Scorpion in the Sea

FORTY-SEVEN

“I’ll have the veggie-burger, no fries, a small salad, diet coke,” said the Commodore. He handed over the menu.

“I’ll have the Navy bean soup and some French bread, iced tea,” said Mike.

The waitress took their menus and departed to get the next table’s order. The dining room was full with the usual lunch crowd, which was about the only time the Mayport O’Club dining room was full. Everyone knew that evenings were heavily dependent on microwave cookery. There was the normal mix of ship’s company officers, shore pukes, staffies, and even some techreps in shirts and ties who were trying not to look like civilians. Mike and the Commodore were seated in a corner table near the seaside windows. The bright white sand of the Navy beach stretched a quarter mile to the Atlantic over low dunes dotted with saw-grass.

Mike had arrived onboard at a little after eight o‘clock, his usual arrival time. The Exec had informed him that the Commodore had invited him to lunch at the Club. Mike and the Exec had speculated over coffee in the wardroom on the reasons for lunch, with Mike feeling sure that there was going to be some more fallout from the disastrous meeting with the Admiral. The Exec took the opposite tack, saying that the Commodore would do dirty work in his office, not at the O’Club.

“Have a good night’s sleep, did you, Michael?” asked the Commodore. He had not missed the signs of a mild hangover, compounded by not much sleep.

“I’ve had better, Commodore,” said Mike, smiling inwardly at the half-truth. Started off shitty but had a lovely finish. Diane had slipped away at just after five and presumably made it home without incident. Mike had wondered what the gate guards thought. Woman was getting out of hand.

“Yeah, well, don’t let it bother you,” said the Commodore casually. “I went to the usual morning staff meeting at Group. Two of the operations staffies were sitting behind me on the back benches. One of ’em put a handkerchief over his head and pretended to operate a periscope. I could see his reflection in the window. After the meeting I cornered them in the passageway. Told them both that I looked forward to seeing them in the Fleet someday.”

The Commodore gave a wolfish grin.

“Made my morning to see their expressions. But Himself seemed normal, and I didn’t sense any lingering animosity.”

“You mean he’s having Martinson call the Bureau instead of doing it himself?”

The Commodore laughed out loud, a short barking noise.

“You take yourself too seriously, Mike. Maybe I gotta stop lecturing you about your career. You’re centering on yourself instead of your ship. Admiral wants your butt offa there, he simply says the word and you turn over to your XO and pack your seabag. He doesn’t have to call the Bureau. I’d have to call the Bureau. Besides, this submarine deal has the potential of being embarrassing, so public executions are not in order. I really think he would be most appreciative if we would just bury the whole notion and go back to normal ops.”

“Cover it up, in other words.”

The Commodore shook his head.

“Such words you use,” he said, going into a Jewish corner grocer routine. “So dramatic. Everyone wants to be part of a Watergate. We were told to bury it. It’s now officially buried. We were never told to do a cover-up. We’re not going to do a cover-up. At least I’m not going to do a cover-up.”

He looked directly at Mike, his expression suddenly no longer part of a routine lunch.

“You’re not?”

“That’s right, Sunshine. And neither, I hope, are you.”

Mike drank some iced tea to cover his confusion. If he understood Captain Aronson correctly, the Commodore wanted Mike and Goldsborough to pursue the phantom submarine matter without the Admiral’s knowledge. Which meant that the Commodore thought the threat was sufficiently real to risk throwing in his lot with a CO who was now firmly in disrepute with the Admiral. The Commodore watched Mike’s face as he worked it out.

“You game?” he said.

Mike grinned. “You bet I am. Sir. But you’re taking a walk on the wild side, if I may say so.”

“You may say so.”

The Commodore broke off as the waitress brought their food. “But what the hell,” he resumed, after she left. “I figure if we do it right, which is to say very discreetly, and we come up empty, and nothing happens, then nothing happens and life goes on. And if we turn up a bad guy, prove we were right all along, who knows?”

“There’d be some awfully embarrassed people up at Group if that came to pass.”

