“Hell, no, Patch,” Catardi said. “He’s good tactically, but he’s still a non-qual. No way Seagraves puts him on the Panther crew.”
Lieutenant Anthony Pacino, clad in a form-fitting wetsuit, stood at the forward hatch of the SEAL lockout chamber, his scuba bottles, regulator, mask, fins and weight belt placed in a neat pile by a passageway corner by the canisters of things they’d take aboard the stolen Kilo sub, including SatNav receivers, radio equipment, clothes and food, and the large container that would inflate into the raft they’d pour the Iranian crew into.
The AI division under Chief Nancy “K-Squared” Kim had set up two large flatscreens on the bulkhead opposite the lockout chamber hatch. One was patched into the number one periscope of the command console, the second a view of the control room taken from aft overhead in the room and looking down on the attack center consoles, the firecontrol coordinator and the command console. Sound was piped in, the conversations in the control room audible from the screen.
Chief Kim looked up at Pacino from her seated position on the deck. “Might as well get comfortable, Mr. Patch. It might be a long time before we need to prep.”
Pacino sank down to the deck at a spot where he could see the control room monitor. “Can you turn that up?” he said to Kim. She increased the volume. He shut his eyes and listened to the hum of conversation. The Panther was still deep, 328 feet, going at a battery-endurance speed of seven knots. The control room crew was on a trip-wire alert, waiting for the target to make a move that would indicate he was coming above the thermal layer up to periscope depth. Perhaps a maneuver like turning in a 180 degree turn to hear shipping behind him in his “baffles,” the area directly astern where his sonar in the bow couldn’t hear, the baffle-clear an attempt to avoid colliding with surface shipping.
Coming to periscope depth was always hazardous for any submarine, with some of the loaded supertankers drawing up to 120 feet to the bottoms of their hulls. A sub coming out of the cold thermal layer into the warmer water stirred by the sun would be in an entirely new sonar environment — sounds up there would reflect off the interface between warm and cold and not penetrate deep. Almost the ocean version of a mirage in the desert. The only way to come to PD safely was to come up slowly and maneuver the ship to hear all sounds from all points of the compass, and only then allow the top of the conning tower to rise above 120 feet.
So there would be plenty of signs that Panther was on his way up, Pacino thought, and told himself to relax. Last night had been sleepless. Watchstanders were rotated in and out to sleep for a few hours, then returning to their battlestations watch, the captain and XO deciding who was fading out and directing team members in and out, almost like a professional coach pulling a player off the field and sending in a fresh replacement. Seagraves had taken over the approach officer duty four hours ago and directed Pacino to his bunk, but all Pacino could do was stare into the dark. A combat operation like this, he thought — anything and everything could go wrong.
He thought about the simulations they’d run before snapping up the Panther. This tranche of simulations began by assuming the boarding party had successfully taken over the Kilo submarine, but then the Kilo and the Vermont ran into opposition forces — Iranian destroyers, Russian destroyers, Russian Kilo-class submarines, even Russian nuclear submarines. Even two Russian nuclear submarines operating together. Seagraves had kept the Russian nuclear submarine attackers at older submarine classes to see how they fared, and against the older Akula II-class and older vessels, they’d prevailed, sometimes easily, sometimes with a bit of a struggle. But in all of them, Vermont heard the bad guys long before said bad guys heard Vermont, and assuming the Russian opposition force was there to stop the Vermont’s mission and recover the Kilo, Vermont had immediately fired upon and destroyed the older attack submarines. In those simulation runs, the main issue was positioning Vermont out ahead of the Panther, so there would be little chance of a Vermont-launched torpedo homing in on the Panther instead of the Russian attacker. And that was a challenge because Panther couldn’t hear Vermont, even if she were right alongside. It had been up to Vermont to maintain battlespace awareness and keep herself ahead of Panther. That, of course, made the pair vulnerable to torpedo attack from the rear. Panther wouldn’t hear it and the incoming torpedo would sink Panther before Vermont could even react. A torpedo dropped from astern from an MPA, a maritime patrol aircraft? Mission failure. Every time.
Eventually, after enough simulations had been run that both Vermont and Panther crews were reaching the same results over and over, Captain Seagraves upped the ante and tossed in a modern Russian Yasen-M-class attack submarine, approaching from the south.
Those simulations had all ended in disasters. The Yasen-M submarine, commanded by Romanov in the simulations, every single time, heard Vermont before Vermont heard the Yasen-M, and it had come down to what the Russian’s rules of engagement were. If the Russians had permission to attack on detection, both Vermont and Panther went down. Mission failure. And all the good guys died. If the Russians had to go to periscope depth to ask for permission to shoot warshots from fleet HQ or Moscow, Vermont had enough time to detect the Yasen-M, mostly from the transient sounds the Russian boat made as it ascended to periscope depth, or increasing noise from “clearing baffles,” exposing all sides of himself to Vermont’s sonar arrays, with one angle being the “bingo angle-on-the-bow” where his emitted noise was louder than other angles. But even in those scenarios, it was not an automatic victory for Vermont.
When both Vermont and the Yasen-M were aware of each other and shooting, the scenario would degrade into what was called a “PCO waltz”—so called since prospective commanding officer school featured prospective captains acting as approach officers in submarine vs. submarine exercises, and whenever two attack subs could hear each other and were shooting at each other, the world dissolved into a crazy, mixed-up melee where anything could happen, the fog of war intruded and no one knew what was happening. Likely as not, an attacking submarine could go down from his own torpedo fired into the cloud of confusion. The massive uncertainty of a PCO waltz was to be avoided at all costs, Seagraves had cautioned. “If you’re in a PCO waltz, withdraw and clear datum, and try to sneak up on the bastard again when he least expects it.”
Something about that last advice had rubbed Pacino the wrong way. Retreating in the face of the enemy? That wasn’t the American way, or what he imagined the American way to be. Romanov had chided him harshly for being naïve. “Sticking around for certain death isn’t dagger-in-the-teeth courage, non-qual. It’s dagger-in-the-teeth stupidity. Above all, in submarine operations, stupidity is punished harshly, either by the sea itself or the enemy. So if you’re fighting an attack submarine that knows you’re there and is shooting at you, get the hell out. Clear datum, come back later and sneak up on him.” Pacino had put his head down and yes-ma’amed her, but he doubted he could ever do that. Perhaps, he thought, that was his fatal flaw. Perhaps that was a terrible thing in a harsh future, lying in wait to kill him.