Voyage of the Devilfish

  VOYAGE OF THE DEVILFISH by MICHAEL DiMERCURIO

  PROLOGUE.

  13 DECEMBER, 1973 arctic ocean

  The USS Stingray hovered silently 200 feet below the polar icecap. The nuclear submarine’s control room was absurdly cramped. Filled with consoles, valves, piping and cables it was uncomfortable, but functional. The room was lit by a dim red wash from the overhead fluorescents and the redmasked gages and dials of the ship’s control consoles. The only sounds were the whining of the gyros, the low growl of the ventilation fans and murmurs of conversation from the crew in the space.

  On an elevated platform surrounded by stainless steel handrails, a tall man with a tightly trimmed beard frowned in concentration at a television screen glowing red. The dim light further revealed a stern-faced man in his early forties, dressed in black overalls with a silver oak leaf on each collar. Over his left pocket was a gold pin resembling a pilot’s wings, but each “wing” was a scaly fish facing the middle, with a submarine’s conning tower—its sail—forming the center: a submariner’s dolphins. Embroidery thread over his right pocket spelled PACINO.

  A phone buzzed. Without taking his eyes from the screen, he pulled the handset to his ear. “Captain.”

  “Captain, radio, sir. The outgoing patrol-report message to COMSUBLANT is ready to transmit.”

  “Very well, radio.” Pacino replaced the headset.

  A lieutenant standing at the firecontrol console looked up at him on the periscope stand. “Sir, the ship is ready to vertical surface. Ice overhead is one foot thick.”

  “Very well, vertical surface.”

  “Diving Officer, vertical surface the ship,” the lieutenant called to a chief petty officer sitting behind Pacino at airplane-style controls. At the lieutenant’s order another chief at a wraparound console on the control room’s port side pushed the hovering system’s joystick up to the BLOW position.

  The ship started to rise at a steady two feet per second.

  Every half second the digital-depth gage clicked off another foot. On the surface above a stiff arctic wind blew the falling snow almost horizontally. The howl of the wind was suddenly punctuated by the sound of the Stingray’s three thousand tons crashing through the thin ice. Several ice blocks fell from the top of the black conning tower to the horizontal surfaces below. A tall mast rose out of the sail—the periscope.

  A second—the radio antenna—soon followed. It began transmitting a flash priority message to COMSUBLANT, the admiral in command of the Atlantic submarine force. The message reported the position of the newest known Soviet attack submarine, NATO code name VICTOR III. Four kilometers away, aboard the Leningrad, Captain 1st Rank Alexi Novskoyy hunched over a firecontrol console showing the position of the American submarine to the south. Long sleepless hours had left dark circles under his eyes, barely showing through the mass of uncombed hair hanging over his face.

  He stood and addressed the men in the cramped space.

  “Attention in the control compartment. As you are all aware, four months ago an American submarine collided with the Kiev not far from here. The Kiev’s hull was ruptured and she sank with all hands. Our submarine force was disappointed by our official response, little more than a diplomatic protest to Washington. Now we are positioned to deliver the Northern Fleet’s unofficial response.” All conversation stopped as the four officers stared up at the solid, compact Novskoyy. Only the whining of the firecontrol computer and the deep bass of the ventilating ducts could be heard as he lit a cigarette and blew the smoke into the overhead. Novskoyy looked into his officers’ eyes. Each man nodded and turned to his control console. “Weapons Officer, lock the firecontrol solution to the target into the torpedoes in tubes one and two and prepare to fire. Deck Officer, open outer doors to tubes one and two. Ship Control Officer, slow to fifteen clicks.” Each officer began his assigned task almost before the order was given. He’d trained them well, Novskoyy thought. The hole in the ice created by the Stingray faded as the ship descended to 500 feet and accelerated to five knots. The phone beside Pacino buzzed again.

  “Captain.”

  “Captain, radio, sir. Outgoing patrol report message to COMSUBLANT transmitted to the satellite. The broadcast has been received, it’s printing out now. No flash traffic, sir, but we do have the familygrams aboard.”

  “Very well, radio. Did I get anything?”

  “Yes sir. Message from your son, sir. Should I read it out to you?”

