Scorpion in the Sea

FORTY-TWO

Mike sat in an armchair in Barstowe’s office waiting for the Commodore to finish a meeting with three other Commanding Officers. The DesRon 12 staff was humming again now that the Commodore had returned from Norfolk. Mike noted that there was much coming and going through the suite of offices in the old building. Barstowe had taken a quick briefing from Mike on the status of Goldsborough’s engineering repairs, and was now on the phone with the base police about a traffic accident involving a staff yeoman.

Life goes on, Mike thought. He was always struck by the diversity of responsibilities imposed on senior officers in the Navy, whether ashore or afloat. Every facet of everybody’s life was somehow mission related and therefore the Command’s business. He turned over for the hundredth time in his mind the whole business of the submarine, shutting out the intermittent stream of petty officers and junior officers coming in to see Barstowe.

Beyond the previous facts, what did they know: Deyo’s tapes revealed the presence of what could be a diesel powered submarine recharging her batteries on or near the surface. The ASW school had evaluated Goldsborough’s tapes as “possible.” Diane really liked to have the hollow of her throat kissed.

“Captain? The Commodore will see you now, Sir.”

With a mild flush rising across his face, Mike got up and followed the yeoman down the hall to the Commodore’s office, passing the three Commanders as they came through the batwing doors. They exchanged greetings, sizing each other up as CO’s did, and then he went into the Commodore’s office.

“Mike, sit down,” barked the Commodore. He continued to scribble on a yellow legal pad for a minute before putting it aside and looking up.

“So Deyo drew a blank, hunh?”

Mike took a deep breath. “Not quite, Commodore.”

Captain Aronson’s face began to gather in a frown. Mike went on to explain what his Chief had found out from the Deyo tapes. The Commodore had set his mouth in a flat line by the time Mike had finished.

“Lemme get this straight,” the Commodore said. “Deyo’s message said nothing there, but the tapes show the sound line of a snorkeling submarine?”

“What could be the sounds of twin main engines on a diesel boat, Commodore. And it could also be a distant merchie with a pair of big diesels transiting offshore and propagating the sound lines through an unusual convergence zone or sound channel. The point is that amongst the fishing boats out doing their thing in the Mayport opareas, two big diesels came up on the waterfall screen at around one in the morning, and ran for about three hours without bearing drift or doppler, and then faded off the displays.”

“Sonofabitch!” exclaimed the Commodore. He leaned back in his chair and studied Mike’s face before continuing.

“We both know that there’s not enough depth excess out there for convergence zones,” he said. “And the normal deep sound channel is at 3000 feet. So what’s your take on all this?”

Mike paused for a moment, glancing out through the large, tinted plate glass window at the forest of ship’s masts along the waterfront.

“I’m not sure what to make of it, Commodore,” he sighed. “If you want to believe that there’s been a unident lurking around the Jax opareas for the past couple of weeks, then you can make a lot of these things support the proposition. On the other hand, there’s ambiguity associated with each factor in the case.”

“Why do you suppose Deyo didn’t report the sound lines from the big diesels?”

“I’m not entirely sure, Commodore. According to my Chief, the presence of the sound lines were purportedly relayed up the chain in the ship, but the command ruled that it wasn’t worth reporting. The Chief got that from his counterpart in Deyo. Last night I suggested to my XO that maybe Deyo had been told to bury this whole deal, but the XO pointed out that you were the one tasking Deyo to go have a look in the first place.”

“And?”

“And, it’s not beyond the realm of possibility that one of the I.V.’s buddies up at Group told him to put a lid on it.”

The Commodore looked at him for a long moment, and then swivelled around in his chair to look out the large window himself. Without turning back, he began speaking, almost as if he were musing aloud.

“Something doesn’t quite add up here. We get this harebrained report of a U-boat sighting, we go look for something, find nothing, then a fisherman goes down for no apparent reason, leaving behind an oil slick and a nameboard with a bullet hole in it, the boat ending up on the bottom with no visible fatal damage, so we go out looking again, get a contact this time, lose it, get another one that acts a lot like a decoy — and I talked to the Master Chiefs up there at the School, by the way, and they think the decoy contact was indeed a decoy — lose that, give it all up for Lent, and now Deyo comes back in with a negative report, but their sonar gang has a waterfall that might be a pigboat on the snort. If it’s not a distant merchie …”

Mike spoke to the back of the big chair.

“The thing that I keep hanging up on is what XO has been calling the motive. If there is a gomer hiding out in the opareas, why the hell is he here? I mean, Chief Mac thinks it’s a Foxtrot. OK, say it’s a Foxtrot — is it reasonable that the Soviets would deploy a diesel electric antique into one of our fleet operating areas? It simply doesn’t wash. We speculated that it might be a test of some kind, something the Fleet Commander set up to see if we would notice, you know, his big readiness kick. Like the Barry business with the EW signal. But the USN doesn’t have any conventional boats. I’m stumped.”

