By Dawn's Early Light (9 page)

0400 LOCAL
WEST OF OAHU

“Prepare to dive the boat,” Dillon said into the growler phone. He did a quick three-sixty, then glanced up at the billion stars overhead. No fanfare this time. Only the lights of a couple of fishing boats far away to the south, and the gleam low on the horizon behind them from Honolulu.

He'd wanted to call Jill. Wanted it with everything in his heart. He was the commanding officer; it would have been easy. No one would have known he'd broken orders. Only he.

He made another sweep, a shutter closing off that part of his mind, focusing him on the job at hand.

“Clear the bridge,” he ordered.

“Aye, aye, skipper,” Alvarez said. He disappeared into the boat, followed by the lookout, with Dillon right behind them, dogging the hatch.

His crew was in place when he reached the control room. “My hatch is secure,” he said, stowing his cap and binoculars. Exact routines were important aboard a warship, especially a submarine. Their lives depended on doing the same task in exactly the same manner every time.

“Skipper, I have an all-green board,” Alvarez announced. “Pressures in the tanks are normal. We are ready in all respects for dive.”

“Very well,” Dillon said. “Dive the boat. Make your depth sixty feet.”

“Aye, aye, dive the boat, make my depth six-zero feet,” Alvarez repeated the order.

Bateman sounded the warning klaxon, and as Alvarez went through the steps to dive the boat to periscope depth, Dillon pulled down the growler phone.

“Sonar, conn.”

“Sonar, aye.”

“How's it look, Ski?”

“No subsea targets, Captain,” Chief Sonarman Leonard “Ski” Zimenski, came back. “I have numerous surface vessels to the southeast and northwest. Fishing boats, and one large vessel, inbound to Pearl from the southeast. A container ship.”

“Very well, keep a sharp lookout. We could be having company at any time. We've been advised that there's at least one Akula about eight hundred miles west, possibly right on our track.”

“Aye, skipper. If he's still around, we'll bag him.”

Dillon hung up the phone.

He glanced at the masthead indicators. “Mastheads are wet,” he told his diving officer.

“The time is fourteen-twelve Zulu, skipper, shall I message Pearl?” Bateman, his hand on a growler phone, asked.

“Negative,” Dillon said. “No message to Pearl.”

“Ease your angle on the planes,” Alvarez told the planesman, and their rate of descent slowed as the chief of boat balanced the trim tanks. They stopped at sixty feet.

“Check all compartments and all machinery in all respects,” Dillon said.

“Aye, Captain,” Alvarez responded, and he passed the order to all sections from the forward torpedo compartments to the aft engine room.

Dillon raised the search periscope and made a quick three-sixty sweep, and then a second, much slower sweep. There was a jumble of lights to the southeast, and another off to the northwest. White lights stacked up in vertical columns, and red and green lights on either side. They were fishing boats working the waters west of the Hawaiian islands. He could not make out the lights of the container ship, which was still well below the horizon, and there were no other lights in any direction except for those of Oahu, now far to the east, but the Russians were somewhere out there. He could almost smell them.

He wanted a little time before they made contact. If he couldn't make an end run to avoid the Akula, he wanted at least twenty-four hours to get his crew acclimated. It took that long even for the best to be transformed from a shore-based mob to a smoothly operating team of fighting men.

“All compartments report ready for sea in all respects, skipper,” Alvarez reported.

Dillon lowered the periscope, and turned to his control room crew. Bateman and Alvarez were looking at him, waiting for their next orders.

Everyone else was busy at their assigned tasks of keeping the
Seawolf
straight and level at precisely sixty feet. It was a task much like trying to balance an inherently unstable whale on a knife edge while moving through a fluid that was in a constant state of change. Salinity, temperature, and subsea currents all had serious effects on a submarine's trim. The distribution of supplies, food, potable water, sewage, garbage—and even personnel—also had their effects. Their speed through the water and the boat's attitude made a difference. At some combinations the
Seawolf
's hull form was almost impossible to keep under control. Each time they fired a torpedo, or a tube-launched missile, the boat's trim went through the gyrations of the damned.

