“Now, the Rising Suns have good torpedo countermeasures, according to the tapes we’ve gotten from the Maritime Self-Defense Force. They have four pods that detach from the X-tail aft that sound just like a Rising Sun, just louder. Each pod inflates a foil balloon that acts as a sonar reflector. Guaranteed to confuse a torpedo. But like I said, they have only four apiece, so we run the bastards out of decoys. Then they have a ventriloquist sonar, an active system in the tail that puts out fake sonar returns to the incoming torpedo, throws it off. They can evade one weapon, maybe two at once, but not a dozen.
“Now, even though I’ll be putting out torpedoes from our vintage 688s, the main weapon will be Piranha’s Vortex Mod Bravo battery, ten weapons, all long-range. If it’s a good day, Bruce Phillips aboard the Piranha fires six Bravos and this war is over. If it’s a bad day, some or all of us take plasma torpedoes on the chin. No guarantees. Next resort after Piranha are the Vortex Mod Charlies we carry, the smaller, shorter-range Vortex, or Vortex-Lite, if you will. We’ve got more of them than the Piranha has Mod Bravos, but with their shorter range, we’ll have to go in deeper in the op area to get them on target.
“In general, gentlemen, I’m optimistic, but here is my list of worries. One, the Rising Suns have antiair missiles. If they detect the P-5 Pegasus patrol planes, they might shoot them down, and with them, our Yo-Yo remote OTH sensors. If that happens, I’ll blow the wad on the Mark 4 Sharkeyes, but if I only detect some of the Rising Suns, we’ll be in trouble. I’ll have to send in Piranha to shoot what we see, and risk that it may be shot at by the Rising Suns we don’t see.
“Next worry, that we look out here and don’t find any Rising Suns. If I missed my guess, the boats are dispersed. If that’s the case, we’ll deploy and redeploy Yo-Yos until we see them. At some point we may need to draw their fire. Not a popular option, and the only way to do it is with the Devilfish, because everyone else is blind. If they take us down when we do that, the operation is over and the convoy goes in without us.”
“What? The convoy goes in anyway?” Porter asked.
“Exactly. The Rising Sun weapon loadout is 48 weapons per sub, total of 288 units. We lost a total of 110 ships. Say that’s about 120 weapons. That means they have about 148 or so torpedoes left. We would draw their fire with a convoy until there are no more torpedoes.”
“But they have enough to take down the lion’s share of the second convoy,” Porter protested.
“Look, I didn’t suggest this. It’s just what General Baldini will do. I know that guy. He’s bullheaded, and he’s been known to do frontal attacks on brick walls. Maybe he’ll gamble that the Red force spent more than 120 weapons on 110 kills, and that he can at least get half his men in. Half of a 400,000 man force is better than none, or so Bull Baldini thinks.
“There is one consolation here,” Pacino continued. “According to the Japanese, the maximum speed of the Mod II Nagasaki torpedo is only 46 knots. A 688 can outrun a torpedo in a tail chase, which I suspect is what happened to the Annapolis. But you can’t run from a torpedo you didn’t detect, so our sonar system is key.
“And the last worry on the list is that this mission falls on its face if Cyclops fails. We’d better hope the computer works and doesn’t crash on us.”
“If it works anything as well as Miss. O’Shaughnessy looks, it’ll do great,” a young voice said from the other side of the room.
“That’s enough,” Pacino said, suddenly furious, biting his lip. “Any questions? Captain, please dismiss your men and come see me in the VIP stateroom.”
Pacino left the wardroom and crossed the hall to the stateroom, his heart still thumping in anger. No doubt about it, he’d feel better when Colleen was off the ship.
Chapter 11
Thursday November 7
“Tanker in sight, bearing mark! Range, mark! Three divisions in low power, angle on the bow starboard five.
Offsa’deck, take the scope,” Patton called, releasing the grips and turning away. “Where’s O’Shaughnessy?”
“She’s not at the escape trunk, sir,” the helm officer said, putting down his phone.
Patton and Pacino exchanged a look. “I’ll go for her,” Pacino said. He walked out of the control room, past the door to sonar, and down the forward centerline passageway all the way to the end at the door to the computer room. He tapped in the combination to the button-type lock, the alphanumerics set to “S-S-N-X,” clicked the latch, and walked in. Colleen O’Shaughnessy sat at her console, typing away, as if there were no personnel transfer waiting for her.
“You’re late,” Pacino said, trying to keep his voice level. “We need to get you going. Wrap up there and get into the suit and tanks.” He pointed at the wet suit on the deck, the scuba bottle lying next to it.
She just kept typing, ignoring him.
“Colleen, let’s go.” He reached for her upper arm, and she shrugged him off, continuing to type.
“What’s the matter with you?” he cried, his anger rising.
“I’ll tell you what’s the matter with me,” she said, her voice low, quiet, and furious. “You’re treating me like a child. Now, cut it out and leave me alone. I’ve got two terabytes of code to fix.”
“Colleen, we’ll manage. Turn it over to Commander Porter. We need to get you off the ship.”
“Why?”
“Because your life is in danger.”
“No, it isn’t, yours is. Especially if you kick me off the ship. Admiral, the code’s corrupt. It has maybe an hour at a time to run before it collapses, and I have to cold-start it.” She kept typing while she spoke.
“Fine, we’ll cold-start it when it shuts down. Now let’s—”
“You don’t understand. Each time it shuts down, I have to process and fix the error message. It’s how the debug-system module works. We might even lose the system fifty times in an hour if there are fifty lines of code incorrect. And your Mr. Porter won’t be able to do that. So it’s not whether my life or your life is in danger, it’s the mission that’s in trouble. This mission goes exactly nowhere without Cyclops. You said it yourself, Admiral, I am the battlecontrol system.” She stopped typing, dropped her hands into her lap, and looked up at him. “I’ll tell you the real reason you want me off the ship. It’s because of your feelings for me.”
Pacino dropped his jaw, looking down at her. The ponytail was gone. She had combed out her hair, and it looked freshly washed, shining in the light of the overheads.
Her skin was as healthy as if she’d been outside in the sun, her eyes shining.
“My feelings for you?”
“Exactly. And it’s okay, Michael. I have feelings for you too. I have since the first time I saw you 137 days ago at the Dynacorp shipyard meeting.”
“I never knew,” Pacino sputtered, his chest so tight he could barely speak. “Why didn’t you say something, or do something? Something to tell me?”