Scorpion in the Sea

FORTY-FOUR

Commander Barstowe came into the Commodore’s office and nodded once at the Commodore, who was sitting at his desk in his big chair. Mike followed and sat down in one of the armchairs at the Commodore’s conference table. The Exec, Linc, and Chief Mackensie sat in straight chairs against the office wall. A PC was set up on a moveable table, along with Chief Mac’s tape player. Outside, the deepening orange light of sunset glinted on the sides, masts, and funnels of the warships clustered along the piers, the light still bright enough to penetrate the shaded window. The Commodore stopped arranging papers on his desk and looked up.

“OK. He’s agreed to come over. Alone, right, CSO? Good. Mike, you get to walk through the whole thing one more time. Just relate the facts — no advocacy, no passion, no Perry Mason. Just go over what you got. Mr. Howard, you and the Chief be prepared to turn on the sound and light show at the appropriate moment. Mike, you just tell the story, and I think I know him well enough to predict that he’ll ask the magic question of why, and then you can drop the Libyan theory on him. After that we’ll see where he wants to go with it, OK?”

“Aye, Aye, Sir. May I ask a question?”

“Yeah?”

“Do you believe it?” asked Mike.

“Let’s just say I think we have enough to warrant a more serious look, no offense to Goldy intended. If there is a goddamned Libyan submarine loitering in our opareas, I think the proper mix of helicopters and specialized ASW ships could flush his ass out. We can put a small task unit out there, three Spruances, each with a helo, and some more heloes on stand-by here at Mayport — you disagree, Chief?”

Chief Mackensie shifted uncomfortably in his chair.

“Well, Sir, you’re talking about getting the first team, ASW-wise, out into the problem, and that’s logical and everything, except for the waters we’re talkin’ about.”

He paused and looked over at Mike, as if asking whether or not he should continue. Mike nodded at him.

“Go on, Chief, we’re all regular Navy here,” said the Commodore, who had detected the Chiefs discomfort.

“Well, yes, Sir, like I was sayin’—the Spruances got too big a sonar to go active in these shallow waters. Anything less than a coupla thousand feet for those big ass, low frequency sonars, be like climbin’ up in the steeple and banging on the bells with a fifteen pound sledge — you’re gonna make a lotta noise, but you won’t hear shit for all the ringin’ in your ears. And I know they got really slick passive stuff, but if the gomer stays on the battery, he won’t make any noise. Not one squeak. A diesel boat with amps in the can’s gonna hover on his trim tanks out there in all that swirling plankton and shit on the edge of the Stream, and a dozen shrimps gonna make more noise’n he is. Or he can go sit on the bottom for ten days. And he will, soon’s he hears the first Spruance go active. Which means you gotta put a large crowd out there for a coupla weeks at least, make him expend the battery, make him snorkel, and maybe get a line on him. And when he hears that crowd coming out of the harbor on day one, he’s gonna go slip-slidin’ away, other side’a the Stream, and we got nothin’.”

“But the heloes, they’d have a much better chance,” retorted the Commodore. “They have precise, albeit short range sonars.”

“That’s just it, Commodore,” said the Chief. “You can’t use a helo until you’ve localized the target to a reasonable area; then they’re good at getting him into the killing ground. But they’re useless for general purpose search. This guy—”

“What guy is that, Chief?” asked Admiral Walker, stepping through the bat wing doors.

Everyone in the room, including the Commodore, stood up. The Admiral waved them back into their seats. He went over to the leather couch against the opposite wall, sat down, stretching his long, lean frame out comfortably, and looked around the room.

“OK, Eli, you called. Here I am. Who’s going to tell me what this is all about?”

“Mike, go ahead,” said the Commodore.

“Yes, Sir,” Mike said, clearing his throat. “Admiral, this concerns that phantom submarine we’ve been screwing around with—”

“I thought it might, Captain. I suppose you’re going to tell me you think it’s really there.”

The Admiral did not pose this as a question, but rather made a flat statement, his face impassive and, to Mike, unreadable.

“Yes, Sir, we are. Permit me to review some facts and some assertions.”

The Admiral gave Mike a neutral look.

“I’m glad to hear you categorize what you’re going to say into facts and assertions, Captain. I have a feeling we’re going to have more of the latter than the former.”

Mike did not say anything for a moment, and the Commodore gave him a warning look. Mike looked down at his feet before continuing, applying control.

“Yes, Sir, that’s correct. We have a great deal of ambiguity here, and connecting it all is one underlying assumption, that all of the events tied up in this problem are related. And I admit from the start that the whole thing is unlikely.”

