Voyage of the Devilfish

CHAPTER 8

Commander Jon Rapier started his walk through of the submarine, ensuring the ship was rigged for sea. This had always been Pacino’s duty — the captain insisted on seeing every corner of the boat himself. But today he had asked Rapier to do the walk through and had remained in his stateroom. Something was definitely wrong with him. Rapier thought. The last two years had been tough with home life and navy life seemingly at cross purposes. But even during the stormiest times Pacino had kept a sense of humor. This run was different. Something had changed the captain and it seemed to be much more than any family squabble.

In his stateroom Rapier had changed into his underway uniform, a one-piece cotton overall with his name sewn above the right pocket. He strapped on his khaki belt and radiation dosimeter, pinned his dolphins on, got into his at-sea boots, left his stateroom and walked forward along the central passageway through operations-compartment upper level and down narrow stairs to the middle level, then turned left to officers country. Each “stateroom” occupied by three officers was six-by-six feet, with two chairs and two fold-down desktops, a few lockers recessed into the fake wood panelling and three “coffins,” racks shaped like drawers in a morgue except each had a side-entrance curtain and a reading light. The coffins were stacked three high in the staterooms, four high for the enlisted men. Those high-ranking enough got coffins to themselves; many hot-racked, shared a coffin with someone on a different watch section. That still left about twenty men who had to make a rack on top of the torpedoes in operations lower level. At the aft end of the officers-country passageway was the wardroom, about twenty-by-fifteen feet with a table in the center. At the aft end was the door to the small pantry, which further aft opened into the main galley. The wardroom was used as a dining room, tactical-planning room and end-of-watch reconstruction room. One of the largest open areas aboard, the crew’s mess, could seat about thirty men. The starboard bulkhead was painted with a mural of two square-rigged ships sailing on a stormy sea.

The central columns were covered with hemp rope spiralling around, with brass lanterns at the top. The forward bulkhead had a mirror framed in more hemp rope. The leather bench seats and tablecovers were done up in blue. The deck was tiled in blue and white. Actually the mess looked more like a cheap fish house than a combat submarine. Never mind. Rapier told himself, at least the crew liked it. At the aft end of the crew’s mess was the Trash Disposal Unit room. The TDU was a vertical torpedo tube used to eject compacted trash through a ball valve at the hull. The garbage was sealed in plastic and weighted with lead bricks so no floating waste would give away their position.

By the TDU room was a steel ladder to the lower level that Rapier slid down. Rapier’s inspection now took him through the gyro room below the crew’s mess, to the Auxiliary Machinery room, then the torpedo room. In each space he made sure there was no unsecured equipment that could get damaged if the ship took on a severe angle or suddenly went into a roll. He lingered in the torpedo room, a long wide space built for weapon storage. A central aisle threaded between the waist-high storage table for the upper tubes. The port and starboard tables were packed with Mark 49 torpedoes, each painted green and stencilled with white block letters— MOD B HULLBUSTER. At the centerline were the experimental Mark 50’s, painted glossy red and stencilled HULLCRUSHER and looking long and graceful and fast. Forward of the weapon-storage area was the central-torpedo local-control panel, where the torpedo chief flooded and drained tubes and where the weapons could be moved from the panel with powerful hydraulic rams. On either side of the local control panel were the tubes themselves, canted outward from the centerline because the torpedo room was amidships. Since the torpedoes were socalled smart weapons, it no longer mattered in which direction they were launched… they would turn toward the target impact point by themselves. The tubes were embedded in water tanks, which were piped to the ship’s high-pressure air-system. Air pressurized the water tank, which was open to the aft end of the torpedo tube. The pressurized water pushed the weapon out of the tube, flushing it out. No air bubbles would escape to allow them to be detected. On each tube’s inner door hung a sign, WARSHOT LOADED.

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.

Now 160 nautical miles northeast of Norfolk, Devilfish was still running on the surface but she was rigged for dive, the watch already transferred from the bridge to the control room. Lieutenant Stokes, the Officer of the Deck, hugged the number-two periscope on the raised stand, slowly rotating it over the horizon.

Pacino walked now into the control room. In the forward end sat the four men who drove the submarine. Two seats were stationed behind a large panel with a console in between. Each seat had a steering wheel in front. One seat was positioned behind and between the two seats. The panel wrapped around to the left side where the Chief of the Watch sat. Actually it looked much like the cockpit of a large airplane. The left “pilot’s” seat was the fairwater planes man, whose job was to control the horizontal fins on the sail. In the right seat was the helmsman, who steered the ship with the rudder and controlled the sternplanes, the horizontal fins in the far rear of the vessel. The seat behind them was the Diving Officer, charged with the ship’s angle and depth; he supervised the two planesmen and the Chief of the Watch on the left wraparound panel. The Chief of the Watch’s panel controlled the various tanks in the ship, the ballast and weight distribution and the hovering system.

Behind the control station was the Conn, the raised platform, eight-by-four feet, penetrated by the two periscope poles. A console with a remote sonar display, microphones and computer gear was on the port side. To the right of the periscope stand, the Conn, was a long row of computer consoles — the fire-control system. To port, on the outboard side of the Conn, was the SHARKTOOTH underice sonar console. The SHARKTOOTH, which looked up and forward to find the ice, was an active pinging sonar but faint to being nearly undetectable. In the far rear left corner of control was the chart table, and in the rear center of control was the Ship’s Inertial Navigation System equipment, the SINS.

