Scorpion in the Sea

TWENTY-EIGHT

The sudden silence was almost deafening. The enemy’s sonar had gone quiet. The creaking and cracking noises were audible again. The Captain turned to the sonar operator.

“Report.”

“Sir: the enemy destroyer is audible on the starboard quarter. He has stopped directional pinging. He is barely cavitating. I — wait! He’s gone back to omni!”

The distant ringing sound permeated the control room, distinctly different from the long and much louder directional ping.

“The ping has down doppler; he’s moving away from us, Captain.”

The Captain nodded silently. He found his hands were gripping the railing around the periscope rail tight enough to hurt. He forced himself to relax.

“I will have some tea,” he announced. His statement had the desired effect of breaking the tension. The Captain would not call for tea if the action were not over.

“Recommend we come up in depth to 80 meters,” called the Musaid.

“Permission granted. Make your depth eighty meters. Proceed to the east for one hour at five knots, and then turn south.”

There was a collective if discreet sigh of relief in the control room; no one liked to be at 400 feet of depth unless they had to; there was little margin of safety if something went wrong, with as much danger from a collision with the bottom as there was from a sea water leak at depth. It was much easier to get back to the surface from 260 feet if something gave way than from 400 feet. The Captain ignored their concerns; by the book, the Al Akrab was capable of withstanding the pressure of 200 meters, or more than 600 feet. If the water had been that deep, he would not have hesitated to go down to 200 meters just to show the crew that the boat could take it. He accepted the mug of tea, and went over to look at the plot. The control room personnel were changing the watch, and talking quietly among themselves about the encounter with the destroyer. The Deputy was clearly concerned. The Captain glanced over at him.

“Yes?”

“Sir,” the words tumbled out. “Sir, the decoy: now they will surely know—”

“Lower your voice! They will know nothing,” said the Captain harshly. “If they thought that was a decoy, they would not just turn away and resume their aimless searching. They would have gone into lost contact procedures, initiated a close area search, continued directional pinging, called for a helicopter — anything but turn away. They are not hunting. They are not hunters. They are not even warriors. I will predict that they will go back into port for their long sabbath.”

The Deputy wanted to believe, but his years as a political officer had given him a more suspicious mind. He leaned forward.

“Sir,” he said, his voice an urgent whisper. “They were doing nothing, and then they turned towards us. Changed their sonar’s pulse. Came directly down the bearing towards us. We evaded and released a transponding decoy. They pinged on it for a minute and a half, and then went silent. And then they turned away. The ending of this sequence is not what we would expect, but the sequence itself is significant!”

The Captain shook his head impatiently. “I tell you it is not. No destroyer searching for a submarine would break off an action if he even thought that a decoy had been fired: it would confirm the existence of the submarine. This ship is not even searching, I tell you. He gained contact, classified it as possible, lost contact, gained another contact, and classified it as nothing, and broke off. That is all. We remain undetected, and we remain free to operate where we want and when we want. Our next operational objective is to plan for the seeding of the mines in the river’s mouth. We will receive a signal soon telling us the attack date. We will plant the mines one or two nights before the attack day. Your primary duty now is to plan the approach and the maneuvers to lay the field. Is that understood?”

The Deputy stood back. “Sir. As you command,” he said, formally.

“Very well.”

The Captain dismissed the Deputy with a jerk of his head. The Deputy went forward to find the operations officer. The Musaid approached. The Captain saw that the older man was very tired. He felt a wave of guilt over the fact that the Musaid was taking his request to supervise the control room watch too literally. He had forgotten his own mental note.

“You must get some rest, Musaid,” said the Captain.

“My place is here, as you commanded.”

The Captain waved his hand, dismissing his previous command, and the dire threats about shooting people who made mistakes.

“I command that you go to sleep for eight hours. Rest. The crew is tight again; the officers are reacting.”

His eyes narrowed momentarily, as he remembered the watch officer’s maneuver of forty-five minutes ago.

“Except that Achmed should have called me first, and then increased speed. He created doppler where there was none. He should have dived first.”

The Musaid gave the Captain a wry look.

“But he acted, Captain. He did not just sit there, and by moving away he maintained the range when the enemy closed us. If you chastise him now, none of them will act with initiative again.”

The Captain gave the Musaid a hard look, but then nodded.

“What you say is true. I will hold a debriefing of the incident, and we will discuss it. I have instructed the Deputy to plan the mining operation. I will want your views when the plan is laid.”

“As you command.”

“Go then; get some rest. I need your brain alive when we plan the next move. I feel that the attack day is approaching. Do you think the decoy was a mistake?”

The Musaid stared down at the plotting table. The question had come suddenly.

“It was a calculated risk,” he replied. “The enemy did not react as if he had detected a decoy, but only another contact. One among many, and one on the edge of the great Gulf Stream. It was a risk, but it appears to have worked.”

The Captain felt reassured, as he always did when the Musaid agreed with him. The whining Deputy was a political officer, not a submariner. The Musaid was, like him, a warrior at heart. Warriors took chances.

“But we did not set the attack condition,” observed the Musaid, and the Captain’s sudden surge of euphoria dissolved.

The Senior Chief was entirely correct. They should have set the attack condition — if it had come to it, they might have had to fight, and he had become so engrossed in the problem of evasion that he had forgotten to prepare the boat to fight. It had been a major omission. The Captain nodded slowly, grateful that the Musaid had kept his voice down. Had the other officers noted the error? They would, later. He would have to bring it up at the debriefing session. They all needed to hone their procedural awareness. Someone should have made a recommendation to set the attack condition.

“You must compliment them, encourage them again,” said the Musaid, as if reading his mind. “They fear you, and your threat of shooting the next one to make an error smothered their initiative. Encourage them to speak out with recommendations, and they will remember the things you might forget in the heat of the moment. It is the proper way.”

The Captain nodded again. He would reflect on it. The Musaid saluted him, and left the control room. The Captain walked back over to the sonar console, and tapped the operator on the shoulder. The operator passed back the earphones. There, in the distance, the drawn out ringing sound, succeeding pulses ranging gently down the doppler scale as the destroyer moved away from them. The raucous background noises of the Gulf Stream were steadily overcoming the enemy’s ping, even as they enfolded the Al Akrab in a cloak of living noise, reinforcing the submarine’s great advantage of being immersed in the sea instead of upon it.