Scorpion in the Sea

TWENTY-ONE

“Surface sonar contact bearing 100, range undetermined, closing, composition one, single screw. Evaluate merchant.”

“Very well.” The Captain hung up the phone by his rack, and glanced at the depth gauge above his bunk. Sixty meters. The submarine was in the rendezvous position, as she had been for two nights. There had been no contacts; this position was not on any routine sea lane. But now, in the third day of the rendezvous window, a single ship was closing the position. With any luck it would be the tanker, Ibrahim Abdullah. They would know in an hour, if the contact created the recognition signal. Precisely at midnight, local time, the tanker was to throw three hand grenades over the side. The noise would propagate for miles, and the submarine would come up. The weather had been perfect at the last periscope observation taken at sundown. The sonar station buzzed him again.

“Yes.”

“Sir, the contact has slowed to 20 rpm; she’s closing still, but very slowly now. Bearing still 100.”

“Very well. Protect your ears at midnight.”

“Yes, Sir. We are ready.”

“Tell the watch officer that I will address the crew at midnight, if this is the one.”

“It will be done.”

He looked again at his watch. 2320. Forty minutes more or less. He lay back in the bunk. Their transit out to the rendezvous had been uneventful. They had spent the time making an inventory of small repairs needed, pumps, motors, valves — the usual laundry list. The tanker had been fitted out with a machine shop for this mission. She also had food, diesel fuel and fresh water for them, which was very fortunate because one of their evaporators had broken down. Submarines, like surface ships, had to make all their potable water from seawater, using distillation plants called evaporators. A submarine had small water reserves to begin with; the loss of even one evaporator was serious.

If the weather held, they would be able to get the men off the sub and onto the tanker for a few hours, for hot showers and a good meal. He wondered if there would be women. The Russian advisors had told him that their support ships were crewed almost entirely with women; full service support ships, they would say with a leer. He had seen some of the Russian women, and wondered how one told the difference between them and the machinery. He had never married and had no particular interest in having a permanent relationship with a woman. They satisfied sexual needs, but were nothing but trouble for anything else.

He had to control himself from going to the Control Room. He sensed that the mission was at midpoint. there were still times he could not believe that they were doing what they were doing, that he, of all the submarine Captains, had been chosen for this mission of all missions. He had come a long way indeed.

His parents had been servants in the mansion house of a British businessman in Tripoli. He had grown up with four other children in a one room hut built into the back wall of the mansion’s compound. His “duties” as a child were limited to helping the groundskeepers; none of the children had ever once been allowed inside the main house. He had grown up knowing only what his father would tell him of the many rooms, the fine furnishings, and the incredible amounts of food. His mother had taught all of them to read and write Arabic, but he had never set foot in a school until the Revolution had upended the colonial order of things and changed everyone’s world dramatically.

He had joined the Army as soon as he was old enough, and had flourished, applying his native intelligence in a manner that quickly caught the attention of superiors who were desperately looking for indigenous officer material. He had been assigned to the artillery, where he was schooled by grim-faced Soviet advisors in the lethal mathematics of ballistics and the intricacies of surveying. Because his tribal origins were the same as the fledgling nation’s leader, he was promoted somewhat faster than many of his fellow officers.

His political education paralleled his technical training. He learned that the entire world, led by the United States and its allies, had turned against his country for the sin of throwing off the yoke of colonialism, and that they were now attempting to isolate his country to the desert sands of North Africa. Only the Soviets had been their steadfast friends on the world scene, providing armaments, training, advisors, and a market for the precious oil when the Arab world executed its first oil embargo. He had learned Russian through a combination of association with the advisors and formal schooling.

