Scorpion in the Sea

FORTY

“You better git,” Mike said, without conviction.

“You throwing me out of your bed, Sailor?”

Diane lay on her side, her upper body propped up on one elbow. Her right breast was level with Mike’s right eye. He spoke again; the breast appeared to be paying attention.

“That plane came in at least an hour ago, and you are going to have some questions to answer.”

“It’s not like I don’t have all the answers,” she said. “I think I could say with a straight face that I’d been out fucking my brains out, and J.W. would give me a condescending smile and say something clever about going to a brain fucking contest unequipped.”

Mike adjusted the level of his right eye and made a tentative probe with his tongue.

“Looks like you’re equipped to me. From this aspect, that is.”

The bedside phone began its electronic trilling. Diane swung herself out of bed and headed for the bathroom.

“If that’s for me, I might as well stay here,” she said as she closed the door.

“Captain,” grunted Mike, pulling the phone across the bed from the bedside table.

“Yes, Sir, Captain, Ben here,” came the XO’s voice. “I think it’s not over.”

Mike groaned, and switched on the bed’s reading light. He could hear the sounds of the shower coming from the bathroom. He looked at his watch. Woman liked to live dangerously, he thought.

“OK, what’d Chief Mac find out?”

“Uh, I think it might be better if you saw this stuff for yourself, Sir. Can maybe we come out to the boat?”

Mike glanced over at the bathroom door. The shower noises had stopped.

“Yeah, uh, sure, XO,” he said, thinking quickly. “But make sure you bring along the presentation stuff we gave the Commodore, though.”

The Exec seemed to hesitate for a second.

“Uh, Aye, aye, Sir. I think Linc’s got that squirreled away in his room; we’ll have to go find it. We’ll be out in about twenty, maybe thirty minutes.”

“That’s fine, XO. See you here. You get chow?”

“Yes, Sir. I had dinner on board. Meat loaf.”

“Meat loaf, hunh? Thirty-weight or forty-weight?”

“Forty weight at least.”

“OK, I’ll have some decent Scotch ready. See you in a bit.” He hung up as Diane came back out of the bathroom, drying her hair vigorously with a towel. She retrieved her various articles of clothing, and put them on while continuing to rub the towel through her hair. Mike lay back and enjoyed the show of dexterity and wondered what might be accomplished in five minutes or so. She caught his look and smiled, picked up her purse and went back into the bathroom to tend to her makeup. She was back out in three minutes. Her eyes were shining; she fairly exuded an aura of well being.

“I’m impressed,” said Mike, looking again at his watch. “But you need to dim that glow a little; the whole world will know what you’ve been doing.”

“Not to worry,” she said. “J.W. hasn’t seen that glow for ten years. He wouldn’t recognize it even if he did notice. I’ll have my machine call your machine.”

She blew him a quick kiss before he could say anything else, and slipped through the bedroom door. Hooker gave her a wolf whistle as she went through the lounge. “Hooker needs a girl friend,” she called in a sing song voice from the hatchway.

Mike got up and headed for the shower himself. He figured he had about twenty minutes to get cleaned up and dressed in something that might suggest to his two visitors that he had been doing something more Captain-like than fucking his brains out for the past few hours. The Chief would probably not be fooled. He hoped that they would not pass Diane on the two lane road that led from the base to the marina. He was also grateful for the size and layout of the houseboat, which made it possible to separate the bedroom cabin from the main lounge. Maybe he would take them straight back to the back porch deck, at least for long enough to let the A/C system clear out the redolence of sex.

He was tempted to linger in the shower as he let the hot water soothe his muscular body. They did by God make the music together. He wondered now why the hell he had always sought out the younger women among the beach bunnies. Diane had to be close to forty, and yet she was infinitely more satisfying in bed than any of the nubile young lovelies. He acknowledged to himself that he still had much to learn about women. He chased away a disturbing tendril of thought about the possible consequences of an affair with the Chief of Staffs wife with the rationalization that the Chief of Staff would have more to lose from public exposure than he, an already out of favor Commander. Sounded good, anyway.

