Scorpion in the Sea

SIX

“Captain’s in Combat,” sang out a chorus of voices, as Mike stepped through the door into the darkened Combat Information Center. The ASW team was in place around the central plotting table, where the search plan had been laid out for the night’s operations. He walked over to the table. The Weapons officer, who was the Evaluator, greeted him.

“Evening, Cap’n, Sir. We’re at twelve knots, on the fourth leg of the expanding square search.” He pointed to a spot of light that was projected from underneath the glass top of the plotting table. The spot marked the Goldsborough’s true position relative to the search plan track that had been traced out on the sheet of plotting paper taped to the top of the table.

“Sensors status?”

“SPS-10 surface search is in radiate; SPS-40 air search is in standby, TACAN is in standby, all fire control radars are in standby, the sonar is active, the fathometer is off, and the Pathfinder radar is radiating.”

“Very well. What are the sonar conditions?”

“Piss poor and getting worse,” said the Evaluator, with a wry grin. “All we’re doing out here is pissing off a million snapping shrimp, and probably energizing a few acres of bioluminescence around the bow.”

“Don’t sugar-coat it, now, Weps. Tell it to me straight.”

The Weapons Officer shook his head as the plotters grinned around the table. He pointed to the raypath diagrams glimmering on the screen of a PC set up next to the table.

“We’ve got a layer at 80 feet, and another layer at around 240 feet. To the east, about ten miles by our navi-guesser’s best estimate, is the western edge of the Gulf Stream. Injection temperature is still holding at around 76 degrees, but we get an occasional whiff of 82 degree water, so we’re right on the edge of the boundary layer. That means vertical layering. The sonar girls tell us we’re getting max reverberation.”

The Captain pulled a three legged stool over to the table, and sat down, his large frame perched precariously. The rest of Combat was quiet, as the watch team concentrated on the ASW picture. The large, plexiglass plotting boards used for displaying the air picture were dark. The plotting table was manned by two enlisted people, a plotter, who marked the ship’s position at three minute intervals to construct the trace, and a phone talker, who communicated with sonar control four decks below. The Evaluator, who was also on sound-powered phones, was linked to the conning officer on the bridge, and the sonar watch officer down in sonar control.

“Any surface contacts?”

“Just a few — night fishermen, the occasional merchie going in or out of Jax, and the usual collection of pleasure boats, smugglers, and dope runners. Nothing exotic.”

“Any other Navy around?”

“One K-mart frigate fifteen miles north, doing a full power run, according to the weekly op-order. Otherwise, nothing. We are the proud owners of the op-areas tonight.”

“Us and our submarine.”

The Weapons Officer snorted. “Yes, Sir. Right. Our very own submarine. Captain, if there is a sewer pipe around here, and he wants to hide, he’s gonna stay hid.”

The Captain leaned over the plot, absorbing the picture of surface contacts and the planned search track. The expanding square search was the classic technique if one had only the vaguest notion about where the object of the search might be. If properly computed, the track would cover the maximum area in a minimum of time. The ship would proceed two miles in an easterly direction, then turn right to the south and go three miles, and then turn to the west, and go four miles, and so on. The track was adjusted for the predicted effective sonar range, so that a broad path on either side of the ship would be swept for submerged contacts throughout the night.

“It kind of depends, Weps,” mused the Captain. “If it’s a nuke, the only clue we’re going to get would be hydrophone effects if he happened to kick it in the ass within range of our sensors. Since we’re banging away in the active mode, he would have to be pretty dumb to give us that much noise. If it’s not a nuke, then our chances of detecting him are slim to none, unless he does one of three things: go fast and cavitate, stick a scope up to see who’s out here pinging, or, stick a snorkel mast up sometime tonight to put some amps in the can.”

“Yes, Sir, but all of that assumes there is, or ever was, a sub out here, and, second, that he’s still somewhere nearby the original sighting position.”

They were interrupted by an announcement over the 29MC system, a voice activated announcing circuit controlled by the sonar operator.

“Sonar contact, bearing one-one-zero, range, 2450, doppler no, definition medium, classification to follow.”

The plotting crew marked the contact in red pencil on the trace, and waited for the follow-up classification.