Ten years into his career, the Soviets had provided six submarines, and a call had gone out through the Army and the Air Force for volunteers to become submariners as the leader added a new and deadly dimension to the country’s armed forces. He had been encouraged by his Commanding Officer, a Colonel of his own tribal group, to volunteer on the basis of political reliability, mainly to extend the family’s influence into this new and exciting facet of the country’s armed forces. With his grasp of the Russian language and innate technical ability, he had been accepted easily, and then had come the intensely alien experience of living and going to submarine school in the Soviet Union. Upon completion of the year’s training, he had been put in command of a Foxtrot class Russian submarine, and had been its Captain ever since.

Mechanically, his submarine was no easier to keep running than the other five, but he had patiently assembled a capable crew and reliable officers over the years, many of them volunteers from different Arab countries or nationalities. More importantly, they remained with the submarine permanently, as his country did not subscribe to the policies of rotation that other navies used. As the international climate grew increasingly hostile to his country, the submarines were given more and more resources against the day when they might have to go out into the Mediterranean to defend the country against the growing power of the imperialists, or to strike a blow against the hated Zionists. The Al Akrab achieved a reputation for readiness that made her the natural candidate for this incredible mission to restore his country’s honor after the American sneak attack.

The phone buzzed again.

“Yes.”

“Sir, the contact has stopped engines.”

“Very well; turn off axis to 010; begin a passive plot on him for the next thirty minutes, and estimate the range.”

“It will be done.”

He climbed out of his rack and found his sea boots. A thirty minute passive plot was a waste of time, but it would give them something to do while waiting. This had to be the support ship. He needed to tell the whole crew what was going on. But he would have to wait for the signal, to be sure. He went aft to the control room.

Arriving there he found the tactical team hovering over the plotting board. Every three minutes the sonar operator would call the bearing to the contact, derived by listening to its engine noise, to the table plotters, while the submarine travelled north, perpendicular to the initial bearing, at a steady speed of five knots. After thirty minutes, the bearings would begin to converge, and a very rough range could be measured. If the contact was also moving, the procedure was more elaborate, and took much more time. But for a stopped or almost stopped target, one leg would do it for a very rough estimate. It was good practice for the watch officers; the submarine could determine the all-important range to the target without making a sound or revealing a periscope. He looked at his watch. Ten more minutes. He sat down on his steel stool by the periscope, and waited.

At midnight, he asked for the estimated range.

“Three thousand, five hundred meters,” replied the watch officer. The quartermaster logged the number in the contact log. They waited.

“Turn back to 110,” ordered the Captain. He would begin closing the ship.

At five minutes past midnight, three evenly spaced, metallic clanks were heard throughout the boat. The Captain smiled.

“Prepare to surface,” he ordered.

Five minutes later, the Deputy announced that the boat was ready to surface. The Captain acknowledged, and picked up the ship’s announcing system microphone.

“Be silent,” he began, using the traditional admonishment which preceded any important announcements. “In the name of Allah, the Merciful: in a few minutes, we will surface to make rendezvous with our mother ship, the Ibrahim Abdullah, a national tanker. She has been sent by our Leader with fresh provisions, fuel and water. For the fortunate, she may also have mail.

“Our plan is to remain alongside for twenty-four hours. This depends on the weather remaining calm, and no other contacts coming near. Everyone will be allowed to go aboard the mother ship, to bathe and to enjoy some fresh air, and perhaps other things. All clothing and bedding will be cleaned. But first there is work to be done. We must take on a full load of fuel and water and food before anyone goes anywhere. That way, if we are forced to dive, we will have done the essential things.

“We have completed the first half of the mission. We have journeyed to the enemy’s coast, we have learned his patterns of operations there, and we have scouted the bottom in preparation for the second phase. This rendezvous is the vital intermission point: from here, we go back to the patrol area, and await the American carrier.

“Remember, our mission is still a secret. The crew of the Ibrahim knows only that we have been dispatched to America to carry out an important mission of reprisal. They do not know the target, nor the timing. Keep silent about the final objective. If they wish to speculate, smile with them, let their imaginations run, but do not confirm our mission. A failure of surprise will mean the death of every one of us. Surprise is our only protection from the American Navy.

“Now, surface. Allah be with us. That is all.”

