“What is this, a conspiracy?” Pacino joked. “You two planning a mutiny?”
Boozy Varney smiled, as did Resa Ahmadi.
“Mr. Patch,” Ahmadi said. “Shouldn’t you be sleeping?”
Pacino shook his head. “Who can sleep when things are this exciting?”
“Yeah, exciting,” Varney said dismissively.
“So, Boozy, where do we stand with getting the torpedoes operational?”
“They’re ready to go. Firing panel function checks are sat. We checked the weapons we could access. All good.”
“What’s the loadout?”
“We have sixteen UGST Fizik-1 units. Interesting, they have Mark 48 similarities but seem to have features the Mark 48 sadly doesn’t. Tubes one to five are tube-loaded UGST Fizik-1 torpedoes. Captain Ahmadi says they’re fire-and-forget weapons. They’ve got wake-homing, infrared, passive and active sonar. Or at least, I hope so.”
“How fast can you shoot and recycle? Are there common firing mechanisms that limit how fast you can shoot the tubes?”
“No,” Ahmadi said. “Each tube firing mechanism is independent. You could actually fire the entire bank of six at the same moment, although that’s not recommended. The wake from one would tumble another, or the Venturi effect could suck one weapon into another, making them both tumble. But firing at two-second intervals seems to work well.”
“How long to reload and recycle the firing mechanisms?”
“There is no mechanism recycling needed. For the next weapon bank fire, we’re just limited by time to shut the outer door, depressurize, vent and drain the tube, open the inner door and push in a new weapon. Then shut the breach door, flood, pressurize and open the muzzle door.”
“Time to do all that?”
“Our record is ninety seconds,” Ahmadi said, “but that’s with a full crew in the torpedo room. A highly trained crew. With us? Better count on at least three or four minutes.”
Pacino bit his lip. That wouldn’t be good enough. “We may have to shoot one at a time while draining and reloading, and that would continuously dump the room in the minimum amount of time.”
“You planning on a big battle, Lipstick?” Varney said, his eyebrow raised.
“Let’s put it this way, Boozy. If we find ourselves under fire from an opposition force, we’re going to shoot everything we have at it. We may hit nothing, but it will add to the confusion. The fog of war. And who knows. We could get lucky and take down an attacker by dumb luck. Or by the Russian designs of these UGSTs. But one thing’s for certain. If I have to die on this mission, I intend to die with an empty torpedo room.”
Varney laughed. “Wow, that’s like a famous naval saying, something John Paul Jones or Horatio Nelson would say. Or like your father with his famous quote, I still have one torpedo and two main engines. Easy Eisenhart told me there’s a big brass plaque with that quote mounted on the wall of Memorial Hall at the Naval Academy. Are you trying to outdo Pacino Senior?”
Pacino smiled. “Boozy, no one, and I mean no one, will ever outdo Admiral Michael Pacino.”
“Are you worried that if you ‘shoot the room,’ as you say, you might hit the Vermont with one of your UGSTs?”
“Vermont knows enough to stay out of the way of a volley of our warshots,” Pacino said, “and in the worst case, they could activate the Mark 48 Mod Nine’s torpedo countermeasure mode.” Pacino put his hand on one of the shiny green torpedoes. “These UGST torpedoes — do they have an anti-torpedo countermeasure mode?” Pacino asked. Were they good enough to shoot down an incoming torpedo?
“Sadly, no, Mr. Patch,” Ahmadi said. “We have an older version of the attack software. But for that we’ve tried using the VA-111 Shkval torpedo. It’s loaded in tube six.”
“Shkval,” Pacino said. “That’s the peroxide-fueled supercavitating torpedo, right?”
“Yes, Mr. Patch.”
“Yeah,” Varney said, wiping sweat off his greasy forehead. “The torpedo that killed the Kursk.”
Ahmadi looked at Varney, startled. “They told us the Americans sank the Kursk.”
Varney moved his hand as if batting away an annoying fly from his face. “The hell we did. We had nothing to do with that. Kursk’s torpedo room blew up right after her Shkval unit exploded after a peroxide leak. She went down from her own friendly fire.”
Ahmadi shook his head, frowning. “The Russians insisted that American SEAL commandos planted a smart mine on Kursk’s bow before she sailed, programmed with an algorithm that measured time from port departure, time from submergence, depth, and transients like a torpedo door opening, then blew up the bow when the algorithm was satisfied. The torpedo room exploding eliminated all forensic evidence of the American mine.”
Varney looked at Pacino, pursing his lips and shaking his head. “That’s a dumb-ass tall tale designed by the Russians to keep the blame off themselves,” he said. “Besides, why the hell would we do that? It was peacetime. And how the hell could anyone believe that nonsense with zero proof?”
“According to the Russians,” Ahmadi said, “when things warmed up under Yeltsin and Clinton, during a Russia-America general officer party, a Russian admiral tanked up on vodka and cocaine walked up to his opposite number in the American Navy and admitted they sank your submarine Stingray under the polar icecap, out of revenge for the supposed American sinking of the Soviet submarine K-129, and he apologized. Seven years later, the U.S. Navy extracted their revenge.”
Pacino stared at the Iranian officer, stunned. The submarine Stingray had been commanded by his father’s father, and the sinking’s board of inquiry insisted she’d gone down in the Atlantic near the Azores from a defect in her own torpedo, which experienced a hot-run in her torpedo room and exploded, blowing up all the weapons in the bow and violently sinking her. Other competing theories, still hotly debated decades later, imagined the ship had suffered a battery explosion, another theory stating that her screw and its drive shaft fell out of the hull, opening up a huge hole in the engineroom. But being intentionally targeted by the Russians? Under the secret reaches of the Arctic Ocean’s ice canopy? No wonder Ahmadi thought the Americans had a motive to sink the Kursk.
“Wow. Apology not accepted,” Varney said. “But still, no evidence the U.S. Navy took down the Kursk. It’s still a big-assed excuse.”
“The evidence the Russians quoted was that after the wreck of the Kursk was pulled out of the Barents Sea and lay blown to pieces in a Russian drydock, the Russian admiral who apologized for the Stingray sinking received a handwritten note accompanying an expensive bottle of American Pappy Van Winkle Kentucky bourbon, from the American admiral to whom he made the confession. The note reportedly read, ‘Thank you for your candid admission. Now we’re even.’”
Varney stared at Ahmadi, his mouth half open.
“Anyway,” Pacino said, trying to shake off the shock of Ahmadi’s story, “if we can return to today’s mission, gentlemen? Captain Ahmadi, you said you employed the Shkval torpedo against attacking torpedoes. How did it perform?”
“It was mixed news, Mr. Patch. One time out of six it destroyed an incoming torpedo, but we think that was a coincidence. We’ve taken to calling the Shkval ‘the 53-centimeter evasion device.’ It’s so loud and so fast that anyone hearing it would be well advised to get out of its search cone fast and run away. Meanwhile, we get out of the area going the other direction.”