Scorpion in the Sea

TWENTY-SEVEN

“Sonar is still passive,” announced the Evaluator.

Mike sat forward in his chair. They had driven along at twelve knots down the last bearing of the contact, theoretically closing the range, for the last four minutes.

“How close are we to the wreck?” he asked.

“Sir, the wreck should be 075, at about 16,000 yards,” answered the surface supervisor.

Mike leaned back in the chair, and stared up at the darkened ceiling. Now they would get contact again, this time on the wreck. It was entirely predictable. But, what the hell.

“Tell Sonar to go active,” he ordered.

“Sonar is going active,” announced the Evaluator.

“Sonar Contact!” announced the squawk box, twenty seconds later. “Contact bearing 090, range 10,450 yards. Echo quality sharp, doppler is up doppler, echoes are intermittent due to layering.”

Mike sat up when he heard the report of up doppler. This was not the wreck; doppler meant motion — this contact was coming at them.

“Classification?”

The Evaluator consulted with Linc in the sonar room below.

“Bearing is clear,” reported the Bridge.

“Linc says sonar thinks it’s a decoy, Sir.”

Mike closed his eyes for a moment. A decoy? Oh, come on, he thought. Then Linc’s voice came on the box.

“Captain, this new contact is too good. It’s coming in and out of the layers with a consistent echo quality, and it’s headed in our general direction. The last contact was going away like a bandit. That doesn’t compute. I need to change pulse back to omni and mess around with him, but I think this is a decoy.”

Mike considered this data. The officers around the plotting table were looking at him. He got out of the chair and reached for the squawk box key.

“OK, Linc, do what you want to with the sonar. I think we’re stretching things a little here, but I’ll go along with it. Check your contact out and advise.”

“Aye, aye, Cap’n.”

Mike thought for a moment. If this was a decoy, which he doubted, it implied two things. First, a decoy meant there had to be a submarine. And second, if this was a decoy, where was the sub? He stepped back over to the plotting table, and the officers made a space for him around the plot.

“What was the original contact doing when we lost him — where was he?” he asked.

The plotter pointed to the red trace with his pencil.

“He was going away from us, to the east by southeast, speed around eight, maybe ten knots. We lost him right here, Cap’n, and the new contact came up over here.”

Mike could see that the new contact had appeared north of the original track. Which implied that the sub — there I go again, he thought, the sub — had turned left before putting out the decoy. Linc was back on the box again, his voice excited.

“Cap’n, Sonar Control: the echoes remain the same no matter what keying mode or frequency we lay on this thing: the Chief says that’s the sign of repeater — this thing is pinging back at us with a constant doppler shift, and matching our freq so that we get consistent echoes. By our bearings plot it’s going south now, across our track, but the contact’s quality is constant. It’s too good to be anything but a transponder.”

“OK, Linc, how do we let this guy know we’re onto his trick?”

“We go silent again, wait a coupla minutes, and then come up again — let the decoy run outa gas. Then we go back into search.”

“Where do we look, Ops?” Mike asked.

Mike knew that this was the magic question. They had lost the original contact probably because he had gone deep enough to get beneath several acoustic layers. After that, the sub could have gone in any direction. Their chances of regaining him were slim to none, but the appearance of a possible decoy changed the whole game.

“Cap’n, I don’t have a clue. He could be anywhere.”

The Weapons Officer spoke up.

“Sir, the decoy came from north of the original track. He probably turned north, dropped the decoy, and then turned again. My guess he’s gone out into the Stream because that’s the best water to hide in. I recommend we go silent, turn northeast or east, wait fifteen minutes or so, and then resume omni pinging. That’ll tell this guy we weren’t fooled.”

Mike thought about that. Tell this guy? What guy? If there was a sub out here, and that now looked to be at least possible, what did they want to reveal to the sub’s skipper? That the U.S. Navy was now alerted to the presence of an unidentified submarine? Wouldn’t it be better to break off, go somewhere else while they reviewed what they had, looked and listened to their tapes, and maybe asked for some more assets?

“Sonar reports no echoes; last bearing 094, last range 9400 yards.”