He was dressed in slacks, loafers, and sport shirt when the Exec and Chief Mackensie picked their way across the piers to the Lucky Bag, their khaki-clad figures appearing and disappearing through the circles of light shining down from walkway lights atop the pilings. The Chief was carrying several charts rolled up under his arm, and the Exec carried two briefcases. He greeted them at the gangplank, and escorted them back along the main deck to the screened porch overlooking the intracoastal waterway, thereby avoiding the interior of the boat. The waterway was quiet, with only a few boats plodding down the channel. The air was beginning to cool off after the heat of the day.

He set out three glasses, a silver water pitcher, an ice bucket, and pointed the tip of a bottle of Glenlivet at each in turn.

“I have club soda if you prefer,” he said.

“A little water’s fine, Cap’n,” said the Chief.

“Fine for me, too, Sir,” said the Exec.

Mike poured out the whiskey, and then sat back in the wicker arm chair while the other two adjusted their drinks.

“OK, guys. What did we learn from the good ship Deyo?”

Chief Mac leaned forward, putting his drink down on the edge of the glass topped table. He reached down to the floor for his collection of rolled up charts, scattering them around his chair until he found the waterfall print he was looking for. He unrolled it on top of the table into the circle of yellow light from a brass standing lamp. The paper was flimsy, like the variety used in a facsimile machine, and the light breeze from the water lifted the paper. The Exec pinned down one corner, and Mike another. The Chief reviewed with them what the lines meant, and then showed Mike the little red tick mark on the side of the waterfall.

“Right here,” he said, “the passive operator saw that all the lines were beginning to draw together, makin’ a mess. So he changed the frequency scale, which means that individual frequency lines are now separated by more physical space on the paper trace. You can see that here. Now, look right below this area.”

“Those thick lines?”

“Yes, Sir. They start up right about here on the timeline, and they’re way over here on the left, that’s the low freq side. These are primaries, these here are harmonics. See how close the harmonic lines are together? That’s another indicator of low freq noise: second harmonic of 10 Herz is only 20 Herz, whereas the second harmonic of 50 Herz is a 100. If the sound source is a big thumper, the harmonics all draw real close to the base freq.”

“Which means?”

“Which means a big fuckin’ diesel came on line right about the time the passive operator spread out the trace. And stayed on line: nice and stable, see—” He unrolled more of the scrolled trace. “You look down the trace for another hour and you see the smaller engines changing up and down — fishermen changing their boats’ position a half a mile or so, and then slowing back down. This thing stays the same.”

“Like a big diesel generator,” said Mike softly, staring down at the line trace.

The Chief leaned back in his chair, nodding his head, but holding up two fingers, and staring at Mike.

“Two? Two engines?” said Mike.

“Yes, Sir. Two.”

“But the trace only shows one set of lines.”

The Chief nodded, reached for his drink, took a hit, and then put it back down, and reached under the table again. He unrolled a second trace chart on top of the first one.

“I had me a talk with the guy who was on the active console that night. Because they were doin’ passive search, they of course had the big SQS-53 shut down, so he didn’t have anything to do but stay awake. The passive guy made a head call right about when the big engine came up, so it was actually the active guy who marked the trace. Now, the Deyo bein’ a fancy ASW boat, they always record on mag tape what the array is drawing on the paper trace.”

“So?” asked Mike.

The Exec leaned forward, joining the discussion.

“It means that they can replay the whole thing after the fact, anytime they want. So Chief Mac had ’em replay it, and he sent the replay to the paper trace again.

“Only this time,” continued the Chief, “I had the passive processor do a frequency diversity algorithm on the signal coming off the mag tape before it went to the paper. The computer takes the broadband signal and breaks it down into all of its parts, and does a statistical comparison between what it’s listening to and the normal statistical distribution of individual frequencies in a sound like that. If there’s a difference, it concludes that there are two sources, so it does a sort to see if it can construct two sound lines, each with the correct distribution of frequency components and harmonics. If it can, we get this—” He unrolled a new paper trace. “You can see right here that the two big black lines are separated by an RCH, which equates to two sound sources, similar, but still two separate sources.”

