Scorpion in the Sea

THIRTY

When he returned to the ship, Goldsborough was tied up port side to the pier. Mike crossed the quarterdeck and made his way up the outboard side to avoid the press of sailors passing shore power cables and steam lines between the pier and the ship. The Exec caught up with him on the 01 level amidships as he was picking his way through the snarl of cables.

“That go OK, Skipper?” asked the Exec.

“Yeah; they weren’t interested in us after all,” replied Mike. He related the news about the Coral Sea as they walked forward.

“Damn. Sounds like they really got into it out there. She was due back here in a couple of weeks; I wonder if they’ll bring her home early. My neighbor’s the MPA. His wife is always a nervous wreck when the ship’s gone for a couple of months. Now she’ll be a basket case.”

They walked together through the radio passageway and up to the Captain’s cabin. The Exec had to walk behind Mike; there was not room for two men to walk abreast in the cramped passageway. Mike pitched his hat onto the bunk shelf and sat down. Hooker croaked some obscenity from the corner of the cabin.

“Up yours, bird,” said Mike. The XO remained standing; he had a folder of papers in his hands.

“So. We shut down?” asked Mike.

“Yes, Sir. We’re on the diesels right now, and expect shore power in about a half hour. Here is a bunch of paperwork that I’ve accumulated over the week which needs to get signed out by Monday, and also Linc wants to come see you before you shove off, tonight, if that’s possible.”

Mike frowned. It was after 2200, and he was tired. He did not feel like getting into a discussion with his ASW officer, especially since Linc would want him to explain why they had broken off the contact that afternoon. The Exec saw Mike’s expression.

“I told Linc he could have five minutes tonight,” he said hurriedly, “and that he was not to come in here all hot and bothered.”

“He was disappointed that we quit, wasn’t he?”

“Yes, Sir, but he’s a pretty professional guy for a junior officer. He got wound up in this thing, and he really believes we had something out there.”

“How do you recommend I handle this?”

“Like we discussed earlier — I think he wants reassurance that you’re not blowing this thing off. He’s got all his charts and tapes ready, but I told him that had to wait.”

“I can come back in tomorrow morning,” said Mike. “But I hate to make him and his Chief come in on a Saturday after a week at sea; the wives get an attitude about that.”

The Exec laughed. “Tell me about it.”

The Exec, like all Execs in the Navy, came in almost every Saturday morning for a few hours of undisturbed paperwork.

“OK, I’ll see him. Then I’m going to take this impolite bird and my weary ass home to the houseboat. Leave that stuff in my in-basket. You want to sit in on this?”

The Exec thought about it for a moment, trying to determine if Mike wanted him to stay or was just being polite.

“I think it’s you he really wants to hear this from, Captain. I kind of set the stage this afternoon, but I think he wants to be sure we’re not putting him off.”

Mike nodded and put on an injured expression.

“You’re a hard man, XO, making your poor, ole CO deal with this all by himself, abandoning me to the slings and arrows of an offended J.O. I guess nobody loves me but my parrot, and he craps on the rug all the time. I’ll remember this at fitrep time.”

The Exec grinned back at him. “Yes, Sir. I’ll get him up here.”

He left the cabin, and Mike went over to the perch and picked up his parrot.

“Hello, Bird,” he said.

He scratched the bright feathers on the bird’s neck. Hooker looked up at him sideways and then closed his eyes to concentrate on the neck rub. Mike stood by the single porthole in his cabin, staring out over the twinkling waters of the harbor basin in the moonlight. The bulk of the super-carrier Saratoga loomed against the carrier bulkhead across the basin, the detail of the 96,000 ton monster lost in the shadow of her own overhanging flight deck.

Once again he sympathized with the Captain of the Coral Sea, the other Mayport carrier, who was now going through all the hell of an accident investigation, although it sounded like it had been entirely the oiler’s fault. Still, he had lost some people and an aircraft. He remembered the pit in his stomach during the days of his own collision investigation. There was a knock on the door behind him.

“Come in,” he called.

Lincoln Howard stepped through the door. Howard was the sole black officer in the ship. He was of medium height and slim build, and he carried himself with a quiet dignity that belied his age. He was a Naval Academy graduate and an extremely sharp young man. Both his mother and father were civil servants in Washington, and every one of their five children had achieved success in professional careers. Mike thought he was one of the best officers in the wardroom, and so did most of his shipmates.

“Linc, sit down, please,” said Mike. “I’m pleased that you wanted to hang around tonight and talk about our little mystery out there.”

Howard cleared his throat nervously. He was always extremely polite and respectful around the more senior officers in the ship, to the point where they were careful not to kid him too hard because he tended to take it literally. He sat almost at attention on the edge of the couch which concealed the Captain’s folding bunk bed.

“Thank you, Sir, for seeing me tonight.”

He appeared to be working up to a prepared speech, so Mike cut him off. He remained standing, the parrot in the crook of his left arm.

“I know you guys were disappointed when I broke this thing off today, but it was not a frivolous decision, as I think the XO explained earlier.”

“Yes, Sir. He did, and I understand what you want to do.”

“OK, then, and if you can come in tomorrow morning, or Monday if you want, I’m ready to hear your rationale and look at the evidence that we really had a contact. But for now, I want your personal, professional opinion: do you really think that contact was a submarine?”

Linc cleared his throat again, and then plunged in.