Sailing a submarine submerged was like flying a helicopter through Jell-O; it was definitely a full-time job, and definitely
not
a hands-off experience.

“Make your course two-seven-zero. Increase speed to flank. Make your depth six hundred feet.”

“Aye, sir. Make my course two-seven-zero degrees, increase my speed to flank, and dive to six-zero-zero feet.”

Dillon reached up and braced himself. Bateman did the same at the periscope rail. Everyone else not strapped into their bucket seats braced themselves against something.

Within seconds
Seawolf
heeled sharply to starboard, her bows angled downward at twenty degrees, and she accelerated as if she were a fox with a hot poker suddenly stuck up her ass.

Alvarez was ginning ear-to-ear; he was back in the hood cruisin' chicks in his lowrider, only this was a billion times more cool.

His normally unflappable, mild-mannered XO, Charlie Bateman, who wanted his own boat so that he could hurry up and retire to teach high school math and physics, looked like a kid in a Toys “R” Us store. His eyes were bright, his hair was slicked back like an Irish muskrat's, and he leaned as nonchalantly as he could against the periscope platform rail. “All right,” he said softly.

Anyone who had ever experienced the
Seawolf
putting the pedal to the metal while turning and diving, couldn't help from feeling like they had strapped on an F/A-18 Hornet and were being catapulted off the deck of a carrier. The accelerations were awesome.

They hadn't gotten to their angles and dangles first time out before they'd been recalled to Pearl, so this would have to suffice. So far Dillon hadn't heard anything serious crashing inside his boat, though he suspected that there'd be loose clothing, maybe a few books or CDs and a few odds and ends breaking loose here and there. But by the time the next watch came on duty everything would be properly stowed.

His chiefs would see to that.

“Passing one hundred feet,” Alvarez said. “Ease left on the helm.”

Seawolf
's starboard heel began to lessen as the helmsman backed off the rate of turn. Their heading passed west-southwest, and the five digital and one analog compasses in the control room all settled slowly on due west.

“Our new course is two-seven-zero degrees. Passing two hundred feet.”

Flank speed submerged was forty-six knots, which was a highly classified figure. But the trick in this maneuver was to maintain that exact speed. With the reactor putting out 110 percent power at straight and level,
Seawolf
could achieve her top speed within less than one mile from a standing start. Diving at a sharp angle, however, could add an extra four or five knots.

Alvarez played a delicate balancing act.
Seawolf
entered a highly unstable zone between forty-eight and fifty knots, in which she was susceptible to pitching downward so violently that recovery was theoretically impossible. The submarine could carry them beyond the crush depth.

Dillon had spent a lot of time thinking about the problem. Under certain combat conditions, when they were trying to outrun an enemy torpedo, for instance, they could end up in such a situation. He had developed a maneuver that worked three times out of five in the model tank. He didn't know if he cared to try it in reality, but it was there.

“Passing three hundred feet,” Alvarez reported. He picked up the growler phone at his position, and said something to the engine room officer that Dillon couldn't make out. He probably asked for a specific number of propeller revolutions to maintain flank speed on the way down.

“Passing four hundred feet.”

Dillon made his way around the periscope pedestal to the plotting tables, where the assistant navigation officer, Ensign Howard “Buster” Brown, was keeping the dead-reckoning paper plot with the compass readings, speed of advance (SOA) that they took from the boat's external sensors, and a stopwatch. Twice during each six-hour watch, the DR plot was checked against the sub's inertial guidance system's position. Their position was updated when they could get a surface fix as well: satellite, celestial, radio beacon, radar, and visual.

Before they got into the Indian Ocean and up into the Bay of Bengal they would have to thread the needle through the Mariana Islands, south through the Philippines, then Indonesia, the lesser Sunda Islands, and finally the Timor Sea. Land masses, reefs, shallows, sea mounts, and warships from a dozen countries would be in their way. All of it negotiated at flank speed. Their initial plots would have to be right on the money.

