Phoenix Sub Zero

“Why didn’t we do that deep. Senior?”

“It’s a bigmouth problem. Captain. We didn’t see it until the mast was dry.”

“I’m taking her deep,” Kane said. “We don’t have time for this. Sonar, conn, proceeding deep. Chief, lower the bigmouth. Dive, make your depth 500 feet, steep angle. Helm, all ahead two-thirds.”

Almost immediately the waves came up and splashed the periscope lens. Kane snapped the grips up and lowered the scope. The bigmouth and the number-two periscope clunked into their stowed positions a second apart. The deck inclined downward to a steep thirty-degree dive.

“Helm, ahead standard. Sonar, Captain, report status of Target One.”

“Conn, sonar, complete loss of Target One.”

“Houser, you have the deck and the conn.” Kane walked into sonar, where he found Sanderson glaring at the console screens. The senior chief glanced up at Kane, then went back to flipping through his displays, talking while he searched.

“Narrowband is coming up but I’m not sure what I’m looking for. And there’s no trace of him broadband.”

Kane moved back into control. “XO, based on Target One’s previous track, give me an intercept vector to his position.”

“Unlikely he stayed on course and speed. Captain.”

“Plot it like he did. We’ll drive out to where he’d be if he kept going like he was and see if we hear him. Once we do, sonar can get a narrowband signature on him and we can track him at the longer ranges. Get the calculation done, then have Mr. Houser get us there, fast.”

Kane didn’t wait for an acknowledgement as he stepped out of control to the radio room. He punched in the combination to the push-button combination lock and slammed the door open. “Senior, what the hell was going on up there?

We’ve lost the god damned Destiny and no one knows he’s out there but us.” Kane took a breath, upset he’d let his temper take over.

Binghamton looked up, the sweat on his cueball head forming droplets that glinted in the light of the bright overhead lights. The senior chief, used to communication foul-ups during tense tactical situations, was steady. “UHF antenna is gone. Captain. Short of a new bigmouth, we won’t be talking to anybody. Even if we surfaced and had replacement parts, it can’t be fixed.”

Kane leaned hard against the bulkhead, handles and dials of the radio cabinets digging into his flesh. Rotten irony, he had come this far and gone through the near-sinking and the second encounter only to learn the ship was mute as well as weaponless. Okay … what to do? Surface and drive for the nearest port, where he could phone Admiral Steinman and tell him about the Destiny? Gibraltar was only a day away now. But that would mean he couldn’t keep an eye on the Destiny as it continued on its mission, whatever it was.

“But we’re not out of business yet. Skipper. The UHF is a dud, it’s true, but we may have HF capability.”

Kane didn’t know how to react to that. HF was notoriously unreliable, subject to any sort of atmospheric disturbance.

During a tactical exercise three months before, the ship had tried to reach Norfolk from a hundred miles out and could raise no one. Nothing but static. When they did get voice contact it was with a radio operator in Brazil. This absurdity of HF radio was the reason the U.S. had launched all those hundred-million-dollar satellites into geosynchronous orbit that received crisp, reliable, straight-line UHF transmissions.

Using HF would be like stepping back into the 1940s, but it was still better than nothing.

“Only thing is, sir, we’ll need a long time at PD to find a way to transmit this message. Could be an hour, maybe two.”

Not quite the sixty-second stay at PD that a satellite would allow, Kane thought. How could he possibly trail the Destiny and linger so long at slow speed at periscope depth?

The answer was he couldn’t. He had to make a decision: lose the Destiny or communicate. He could not do both.

He muttered a curse and walked back into control.

“Status, Mr. Houser?”

“We’re doing twenty knots to intercept the previous track of the Destiny, Captain. Fortunately he was going only five knots the whole time we had him before. We’ll slow down in another two minutes and see what sonar hears.”

Kane bent over the chart table and almost found himself hoping that they wouldn’t regain the Destiny on sonar, that he could spend the time at PD to communicate, then head home.

“Conn, sonar,” Kane heard as he strapped on his sweat-soaked headset, “reacquisition Target One, bearing two five four. Recommend slowing to four knots.”

“Ahead one-third, turns for four,” Houser shouted to the helmsman.

“Man the plots,” Mcdonne called. The consoles of the firecontrol system suddenly flashed into life on the attack-center screens, then died again. “Firecontrol, what’s the status?”

“Coming up in tape mode in two minutes, sir,” the technician reported, his voice muffled by the tall consoles between him and the control-room crew.

Kane ran his hands through his hair, adjusting the headset.