  “No, just send over the printout.” Pacino replaced the headset, smiling faintly. Every month or so COMSUBLANT included radio messages from family members— usually less than a hundred words—in their submarine broadcast. For the last three months, it was the only communication from home anyone had had.

  “Officer of the Deck,” Pacino called. “Time to head home. Come around to the west and clear baffles before you steady on course. I don’t want the VICTOR sneaking up from behind and following us home.”

  “Come around to the west and clear baffles. Officer of the Deck aye, sir,” the lieutenant said. “Helm, right five degrees rudder, steady course two seven zero.” The lieutenant picked up a microphone and spoke into it. “Sonar, Conn, clearing baffles to the right.” The speaker crackled, sending the voice throughout the control room. “CONN, SONAR, AYE.” Pacino stared at the sonar console, wondering where the Soviet submarine was. A radioman came to the control room and handed him a metal clipboard with the incoming radio messages. The first page was Pacino’s own familygram, typed by the radioman on the inside of a blank Christmas card. Pacino grinned as he opened the card. “Nice touch.”

  dad— ANNAPOLIS IS A PAIN. I KNOW, I KNOW—I’M SUPPOSED TO HATE PLEBE YEAR. I’M HANGING ON FOR CHRISTMAS.

  AND FOR YOU AND STINGRAY TO GET BACK. SEE YOU THEN. GOOD HUNTING AND TAKE CARE, MIKE Pacino left the center of the control room and wandered back to the navigation alcove; he wished he could have been more of a father during his son’s first year at the Naval Academy, but Stingray had been at sea so much he’d only been able to make a few calls and send the occasional letter. Still, Pacino thought, nothing would stop Michael from being an officer. He’d hang in there, graduate and maybe fly a jet off an aircraft carrier—or even follow his old man’s footsteps and join the Silent Service. Michael would be okay. He had to believe that.

  “Tubes report ready. Captain,” the Weapons Officer reported to Novskoyy.

  “Firecontrol ready. Captain,” his First Officer called out.

  “Shoot tube one,” he ordered, and felt the deck lurch beneath him as the heavy 53-centimeter torpedo was ejected from the ship. “Shoot tube two.” After the second lurch,

  Novskoyy leaned over the firecontrol console to watch the target disappear… The force of the torpedo explosions threw Pacino into the ship-control console. His head spurted blood over the central panel. Before his eyes the depth gage turned faster and faster, its normal slow clicks accelerating to a mad buzz. The numbers spun by: 1300 feet, 1350, 1400. The ship’s crush-depth approached rapidly. Pacino heard the hull creak and pop around him. He heard a scream and water roaring into the room. The lights went out, and soon the deck was so steeply angled downward that the forward bulkhead, the wall, had become the floor. The depth gage continued to buzz off the depth. Pacino’s eyes became unfocused. For a second he thought he saw his son Michael standing in front of him, tall, tanned, handsome and proud in his fourth-class midshipman’s uniform.

  GOOD HUNTING AND TAKE CARE. Pacino took his last breath as the compartment around him imploded in slow motion, the wave of water and crushing steel coming at him like a huge thrusting piston. Blood and icy seawater filled what had been the Stingray’s control room. The headquarters building of Commander Submarine
s U.S. Atlantic Fleet, COMSUBLANT was a massive brick building in an old northwest section of Norfolk, Virginia. The building looked drab and squat, a ghetto gymnasium that seemed half swallowed by the earth. The complex was surrounded by two high chain-link fences with spiral wound razor wire on top. A guard house was perched at the only entrance, manned by two armed Marines. Inside the building a stainless steel-walled elevator descended to the Flag Plot room sixty feet below the basement level. Inside the elevator was Air Force Brigadier General Herman Xavier Tyler, who wore a blue uniform with an orange tag clipped to his pocket, black block letters proclaiming “VISITOR.” Tyler’s general stars were brand new from his recent promotion from Offut Air Force Base’s Strategic Air Command Headquarters. Tyler’s youthful looks tended to rob him of an air of authority, in spite of his steady frown and whitewall haircut, the hair clipped tight to his head. Tyler was enroute to a briefing on the submarine force, a necessary level of knowledge for his future staff duty when he would be shoulder-to-shoulder with Navy officers. The elevator stopped and the doors opened slowly, revealing a hall with framed photographs on the painted cinderblock walls. Two Marines with M-16’s guarded a large steel door at the end of the hall. The door slowly swung open and the Marines came to attention as a naval officer in khakis stepped out. General Tyler noticed that the steel door was solid and almost a foot thick, with an elaborate spring and counterbalance system to help open it. Several latches showed on the door, each latch over two inches thick. It was a blast door, the general thought. The Flag Plot room must be hardened against all but a direct hit from a nuclear weapon. The naval officer stepped closer, stretching out his hand. He had the same silver oak leaves that a lieutenant colonel in the Air Force would wear on his collars. For a moment the Air Force general tried to recall what the Navy called that rank. As the officer got closer the general saw pilot’s wings over his left pocket. The officer was slim, in his early forties, with most of his head bald. His only hair, once dark but now mostly gray, was tightly trimmed above his ears. The officer walked with a swagger, as if he was carrying a ceremonial officer’s sword at a parade. When he reached the general he flashed a wide smile of unnaturally white straight teeth and held out his hand.

