Scorpion in the Sea

EIGHTY-ONE

Diane was awakened by the sound of the night call bell on the counter of the intensive care suite waiting room. She had fallen asleep on the sagging, imitation leather couch in the dark corner of the waiting room. Her entire body was stiff and aching. She sat up slowly and looked around the darkened room. The other three women who had been waiting in the room with her had gone; they had probably turned out the lights when they had seen she was asleep.

She tried to remember details from the night before. After Mike’s gurney had gone upstairs, she had been swept up in the press of tending to the flood of casualties for two and a half hours before breaking free to try to find Mike. The exhausted OR staff on the fifth floor had told her that Mike had undergone three hours of surgery and was now in ICU on the third floor. She held back in the ICU lounge while several other dependents, legitimate dependents, she remembered thinking, had sought after news of husbands and sons. Finally she had steeled herself to step up to the desk and ask. If the corpsman had had any curiosity about why she was asking, he had given no sign. Commander Montgomery was stable, following major surgery. Was she his wife? Only a spouse or other close next of kin would be allowed bedside; she was welcome to wait and ask for reports throughout the night if she liked. The last report she was able to wring out of the ICU staff was that he was stable, and barring complications, would pull through. She heard the bell again.

An officer was at the darkened counter, obviously looking for the corpsman on duty. The waiting room and the adjacent hallway were darkened down to night lights. She stretched and yawned, fighting off her fatigue and the stiff ness of sleeping on a couch. The officer rang the bell again, impatiently, but still no one came out of the stainless steel, swinging doors leading into the ICU. She switched on a table lamp.

“They’ll come out when they can,” she called across the room. “Sometimes they get busy.”

The Gray Lady speaks, she thought irreverently. Support the staff.

The officer turned, and she recognized the Commodore. He was in khakis, and his face was shadowed by the beginnings of a heavy, dark gray beard. His uniform was rumpled, and he looked like he had been up all night. He stared at her for a moment, and then walked over, pitching his heavy, gold braid encrusted hat onto a chair. He examined the coffee pot as he walked over, but it was long since empty. The waiting room and the hallway were dead quiet.

“Well,” he said. “I see you didn’t take my advice.” His voice sounded weary, but he spoke without rancor.

“I was called up,” she said. “They needed everybody.”

“I can believe that. Christ, what a night. What a day and a night. What’s his status?” he asked, sitting down heavily on the other end of the couch.

“Fractured skull, legs broken, ankles broken, lost lots of blood, beat all to hell.”

“Sounds just like Goldsborough,” he said, sadly.

“They finished surgery sometime after midnight,” she continued. “They told me that he was stable after surgery, and that they were watching the head wound. I drifted off sometime after two, I guess. They said they’d call me if there was a change.”

She shook her head to clear the cobwebs. She desperately wanted a shower and some coffee. She got up from the couch, partly to get away from the Commodore’s disapproving gaze, to see if the makings for coffee were in the cabinet beneath the pot. They were.

“How about you getting the water, and I’ll make the coffee?” she said.

He nodded. “First useful thing I’ll have done in the past twenty-four hours.”

He took the pot up the hall to the men’s room. She fixed the filter basket, and started up the pot when he brought it back. They both sat down again to watch the coffee maker go through its cycle, the smell of freshly brewing coffee bringing a ray of life to the dreadful room. Outside, the first hints of daybreak began to dilute the stark blackness of the windows. There were still no sounds from the ICU.

“So,” she said. “What in God’s name happened out there?”

He closed his eyes and leaned back into the couch. At first she thought he was ignoring her question and going to sleep. But then he began to tell her.

“They got the Goldsborough back in. By the skin of everyone’s teeth, and she still may have sunk at the pier by now. Because the seas were flat calm, the two Spruances decided not to wait for any tugs but simply made up double lines to Goldsborough, made a Goldy sandwich, and steamed back in at five knots with guys holding axes standing by the lines in case she went down on them. The ship is apparently shattered, literally — hundreds of cracks in the hull, most of the main machinery dumped on the deck, and damned near all hands here in the hospital or downtown at Duvall General.”

He looked over at her. “And we don’t know what did it.”

“Surely the submarine did it,” she said.

He smiled at her, closing his eyes again.

“Ah, yes, the submarine. The mysterious, improbable, most unlikely, hardly credible, submarine.”

He was silent for a moment, as if waiting for her.

“They’re going to cover it up, aren’t they,” she said.

He laughed this time, an unhealthy sound.

“You’re as smart as you are good looking,” he said admiringly. “Right to the heart of the matter.”

He sat back up and rubbed his eyes again.

“Because that is the heart of the matter. I spent a very unpleasant few hours yesterday, last night, between the first reports of the action at sea and the beginning of the full scale medevac and salvage operation. Got to participate in several politically toxic conference calls between Norfolk, the Type Commander, the Fleet Commander, the Joint Staff in Washington, Group Twelve, and us little fish in Mayport. Your husband, by the way, is back — flew in on a helo from Coral Sea. The carrier’s coming in around seven or so this morning, but your husband could not wait. No matter that they needed the seat for some of the injured.”

“That’s my J.W.,” she murmured.

“The submarine that wasn’t there,” he continued, as if he had not heard her. “We have reports from the Coral Sea helicopter pilots who were assigned to Goldsborough when he gained contact. They confirm that torpedoes were fired. They confirmed some electric torpedoes from Goldsborough, which they could hear on their dipping sonar, and some great big fucking torpedoes, their words, excuse my French, which they could see from some unknown source fired at the carrier. Apparently Mike turned his ship across their track and laid a pattern of depth charges in their way, and countermined three of them. One kept going, and the helo pilots saw its wake heading over the horizon in the direction of the carrier.

