Scorpion in the Sea

FIFTY-THREE

Mike awoke suddenly, as if sensing an intruder. The sound of thunder rumbled across the darkened river. Lightning flickered against the windows of the cabin, and the rain from the latest squall line continued to drum on the deck above. He could feel the persistent slap of small waves against the transom of the boat.

Diane lay asleep in the crook of his arm, her legs wrapped over his, her breathing deep and regular. His arm was asleep, but he did not try to move it, choosing instead to look at her as she slept. After their first frantic coupling on the couch, he had carried her back to his bedroom, where they had tried it all again, pacing themselves this time. He had been touched by her murmurs of need as he brought her to climax a second time. When she was spent, he held her on top of him, wrapping his arms around her and kissing her hair until they both fell asleep. She moved.

“Oh,” she said, opening her eyes and finding him awake, looking at her.

“Oh, indeed,” he replied. They kissed, and he felt himself stirring again.

“Unh-unh,” she moaned. “I have to be able to walk out of here tomorrow.”

The thought of her having to leave deflated him at once, as the real world intruded. She rolled away to the side of the bed.

“Is the bathroom still in there?”

“Sure is.”

She groaned as she got up from the bed, moving gingerly.

“Want a light?”

“No; it would spoil the glow.” He smiled in the gloom as she closed the door to the bathroom.

He got up, thought about putting on his robe, and then decided against it, and looked out the portholes at the river junction. Occasional spears of lightning painted photo flash pictures of the choppy water and the masts of the fishing boats weaving from side to side in the rainy gusts outside. It was the back of the storm, though; the dark mass of clouds was moving rapidly offshore. Diane emerged from the bathroom.

“All yours,” she said, as she flopped onto the bed.

He went in and took care of business, and then came back out to the bedroom. She was lying on her stomach across the bed, her head turned sideways on her folded arms, her buttocks white and round in the flickering light of the storm. He went over to the bed, and carefully straddled the backs of her thighs, holding most of his weight on his knees and hands. He kissed the back of her neck, and pressed himself between her thighs, insistent, searching.

“You promised,” she murmured.

“No, I didn’t.”

“You are going to have to carry me from here on out, Captain,” she sighed, as she moved with him at last.

“Least I can do,” he said, before he found her again and went inside in one smooth thrust. She groaned at the feel of him, and he lay there for a long minute, savoring the exquisite warmth of her body. He drew back, and, holding her hips, pulled her up onto her knees, and then entered her again, deep this time, gradually building his rhythm, trying to make it last but finally letting go in a surge of powerful stroking until he came so intensely it almost hurt. He held her when he was done, his arms locked around her waist and his face on her back. He could hear the hammering of his heart, and realized he was out of breath. After a few minutes she straightened out on her belly again, pulling away from him, turning over on her side, and reaching for him, cradling his head in her breasts until he was still.

“I can’t get enough of you,” he said, after a while. His voice was muffled by her arms.

She stroked his cheek. “In case you haven’t noticed, I’m having the same problem.”

He looked up at her, trying to see her face, but it was in shadow.

“I knew I was in bad shape, ever since the O’Club,” she continued.

“The O’Club?”

“When we collided in that doorway. Your hand touched my stomach. I felt like I’d been branded for the next week. Just an inadvertent touch. I didn’t realize how badly I needed a man to just love me, like you did just now.”

“One way Charlie, I’m afraid.”

She giggled. “So you’ll owe me.”

“I always pay my debts, Madam.”

“See that you do, kind Sir, only not tonight, please.”

He looked up at her face in the half light.

“Did you hear the one about the sex survey guy who knocks on this lady’s door one morning, tells her he’s conducting a sexual practices survey, and asks if she would be willing to answer a few questions for their statistical records. She says yes, so he goes through a whole long list of stuff, and then finally asks her if she smokes after making love. She thinks about it for a moment, and then says, I don’t know; I’ve never looked …”

She hooted, falling back on the bed and laughing with him until they both had tears in their eyes. He moved up alongside her, looking into her eyes, tracing her features with his fingertips.