No echoes. So now, whatever it was, it was gone. He stared down at the rubber matting on the CIC deckplates. Should he call in help from the specialized ASW forces? Maybe get a helo out here, or one of the ASW destroyers? If you find a fire, first call the fire department, then and only then you grab a bucket of water. He was aware that his officers were waiting for a decision. He felt a sudden need to consult with the Exec.

“Evaluator, turn off track to the south, resume omni pinging, resume the original search pattern. Wait one half-hour, then secure from 1AS. Tell Linc to bring his tapes up here to Combat and bring the Chief. I’m going to go talk to the XO.”

The Evaluator raised his eyebrows and then acknowledged and passed the orders down to sonar over the sound-powered phones. Mike knew that Linc would be protesting that they would lose any chance of regaining contact. The Evaluator gave him a verbal shrug and told him to come up to Combat with his tapes. The CIC crew also looked visibly disappointed, but Mike ignored them. He headed for the bridge.

Stepping out onto the bridge, he had to squint in the bright sunlight. He saw the XO leaning on the Captain’s chair, and smiled inwardly as the Exec stood upright suddenly when the bridge watch announced that the Captain was on the bridge.

“XO, step out here with me for a minute.”

They walked out onto the port bridge wing, and the watch team made themselves inconspicuous on the other side of the bridge so that the two could speak in privacy.

“XO,” said Mike. “Linc thinks that last contact was a decoy. If he’s right, that changes everything.”

“Yes, Sir, I overheard that report on the phone circuit. I’m having a little trouble with it, myself.”

“Yeah,” said Mike, looking out over the calm, entirely peaceful sea. Staring at the vivid red lines on the plotting table made it seem real. The placid seas of the Jacksonville operating areas, dotted with fishing boats and afternoon pleasure craft, framed the whole idea of a submarine in unreality. He shook his head.

“I still can’t feature it, XO. Why would a submarine, any kind, ours, theirs, or a perfect stranger’s, be skulking around the Jax opareas? What’s the point? What’s the likelihood of it? There’s no intel, there’re no out of area reports, there’s really no hard sighting data, just one perpetually drunk fisherman’s report, and one coincidental accident — and now our guys have talked themselves into ‘finding’ something, which I’m convinced appeared because we’ve been looking hard for three days … Can you imagine what the Group Chief of Staff would say if I report that we have a sonar contact out here?”

“You seem to be arguing with yourself, Cap’n,” reflected the XO, being careful to look into the distance. “If you really think this is a buncha shit, then we call it off, log the thing as a good drill, and wait for the come-back-in message.”

The Exec’s voice was neutral. Mike had heard that tone before, every time the XO went into his “You Chief, me injun” mode. It usually meant the Exec disagreed.

“OK, XO,” Mike said with a sigh. “Let’s hear it. What do you think’s going on here?”

The Exec pulled out the clasp knife he carried in a leather sheath on the back of his belt, and began cleaning his fingernails with the narrow blade. He wedged himself into a corner of the bridgewing bulwark, hooking one foot back up on the pelorus pedestal.

“I think we’re not being entirely objective with all this,” he began.

Mike noted the use of the “we” term; XO was being polite.

“I think, if we put aside the waterfront politics for a minute, we have a chain of events that bears investigation. We have the initial report, which came up with a fairly precise description — guy called it a U-boat. Not a submarine, not a periscope, but a U-boat. Now, Maxie’s been out at sea for the whole time, and nobody’s been able to ask him any questions about this sighting, but he called it a U-boat, and Maxie’s old enough to have actually seen or at least remember what a U-boat looked like.

“Then, we have Chris Mayfield getting into some kind of scrape that gets his boat sunk, without a scratch on it, mind you, and in weather that, at max, would have been classified as a heavy rain, and we retrieve his nameboard with a bullet hole in it. No sign of any people — no bodies, no life-rings, maydays, no reports, no nothing. Just the boat on the bottom, with its nets out but closed, and the nameboard with a bullet hole.”

The Exec shifted from one leg to the other, still not looking directly at Mike.

