Vulcan's Forge

The Pacific

By its very nature a modern nuclear submarine makes an optimal platform for sensitive intelligence gathering. With its ability to remain submerged for extended periods and its absolute silence, a sub can maintain station near an unfriendly coast for weeks or even months with relative impunity.

The sub now lying in wait two hundred miles northwest of Hawaii had been there for seven months and apart from one minor incident had not once come close to detection. There was only about another week or two left of this patrol, so morale, which had been dismal, was finally picking up.

The crew, mostly northerners, no longer snickered at the captain’s thick Georgian accent. The bickering, which had become an almost daily occurrence even among this highly disciplined crew, had ceased. The men knew that very soon they would feel the warm sun, breathe unrecirculated air, and have the company of their families once again.

The captain, an unlaughing, hawk-faced man in his midfifties, scanned the control room slowly. The red lights of battle stations, which had glowed continuously since the beginning of the mission, stained the faces of his men and hid every corner of the room in shadow. He too was looking forward to going home. Though he had lost his wife years before, he did have a daughter. A daughter who would have given birth to his first grandchild in his absence.

A boy or a girl? he mused. And if it was a boy will she name him after me or that idiot husband of hers?

“Captain, contact bearing two-oh-five degrees range fifteen miles,” the sonar operator barked.

The bridge was galvanized with anticipation, each pair of eyes riveted on the captain. He checked his watch and decided that this might be the ship they were expecting.

“Sonar, scrub the target’s signature please,” the Old Man said calmly.

“Range too far, sir, we have to wait. Range thirteen miles. Single screw turning thirteen knots.”

The captain picked up the hand mike. “Fire control, plot a solution to target and give me a lock. Torpedo room, flood tubes one and two but do not open outer doors.”

Even on the bridge, thirty yards from the torpedo room, the captain could hear the water flooding into the tubes. He just hoped that there was no one else out there to hear as well.

“Sonar, can you scrub the signature yet?”

“Affirmative, sir, working now.”

The boat’s multimillion-dollar acoustical computer was analyzing the sounds coming from the approaching ship, digitally washing out the grinding rotation of her screw, the liquid friction of her hull cutting through the waves, and the omnipresent background noise of the living sea, until. .

“We have our target, her signal is coming in strong. Repeat, she is our ship.” Amid the ambient noise of the vessel, an ultrasonic generator pulsed a signal through the water to be picked up by only those listening for it. It was this signal for which the computer searched and the captain waited.

The captain picked up the microphone again. “Torpedo room, stand down.”

“Shit!” the sonarman screamed and ripped off his headphones.

“What is it?” the captain demanded.

There was a thin trickle of blood from the man’s ears. He spoke unnaturally loudly. “Another underwater explosion, sir. Much more powerful than any other.”

“You are relieved,” the captain said.

The sensitive sonar gear was designed with a fail-safe acoustical buffer to shield the hearing of the men who listened in, yet his four top operators now suffered permanent hearing damage due to the buffer’s inability to screen out the nearby subsurface explosions. The equipment simply wasn’t designed for this kind of abuse. And neither were the men.