“Two generators.”

“Which, if it’s a diesel sub, would indicate a Foxtrot,” said the Exec. “They have three main engines; they’d snort with two, and keep one lined up for a crash dive.”

“So what we gotta do now,” said the Chief, “is get a training tape of a Foxtrot on the diesel, and make some comparisons.”

Mike sat back in his chair, and considered the enormity of what they were telling him.

“What else could it be?” he asked.

“It could also be a medium sized merchant ship with twin diesel main engines, going either up or down the coast beyond radar range of the Deyo, but within a convergence zone of the Deyo’s passive sonar,” the Exec said.

“Were the water conditions right for convergence?” asked Mike, already knowing the answer. “Not deep enough, is it?”

“You got it, Skipper,” said the Chief. “But shallow water will sometimes channel sound for a long way, especially coming over the continental shelf. They coulda been listening in a sound channel; without radar contact, they’d have nothing to correlate this source with. That sound coulda been coming from sixty miles away, and their radar is good for about twenty-five. So it could be surface noise.”

“But you don’t think so, do you?”

“No, Sir. It’s real unlikely.”

“And the lines show almost no bearing drift,” interjected the Exec. “A merchie underway in steady state steaming conditions would move across the bearing circle. They only go in two directions out here: into or away from port, and up and down the coast. Into and out of port directions would have eventually produced doppler; parallel to the coast would have produced bearing drift. We’ve got neither.”

Mike nodded thoughtfully, swirling the ice cubes around in his drink. Then something else occurred to him.

“Why didn’t the Deyo report this?” He looked from the Exec to the Chief.

“That’s also kinda interestin’,” the Chief said. “Seems like the two operators told their Chief, and the Chief told the ASW officer, and the ASW officer took it up the line, and then came back and told the Chief to forget about it. So he forgot about it, until I come askin’ around.”

Mike looked at the Exec. “Comment?”

The Exec shook his head. “All I can figure is the Deyo CO was predisposed to ignore anything that came out of this search drill.”

“Or he was told to bury it, maybe,” speculated Mike.

“Possible,” said the Exec. “But not likely. It was the Commodore who tasked him to do this, and I don’t think the Commodore would have told him to record the diesel band but ignore the results, if any.”

“I wasn’t thinking of the Commodore,” replied Mike as he leaned back in his chair, his face in the shadow outside of the lamplight.

“Pierce Marshall keeps himself pretty well plugged in to the Group Staff, because that’s where the nearest Admiral is. I’m wondering if Group didn’t know about Deyo’s little project, and if someone on the Group staff didn’t instruct Deyo on how to play this one.”

The Chief studied his glass, as he realized that the discussion was rapidly getting above his paygrade. Mike noticed his discomfiture, and shut it off.

“OK, XO, tomorrow, you, the Chief here, and Linc redo our presentation, and fold in this new data. I’m apparently on the Commodore’s calendar first thing tomorrow, so I’ll give him the gist of this, and suggest that the four of us go over it with him again, in his office this time. I’m also going to suggest he get Commander Barstowe into it. He’s a level head and a straight shooter. Maybe when he sees it cold for the first time he can find a hole in this deal.”

“Aye, aye, Sir,” said the Exec, finishing his drink. The Chief did likewise and began to gather up the trace charts.

“Chief,” said Mike, “can you get those comparison tapes from the local ASW training office here on the base?”

“No, Sir, they won’t have ’em, but the Spruances carry a collection of those tapes for their mag trainers; I’ll go to one of the other ships and ask to borrow the use of it.”

“Can we play those tapes?”

“Goldy? No, Sir, no way. But I can get them to run the tape and push it to the trace paper; it’s the paper we want, anyway, so’s we can compare it to these waterfalls.”

“Good man,” said Mike. “Keep it discreet — I think you can see we have two problems here.”

The Chief grinned “Gotcha, Cap’n. Long as we can go back out there and go find this sewer pipe, I don’t care what kinda games we gotta play ashore.”

Mike grinned back. “That’s exactly what I want to do,” he said. Beyond the porch screens, the waterway was lost in the moonless darkness.