Counter Poised (21 page)

“That’s fine, we can handle that. These fighters are going to be great. By the way, how did the testing go on the locking mechanism?”

“Just fine. We built a mock-up of a section of the
Louisiana
’s deck with an escape hatch and tested the whole configuration. We welded a flange over the hatch and brackets on each side of it and set the prototype, SF-1, on top. There’s a locking bar inside the fighter that’s used by the sonar operator to clamp the fighter onto the deck. We put it on his side because we figured the pilot would be busy flying the fighter into position.”

“Good thinking.”

“Anyway, the locking bar connects to a cam, which controls a couple of steel hooks. When the sonar operator pushes the locking bar about halfway down, the hooks extend under the fighter and grab the brackets welded to the deck. When he pushes the locking bar the rest of the way down, the cam takes over and pulls up on the hooks. As a result, the fighter is tightly clamped to the deck. I can tell you for sure, when that locking bar is down, that fighter is going nowhere!”

“That’s good, because after all this development, I’d sure hate to lose one!”

“Ain’t gonna happen, Cousin.”

“What about the watertight seal? We need a watertight seal between the fighter and the access flange so we can open both the hatch on the bottom of the fighter and the hatch on the
Louisiana
’s deck. That way the pilot and sensor operator can move freely between the
Louisiana
and the fighter while submerged. We can also rig electrical cables so we can recharge the fighter’s batteries from the
Louisiana
whenever the fighter is docked.”

“No problem. We pressure-tested the mock-up to the equivalent of eleven hundred feet without any leakage.”

“All right, so no problems or concerns at all?”

“Well, I wouldn’t push it on the upper limit of the launch speed if I was you. If you get over ten knots, there could be enough drag on the fighter that your sonar operator can’t raise the locking bar. If that happens, you’ll have to slow down.”

“You’ve done a great job with the fighters and with Platform Alpha, Dwight. After ten years of development, I’m sorry we couldn’t see our plan through to go into business together. I’m sure that if we had had the opportunity, we could have made millions of dollars selling sub-fighters to the navy. Unfortunately, the attack on DC changed all that, at least for me.”

“What do you mean, at least for you? Are you suggestin’ I could still sell them myself?”

“Sure, why not? As long as you can distance yourself from me—”

“No way, Cousin. There’s no way I could excise you from all the records. Besides, I think we have a higher callin’ for how to use these fighters now. What’s money anyway? When all is said and done, we have to live with ourselves and know we did what we could for our fellow man. I don’t regret makin’ this decision.”

“You’re a good man, Charlie Brown.”

“Thanks,” Dwight said looking around at the rig. “You know when you guys are gone, I’ll probably have to scuttle this thing.”

“When we leave, I think the cover story we came up with to cover your butt is still the best…deep-six it, and claim it was weakened in the storm and just couldn’t be rebuilt.”

Just then, at the top of the stairs next to Dwight, Leona appeared. “Welcome to Platform Alpha…whoa!…Captain!” she announced. “You look different!”

“Well, hello there, Leo—I mean Petty Office Harris! It’s good to see you!”

“Good to see you, too, sir!” Leona’s hand involuntarily went to her throat as if surprised. “What’s with the beard?”

“Just a little bit of insurance…in case we run into someone who might recognize me.”

“Good idea—you’re pretty famous.”

George wanted desperately to jump onto the stairs and rush to the top to give her a big hug and a kiss! And he could tell she felt the same way. But for the moment, they had to keep up appearances.

“I want to thank you for your support during our brief deployment. You should know that your daily summaries of ships’ positions were extremely valuable to us. We probably wouldn’t be here today if it wasn’t for you.”

“Thank you, Captain. It was my pleasure.”

“Since you’ll be joining the crew here, come on down and I’ll have someone show you to your berthing area.”

“Thanks, Captain. I’ll grab my things and be right back!”

Dwight interrupted. “So come on up, George, and let’s get that coffee now. Chicory—just the way you like it!”

“Okay, I’ll be right up! Oh, by the way, I almost forgot—we have a couple of extra crew members we didn’t count on before. A couple of marines—Sergeant Ramirez and Corporal Williams.”