“Bridge reports bearing is clear on the surface,” said the Weapons officer. Then the 29-MC came to life again.

“Sonar control evaluates the contact as non-sub; probably marine life.”

Everyone relaxed. The Captain stood up.

“We’ll probably see a lot of that throughout the night. Maintain that track — it’s as good as any. Have the surface search radar watch pay close attention to pop-up contacts, especially on the pathfinder. I’ll be in my sea cabin.”

“Aye, aye, Sir.”

The Captain left the CIC, and went back out to the bridge. It was a clear night, the sky glittering with stars, and a gibbous moon behind them. The night air was twenty degrees cooler than it had been at midday. The lights of some of the surface contacts twinkled on the horizon. By morning there would be mists and fog as the dew point reached saturation over the warm expanse of the Gulf Stream to the east. He climbed into his chair for a few minutes.

Who could this be, he wondered, if indeed there is a pigboat out there. Submarines simply did not come and go out here. American subs made transits all the time, providing exercise services to the surface units and the squadrons of ASW aircraft at Naval Air Station Jacksonville on their way to other business. Submarines from allied nations sometimes made a trans-Atlantic crossing to participate in fleet exercises, but this was fairly rare. The fisherman’s report made it sound like the sub had been seen on the surface. A U-boat. That suggested a conventional diesel-electric boat, as opposed to a nuke which almost never would come to the surface — there was simply no need. And, the fisherman had reported a submarine, not a periscope.

The Bosun mate brought him a paper cup of coffee, two sugars, no cream, as he liked it. Murmuring thanks, he settled back into his chair. So, a diesel boat. Whose diesel boat? And what was it doing out here, practically in the Gulf Stream? Jacques i got himself a sub, maybe? Doing some marine research? The whole thing didn’t compute. The Soviets wouldn’t send a diesel boat across the Atlantic for some offshore intel work — a nuke attack boat was more like it, and Navy intelligence kept a pretty good handle on where the Soviet nukes were operating.

There was another announcement of a sonar contact, followed moments later by the same classification of marine life. The Gulf Stream was like the aorta of the Atlantic, thrusting a teeming flood of living organisms up the east coast of the United States to sustain a food chain that stretched from Florida to beyond Iceland. But it was no place to do active ASW, he thought. Like listening for a single conversation in the crowd at a football game. The swirl of marine life, the surging canyon of water moving north at up to three knots, and the kaleidoscope of temperature gradients refracted and deflected the sound waves from their sonar, creating three dimensional shadow zones in the sea in which a large object could hide with impunity. An active sonar in these conditions was like a boom-box in a deep canyon. As he well knew, the submarine, which lived in that environment instead of trying to look into it, had a much clearer picture of what it looked like than a surface ship, which had to rely on hourly bathythermograph soundings to plot the ocean structure beneath them. He sighed out loud. They would play the game, find nothing, and go back in. A perfect assignment for a couple of has-beens, Montgomery and Goldsborough.

He reflected on the twilight of his naval career. It hadn’t always been like this. He had graduated from his mid-western university with a degree in business administration, compliments of a Navy ROTC scholarship, and varsity letters in football. His parents had fairly burst with pride at his commissioning, the first of their family to gain an officer’s gold bars. He had been assigned to a destroyer in the Pacific Fleet, where he had enjoyed the exotic pleasures of being a single, junior officer in the exotic Orient for his first year in the fleet. He had married a beguiling blonde from San Diego in his second year in the ship, but then Vietnam had come over the western horizon like a fast moving storm, and the deployments for his destroyer had turned into a gruelling grind of six months in the States, and seven, sometimes eight months overseas on the shore bombardment gunline off north and south Vietnam.

His young marriage had become a casualty of the deployment cycle. His new bride soon tired of being left alone when Mike had gone to sea for months on end. He had come back from a deployment to Vietnam to find letters from a lawyer informing him that his wife had filed for divorce on grounds of mental cruelty, and was planning to remarry, to said lawyer, no less. She had moved out of their rented apartment in San Diego, leaving behind his civilian clothes, a hi-fi set and his budding book collection to gather dust until he got back. The lawyer letters told him that she wanted nothing from him in the way of alimony or possessions; her new husband would see to the better things in life. His one attempt to contact her had resulted in a severely strained conversation with what seemed to be a perfect stranger. He had been stunned by her efficient, calculated departure, and had not been overly consoled by the observations of more experienced officers in the ship who told him he had gotten off lightly.