Fifteen minutes later, the boat was nosing into position alongside the tanker, her diesels rumbling, filling the diminishing space between the tanker’s high, slab sides and the submarine with their noise. The tanker was an old Greek multi-product carrier, bought in Piraeus three years ago for the specialty fuels run along the north African coast, and modified for this mother ship mission six months ago by the military shipyard at Benghazi. She looked like any other medium sized tanker in the world, with a superstructure and funnel aft, a long, flat deck running forward, where another superstructure containing the bridge and the cabins rose close to the bow. She was of 25,000 dead weight tons displacement. Nothing in her outward appearance would have revealed any special capabilities.

She lay to now, a dark silhouette in the light of a full moon, as the submarine maneuvered alongside. There were special fenders already deployed along the tanker’s side, and they creaked and groaned as the sub slid alongside and backed down. Heavy ropes snaked down to the sub’s deck, and the crew then pulled down wire mooring hawsers to make her fast. The submarine kept one main engine on the line, charging batteries and maintaining readiness to cut away quickly if they were discovered.

Once alongside, the tanker deck crew passed down a fuel hose and a water hose, and the vital replenishment began. There was some back and forth shouted conversation between the tanker crew on deck up above and the submariners, but the essential transfers were the main order of business. A steam winch blew clouds of exhaust steam over the side as it hoisted pallets of food and spare parts down to the submarine’s deck. The crews worked until 0330 before the fueling and watering was completed, and most of the stores had been brought onboard. Then, with the weather still flat calm, everyone secured until later in the morning. If the submarine had to be cast off in an emergency, the main replenishment was completed.

At 0900 that morning, the tanker crew dropped an accommodation ladder down over the side, and one half of the submarine’s crew went topside for the first time in five weeks. They were a smelly, scruffy lot, carrying their accumulated dirty laundry and bedding up to the mother ship. Once onboard, they were delighted to find out that there were women onboard, along with unlimited quantities of hot water for baths, and a special meal available in the dining room all day long.

The remaining half of the crew stayed aboard the boat to keep watch, and to stow the fresh provisions. They also passed up the items for repair, taking care to disable no system entirely in case they were scared off the mothership. The rendezvous position had been picked to avoid shipping lanes, so the chance of another ship coming along was very remote. The position, as best their intelligence services could ascertain from their Russian friends, was also off the track of surveillance satellites.

The Captain went up the ladder at 1000, following the first increment of his crew. He was greeted by the master of the tanker, who introduced the political officer, a Lieutenant Colonel in the security service. The Captain recognized him as the officer accompanying the Colonel on the landing the night they had left. The political officer was several years older than the Captain. He indicated that the Captain should come with him to his cabin. He instructed the master to keep a vigilant watch while the two military officers conferred. By his manner, he was clearly in charge of the entire replenishment operation.

They went up to the forward superstructure, climbing a set of ladders to the third level above the tanker pipe deck. It was a bright, sunny day, with almost no wind. The submarine was hidden in the shadow of the Ibrahim created by the easterly sun. They made their way to the Lieutenant Colonel’s cabin, which was a spacious affair, especially when compared to the Captain’s tiny quarters aboard the submarine. There was a sitting room with conventional furniture, and a bedroom and bath off to one side.

The Lieutenant Colonel politely offered tea, and inquired after the Captain’s health and personal well-being in the traditional manner. He was a swarthy, powerfully built man, who looked more like a Turk than a Bedou, which he was. He had been a Major General until the last coup attempt had provoked Khadafi to reduce all ranks to something below full Colonel. He was of Khadafi’s tribe, and therefore to be trusted. He smoked noxious French cigarettes continuously.

The Captain reviewed the events of the transit across the Atlantic, and the first few weeks off the Florida coast. He did not at first describe the broaching incident, but he did give full details of the sinking of the fishing boat. The Colonel’s eyes grew narrow.

“What was the enemy’s reaction to this incident?”

