Phoenix Sub Zero

Tawkidi came to attention. “Yes, sir. Good evening. Commodore.”

Chapter 30 Saturday, 4 January

LABRADOR SEA, WEST OF GODTHAAB, GREENLAND

USS SEAWOLF

The left clock of the side-by-side chronometers read 0405, the one set for zulu time, GMT. The right clock read five minutes after midnight, the local time at the ship’s present position. Friday had turned to Saturday. In another four hours Pacino expected to be somewhere in sensor range of the Destiny submarine, assuming the Phoenix had gotten its position right and the UIF sub continued north at its present speed.

Pacino knew he should be asleep, getting his rest before he stationed battle watches throughout the ship, but sleep had eluded him.

He shook his head and got back in his rack to try again.

The officer of the deck would be buzzing him in three hours to man battle stations …

CNFS HEGIRA

Comdr. Ibn Quzwini crawled the last two meters up to the hatch to the command module, the cold of the ballast tank making his hands fail to grasp the handholds. A man in the hatchway above pulled him up and into the warmth of the pressure hull. Quzwini had been the last man in the tank.

He didn’t look back. He crawled away from the hatch while Lieutenant Ishak and Sublieutenant Rhazes began the work of positioning the heavy steel plate over the hatchway and tack-welding it in place, preparing it for the multiple root passes that would reweld it into the pressure hull. In the cold and exhaustion, time seemed to slip by. The hatch moved into place with the jerkiness of a silent movie, the tack welding done in what seemed a few minutes, the circular passes of the root welding zipping around the circumference of what had been a gaping hole. For the next four hours Quzwini slept where he had collapsed near a stall of the head at the forward end of the command-module middle level.

One deck above, in the control room. Commodore Sharef made his first appearance since the torpedo explosion that had incapacitated him. Two of the rolling seats at the weapon-control consoles were occupied by Sihoud and Ahmed. Sharef leaned on his makeshift cane, made from the piece of pipe, and looked hard with his good eye at the two who presumed to set up camp in his control room.

“The missile is finished, Commodore,” Ahmed said. “I suggest you bring the ship around to the south and clear some of these drifting icebergs.”

“Very well. Deck officer, turn the ship to the south. How long till we are ready to launch?”

“We are still checking the Scorpion-warhead electronic modules. So far all is in order. The Hiroshima missile airframe, engine and guidance system has already checked out satisfactorily. The Scorpion checks should be done in another thirty minutes.”

Sharef leaned over the remains of the plot table, but its glass was caved in, the tube shattered, some of its glass now embedded in his eye. The navigation plot was now displayed on one of the smaller screens of the sensor-control consoles, the sea of the Davis Strait and the Labrador Basin a wide corridor of ocean, its left bank extending from the southeast point of Canada to its furthest northward tip near the pole, the right bank formed by the nearly northward running west coast of Greenland. A touch of a function key, and a mist appeared to represent the ice cover, the mist light at the southern mouth, denser halfway up, and solid ice north of the arctic circle. The flashing indicator of their present position showed them in a thick ice cover, perhaps a coverage of eighty percent. That seemed borne out by the slight creaking noises heard outside the hull, so faint that they were barely discernible. The creaking and moaning sounds were ice floes colliding and rubbing against each other, even the complete ice cover composed of separate cells of ice that constantly shouldered each other aside. There was something foreign to this sea, this cold, this ice that made Sharef long for open water, for the warmth of the Mediterranean. He wondered if he would ever see Kassab again, but pushed the thought aside while leaning over Ahmed’s console to see how the Scorpion-warhead checks were progressing.

If one of the checks failed it would mean going back into the ballast tank and opening the tube again to get to the warhead.

Sharef doubted the tube could stand up to the stress of a missile launch after two tube cuts. Perhaps even the initial cut into the tube had weakened it beyond the ability to sustain the missile launch. And a tube reentry would mean more than just tube problems, it would mean added time, time for Coalition naval forces to find them. Sharef tried to feel the urgency of the matter but with his conflicted feelings couldn’t muster it. If Coalition navy ships and aircraft came, he would fight for the ship to the best of his ability. That, after all, was his true mission.

USS SEAWOLF