“You really are lovely,” he said. “We’re both kinda out of control here, but the more it goes on, the less I care.”

She stared back at him, her eyes wondering at her own feelings. A multitude of expressions fled through her mind, each of them sounding more trite than the last one. I’ve never done this sort of thing before, she wanted to say, except that it sounded so ridiculous. He watched her struggle for words, and put a finger on her lips.

“I know. I’ve been a bachelor all my life. I wasn’t kidding about my hangup about married women. But you, well, I just had to have you. You’ve swept me away, and I don’t even think you meant to do it. It’s completely crazy, but, God, it’s wonderful. Now, don’t say anything. That way you’re free to do whatever you want.”

Her eyes misted over, and she pulled his face down to her lips. They held each other for a while longer, alone with their thoughts but not alone in their need. Then his stomach growled, and she started giggling again.

“OK, OK, people, it’s chow time in the city.” He got up from the rumpled bed, and pulled his robe on.

She swung her legs out of the bed, and sat unsteadily on the edge of the bed for a moment. He laughed and brought her a robe, and helped her into it. She leaned against him, her arms wrapped around his neck for support.

“Rubber legs, I’m afraid,” she said softly.

“All in a good cause, Madam.”

He walked her out to the lounge and lowered her down gently on the leather couch, and turned on some more lamps. Hooker grumbled at being awakened. Mike went to the bar, and pulled a bottle of Riesling out of the refrigerator. Opening it carefully, he filled two wine glasses, and brought them over to the couch, and went into the galley to make dinner.

“I want you to know that I had to lay out a screen before you arrived,” he called from the galley.

“A screen?”

“Yeah. I forgot that my Exec, Ben Farmer, was coming out here this afternoon. I had to alert Maxie Barr — he’s the guy owns this marina — to watch for your arrival and divert you if Ben was still here.”

Diane had a fleeting image of another car following her into the parking lot, but she had not really paid attention to it when she made the dash for the marina office. She did remember the older guy in the office, but he had made no visible effort to divert her from seeing Mike after she asked him to call the Lucky Bag.

“I guess he must have been gone by the time I got here,” she said.

“Yeah, he’d left about fifteen minutes before you called from the office. If you’d been five minutes later, I’m not sure the phones would even have worked.”

“You must be a mean man to make your XO come to work on Saturday,” she said.

He came out with the wine bottle and sat down. The aroma of shrimp drifted into the lounge.

“I guess I can tell you about this,” he said, sitting down. “It’s a little operation that the Commodore and I are running. Nobody at Group knows about it, and we’d both be in the shit if they did.”

She sat forward, interested. Mike once again made the mental observation that this was a Captain’s wife. It seemed to him that there were two kinds of Navy wives: those that knew a hell of a lot about the profession, and those that knew almost nothing. Diane was obviously of the former variety.

“It’s that damned submarine thing,” he began.

“I’m surprised,” she said. “J.W. told me the Admiral had squelched that whole business. He said that you all thought it was a Libyan sub? Waiting to ambush the Coral Sea?”

“Right; I know it sounds farfetched, but actually you gave me the idea when you noted that other countries have diesel subs besides the Soviets.”

“And you and the Commodore briefed the Admiral? J.W. was a little miffed that the Admiral came by himself, by the way. But he said once the Admiral heard the story, he decided that the whole thing had gotten out of hand and was just a pipedream, and that the mystery submarine issue was now officially over. Are you saying it’s not?”

“Officially, yes, it’s over. Unofficially …”

Mike took a long pull at his wine before continuing.

“Basically, the Admiral said we were all nuts and ordered us to drop it. The next day the Commodore calls me to the Club for lunch and says he doesn’t want to drop it. He believes — and so, somewhat reluctantly, do I — that there might in fact be a Libyan sub waiting out in the Jax opareas for the Coral Sea. Might is the operative word. At least we think there’s enough evidence to warrant timing my next engineering sea trial to coincide with Coral Sea’s arrival sometime around next Thursday or Friday.”

