U.S.S. Seawolf (2 page)

Friday, October 7, 2005
.
Pacific Ocean. 120 miles west-southwest of
San Diego, California
.

The darkness crept ever westward through low, overcast skies, and the gusting northwest breeze whipped white crests onto the long wavetops. At this time of the evening, in the 20 minutes of no-man’s time between sunset and nightfall streaming in over the immense ocean, the Pacific takes on a deeply malevolent mantle. Its awesome troughs and rising waves glisten darkly in the last of the light. There’s no bright, friendly phosphorescence in the bottomless waters out here. To stare down at the black seascape, even from the safe reassuring deck of a warship, is to gaze into the abyss.
Oh Lord, your ocean is so vast, and my boat is so small
.

Eight hundred feet into the abyss, way beneath the twilight melancholy of the surface, USS
Seawolf
thundered forward, making almost 40 knots, somewhere south of the Murray Fracture Zone. The 9,000-ton United States Navy attack submarine was heavily into her
months of sea trials, following a massive three-year overhaul.
Seawolf
was not at war, but a passing whale could have been forgiven for thinking she was. Forty knots is one hell of a speed for a 350-foot-long submarine. But
Seawolf
had been built for speed, constructed to lead the underwater cavalry of the Navy, anywhere, anytime. And right now she was in deep submergence trials, testing her systems, flexing her muscles in the desolate black wilderness of America’s western ocean.

Powered by two 45,000-horsepower turbines and a state-of-the-art Westinghouse nuclear reactor,
Seawolf
was the most expensive submarine ever built. Too expensive. The Navy was permitted to build only three of her class—
Connecticut
and USS
Jimmy Carter
were the others—before budget restraints caused the cancellation of these jet-black emperors of the deep. Over a billion dollars had been spent on her research and development before
Seawolf
was commissioned in 1997.

Now, after her multimillion-dollar overhaul, the submarine was, without question, the finest underwater warship in the world, the fastest, quietest nuclear boat. At 20 knots there was nothing to be heard beyond the noise of the water parted by the bulk of her hull. She could pack a ferocious wallop, too.
Seawolf
was armed with a phalanx of Tomahawk land-attack missiles that could travel at almost 1,000 mph to a target 1,400 miles distant. She could unleash a missile with a 454-kilogram warhead and hit an enemy ship 250 miles away. She bristled with eight 26-inch torpedo tubes, launching bases for big wire-guided Gould Mark 48s, homing if necessary to 27 miles. Highly effective, these weapons offered a kill probability of 50 percent, second only to the British Spearfish.

Seawolf
carried sonars estimated as three times more effective than even the most advanced Los Angeles-class boats. She used both TB16 and TB29 surveillance and towed arrays. For active close-range detection she used the BQS 24 system. Her electronic support measures (ESM) were nothing short of sensational. Any ship any
where within 50 miles could not move, communicate, or even activate its sonar or radar without
Seawolf
hearing every last telltale sound. She was not a gatherer of clan-destine information, she was an electronic vacuum cleaner, the last word in the U.S. Navy’s most secretive, private, advanced research.

And Captain Judd Crocker was darned proud of her. “Never been a submarine to match this one,” he would say. “And I doubt there ever will be. Not in my lifetime.”

And that was worthwhile praise. The son of a surface ship admiral, grandson of another, he had been born into a family of Cape Cod yacht racers, and he had been around boats of all sizes since he could walk. He never inherited his father’s unique talents as a helmsman, but he was good, better than most, though destined always to be outclassed by the beady-eyed Admiral Nathaniel Crocker.

Judd was 40 years old now. A lifelong submariner, he had served as
Seawolf
’s first Executive Officer back in 1997 and commanded her five years later. He received his promotion to Captain just before she came out of overhaul, and resumed command in the high summer of the year 2005.

That was the culmination of all his boyhood dreams, and the culmination of a plan he had made at the age of 15 when his father had taken him out to watch the annual race from Newport around Block Island and back. The admiral was not racing himself, but he and Judd were guests on board one of the New York Yacht Club committee boats. It was a day of intermittent fog out in the bay, and several competitors had trouble navigating.

