USS Washington, SSN 787, “the Blackfish”
North Atlantic
0524 local time
Knepper had always wanted to conduct the evolution the Blackfish was about to attempt, but the opportunity had not presented itself during either his JO or department head tours. A close aboard acoustic collection of an enemy submarine required three necessary criteria: First, the target submarine had to be completely blind to the hunter’s presence. Second, the environmental and tactical conditions had to support the evolution. And third, it took a commanding officer with nerves of steel—someone willing to risk undersea collision for the reward of acoustic intelligence.
Check, check, and check, he thought as he glanced at Commander Houston, who stood next to the command workstation in the middle of the conn. I can’t believe we’re actually going to do this.
The control room was more crowded, tense, and quiet than he’d seen since the day he’d come aboard as XO. The captain had ordered battle stations manned for this evolution—not because they expected a shooting match, but rather for the sake of preparedness and optimization. On a warship, “Man battle stations” was the command given to rapidly transition to the highest level of readiness. During normal operations, at any given time, a third of the ship’s crew was on watch, a third was asleep, and the remaining third was scattered about the ship. At battle stations, all personnel were awake, accounted for, and posted where they were the most capable. For this evolution, the normal section tracking party rotation watch bill didn’t cut it. If something went wrong, the CO wanted the best of the best on watch and all hands ready to respond at a moment’s notice.
For his part in this highly choreographed dance, Knepper assumed the role of fire control coordinator. His responsibility was to analyze and maintain a firing solution on Master One—the Gepard K-335. If everything went according to plan, no torpedoes would be exchanged, but that didn’t mean the evolution held no danger.
Knepper looked right at the WEPS.
Juggernaut stood—hands on hips—at the attack center, looking over the shoulders of the seated fire control technicians manning their consoles configured for target management and weapons control. The XO took a mental snapshot of the scene and burned it into his brain. This was Jackie’s moment. What she’d spent a decade training to do. She knew the system and her people better than anyone else on board, and her confidence and knowledge of this fact practically glowed around her like an aura. If he were to try to step in and do her job for her, the intervention would only diminish the outcome. The same was true of every watch stander on the boat at this very moment. Every crew member was posted at the station where they were optimized to excel the most.
His gaze indexed around the control room, jumping from shipmate to shipmate. The pilot, the copilot, the nav—who was OOD—the sonar techs, the sonar LCPO standing supe, the ACINT specialist, the quartermaster, the contact manager . . . Knepper’s life was literally in their hands.
Gooseflesh stood up on his neck.
Damn . . . There ain’t nothing in the world more badass than a Virginia-class submarine control room at battle stations.
The Blackfish had been tracking Master One for nearly forty minutes and during that time had determined two very important things. First, Master One was stationary, and second, the contact was operating submerged. They knew this because the CO had ordered the boat to PD to take a look after getting multiple legs on the contact and a rock-solid fire control solution. For a surface ship, station keeping was no big deal. For a submarine, however, static hovering was no small feat. After visually confirming there was no surface vessel at Master One’s coordinates, the Blackfish went deep and prepared for the next step.
The CO had chosen seven hundred and thirty feet—the shallowest depth the sound velocity profile would permit to maintain optimal acoustic reception, while hopefully maximizing depth separation between the target and the Blackfish. Unlike the surface Navy, submarine cat-and-mouse games were played in three dimensions. That uncertainty—the not knowing—was an omnipresent, ulcer-inducing stress for the submariner.
“Captain, Quartermaster—stand by for the turn to course two-eight-five,” the quartermaster said, alerting everyone that the ship was approaching the calculated track.
“Very well, Quartermaster,” the CO said, then added, “All right, everybody, buckle up and let’s do this.”
“Stand by for the turn . . . In three, two, one, mark the turn.”
“Pilot, come left, steer course two-eight-five,” the captain announced in a loud, confident voice.