“My God,” she said. “And Group doesn’t know this? What happens if you’re right?”

“We’ll have us a little gunfight at the OK corral, Ma’am, and everybody’d better hope Goldsborough wins.”

She thought about that for a moment. “And if it’s not true?”

“Then no big deal — Goldy went to sea to conduct engineering sea trials, saw the Coral Sea go by, paid her respects, did her trials, and came back in to gather some more rust, with, hopefully, nobody the wiser. Right now only three people know we’re even thinking about it — four, I guess: you, me, the Commodore and my Exec.”

She shook her head, and gathered her robe closer as if suddenly chilled.

“I’m having a little trouble with this,” she said. “You’re telling me you may go out to sea five, six days from now, with no help from all these other ships and air squadrons at Mayport, in search of a hostile submarine, and, if you find one, you’re going to try to sink it, and, presumably, it will try to sink you, and try to torpedo the Coral Sea?! How can you be just sitting here!?”

“Shucks, Pilgrim, it ain’t nothing,” Mike said in a passable John Wayne imitation.

“Mike, for God’s sake, get serious. You’ve got to tell somebody!”

“We did, remember?” he replied, his voice sharper than he meant it to be. “They all laughed. What’s worse, they were embarrassed by our ‘preposterous’ conjectures. And now, even if something happened between now and when the Coral Sea comes back in that substantiates our theory, I don’t think they’d go forward with it because they’ve sat on it for so long. They’d all look twice the fools.”

Diane stood up and walked slowly around the room. She suddenly looked to Mike like a woman who needed a cigarette. Mike felt a sudden flare of passion for her, not so much sexual wanting as a thrill of possession. Diane caught his look.

“Oh, stop,” she said, peremptorily. “There must be some way out of this box. All I’ve ever heard about ASW is that one ship versus one sub is no contest, that it takes a bunch of ships, airplanes, intelligence, sensors, and even then, good luck to find a submarine who doesn’t want to be found.”

Mike nodded, sitting back on the couch. “That’s all true,” he said. “Except this case is a little different. For one thing, assuming he continues to wait offshore, we know roughly where he has to be in order to make an attack on the carrier, and also, about when. All he will know about Coral Sea is that she has to come from the sea to Mayport. He may or may not know when, although if they have spies here, it’s hardly a secret when a carrier’s coming back. But that’s really all he has to know. So all he has to do is hang around the Mayport approaches, which is what this guy’s been doing, we think, and wait for the target to come to him.

“Second, he can’t just stay hidden on the big day — he has to come in and make an attack. That means he has to move, and he probably has to show a scope. The water is not deep, and Goldy happens to have a pretty good sonar for that kind of situation. We’ll probably go out there quietly, and then light off and make no secret about being there once the bird farm shows up, and hopefully complicate his attack a lot.”

“Sure,” she interrupted. “Until he torpedoes the Goldsborough.”

“Or we torpedo him. Either way, the carrier will be warned and hopefully will get away. Coral Sea can outrun a diesel submarine — not a nuke — but a diesel electric on the battery? Piece of cake. The trick is to warn him in time.”

“I know Jack Farrington, the GO of Coral Sea,” she mused, looking out at the remains of the rain squall through the porthole. The lights from the marina played a calico pattern across her face. She turned to look at Mike.

“He’s an aviator. He’d care a lot more about protecting his ship and his crew from a terrorist submarine than he would about the possibility of looking silly. Why don’t you send him a personal message?”

Mike shook his head.

“The Commodore has ordered me to tell no one. He feels that the only chance we have of even getting Goldy out there is if we keep the whole operation in very deep cover. If even a hint of it gets out, Group would see to it that Goldy stayed in port, and then Coral Sea arrives with no escorts. The best I’ll be able to do on-scene, assuming we gain some positive indication that there is a bad guy waiting out there, is to do something really extreme, like issue a floating mine warning to the carrier. Farrington might wonder what the hell, but the first thing he would do would be to turn out of the area, and that will allow us time to deal with the submarine. That way it’ll just be the two of us to duke it out.”

