Scorpion in the Sea

SIXTY-FIVE

Captain Larry Desantes, the staff intelligence officer, was standing in front of Vice Admiral Bennett’s desk. He was not having a particularly good afternoon. The Admiral was reading a secure telefax obtained from Washington ten minutes ago. Admiral Bennett was shaking his head from side to side, as if to will away the information in the fax. He looked up at the staff intelligence officer.

“According to this, N2, the senior photoanalysis committee has met in emergency session and are now saying that one of the six subs tied up at Ras Hilal may not be a real submarine.”

He pitched the piece of paper down on his desk, and swivelled his chair to stare out the window, where he had a fine view of the Navy Exchange across the parking lot.

“And then, of course,” he continued, “in the inimitable fashion of all intel weenies everywhere, it may, on the other hand, be a submarine and the photo might be bad. Or it may be a fox terrier and the satellite is bad, or it may be a rainy day in Washington and the weather is bad!”

He swivelled back again.

“What the hell am I supposed to do with this?”

Before the perspiring N2 could answer, the Admiral yelled past him to the open doorway.

“Mike, where the hell is Aronson — I want to talk to him now, goddammit!”

“Working on it, Admiral,” came the voice of the EA.

The Admiral looked back at his intelligence officer.

“Well?”

“Well, Sir,” he began, nervously. “I listened to the tape of the phone conversation. She said they had several scraps of “evidence,” but no one thing that’s conclusive. I would say that this estimate could be considered another scrap, and one that’s just as ambiguous as the rest of them. But the whole thing, Admiral, is so — I mean, Khadafi would have to be out of his fucking—”

The Admiral’s flat stare cut him off.

“Muammar Khadafi,” he said. “Out of his mind. What a novel concept.”

The EA appeared in the doorway. “Line two, Sir. Commodore Aronson.”

The Admiral punched a button violently on his phone console, pointing the red faced N2 and the EA into chairs, and putting line two on his speaker. The Admiral wasted no time with polite preliminaries.

“Eli, what in God’s name have you got going down there in Mayport? What’s all this shit about a submarine and the Coral Sea — you guys been getting downwind of all those dope smokers down there in Florida, or what?”

“Hello, Admiral,” replied Aronson in a subdued voice. “And, no, we’re not doing any dope. I almost wish we were. Bill Barstowe told me you called and said the magic word. Before I tell you our side of it, may I ask a question of my own — what prompted your call?”

“A very disturbing, thirty minute phone call from one Mrs. Diane Martinson, wife of your Group Commander’s Chief of Staff. How she knew about this is a second Mayport mystery, but it involves the CO of the Goldsborough somehow. I’ll leave that little problem to you Mayport types; I suspect that’s going to be easier to solve than this submarine mystery. Now lemme have it — what’s going on? I haven’t told the CinC anything yet, but I’m getting the feeling that I’m going to have to go see him pretty soon.”

The Commodore sighed and went through the story from the very start to their current situation. He covered his and Mike’s joint presentation to Admiral Walker in detail, and described the net result of that presentation. He reviewed all of the tendrils of evidence indicating that there might be a threat to the Coral Sea, and then, to preserve balance and to show that they had thought of other possibilities, postulated alternative explanations for each one of them.

“As you can see, Admiral,” he concluded, “each of these little indicators is pretty flimsy; it’s the fact that there were so many of them that gave me pause. It has cost me nothing to send Goldy out there, because she had to do a sea trial anyway. I would have preferred to get a crowd out there for a real look, but, well, my boss thinks it’s all bullshit, and he’s the boss.”

Admiral Bennett thought for a moment.

“And if you guys are right, and there is a Libyan pigboat out there, then what happens?” he asked.

It was Aronson’s turn to be silent for a long moment.

“Mike Montgomery is a pretty good guy,” he said. “No E-ring ballerina by any stretch of the imagination, but he had a solid, combat operations record in Vietnam over several tours. He’s one of those warriors we talk about a lot but don’t promote so much, you know? And Goldsborough? Well, Goldy is a bit of an antique — she’s going out next year, you might remember — but she’s got a good, medium power active sonar, and this situation needs a medium power active sonar more than the fancy, new passive stuff. If we’re right — big if, I admit — this is a diesel-electric boat. Not even the Spruances would have much of a chance hearing him when he’s on the battery, and the reverberation from their own active sonars would blow their own sonarmen out of their chairs in that shallow water. But, still: one tin can versus one sub is bad odds. I just didn’t know what the hell else to do, except that I couldn’t sit back and do nothing. I guess that says it all.”

Admiral Bennett nodded thoughtfully to himself. He respected Aronson’s instinctive approach to an ambiguous problem, and, given the circumstances, was rapidly concluding that he himself might have done the same thing, but with one important difference. He would never have done it on his own.

“When’s Coral Sea due in?” he asked.

