Phoenix Sub Zero

Tired of his own internal debates, Pacino assembled the rotary switch to the front of a metal box, checking the installation from the front. He terminated the wires to the switch and ran the cable through a hole in the top of the box, the cable shield fitting through a coupling that screwed into the hole. He coiled the cable and tie-wrapped it together so he could carry it, putting it in the canvas tool bag with the cordless drill, the tie wraps, the wire-pulling rope, the screw driver and the wire-insulation remover. He looked over the wiring diagram one last time, realizing that he had memorized the page where he had decided to tie into the hardwired actuation circuitry.

He packed the materials into a storage cabinet. Its installation would have to wait until the midwatch, when the crew’s mess would be empty. He set his alarm for 0300, turned off the overheads and climbed into his rack, the file open on his stomach. It was a file marked sci top secret— early retirement, given to him by Admiral Donchez, the neatly typed pages bound in a paperback binding. Pacino began reading the thick report, starting at the beginning with all known information about the Destiny-class submarine. A hundred pages later Pacino began to wonder if Seawolf really had any kind of chance against the new machine. An other hundred pages completed the Destiny information, the long section on the computer system both enlightening and confusing.

* * *

At 0100 the O.O.D called and asked permission to take the ship to periscope depth to get their radio traffic from the satellite. Pacino gave him permission, feeling the deck angle upward, the level-off, then the gentle rocking of the deck in the waves from the surface. After a few minutes, the ship went deep again, the hull groaning as it took on the load of the seawater pressure, leveling off at 550 feet, the deck once again steady. Ten minutes later a rap came at the door as the radioman brought the message board. Pacino scanned it— nothing from Steinman or Donchez. Hurry up and wait, he thought. He signed the routine messages, sent the board out with the radioman and returned to his report.

The next section was a collection of profiles of the crew members. The section on Commodore Abbas Alai Sharef was full of interesting details, the most ominous the sinking of the Sahand in 1988. Pacino didn’t even remember that operation—he’d been at sea on his XO tour at the time, under the polar icecap trailing a Soviet Akula-class submarine that had just sailed out of Severodvinsk shipyard on its Arctic Ocean sea trials. That mission had gotten hairy enough that a three-sentence report on the radio message board about the U.S. Navy attack on the Iranian fleet had seemed insignificant. But the attack, conducted in reprisal for Iranian boarding and strafing of merchant ships in the Persian Gulf, did in retrospect seem an overreaction. The file included a Time magazine report as well as the article from the New York Times. Not very much detail in the open media, but a paragraph from a Naval Intelligence target evaluation estimate revealed that the Sahand had taken the hit hard with only a handful of survivors. Sharef had been one of them, which was bound to make him a fighter with a particular hatred where the U.S. Navy was concerned. Pacino found another fact even more disturbing, that Sharef had no family, no wife, no children. Nothing that would whisper in his ear to survive to fight another day. The sort of man who would fight to the death. But then, many of the Islamic fighters were like that, believing death in battle to be a firstclass ticket to heaven. Pacino finished the section on Sharef and continued through the gossip sheet with the first officer, Captain al-Kunis, all the way to the file on the known junior officers — necessary since any one of the officers might assume command if Sharef died.

By the time Pacino finished the report it was 0230. He decided to start his wiring modification early, rolling out of bed and slipping into his shoes. He took the canvas bag from the locker and left through his stateroom’s door to the middle level’s central passageway. A long walk to the aft bulkhead, where it doglegged to starboard at the hatchway to the reactor compartment’s shielded tunnel. Pacino stopped there, considering the hatch to the nuclear spaces, the bulkhead and heavy hatch good for the full pressure of the outer hull; just in case the forward part of the ship flooded and took the ship down, the aft compartments could still survive until the main hull steel failed and crushed. Pacino moved into the hatch, reaching out his hand with eyes shut to a point on the bulkhead of the forward compartment, then keeping his hand there while he climbed back into the forward compartment passageway. The spot on the bulkhead was immediately next to the hatch at chest level. It was a bad location, too easily noticeable by the traffic going into the aft compartments, but it would have to do.