Brown, a heavyset young man built like a tree trunk with deep-set dark eyes and close-cropped black hair, was next up for SOAC (submarine officers advanced course). His next billet would be as a section head; probably as chief navigation officer. The man was precise. Which was why Dillon had suggested to Alvarez that Brown start their plot.

“Did you get a reliable fix before we submerged?” Dillon asked.

“Yes, sir. I got a couple of good star shots, two independent satellite fixes, three radar bearings on the island, and I'll do bottom profiling on each leg.”

“This will be a tight one, Buster. I don't think I'll be able to get you a surface fix until we're on station. I want you to double-check everybody else's work.”

Brown grinned happily. “I'm on it, skipper.”

“Passing five hundred feet,” Alvarez announced. “Ease your angle on the planes.”

Seawolf
's depth was taken from her keel amidships. Since her length was in excess of three hundred feet it meant that her bows were already approaching six hundred feet. The boat would have to be leveled out, her ballast tanks adjusted so that she would skid to a stop at precisely six hundred feet.

Alvarez had been aboard less than six months, but already he was a master of the maneuver. He had the touch. He was slick. It's why he was called Teflon.

The boat's extreme nose-down angle leveled off slowly. Alvarez spoke to the engine room again. When he hung up he turned to Dillon. “Skipper, we are at six-zero-zero feet, course steady on two-seven-zero, our speed is flank.”

“Well done, Mr. Alvarez,” Dillon said. He turned to his XO. “As soon as all sections report normal watch routines, I want all my officers in the wardroom.”

“Yes, sir,” Bateman said, and Dillon left the control room. “Skipper is off the deck; Brown, you have the conn.”

“Aye, aye, sir,” Brown responded.

Bateman pulled down the growler phone to start assembling the
Seawolf
's officers. Frank Dillon was a good man; the very best, in Bateman's opinion. He was usually calm, even cheerful, when they got underway. But this time something was eating at him. Bateman figured that the CO hadn't told them everything yet.

 

At depth, on a steady course and speed, there was no sense of motion aboard the
Seawolf
. They could have been in a windowless space in the basement of a very large building. Nor was there any noise. All the machinery within the hull was mounted on noise-damping shock absorbers. Second only to the nuclear reactor itself,
Seawolf
's noise-abatement equipment and techniques were the most secret things aboard.

Dillon's ten officers assembled in the wardroom looked at him with expectant expressions. The only two officers missing were Brown in the control room and Cunningham in engineering.

As of midnight the crew had gone on the eighteen-hour watch system that was kept aboard all U.S. submarines: six hours on and twelve hours off. Since submarines were so confining, the crews were kept busy. In actual fact there was very little time off to lay around and get bored. During a crewman's twelve hours off he was expected to help with KP; attend classes and study sessions to upgrade his rating; do fire and escape drills; do battle stations missile and torpedo; and, if there was time, sleep.

It was no easier for the officers because they and the chiefs conducted the classes and oversaw the drills.

They lived for action. It was what they had spent months and years training for.
Hunt it, find it, kill it,
were not just words on a plaque. They were etched in bronze in the gut of every man aboard.

Now that they were underway and safely submerged, the skipper had something to say to them. And by the look on his face it was going to be good.

“Gentlemen, I'll make this brief,” Dillon began. “There are three items of importance that you were not told back at Pearl. I was ordered to wait until now to finish your briefing for security reasons.”

Bateman leaned against the door frame, one eye on Dillon and the other on the corridor and the ladder up one deck to the control room.
Seawolf
was not his boat. Nevertheless, he had a proprietary interest in her and her crew that went beyond that of the usual XO. Dillon had a tight crew, starting at the top.

“The first item of importance to you is comms security. For the duration of this mission there will be no, and I repeat, no communications to or from this boat. That means no updated or changed orders or fresh intelligence; and that also means no familygrams.”