The pilot acknowledged the order and Knepper felt the Blackfish heel ever so slightly as the rudder came on. From the corner of his eye, he saw the quartermaster—who was standing at the nav plot—cross himself. In theory, the plan was simple. The Blackfish would make two passes at a range of two hundred yards: the first pass, to the north on a westwardly course, the second, to the south on a reciprocal course to the east. The pucker factor at that range, however, was off the chart. Any unexpected movement of the target or change of depth could result in collision. And a collision between two submarines could result in the loss of both vessels. A pressure hull breach at depth would be a catastrophic and unrecoverable casualty.
“Captain, the ship is on course two-eight-five,” the pilot reported a few moments later, a course that had them driving head-on into the ocean current to minimize the impact of set and drift while trying to maintain track.
“Very well,” the CO said.
“Crossing two thousand yards to target,” the quartermaster announced.
As per their pre-evolution brief, the quartermaster would be announcing range to target in increments as the Blackfish closed on Master One for all the watch standers in control.
“Very well.”
The ship was also rigged for “ultra-quiet,” which meant using the quietest propulsion plant and auxiliary equipment lineup. Routine maintenance, housekeeping, and activities that could generate transient noise were all prohibited. No toilet flushing. No cooking in the galley. No announcements on the ship’s PA system. No movement of tools or stowed materials that could possibly drop. Even the crew spoke in hushed tones, although this was psychological rather than procedural. The Blackfish became a black hole of sound in the water so the target would never know what happened.
Knepper glanced at the closest stack and checked the fire control solution for Master One on the geoplot—a downward-looking, bird’s-eye view of the patch of ocean they were operating in. “Own ship,” as submariners referred to themselves, was represented as an icon centered in the very middle of the display and contacts being tracked were represented by triangular icons in relative space around it. In this case, the Blackfish held only one contact and that was Master One off their port bow.
Range: 1835 yds Bearing: 279 T AOB: S174 Course: 285 Speed: 0 kts
The FT had chosen to orient Master One facing into the current for the same reason the CO had chosen this course. The target’s true orientation was unknown because Master One was hovering, but the FT’s assumption was grounded in logic and certainty. Knepper watched the triangular icon for a beat, willing it to stay put. Somewhere in the back of his mind, he felt Mr. Murphy—the architect of entropy and chaos and every submariner’s sworn enemy—loitering, waiting for the perfect moment to crash the party and ruin everyone’s day by evoking his law.
If something can go wrong, it will go wrong, a voice in his head whispered.
Why did that have to be the submariner’s aphorism?
He glanced over at the narrowband display on the upper monitor. The bright 151.7-hertz trace was nearly perfectly straight and smooth following the slow, leftward-predicted bearing drift he expected to see as they closed. The closer they got, the faster the bearing rate would change, reaching the maximum delta as the Blackfish passed Master One close aboard off her port beam. He loved the fact that he could see both sonar and fire control data at the same time on the same stack. Unlike the fire control systems on previous classes of U.S. submarines, on Virginia-class boats, the fire control technicians could access the same raw sonar data and displays as the sonar techs, seated at identical consoles laid out in a mirror image on the port side of control. This integration allowed the FTs to recognize any change in sonar bearings instantly, which would indicate a change in aspect, course, or speed of the target. The converse was also true, in that a sonar tech could pull up a fire control geoplot on their stack. This flexible approach to data management was called ADAW, or any display anywhere, and meant that any of the numerous flat-panel screens inside the Blackfish’s control room could be configured to display any of the dozens of different tactical or operational interfaces used for piloting, navigation, sonar, fire control, system management, and weapons configuration.
“Fifteen hundred yards to target,” the quartermaster announced as they closed range.
“Very well,” the CO said.
A tense silence hung in the control room, so pronounced it almost felt suffocating. Instead of trying to pretend it wasn’t there, Knepper acknowledged and embraced it. Like their namesake, the orca, they were an apex predator, fueled by adrenaline and gliding silently toward their quarry. But instead of capturing prey with serrated teeth, the Blackfish would be capturing sound using their TB-34 and TB-29—twin towed arrays consisting of hundreds of hydrophones arranged linearly on a cable. Unlike the hull-mounted sonar systems, which were the workhorses of the submarine for daily navigation and contact tracking, towed arrays were literally towed several hundred yards behind the submarine in a zone of quiet behind the propulsor wash and away from the submarine’s hull noise. The real data collection would happen when the submarine was already beyond the target and the towed arrays were passing directly abeam of K-335.