“Off sa’deck, your report,” Pacino said.

“Captain, the ship’s rig for dive was checked by Lieutenant Commander Bahnhoff, Ensign Fasteen and Lieutenant Brayton. Straight board. Bottom sounding is 670 fathoms. One contact, tanker, bearing two zero five, range twelve thousand yards, angle on the bow starboard one twenty degrees, past closest point of approach and opening. We are on course zero three five, all ahead two thirds. Latest fix by NAVSAT shows us two miles northeast of the dive point. SINS agrees. Request permission to submerge the ship, sir.”

Hands in his pockets, Pacino looked at the television monitor showing the view out the periscope. He stepped up to the Conn and took a look at the remote sonar display, then stepped back down and looked at Pos Two, the central of the three TV computer displays for the fire-control system. He disappeared around the other side of the periscope stand, studied the chart for a moment and checked the depth sounder. He returned to a position by the Diving Officer of the Watch seated between the planesmen.

“Off sa’deck, submerge the ship.”

Stokes nodded. “Diving Officer, submerge the ship to six seven feet.”

Fasteen repeated the order. “Submerge the ship to six seven feet, dive aye. Chief of the Watch, open the vents on all main ballast tanks. Sound the diving alarm, over the P.A. Circuit One, dive, dive.”

The Chief of the Watch Chief Robertson flipped eight solenoid switches to the up-position and saw eight lighted green bars on his panel turn into red circles. “Vents open, sir.” He pulled a lever in the overhead, and throughout the ship the diving alarm sounded.

OOH-GAH. OOH-GAH.

“DIVE, DIVE,” Robertson announced on the P.A. Circuit One. Stokes trained the periscope view down and forward, and a huge cloud of white spray rushed out from below his view. “Venting forward,” he called out and rotated the periscope aft. More clouds of water vapor rushed out of the aft vents as Pacino and the crew watched on the periscope TV monitor. The rear deck of the sub was now settling into the sea as the white foam washed around it, and Stokes called out! “Decks awash.” Soon the aft end of the ship vanished and the waves were getting closer to the periscope lens.

“Four five feet, sir,” Diving Officer Fasteen announced.

“Very well. Dive,” Stokes replied. Steadily, the Devilfish settled into the waves. After the deck vanished, the sail was all that was visible. Soon the fairwater planes, the horizontal control surfaces protruding from the side of the sail, splashed the waves, then also vanished underwater. The top of the sail settled until it too was obscured. Only the tall number-two periscope rose above the water, lowering until it only poked above the waves by four feet, a small foamy wake trailing behind it.

“Six seven feet, sir,” Fasteen called out.

“Vents shut,” said Chief Robertson.

“Get a trim. Dive. Helm, all ahead one-third.” Stokes never removed his eye from the periscope as he continued to train his view around in slow circles, switching between low and high power, then looking upward in search of aircraft, the submariner’s lethal enemy. After ten minutes of pumping and balancing, Fasteen had Devilfish at neutral buoyancy.

“Captain, we’ve got a good one-third trim. Request to go deep and head north, sir,” Stokes said.

“Off sa’deck, proceed to five four six feet and continue northeast at flank,” Pacino responded.

American submarines cruised at odd depths like 546 feet, the idea being to avoid collisions with Russians, assuming the Russians measured depth at the keel and cruised at even depths measured in meters. Pacino always wondered if they cruised at depths like 334 meters to avoid collisions with Americans…

“Helm,” Stokes called, “all ahead two thirds. Dive, make your depth five four six feet.”

Pacino watched the periscope view showing on the remote TV monitor to the right of the control station, where the view of the sea grew more restricted as the vantage point got closer to the waves.

“Six eight feet, sir. Six nine,” Fasteen reeled off. The periscope view hit the waves. Foam boiled up around the periscope lens. The view cleared. Waves again.

“Scope’s awash… scope’s awash…” Stokes called out.

“Seven zero feet, sir,” from Fasteen. One final wave came up and splashed the periscope view. Then the view showed the underside of the waves. The field of view trained upward and looked at the waves from the bottom side, watching them get further away. When they were 40 feet overhead Stokes snapped the periscope grips up, reached into the overhead, rotated a large metal ring and said, “Lowering number-two scope.” The periscope optic-control section vanished into the periscope well, and the stainless steel pole lowered thirty feet until the top of the scope disappeared into the sail. The periscope television repeater automatically turned itself off, and the deck angled downward as the ship went deep.

“Helm, all ahead flank,” Stokes ordered. The hull creaked and popped as the ship went deeper into the increasing sea pressure.

“Off sa’deck, maneuvering answers all-ahead flank,” the helmsman called.

“Very well. Helm.”

“Off’sa’deck, passing four hundred feet,” Fasteen reported.

“Very well. Diving Officer.” Stokes looked at the remote sonar display. One lone contact, the supertanker, was fading astern.

“Offsa’deck, depth five four six feet.”

“Very well. Diving Officer.” Stokes picked up the P.A. Circuit One microphone. “RIG SHIP FOR PATROL QUIET.” Pacino looked at Stokes, who leaned on the periscope pole, arms crossed over his chest.

“I’ll be in my stateroom,” Pacino said, and walked aft.

Five-hundred-forty-six feet beneath the waves, the USS Devilfish continued northeast, enroute to the polar icecap. Enroute to Pacino’s fateful confrontation.