“We’ll be towed out along this track. I’m trying to figure out where to submerge on the diesel,” Phillips told him.
“How much room do you want, sir?”
“At a keel depth of eighty feet snorkeling, it would be nice to go down to 150 feet if some traffic came by—”
“You’d have to secure snorkeling and run on the battery while starting up the reactor. Captain.”
“It wouldn’t be pretty, but even if the engineer is running a main feed pump on the diesel and we have to pull the plug to go deep, he’d just stop the pump and stop the steam draw. Hornick could recover from that, don’t you think?”
“Skipper, thank God we’ve got Walt back here. I doubt anyone else could handle this.”
“Okay, 150 feet, with a margin of another 150 feet, that’s 300 feet or fifty fathoms.”
“That’s shallow, sir.”
“Fine, sixty. Where’s the sixty-fathom curve?”
Court touched a software function key and danced with the software until the depth curve he sought highlighted itself. “Right here. Captain.”
“No way, that’s too far out. Give me fifty fathoms… not much better, but that’s the deal… Weather holding up?” Phillips was sneaking Piranha out of town under the cover of darkness and an overcast sky, all the better to keep the watchful eye of the overhead Japanese Galaxy satellite from looking down at them.
“Both good and bad, sir. It’s started to snow, hard. They’re calling for a foot of snow, and then it’s going to turn to freezing rain and sleet. The snowstorm will keep us hidden from the Galaxy upstairs, but visibility is closing down on us and that makes this trip doubly dangerous. We’ll have trouble seeing the merchant traffic, and they’ll have problems seeing us.”
“Maybe we should keep the tug longer, stay on the surface and run the diesel until the reactor’s warm.”
“I don’t know, sir. The Galaxy machines can see an infrared heat trace through heavy clouds, maybe even through this storm. I like the idea of getting down under as soon as we can. I liked even more the idea of getting the reactor plant up fast.”
“I may spend some time aft with Walt when we’re starting up.”
“Sir, please don’t. That’ll just slow him down. Walt likes precision and plans. You being back there isn’t part of his… plan.”
Phillips smiled. “You’ve been hanging with Walt for a while, now, right, Scott?”
“Sir, Walt is different but he’s damned good. You tell him what you want, and once he agrees he delivers. He’s not your typical military type.”
“Is there a typical type?”
“My wife thinks so. She says all my friends and I are walking military robots.”
“What do you think?”
“I think we wear uniforms and are trained to behave certain ways, and on the ship we’re a team, but the test is when we’re up against a situation we haven’t been trained for, and we go on our own. That’s when I think we’ll prove that we’re about as far from robots as you can get.”
“Is that good or bad?”
“Captain, it could go either way.”
“Guess I should get to the bridge. Is the pilot here?”
“On the tug, sir. It’s waiting for us in the river.”
“Let’s get the hell to sea.”
CHAPTER 17
Pacino had asked for Donner to come into flag plot, away from the bridge and other ears, so he could talk to him about how they would work together on the blockade. Once that was done he’d assemble the submarine operations people in a room and take over from the submarine operations officer. Then he’d get on with Sean Murphy and go over the fleet deployment. It was already 1000 and Pacino had a mountain of work to do before noon.
The worst of the typhoon had passed through during the night. Pacino had spent the storm in his rack, the motion of the ship, which made him seasick when he was up, had the opposite effect on him when he was lying down. The waves had actually rocked him to sleep and he had slept beyond his wakeup notice, but no one had cared. No one but Donner even seemed to know he was on board. With the storm, the accident with the F-14, the sedative and the jet lag, Pacino had needed the sleep. He had awakened feeling so much better that for a moment he almost forgot about Brad Shearson, but the memory of their flight came back and landed on his conscience with a resounding thump. If he had waited a day the kid would have lived.
Pacino looked out the starboard windows at the horizon, the sea calm now that the storm had ceased. The sky was overcast, but the glare from the brightness was giving Pacino a headache. The other ships of the battle group steamed in formation, the beauty of it breathtaking, the precision, the guns and missiles and radars of the sleek surface ships a powerful display of naval might.
Looking at them, Pacino for the first time felt that the blockade might work out. He turned away from the starboard window and looked at flag plot, a room the size of the bridge on the deck above. The room’s windows were as panoramic as the bridge’s, the floor space taken up with plot tables and conference tables. Now that charts and papers were replaced by Writepads, the room’s broad tables were somewhat out of use. In Pacino’s experience on submarines, which were so cramped for space and volume that the eye never focused on a distance more than fifteen feet away, the openness and wide view from flag plot seemed luxurious, almost sinful.
Finally Admiral Donner came in, dressed in fresh working khakis with no decorations on his uniform other than his surface warfare pin and his three silver stars.
“Morning. I see you’re still with us. How do you feel?”
“Better. After last night anything is better.”
“Good. Listen, you’d better take a look at this. Seems things are picking up steam.”
Pacino squinted in the glare to see the writing on Admiral Donner’s Writepad.
“Warner wants to start the blockade tonight,” Donner said.
“But we’re not in position yet. We’ve got another twelve hours of steaming to get us within fifty miles of Honshu, and that’s just the east side of the islands. We have to get the Sea of Japan task group on the other side of the islands to interdict shipping from the west. That’ll take at least another day—”
“President Warner has maps, she knows where we are and the timing of getting in close. Admiral Wadsworth is working on it with her.”
Wadsworth strikes again, Pacino thought.
“Mac, what the hell is this? We can’t set up a blockade that fast. What kind of a blockade would that be? By this evening the Sea of Japan will still be wide open.”
“I thought something like this might happen, Patch. I sent your submarines on ahead a few hours before you landed, if that crash on the deck can be called a landing. I should have told you when you were up on the bridge last night but I figured once you talked to Paully White, the sub-operations officer, you’d come back up here to the bridge to scream about it. But you were down until now.”
Pacino realized he should have checked in and met the submarine-operations officer, the man aboard the carrier who was responsible for the tasking of the two submarines traveling with the battle group. But he had been too exhausted and sick to go below and had left it for today. Once again Pacino cursed the fact that he wasn’t in command of a submarine anymore. On the sub, his information network surrounded him. Now here he was, his information screened by Donner, who kept him in the dark to avoid his anger, hiding behind an operations officer when he was supposed to be as heavy in planning the operation as Donner was. He would have to work on Donner, Pacino thought, deciding to get in touch with Sean Murphy as soon as he left the bridge.