“Yes, Sir, I do. I know I haven’t been at this very long, and I have to admit I’ve never seen a diesel electric submarine on the sonar. But that contact was different from anything else we’d seen out there. We’d had some solid contacts before, but they always kind of melted after a few minutes of pinging. The senior sonarmen, they know the difference; they can usually tell by the audio that a contact is marine life or a mud bottom or a heavy thermal layer. But everybody in sonar sat up on the first ping we got on this guy, Cap’n, and the Chief got on the stack himself after only a couple of pings. It was just like at ASW school — you know those trainer tapes, where the contacts are always perfect — it sounded like that. And we had a change in doppler, after we gained contact. That’s significant. The contact responded when we got on him.”

Mike paced the narrow space between his desk and the end of the cabin.

“And then you lost him,” said Mike. He regretted his terminology almost immediately. It sounded like an accusation, and he saw the flare of concern in Linc’s eyes.

“I didn’t mean that the way it sounds: you were unable to maintain contact.”

“Yes, Sir. We did. But the Chief said we would. We were right there on the margins of the Stream, so any solid contact was something of a fluke in that water — we knew he could slip into a thermal vortex and disappear. You remember we reported that the contact was intermittent due to layering. But when we had him, it was solid. The echoes damn near clicked at us. The fact that we got a contact of that quality in the Stream margins almost has to mean it was a real contact, because the other stuff we get out there would not have persisted for more than just a few pings. And then, of course, we had the decoy.”

Mike nodded again, and sat down in his desk chair. He held the parrot out over his trash can, and the bird obliged with an accurate bomb. “Good bird,” said the parrot, and Linc grinned, relaxing a tiny bit.

“What we’re gonna need, Linc,” Mike said finally, “is a reconstruction of this episode that is convincing, extremely convincing, because if you think I’m skeptical, wait till I run this by some of those staff officers.”

“We could have done a better job of that if we’d held him longer,” said Linc, his hands suddenly clenching the creases in his khaki trousers as he realized that his last comment sounded like a rebuke to his Captain.

“I understand, Linc. But I had my reasons. First, it was unlikely that you could regain contact; second, I wanted to think about this thing. I had never given any credence to this mystery submarine thing from day one — now all of sudden, sonar is telling me you think you have a real contact. Third, if we had gone booming around in a lost contact search, which I think both of us realize would have been something of a futile exercise because of where we were, and this was a submarine, we would have given away the fact that we were on to him. Now, think about this: we’re not at war, so why would some guy be out there in our fleet training areas? If it is a submarine, whose is it? What’s his mission? Could it maybe be one of ours, on some secret operation? And if it isn’t, were we walking into some kind of ambush? And finally, what do you do first when you think you’ve found a fire?”

“You call the fire department,” replied Linc.

“Right, and we’re not the ASW fire department. We’re a straight stick gun destroyer with an antique, active sonar.”

Mike paused to gather his thoughts.

“What I want to do next is for you guys to build a little presentation, a briefing, that shows where we were, the contact track history on a chart, and then some audio-visual stuff, where you show the kinds of contacts we had all week, and then this one, and, of course, the one you thought was the decoy. You need to show that both these contacts were unique. For my part, I’m going to start by telling the Commodore. He may or may not want to pursue it, and his decision will turn on our credibility and the likely political reaction he would get from Group and the higher-ups in Norfolk. You should realize that, if he takes it up the line, you’ll have to send your tapes off to the classification center in Norfolk for real technical analysis.

“Second, depending on how far we take this, we’ll have to prepare something of a defense: if we thought we had an unidentified sonar contact, why didn’t we report it through the normal reporting channels for such an incident.”

Mike could see that the same question had occurred to Linc, so he answered it himself.

“The basic answer is that ASW classification is a commanding officer’s function; that’s official Navy doctrine. And at the time, this commanding officer didn’t believe the data. Now, there’s some behind the scenes politics involved in all this: we were sent out to look for a sub, but it was kind of a wash, OK? Even the Admiral felt the thing was ludicrous, so we were sent out mostly to placate the press inquiries caused by a commercial fisherman reporting a submarine sighting, and their linking it to the loss of the Rosie III.”

“You mean this is news the Admiral won’t want to hear.”

“You got it. And, I think, from a political standpoint, the result may well be an evaluation that the CO was right, this was not a contact, and life goes on. We both know how ambiguous sonar contacts are.”

“But, Captain,” protested Line, “this was a contact. When you see the tapes and hear the audio, I think you’re gonna be convinced. Then what do we do if the higher ups clamp a lid on it?”

“That’s the tough question, Linc. But we’re not there yet. You do the first part, and get me up a convincing briefing. Factor in things like the nature of the bottom in the area, that business about the water conditions obscuring everything except a real submarine, the nearest wrecks, our bottom chart project: I want a show that will convince the Commodore that we’ve thought the thing through, and now we want maybe to go back out there, this time with some real ASW ships, and maybe take a harder look. That will also allow the staffs to query the U.S. submarine operations people, who may tell us to just forget the whole thing.”

Mike looked at his watch, and Linc quickly stood up.

“We’ll have a briefing ready for you tomorrow, Cap’n.”

“That would be fine, Linc. But don’t work on it tonight. Let everybody get some sleep so you start fresh. I’ll be in late, mid-morning, so we can do this in a civilized fashion.”

“Aye, Aye, Sir.”