“Nothing that we could tell. We heard a destroyer operating in the area later the next day, but there were no indications of a real search. They must have concluded that it was an accident. I am convinced that they have no idea we are there.”

“And there were no survivors, correct? You took care that no one was left in the water to tell the tale?”

The Captain swallowed, and sipped some tea to hide his discomfiture. He had still not quite come to terms with what they had done. It offended many precepts of the desert code. In a sense, the sea was not much different from the desert. Even your enemy was given succor if he was helpless on the sands. Later you might kill him, but always the fundamental courtesy of rescue would be extended. To shoot the men in the water had been inescapably necessary, but very much against his instincts.

“Yes, Effendi. There were two survivors, and we machine-gunned them in the water. The sharks took them as we watched.”

“You are confident then that you have not been actually sighted?”

The Captain thought quickly. It was likely that the Colonel would interview the Al Akrab’s political officer when he was done with him. That worthy would surely reveal the broaching incident.

“Yes, we may have been sighted. It was on the second day in the patrol area. The watch officer lost depth control briefly, and we broke the surface momentarily. It is called broaching. There were fishing boats nearby, but it was dark; morning twilight. I doubt that any of them saw us.”

“Was there any Navy reaction?”

“By coincidence there was a destroyer that came out and pinged around the area that day, but they do that all the time. This is their training area. Destroyers, frigates, they are always out there pinging, practicing ASW. We watched him from the shelter of the Gulf Stream, and he went away after a while, going into port that Friday morning as they always do. They are very predictable, these Americans. They come out Monday, they go back Friday by midday. They must be very religious.”

The Colonel, who had been an Attaché in America many years ago, snorted. The Captain obviously had no concept of the American weekend.

“Did you discipline the watch officer who exposed you?”

“I issued a decree that the next such mistake would be punished by death.”

The Lieutenant Colonel’s eyebrows went up. This young officer had steel in him. Killing the surviving witnesses, and now this threat to his own crew. The Colonel had chosen well.

“And there were no more such mistakes?”

“Not until I made the one which resulted in snagging the fishing boat,” he said evenly. Might as well tell the truth, he thought. The older man might actually respect it.

The Lieutenant Colonel looked out the porthole for a long moment. Then he got up and went over to his desk. He retrieved a thin envelope, and handed it over to the Captain.

“This contains the latest intelligence estimate of when the carrier will return to its base. And a new part of the plan.”

“A new part?”

“Yes; we have some additional weapons for you. This is most secret. It is described there, in the instructions. Why don’t you just read them. I will have some food sent in when we are through.”

The Captain opened the envelope and scanned the operations order. He looked up. “Mines?” he asked, incredulously.

The Lieutenant Colonel sat back and smiled at him. “Yes, mines. We are going to take two shots at this carrier. The first will be when you attack him on the approach to the base. The second will come when he actually enters the harbor.”

The Captain’s face flushed. “You mean, if we fail.”

The Lieutenant Colonel looked at him for a long moment. Then he stood up, and began walking around the cabin. The sunlight streamed through the portholes now. The Captain, after weeks in the dim light of the submarine, found the light to be almost unbearably bright. The Lieutenant Colonel stopped his pacing and faced him.

“Captain, this is an audacious plan. An outrageous mission. To strike back at the American Navy for the crimes they committed against the Jamahiriya, If it comes to nothing, for whatever reason — they catch you before the carrier comes back, or during your attack — we will have expended a great effort only to be embarrassed again.”

He leaned forward, staring down at the Captain. His black eyes were bright. “It must not fail,” he said, his voice full of menace. “Do you understand that?”

He calmed himself for a moment. “Look,” he said. “You and I are military men. The politicians always think that, because we can march in close formation and our uniforms are pressed, we can make everything happen according to a plan. Military operations are not like this, yes? You have already had two close calls — perfectly reasonable incidents, considering the dangerous operation you are carrying out. Predictable, even. You are probably going to have others before this thing is over. We hope not, but we know better, you and I, eh? Inshallah, yes? As God wills it. But the politicians, they think that this whole adventure will go boom, boom, boom, right by the plan. The mines are simply a way of adding depth to the plan. You may take your best shot at this carrier, and you may even hit it and damage it. But we both know you probably cannot sink it.”

