The wardroom had fallen quiet. Jabo wanted to break the silence and keep them focused on the task at hand. “What’s our attack plan, captain?” said Jabo.
The captain looked up, a little startled.
“You tell me,” he said. “You’re our battle stations OOD.”
Jabo thought hard for a minute. “I don’t think a standard two shot salvo is the way to go. That pattern is designed to account for evasion tactics, and to make it harder to detect us, the shooter. We don’t have to worry about either one of those.”
“So you want to go with a single shot? Be economical with the people’s million dollar torpedoes?”
“No sir. I think we should fire two shots, but closer together than the normal spread. Maybe offset just twenty degrees. Hopefully we’ll have thirty minutes or so to acquire her and get her solution entered with a high degree of accuracy.”
“What about active?” asked the XO. “Will we use that again?”
“If we have to,” said the captain. “But as we saw today, we can’t rely on it.”
“What about range?” said Burkhardt. “We were close when we found her this morning, right? Inside a thousand yards? Do we want to be firing warshots at that range?
“And how many do we want to load?” said Perez. “Should we put warshots in all four tubes? Just in case we need to shoot again?”
Soon the wardroom was engaged in a lively, productive debate about how to best acquire, prosecute, and sink a submerged target.
James had to drill the hole out slightly to get the gear he’d created onto the smooth axle. He wanted it tight, had purposely undersized the hole, wanting the plastic to grip the steel so that it wouldn’t slip around. But he was worried about cracking the new gear if he pressed to hard. He rubbed a little soap from his mold on the axle to lubricate it, and slowly pushed the wheel down to the small scratch that he’d made on the steel rod, marking its correct placement.
With the gear in place, he slowly reassembled the machine. He’d filed every individual tooth down until it looked perfect, but there was no way he would be able to tell how the thing worked until it was all assembled, until the gears meshed and turned with purpose. He’d gained an appreciation for the precision of the copier as he’d worked on it. And while he understood it well, there were a number of mysteries inside it, gears that appeared to have no purpose, limit switches that had no discernible function. But he knew that the engineers at Xerox wouldn’t waste any space, or parts, in the machine. It was fascinating to him, the philosophical differences evident in machinery. The machines he’d worked on in the military had been designed for reliability and ruggedness. Elegance was never an issue. And to hell with cost, too, especially on a submarine: the thing needed to work when flooded and shot. And if for some reason it broke, it had to be fixed by men at sea or Marines in the field. The Xerox machine had clearly been designed at every stage with cost in mind. Every wire was cut as short as possible, with no slack. When one gear could serve two purposes, it did. When metal could be replaced by plastic, it was. When they got back in port he would find somebody who could explain to him everything about the copier that he couldn’t figure out on his own.
Soon everything but the access panel was back in place. He went to control to get the danger tag cleared from the machine so he could turn it on and test it.
He was surprised to see the engineer on the conn.
“Hello, eng. What are you doing up here?”
He looked irked. “Captain called all the other officers into the wardroom.”
James understood; the engineer felt slighted. They were talking about something tactical and the captain felt he could be briefed later. “Well here’s our chance at some forward compartment glory,” he said, reaching for the tag out log.
The engineer raised an eyebrow, his spirits lifting. “You fixed it?”
“I’ll let you know in a minute,” he said. “Request permission to clear tags.”
The engineer took the sheet from him and signed it. “Clear tags. That’s awesome, James.”
“We’ll see, sir,” he said, already striding away.
Back in front of the copier, he took the red tag off the power switch and paused. He pushed it and nothing happened.
He remembered the small internal breaker, pushed it up, and pushed the power button again. The machine hummed to life.
He closed his eyes and listened as it clicked, and waited for the control panel to say READY. Everything sounded okay, but he knew his little gear wasn’t turning yet.
The READY light turned green. James looked around the office for something to copy. He found a sheet of paper turned over on the table, a flyer for the Hickam Half Marathon that had taken place a week before. He put it face down on the glass of the copier, closed the lid, and pressed the COPY button.
He heard a jarring click that almost bothered him, but the machine hummed and chuckled to life. He saw the warm incandescence of the copier’s light moving below the cover. Then, a pause, and a perfectly formed copy came out the other end.
James took it out and admired it.
The 1MC speaker next to his head clicked to life. “This is your captain,” it said. “I’m going to tell you men what we’re doing tomorrow morning.”
Jabo and V-12 rolled out of their racks together; Jabo let the young man in the lower rack exit first. They had both decided to take showers, interestingly, even though it certainly wasn’t required and they could have used the extra sleep. They were doing something important, thought Jabo, and maybe it would be better if they didn’t stink.
They toured the boat together. Every man was alert and ready. In the torpedo room, they were loading warshots into the tubes; they stopped and watched. Both because it was of critical importance for what they were about to do, and because it was a strangely beautiful operation to watch.
The Mark 48 torpedoes were nineteen feet long, taking up almost all the room available in the torpedo room. They weighed 3,500 pounds each, 650 pounds of which were the high explosives in the warhead. They could be steered via miles of thin copper wire that connected the weapon to the ship, and each weapon contained both active and passive sonar of its own. Danny had once been at a security seminar while on shore duty, and someone had asked the admiral on the podium if we would ever have drone submarines, the way the Air Force had embraced drone aircraft. He responded that the Navy had had drone submarines for a century: they were called torpedoes.
The torpedoemen moved the weapons up and down in their racks almost silently as they eased them toward the tube. At the breech door, they verified again that everything was lined up, and then the weapon was smoothly, almost silently inserted inside, the twenty-one inch diameter of the weapon filling the tube exactly. It occurred to Danny that there was a kind of close precision that was distinctive to loading weapons, whether it was a Trident missile being lowered into its tube, a Mark 48 torpedo being loaded, or a shotgun shell being pushed into his Remington 870 at home.
Timmons, the leading torpedoman, shut the breech door when the weapon was fully inside, and wrote on its status board in grease penciclass="underline" WARSHOT LOADED. All the tubes said the same thing now.
“You think we’ll shoot all four?” asked Timmons.
“If we do, it means I’ve screwed something up,” said Jabo. “If all goes according to plan, we’ll only need one, but we’ll shoot two just to be sure.”