Scorpion in the Sea

THIRTY-EIGHT

“OK, Gents, let’s hit it,” said Mike, breaking up the morning engineering staff meeting.

The Chief Engineer, his machinist mate and boiler Chiefs, the ship repair superintendent, and the ship’s department heads rose from their chairs and filed out, refilling paper cups of coffee on the way. Mike and the Exec remained seated at the head of the wardroom table while the officers and chiefs left. They had been meeting for almost an hour, as they did every morning during the week of repairs in the main propulsion plant. Mike got up and brought the stainless steel coffee pot over to the table and refilled both their cups, put the pot back on the warmer, and sat down again, rocking back in his armchair at the head of the table. The sound of a pneumatic chipping hammer could be heard chattering up forward on the forecastle.

“Well, XO, they gonna fix these main feed pumps or was this all smoke and mirrors?”

Ben Farmer reviewed his notes.

“An awful lot of wishful thinking going on,” he said. “They’re going through all the correct repair procedures and motions, but I haven’t heard anybody say they’ve found the problem in each pump and that they know for a fact what’s wrong and how to fix it. This is just a quick and dirty overhaul.”

“Which is better than nothing, I suppose,” Mike said. “I’m almost surprised they’re doing it, given that Goldy’s going out next year.”

“I think that’s because they’re never sure about decommissioning — remember Vietnam, when all those old cans from Willy Willy Twice were extended in ‘67 for six months to go on the gunline? They were still all there in ’73.”

“Yeah, I suppose,” said Mike. “But this has to be costing megabucks — new twelve hundred pound steam seals, new regulating admission valves, all that level one welding to get access to all this shit, the X-rays after the welds, and then they’re not positive they know what’s wrong with the goddamn pumps!”

“I think it’s a case of age, Cap’n: those hummers’ve been turning and burning for twenty three years. That’s main steam: 1275 psi and 980 degrees, pumping water at 1500 psi into a steaming boiler for two dozen years.”

“Yeah, I reckon. Well, what else we got going on?”

“We have the preparations for the next 3M inspection, which I’m guessing is coming up pretty soon. Chief Taggard from Squadron has been nosing around the Chiefs’ Mess, which usually means a ‘surprise’ 3M inspection is inbound. The Chiefs all have the word, but we’ll need an all-officers meeting on it. And then there’s a medical assist team coming Friday for a sanitation inspection, and that will be followed by the TyCom medical officer’s ‘surprise’ inspection within the next thirty days. And then—”

“OK, OK—!” Mike threw up his hands in surrender. “That’s enough inspections and assist visits for one day. Christ! I wonder how the 10,000 ships we had in World War II ever managed to win the war without all these staff assist visits and inspections.”

Mike blew on his coffee, as if that might improve the taste. The Navy had been buying progressively cheaper coffee over the past few years; some of it was genuinely awful.

“I think it’s what miners call overburden,” said the Exec. “In those days they had one Admiral and his staff for every 200 ships in the Navy. Today we have one Admiral and his staff for every three ships. With no war on, we have to justify the existence of all those brass hats, which is where I think all these ‘command attention’ programs come from.”

Mike sighed. The constant stream of rudder orders from the high command on how to run every aspect of a command’s daily life was the bane of every Commanding Officer’s existence, ashore and afloat.

“Well, XO,” he said. “It’s a hard monster to get your hands on. Each of the Navy’s mandated management programs is, in and of itself, justifiable and possibly even necessary. The problem comes when you aggregate them. I spent six weeks going through a Prospective Commanding Officer school in Newport prior to coming here, just like you spent six weeks in your Prospective XO course. The whole curriculum was focused on this enormous array of special management programs required of every ship. They did a good job of explaining where each program came from, and how each one evolved from the discovery of problems in the fleet, ranging from poor engineering maintenance to ineffective oversight of personnel records.”

“So each time a fleet-wide problem is discovered, the Navy charges the Fleet Commander or the Type Commander to design a special management program to fix it.”

“Right. And each program gets designed by a whole staff of people as if the ship were going to do nothing else but that one program. Nobody ever coordinates all the programs, and the resulting paperwork requirements. You read the directives: the Commanding Officer shall personally devote X amount of time and attention to seeing to it that the Personnel Qualification Standards program is, etc., etc. I keep hoping someday the CNO will sit down and add up the total paper requirements of all these programs.”

“If he does,” snorted the Exec, “we’ll get another program, a paperwork reduction program, complete with reports, how many pounds of paper got reduced today, and so on.”