In reaction to the sudden, almost surgical demise of his marriage, he had thrown himself into his career with the dedication of someone with nothing else to do with his life. After a second, two year ship tour, he had volunteered for the riverine gunboat force that was forming up for operations in-country, against the advice of his Executive officer and Captain, who looked on the brown water Navy as a career sideline. But after nearly four years in the increasingly paper bound ship Navy, the excitement and novelty of the river gunboats had drawn him into the exotically alien land war in southeast Asia. Instead of doing his war from the safety of a ship offshore, with three meals a day at the wardroom table, clean sheets and fresh laundry, and off-hours of paperwork, he would be on the ground in the thick of things.

His first night fire-fight in a narrow waterway of the notorious Rung Sat secret zone had disabused him of any notions of being simply out on some kind of Hollywood adventure. The sudden roar of machine gun fire flashing out at his boats from the black jungle ten feet on either side of him, the crash of shattering windshields amidst the whining buzz of bullets, the rain of hot brass casings into the pilothouse from the twin fifties mounted above, and the screams of wounded men afloat and in the bush ashore had shocked him into the reality of close combat, and nothing was ever the same after that night. He had completed his full thirteen month tour, grimly intent on surviving and ensuring that his boats and his people also survived.

Following his in-country tour, he was assigned to another destroyer on the gunline for two years, and then a missile cruiser, where he made Lieutenant Commander and added another row of ribbons to his already impressive collection, the fruits of six years service in the seemingly everlasting Vietnam conflict. At the end of his second year in the cruiser there came a collision at sea in which he had a role, followed by transfer to yet another ship in the Pacific fleet. By the end of his twelfth year in the Navy, he had accumulated more years on sea duty than most officers would see in an entire twenty year career, and the Bureau of Personnel had wanted him to come ashore. But the stigma of the collision at sea was obstructing his selection for an Executive Officer assignment, so he wrangled yet another seagoing job, this time on a carrier group staff. Two years on the staff had broadened his horizons immensely and helped to wipe away the stain of the collision. He had been selected on his next to the last look for a Lieutenant Commander Exec’s job, to which he proceeded directly from the carrier group staff and six months at the prospective XO school in Newport.

The Exec’s job had come in the Atlantic Fleet for a change, but the deployments ground on. His ship made two, six-month deployments to the Mediterranean, where the emphasis seemed to be on fresh paint, polished brass, and shined shoes in contrast to the rough and ready Pacific Fleet after years of wartime operations. It was a stark contrast to the freewheeling days of Vietnam, and Mike Montgomery’s rough edges became evident despite the paternal attentions of two successive Commanding Officers, who had tried with varying degrees of success to align Mike’s professional talents with the niceties of professional political behavior as he drew closer to command selection. His second CO talked him into taking his first shore assignment in nearly fifteen years, at the headquarters of the Atlantic Fleet destroyer force, with the intent of exposing Mike to what the Captain called the grownup side of the Navy.

Mike spent three years at the headquarters, where he was promoted to full Commander, but not selected for command until the third year, and then only because his Admiral was President of the selection board. After the board’s command selection list had been published, the Chief of Staff had shared some of the Admiral’s observations about Mike’s record, pointing out that his seagoing career, and especially his war record, was stronger than almost all the other candidates, but that the taint of the collision at sea, combined with Mike’s own intolerant views towards the Navy’s vast shore establishment, had almost done him in. He advised Mike not to try to negotiate for a better offer when he was finally offered a command, but to take it and run because there would not be a second offer. Which was how he had ended up on Oldy Goldy, a ship that was headed for decommissioning in less than a year, and was out looking for a U-boat, of all things, in the Florida op-areas this fine night. He sighed again. He began to look forward to the weekend as he rose from his chair.

“I’ll be in my sea cabin, OOD.”

“Aye, aye, Sir. Do you want to be called for contacts?”

“Only if they classify it as possible sub, Frank.”

“Aye, aye, Sir. We probably won’t be calling you then.”

“Probably not.”