“Yeah, there would. And well above Group, for that matter. But don’t go thinking that embarrassment at high levels is necessarily a good deal for the guys who cause it. Remember the Flag protection circuit.”

Mike knew that in the Navy, as in other familial bureaucracies, the Admirals tended to close ranks when one of their own screwed up. When the Flag protection circuit operated, it usually spat out a sacrificial Captain or two and the matter was quietly closed. Mike also knew that the Commodore understood the system probably better than he did, and thereby knew full well the risk he was taking.

“You’re doing it for the satisfaction?” he asked, watching the Commodore carefully.

“I’m doing it for the integrity of the system,” said Aronson, the kidding gone from his voice. “Hell, from the Admiral’s perspective, he’s doing the right thing. He gets leaned on to conserve operating dollars, and to keep things on an even keel. But: recall my little homily in your cabin. The Navy is getting out of the habit of calling things as they are. Dog craps on the rug, I’m of the opinion that that’s dogshit on the rug, not circumstantial and temporary evidence of a defective canine house-training program. Deal like this might shake the Navy up a little, knock some of that Washington E-ring varnish off our image and get us back to being straight shooters. And yeah, maybe just a skoshii of satisfaction.”

He looked over at Mike, his expression tinged once again with amusement. Mike was impressed. The Commodore’s decision to keep on with the submarine project was a refreshing demonstration of principle.

“I’m still having a little trouble distinguishing between burying something and covering it up. How do we work it, Commodore?” he asked.

Captain Aronson finished his salad before replying, and then looked around the room to make sure no one was paying attention to them. He leaned forward.

“Burying something means putting it in a deep hole and forgetting about it because it’s a dead issue. Covering it up means putting it in a deep hole because we don’t want to see it or have anyone else see it, even though it’s a live issue. Cover-ups are OK sometimes — they serve our purposes occasionally. But you shouldn’t ever execute a cover-up unless you know you can control all aspects of it. In this case, if there’s a submarine out there, he controls what happens when the Coral Sea comes back, not us. Based on the Admiral’s orders, we have to be seen to be putting it in a hole. But because you and I think it might be a live issue instead of a dead issue, I feel obliged to kick it around a little bit more until we’re convinced it’s really dead. Then we can and will forget about it, as directed.”

He glanced around the room again before continuing.

“So: what we do is sail Goldsborough on a sea trial next week as soon as you’ve got the engineering repairs done and the plant checks out. We’d do that anyway after major engineering system repairs, so it won’t cost the Navy anything it wasn’t going to pay for anyway. No further expenditure of assets, like the Admiral said. Besides, I happen to know that there will be some extra at-sea days in the budget because Goldy isn’t going on the FleetEx. Now: you can’t stay out there forever, so what we gotta do is make sure you go out there for your sea trial on the day when the Coral Sea returns to Mayport, because if something’s going to happen, that’s when it’s going to happen. I figure she’ll come back next Friday or so. If we’re right about the submarine, we can use the old convoy tactic to flush the bad guy: put the escort next to the target, and since the submarine has to come to the target to do business, the escort doesn’t have to go find the submarine — it comes to him.”

“There’s still a lot we don’t know, Commodore. Like when Coral Sea will return, exactly, and whether or not she’ll have escorts of her own, or even if one of Khadafi’s boats is unaccounted for. We’ll have to time this sea trial pretty carefully.”

“Exactly. But I have the staff assets to check on some things. For instance, I told you I’d have my intel weenie pulse the system to see if Muammar’s sewerdogs were all in the kennel. I mentioned doing this casually to the Admiral. Admiral said forget about it. OK, so I don’t formally pulse the system. But my intel weenie can make an informal call to a buddy on the SurfLant staff, and he can call a guy on the LantFleet staff, and that guy can call the right place in D.C. and ask the pregnant question. Actually, we could just read the weekly intel summary, but I’d like to ask the guys who actually read the satellite imagery directly if we can. Kinda like the Deyo deal: there was nothing there but there was, until somebody who shall go nameless told the I.V. to blow it off.”

“Yes, Sir. And you’ll know from the daily meeting at Group when Coral Sea’s coming in.”

