Voyage of the Devilfish

The boat’s diesel motor throttled up, its wake turning to white foam as it accelerated away. Pacino stood at a rail and looked back at the Devilfish, still going dead slow ahead. The ship was graceful and powerful, her black cylindrical hull so low to the water that she was practically submerged even when rigged for surface. The water climbed smoothly up nearly to the forward hatch as the ship picked up speed and drove by the small boat. The conning tower was placed far forward, near where the hull started its slope down into the water. The sail was a beautifully crafted 25-foot-tall fin shaped like a long teardrop in cross section, vertical on its leading and trailing edges, curved on top. Two officers with green parkas and binoculars stood on the bridge, the cockpit at the top of the forward part of the sail. Behind them a ten-foot-tall stainless steel flagpole flew the American stars and stripes and the stark black and white of the Jolly Roger. Coming out of the sail were two horizontal fins, “fairwater planes,” shaped much like a jet airplane’s horizontal tail surfaces. Rising high out of the sail, looking like two telephone poles, were the periscopes. The forward one was a simple and rugged World War II-era device. The one aft was a high-tech radar-invisible mast that was part-periscope, partvideo camera, part-electronic countermeasures device, partradio receiver. Further aft of the periscopes was an even taller, slimmer telephone-pole mast — the BIGMOUTH multifrequency radio antenna. Behind the sail the hull extended far aft, smooth and cylindrical, until it sloped slowly into the water. The aft slope was much gentler than the forward slope, the hull gradually lowering into the sea. After a long gap of water the rudder jutted out of the water, shaped like an airplane’s vertical tail. The only surface characteristics visible were white draft marks on the rudder. Devilfish displaced 4500 tons, was 292 feet long and 32 feet in diameter. Her screw was submerged and invisible in the water. Pacino remembered the first time he had seen her in a drydock, she had looked huge and fat with no water to hide beneath. The tail section was complicated, with another rudder under the ship, horizontal fins — sternplanes— and the screw aft. The screw was a spiralbladed shape with ten long curving blades, each looking like a scimitar sword, the hub of the screw extending far aft of the junction of the blades and the hub. A long tube extended from the skin of the ship aft to a horizontal tail fin, the sternplane and further aft beyond the screw. It was a fairing for a towed sonar array the ship could pull several miles behind her. Pacino could stare for hours at the Devilfish. Aboard the transfer boat he imagined the salt breeze of the wind on his face on its bridge, the snapping of the flags behind him, the hum of the rotating radar mast aft of the flags… He felt his grip on the rails tighten, hoping he wasn’t being relieved of command. It wasn’t his career he worried about but the thought of never driving the submarine again, never feeling her deck vibrate beneath him as she plowed through the sea at flank speed. As he watched, the Devilfish shrank into the distance so that all that remained was the vertical fin of the sail and the horizontal fins of the fairwater planes, forming a cruciform shape against the backdrop of the land beyond. When the small boat landed at a jetty it was almost like being awakened from a dream. Pacino took one last look into the distance and stepped onto the dock. As he did a lieutenant came to attention and saluted, her hair pulled up into a tight bun under her oddly shaped female officer’s cap. Pacino saluted back and followed her to a black staff car. He didn’t ask what was going on. He would know soon enough.

CHAPTER 4

MONDAY, 13 DECEMBER, 1920 EST

NORFOLK, VIRGINIA

COMSUBLANT HEADQUARTERS