“Marines! What happened?”

“It’s okay. I’ve interviewed them at length, and they’re good men—a valuable addition to the team. I actually should have thought about it before.”

“Thought about what? What are you gonna do with them?”

“Security. If anything unexpected ever happens, it will be good to have some marines on our side. For right now, I’ll send them up to stand watch. Give them each a pair of binoculars and a post on opposite sides of Platform Alpha. We’ll have them keep watch for any small craft that might wander into the area but not show up on your surface search radar.”

“Okay,” Dwight agreed. “You’re right, it sounds like a good idea.”

“Oh, and Dwight…either find them each a post that’s covered, or get them some coveralls like the rest of your crew. If this overcast sky clears up, I don’t want any surveillance satellite spotting marines walking around on what is supposed to be an out-of-commission civilian oil rig. It wouldn’t look good, if you know what I mean.”

“Absolutely. We’ll keep them out of sight of Big Brother’s probing eyes.”

Chapter 28

Platform Alpha

Pappy gave George a confused look. “What the heck’s a sub-fighter?”

“Oh, a little project I’ve been working on for ten years or so—mostly with my own time and money, and a
little
help from Dwight,” George answered nonchalantly. “You’d be surprised what you can do on a shoestring budget when you have a cousin in the manufacturing business!”

“Okay, but what is this thing, and what makes it a
fighter
?”

“Well, let’s compare aircraft and submarines. They’re similar because they both move through a fluid medium—one through air and one through water. So when you look at the shape of a submarine and the size of its control surfaces, what does it remind you of in terms of aircraft?”

“A blimp or dirigible.”

“Right. And how fast and maneuverable were the old lighter-than-air dirigibles compared to later heavier-than-air airplanes?”

“They sucked.”

“Exactly. And how is it that a submarine maintains its depth when it’s sitting still?”

“Ballast tanks,” replied Pappy. “We flood some of the ballast tanks to dive and pump air into them to surface. To maintain a depth, we flood or pump until we achieve neutral buoyancy.”

“That’s right. So effectively, a submarine hovering under water is like a blimp hovering in the air. And it’s just about as maneuverable. In your words, it sucks.”

“Yeah, but I can’t see how you can do anything about it. I mean, without using ballast tanks we could drive the boat up to the surface using the dive plane, if we had enough headway, but if we slowed down any, we would sink. We would have to blow the ballast tanks to stay on the surface.”

“That’s great in-the-box thinking, Pappy. I would have expected more from you! I think we’ll send you back to World War One—you’ll fit in perfectly!”

“All right, all right—quit giving me grief, Captain. Just tell me what the heck these things are!”

“OK, they’re two-man submarines. They’re heavier than water with no ballast tanks. So they have to maintain headway to maintain depth. Just think of them as the sharks of the submarine community—they have to keep moving or they die. They’re sleek, hydrodynamic, with very little drag. They have wings. Not quite like an airplane, but relative to their size, their wings are much larger than the little excuses for control planes that submarines currently have. With larger wings and control surfaces, they have tremendous maneuverability, and the lift produced by those wings greatly reduces the amount of headway needed to maintain depth. In fact, they can maintain depth, fully loaded, at less than five knots.”

“That’s nice to know, but they still need propulsion even to maintain that slow speed, don’t they?”

“True enough. For propulsion, they have a unique system I designed in cooperation with a marine biologist. Compared to the noise we have to make in order to turn that screw back there on the
Louisiana
, these little guys are silent. They make the “silent service” seem like a drag strip! Ever been to a drag strip?”

“Yeah, don’t go without ear plugs!”

“That’s right, but hey, I have a better comparison. Ever been on the deck of an aircraft carrier during a launch and recovery?”

“Yeah, I was on a carrier for one of my midshipmen cruises at the Academy,” replied Pappy. “After hearing the incredible level of noise on the flight deck, it seemed to me the carrier was a sitting duck. All the enemy had to do was
listen
. I bet you could hear that thing with the naked ear from twenty miles away! It’s funny, because at one point, I thought I might want to be a fighter pilot!”

