SSN - Tom Clancy [74]
For the officers, the same qualification petty officers checked out the candidates, as did the responsible department heads. Once the senior watch officer and the navigator, who was Cheyenne's third senior officer, made their recommendation to the executive officer and captain, a qualification board was held in the wardroom.
The reward for these officer qualifications were the much rarer and even more coveted gold dolphins, which designated the officer as "submarine warfare qualified." After Cheyenne's most recent war patrols, Mack felt that all her hands had earned this designation, and he was pleased that they had gotten the chance to catch up on this.
In addition to catching up on paperwork and officer qualifications, the respite also gave Mack the chance to have his junior officers practice their surfacing and diving of the submarine. But Mack didn't let that go too far. This was war, after all, and there was always the chance that some of those pesky Chinese Kilo SSKs were lurking about, so he instructed his junior officers to only simulate blowing the main ballast tanks. That restriction kept Cheyenne safe, and it didn't affect the quality of their practice at all.
Mack wasn't worried about their knowledge. He knew that they had learned, at least on a theoretical level, how to handle the boat. All the officers on Cheyenne were nuclear trained-training which had required all officers to complete Nuclear Power School in Orlando, Florida, along with training at one of the reactor prototypes, either in West Milton, New York; Arco, Idaho; or Windsor, Connecticut. This training had taken a year to complete, and it was so intense that they'd had to memorize volumes of information that, when stacked on top of each other, easily reached over six feet high. And it didn't end there. It was followed by a stint at the Naval Submarine School in Groton, Connecticut.
This was all before they ever got to their first submarine. Once on board, they had new reactor and propulsion plant manuals to study, supplemented by ship's information books, weapons manuals, and at least twenty more documents related to operations against what was now the enemy.
After all this. Mack wasn't worried about what they knew, but they needed practice and experience to go with all that book knowledge. It was the procedural steps and the feel of the ship under their feet that the JOODs needed to learn well enough so that they could surface and dive the ship in their sleep. And even more important, they needed to learn how to think on their feet, in case the unusual were to happen, which might not be covered in books.
Cheyenne's junior officers weren't the only ones boning up for qualification boards, either. Her executive officer was shooting for the "qualified for command" designation-but he didn't know that Mack had recommended him to CTF 74 prior to their last underway. His first hint that he'd better ready himself for the qual-for-command board was a message stating that their commodore, Commander Submarine Squadron Eleven (CSS 11) in San Diego, would be on board Arco, the floating repair dock, medium (ARDM-5).
Upon receiving that message, the executive officer initially expected that the board would consist of CTF 74, expectation changed, however, when Cheyenne received an operations directive routing them to Subic Bay instead of the safe anchorage off Brunei, where they had originally expected McKee and Arco to be located. Based on the rest of the message traffic, the executive officer wasn't sure there would be time for his qual board.
Message traffic indicated that IUSS (Integrated Undersea Surveillance System) had sniffs of a number of the newest operational class of Russian SSNs. the Akula II, heading south from the Sea of Okhotsk area toward the South China Sea - and the numbers did not match naval intelligence's initial expectations. Satellite imagery of Vladivostok showed