“What if he remains submerged deep well into the Gulf of Oman, only popping up before the Strait of Hormuz?”
“Mission failure,” Pacino said, looking Romanov in the eye. “But that scenario would never happen. Hell, even with our inertial nav, the Goddess of the Fix Error Circle eventually has her way with you. Any sub doing what you described would run aground or hit an underwater seamount if it tried to do that for the thousands of miles we’re talking about traveling.”
“You can only hope, Mr. Pacino,” Romanov said coldly. “Commander, glitch three?”
“Master One comes to periscope depth when the SEALs foul its screw, and like the narco-sub, it turns out it’s operated by an AI computer system.”
“Ops Officer, Mr. Varney, go,” Romanov said.
“Let’s say the SEALs can get in,” Varney began, rising to his feet. “They’ll have to react to whatever the AI system is doing. If the ship is stable with the invasion force onboard, they’ll have time to bring aboard the boarding party, and Chief Kim will disable the AI and shift to manual control. Then the mission continues as before. If the AI looks like it is taking hostile action, such as a ship self-destruct, Commander Fishman pulls the pin on the Mark 14 NNEMP pod and the electromagnetic pulse takes out any electronics not directly shielded from the blast.”
“Won’t that destroy the nuclear reactor electronics?” Romanov asked.
“We think the heavy steel bulkhead between the forward compartment and the new reactor compartment would prevent reactor electronics from being affected. There’s a large shield tank with a lead lining between the compartments, for shielding from neutron and gamma radiation from the reactor, but it will work the opposite direction, shielding the reactor electronics from the EMP.”
“What about ship control systems?”
“If the EMP makes ship control impossible, we may have bigger problems,” Varney admitted.
“Let’s say you start to sink. What do you do?”
“Look for a ballast tank blow system or the levers to an emergency ballast tank blow system. This Kilo isn’t designed ground-up to be run by AI, so any AI in command is superimposed on top of the original manually controlled systems. Somewhere in the control room is the ability to blow ballast. We’d use it to surface. Vermont would have to call for a surface task force to tow the Kilo out of there.”
“And what if you’re going down?” Romanov persisted.
“We evacuate the Kilo, lock out of it, attach a sonar locator beacon to the upper hatch so we can find her on the bottom, climb on to a raft and await rescue from the Vermont. And Vermont will chart the position of the sinking with precision so we can come back and salvage or explore the wreck at a later date.”
“So, not exactly a good day at sea, eh, Mr. Varney?”
“No, ma’am.”
“Okay, Commander, glitch four.”
“At the point the SEALs enter the hull, the crew of the Panther resist heavily with small arms fire, maybe automatic rifle fire. Maybe they start to act to initiate a manual self-destruct or scuttle the sub.”
“Chief Goreliki, what happens then?” Romanov said, addressing the radio chief.
Radioman Chief Bernadette “Gory” Goreliki stood up. She was petite, barely five feet tall, with sleek, straight black hair, dark skin and a Cuban accent. It was a shipwide mystery why she had a Polish surname, but she would only smile and change the subject when asked.
“The first SEAL in pulls the pin on an H2S grenade — and hopefully his scuba rig has a good airtight seal.”
“So, hydrogen sulfide gas, Chief. What will it do to the Panther crew?”
“At a thousand parts per million, Nav, it will cause immediate death. One grenade in a room will give us about ten times that. Two or three are the base plan. We can be confident it would kill anyone in the control room and give the SEALs time to search the other compartments, but even in lower concentrations elsewhere in the ship, the H2S will immobilize other crewmen from the ventilation system spreading the gas. The gas is flammable and corrosive, so at the earliest opportunity, we’ll want to ventilate the submarine.”
“Chief, why lethal H2S?” Romanov asked. “Why not use non-lethal halothane and fentanyl, like the Russians did to retake that theater from Chechen terrorists back in the day? That drops people in their boots but doesn’t kill them.”
“That combination is effective but unpredictable,” Goreliki said. “To this day, we’re still not exactly sure what the chemical combination or formula was for the gas the Russians used. And while some survived, it did kill others. Meanwhile, H2S is a no-nonsense, more certain response to a counterattack by ship’s force. It’s lethal, but that’s life in the big city.”
“It could also hurt our people, though, right?” Romanov said.
“Our procedure is that no one takes off their scuba rig until we’ve tested the atmosphere in the Panther.”
“Very well, Chief, thank you. Commander?”
“Glitch five. We take the Panther successfully, but we miss a hidden member of the Iranian crew or the Russian test technicians, and when we least expect it, the person either sabotages the ship or comes out with weapons to kill us.”
“This one’s for you, Chief Albanese,” Romanov said, pointing to the sonar chief.
Albanese stood, his voice nervous, obviously uncomfortable speaking to an audience. “Prevention is the key to this one, Nav. We do a thorough search of the ship visually and with infrared sensors. We tested these in the torpedo room bilges and the aft compartment lower level. If a warm body is hiding, we’ll find him. We’re vulnerable to attack from a hidden crewman until we conduct the search, so by procedure, we’ll all be armed with weapons drawn until we can verify we’re clear. Kind of like when cops kick down a door, unsure of whether there are hidden bad guys.”
“Nicely done, Chief,” Romanov said, smiling at the sonarman. “Commander, glitch six?”
“This is my favorite,” Fishman said. “On the way out of the Gulf of Oman and continuing into the Arabian Sea and perhaps even into the Indian Ocean, Master One is escorted by and guarded by an Iranian gunship or gunships, perhaps even a frigate or destroyer.”
“Chief Kim, this one’s for you,” Romanov said, smiling at the chief.
Firecontrol Chief Nancy “K-Squared” Kim rose to her feet. Like Albanese, she wasn’t used to public speaking. A daughter of a South Korean immigrant and business mogul, Kim was technically brilliant and confident of that fact, never stumped by the myriad problems presented by Vermont’s AN/BYG-1 combat control system, but then, she’d been in on the birth of the unit in the DynaCorp AI labs that brought the complex system to fruition.
“Well, let me see,” she said in a thick Korean accent, speaking just a notch too loud, which Pacino had always found somewhat odd. “I think Mr. Pacino solved that riddle once before, Commander. We launch a Kakivak cruise missile at the surface force and the EMP blast knocks them dead. Then we proceed to take the Panther as before.”
“Do our rules of engagement allow us to do that?” Romanov asked.
“Yes ma’am. The ROE allows non-lethal weapon employment.”
“What if the escorting surface force is Russian? And what if there are several of them? A task force?”
“It doesn’t matter whose flag the ships fly. We launch an NNEMP Kakivak at them and they’ll all shut down.”
“Well done, Chief. Next, Commander?”
“Glitch seven, people. Panther will need refueling four, five or six times en route AUTEC. What if she gets attacked on the surface while refueling or re-provisioning?”