“One thousand yards to target,” the quartermaster announced.
“Very well, quartermaster,” the CO said.
“Observed bearing rate matches fire control solution for Master One. Target is still static. Recommend maintaining course and speed,” Knepper said, more a statement of reassurance than anything else.
“Very well, coordinator.”
“Passing nine hundred yards.”
“Very well.”
Someone dropped a pen, a gentle sound that shattered the heavy silence in the conn, and Knepper saw one of his FTs jump slightly.
Knepper’s heart rate ticked up as the range closed quickly. The call-and-response between the captain and the quartermaster developed into a cadence that was impossibly both unnerving and assuring at the same time—unnerving because the range was shrinking with each announcement, but assuring because of the calm certitude in the skipper’s voice.
“Passing five hundred yards.”
“Very well, quartermaster,” Houston said. “Report distance to track.”
“Ring laser one and two, hold ship on track, plus or minus twenty yards,” the quartermaster answered, referring to the sub’s two inertial navigation systems that continuously measured three-axis acceleration while submerged to calculate the ship’s velocity, direction, and estimated position.
“Coordinator, how are we looking?” the captain asked, his voice soft and just above a whisper, glancing at Knepper.
The CO watched the same geoplot on the command workstation that Knepper had over at the attack center, but that wasn’t the point. The captain was giving him one final chance to call an abort before they reached the point of no return.
“Fire control solution is still tracking. Recommend maintaining course and speed,” he said, his voice equally as soft, seeing no signs at all of trouble.
“Very well, coordinator. Sonar, sitrep?” the CO said, covering all his bases.
“Still hold strong narrowband contact on the 151.7-hertz signal,” the sonar supervisor said, “but we’re starting to pick up some other transients from Master One. Analyzing . . .”
“Very well, keep after it.”
“Passing four hundred yards.”
Knepper watched the bearing rate accelerate and the sonar trace begin to curve left as the Blackfish approached CPA, or closest point of approach, on the target.
“Three hundred and fifty yards to target.”
“Very well, quartermaster.”
“Passing three hundred yards.”
Knepper could feel his pulse throbbing in his ears as the icon for K-335 on the geoplot drifted closer and closer. His engineer’s mind started integrating all the margins of uncertainty for this evolution, and he didn’t like the output. Contact management when submerged was nothing more than a geometry problem consisting of lines of bearing, angles of offset, and ever-changing vectors . . . All calculated from sound waves that were constantly bending, bouncing, reflecting, and Doppler-shifting in the water, thanks to variability in temperature, salinity, and bottom topography.
God, I hope what I’m looking at on the screen reflects reality.
He didn’t dare vocalize the crazy thought, but he suspected he wasn’t the only one having it. Driving a submarine was like asking a blindfolded person to navigate a shopping mall without a cane—a crazy proposition. The “picture” they used on the geoplot was nothing more than an approximation of reality, based on imperfect sound data.
“Passing two hundred and fifty yards . . . two forty . . . two thirty . . . two twenty . . . two ten . . . mark closest point of approach.”
“Coordinator concurs,” Knepper said, his eyes on the sonar trace whipping across the display as they passed abeam of the Russian submarine.
“Sonar concurs,” the sonar supe announced.
“Very well,” Houston said, acknowledging them all.
“Two hundred twenty yards and opening,” the quartermaster said with a notable tenor of relief in his voice as the Blackfish slipped silently and unmolested past the target.
So friggin’ cool.
Knepper smiled as he watched the range to K-335 opening on the fire control screen.
Beside him, in a voice barely audible, Juggernaut said, “Hell yeah, fear the Blackfish.”