  “General Tyler? I’m Commander Dick Donchez, COMSUBLANT Intelligence. Welcome to Flag Plot. The admiral sends his regrets but asked me to show you the operation here.” General Tyler took a moment to look at the gold pilot’s wings on Donchez’s chest, and noticed they weren’t wings at all, but two strange scaly fish facing an old fashioned Uboat-type conning tower. Submarine dolphins, he remembered. Odd to show dolphins as scaly. The two men started walking down the narrow hall toward the blast door when Donchez stopped short at a framed picture of a submarine running on the surface, the cylindrical cigar-shaped hull plowing through a white wake, a fin-shaped conning tower atop the cigar with horizontal fins sticking out of it.

  “Before we go in, sir,” Donchez said, “it might help to explain a few things. Have you ever worked with the submarine force before?”

  “I was on a staff with a few submarine guys at SAC Headquarters in Omaha, the strategic targeting team, but I really never knew them,” Tyler said, looking at the submarine picture.

  “Well, let’s start with this, then. Newspapers call these boats hunter/killer subs. We call them fast attack submarines. We have about fifty of them, all nuclear, all incredibly quiet and all very fast. None carries nuclear weapons.” The general looked surprised. Every modern submarine he had visualized had a bellyful of intercontinental ballistic missiles. Donchez took him to a photograph further down the hall. This picture also depicted a submarine on the surface, but this one had a long flat back behind the conning tower and looked bigger.

  “Sir, this is the kind of sub you’re thinking of. It carries I.C.B.M’s, SLBM’s we call them, stands for Submarine Launched Ballistic Missiles. These boats are officially called FBM’s, Fleet Ballistic Missile submarines. We just call them boomers. We only have about thirty of them. They’re not under our operational control—they work directly for the President when they’re at sea. They just hide, waiting for orders to launch nuke missiles at the enemy strictly on orders from Washington.” Donchez stepped back to the original photo. “But these ships here, the fast attack boats, are our business here at SUBLANT. No missiles, just torpedoes. Their main mission is antisubmarine warfare, since the best way to catch a submarine is with another submarine. But they’re useful for missions of covert surveillance too—subs are nearly invisible, and on sonar, and they can hide beneath thermal layers. Surface ships, airplanes and choppers are just no match for a submarine that wants to hide.

  “Let me put it this way,” Donchez said, “the ballistic missile subs, the boomers, are like one of your monster bombers. Same mission—drop lots of nukes and get in quietly without the enemy knowing you’re there.” Tyler nodded.

  “Fast attack boats, they’re like your fighter planes or interceptors. Attack subs are designed to sink surface ships, like in World War II. Now we have smart torpedoes that can pursue a surface vessel to the ends of the earth, and we’re working on some anti-ship missiles that we can launch at a surface target. If we’re up against any kind of surface ship we can either let the water in the bottom or let the air out the top.” Donchez was on a roll and liking it. He led the general past the Marines into the blast door and slammed it shut. It took some thirty seconds to lock the latches on the door, and Tyler found himself in a cavernous room with walls twenty feet tall, each wall lined with back-lit charts of the oceans, each chart full of marks and circles and lines.

