Computers were wonderful, supercomputers even better, and the Second Captain system was everything a submarine could ever want, marking control of the ship and the sensing of the seas around the ship easy and natural; the system conquered the task of blending man and machine into one organism, mating the human instincts and reflexes of the machine, until the interface between them blurred to the point that the entire ship was an extension of his well-trained crew. But could a mere box of integrated circuits be trusted to drive them from harm without any human supervision?
The question was now more than academic — the procedure called for Sharef to turn command over to his computer counterpart and let go.
He was surrounded by incoming high-speed torpedoes bearing down on the Hegira from three directions. If Sharef withdrew along the wrong course he might evade a distant torpedo at the cost of driving into a close one. When the bearings to the torpedoes were known and plotted, conventional wisdom dictated the submarine commander drive his ship in a direction that would bisect the largest angle between the bearings to the weapons. But that would be suicide if the ship drove into the closer of the incoming torpedoes. Range to the torpedoes was crucial information, but doing target-range analysis, wiggling the ship in long slow maneuvers, was not possible with only seconds to impact with a close torpedo. The ship’s sonar systems, with the exception of the ventriloquist SCM sonar countermeasures suite, were entirely passive listeners — pinging an active sonar to find torpedo range was just not an option.
The Destiny-class submarine designers had known she would someday be outnumbered, and expected if the sub ever got into combat that several weapons would be vectored in at her from other submarines, from aircraft, from surface ships. The Destiny was conceived as a one-ship fleet, and as such was required to have the computer systems made capable of fighting multiple threats from multiple bearings.
The standard operating procedure in the case of multiple inbound torpedoes from around the compass was simple. But Sharef still did not like it. The procedure called for turning his ship over to the Second Captain, which would do course target range analysis by driving the ship through a rapid wiggle, perhaps an S-curve, then, having a feel for the torpedo ranges, calculate the ship’s best course to evade, even if it meant driving almost head-on into the most distant weapon.
It required an act of faith, the one quality Commodore Sharef had a severe shortage of, cynicism setting in on the day of the Sahand sinking. But Sharef was no fool, and valued his ship and his crew and his mission, and he gave the order. He shared a momentary look at his first officer, Captain al-Kunis, who had remained silent through the entire day’s combat as his function required — he could not participate by UIF regulations and Islamic tradition — the second-in-command’s lot in life was to stand beside the commanding officer, remain silent and be ready to take over if the captain fell. Until that moment he would not involve himself, only observe. But it was clear that al-Kunis felt Sharef’s thoughts about total trust in the Second Captain system, the doubt in the first’s eyes a dark shade.
“Deck officer, engage the Second Captain in ship-control mode.”
“Ship control, engage the second,” Tawkidi ordered the ship-control console operators. Sharef watched as the operators keyed in the system, their training anticipating the order and the functional menu screen already called up on their displays, the ship a single keystroke from computer control.
Sharef grabbed a handhold set into the side of the plot table just as the Second Captain took command and put the rudder over. The deck inclined rapidly to the left as the computer threw the ship into a violent maneuver. The ship shuddered.
From below came the sound of dishes falling out of a cabinet and shattered on the galley deck. As suddenly as the first maneuver, the Second Captain shifted the rudder, the deck rolling back to starboard, one man at the reactor-control consoles thudding to the deck, sheepishly crawling back into his control seat. The deck then leveled and steadied, the ship’s S-curve complete. Sharef looked at the ship-control console and saw that the ship was driving up northwest, heading 262 degrees true, almost exactly between the torpedo at 194 and the one at 330. Those fish must be roughly at equal ranges, Sharef thought, which made sense, because the range at which a torpedo could detect them should be a constant. Then again, the chart also told a story, the land too close to allow the Second Captain to drive them back east, which was also part of the computer’s evasion routine.
Now under Second Captain control, there was little to do but wait and monitor the system for gross failure. The Second Captain would continue to monitor the weapons, perhaps even sending the ship suddenly into another maneuver to test for range or to check on a weapon coming in from astern in the main sonar’s blind spot. As yet there had been no torpedo sonar pulses showing up on the sensor displays, but then evading three torpedoes was not like running in a tail chase from one. The SCM ventriloquist was again enabled in automatic, but it would be useless trying to fool three torpedoes at once. And the system would not do well against a weapon closing in on them from an angle.
Sharef became aware of the officers looking at him, searching his face for signs of confidence or despair, trying to see if their captain saw hope or defeat. Sharef knew the psychology of his men, the same as any crew. A crew without hope could not function. But his face had made him a liar, because just as before he had felt it was not yet time to die, he had a sensation that perhaps now it was.
Chapter 19
Sunday, 29 December
Lieutenant Commander Thomas Schramford had been Phoenix’s chief engineer for almost three years. Before that he had served as an engineering-division officer on the Hartford in each of the aft divisions — electrical, reactor and mechanical — then rotating to the new construction submarine Tampa while she was built at Dynacorp’s Electric Boat’s Groton yards. While spending his two years watching Tampa progress from a single hoop of structural HY-80 to a fully fitted-out combat submarine he learned the 688-class in such detail that every cable, valve, microelectronic processor, pipe and panel were engraved in his memory. On the wall above the engineering officer of the watch’s desk was a large print of the piping and instrumentation systems of the plant, from the core’s main coolant piping to the last condensate pump pressure control valve. As part of studying for the engineer exam, Schramford had to be able to reproduce it from memory, and he still could. If need be he could have started up the reactor from memory — in spite of the fact that Operating Instruction 27, Normal Reactor Startup, was over 120 pages long, not including the steam plant startup procedures.
Of all the men aboard, Schramford was one of few in the aft compartment who had escaped serious injury or loss of consciousness from the collision with the bottom — the others who remained conscious were dazed or trapped under bodies or equipment. He was conscious but his mind was dulled with pain from striking his groin on something, the terrible ache ballooning up through his abdomen. He clamped his eyelids shut and bit his lip, trying to fight the pain, but for some time the pain won, and after seconds or minutes or hours the ache eased but continued throbbing, sapping his strength.
The ship was quiet, the roar of the turbines gone, the air handlers shut down, the reactor inert. There on the deck of the maneuvering room, Schramford found his thoughts turning to the reactor core. The ship had been steaming full out just before the loss of all electrical, and the reactor went from over 150 percent power to zero. But nuclear reactors never just turned off. The radioactivity of the core remained after the bulk of the reactions were stopped, adding tremendous heat to the coolant loop, in this case heat equivalent to running the core at fifteen percent power without cooling.