Phoenix Sub Zero

“Sihoud’s aboard,” Pacino said, sipping the hot coffee.

The ship-control readout panel set into a cubbyhole next to Pacino’s chair read 250 feet. The deck inclined again as Court drove the ship further down. The hull groaned for a moment. “Destiny might be sneaking him out of Africa to go around the horn. Or getting him away to someplace he can hide.”

The crowd was speechless, the fact of Sihoud’s presence aboard not yet declassified to the men. Pacino was now unwilling to keep the secret when he relied on this crew to help find the UIF killer submarine. The silence was interrupted by a loud pop from above, the hull equalizing against sea pressure as the ship dived deeper. The deck leveled again for a few minutes.

“Our op-plan has us driving here,” Vale said, the screen changing to a depiction of the Atlantic Ocean as if the oh server orbited thousands of miles above the earth. A dotted red line curved from Norfolk up to point bravo. “We’ll come up to periscope depth and get our traffic from the satellite. With luck we’ll have a hot tip on the Destiny by then. If not, we’ll hold there in a large area sonar sector search until we sniff him out.” “Sir,” the engineer Dave Hobart said, the sweat streaming down his fleshy face from being back aft for the drive out of Norfolk, “what good does it do to hold in the Western Atlantic when the Destiny’s coming out of the Med? Seems kinda messed up, you know? If he’s really zipping around the horn we ain’t about to catch him in westlant. You know?” Hobart’s speech was always full of “you-knows.”

Pacino thought about Hobart’s remark, knowing there was some logic in it based on what he knew but not yet willing to disclose Donchez’s suspicions about the Destiny, about the possibility of it coming west. Coming … with whafl “That’s the order,” Pacino said. “A lot could happen by the time we get there tomorrow morning. The Atlantic is being scoured by Burke-class destroyers, P-3 Orions, LAMPS choppers, the SOSUS submerged hydrophone network and by our spy satellites. Anything pops up, we’ll vector in to ward it.”

Hobart still wasn’t satisfied. “I don’t know. Captain, it’s still sounding fishy, you know? For one thing, why doesn’t COMSUBLANT send out the 688 squadrons as a barrier sonar picket, all listening together, you know? Surely they could cover more square miles than we can alone.”

Pacino was about to tell Hobart that so far the Los Angeles-class ships didn’t detect the Destiny until it was either right on top of them or had already sent a torpedo down the track. He was interrupted by the buzzing of the phone from the conn.

“Captain, off’sa’deck, sir. Ship is at 600 feet. Request to rig for deep submergence and proceed to test depth.” The ship-control repeaters read 600 feet. Pacino had barely noticed the steady down angles and level-offs getting down to (hat depth. He wondered if the Vortex tube patch would hold up. If it didn’t, the mission was over early.

“I’ll be right there.” Pacino stood. “Time to take her deep, gents. We’ll finish this later when we get more data, XO, let’s go to control.”

Scott Court presided over the control room from the elevated periscope platform, leaning on the handrails of the conn.

“O.O.D, rig for deep submergence and take her down. XO, I’d like you to stay here. I’ll be in the torpedo room.”

Vaughn nodded and Pacino left through the aft passage way past his and Vaughn’s stateroom on the port side, radio and the electronic countermeasures room on the starboard.

The passageway ended at the compartment bulkhead, where a dogleg led to the hatch to the reactor-compartment tunnel.

Pacino stepped instead down the steep and narrow stairs to the lower level, passing a storage room, the auxiliary machinery space where the massive diesel engine sat dormant, to the door to the torpedo room. The room, previously cavernous when empty and tight when full of weapons, was now so jammed that Pacino could barely make his way past the giant and useless Vortex tubes to starboard. The three tubes, each over three feet in diameter, started thirty feet for ward at the room’s bulkhead and extended aft all the way to the wall forming the storage space and beyond—the ship yard had cut the storage room in half to accommodate the tubes—and the entire starboard side of the room had vanished, to be replaced by the tubes. Each one was similar to the one that Pacino had visited briefly aboard the Piranha just before the test platform’s Vortex tube had exploded and sunk the ship. The port side of the room had been left alone but the weapon loadout had been diminished from the previous fifty torpedoes to the present twenty-four, including the three loaded in the port bank tubes. It was a giant step backward.