Polaris (26 page)

*   *   *

The evening after Pete heard the sound of the
Scorpion
being crushed by sea pressure, he waited on the conn of the simulator for his normal four-hour shift. He reviewed procedures as he waited; there was some problem with the computers and they had to wait while the entire software package was reloaded by the simulator's operating crew. Commander Ase leaned on the rail and watched him as he paged through the procedure for flooding. First immediate action: ahead full. Maximizing speed maximized the flow of water across the planes, the force that would pull them to the surface.

“What did they teach you today in the classroom?” said Ase, emphasizing the world “classroom” with disdain.

“More submarine disasters,” said Pete. “Lessons learned from the
Thresher
and the
Scorpion
.”

“Lessons learned?” He laughed theatrically at that, the sound echoing in the cavernous space that held the simulator. “What did they tell you to learn from the
Thresher
?”

“Don't screw around at test depth,” said Pete.

Ase nodded appreciatively, but it was hard to tell if he really approved, his scarred face frozen in its permanent sneer. “That's not bad,” he said. “Good advice, actually. But I'll tell you the real lesson.”

“Please do.”

“It was an unlucky boat! They had a scram pierside in Puerto Rico in '61. Then the diesel wouldn't work, then the battery crapped out. Got so hot inside they had to evacuate the crew. The
Cavalla
had to pull alongside so they could draw electric power from her. If that had happened at sea, they would have sunk. In 1962, a tug ran into her in port; she had to go to the yards in Groton to get that fixed. You want a lesson from the
Thresher,
there's your lesson: stay off unlucky boats.”

“I'll do my best,” said Pete. “What about the
Scorpion
? What's the lesson there?”

“The lesson of the
Scorpion
?” Ase pointed a long finger at Pete. Pete noticed for the first time that even the tip of his finger was scarred, the skin waxy and wrinkled, the nail deformed. “Here's the lesson of the
Scorpion
. Don't ever trust the Russians,” he said. “No matter what anybody says.”

The simulator reset with a thud, startling Pete.

“OK,” said Commander Ase, rapping his academy ring against the metal guardrail on the platform. “Let's get to work.”

*   *   *

Pete drove the simulated ship down to the depth of the range, 632 feet.

“All stop,” he ordered. The engine order telegraph dinged its acknowledgment as the ship slowed, creeping right into the range.

Pete zoomed in on his console, checked the motion of the ship. Current was a negligible .2 knots. That was, Pete knew, the exact value of the historic average current in that area, although you would never know it by the consistently apocalyptic conditions they usually thrust upon him in the trainer. The ship drifted into the degaussing range as Pete waited on the balls of his feet for the next, creative disaster to befall them.

A yellow light came on the diving officer's panel; the lights dimmed slightly.

“Degaussing is active,” said Pete. He looked out into the darkness, where somewhere Ase and his crew of tormentors were preparing to spring something on him.

The ship slowed slightly near the exit of the range. “Make turns for three knots,” Pete ordered, needing the slight additional thrust to maintain ship control and complete their passage through the range.

The yellow light went off. “Ship is clear of the range,” Pete announced.

He waited, but still no disaster. He walked to the chart. It wasn't the first time they had allowed him to get this far, but it was rare, so it took him just a second to recall the next step.

“Ahead two-thirds!” he said. “Right fifteen degrees rudder.”

The ship sped up and turned, driving Pete to the position where they'd determined they might squeeze through the shoals at periscope depth, the seven o'clock position, if due north on the island's clock was high noon. “Make your depth one hundred feet.”

At the shallow depth, Pete slowed and executed a slow right turn to clear his baffles: peeking behind him to make sure no enemy boat had crept up in their sonic blind spot. Sonar reported no contacts.

He stepped to the conn. “Dive, make your depth eight-zero feet,” he ordered, at the same time turning the orange ring of the port periscope. The cylinder rose up smoothly, and Pete flipped out the handgrips as it came up, quickly putting his eye to the soft rubber eyepiece.