He paused to light another cigarette from the embers of the last one. He pitched the butt into a trash can. The room filled with stinking smoke, blue in the bright sunlight.

“The Colonel demands that the carrier be destroyed. A ship, even an American super-carrier, is not destroyed if it can get to harbor, however badly damaged. We military men would be satisfied with putting it out of action, killing hundreds of their men like they did to us in their little sneak attack. Kill them while they are sleeping, yes? That is justice, and justice is a good enough reason for a mission like this. But Dey Khadafi says ‘destroy’. Tell me if I am wrong: a ship is not destroyed until it is put down beneath the sea, yes? This is the way of it?”

The Captain nodded. He was beginning to see the logic of it. If the Americans drove him off, they would relax; they would have won, after a fashion, they would feel safe. They would never expect mines, not in their own backyard. The Lieutenant Colonel watched him carefully, saw him work it through, accept it, even appreciate it.

“You see it now, don’t you. Mines. Little assassins, lying in wait. You will make your attack, and hopefully tear open his belly with torpedoes. Then you will make your escape, God willing. The carrier will be helped into the nearest port, which is her home base. And then the assassins will finish the job. Come, I want you to see them. Then I must show you some other things, and then you can rest, have a decent bath and a good meal. You may use my cabin for as long as you want. But first, come see.”

They left the cabin and retraced their steps down to the long flat deck between the two superstructures. The air above the tank decks stank of fuel oil. Between the forward and after deckhouses, the midships winch operators were clustered around two pallets, each containing two brown cylindrical shapes. They looked like torpedoes without propellers, each being about eighteen feet in length, almost two feet in diameter, and painted a dull, sandy brown color. The Lieutenant Colonel pointed out some of the mines’ features, while the workmen stood around, waiting to lift them down to the submarine below. The Lieutenant Colonel pointed with pride.

“They are made in France; the French are wonderful people — they never let their alliances or their rhetoric interfere with business, eh? Only the Germans are better. You see the sensors, yes? Pressure, magnetic, and the ear of the ship counter. I am an Army man, but these things have been explained to me. You know all about them, I suppose.”

The Captain nodded. He had been schooled in the Soviet Union, but not on French mines. But a sea mine was a sea mine: the principles were the same the world over. Mines lay in wait on the bottom until they were activated by a prescribed target. They could be set to explode when the magnetic field of a ship’s steel hull passed over them, or when the mine sensed the pressure differential created by a large hull moving through the water over the top of the mine. The counter listened and counted the number of ships, which allowed minesweepers to make several passes over the mine without effect. The mine might be set to activate after ten or fifteen ships had gone overhead, or it could be set on a combination: lie still until ten ships had gone by, and then activate on the next contact which exuded a sufficiently large magnetic and pressure field. The really sophisticated mines activated and became torpedoes, rising off the bottom and pursuing their targets. The thing that caught his attention was the size of these mines: these were very big mines.

“The warhead?” he asked.

“Very special. They have 1800 kilos of gas enhanced Semtex. This should be sufficient to lift even an aircraft carrier, yes? And four of them? I think these assassins will be valuable allies.”

“The trick will be to place them,” mused the Captain, awed by the size of the warheads. They were monsters. And the Semtex was gas-enhanced.

“The channel entrance to the carrier basin at Mayport is only 60 to 70 feet deep,” he continued. “We will have to go in on the surface. And there is the problem of the river; the river currents mingle with the tidal currents at the mouth. The mines may not stay where we place them. I shall have to think about this.”