“Good. We feel the same way. Go ahead.”

Mike reviewed the entire story from the first report of a submarine sighting through the developments of the Deyo’s passive search mission. He was careful to segregate factual events from logical conclusions. The Admiral listened carefully, asking no questions. He listened attentively as the Chief and Linc Howard presented some of their acoustic data. Mike found himself nervously rubbing his face under the older man’s direct concentration.

“We conclude from all of this that there’s a good chance that there is a conventional submarine that’s been lingering in our fleet operating areas the entire time,” he concluded. “Which surfaces two questions: who and why.”

“I assume you have some proposed answers?”

Mike took a deep breath and wished for a glass of water.

“Yes, Sir: we think from the technical evidence, such as it is, that it’s a Foxtrot class diesel boat. Chief Mackensie here can amplify that if you’d like. But we know it’s not USN, and we’re pretty sure it’s not an allied submarine. If it’s not USN, and it is a Foxtrot, then it’s either Russian or Third World. We assume it’s not Russian because they don’t ever send their Foxtrots across the Atlantic; there’s no conceivable mission for them, not to mention the political implications if they did so at this particular juncture in our mutual relations. If it’s not Russian, then it’s Third World; the only Third World country that has Foxtrots and also has a credible reason to send one over here is — Libya.”

“Libya?!”

“Yes, Sir.” Mike took a deep breath. “The U.S. Navy had the major role in bombing Khadafi’s headquarters, and we think he’s cranked up one of his boats to come over and get even by torpedoing the carrier that did the bombing, the Coral Sea.”

“And?”

“Uh, that’s it, Admiral. I guess it sounds a little far-fetched—”

“A little? A little?! The whole thing is preposterous. Eli, I’m a little surprised at this. You don’t have any facts here — it’s all gross conjecture. And I also did not know that Goldsborough had ever made a contact with something through all of this — when did that happen?”

The Commodore looked embarrassed.

“Well, Admiral, Mike here didn’t believe what he was seeing at the time, so he did not make a report for fear of crying wolf until he had had some time to look at and analyze all the data. Once he did, he came in and told me about it right away, but to tell the truth, I had the same problem with it. I didn’t believe it. So I didn’t say anything about it until I’d had a chance to get some expert help. When I went up to the Norfolk conference, I had them run the acoustic data by the ASW analysis center; they concluded that the contacts on Goldy’s tapes were ‘possibles,’ and that the decoy contact, or the one we call the decoy, did in fact look like a transponder.”

“Did they give you this in writing?”

“No, Sir. It was an informal look, so the answer was verbal.”

“Hell’s bells, Eli, everything is always a ‘possible’ to those people,” snorted the Admiral. “That doesn’t prove anything one way or the other.”

He was ignoring the others in the room and focusing directly on the Commodore.

“Yes, Sir, I know,” said the Commodore, getting out of his chair. “As Mike has said, no one element of this business stands up very well to the light of day. That’s the main reason I haven’t brought it to you before this, and it’s why I asked Deyo to do a passive probe. And even Deyo’s data on the traces of the three hour diesels were ambiguous.”

“Yes. I think Captain Martinson mentioned that Deyo was doing some kind of acoustic tasking for you in conjunction with her sea trials. And reported that he found nothing, as I recall. And of course they’re ambiguous. Those engine noises could be anything at all and anywhere at all. I agree with Deyo.”

Mike looked over at Barstowe. They had their answer about the LV. The Commodore leaned forward.

“But the sequence of events, Admiral. It’s very suggestive of something more than pure coincidence. Fisherman sees a ‘U-boat,’ as he calls it. Another fisherman is sunk for no apparent reason, no bodies, almost no floating debris, a bullet hole in his nameboard. The police confirmed that. No other marks on the boat to indicate why it went down. Then Goldy goes out and gets two active sonar contacts, using the only sonar here in the basin that’s fit for doing active ASW in these local waters. They’re evaluated by the pros at the ASW analysis center as ‘possible,’ which means that they did not conclude these were spurious contacts. Deyo gets a sound gram that could be construed as a diesel boat on the snort, in the same general area of Goldy’s contacts, running for three hours, at zero dark thirty and in good masking position … yes, it could be a merchie in some subsurface acoustic anomaly, but there’s no doppler and no bearing drift. You see what I mean? It’s the chain of events that has me wondering.”

The Admiral shook his head.

“And how on earth do you make this wild leap to Khadafi? You say that the Soviets have never deployed a Foxtrot over here — well, neither has Khadafi. So likelihood of deployment is no argument. In fact, the Sovs do have Foxtrots that go to Cuba from time to time, so they do deploy diesel boats out here in WestLant.”