“Yeah. Now, we can also get that from port operations — you know they freeze all harbor movements when a carrier’s coming back to this little fishbowl of a base, So there won’t be any special inside information.”

The waitress came back to clear away the dishes and brought coffee and their checks. The Commodore again surveyed the dining room before continuing.

“Now, we can work this little deal without causing even a ripple, but it depends on your not lighting any more fuzes up at Group. I told you earlier that the Admiral is not likely to take you off Goldsborough just over the submarine thing. But I do think he’d like to make you go away, and I know Captain Martinson would love to make you go away. Martinson’s been keeping a book on you, did you know that?”

Mike felt a flash of alarm, but was not entirely surprised. “No, Sir, I didn’t.”

“Well, he has — he called me in for a little chat this very morning and went down a list of your supposed sins. The bastard’s pretty clever, for a staff puke. I believe his dislike of you is personal more than professional, but the notes in his little book are all couched in professional terms: ship doesn’t meet her operational commitments, their traffic safety program is ineffective, the Captain leads a very unconventional life style, the Captain displays a ‘screw it, I got my twenty in’ attitude, the Captain tends to be flippant and even occasionally insolent to senior officers, the Captain sends intemperate messages when the repair establishment screws up, shit like that. Martinson’s a pattern man, and he’s painting the kind of pattern that only needs one dramatic incident to make his case. So, for the next week, cool it, OK? No vitriol in the message traffic, make sure you pass your ‘surprise’ maintenance inspection, and so forth. OK? This submarine thing may be a total wild goose chase, but if it’s not, you’re the only guy I can put on it, because the whole idea has been officially discredited. So please don’t do anything to attract attention until Coral Sea is safely home.”

“In other words, don’t fuck up never no more,” said Mike. He could not disguise a trace of the bitterness he felt about how his career was going, or not going.

“Right. For a week, anyway. That’s not so hard. And, look — this whole deal between you and the shore staffs isn’t personal, as the Sicilians say, Martinson not withstanding. It’s just business. Peacetime business. And it’s been peacetime for a long time. The Navy gets pretty hidebound and conventional when all it has to do is look at its own image. You’ve read U.S. naval history: every war that’s come along, the Navy always has had to fight its way out of its own inspection manuals before it ever got to the enemy. It’s just the way it is; it’s a good outfit, with more than a few fine people. But you’re a member of a pretty rarified group right now: a Commander, USN, in command at sea. We only have, what, 450 ships? Which means 450 some CO’s out of what, sixty thousand officers in the whole Navy? You step up to the command box, you step right into a big spotlight. You are not a bad guy — you’re just a bit of a nonconformist, and that’s OK if you’re willing to pay the price in a conforming society. If I thought you were a slacker or a non-hacker, I wouldn’t be here talking to you, nor would you still be in command. The main thing is, Oldy Goldy may end up being the only thing between the five thousand guys on the Coral Sea and a boatload of raghead terrorists, if in fact there’s something out there. So I want you to forget about the career shit and focus hard on getting your plant fixed in time to get to sea before Coral Sea shows up in the Jax opareas. After that we can resume the image wars. OK?”

“Yes, Sir. Got it,” said Mike with a sigh.

“Good,” replied the Commodore, not missing the dejection on Mike’s face. “Think of it this way: think what a message you could send if you bagged a terrorist sub that was about to attack a U.S. carrier. Think of the new heights of sarcasm you could reach. It would be the Montgomery-gram to end all Montgomery-grams. I’ll do my part and find out what we gotta find out.”

“Suppose the Group finds out what we’re up to?”

“They won’t. This is between you and me, and your guys. Your guys are good guys. Goldy won’t be doing anything that she wouldn’t be doing anyway after a big engineering repair; everybody will expect a one day sea trial. We’re just mucking around a little with the timing of it, and you’re gonna groom your ASW teams a little bit between now and then, and maybe do some tactical warfare exercises with your CIC staff. Good inport training, like we tell you to do all the time.”

“The Group seems to have its ways of finding shit out. What then?”

The Commodore smiled. “Fuck ’em if they can’t take a little joke, right?”

Mike laughed then. That was an attitude he understood.