“Load them to the submarine,” ordered the Lieutenant Colonel, and then he took the Captain by the arm, propelling him back to the forward superstructure. The Captain knew there was something important he was forgetting. They were intercepted on deck by the master of the Ibrahim and the Al Akrab’s weapons officer. The weapons officer spoke first.

“Captain, I did not know about these mines.”

“Neither did I, Lieutenant,” replied the Captain. “But there has been an addition to the plan.”

“Where shall we put them, forward or aft?”

The Captain now knew what had been bothering him. The addition of four mines to their warload presented a problem. They had a full torpedo load onboard, which meant that all ten tubes, six forward and four aft, were loaded, and all the reload slots were also full. They would have to download four torpedoes to accommodate four mines, because mines were deployed from the torpedo tubes. It would mean unstowing four large, warshot torpedoes, assembling the torpedo loading path trays through the submarine, opening the weapons loading hatches, and then carefully extracting four live torpedoes out of the submarine, all from alongside another ship. Each fish would take several hours, at least. The Captain explained the problem to the Lieutenant Colonel.

“You cannot just put them aboard — lash them down somewhere?”

The Lieutenant Colonel had never been aboard a submarine, that much was clear. The Captain shook his head. “That is impossible. They have to be in one torpedo room or the other, and all the stowage bays are filled. My crew sleeps literally on top of the torpedoes, Lieutenant Colonel; it is that crowded.”

The Lieutenant Colonel sighed in exasperation. Somebody had screwed up.

The Lieutenant spoke up. “Captain, if we must take these things onboard, there is a quicker way, although it is wasteful.”

“Yes?”

“We cast off the after part of the boat, and we safe and fire the four torpedoes out of the stern tubes. We then load the mines into the after torpedo room. It will still take several hours, but we will not have to drag out the warshots. It would be the safe way, but, as I said, most wasteful.”

“Do it,” ordered the Lieutenant Colonel. “The mines are essential to the plan.”

The Captain shrugged his shoulders. The Lieutenant Colonel would bear responsibility.

“I will need certain people back in the boat for this,” he said to the Lieutenant Colonel. “I will have to put off your offer of hospitality until this evening, Sir.”

“Cannot your people do this thing by themselves?”

“No, Effendi. I must be present whenever we handle large weapons such as torpedoes or mines. If there is an error or accident, the Ibrahim could go to the bottom along with the boat. And we need to do this thing before the weather turns.”

The Lieutenant Colonel was impressed. “As you wish, Captain. We have some more things to discuss when you are finished with the mines. Can you spare your political officer while you are loading the mines?”

The Captain had guessed right. He was relieved that he had admitted the broaching incident.

“I will send him aboard at once,” he said.

He longed for a hot bath, but the loading of the mines, and the firing of four torpedoes, demanded his personal supervision. The crew would be unhappy, losing the afternoon.

Half an hour later, with her stern pointed off at an angle of twenty degrees from the side of the Ibrahim, the submarine fired the first of the four torpedoes. The Captain had ordered the arming wires disconnected; the two ton torpedoes, their propulsion systems and warheads disabled, plummeted harmlessly to the bottom 10,000 feet below. The weapons officer had wanted to fire them hot, but the Captain, ever mindful of the possibility of a circle runner, had elected to safe them instead.

On deck, the crew had unbolted the weapons handling hatch on the submarine’s deck aft of the conning tower. The winch operators on the Ibrahim had lowered all four of the mines down to the deck. Once the crew had the torpedo handling slide assembled, and the submarine was back alongside, the winch operator picked up the sling on the first mine, and dangled it, nose tipped down, at the upper lip of the slide. With six men pushing and shoving, the mine was landed on the slide and started down into the after torpedo room. There was no stowage for reloads in the after room, so each mine was loaded directly into a torpedo tube. By sunset, all four were in tubes, and the crew began the task of disassembling the weapons loading slide and re-bolting the hatches opened through the pressure hull to permit the operation.