“You got it, XO. Watch out, they’ll make a staffie out of you for thinking that way.”

They were interrupted by a knocking on the wardroom door, followed by the radio messenger bearing a steel clipboard.

“Personal For, Cap’n,” he announced, passing the clipboard to Mike.

Mike opened the clipboard, initialled the record copy of the message, and then took the back copy, dismissing the messenger.

“It’s from Pierce, in Deyo,” said Mike. “Addressed action to the Commodore, info to me. And it says: ‘have recorded underwater sound survey in diesel bands for two successive nights. Not surprisingly, have detected several diesels, but nothing to indicate unusual characteristics or anything but the normal anomalies of the Jax opareas and fishing grounds. Unless otherwise directed, intend to continue survey for one more night prior to return to port Thursday, unless engineering trials completed Wednesday, in which case will return to port Wednesday P.M.’ Rest of it is on his engineering trials, which went, unlike ours, swimmingly. ‘Very respectfully, etc, the IV.’” Mike tossed the message over to Farmer, who scanned it briefly.

“So nothing to write home about there, either, XO. I think now maybe this thing’s dead. Or gone. Or both.”

“I wonder what he means by ‘normal anomalies,’” muttered the Exec.

“Shit, I don’t know. The professional ASW guys tend to speak in tongues,” said Mike. “As everybody seems to know, ASW is an imprecise business.”

The Exec put the message down on the table, and drank some more coffee.

“This stuff is getting worse,” he commented, peering suspiciously into his cup. “Navy gets cheap on coffee; we’re really getting down there.”

He studied the message form, as if by looking at it he could compel it to explain the mystery submarine. Mike stared off into space.

“I wonder,” said Farmer, “if we’re not running into the same thing on Deyo that we got up in Norfolk.”

“Like?”

“I mean that the IV may have dismissed this whole project a priori as something from fantasy land. Maybe we ought to send Linc and his Chief over to Deyo tomorrow when they get in to actually look at their tapes. Informally, of course. Let the Chief set it up; matter of fact, don’t send Linc, just send the Chief. Chiefs are forever coming and going along the waterfront, so nobody would notice. See what we get.”

Mike nodded thoughtfully.

“That’s probably not a bad idea, although from the sound of things, he’s coming in tonight, so we’ll only see two nights’ worth of tapes.” He looked over at the Exec. “And if we see something on his tapes that he didn’t? Then what?”

“Then we hold another skull session with the Commodore and we figure out what to do next. We’re going to be back out there ourselves next week, if they fix these fornicating feed pumps.”

“That’s not on the schedule.”

“Yes, Sir, but we’ll need an engineering trial to prove that the feed pumps can handle steaming loads.”

Mike pushed away the coffee.

“If the higher ups conclude that there is something to all this,” he said, “they sure as hell are not going to send Goldsborough to deal with it.”

“But if they conclude that it is all bullshit, we can go out and screw around some more, see what we turn up, and nobody has to know.”

“The Commodore would have to know. But what the hell can we do that the Deyos of the world can’t do? I mean, shit, she’s an ASW specialist. Sonars up the gazoo, carries a helicopter, and they can even process sonobuoys. All we can do is ping.”

“Yes, Sir,” said Farmer, leaning forward. “But that’s precisely it: we can ping in shallow water where the Deyo’s sonar is useless: it’s too damned big. So far, everything that’s happened has happened inside the continental shelf: the U-boat sighting, the fishing boat going down with a bullet hole in her nameplate, our two contacts, all in water 300 to 500 foot deep, and all inside the Gulf Stream, too. Spruances like Deyo need water 6000 foot deep for their sonars to reach out there and touch someone.”

Mike sat back in his chair, a surprised look on his face.

“You’re back to believing this shit, aren’t you,” he said.

Farmer nodded once.

“I go back and forth on it. I’ll admit that. But I want to know what Deyo means by normal anomalies — that’s an oxymoron. If our guys can see something on his tapes that might be a sub on the snort, then I think we ought to go out there and try to find the sucker, before—”

“Before what?”

Farmer sighed and started rubbing his eyes with both hands.

“I don’t know,” he said, his voice muffled by his hands. “We’re still missing something here.”

The wardroom door opened and the Chief Engineer came back into the wardroom with the shipyard superintendent.

“Cap’n, we think we’ve found out what’s eating those steam seals,” he announced.

Mike looked at Farmer for a moment, and nodded his head fractionally, acknowledging that the Exec might be right. He then turned to the Engineer.

“OK, Snipe, sit down and tell me all about it. You know how I love main feed pump steam seals.”