Phoenix Sub Zero

Pacino read the messages again. He could hardly believe it. Destiny, if it turned north, would be in the marginal ice zone by the afternoon. And it would definitely turn north, since it had come so far north already. If Donchez was right about the Hiroshima-missile theory, the Destiny had been in range of the northeastern cities for some time, at least a day.

Which seemed to go against the whole idea. If the Destiny was coming to throw up these Hiroshima missiles, why hadn’t it already fired them?

And what the hell was the Phoenix doing? Here’s a ship that gets almost blown away, shoots every damned torpedo in the inventory, and then follows the Destiny into the Atlantic.

Whoever her skipper was, he was either very brave or very stupid, and probably some combination of the two.

Pacino didn’t stop to think what he would have done in the same situation, knowing that he probably would have trailed the Destiny, but scoffing at the idea that he’d be dumb enough not to save a torpedo for himself.

It didn’t answer one question that nagged at him — if the Destiny had been so damned elusive in the Med, what had changed to allow a damaged 688 to track her clear across the North Atlantic? Pacino started to wonder if the UIF wanted them to track the Destiny, that maybe it was a decoy, and the cruise missiles were somewhere else, but the headache that came from that line of thought pounded between his temples until he decided to save it for later.

“O.O.D, do you have a course from the navigator?” The chart was not encouraging. The point bravo hold position was designed to stage Seawolf for an interception in mid-Atlantic, not the Labrador Sea. They’d have to go northeast to get around the point of Newfoundland, then turn to the northwest to go up the Davis Strait. That was over 1,300 nautical miles, almost thirty hours at flank speed. They wouldn’t catch up to the projected Destiny position until the next day in the morning watch. By then, anything could happen.

It might already be too late, Pacino thought.

“Yes, Captain,” Scott Court said from the conn.

“Proceed at flank until we’re within 100 miles of the Phoenix position. But get ready to come to PD in the next half-hour. There’s something I want to say.”

“Aye, aye, sir. Helm, right five degrees rudder, steady course zero five zero, all ahead flank. Dive, make your depth five five zero feet.”

Pacino picked up the microphone, deciding to do a quick brief of the crew before he tagged out the loudspeaker system.

“Attention all hands, this is the captain. We’ve just gotten a message from COMSUBLANT that our target, the Destiny, is identified and located north in the Labrador Sea. We are now departing the point bravo hold position and driving up at flank to intercept. Sometime in the next two days we will engage the Destiny and try to sink him. I urge all hands to get what rest they can in their next off-watch period, because once we get into the Labrador Sea I will right the ship for ultraquiet and man battle stations.” Pacino paused, wondering if he should say something more personal, feeling he’d fallen short of the famous World War II submarine skippers’ speeches to their crews, inspiring words of wisdom for the men to take into battle with them, words to tell grandchildren decades later, but he wasn’t a poet. “That is all. Carry on.” He put the microphone back into its cradle, thinking about what the crew thought, how they would react.

“Off’sa’deck, I’ll be in my stateroom drafting a message to go out in the next PD.”

“Aye, sir.”

Pacino moved out of control to the inner sanctum of his stateroom, took a blank message form out of his drawer and stared at it for some time, the chart of the Labrador Sea now engraved in his mind.

CNFS HEGIRA

Comdr. Ibn Quzwini felt closer to death than at any time in his forty years. It was obvious that the work in the ballast tank would have suited itself better to the younger officers, but he was now third in command, the mechanical officer, the man who knew the ship’s systems better than anyone aboard. The ballast-tank work could not proceed without him. Still, it might have to if he succumbed to the cold and the exhaustion.

The tank was a frightening place to be, even in the dry dock. Quzwini had had to enter it in the Japanese construction yard just before the dry dock was flooded. He had been slated to be the last man in the tank to ensure that no shipyard worker had left tools in the tank that could cause rattles when submerged, that all the pipe supports were installed correctly, that nothing was forgotten. In those days just before the war, his only cares were that the ship be received from the Japanese in the best possible condition.