The Commodore remained silent. Outside his office three phones began ringing at once. Monday morning. Except it was Thursday, Mike thought irrelevantly. The Commodore swivelled the chair back around again. It occurred to Mike that the Commodore suddenly looked older.

“So what do you recommend, Captain?” he asked softly.

Mike recognized the ploy — when you don’t know what to do, ask your subordinates for a recommendation. They might even come up with something. He took a mental deep breath.

“I recommend that Commander Barstowe come over to Goldy later on today and listen to the whole pitch, from start to finish. I presume he’s reasonably cold on the subject, so maybe he can give us an unbiased look. Maybe even come up with a course of action. I, for one, am not ready to go to the Group with this — there are too many technical ambiguities, even if we could get past the biggest question of why would this guy be here.”

The Commodore nodded.

“I concur. And, yes, Bill Barstowe is cold on it because I’ve kept him out of the loop so that at some point he could do just this kind of an appraisal. He knows we’re working an issue, but not the details. And I guess I have to go do some snooping up at Group to see who might be playing the backfield on this issue. When can you go to sea again?”

“The snipes tell me they’ll have that pump set back together by tomorrow, so we can light off probably Monday, and if everything tests out, get out to sea by Wednesday. We can go faster, but we’d have to work all weekend—”

The Commodore shook his head impatiently.

“No, no, I don’t want to get into that. It’s not like we’re talking about a deployment here. Keep an even strain going, but don’t bust your guys’ humps. Meanwhile, I’m gonna have to go scratch around on this submarine deal. The thing is, if we all decide down here that there might in fact be an unidentified boat out there, the next question is who do we send out. I mean, we have the world’s supply of heloes here, P-3’s over in Jax, Spruances — the best ASW forces in the Lant fleet. If it comes to it, we can probably find this gomer and smoke him out.”

“In shallow water, on the margins of the Gulf Stream, Commodore?”

The Commodore opened his mouth as if to speak, and closed it again. He paused, thinking.

“Yeah, you’re right. This whole deal’s been over the shelf, hasn’t it. What we’re talking about here is active sonar. Shit, Goldy’s the only straight stick active pinger we’ve got down here — all these other guys would just blow each other out of the water with those monster, low frequency sonars. But the heloes, now, the heloes could catch his ass, ’cause they can dip an active sonar into the water or drop active buoys. But I’m getting ahead of myself: we still haven’t concluded that there is a boat out there. Or why.”

“The why bit is the hard part,” said Mike, getting up. “You want me to talk to Bill?”

“No, I’ll brief him. Plan on this afternoon. I may even come along. Your people keeping this under wraps for now?”

“Yes, Sir, although we gained some more converts to the cause once Chief Mac showed the Deyo’s waterfalls to the other sonar girls.”

“OK; we’ll take a look this afternoon. You do understand that, if we all agree there’s the possibility of an unidentified submarine lurking in the opareas, we’ll have a national issue on our hands, not a local problem?”

“Yes, Sir,” said Mike glumly.

“OK. And before we get to that, of course, we’ll have to go up the mountain to see your good buddies at Group.”

“Yes, Sir. But I thought you were going to mention it to them up in Norfolk.”

The Commodore shook his head.

“The time wasn’t right — we were so wrapped up in budget drills and scheduling fights that I couldn’t bring myself to raise a Weird Harold like this. And before you say anything, yes, basically, I procrastinated — I wanted to see what Deyo came up with. This whole thing remains so ambiguous. But now I think we have enough data points that I have to take it up the line.”

“I can hardly wait,” said Mike.

“I don’t want to, either. But maybe Bill can see the flaw in this mess.”

Mike shook his head. “I feel like we ought to be going to GQ over this, not just sitting here talking about it. I realize that—”

“Yeah, that’s the problem,” interrupted the Commodore again. “We have barely enough steaming hours and flight hours allocated these days to keep basic readiness up to snuff, and nobody would give this story the time of day unless we have a very convincing case — like you said, we can make the various data points fit the curve, but the data points themselves don’t necessarily produce the curve.”

“And the basic question — if he’s there, why is he there?”

“Beats the shit out of me,” said the Commodore with a sigh. “But when we figure that out, then we may go to GQ.”

“I just don’t want to find it out the hard way,” said Mike.

“I’m open to suggestions, Captain. But until you or somebody thinks of something, let’s take another look at the ASW data. Absent the smoking gun, we’ll have to take this thing one step at a time. I’ll have Bill come over this afternoon.”