“Now, we search out here for three days, learn a lot about the opareas, the bottom, map some wrecks and pinnacles, get the ASW team oiled up pretty good, and then at the last minute we get a contact that’s different from all the false alarms we’ve had all week. What is it? We don’t know, except that it’s different. And while we’re screwing around with it, with the first team on the sonar stack, by the way, we lose the first contact and then get another contact, and this one exhibits the classic technical signal of a transponder decoy, just like the mini mobile targets we throw over the side to train with.”

The Exec had turned to look at him now. “So,” he continued, “that’s two contacts out of the ordinary, and they could be related — a decoy’s gotta come from somewhere. There’s nobody else around throwing transponders over the side — nearest Navy unit is fifteen miles away — so how come this thing pops up when we’re working the only unique contact we’ve seen all week? I gotta tell ya, Cap’n, if this were a homicide investigation, your famous detective’s elbow would be tingling right about now — too damn much coincidence here. I realize it’ll sound squirrely to the shore establishment, but this detective’s elbow is tingling.”

Mike took a deep breath and let it out. The XO was a devoted reader of mystery novels, and often spoke in the metaphor of police procedurals. Mike stared out over the serene seascape as the ship plowed south through the entirely familiar and ordinary looking fleet operating area on this sunny, Thursday afternoon. There were men out on deck below working on touching up the paintwork, the buzzing of their deck sanders and casual banter reinforcing the normalcy of the scene around him. He looked sideways at the Exec.

“You think this thing is real, don’t you.”

“Like I said before, I think this thing is possible. I can’t prove it, and I can’t explain it. But I think the facts point to the possibility that there might be a submarine out here, messing around in the Jax opareas, and that, somehow, is important. And there’s something else.”

“What’s that?”

“I think some of our officers and troops feel the same way. Linc is going to come up to CIC armed for bear. He’s gonna try to persuade you that they had something, and he’s gonna be pissed off that we broke it off. We both know how dumb this would look if we filed a contact report, but have you figured out what you’re gonna say to Linc and his sonar team?”

Mike squinted at the Exec in the sunlight.

“I didn’t think so,” continued the Exec. “I don’t know what to say either, other than it’s your best judgement that there was nothing there, and you’re the Old Man. But you’ve always been pretty straight with them up to now, and that’s going to sound phony.”

Mike was stung; the Exec was right, as usual. Any superficial excuses he offered for breaking off the search would be phony. He would be violating yet another old Army maxim: you don’t shit the troops you march with. And yet he knew that his superiors ashore would hit the overhead if he came in now with anything resembling a contact report. They had not been sent out to find a submarine, only to go through the motions of looking. But then an idea began to take shape in his mind.

“OK, suppose I punch the I-believe button, which I haven’t done yet, by the way, and accept the existence of an unidentified submarine lurking in the Jax opareas. You know and I know that we’d be laughed out of the harbor if we took this notion back in with us. Martinson would probably be able finally to convince the Admiral that Goldsborough needs a new CO. But let me run this by you: suppose I believe it — what’s the next move? The smart move? Nobody else will believe it until we can bring back some hard evidence, some proof, and some reason for a sub to be here. Right?”

He began to pace back and forth on the narrow bridge wing, while the Exec listened, and the watch team tried to.

“When we lost contact back there, he could’ve gone in any direction, and we’re close enough to the Stream that our chances of regaining contact are lower than whaleshit. So: doesn’t it make sense not to let the guy know we know he’s there? If he thinks we’re on to him, he’ll really hide, but if he thinks he fooled us, maybe we can find him again. I don’t know, I’m wingin’ it here, but we do know what the reaction to this would be if we report it. So, this is what I tell Linc and his guys: I broke it off because I want to study the tapes, and I want to kick this thing around here in the family, so to speak, and then figure out what to do next and who to tell, all the while not revealing to the potential bad guy that we know his ass is out there. How’s that sound?”

The Exec slowly grinned at him. “Not bad, for wingin’ it. I suppose you want me to tell ’em.”

Mike grinned back. “Yeah, I do. I want them to build a case — tapes, plots, contact characteristics: as much hard evidence as they can, and come convince me why they think it’s real. If they convince me, I’ll take it up the line.”