Even Judd’s committee boat was a little wayward in the early afternoon, straying too far southwest of the island, about a half mile from the point of approach of a 7,000-ton Los Angeles-class submarine rolling past on the surface toward the Groton submarine base. The sun was out at the time, and Judd had watched through binoculars one of the great black warhorses of the U.S. Navy.
He was transfixed by the sight of her, noting the number 690 painted on her sail. He almost died of excitement when a couple of the officers on the bridge waved across the water to the committee boat. And he had stared after the homeward-bound USS
Philadelphia
long after she became too small to identify on the horizon.

Submarines often have that effect on nonmilitary personnel. There is a quality about them, so profoundly sinister, so utterly chilling. And Judd had gazed upon the ultimate iron fist of U.S. sea power with barely contained awe. In his stomach there was a tight little knot of apprehension, except that he knew it was not really apprehension. It was fear, the kind of fear everyone feels when a 100 mph express train comes shrieking straight through a country railroad station, a shuddering, ear-splitting, howling display of monstrous power that could knock down the station and half the town if it ever got out of control. The difference was that the submarine achieved the same effect in menacing near-silence.

Judd Crocker was not afraid of the submarine. He was fascinated by a machine that could demolish the city of Boston, if it felt so inclined. And as he turned back to the infinitely lesser thrills of the yacht race, he was left with one thought in his mind. What he really wanted was to drive the USS
Philadelphia
, and that meant the United States Naval Academy at Annapolis three years hence. From that moment on, Judd never took his eye off the ball, which was why, a quarter of a century later, he commanded the most awesome submarine ever to leave a shipyard.

“
Conn—Captain…reduce speed to twenty knots. Five up to five hundred feet…right standard rudder…steer course two-two-zero
.”

Judd’s commands were always delivered in a calm voice, but there was pressure behind the words, betraying not anxiety, but the fact that he had given the matter careful thought before speaking.

“
Conn, aye, sir
.”

Judd turned to his XO, Lt. Commander Linus Clarke, who had just returned from a short conference with the engineers.

“Everything straight down there, XO?”

“Minor problem with a jammed valve, sir. Chief Barrett freed it up. Says it can’t happen again. We going deeper?”

“Just a little for the moment, but I want her at one thousand feet a couple of hours from now.”

They were a hugely unlikely combination in command, these two. The captain was a barrel-chested man, a shade under six feet tall, with a shock of jet-black hair, inherited from his mother’s Irish antecedents. Jane Kiernan had also bequeathed to him her deep hazel-colored eyes and the carthorse strength of the male members of her family, farmers and fishermen from the wild windswept outer reaches of Connaught on Ireland’s western shores.

Judd was a rock-steady naval commander: experienced, cool under pressure, and self-trained in the art of avoiding panic in any of its forms. He was popular with his crew of 100-plus because his reputation and record demanded respect, and because his presence, a mixture of imperturbable confidence, professional approach, and great experience, all leavened with a quiet sense of humor, inspired total trust.

He knew as much as any of his expert crew, and often more. But he still took care to show that he valued their work and opinions. He would mildly set them straight only when strictly necessary—often with an apparently simple and innocuous question that would cause his adviser to think again, and work it out for himself. He was anyone’s idea of the perfect commanding officer.

Judd had high qualifications in hydrodynamics, electronics, propulsion, and nuclear physics. His appointment to command
Seawolf
had come directly from the top, from Admiral Joe Mulligan, the Chief of Naval Operations, in person, himself a former nuclear submarine commander.

The reasons behind Linus Clarke’s recent appointment as Captain Crocker’s executive officer were less apparent. The lieutenant commander was only 34, and he was known to have served for several months with the CIA at Headquarters in Langley, Virginia. No one ever asked anyone precisely what he had been doing there. But serving naval officers with Intelligence backgrounds were rarely appointed second-in-command on big nuclear attack submarines.

Linus wore his mild celebrity with relish. He was a tall, slim Oklahoman with dead-straight floppy reddish hair. And he wore it rather longer than is customary among the disciplined officer corps of the U.S. Navy. But his rise had apparently been consistent, and he had graduated from Annapolis in the top quarter of his class. But no one was interested then, and he managed to disappear very successfully for a few years before emerging from the portals of the CIA with a rather mysterious reputation.