In the after torpedo room, the weapons officer and the chief electronics technician sweated over the technical manual, which was written in French. They had to back each mine partially out of the tube to make the activation settings, one for magnetic field strength, one for pressure, and then the counter. In each case, they set the field strengths for the maximum setting, on the theory that an aircraft carrier, at nearly 100,000 tons, would create the biggest field the mine would see. They set the counter to zero, which meant that the mine would activate and explode upon first sensing a field of pressure and magnetic flux equal to or greater than its minimum settings. To make sure, they set an “and” gate on each mine’s computer, which meant that it had to sense both maximum pressure and maximum magnetic flux.

They successfully set up three of the mines, but the fourth would not accept the combination settings. They called the Captain, who came aft to take a look. The after torpedo room was the next to the last compartment in the submarine, with only the steering machinery room behind it. The overhead curved down at the back end to match the hull contours. The compartment was hot, being right behind the motor compartment. With tube doors being opened and closed, there was some oily seawater in the bilge, and the tiny space was extremely humid. The overhead was full of piping and electrical cables; three men could barely fit in the room.

The torpedo tube inner doors, glistening in chrome and brass, filled the after bulkhead. During an attack action, one man was stationed in after torpedo; he could manually fire each tube once if the remote firing mechanism, controlled from the weapons direction console in the control room, failed to work. Four high pressure air flasks, with piping capable of holding 3000 pounds per square inch pressure, bulged out of the bulkhead over each tube door. A firing signal released the compressed air in the flasks into the back of the tube, blowing the projectile out into the sea. In the case of a torpedo, the arming lever on the torpedo was attached to a hook in the torpedo tube by a short length of tungsten wire called the arming wire. When the fish was expelled, the wire tightened and tripped the lever on the back of the torpedo, allowing the torpedo’s propulsion system to fire and its gyro to spin up to control speed. In the case of a mine, the wire simply activated the mine’s battery and computer. The mine itself would travel about fifty feet aft of the submarine before settling to the bottom, arming itself on the way down.

“What’s the problem?” asked the Captain, bent over to avoid hitting his head. His uniform wilted at once in the extreme humidity.

The weapons officer and the Chief were stripped down to shorts and their hats. The temperature in the cramped compartment was nearly 100 degrees. The pages of the technical manual were curling up in the wet heat.

“This pig-fucker will not take settings,” complained the weapons officer. “It remains on default settings, which is counter zero, and pressure or magnaflux of the minimum setting.”

He squatted down on his haunches.

“If we put this bitch in the river mouth, it would arm immediately and get the first good sized fishing boat that came along, if not us in the process.”

The Captain nodded. “We’ve already got one of those,” he mused. The Chief grinned; he had no particular scruples about killing Americans, civilian or otherwise.

“I recommend we safe it and shoot it; get rid of it. I don’t trust it, especially with a faulty computer,” said the weapons officer.

The Captain thought about it for a minute. Perhaps there would be a use for this final mine. He hated not having any torpedoes in the after tubes. A brace of fish into the face of a pursuing enemy destroyer was always a good diversionary tactic for an evading submarine. Everything they were going to do would be in shallow waters. A hair-triggered mine fired in front of a pursuing destroyer might be just the thing. If the submarine was able to get far enough away from it. That much Semtex would blow the front half of a destroyer right off, but it might also smash a submarine’s propellers and rudder if it went off within a few hundred yards. A stinger in his tail, albeit a very dangerous one, but one befitting a scorpion.

“No,” he decided aloud. “We will keep it. Load it at default settings, and mark the tube door for manual firing only. I don’t want that one capable of being fired from the console.”

He saw the concern on his weapons officer’s face.

“Consider,” he said. “We have jettisoned the stern shot torpedoes. With this we regain a stinger in our tail. You are correct that we cannot use it for the carrier attack. But against a pursuing destroyer?”

He saw the comprehension in their eyes.

“It will be done,” said the weapons officer.

The Chief was not so sure. How far would such a weapon go before arming itself, and was that far enough to keep the submarine safe? But he held his silence.