“Not to Mayport waters, Admiral.”

“Not that we’ve known about, OK, because they’re supposedly always on transit to Fidel’s workers’ paradise. They have no reason to come to Mayport.”

“Precisely,” muttered Mike. The Admiral shot him an exasperated look.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” he asked.

“The Libyans have a reason to come to Mayport,” answered Mike.

“Oh, right. I forgot: to torpedo the Coral Sea. Can you just imagine the repercussions if a Libyan sub torpedoed an American carrier in U.S. coastal waters, or anywhere else, for that matter? That’s an act of war, at a minimum. The U.S. would go over there and pound the dogshit out of Khadafi and every raghead within five hundred miles. We’d do to Libya what the Romans did to Carthage, only our salt would glow in the dark. Khadafi might be a looney, but he has also survived a long time, and he’s done it by not ever going so far over the top that a superpower might have had to take formal notice and whack him seriously. And I think everyone agrees that he got the message when President Reagan had the balls to whack him semi-seriously.”

He stood up, reaching for his hat. Everyone else rose with him.

“No way, Gentlemen. No frigging way. And even if I were convinced that there was something to all this, and I am most certainly not convinced, I’d have to get ships and aircraft underway for unprogrammed at-sea operating time. There’s no money for that. Hell, we’re fighting every day for the dwindling number of at-sea days that we do get. This is simply preposterous, and I can’t go forward with it, and I want you to drop it altogether. I’m sorry I ever sent Goldsborough out in the first place.”

“If I may, Admiral,” said Mike. “Suppose it were true? Suppose Khadafi construed the attack on his country by the U.S. as an act of war? Suppose the Coral Sea gets ambushed, gets torpedoed, and we never find the guy who did it? Who would we go whack then? There’s every probability that any escorts coming in with Coral Sea, as well as the carrier, will be rigged out for return to port and liberty call and not be at a state of readiness high enough to detect or even to deal with a submarine, especially if Coral Sea was blowing up all over the approach lanes to Mayport. Any escorts would be trying to avoid running into her and the rocks at the same time. They wouldn’t even have charged flasks in their torpedo tubes, so what would they do to a submarine even if they did detect it? And when you think about it, you can’t even fire an ASW torpedo in water that shallow. How much egg would the U.S. Navy have on its face if it worked out that way, the Coral Sea torpedoed and the U.S. Navy without a clue as to what the hell had happened ten miles from a major ASW base?”

The Admiral stared at Mike. The Commodore diplomatically looked out the window, and the other officers tried to get small in the suddenly close room. The Admiral put down his hat.

“Eli, I want to talk to you. Alone.”

Mike and the others gathered quickly by the door and filed out of the room. Barstowe shepherded them down the hall, away from the batwing doors. The staff offices were quiet, the rest of the staff having gone home except for the duty yeoman. They filed into Barstowe’s office.

“I’ve got to admit, I was siding with the Admiral until you asked those pungent questions,” said Barstowe. “Now, I just don’t know what to think. And you didn’t ask the one question that I think actually cleared the room.”

“What was that?” said Mike, his heart heavy with foreboding.

“How would anybody here ever explain those awful events you conjured up in there having had a warning beforehand …”

“I think all we did was really piss him off.”

“No doubt of that, but you told it like it is,” said Barstowe.

“Like it might be, you mean. Hell, I want to line up with the Admiral, too,” said Mike. “I don’t want to believe any of this. But if it did happen, and there was an investigation, and it came out that we knew or thought something was out there beforehand, and did nothing, I think a lot of American heads would roll, not Libyans. As well they should, for that matter. But I guess I’m condemned to be the perennial devil’s advocate on this little deal.”

“Yeah, well, I’ll spot you that. In the meantime, keep a hand on your own neck,” said Barstowe with a mirthless grin.

They heard the batwing doors squeak and the Commodore speaking rapidly to the Admiral as he escorted him out the front door of the staff offices. The final words from the Admiral as he went through the door were “No way, Eli. No way.” Then the door closed, and there was a moment of silence in the darkened hallway.

“Bill?” called the Commodore.

“They all went home, Commodore,” called out Barstowe from within his office. “The CSO, the Goldsborough troops, everybody. Nobody here but us chickens.”

“Get your asses in here, all of you,” growled the Commodore as he banged through the door to his office. They filed back into his office and remained standing. The Commodore sat down at his desk.