  “This is Flag Plot, sir. Has nothing to do with flags, by the way. Admirals are called flag officers because they fly their flags on ships when they’re aboard. Like your staff car has flags on the fenders. This is the admiral’s plot room, so it becomes Flag Plot. The admiral in command here is in command of the Atlantic Fleet’s submarines but also owns the Mediterranean and the Arctic Ocean beneath the polar icecap.” Donchez saw a momentary flicker of interest from the general at the mention of the polar icecap.

  “See that chart there, sir? Arctic Ocean, north pole at the center… we’ve got a boat up there right now trailing a new Russian attack sub under the ice.” Donchez pointed to the chart, which showed a blue X next to a red X, both inside a wobbly circle labelled as the permanent icepack.

  “We spend a lot of time trailing their boats. We can get away with that because we’re quieter than they are; it’s harder for them to hear us. And every sub has a blind spot astern of it. We call it the baffles. The screw and engines block out the ocean noises to the rear of the ship, and most sonar gear is located in the nosecone of the sub. So if you’re good, you can sneak up on another sub and just follow him in the cone of silence behind the screw. That boat there,” Donchez said, pointing to the blue X near the north pole, “is driven by my old Annapolis roommate. He’s in trail of a new Russian boat called the VICTOR III. Whenever they launch a new one we try to trail them on their sea trials and see how the new boat does, spy on their exercise torpedo shots, observe their tactics. Since an attack submarine is invisible it can do things no one will ever know about. Anyway, that’s the idea.” Enjoying his audience, Donchez went on, “The Atlantic plot here shows a number of blue X’s alone. Those are boats on independent operations. Those red X’s with the blue X’s off the coast are Russian boats being trailed by our attack units. To date no Russian has ever gotten us in trail. How do we know? We check. We’ll have one of our attack boats try to sneak up on another of our boats to see if there’s a Russian hiding there in the baffles. We call it delousing.” The general stopped Donchez. “What about that big expensive sonar network you people put on the ocean floor for detecting enemy submarines? Doesn’t that do all this without having all these big-money attack-boats out there?”

  “You’re thinking of SOSUS, the underwater sound surveillance system. It is expensive and it’s good. But not good enough or accurate enough for us to kill a sub even with a
huge nuke weapon. Look here.” Donchez returned to the Arctic Ocean polar projection chart. “See the green line?” A green line went from a dot north of Norway’s coast to a point near the red and blue X’s near the north pole.

  “That is the detect on the VICTOR III we were just talking about. He could be anywhere in an area one hundred miles square. Plus he’s under ice, and you’d never get him. The only thing that can nail that guy is another submarine, like the Stingray, the one who’s trailing him now. The SOSUS detection system is picking up the sounds of the Russian VICTOR III but not our own sub—the Stingray is just too quiet for us to pick up.”

  A lieutenant rushed up to Donchez with a notepad.

  “Commander Donchez… there’s trouble. SOSUS detected two explosions on the bearing line to the two submarines at the north pole. They reported faint sounds of a hull breaking up and several minutes of bubbles.” Donchez turned to the general, his smile gone.

  “General Tyler, I need to ask you to depart Flag Plot. Now. We’ve got a situation here.”

  The general was taken off by a waiting petty officer and as he was being pulled to the blast door he heard Donchez talking to the lieutenant.

  “Does SOSUS still have a detect on any of the subs up there? He’s still got the Russian unit? Goddamn… get the admiral on NESTOR secure voice and tell him I’m sending a chopper for him, then get back on NESTOR and notify CINCLANTFLEET, NMCC, the White House—” The blast door slammed. As Brigadier General Tyler was escorted down the hall, he lingered for a moment at the picture of the attack submarine the commander had been so proud of. So much for the assumed overwhelming superiority of American machines over Soviet ones, he thought.

  Six days later, 19 december 1973 pier? norfolk naval base, norfolk, virginia

  A light rain had started about four hours after Stingray’s scheduled dock time. The soaked banners read “WELCOME HOME STINGRAY’:’ The brass band had long since gone. Families huddled in groups, their conversations hushed, apprehensive.