Warshot (The Hunter Killer Series Book 6) by Don Keith (top ten ebook reader TXT) 📗

a thousand miles wide and streamed the data up to a geosynchronous communications satellite orbiting at twenty-three thousand miles out over the central Pacific. From there it was downlinked to the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, located in Fort Belvoir, Virginia.

The images, each with a resolution good enough to read a license plate number, were automatically reviewed by some very advanced artificial intelligence algorithms running on some of the world’s most advanced super-computers.

Fifteen minutes after the four Yuan submarines emerged from the cave on Hainan Island, the phone rang in Jon Ward’s office in the Pentagon.

Ψ

The George Mason had this stretch of the Philippine Sea all to itself. In one of the most heavily traveled shipping lanes in the world, that was an exceedingly rare event. The submarine’s officers knew it was time to make the most of the opportunity. LCDR Jackson Biddle, the executive officer, and LCDR Billy Jonas, the engineer, both stood as their commanding officer, Brian Edwards, stepped into the wardroom. The chief of the boat, Dennis Oshley, and three other chiefs—all nukes—were sitting at the other end of the wardroom table. They stood as well.

When Edwards took his seat at the head of the table, they all plopped down.

“Okay, Eng,” Edwards started. “We can spend the next couple of hours playing around out here in all this empty ocean. The Nav says we are at the front end of our patrol box already, so we have a couple of hours before PIM catches up with us. You got your trainees all ready to show their stuff?”

Billy Jonas was a product of the University of Nebraska NROTC program and the Navy Nuclear Power Training pipeline. He had reported aboard the George Mason only a few days before they left Pearl Harbor on this WESTPAC deployment. At just five foot seven and a few pounds overweight, he was already known to the crew as “Fireplug.”

“They’ve finished the check-outs and prac facs for these drills,” Jonas answered. He flashed an evil grin. “Whether they really are ready or not, we’ll soon find out. ET3 Maddox is the reactor operator trainee. I’ve got four trainees in the engine room. MM1 Nelson is the engineering watch supervisor trainee, and Ensign Walters is the engineering officer of the watch under instruction.”

As Edwards nodded his approval, Jackson Biddle chimed in. “Skipper, I’ve got ST1 Hannon as copilot U/I and Lieutenant jg Pawley as officer of the deck U/I. If you can observe Mr. Pawley, the COB can observe Hannon.”

Edwards nodded and the discussion shifted to what havoc they were about to wreak on the trainees. They also ran through the safety precautions to make sure nothing got out of hand. Despite the common belief, there was very little downtime on a submarine at sea. Continual training helped ensure every man and woman knew what to do while on watch, and especially if something went haywire. These drills were as close as they could get to train for the real thing, because for most of them, once they started, they pretty much were the real thing. Thirty minutes after the start of the meeting, they all filed out and took their stations.

Edwards walked into the control room. Ray Pawley was huddled with Ashton Jennings, the WEPs, and the on-watch officer of the deck. They were closely studying a screen that told them all the immediate actions that should be taken for a reactor scram. That was the term for an emergency shutdown of a nuclear reactor by dropping all the control rods to squelch the fission reaction.

Joshua Hannon sat in the co-pilot’s seat. Chief Schmidt sat in the pilot’s seat beside him. The atmosphere in George Mason’s control room was tense, expectant.

“Mr. Pawley, you think you have a handle on this?” Edwards asked as he stepped up to the command console. He flipped through the sonar displays as he waited for the young officer’s answer. Good. Nothing on the screens. No contacts out as far as George Mason’s supremely sensitive sensors and high-tech processing algorithms could reach.

“Yes…yes, sir,” Pawley answered, stuttering nervously, a thin trickle of sweat running down the side of his face.

“Reactor scram!” the announcing system suddenly blared throughout the boat. “Conn, maneuvering, reactor scram, answering all stop. No apparent cause.”

“Pilot, make your depth one-five-zero feet,” Pawley coolly ordered, but then, “Left full ridder...uh...I mean rudder. Steady course south. Rig ship for reduced electrical.”

The big boat was already angling upward as the pilot used what remaining speed he had to get shallow and maneuver the ship around to the ordered course.

Joshua Hannon grabbed the 1MC microphone and announced, “Reactor scram, rig ship for reduced electrical, casualty assistance team lay aft.” He then flipped a couple of switches that secured most of the ventilation fans and other electrical equipment that were, at least temporarily, unnecessary. That included the toaster and coffee pots in the galley and almost all of the ventilation and air conditioning systems. The control room suddenly got quiet—no one noticed the noise of the constantly blowing ventilation fans until they were no longer there—and the temperature had already begun to rise.

“Sonar, clearing baffles to the left. Report all contacts,” Pawley called out to the sonar operators. They sat over on the starboard side of the control room and could hear the OOD U/I just fine without using the communications system. They would be looking for any quiet contact that may have snuck up on them in the sub’s baffles, the area directly behind the boat where hull-mounted sonar units were unable to hear anything.

“Conn, maneuvering, rigged for delayed scram. Request ‘prepare to snorkel,’” came the report over the engineering announcing circuit. The nukes had not immediately found and fixed the cause of the reactor scram. But they had secured all unnecessary steam loads so that the residual reactor steam and heat would be available for emergency propulsion. They had also lined up the engine room systems to be ready to rapidly come back online when the reactor was “fixed.”

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