He was staring in the ocean now, looking up as far as the scope would let him, turning slowly, watching as they ascended. Even a fishing boat dragging nets could screw things up, although he doubted in real life a fishing boat would be operating here, in the land of the drones. But the simulator crew had never let realism stop them before in their endless pursuit of creative disasters that could stop Pete on his quest.

The view through the scope was a perfect simulation, taking into account weather and time of day. It was calm and bright. Pete watched the water get lighter as they came shallow, expecting the whole time to hear that a fire had erupted in the engine room, or a scram had shut down their power plant, or that a torpedo had appeared out of nowhere and was screaming toward them.

But nothing happened.

The scope broke through, and Pete executed three slow turns, verifying (once again to his surprise) that they were alone. “No close contacts!” he said. And he trained the scope on Eris Island.

It was right where it was supposed to be. Drones flew above it, some lazily making their way toward him. Pete knew that they were randomly searching, that they hadn't seen his scope at this distance. And the degaussing had made the ship invisible to their magnetic sensors at periscope depth. They moved slowly toward the small break in the shoals. Pete's heart raced; they'd never allowed him to make it this far.

Right before the shoals, one of the drones drifted right on top of them. Pete knew immediately they'd been seen. It soared into the sky. At this proximity to the island, it attracted a legion of followers.

“Right full rudder!” he ordered. He was too close to the island to go deep, however. The ocean bed was right beneath him. An attack formation of five drones was heading directly toward them. Pete braced himself for the impact of their bombs.

The simulator stopped moving with a pneumatic gasp. The lights came on around them. Pete heard Ase approaching first, and then saw him at the edge of the platform, throwing over the small bridge onto the simulator.

“I thought the degaussing would make me invisible?”

Ase shrugged. “I guess it didn't take.”

“Didn't take?” said Pete, his frustration rising. “What am I supposed to do? Swim out there and fix it?”

“Calm down,” said Ase. “You did fine. I would just recommend verifying the effectiveness of the degaussing before you make your approach to the island. That range hasn't been used in five years. If it doesn't work, you can always make another pass.”

“Verify it?”

“Give the drones a peek before and after you degauss. Do it while you can still go deep and evade if necessary, see how they react. That's all, Hamlin.”

“OK,” said Pete. Ase was being unusually constructive in his criticism. It was every bit as unnerving as his quiet approach to the degaussing range. Pete found himself bracing for the next catastrophe.

*   *   *

They did three more runs, these a more traditional series of flooding, fire, and every variety of ship control casualty. Pete had learned that the outcome of the training wasn't necessarily to bring the ship through the degaussing range every time. Indeed, he was convinced that given the complexity of some of the casualties being thrown at him, recovery was often impossible. Rather, they were looking to see if he had completely absorbed the procedures and the doctrine that they were throwing at him all day, so that even in a catastrophic situation, he was still making logical choices, making the best of whatever bad options he had.

*   *   *

“You're getting there,” said Ase, after a particularly challenging run through the range in the simulator. He was sitting on the dive chair with a clipboard, going through his critique.

“High praise,” said Pete. He'd been in Charleston for four weeks. The last week they'd abandoned the classroom entirely, and he'd spent full days in the simulator, eight hours with a short break for lunch. At night, it was back to his room to study procedures and try to relax enough to fall asleep.

“Well, don't let it go to your head,” said the commander, smiling with the half of his face that still worked. The dim lights in the simulator exaggerated the ripples of his scars. He was truly a frightening man.

“Want to do that one again?” asked Pete. “Maybe throw in a couple of helicopters?”

Ase shook his head. “Nope,” he said. “That's it. You can practice more when you get to the boat.”

Pete was startled. He'd stopped asking when he was actually going to report to
Polaris.
“When is that?”

“You leave tomorrow for the coast.”

Pete nodded, trying not to look nervous in front of Ase. “Tomorrow.”

