“Not exactly,” Romanov said, her cheeks reddening slightly. “This is a narcotics smuggling submarine. The narco-subs have progressed tremendously, but they’ve mostly just been speed boats with the topside flattened out. Ten years ago, the Medellin cartel built a small diesel-electric submarine with a snorkel mast and a diesel that could smuggle ten tons of cocaine, but it had trouble in the open seas, balance trouble, and it had problems trying to submerge, even more trying to surface. It sank a few times, each time killing the four-man crew. They kept resurrecting it, but eventually it sank in deep water, killing the crew, and three hundred million dollars’ worth of product was lost. Designing a submarine is not for the inexperienced. We think the Colombian Barranquilla cartel tried their hand and started off with a blank sheet of paper and started designing a special purpose submarine, but like their competitors, their prototypes were ridiculously underpowered, or heavy, or unbalanced. Or they simply sank. The cartel finally realized that reinventing the wheel made no sense. So they took a look at past designs, designs they could get their hands on from open sources. Their shipbuilders found the detailed plans for the L-4 and visited the actual submarine, rusting away in a Massachusetts coast museum. They had just enough unclassified data from dusty old Navy archives and DynaCorp file rooms to be able to build a new one.
“For secrecy, they assembled it in the hold of a cargo freighter lying-to in Port Saint Marta. They’ve fitted it out with modern Edison battery Giga-Packs, with battery power density four times what the 1914 versions had, with half the weight and less than half the volume, and modern diesel engines, with twice the fuel efficiency, so they could maintain the same range with half the volume of fuel. Which makes for even more space available for cocaine. With a ten-ton load of coke, the most anyone’s been able to smuggle in a narco-sub, you make upwards of three hundred million dollars. This ship can transport over fifty tons, perhaps even sixty. That’s over one point six billion dollars. And no depth control or instability problems with this boat — it was a success over a hundred years ago, and they have the detailed specs. They just copied it. We’ve been looking for it ever since our good friends in the intelligence services got wind of it. But no one has ever even gotten close to this thing. We think this ship has made at least half a dozen successful smuggling runs already, and with that load of coke, the cartel will corner the market.”
“Wait, we’re doing drug interdiction,” Spichovich asked, incredulously. “You sent us down here at flank speed to, what, intercept and sink a fucking narco-sub?”
“No,” Romanov said dryly. “We were sent down here at flank speed to steal it.”
The wardroom burst into loud crosstalk. Pacino looked over at Tiny Tim Fishman and Grip Aquatong, who were smiling in pleasure. Grip reached out and fist-bumped Fishman.
“Quiet, people,” Quinnivan said from the aft end of the room.
“This makes no sense,” Spichovich said, acid in his voice, “why would they replicate a World War I sub where there are a thousand more advanced subs they could copy? A late-flight World War II German U-boat, for one.”
“The L-class is perfect for them,” Romanov said, staying calm, only her slight blush a sign that Spichovich’s harassing questions were bothering her. “The World War II subs could be twice this size or even triple the size. Too cumbersome, too difficult to hide, too long to build and too expensive. This one could well be called ‘Goldilocks’ instead of ‘Bigfoot.’ It’s not too big, not too small, but just right. Small enough to be assembled in the hold of the cargo mother ship, which was modified to have under-hull opening doors and a crane mechanism to lower the sub into the water unnoticed. So for now, gentlemen, this is the state of the art narcotics smuggling submarine. It has a test depth of 200 feet, deep enough to avoid any Coast Guard activity. And you guys will enjoy this. The boat has fully functional torpedo tubes — not to attack with weapons, but to offload the drugs. They have neutrally buoyant torpedo shaped cargo containers holding the coke, and when they get to the Florida coast, they rendezvous with the coastal boats and shoot the cargo out the tubes, which the receiving boats catch in nets. The L-class stays submerged the entire time, then sneaks back to Santa Marta, Colombia, for another load. We think that her maiden voyage paid for the submarine’s construction ten times over. Multiple trips? That, gentlemen, is a business plan. Questions?”
“So,” Quinnivan said, “tell us more about stealing this sub. How do we do it? I’m assuming this is the reason the SEALs are embarked.”
Seagraves broke in. “Let’s ask our newest non-qual junior officer, who will be the approach officer for this op so that he can fulfill the requirements of his qual card. Mr. Pacino, knowing what you know now, and seeing that we have our SEAL friends here, how do we hijack a diesel-electric sub?”
Pacino shook his head, feeling warmth come to his cheeks. “I’d have to say, force it to the surface. Sneak up under it, blow ballast, bang into her undersides and bring her up to the surface. Then the SEALs open a hatch, toss down a nerve gas grenade and make off with the sub.”
Fishman laughed and smiled. “That’s actually not half bad, Captain. Not very subtle, but not bad.”
The other officers were rolling their eyes, shaking their heads or making dismissive noises.
“No, Mr. Pacino,” Seagraves said. “Do you want to try again?”
Pacino shrugged. “I’ve got nothing, Cap’n.”
“What about you, Weapons Officer?” Seagraves looked over at Spichovich. “You have a better plan?”
Spichovich nodded. “Gentlemen and Navigator, back during the Cold War, one of our attack submarines was trailing a Soviet Akula nuclear attack sub that had arrived on a top-secret patrol in the western Atlantic, right off our shores, coming to see if he could himself shadow a missile sub leaving Kings Bay or one of our attack subs leaving Norfolk or Groton. The incident is still highly classified, but the basics are that our boat managed to get too close to the Russian at an odd angle and got his towed array sonar completely wrapped around the Russian’s screw. With his screw fouled, the Rooskie came to a stop, then surfaced to see what happened. There he is, on a super-secret hush-hush covert mission off American shores, and he surfaces in broad daylight, and a dozen members of his crew — probably a bunch of smelly A-Gangers,” he said, shooting a smirk at Dankleff, the head of the auxiliary mechanics, “come out of the hatch and stare dumbly aft trying to see what happened. Eventually divers got equipped and went over the side.”
The towed array was a thick cable a shiplength long towed by a steel wire rope that could be a mile long, intended to process high frequency narrowband sonar signals, the cable length intended to get the array far away from the noise generated by the sub streaming the array. The cable of it wrapping around a ship’s screw would completely immobilize it, as would the thick diameter array itself.
“So without propulsion,” Spichovich continued, “a submarine would have to have perfect trim and a fantastic hovering system to avoid sinking or popping to the surface. There is no standard operating procedure for a fouled screw, just common sense to use the engines at maximum revs to try to break whatever is fouling the screw, and if that doesn’t work, come to the surface and send over divers to get rid of the fisherman’s net or whatever it was that got wrapped around the screw.”