“You know, Mikey,” Donchez said, “the polar icecap is a lonely place. Things can happen there that no one on earth will ever know about. Look at Stingray. Only a few men know what really happened to her.” Donchez swivelled around in his chair and looked directly at Pacino. “Those Mark 50 torpedoes, the Hullcrushers, they’re new, experimental. They have shaped charges designed to penetrate and blast through doublehulled submarines with one hundred times the killing power of the old Mark 49’s. And as far as your tubes and fire-control systems are concerned, they’ll look exactly like Mark 49’s. No system modifications necessary. They’ll go fifty-five knots. Their sonars have improved doppler filters. And their crush-depth is deeper than 10,000 feet. We figure they’re the antidote to the OMEGA.”

Pacino’s mind raced, wondering whether Donchez really meant what Pacino thought he did.

“In fact, Mikey,” Donchez went on, “those torpedoes are so new and so experimental that we’ve never had a chance to take inventory of the five on the squadron truck. Why, if you came back from up north and those torpedoes were missing, well, no one would ever notice. As far as squadron and SUBLANT are concerned, those torpedoes don’t exist.”

Pacino stood up, hands balling into fists. Donchez stood up and held out his hand. Pacino saluted, turned and walked to the door, putting on his blue baseball cap.

“Merry Christmas, Uncle Dick,” he said and closed the door behind him.

Admiral Richard Donchez sat back down and said! “Merry Christmas, Mikey… and good hunting.” He looked out again over the grass to the plaza across the street. The construction going on was for a contract he had written personally: to build a marble monument in honor of the officers and men of the USS Stingray. Donchez took a long puff on his Havana cigar. “And Merry Christmas to you. Patch,” he said softly, “and rest in peace, old friend.”