Phillips looked up at Hornick, a sad expression on his face.
“Skipper, it would be my pleasure,” Hornick said, clamping his own cigar between his teeth. “You give me a half-hour and I’ll give you main engine shaft horsepower, all fifty-seven thousand of them.”
Phillips clapped Hornick on the back. “Good man, you let me know.”
He winked at Hornick and ducked through the tunnel hatch and vanished. Hornick smiled, shaking his head, then walked quickly aft to the maneuvering room.
The reactor tunnel’s forward hatch opened out into the forward compartment middle level. After the bright lights of the engineering spaces, the forward compartment’s red lights seemed strange. Phillips followed a dogleg in the passageway to a central passage that went past his and Whatney’s staterooms to port, the electronics rooms — radio and countermeasures — to starboard, the passageway stopping at a door labeled CONTROL ROOM — AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. Phillips went in, the space crowded with watchstanders, and hot. The room was larger than the Greeneville’s control room, but even though Piranha’ control space was the full width of the ship, over forty feet wide, it still seemed cramped.
“Navigator, sounding please!” Phillips shouted, the cigar still clamped in his teeth.
“Forty-nine fathoms, sir.”
“Close enough. Offsa’deck, where’s the officer of the deck?”
“Here, sir.” Meritson’s voice was muffled as he was hugging the thick periscope module of the type-twenty periscope, the scope extending from the overhead all the way to the well in the deck of the periscope stand. The module would be hot, at least 105 degrees from the electronics it bristled with. An hour at the periscope would leave the front of a man’s shirt wet with sweat — the reason periscope time was known as “dancing with the fat lady.”
“Status, please.”
“Yes sir, the bridge is rigged for dive, control is in the control room, I have the watch, ship is rigged for dive with the exception of the forward escape trunk hatch. I have two men topside ready to cast off the tug line on your orders.”
“Very well, coordinate with the tug, come to all stop and cast off the tugline.”
“Aye, sir.”
Phillips was beginning to smell progress now. It took five minutes, but finally Piranha was officially on her own, on her diesel engine, her reactor still in a coma, but without tugs.
“Offsa’deck, submerge the ship to snorkel depth,” Phillips called. The order began a flurry of activity. A phone talker called for Phillips.
“Captain, Engineer on the one-jay-vee phone.”
Phillips reached for the phone. “Captain.”
“Engineer, sir. Reactor’s critical, performing an emergency heatup now.”
“Excellent, Eng. How did it go? Any overpowering?”
“No, Sir, it came right up to one decade per minute, just like you said.”
“I didn’t say anything, Eng, that’s your startup. Remember that, Walt. Now, how long till you’re answering bells on the mains?”
“We’re at thirty degrees per minute, that’s about twelve minutes to the green band, then we’ll warm the steam plant. I’d say another twenty minutes.”
“Battery?”
“Holding up, but don’t give it more than four knots.”
“Aye. Hurry up, Eng.”
“Yes sir.”
Phillips found a seat in the captain’s chair aft of the periscope stand, the “conn,” from which the ship was controlled. It would be a long night, he thought.
Submerging without the reactor! The last thing he thought he’d be doing with the newest ship in the fleet, but then, if it kept him from being peeked at by the Galaxy satellites so much the better. He settled back into the chair and watched Meritson submerge the ship, the vessel sinking slowly into the Atlantic as the main ballast tanks gave up the air. Soon, he thought, he’d be driving on nuclear power. He waited, puffing the cigar.
CHAPTER 19
The deck trembled with the power of the main engines at flank speed. Capt. David Kane walked into the wardroom, crowded with officers waiting for his briefing.
Kane was taller than average, slim, with a full head of dark hair and a tan. When the ship was in port, he would be on the beach, running, walking his dogs or hanging out with his wife Becky and his daughters. He was famous for being the Pacific Fleet captain who worked smarter, not harder. His face was chiseled, the high cheekbones set above thin cheeks and a strong square chin. When he had been at Annapolis he had been the six-striper, the brigade commander. He had met his wife while a first-class midshipman, when he and his friends had written to a Playboy centerfold model, the letter written as a prank, but after two months she had written him back. After they corresponded for a few weeks they decided to meet, choosing a Georgetown bar. After that it had been all over for Kane. He had proposed to her on that first date, and she had just laughed. During their spring break they had flown to Bermuda, and on the beach one twilight he had popped the biggest ring he could finance into her hands, and this time she didn’t laugh. In fact, she had cried. They had been engaged for two months when Kane had been interviewed for the nuclear-power program by Admiral Rickover, the famed father of the nuclear navy. Rickover had managed to shoehorn a nuclear reactor into a submarine, an engineering task that should have taken fifteen years, but Rickover had done it in three at a fraction of the cost of the estimates, and with an impeccable safety record.
When his USS Nautilus, the first nuclear submarine, went under the polar icecap, his nuclear navy had been the envy of the world. He had pledged to Congress that not a single naval officer would be admitted to his program unless he personally approved of him. Every single candidate would be interviewed personally. Once Rickover flunked someone, there was no appeal.
Rickover had called a very nervous Kane into the office.
Submarine duty was all he wanted to do in the Navy. Airplanes held no fascination, and surface ships made him seasick, many of them stinking of diesel fuel, the amphibious fleet a flotilla of rustbucket ships that carried unwashed Marine troops into combat. Aircraft carriers particularly irritated him, since it was the worst of two worlds, a surface ship that acted as a bus for a bunch of arrogant pilots. He had gone into Annapolis for the free education and the status, but as graduation approached he could only see himself being a sub driver.
Now that he was finally in Rickover’s office, it sank in that Rickover could easily say no to him, as he had done with 40 percent of the applicants. The man who had the interview two before Kane had left the office with glazed eyes.
“What happened?” Kane had asked him.
“Rickover told me I’m too shy,” the midshipman had said. “He told me I had thirty seconds to piss him off.”
“What did you do?”
“I stood on a chair. I was going to piss on his desk but he looked at me like I was an idiot, and I couldn’t even do that. I couldn’t get the piss to come out. Rickover said that even my cock was too shy, and he told me to get the hell out.”
“That was it?”
“No. He has this four-foot-long shiny model of the Nautilus on his desk.
I picked it up and smashed it into a thousand pieces. One of the fragments broke and nicked his hand. He was bleeding onto his shirt.”