“Well don’t give up yet. You still might get your chance—only just a little different from how you pictured it as a midshipman!”

“Tell me more, Captain. Now you have my attention!”

“The hydrodynamic design of these fighters enables the electric propulsion system to push them along at over fifty knots, totally silent. In a way, they’re kind of a throwback to the old World War Two diesel-electric boats, which used electric motors for propulsion when submerged. Those old boats didn’t have today’s battery technology, though, which meant they had to surface a lot or snorkel to run their diesels and recharge their batteries. But any submariner who has ever been in an exercise against a diesel-electric boat knows they were extremely quiet when submerged—and extremely difficult to detect. Well believe me, our sub-fighters make
those
guys sound like the drag strip!”

“I’m going to have to study these things, Captain, to see how you did it.”

“You’re welcome to do that, but since it’s overcast today and Big Brother can’t watch us from above, let’s launch one instead. You can experience a sub-fighter for yourself, firsthand. I’ll get Dwight to demonstrate, and you can get your first familiarization flight, FAM-1, at the same time.”

“Really? You mean…I can get checked out in a sub-fighter? Now?”

“I’m going to be relying on you to be my lead pilot, Pappy. You and two of the lieutenants will rotate flying duties, so you’re going to have to get checked out sooner or later. And there’s no time like the present. Let’s go see Dwight.”

The captain and XO made their way up the stairway from the conning tower to the main deck of Platform Alpha. The XO, who had never been on an offshore oil rig, looked around in amazement. It was huge, with ladders and machines everywhere.

“This reminds me of being on an aircraft carrier,” he said.

“There are a lot of similarities. This place is like a city at sea. The kitchen and mess hall are on this deck along with the laundry room, the head, the showers, the bunkrooms, and the rec room where the crew can play pool or watch TV. That machinery over there is a desalinization plant for making fresh water from seawater. Up above are the working spaces. We can take this ladder right here up to Dwight’s office.”

The captain led the way, and when they arrived, Dwight was standing at a large whiteboard mounted on the far wall. The board extended the full length of one side of the room and was filled with tasks and timelines for getting the
Louisiana
back to sea within two days. Dwight indicated the beginning and ending of tasks with small triangles connected by a horizontal line. The length of the line indicated how long the task should take. When a task was started, Dwight colored in the triangle at the beginning of the line, and when the task was completed, he colored in the triangle at the end of the line. In Dwight’s usual “low-tech” manner, a vertical string was tacked at the top and bottom of the board. The string represented current time and was repositioned to the right every half hour. Any tasks to the left of the string should have been completed by now, and tasks to the right of the string were yet to be done.

Seeing the captain and XO enter, Dwight pointed proudly to the board. Thanks to the overcast day, his team was at least six hours ahead of schedule. A number of the triangles to the right of the string were already filled in.

“Very impressive, Dwight. Your team is going like gangbusters!”

“You betcha. We aim to please!”

“Well, since you’re so far ahead of schedule, and we don’t have to worry about satellite snoops today, how about taking Pappy for a FAM-1 flight?”

“I’d love to. I was hopin’ to get another chance to fly one of those babies before you took them away! Let’s go…they’re in the hangar sittin’ on dollies. They’re both charged up and ready to go so we’ll push one out to the exterior hoist and lower it to the water.”

“Uh…one question first,” said the XO. “How are you going to recover us? I understand these things have to keep moving or else they sink.”

“Good question,” said Dwight. “We have a net, which we lower into the water with the hoist. We spread the net out to form a barricade. Then, when we complete our flight, we simply fly the fighter into the net and get hoisted out.”

Pappy gave Dwight a skeptical look, and Dwight further assured him, “Believe me, Pappy, we’ve done dozens of test flights on these babies, and the recovery is a piece of cake!”

Pappy gave him a nod, not really convinced, and the three men walked together into the hangar. Pappy let out a low whistle as he caught sight of the fighters. “Wow, you were right, Captain, these things
do
look like a cross between an F-104 and a Mirage fighter—this is incredible!”

As Pappy walked around the fighter admiring its sleek lines, he noticed something unusual. “Captain, I think we have a problem here.”

