With that Liu Pen slammed his hands down on the table and rose. He turned and walked out of the room. The meeting was over. It was time for action.
10 May 2000, 1815LT (0415Z)
“Conn, sonar. Regain contact on Sierra Two-Two, bearing three-one-five.”
The 21MC announcing speaker blared in Jon Hunter’s ear. The Commanding Officer of the nuclear attack submarine USS SAN FRANCISCO was anxiously waiting for this report. But the announcement still startled him. He glanced at the BQQ5 sonar repeater to see a faint squiggle just beginning to appear on the screen, confirming that they weren’t all alone in this part of the Pacific.
They had been playing cat and mouse with Sierra Two-Two, the Trident submarine USS NEBRASKA, for the last three days. Both submarines were doing their best to hide in the cold, black depths West and North of Hawaii.
Hunter reached over and snatched the 21MC speaker from its holder next to the sonar console. “Sonar, Captain, aye. Looks like he’s slowly drawing to the left.”
The six foot tall Commander hunched over the screen, his brow furrowed as he stared at the screen. His thick blond hair and fit figure belonged to a young man. Only the crows feet developing around his deep brown eyes belied his forty-two years, nearly twenty of them riding submarines.
Just a few feet forward of where Jon Hunter stood, six sonar operators sat poring over more sonar screens, each trying to draw every possible bit of information from the ocean outside the LOS ANGELES class submarine.
Master Chief Sonar Technician Holmstad, the sonar supervisor, took a quick glance over one operator’s shoulder and watched the passive broadband display for an instant. “Captain, Sonar. Sierra Two-Two bearing rate left zero-point-three degrees per minute,” he reported while he kept moving over to look at the next display. “Just starting to pick up a two-forty-seven hertz line on passive narrow band again.”
Holmstad was a fixture onboard. He had been the sonar chief onboard SAN FRANCISCO ever since she was launched, almost fifteen years ago. He made his name aboard the older STURGEON class boats when they went up North of the Kola Peninsula to hunt out the Soviet boats.
Hunter flipped the screen on his display over to passive narrow band just as Bill Fagan stepped over. Fagan, SAN FRANCISCO’s Executive Officer, was busy supervising the fire control party as they struggled to transform the sonar information into range, course, and speed information for the NEBRASKA.
“Captain, we’ve been picking up that two-forty-seven line at about two thousand yards. That’s about two thousand yards closer than our tracking solution has him.”
“Well, looks like you’d better move your tracking solution in a couple of thousand yards,” Hunter said dryly.
SAN FRANCISCO’s control room was so crowded that it was difficult to move. At least fifteen crewmen crushed into a roughly thirty foot square space already jammed full of equipment. The entire starboard side was devoted to the computerized fire control system. Six men, dressed in nearly identical blue coveralls, sat in front of flickering screens, deciphering the hieroglyphics, manipulating data, flitting from display to display as they labored to solve the problem of what was happening in the sea around the sub.
Two large glass topped chart tables filled the aft third of the control room. A team of sailors huddled over paper charts, chewing on every tidbit of information as it came in from sonar, fitting it into a mosaic. Everything to give Jon Hunter another look at what they thought NEBRASKA was doing.
From the forward port side of the room, the Diving Officer and his team drove the sub through the depths. Just forward of the Diving Officer’s seat, the helmsman and planesman controlled the submarine’s depth and course. Two of the youngest men onboard, barely legally allowed to drive a car, were driving the seven thousand ton monster with ease. They handled control yokes that looked very much like the ones that airline pilots used. The helmsman, sitting on the right, turned his wheel to turn the rudder and steer the sub. By pushing or pulling the control yoke, he positioned the fairwater planes to make SAN FRANCISCO go up or down. The stern planesman, sitting on the left, controlled the sub’s angle by pushing or pulling his control yoke, positioning the stern planes.
“XO, get a quick handle on what NEBRASKA is doing. We need to get up to copy the broadcast,” Hunter ordered. “Never can tell when Squadron will decide to tell us to do something else.”
Fagan nodded and chuckled, “Maybe they’ll get lonely and call us home. Don’t know about you, Skipper, but I’m getting mighty tired of babysitting these boomers. I’d even settle for a Squadron admin inspection if it meant I could get to the O-club for happy hour.”
“Careful what you wish for, XO,” Hunter answered. “Commodore Calucci and his boys would probably be waiting at the pier. At least out here we don’t have them trying to “help”.”
Hunter stepped over to the periscope stand that dominated the center of the control room. Two silver poles of the side-by-side periscopes rose out of the deck and disappeared into the overhead.
“Officer of the deck, make your depth one-five-zero feet, slow to ahead one third,” he ordered the young Lieutenant standing by the number two scope. Gold dolphins decorated the right breast of his blue coveralls; a cloth nametag with the name “Miller” embroidered on it was sewn to the left breast.
The submarine angled upward and slowed as it rose up to the