“OK, you heard him. He was, as they say, underwhelmed by the force of your arguments. In other words, he thinks we’re all nuts. He told me to drop the whole thing, and to ensure that none of you ever mentioned this again, and that no further expenditure of Navy assets or resources was authorized.”

Mike stared down at the floor, his stomach churning.

“Captain?” said the Commodore, softly.

“Yes, Sir?”

“I know you disagree, but we’ve done what we’re supposed to do here. You brought the matter to me, your boss, and I took it to the Admiral, my boss. We’ve presented the facts, our conjectures, and our conclusions, and the next senior guy in our chain of command is not convinced. He has the authority and the responsibility to make a decision, and he has decided that this is a fairy tale. He has ordered all of us to drop it. That’s a legal order, and it’s also not unreasonable.”

“But it may be dead wrong,” said Mike.

“Yes, it might,” nodded the Commodore. “But then we did our best to convince him, and it didn’t fly. Remember that old rule about following orders: the guy giving the orders we disagree with might know something we don’t know. Anyhow, that’s it.”

“Can we make one last check of something?” asked the Exec.

“What’s that, XO?” asked the Commodore.

“Can we check with the intel world to see if all of Muammar’s pigboats are in their pens?”

The Commodore thought for a moment.

“OK, I’ll do this: I’ll have my staff intelligence officer make an informal call to the N2 up at Surflant or maybe LantFleet. Informal sort of thing. Somebody will tingle a friend in Washington, somebody who prepares naval force locators, and they’ll have the latest pictures from the appropriate satellite. But that’s it, guys. Now let’s go home.”

Mike said good night to Barstowe and the Commodore, and he and the rest of the Goldsborough officers went out the front door of the staff office. The entire Mayport basin could be seen from the front steps, the ships illuminated for the night, with bored little knots of watchstanders lounging around each quarterdeck. It was almost fully dark, and Mike paused at the top of the steps leading down to the waterfront street.

“OK, people, I guess that’s that. Linc, take all the tapes and other materials and lock them up somewhere safe. I still think we were right, but, orders is orders, as they say. Thanks for all your efforts, and let’s hope the Coral Sea doesn’t go boom in the next few weeks.”

The Exec shook his head.

“I don’t understand why they won’t even go out and take a look — we’re always doing drills and exercises, why not make this an exercise?”

“Because there’s barely enough money for the regularly scheduled underway ops; all the exercises are planned out and funded a couple of years in advance. The Group Commander just can’t get a ship underway for more than a sea trial anymore on his own authority, certainly not without explaining it up the line. I think the Admiral’s coming at this from a different point of view — he’s got an entire Cruiser-Destroyer Group to operate and keep at a specified level of readiness. What did the I.V. call this? A firefly? They can’t go getting a task unit underway to chase a firefly, I guess. And you know, I felt quite strong about this when we worked it out in the wardroom, but I felt kind of dumb in there when I pitched it to the Admiral. Think how he’d feel pitching it to the Fleet Commander. I think he’s wrong, but I can sure see his point of view.”

“I wonder if they’ll even alert the Coral Sea group to be on the lookout?” asked the Chief.

“I don’t think so, Chief,” said Mike. “The Coral Sea would have to come back and ask what they want him to do about it. Anyway, I guess we get back to concentrating on boilers and feed pumps. I’m going to go home and have a beer.”

“Sounds good to me, Cap’n,” said the Chief. “Thanks for taking this up the line.” Linc Howard nodded his agreement.

“Yeah, well, I don’t think I had too much to lose, based on the way the Admiral was looking at me when we were excused. But that’s why they pay me all this terrific money. Hang in there, Guys. I’ll see you tomorrow morning at whatever inspection inbriefing we have on tap.”

The Chief and Lincoln Howard said goodnight and walked down the steps. Ben Farmer remained behind.

“Damn, damn, damn!” swore Mike softly.

“Yes, Sir,” said the Exec. “Are we just going to drop all this?”

“I think the Commodore isn’t finished yet, Ben. I think — I hope — he’s gonna find a way to keep probing. It’ll depend on what the Admiral said to him when they chased us out. I keep saying to myself we did our best, but that doesn’t cut it, somehow. I think Coral Sea might be in real danger.”

“Now who’s believing this shit, Cap’n?” said Farmer, softly.

“Yeah, yeah, there you go being insolent again, XO,” grinned Mike. But then his face grew serious.

“We need to put our thinking caps on. There has to be some way we can keep going on this thing until we either prove ourselves right or wrong.”

“I wouldn’t mind being all wrong on this one,” said Farmer, staring out over the quiescent basin.