Scorpion in the Sea

TWENTY-THREE

The sound of eight bells, ringing out in four groups of two, echoed through the ship, marking the official arrival of noon. In the wardroom, the officers were finishing lunch, turning over coffee cups in their saucers to let the mess attendant pour coffee. At the head of the table, Mike declined dessert. The Exec, sitting next to him, accepted; it was banana cream pie, his favorite. Bright sunlight streamed in through the front portholes, and the ship rolled gently in generally calm seas.

“That shit goes straight to your middle, XO,” said Mike.

“Yes, Sir, it does; it’s nice to see at least one system that’s efficient on this ship. But so far, it doesn’t stay there.”

“Just you wait, Henry Higgins; one day it will.”

“You seem to be avoiding it pretty well, Captain. All that pumping iron doesn’t hurt, I’ll bet,” said the Operations officer.

Mike winced inwardly; Ops tended to be obsequious at times.

“Yeah, well, the iron keeps the muscles fit, but I need to run to keep banana cream pie from settling in; kinda hard on a tin can, though. Maybe this weekend.”

“We going in today, Captain?” asked one of the Ensigns. Mike stirred his coffee for a moment before answering.

“We sent out a sitrep at 0900 this morning; if they want us to stay out over the weekend, we should get the word in the next few hours. It kind of depends on how the PR guys have been playing this thing. Lord knows we’ve given them enough purple prose to work with.”

“My guess is we’ll go in this evening,” said the Exec. “We phrased this morning’s sitrep to sort of conclude things, and they’ll have to come up with a pretty good reason to have us stay out into the weekend. With this new policy about saving fuel and impacting personnel retention with weekend ops, my bet is we’ll go in.”

“Maybe they’ll redesignate Goldy as a hydrographic research ship,” grumbled the Engineer.

“Well, they might. That thing Linc dreamed up has produced a pretty interesting collection of bottom data. I had no idea there were so many wrecks out there, for one thing,” said Mike.

“The east coast was a tough place for tankers in 1942,” said the Exec. “They say they used to be able to see them burn from the beaches up and down the coast. Damned U-boats had a field day for a while.”

“What finally beat ’em?” asked the Supply Officer.

“Radar and convoys,” replied the Exec. “As long as they sent tankers out by themselves, the Germans picked them off one by one. When they sent them out in groups, with some tin cans and maybe a light carrier with radar equipped planes, the free ride was over. Then it was the U-boats that got picked off. There’s a sunken German submarine in our collection, by the way. The sonar girls had a lot of fun mapping that one.”

The Weapons officer joined the conversation.

“I’ve heard there’s a dive charter guy up in Charleston who’ll take you out to a U-boat off the Carolina coast; you can go inside and crawl around, at 160 feet. Still has torpedoes onboard; dead Germans’re still in there, too.”

“Really terrific,” said the Engineer. “Just what I’d like to do — bump swim fins with skeletons. They ought to just leave them alone. A sunken warship is a national tomb, for Chrissakes.”

“Yeah, the German government complained about that charter guy; I was in OpNav when we worked the action to get him shut off; he used to keep some skulls from the sub in his dive shop window. Kinda insensitive.”

“Well,” observed Mike. “That’s what happens when you lose an ASW action; one or the other of you gets to spend eternity in a drowned ship.”

The officers at the table shifted uncomfortably at this reference to death at sea.

“There’s some tin cans out there along the coast along with those U-boats,” Mike continued, “not to mention a lot of dead merchies who were deep fried in burning oil when the U-boats got lucky. A torpedo hit on a destroyer is usually the end of the world; our training battle problems, where the script reader calls out, Torpedo hit, forward, does not begin to convey what it would be really like. We have to train for it, of course, but in most cases we’d have a minute or so to collect our hat, ass and overcoats and step into the sea.”

“Well,” interjected the XO, “if you got hit on the bow or stern, you could do some damage control and probably keep her afloat. But for a torpedo amidships, I agree, we’d be wasting our time trying.”

“Kinda like this little witch hunt we’re on, XO?” asked Ops.

He had apparently remembered the Captain’s initial comments about the fishing boat incident. Mike glanced at the Exec before answering.

“Well, it’s true we haven’t found any submarines; on the other hand, let’s review the facts: we’ve had a fishing boat Skipper sight what he thought was a submarine, and then we’ve had another fishing boat, skippered by a very experienced guy, go down for no apparent reason with no survivors or even a trace of the people onboard. Both of these events are unusual, and maybe, remotely connected. Some of what we’re doing is window dressing, of course; make the Navy look like it’s at least a little concerned. But, if nothing else, it’s been some good training, as well as producing some very unique knowledge about the local operating areas. If we ever had to fight our way out of Mayport in wartime, this stuff Linc’s team has put together would be invaluable, especially for shallow water ASW.”

The sound powered phone under the table at the Captain’s chair buzzed twice. Mike picked it up, as the table went quiet.

“Captain.”

“Yes, Sir, Cap’n, Evaluator in Combat here; Linc’s guys think they have something worth looking into.”

“Like?”

“Yes, Sir. Sorry. An active sonar contact they’re classifying as possible, confidence low to medium, definition metallic. The guys got onto it about five minutes ago, and were about to drop it when it appeared to take off. Doppler went from no to audible down. Linc wants us to head back east, 110, to take a better look.”

“OK, I concur. Don’t change the keying interval or make any other indication that we might have detected something. And make no reports to the beach yet; if this is another false alarm, I don’t want to interfere with the come-back-home message we expect any time now.”

“Roger that, Cap’n.”

Mike replaced the phone under the table. He looked up at the officers.

“Line thinks they have something,” he announced to the table. “We’re gonna go take a look.”

He turned to the Exec as he pushed back from the table.

“XO, let me know when we hear from the Group. I’m going up to Combat.”