“Rebman, Doug Rebman,” Pacino whispered back, “the Dynacorp vice-president of attack-sub shipbuilding. He’s hard to take but he knows his stuff.”
“And the captain?”
“Emmitt Stephens, superintendent of shipbuilding. As SUPESHIPS he has the unpleasant duty of hanging around with Rebman, but he got my Seawolfto sea from a drydock in four days when it would take a normal mortal four weeks. He’s the best.” Rebman led them around the corner of the facility to an elevated platform overlooking a jetty four stories below. Phillips stopped dead in his tracks. Pacino looked over at him and smiled. “Never seen the Seawolf class before, Phillips?” Beyond the railing of the platform a submarine lay next to a narrow jetty, the hull bounded closely on either side by the protruding concrete structures. The ship was tremendously large, looking absurdly wide and fat. The hull was a flat black, the surface of it covered with foam tiles for quieting against active sonar pings.
The conning tower, the sail, jutted straight up over the cylindrical hull, a triangular fillet joining the front of the sail to the ship below. “She’s huge,” Phillips gasped. “I mean, she’s at least ten feet wider in diameter than my Greeneville.”
“Meet the USS Piranha;’ Pacino said. “SSN23, third — and last — in the Seawolf class. Named after the original Piranha that Dick Donchez commanded in the 1970s. She’s forty-two feet in diameter. She displaces over nine thousand tons, makes way on twin turbines cranking out fifty-two thousand shaft horsepower.
The nuclear reactor is natural circulation cooled up to 50 percent power, that’s thirty-two knots without reactor circulation pumps. Bruce, this submarine is quieter going full Out than your old Greeneville is at idle.” Pacino continued on, and before Phillips realized it, a half-hour had gone by, and he realized that something was different about the submarine. Where a few minutes before the hull had been black and unmarked, there was now a distinct white waterline mark circling the hull. He looked again, and noticed that the white line was rising further fronmhe water. “What’s going on?”
“Dr. Rebman, please explain,” Pacino said. “We’re lifting the hull out of the water,” Rebman said.
“For Admiral Pacino’s ship alteration. We call it the Pacino ship-alt,
Admiral.”
“Lifting the hull out?”
“The ship is resting on blocks much like those on the floor of a drydock. This is a special jetty, Commander. The blocks touching the underside of the ship’s hull are connected to a large metal platform, and beneath that we have steel columns about one meter in diameter. The columns are threaded and connected to motors below. There are twenty of them, and when we turn the motors, the columns turn and lift the platform out of the water, an inch at a time. Once the platform is out of the water the whole assembly can be moved into the assembly building. It allows us to move a submarine from its wa terbome condition to inside the manufacturing bay in about four hours. That same operation to get a sub into drydock would take two to three days.” Phillips looked down at the jetty and saw that the sub had emerged from the water by another foot while they were talking. “Let’s go into the conference room, gentlemen,” Reb-man said.
“We’ll have a window view there. You can still see the ship coming out of the slip and into the building.” The four men walked inside to a hallway and then into a windowed room, one set of plate glass looking out over the jetty, where the Piranha was still quietly coming vertically out of the water, the other looking into the cavernous expanse of the manufacturing building. Phillips chose a seat where he could swivel his chair and see first one view, then the other. Rebman doused the lights and started a disk presentation on the projection-screen wall.