The Exec nodded. Mike felt better. He still did not believe there was a sub out here, but now he had a way of facing his ASW team, at least for the moment. Then they both noticed the radio messenger standing just inside the pilothouse door.

“Cap’n,” he said, “I got an Oboe from Group Twelve.”

Mike took the message and scanned it. The message directed Goldsborough to break off the ASW search and return to port that afternoon.

“Goldy-come-home?” asked the Exec.

“Yeah. Get together with the ASW team and tell ’em what I said, and to keep this under wraps. Under tight wraps. Tell their people not to yap about it. Impress on the officers and Chiefs in CIC and Sonar that it’s not over, but if this gets out we’ll look like turkeys, and that the only way we’ll get to pursue it is to keep it quiet. They’ll take care of the troops. I’ve got to decide whether or not to tell the Commodore — I think he would be an ally, as long as it’s not out in public.”

The Exec nodded his understanding. “I’ll get ’em together in CIC right now.”

He looked at his watch.

“It’ll take us about four hours to get back into Mayport. Next week we’re in for maintenance, and the week after that we’re slated for sea trials after the engineering plant work. So we have a week to figure this thing out.”

Mike nodded. “Yeah, and like your famous detective, we still have to come up with a motive, XO: why is this guy out here? Who is he, and why’s he sneakin’ around the opareas? And will he still be here in a week? I’m not going to talk to anybody off the ship until we come up with that.”

“Aye, aye, Sir. We’ll get on it. I’ll tell the crew we’re going back in.”

Mike remained out on the bridge wing after the Exec left the bridge. The bosun brought him a paper cup of particularly evil looking black coffee, and Mike dutifully thanked him. He would hold it in his hands for five minutes and then drop it quietly over the side.

He thought about this submarine problem. He would of course have to talk to the Commodore after they got in, but he would have to hear his people’s case first. Maybe Monday afternoon, or Tuesday. He’d get on the Commodore’s calendar when he got in. The main focus next week would be work on the engineering plant — the parts ought to be waiting for them on the pier this evening. Three days to cool the plant down, and then a week’s worth of repair efforts, followed by a weekend light-off — another good deal for the engineers — and back out the following week to see if the stuff worked.

He and the Exec had had an argument earlier on a message Mike had drafted about the steam admission valves. Mike had wanted to excoriate the Mayport repair superintendent, and the Exec had argued against it. Mike had been forced to admit the Exec had a point: it did not make sense to blast the guy whom you were then going to ask to help fix the problem. He had given in to the Exec’s counsel, but with the mental reservation that he would blast them all when they finally fixed the valves. It was because of their sloppy work that the snipes would have to light off over the weekend, thus losing what little time they had with their families.

And, in between, they had to thrash this sub thing out. He thought about the weekend. It would be pleasant as always to get back to the Lucky Bag, kick back, maybe hit the beach clubs. Then the vision of Diane Martinson materialized in his mind. He had been half keeping her memory at bay, half saving it for last, ready to savor the thought of being with her, and yet conscious of that inner voice that told him in no uncertain terms that his seeing Diane was trouble.

How could they meet? Where? Under what pretext? He couldn’t call her, and she might not call him. He felt a moment of panic at the thought that she might not call. Christ, like being a teenager again. He could go back out to the hospital to visit Quigley. But she said she normally didn’t volunteer on weekends — that Saturday had been a fluke. He needed a way to make it happen.

Squirming in his bridge chair, Mike let out a deep breath. He couldn’t keep his mind off her: she was firmly embedded in his psyche, and unless his instincts betrayed him badly, available. No. Wrong word: available implied something superficial, a one night stand, some kind of temporary indiscretion. Diane represented something of value, a woman of substance, a human edifice that was moving off its foundations. He was beginning to recognize that his involvement with this woman might have consequences beyond the difficulties arising from the fact that she was already married, and married to his boss’ boss. But thinking about the possibilities gave him a thrill, not unlike the first time he had given a conning order on a destroyer, and felt 4000 tons of steel begin to move in response to something he had said. The Chief Engineer came out on the bridge wing, a sheaf of work requests under his arm. Thoughts of Diane vanished as Mike went back to work.