Phoenix Sub Zero

The midchannel P-3 Orion patrol turboprop that had launched the Mark 52 torpedo continued following it as it pursued the Destiny submarine. The Mark 52 was easily tracked, its broadband noise signature loud and steady. The Destiny faded in and out. The P-3 had used up three-fourths of its load of sonobuoys tracking the UIF sub, and it would not be long before it would need to be relieved onstation.

The west mouth P-3 had been notified of the attack but could not help out from its position sixty nautical miles farther west, where it orbited as it tried to find the Phoenix.

And from the position of the explosion of the Nagasaki torpedo there was no sign of Phoenix, not even the sound of her reactor cooling on the ocean floor. It was as if she had buried herself in the earth’s crust and vanished. The western P-3 continued the search, standing by in case the eastern aircraft needed help.

Meanwhile, a flash message had been transmitted to CINCNAVFORCEMED detailed the situation with the exchange of torpedoes, the apparent loss of the Phoenix, the pursuit of the escaping Destiny, and the need for further ASW assets at the entrance to the Atlantic to prosecute the target. Soon after the cinc’s receipt of the signal, the Burke-class destroyers searching the Med’s western basin were vectored to Gibraltar and ordered to outchop into the Atlantic. Several S-3 Viking ASW jets lifted off the deck of the USS Reagan deeper in the Med, the jets banking hard in their turns to the west as they deployed to help the P-3s. At Sigonella Naval Air Station, three more P-3s, all fueled and loaded out with Mark 52 torpedoes and sonobuoys, rolled out onto the runway and lumbered off into the night, but it would be some hours before they would reach the strait.

Within the next fifteen minutes the Mark 52 torpedo caught up with the Destiny submarine and exploded. The sonar techs and the ASW officer in the P-3 above got their hopes up, but when the bubbles and turbulence finally stopped, there had been no sign of a hull breaking up. Two sonobuoys placed farther west radioed their signals, the screen display on the techs console showing that the Destiny submarine continued on its path heading west. By the time the P-3 had throttled up, banked hard and overflown the positions of the reporting sonobuoys, the Destiny was gone.

The sonar tech slumped into his control seat, his eyes shut, then suddenly sat up straight again and looked to the ASW officer.

“Mr. Quaid! I’ve got three traces of torpedoes. American Mark 50 torpedoes. They’re all at attack velocity.”

Quaid leaned over the console, frowning.

“Where’d they come from?”

“Must have been launched by the Phoenix and we didn’t pick them up when they were slow in transit, or maybe they were passive circlers.”

“Maybe Phoenix will get her revenge yet.”

“Too bad it’ll be posthumous,” the tech mumbled. “Too early to call that. What’ve you got?”

“Multiple weapons, look like they’re several miles apart, all of them homing toward the same spot at once.”

“Good, maybe we’ve got a chance for at least one hit.

Let’s set up a sonobuoy field inside the triangle of the torpedoes and hope for the best.”

* * *

Sharef knew the order he had to give.

Computers were wonderful, supercomputers even better, and the Second Captain system was everything a submarine could ever want, marking control of the ship and the sensing of the seas around the ship easy and natural; the system conquered the task of blending man and machine into one organism, mating the human instincts and reflexes of the.machine, until the interface between them blurred to the point that the entire ship was an extension of his well-trained crew. But could a mere box of integrated circuits be trusted to drive them from harm without any human supervision?

The question was now more than academic — the procedure called for Sharef to turn command over to his computer counterpart and let go.

He was surrounded by incoming high-speed torpedoes bearing down on the Hegira from three directions. If Sharef withdrew along the wrong course he might evade a distant torpedo at the cost of driving into a close one. When the bearings to the torpedoes were known and plotted, conventional wisdom dictated the submarine commander drive his ship in a direction that would bisect the largest angle between the bearings to the weapons. But that would be suicide if the ship drove into the closer of the incoming torpedoes. Range to the torpedoes was crucial information, but doing target-range analysis, wiggling the ship in long slow maneuvers, was not possible with only seconds to impact with a close torpedo. The ship’s sonar systems, with the exception of the ventriloquist SCM sonar countermeasures suite, were entirely passive listeners — pinging an active sonar to find torpedo range was just not an option.