He unclicked the mike and partially stood to get to the general alarm, a small lever in a panel in the overhead, found it and rotated it clockwise. The blaring BONG BONG BONG of the alarm rang throughout the ship.
He clicked the circuit-one microphone one more time.
“MAN … BATTLESTATIONS.”
Keebes clicked a stopwatch on his neck and waited for the crowd to arrive in the control room. He leaned over the chart table and saw the flashing dot where they were presently located, the ship channel pulsing in yellow, the position of the target, a VLCC supertanker called the Petersburg, there in the shipping channel some twenty miles to the northwest, approaching the boundary of the exclusion zone, the edge of the Japan Oparea.
“Off’sa’deck, take her deep and flank it at heading three one zero. Once you’re down lay out a course to the target.”
“Aye, sir. Dive,” Becker called to the diving officer, “make your depth five three zero feet. Helm, all ahead standard.”
“Five three zero feet, aye, sir.”
“All ahead standard. Helm aye, maneuvering answers all ahead standard, sir.”
“Five degrees dive on the sternplanes,” the diving officer ordered, his seat set up between the control seats of the flight-deck arrangement, the man in the left seat the sternplanesman, the man in the right seat controlling the rudder and the bowplanes and responsible for the ship’s angle. “Five degrees down bubble, bowplanes down ten degrees.”
O.O.D Becker’s view out the periscope grew closer to the waves. Keebes looked up into the overhead at the television repeater, wondered if the approach of nightfall would make the blockade that much more difficult. How hard would it be to shoot the target at night, with darken-ship rules, he wondered. Still, it was hard to believe the tanker would really try to run the blockade, though the threat of submarine attack might or might not work. The view from the scope, displayed on the repeater monitor in the control room overhead grew so close to the waves that the sea splashed up on the view, the white foam obscuring vision, then the crosshaired reticle focused up on the underside of the waves, bits of seaweed floating by the view.
“Lowering number-two scope,” Becker called, aligning the view directly forward and retracting the instrument with a rotation of the hydraulic control ring set into the overhead. The module vanished into the scope well, the smooth stainless-steel pole coming down afterward, riding all the way down into the well until the scope was fully retracted.
Keebes looked up from the chart as Becker leaned over the table with him, the two men calculating the course and speed while the ship dived for the depths.
The deck leveled out.
“Sir, ship’s depth five three zero feet.”
Becker called to the helmsman, still looking down on the chart table.
“Helm, all ahead flank, right two degrees rudder, steady three one zero.”
The deck began to tremble. The room began to fill up with watchstanders, the lone firecontrol tech manning the four consoles of the attack center replaced with four officers. The executive officer Mike Jensen arrived.
Lt. Comdr. Mike Jensen was a Stanford grad, a thickly muscled black man with an open face, a coathanger grin and an easy Southern California manner. His laugh kept ship’s morale high, as did Jensen’s girlfriends when he threw a wardroom party. He drove a Porsche, owned an airplane and gave glider lessons. A shark jaw graced the bulkhead of his XO stateroom, but the shark had its own trophy, a piece of Jensen’s leg from one of his scuba dives.
Keebes and Jensen were as different as two men could be. Keebes was raised on a Pennsylvania farm. He had gone to the Naval Academy without the slightest idea of what he would be getting into. For him the Navy had been a vehicle for a college education. He found that he neither loved it nor hated it. He was a loner, quiet, enjoyed engineering and his weekends studying at the library.
The librarian and he had become friends, and after knowing Louise for four years, on the eve of graduation, he had asked her if she wanted to go with him to the Smithsonian in D.C. One thing slowly led to another.
Keebes had then passed his Rickover interview and gone nuclear, leaving Louise for the sea. She had moved to Virginia Beach on her own, showing up on his pier one day when the Buffalo was coming into port. Fifteen years and two kids later, and Keebes had never looked at another woman. He had wondered, though, if he would ever command a sub, since on his executive-officer tour the captain decided to take a disliking to him.
That captain had been a drinker, a partier, with a mistress in every port. He had tried to deice Keebes, but Keebes wanted no part of it.
Fortunately for Keebes the new admiral in command of the reorganized Unified Submarine Command, Admiral Pacino, had interviewed him after reading through his record and taken him to a battle simulator. After a sweaty eight hours of simulated approaches with an unfamiliar control-room crew, Pacino had offered him command of the Cheyenne.
“Captain, battlestations are manned,” Jensen now reported.
“Very well,” Keebes said. He stepped up on the conn and addressed the control-room crew.
“Attention in the firecontrol team. We’ve just received orders to intercept a supertanker that may try to run the blockade. We’re setting up to position ourselves on the north of the supertanker’s track as it crosses the exclusion zone boundary. We’ll be at periscope depth with a solution to the supertanker. A flight of F-14 jets is on its way to intercept the supertanker and turn him around. If he turns around we’ll go deep and wait for the next violator of the blockade. If he’s stupid and doesn’t believe we’re here, we’ll get orders to put some torpedoes in him.”
Keebes looked around at the watchstanders.
“Chances are that he’ll turn around, but we’ll be doing an approach on him anyway. Carry on.”
The watchstanders turned to their tasks. Keebes glanced up at the sonar display, waiting for the supertanker to become visible on the screen.
Comdr. Toshumi Tanaka stood in the center of the control room of the Winged Serpent, the square room’s center dominated by the periscope control center. The starboard forward corner was the electronic section devoted to ship control, the starboard aft quarter the reactor controls, the port forward section laid out for navigation. The most crowded was the port aft corner, weapons and sensors control. The control room was electronically connected to a control system, the “Second Captain,” a neural network-layered control system that was only one development-generation behind the computers that controlled the Destiny III-class ships.
The Second Captain was able to control the ship and function without a crew — not very well but with adequate programming it could fight its way out of a battle.
Tanaka preferred that it just take orders and leave ship command to the people.
On the Second Captain’s sensor display now were several jumping, undulating curves, a second display showing the curves to be a Los Angeles-class nuclear submarine lurking in the shipping channels. Probably sent to enforce the blockade.
“Program the two Nagasakis in tubes one and two for the enemy submarine and open the outer doors on tubes one and two.”
Bruce Phillips lay on his rack with his arm over his eyes.
The phone from the conn buzzed.
“Captain.”
“Off’sa’deck, sir. Sounding is 600 fathoms. We’re legal, Captain.”