“Yeah. Pack your shit. The driver will be there at 0600.”

“Will do.”

“Here,” said Ase. He pulled a tablet computer that had been hidden beneath his clipboard. “That contains your orders, and the patrol order for the
Polaris
that takes effect when you get onboard. You're the only one that can open that thing, but you'll have to show Captain McCallister when you report.”

“You know him?”

“He's a good man,” said Ase. “Smart.”

“Is he lucky?” asked Pete.

“Up to this point,” said Ase, not quite smiling.

The silence grew as Ase continued to stare at him. The support crew had left, and all the lights on the surrounding platform were off, making it invisible. The simulated control room was now a small cube of dim light suspended in darkness, supported by unseen forces. Soon, Pete realized with a chill, he'd be sitting in a real submarine, suspended in an endless ocean.

“I was out there,” said Ase after a long pause.

“Out there?”

“Where you're going. Near Eris Island. We'd caught a whiff of a Typhon submarine on a SOSUS array; they sent my boat out there to check it out. I was skipper onboard the
Regulus
. Heard of it?”

Pete nodded. “Were you there…?”

Ase did his scary half smile again. “Yeah, I was there during the fire. We went out there to sniff around for this enemy boat, and soon enough we found her. She was noisy as hell, the way those Typhon boats all are—we heard her from five miles away. They don't build them for stealth. A fifty-hertz tonal in a sound channel on the towed array … remember what all that means?”

Pete nodded. The enemy ship's electrical system operated on 50 Hz, unlike the 60 Hz of Alliance ships. A 50 Hz tonal, or any of its harmonics, was one of the surest sonar signatures of an enemy boat. A sound channel was caused by different temperature layers in the ocean, causing sound to travel many times farther than it normally would, like light being reflected by parallel mirrors.

“We worked hard to get close, creeped up on her baffles,” continued Ase. “She went quiet, drifted in and out, but we had a solution we were pretty confident in. By the time I was ready to shoot, we'd been at battle stations for twelve hours.

“We shot two torpedoes with a twenty-degree spread. Instead of running away, she turned right toward us. Launched a couple of countermeasures and came right at us. Her countermeasures worked, our torpedoes peeled off. And then she shot one of her torpedoes right down our throats.”

This was news to Pete. He'd only heard about a fire on the
Regulus,
a heroic damage-control effort. No one had ever told him that the boat had been hurt in battle.

“Her torpedo went right by us, exploded about a hundred yards past. We were so close to each other, it was like a knife fight in a telephone booth. The torpedo missed us, but the shock wave blew out one of our main seawater valves—the engineer called away flooding in the engine room. I fired two more torpedoes back at her and came shallow, trying to slow the flooding.”

“You surfaced?”

Ase shook his head. “Hell no. There were drones everywhere. We stayed at periscope depth and hoped they wouldn't see us. She did the same.

“Anyway, my boys did good work, flood control worked, we slowed the flooding soon enough, but we'd taken a tremendous amount of water onboard—we had to stay shallow while we pumped it off. And it seemed like my torpedoes had done the job; nobody was shooting back at us. We thought we were lucky with the drones, too; none had spotted us at that point with just our periscope raised, although we could see them darting around in the distance. I thought we might live to fight another day. Then the OOD called me to take a look.” He took a lengthy pause, as if he were once again looking out a periscope.

“It was a life raft,” he said. “Drifting right toward us. The goddamn thing just appeared in the ocean. One of those big, orange, covered ones, a completely enclosed inflatable. At first I thought maybe we'd gotten lucky and sunk the bastard, even though we hadn't heard an explosion, and they abandoned ship. We were just starting to debate what we should do about it, whether we should take them prisoner or leave them adrift, when it got close enough for me to see it was empty. I stared for a minute longer than I should have, trying to figure out what it meant. Then the drones saw it.”

“Shit.”

“The Typhon boat had positioned themselves with the current and launched the raft so it would drift right toward us.”