Diane gave him a long look.

“Now that’s a comforting scene, Oldy Goldy mano y mano with a submarine with all her torpedoes left and her primary target hauling ashes over the horizon.”

Mike grinned weakly. “Yeah, well, that’s the idea, isn’t it?”

She came back to the couch and sat down with him again.

“Mike, this thing scares me. Mayport is a peacetime base; everybody here is much more interested in politics and promotions than in real combat at sea; let’s face it, combat at sea is a pretty remote possibility. The battles here are all fought in the message traffic, by the achievement of face time, and with successes in the inspection schedule. Sure, on deployment it gets a little more real, but even that is mostly for the Captain’s fitness report. You’re talking about going out on a sea trial, with a patched up steam plant and a twenty-five year old destroyer, and taking on a submarine that’s come, what, five, six thousand miles with one burning objective, to destroy an aircraft carrier, and the only thing that’s going to be in his way is you? Are you really ready for this? Are your crew, your officers ready for this? I mean, I know I’m just a dumb Navy wife, but you’re talking about the real McCoy here: when a destroyer gets torpedoed a lot of people die — that’s why they call them tin cans, remember?”

Mike’s face grew serious.

“And when a submarine gets torpedoed, or depth charged, everybody dies, and yes, I’ve given this matter some thought. Remember — there’s a decent chance that we’re all wrong and that there is nothing there. Or there is something there but it has nothing to do with Coral Sea. It could still all be bullshit, and the Commodore is still checking out a couple of things. All we have to go on so far are disconnected hints, just a couple of sniffs that there’s something out there. On top of that, the top brass have dismissed the whole notion. That’s their prerogative, and they didn’t get to be top brass by being wrong all the time. They’ve applied their best professional judgement and decided that it just isn’t so.”

“Their best political judgement, you mean,” Diane said.

“Well, I don’t know that. At the Admiral’s age and station in life I’d guess his professional and political judgement are the same thing. Whatever, it’s their job to call it, and they’ve called it. Captain Aronson and I think differently. He’s willing to take the political risk, so I don’t think it’s unreasonable for Goldsborough and all of us sailors who’ve taken the King’s penny all these many years to go out and take the tactical risk. So we’re going to go out prepared to look, and if need be, fight this guy. If he exists. If, if, if …. It’s the best we can do, Diane.”

She moved over to be close to him, and he put an arm around her.

“Hey, I’m one of the good guys, remember? But promise me that the first hint you get that he’s really there, you’ll blow the whistle long and hard so that you get some help,” she whispered.

“Count on it, although I’m not convinced the higher ups would be predisposed to listen. But I think the Commodore will be sitting on one of his ships inport, and we’ll have a special circuit set up between us so that we can sound the alarm. The main problem is that it’s going to go pretty quick — the sub won’t show himself until the attack geometry is pretty mature, and then we’re all going to be very busy.”

Diane snuggled closer. She suddenly decided that she might not just sit back and wait for this little game to play itself out. But she would have to be very careful about how she approached the problem.

“When’s dinner ready?” she asked, with a smothered yawn.

“Excitement’s overwhelming you, isn’t it; lemme go check.”

twenty minutes later he brought back a tray of fresh shrimp baked in seasoned butter, hot French bread, and a spinach salad made with mandarin oranges and almonds. They ate hungrily, enjoying each other’s company, the submarine pushed back from their thoughts for the time being.

After dinner they cuddled on the couch for another hour, talking and being close. She talked some more about her years as a Navy wife. She admitted expecting a guilty conscience, but in fact she felt better, more complete than she had for years. Neither of them spoke about love, preferring to let it build without the help of words for a while. A final band of showers passed overhead, and they sat in silence with their thoughts as the rain drummed on the deck above. The submarine hovered at the perimeter of both their consciousnesses, like a faint but disturbing sound in a house late at night.