“Aye, Captain. Maneuvering, Conn, from the Captain, we are going to secure snorkeling.” Meritson turned the periscope so he could shout at the chief of the watch, up at the ballastcontrol panel in the forward port side of the room. “Chief of the Watch, secure snorkeling!”
“Secure snorkeling, aye, sir.” The COW picked up a microphone to the circuit-one public address system, his voice booming throughout the ship.
“SECURE SNORKELING! RECIRCULATE.”
Walt Hornick’s voice replied on his speaker: “secure SNORKELING, RECIRCULATE, CONN, MANUEVERING AYE.”
Phillips waited impatiently, walking to the aft rail of the conn and peering down on the navigation display, a horizontal widescreen display that projected the chart where they were on a glass surface. The depth beneath them would stay shallow for some time. Usually a sub departing from Groton would be steaming at twenty knots on the surface for twelve hours before reaching the continental shelf, where the water depth fell to thousands of feet beneath the keel. Phillips would be steaming at twenty knots with less water under his keel than a full hull diameter. But that was nothing compared to what would happen when they got under ice.
Hornick’s voice squawked on the speaker again, this time his voice sounding almost cocky.
“CONN, MANEUVERING, MAIN ENGINES ARE WARM, READY TO SHIFT PROPULSION TO THE MAIN ENGINES.”
Meritson did not wait for further orders — Phillips had already made his orders for this moment.
“Helm, all stop,” Meritson called. “Maneuvering, Conn, shift propulsion to the main engines.”
The orders were acknowledged and for a moment a lull came in the room.
“CONN, MANEUVERING, PROPULSION SHIFTED TO THE MAIN ENGINES, READY TO ANSWER ALL BELLS, ANSWERING ALL STOP.”
“Conn, aye. Helm, all ahead standard.”
“Ahead standard, Helm aye,” the kid at the diving station’s helmsman’s wheel called. “Maneuvering answers all ahead standard, sir.”
“Lowering number two scope,” Meritson said, retracting the instrument. “Mark sounding!”
“Nine zero fathoms, sir.”
“Dive, make your depth one five zero feet.”
Even with several hundred feet beneath the keel, the bottom was uneven, rising up to ten fathoms in places, many of the humps uncharted. Phillips continued looking at the chart, then glanced at his watch. Within a few hours they would be steaming in the open deep Atlantic.
Then all he had to worry about was the polar icecap and the Japanese.
Pacino left the bridge and headed for ASW Operations.
Comdr. Paully White looked up from the intelligence plot on a large area Writepad, startled to see Pacino.
“Boss,” White said in his Kensington and Allegheny accent. “What brings you here? I thought you were up with Admiral Donuts up there.”
Paully White was in his late forties, his hair dark and thick, his frame trim. He was something of a comic, a frustrated stand-up comedian, in a place that had no humor, at least none directed toward him. Paully White got very little respect aboard the Ronald Reagan. Neither the surface sailors nor the pilots had good words for the submarine officer. They were happy that the battle group had two escort 688class submarines there, and they knew that someone had to coordinate them, but the surface-group officers, when they saw Paully, had to face the fact that there were enemy submarines out there, that the battle group was vulnerable to them, and that only Paully’s submarines could keep them clean, in spite of the billions spent on surface ship antisubmarine warfare — the destroyers and frigates with their multiple sonars, their ASW standoff weapons, their Mark 51 torpedoes, the S-2 twin-jet Vikings that patrolled the sea for submarines with their blue-laser detectors, magnetic anomaly detectors, sonar buoy detectors and Mark 52 torpedoes, the LAMPS III Sea-hawk helicopters with their dipping sonars and their Mark 52 Mod Alpha torpedoes — all of it was an attempt to combat enemy submarines from above, and it was an attempt that fell short. Because in the end the only thing that could counter a quiet and stealthy hostile submarine was a quiet and stealthy friendly submarine. So many men in the surface battle group had devoted their lives and their careers to trying to prove otherwise and had failed, that when Paully White walked their passageways with his gold dolphin pins gleaming over his left breast pocket he was silenced, ignored. At the wardroom table he could tell a joke, a good one, and he would hear nothing but the clink of silverware on china. Paully, in fact, was the most unpopular man aboard, and desperately looked forward to going back to sea on board a fast attack submarine. “Hi, Paully,” Pacino said heavily. “Admiral Donner is kicking off the blockade. It looks like we’re carrying the ball on the first play.” Pacino described the basics of the operation and directed White to get some messages out to the Cheyenne and the Pasadena.