There was a total of 14 officers in the wardroom of USS
Seawolf
, and while it was obvious that each of them knew something about Lt. Commander Clarke, no one quite knew everything. Except for Captain Crocker. And, like the rest of them, he avoided the subject. Among the enlisted men there was a certain amount of chatter, principally emanating from a seaman in the ship’s laundry who claimed that the name on the XO’s dog tags was not Linus Clarke. But he could not remember what the name was, and he was thus only half-believed. Nonetheless, there was chatter.

Linus himself was naturally rather secretive, and he added to this by adopting a measure of irony to his conversation, a thin, knowing smile decorating his wide, freckled face. He also adopted the slightly self-serving attitude of one who is a bit too daring and adventurous to spend a long time in the company of the hard, realistic men who handle the frontline muscle of the U.S. Navy.
He undoubtedly saw himself as Hornblower, as opposed to Rickover.

A typical Clarke entrance to the wardroom would be, “Okay men, has there been any truly serious screwup you need me to sort out?” He always grinned when he said it, but most people thought he meant it anyway.

One week after his appointment to
Seawolf
, still moored in San Diego, there had been a small cocktail party ashore. After three quite strenuous glasses of bourbon on the rocks, Lt. Commander Clarke had ventured up to his new captain and confided, “Sir, do you actually know why I have been detailed to your ship?”

“No, can’t say I do,” replied Judd.

“Well, sir, we’re going on a highly classified mission, and as you know, I’ve been on similar missions before. Basically, I’m here to make sure you don’t screw it up. You know, for lack of experience.”

Captain Judd Crocker gazed at him steadily, concealing his total disbelief that
any
jumped-up two-and-a-half, even this one, would dare to speak to him in such a way. But he rose above it, smiled sardonically, and declined to say what he really thought—
Oh, really? Well, I’m deeply comforted to have such a rare presence on board
.

At that moment, Linus Clarke made a mental note to be extra careful in all of his dealings with the commanding officer in the future. To himself, he thought,
This is one cool dude…I thought my little speech might throw him a little…but it sure didn’t
.

He was correct there. Judd Crocker had been around ranking admirals all of his life, men of enormous intelligence. He had sailed the East Coast with the heavyweight financiers of the New York Yacht Club, crewing on the annual summer cruise up the New England coast, and sometimes navigating all the way up to the glorious archipelago of the Maine islands. Since he was a boy, and even when he was a midshipman, he’d sat in some of the most expensive staterooms in some of the biggest ocean
going yachts in the United States, and listened to conversations of great moment. It would take rather more than an insolent, smartass remark by a slightly drunk lieutenant commander to unnerve him. But he assumed, too, that young Clarke had also had his share of company with the great and the mighty.

Nonetheless, they did not form what the Navy traditionally hopes will become a natural trusting partnership in command of a ship that had cost something close to the national debt.

Beyond the Silent Service, Judd Crocker was married to the former Nicole Vanderwolk, 10 years his junior and the daughter of the redoubtable Harrison Vanderwolk, a big-hitting Florida-based financier with major holdings in three states. Like the Crockers, the Vanderwolks had a waterfront summer house on toney Sea View Avenue in Osterville, a couple of doors down from the former residence of the U.S. Army’s youngest-ever general, “Jumping” Jim Gavin of the 82nd Airborne, legend of the Normandy landings.

The Vanderwolks, the Gavins, and the Crockers were lifelong friends, and when Judd married Nicole it was cause for a mass celebration in a yellow-and-white-striped tent, the size of the Pentagon on the sunlit shores of Nantucket Sound.

Unhappily, they were unable to have children, and in 1997, shortly after Judd was appointed to
Seawolf
, they adopted two little Vietnamese girls, ages three and four, renaming them Jane and Kate. By the turn of the century they were all ensconced in another waterfront property out on Point Loma in San Diego, both sets of parents having clubbed together to buy the $2 million home as an investment while Judd was stationed on the West Coast under the command of the Submarine Force U.S. Pacific Fleet (SUBPAC). The deal was simple: When it was time to sell, the admiral and Harrison would receive $1.1 million each. Judd and Nicole would keep the change. The
way things were going in the California real estate market, Judd and Nicole were winning, hands down.