“It’s your mission. I’ll radio ahead.”
Donchez didn’t look pleased, Pacino thought, as he went forward to have the pilot radio Japan with the weapon load out Well, the OP was his, it would have to go by his plan. He was beginning to feel the selfconfidence of command returning to him. It felt damn good.
Lieutenant Commander Greg Keebes woke up with a start. The sound of the curtain of his coffin-sized bunk being opened never failed to bring him crashing back to the reality of the submarine. In his year aboard the Seawolf, Keebes had yet to sleep through an entire night aboard, whether in-port as duty officer or at sea.
“What is it?” he asked, rubbing his eyes. A petty officer in dungarees held out a radio-message board.
Behind the enlisted sailor Keebes could see the chief torpedoman, who was also the duty chief for the evening, standing in the dimly lit passageway.
Keebes pushed back the message board, climbed out of the coffin and put on his khaki pants and shirt, feeling desperately in need of a shower. As he buttoned his shirt he nodded at the petty officer to turn on the stateroom’s overhead lights. The bright white fluorescents flickered, then clicked to life. Keebes checked his watch — after three in the morning.
“What is it, Deitzler?” Keebes asked the chief, a salty hovering, forty-five plus, his hair already gray, his face lined. What was it that made men get old so fast in the sub force? Had to be the atmosphere, the nuclear radiation, the food, or the stress. Or maybe the months at sea without a woman. Whatever, the fleet was full of old youngsters.
“Sir, the base weapons officer is topside. He’s asking for you, and get this — there’s a crane and a lowboy loaded with cruise missiles and torpedoes waiting to be loaded. He wants to know why we’re not ready to load weapons. Did I miss something, sir?”
Keebes ran his hands through his hair, wondering if the Navy bureaucracy had failed them again. Sea trials had been interrupted by the emergency orders to get the CO and XO stateside. But even so, the weapons tests weren’t scheduled for another month.
And when the weapons tests did begin they were only to shoot dummies of torpedoes to test the torpedo tube ejection-mechanisms. The plan didn’t have them launching cruise missiles for months.
“A little early to be loading dummies, if you ask me. Chief,” Keebes said, taking the message board from the radioman.
“Sir, these are war shots not dummies. Not even exercise shots. What the hell’s up?”
Keebes held up a finger as he read the message on the board, which had the answer to the chiefs questions:
091857ZMAY
IMMEDIATE
FM CINCPAC
TO USS SEA WOLF SSN-21
SVBJ EMERGENCY SPEC-OP
SCI/TOP SECRET — JAILBREAK
PERSONAL FOR COMMANDING OFFICER PERSONAL FOR COMMANDING OFFICER
//BT//
1. PREPARE TO GET UNDERWAY FOR EMERGENCY SPECIAL OPERATION.
2. NEW COMMANDING OFFICER EN ROUTE YOKOSUKA.
3. EXECUTE WEAPONS LOAD OUT IMMEDIATELY TO SUPPORT TIMELY UNDERWAY.
4. UNDERWAY TO COMMENCE IMMEDIATELY UPON ARRIVAL OF NEW COMMANDING OFFICER, APPROX 1000 LOCAL TIME TODAY.
5. ADMIRAL R. DONCHEZ SENDS.
//BT//
Keebes looked up at Deitzler, handed the message board over to the chief and waited for him to finish reading it. Then: “Get on the Circuit One, Chief, and get the crew up. Station the weapons loading detail. Muster the officers in the wardroom and the chiefs in the crew’s mess. Whatever’s going on, we’ll know soon enough. In the meantime you brief the chiefs and get working on the load out and the pre-underway checklist.”
Keebes hurried into the wardroom and called for one of the cooks to stoke up the coffee machine. A new captain, Keebes thought. An untested submarine. An emergency special operation. Terrific.
CHAPTER 9
Pacino knew he’d be too tense to sleep at his body’s normal time. His submarine would be long submerged in the darkness of the local evening before he slept again. Besides, he thought, it wouldn’t feel like he was an official submariner again until he had skipped a few nights of sleep. The feeling of fatigue had been as familiar and as comfortable as the deck shoes he used to wear at sea.
Pacino couldn’t help feeling excited as he craned his neck to see the large dark shape ahead in the water next to the pier. When the car stopped, Pacino opened his door and stepped out, seeing the breathtaking size of the monstrous submarine lying in the water, waiting for him. The ship lay tied up at the end of the pier, her bow toward Pacino, her stern pointing away toward the waters of the channel.
Donchez joined him on the pier.
“What do you think of her, Mikey?”
The ship was similar in lines to a 688 Los Angeles class submarine, but the scale seemed blown up. Her diameter was so big that the deck appeared almost flat at the crown instead of curving and cylindrical.
The sheer sides of the sail jutted straight out of the deck, unadorned by fair water planes. The ship seemed to extend to the vanishing point; it had to be nearly three hundred and fifty feet long, Pacino thought. The fairing for the towed array extended longitudinally aft from the leading edge of the sail to the stern. The sail had a triangular fillet at the forward edge where it attached to the hull. The rudder protruded from the water far aft of the point where the water lapped the aft hull. Forward of the sail a large hatch was open, and further forward the hull sloped more steeply to the water, the bulbous bow rounder and broader than Devilfish’s. Eight doubled-up lines held the ship to the pier. Amidships, a gangway connected the ship to the concrete jetty. There were no shore power cables on the ship but a heavy gantry with thick cables had been retracted aft near the rudder. They must be steaming the engine room Pacino figured.
Pacino realized Donchez had been waiting for an answer.
“She’ll do, Admiral,” he said, trying to keep his voice flat. But Donchez must have seen through him.
“Come on, Mikey. I’ll give you the rundown up here. I think you’ll find this crew will be motivated to support you, Mikey. I had my aide call the acting captain from the airport while we were on the way in — he gave him a few stories about you.”
“Great. All I need is for this crew to know I got my last command shot out from under me.”
“All he told them was what happened to the other guy, and that you got the Navy Cross.”
“Whatever. Tell me about this ship, Admiral. Give me her secrets.”
Donchez smiled.
“Seawolf displaces 9,150 tons submerged. She’s forty-two feet in diameter — that’s why the pier is new. Her draft is so deep they had to dredge the channel so she could get out.”
“Forty-two feet. Unbelievable.”
“She’s 326 feet long from her sonar sphere to her propulsor. No screw, by the way. She’s got a water turbine propulsor. Much quieter. Very fast, although her acceleration is just a bit off, but that propulsor doesn’t cavitate like a screw, so you can give her full throttle and she’ll come up to speed quiet as a church mouse. Her test depth is 2,000 feet. Her hull has an anechoic coating, tiles made of foam that absorb active sonar pulses, kind of like a Stealth fighter’s radar absorptive material. She’ll do forty-five knots at one hundred percent power, more if you take her into the red. She has 52,000 shaft horsepower, and get this — this boat is quieter going full out than a Los Angeles sub at all-stop.”