“At 1900 tonight in the basin, to make the high slack water. Which means sometime in the next three hours we ought to know if this was a drill or for real.”

“And you say the Group Commander doesn’t know anything about this?”

He heard Aronson sigh.

“About Goldy being out there looking? That’s correct, Admiral. If it’s a drill, I figured no one had to be the wiser, and if it’s not a drill, then there’s going to be hell to pay anyway you look at it.”

“Eli, Eli — basic rule,” intoned the Admiral in a chiding voice. “Gotta keep the boss informed. Now there’s going to be a rocket coming down from CincLantFleet, and we’re going to catch ComSecondFleet, ComNavSurflant, and ComCruDesGroup Twelve all off base.”

“They had their chance, Admiral,” said Aronson stiffly. Across the room, the EA rolled his eyes. He knew the sounds of political suicide when he heard them. The Admiral stared down at his desk.

“I think on the face of it,” he declared after a moment, “we need to send a warning message to Coral Sea, but I’m going to have to get to the CinC before I do that. And we also have the minor problem of figuring out how and what to tell those bit actors in Washington like JCS, the Secretary of Defense, and the President.”

“Yes, Sir,” said Aronson. “I realize that. I think that was the major underlying part of our problem down here. We are postulating that a foreign power is going to attempt an act of war against one of our largest ships. That’s a lotta water to carry to Washington, and I just didn’t feel there was anybody in my chain of command who would be willing to carry it. I should also point out that even if something happens to Coral Sea, or Goldsborough, or both, we probably still won’t have any proof it was the Green Hornet over there that did it unless we pick up a boatload of Libyans. The way I see it, we’re all going to have to wait and see if anything happens out there, and then figure out a way to explain it if it does.”

Admiral Bennett shook his head.

“We might have been able to get away with doing nothing if Mrs. Martinson hadn’t called, Eli. But now that we know, and now that it can be shown that we knew about the possibility in advance, we gotta do something. How long would it take you to get a couple of Spruances and some heloes out there to where you think this action might take place?”

“I’m sitting in the Deyo right now, waiting for word from Mike that he’s turned up something. I guess I could—”

His voice was drowned out by the sound of thunder rumbling over the amplified speaker phone. The three officers in Norfolk sat up in their chairs as another and then another thundering blast echoed in the room.

“Eli? Eli? What the fuck is that?” yelled the Admiral.

“Hang on a minute, Admiral. It sounds like something’s just blown up out on the river. Wait one!”

They could hear the sound of a phone being dropped on a desk, and then a hubbub of voices in the background. Admiral Bennett began to get a cold feeling in his stomach.

“Did you turn on a crisis action team down at the Command center?” he asked the EA, holding his hand over the phone.

“Affirmative, Admiral, right after you heard the CSO say ‘Oh shit.’”

“Good man.”

After a very long minute, a new voice came on the line.

“Uh, Admiral Bennett, Sir — this is Ensign Purvis, Deyo CIC? Are you still there, Admiral, Sir?”

“Yes, goddammit!”

“Uh, yes, Sir, sorry. There’s a big merchie in the channel junction — one of those Japanese car carriers? She’s on fire from stem to stern, and looks like she’s rolling over in the river.”

“What were those explosions, Mr. Purvis?”

“Sir, the XO of the Fife — she’s nested alongside? — said it looked like the merchie got torpedoed. He told the Commodore up on the bridge just now that there were three big fu—, uh, real large explosions under the merchie, just like in the movies? — as she came into the channel. He said they lifted her right up out of the water, and these car carriers are fifty, sixty thousand tons!”

“What’s happening now, Ensign? Quickly!”

The EA had run out of the room to call the Command Center again.

“Buncha people running around topside, Admiral. They—”

His excited voice was interrupted by the sound of yet another blast, big enough to buzz the little speaker on the Admiral’s desk, and then the sounds of people yelling “Take Cover” in the background.

“Uh, Admiral, there’s shit landing all over the basin — pieces of the merch, it looks like. Whoa! Goddamn!”

There was a loud, metallic banging noise, and then the line went dead. The speaker hissed impotently in the office.

Admiral Bennett found himself on his feet, along with the N2. Another phone line buzzed, this one the red phone from the LANTFLT command center. The Admiral grabbed it.

“Bennett!” he said. He listened for a minute.

“Does the CinC know this? OK. Thank you very much.”

He hung up the phone as the EA came back into the office. He looked at the other two officers.

“That was the duty officer, reporting a major incident in the entrance to the St. Johns river. The river is apparently completely blocked, and so is the base channel. I’m going down to the Command Center. The CinC is on his way down, too. Mike, get me that tape and meet me downstairs. You, too, Larry.”

Admiral Bennett left the room, his face grim as he pulled on his service dress blue blouse and headed for the Atlantic Fleet Command Center in the basement.