Phoenix Sub Zero

“I’ll be down in ten minutes. Tell the navigator to start the briefing without me.” Pacino replaced the phone and found Court looking at him from the periscope. “Yes, off’sa’deck.”

“Sir, request permission to dive. We’re at the dive point, ship has been rigged for dive, watch shifted to control. Fathometer reads 610 fathoms. Ship’s course is zero five five, all ahead flank. No visual contacts, no sonar contacts.”

“Very well, slow to two-thirds and submerge the ship to 150 feet.”

A flurry of orders rang out as the diving officer ordered the chief of the watch to sound the diving alarm and open all main ballast tank vents. The helmsman rang up two-thirds and the engine order telegraph needle chimed back as maneuvering aft slowed to two-thirds. The chief at the ballast panel rotated an alarm lever above the panel, sounding the diving alarm. The klaxon blared throughout the ship, the OOH-GAH more realistic, less electronic now that the shipyard had redone the alarm’s computer generator.

“DIVE, DIVE!” the chief announced on the circuit one.

The diving alarm blasted out a final time.

“All main ballast tank vents open, sir,” the chief said after two function keys changed the green horizontal bars on the. vent display to red circles. The main ballast tanks forward and aft began to give up their air and flood with seawater, the loss of buoyancy already dropping the top of the hull a foot closer to the waves. Court rotated his periscope view directly ahead and turned the view down to the forward deck.

Geysers of water jetted out of the hull, the airwater mixture coming out of the open vents like the spray of a firehose.

“Venting forward,” Court called out. He trained the scope aft and looked down on the aft deck, the spray of water from the aft-deck vents reaching higher than the periscope reticle could see. “Venting aft.”

“Pour two feet,” the diving officer called.

On the periscope-view television monitor the afterdeck’s surface began to disappear into the white foam and blue sea.

A wave washed over the top of the deck, thinned out and washed overboard. The next wave obscured the green paint of the deck for a moment.

“Deck’s awash,” Court announced.

The ship continued settling slowly into the sea, the diving officer eventually calling, “Six five feet, sail’s under,” the signal that the ship was completely under, only the number-two periscope exposed above the waves. On the periscope monitor the blue waves grew closer to the view until they were within arm’s reach.

“Eight four feet.” The waves on the monitor were now mere inches from the view onscreen.

“Scope’s awash,” Court called as the white foam boiled up over the periscope lens, obscuring all view. “Scope’s awash …”

The foam calmed, revealing the undersides of the waves, the surface of the sea now seeming inside-out, the waves above steadily moving more distant. “Scope’s under.” The waves in the view had receded until they were just barely visible in the blue haze, finally vanishing, the view filled only with pieces of seaweed floating by in the water.

“Five degree down bubble,” the diving officer called, the deck inclining downward as the ship departed the surface.

“Lowering number-two scope,” Court said, snapping the grips up and rotating the hydraulic control ring in the overhead.

The stainless-steel pole came down into the well.

“Zero bubble, five degrees up on the bowplanes. Depth one five zero, sir.”

“All ahead one-third, diving officer, trim the ship.”

“I’ll be at the briefing in the wardroom, off’sa’deck,” Pacino said to Court. “When you’ve got a trim, perform a controlled dive to test depth. Once that’s complete get us back to 600 feet and proceed to point bravo at full.” Point bravo was a mark on the chart about 500 miles east-northeast of Norfolk, the agreed-upon hold point in the western Atlantic where Pacino would receive some kind of direction from Steinman and Donchez. Without contact on the Destiny, the mission would be a bust.

Pacino climbed the ladder to the middle level, turned the corner at the galley and walked into the packed wardroom.

He made his way to the head of the table, where his seat was waiting, a steaming cup of coffee on the table in a cup with the ship’s emblem on it, the snarling wolf’s head staring out, the silhouette of a submarine hull in the background. Henry Vale, the Harvard whiz-kid navigator, stood at a high-definition television flat screen, a pointer in his hand, the profile of the Destiny-class submarine displayed on the monitor.

“Go on, Nav,” Pacino said. As Vale spoke the deck inclined downward five degrees, the officer of the deck taking the ship down fifty feet at a time to test depth, a test to certify that the hull patch at the Vortex tubes would stand up to submergence pressure.

“Sir, we’ve been over the Destiny’s stats, our instructions to find the sub and put it on the bottom, and the fact that it has killed two of our 688’s. We’ve all got questions about what the Destiny’s mission is and why it fought so hard to get out of the Med.”