“What’s the problem?”

“These fighters don’t have their screws mounted yet, and there aren’t any shafts to mount them on!”

George laughed and said, “They don’t use screws in the conventional sense. When you say ‘screw’, you mean a propeller. For normal cruising, the sub-fighters have a propulsion system which uses an
impeller
instead.”

“An impeller?”

“That’s right. It’s kind of like a backward propeller mounted inside a rotating tube. In this design, the impeller gives us two major advantages over a conventional propeller. First, it’s quieter. The impeller is much less likely to cavitate, and if it does, much of the noise is muffled because it’s inside a tube.”

“Why is it less likely to cavitate?”

“Well, as you know, cavitation occurs when an object traveling rapidly through the water creates an area of low pressure on its back side. The low pressure causes air dissolved in the water to form bubbles, and the bubbles make a lot of racket.”

“Sure, Captain, every submariner knows that. But why is an impeller better?”

“A conventional propeller is mounted on a central shaft with the blades radiating outward from the shaft. When the shaft rotates the propeller, the tips of the blades are the farthest from the shaft (the center of rotation) and therefore travel with the greatest speed. Typically, cavitation first occurs at the tips of the blades, where their speed is the greatest. An impeller, on the other hand, is formed by blades radiating
inward
from the walls of a hollow tube. Water flows freely through the tube from the bow of the fighter to the stern. The tube itself rotates, and the blades, which are mounted on the inside of the tube, rotate with it. Since the blades radiate inward, the tips of the blades are nearest the center of rotation, where their speed is the least. Therefore, the tube and the blade can rotate at much higher speeds without cavitating. The result is a high velocity jet of water being expelled from the rear of the tube and driving the fighter forward.”

“Wow, that’s a great design,” said Pappy. “But you said there were two advantages to using impellers. What’s the other one?”

“The other one has to do with survival. If these sub-fighters had propellers, and one happened to hit a hard object and get damaged or knocked off, what would happen to the fighter?”

“Oh yes, I see. You would be headed straight for the bottom—Davy Jones’s locker! Since these things have to maintain headway in order to maintain their depth or to climb, if you lose a prop, you’re sunk.”

“Exactly. With impellers, we don’t have that problem.”

“Good thinking, once again. I also see there’s a hatch on top. I understood the normal way in and out of the fighter would be through the hatch on the bottom. So I take it this is some sort of emergency escape hatch?”

“That’s right,” said Dwight, “but we’re gonna use it today because there’s not enough clearance under that dolly to get in from below.”

A small forklift truck was hooked to the dolly, and one of Dwight’s men pulled the fighter out of the hangar to the external hoist. Pappy and Dwight got into the fighter with Dwight initially in the pilot’s seat and Pappy in the sonar operator’s seat.

As the hatch was closed, Dwight said, “Strap yourself in, Pappy. You’ve got a lap belt with a fittin’ to hold the two D-rings from the shoulder harnesses. Just slide those two rings onto the post and then lock it down. You can pull on the loose end of the lap belt to tighten everything. This is truly an underwater fighter, so you’ll need to be strapped in pretty tight.” Pappy followed Dwight’s instructions and then announced, “Okay, I’m all set.”

Dwight, who had been watching Pappy strap in, said, “No, cinch it up tighter.”

“What? It’s tight already.”

“You call that tight? My grandmother straps in tighter than that on Southwest. You’re free to get up and move about the country!”

“Okay, okay.” Pappy pulled the end of the lap belt another inch or two through the fitting. “There. I can’t pull it any tighter without cutting off circulation!”

“All right. Just remember, I told you so. When we get started, I’ll demonstrate a few features, and then we can trade positions so you can get a feel for it yourself.”

“That’s fine. Believe me, I’m a little bit intimidated by this thing right now.”

“Not to worry. You’ll find this thing very easy to fly.”

They put on their headsets, tested the intercom, and tested the communication link with the hoist operator. Dwight gave the operator the go-ahead for water insertion. The hoist lifted them into the air on the end of a cable, swung them over the side of the platform, and lowered them forty feet to the water.

“All right, ten feet,” Dwight told the operator.