“Commander Phillips, this presentation is for you as commanding officer of the Piranha. We put together this briefing about the Vortex missile, which I’m sure you’re not aware of, when we moth-balled the program. Now the program is back.” Phillips looked to Pacino, who had a single finger over his lips, then watched the film on the Vortex program, observing computer views of the innards of the missile. He saw the missile test in the Bahamas when the missile was fired from one sub to see if it could hit the other. The screen view showed the explosion of the target boat as seen from the surface. The camera obviously had shaken as the shock wave hit, the enormous mushroom cloud rising from the sea as if a great beast had climbed out of the ocean, then the spray was raining back down again as the cloud dispersed. The target was obliterated, but then the film showed the slow-motion cameras depicting the inside of the firing ship, the film capturing the firing tube as it blew open, the flames pouring violently out of the tube, the screen going black as the recording camera was vaporized by the hot gas exhaust. A graphic came up, showing a cartoon of the missile in the tube and how the tube exploded, then widened to show how the rocket exhaust melted through the hull while the tremendous gas volume blew the hull open just as the missile had blown open the tube. In the cartoon the firing sub broke in half and drifted to the ocean bottom. After a few more words describing the final moneys spent on the missile program, the disk went blank.
“That was two years ago,” Dr. Rebman said. “We thought the missile program could not go on. We put ten production missiles in a warehouse, archived the records and let the program die. Then Admiral Pacino called me. His idea to revive the Vortex missile is key to the alterations we will be doing to the Piranha. And that, Commander Phillips, is where you come in.”
“What the hell are you doing to my ship?” Phillips heard himself ask. “It’s not quite your ship yet, Bruce,” Pacino said, “but I’m glad you already feel possessive about her.” Pacino then went to the white wall, pointed his finger and traced a shape on it. As he did, the electronic white board turned his finger motion into a drawing, his finger acting as the chalk. The resulting shape was a submarine hull. ‘ “Bruce, we know the Vortex missile needs to be launched from a tube to be stable. We also know it blows up missile tubes. What we want to do,” Pacino said as he drew a small cylinder on the outside of the sketch of the sub hull, “is put the launching tubes on the outside of the sub.
They will have blow-off caps at the aft end. When the missile launches, the outside tube won’t blow up because the rupture cap at the back blows off and the missile leaves through the tube. The tube opens up at both ends and still acts to guide the missile in its first few milliseconds of travel. The missile leaves the external tube and moves on to the target. The sub then discards the tube and it falls to the bottom of the sea.”
“Let me get this straight,” Phillips said. “You’re going to put these tube launchers on the outside of my hull?”
“Right.”
“That’s going to be noisy. It’ll ruin the shape of the ship. All that work making the Seawolf class hydrodynamic and whisper quiet is down the drain. This tub will whistle and rattle and moan at cruising speed. An enemy boat will hear us coming five nautical miles away.”
“Bruce, remember your failure in the simulator the other day? It was inevitable, though I didn’t tell you so at the time. Your torpedoes had to miss. The only thing that would have helped was a Vortex missile. If you’d had one, the Destiny you attacked would have been dead.”
“So would I when the Vortex blew up in the tube.”
“Exactly, which is why they’ll be on the outside of your hull, not the inside. The open-ended launching tubes with blow off caps will keep the hull from rupturing. The problems with the Vortex are, we believe, fixed.” “Admiral, you mentioned them in the plural. You said they’d be on the outside of my hull. So do I get more than one?”
“I’m having ten of them put on the exterior of your hull. If we ever go up against Scenario Orange, you’ll have ten silver bullets.” Phillips looked into Pacino’s eyes, then exhaled and looked out the window at Piranha, now completely out of the water, the hull still drying in the cold breeze, the monster being moved slowly through the open door of the manufacturing facility. “Admiral?”
“Yes?”
“You figure ten are enough?”
The massive hull of the Piranha lurked high above and behind the four men as they walked parallel to the hull to the east end of the bay. Phillips looked up at the black-painted cylinder dwarfing them. It was hard to believe that, with the ship this big on the outside, it would feel small on the inside.