“Then the helo got a contact on its dipping sonar — a good contact, according to them, running west at high speed. Just like sonar school, they said — a good, solid contact. Another torpedo was fired by Goldsborough — they heard it running, and they heard it fizzle out, probably on the bottom in that shallow water. The helo didn’t have any weapons onboard. Then the contact turned around east towards Goldsborough, and the helo was ordered to break contact and position itself between Goldy and where the carrier had vamoosed to. They broke dip, got out on the 5000 yard fence as ordered, and then somebody set off a small nuke, that’s the way both of them described it — a small nuke, underwater, on Goldy’s port quarter. The explosion was so big that Goldy disappeared in the water plume, and you need to keep in mind Goldy’s masthead height is 117 feet. That’s how big the plume from the explosion had to be. The pilot activated his wire cutter, jettisoned his $200,000 dipping sonar, and lifted the helo off the surface to avoid the wave getting him too. Big fucking wave. Big fucking underwater blast. You know what I think?”

“What?”

“I think the bastard had a mine left after his little visit to the river. Because the mines that got the Toyota Maru in the river picked that 60,000 ton ship up, 60,000 tons, that’s fifteen times the size of Goldsborough, and nearly threw her out of the channel. We have Navy witnesses to that. That plus the fact that no one could find any big holes in Goldy. Just a zillion little holes and cracks, and everyone onboard with busted legs and heads, like Mike in there. A massive shock wave. Mine guys said that big mines can deliver a 20 to 30 G-force shock wave if they’re placed right.”

“A mine,” she said. “But from the submarine. Who also laid the other mines in the channel.”

“Yeah. I think the mines in the channel were insurance, or maybe even the primary weapon. The whole bit about attacking the carrier was always risky — she could have been expected to have escorts, and it was only a fluke that she didn’t. And the water is really shallow for submarine work —300, 400 foot out there. Not much room to maneuver a sewer pipe. I think the mines were meant for the carrier, only they got the wrong carrier. And thirty seven Nipponese along with it — nobody survived what happened out there on the river.”

“I saw that thing go up,” she said. “It was terrible.”

“Yeah. I was in Deyo in the CIC, and it rained car carrier for a full minute when all the gas tanks let go. Big mines. We sent a minesweeper out, after it was all over, naturally. They didn’t find any more mines, but the river is ninety feet, that’s ninety goddamned feet deeper than it used to be where it happened. The mine guys say these had to be monster mines, three, maybe four thousand pounds, more than likely gas boosted explosives, to make those kinds of holes. And that’s what I think this guy fired at Goldsborough as Mike went in to kill him with his depth charges, the only weapons he had that might work against this guy, because our side’s torpedoes had locked on to the bottom.” “But what would happen to the submarine if he was close to an explosion like that — wouldn’t it be just like a much bigger version of a depth bomb?”

The Commodore smiled again.

“You want a job?” he asked. “I take it back — brains are dangerous on a staff. Yes, of course. The submarine, being completely submerged, would have taken just as big a hammering as the tin can did, maybe even worse. It probably went down within a mile of Goldsborough.”

“Which means that the Navy can truthfully say that a mine got the Goldsborough, just like the Toyota carrier, but that all this talk of a submarine is fiction, because we don’t habeas a submarine corpus.”

“Precisely. Although they are looking. Boy, are they looking. They’ve got one of the new minehunters down from Charleston, got five sonars on him and frogmen, too, sailed an hour after the Toyota went up, and the Coast Guard has the tethered eye out there. The water depth is between three and four hundred feet, plus or minus, and they are looking very hard indeed. But the bottom is riddied with canyons and ravines, so it’s going to be very tough.”

“But, either way, they’re not going to find anything, are they?”

“I suspect they are not.”

“And how will they explain the mines?”

The Commodore looked up at the ceiling.

“If I were a public affairs officer, I would speculate, not announce, mind you, but speculate that a cluster of World War II mines, from some long ago minefield, have been bumping along the bottom inshore of the Gulf Stream, where there’s known to be a counter current, for lo, these many years, and that they finally did some damage. There will be a great deal of minehunting along the northeastern coasts of Florida for a while.”

Diane got up to check the coffee, and poured them each a paper cup. She sat back down, and eyed the Commodore over the rim of her coffee cup.

“And what will happen to Goldsborough?”

“She’ll be decommissioned; she’s beyond repair. And then she’ll be scrapped.”

“And Mike?” she asked softly.

The Commodore drank his coffee in noisy little sips for a minute.

“That’s a hard one, and it kinda depends,” he said finally. “He saved the Coral Sea. There’s no doubt about that. If those were Russian steam torpedoes, and they probably were, they had plenty of legs to run out there and chase down the bird farm. But Mike called the Coral Sea when the radio message from Norfolk warning the carrier first came out, confirming it as Coral Sea first showed up in the kill zone, mentioning mines by the way, and got him going in the away direction. He also sent them a critical warning to turn north when the torpedoes were detected, which took the carrier off axis enough to escape detection when the one survivor made it out to where the carrier had been. And, of course, Mike’s maneuver with the depth charges was decisive in thinning out the spread to one fourth of its original size. And if Goldy hadn’t been out there in the first place, the gomer could have hit Coral Sea with a spread of six torpedoes, and the mines might yet be waiting for the survivor of that.”

“But by saving Coral Sea, he’s demonstrated that the Group not only guessed wrong, but kept silent when the possibility that there was a submarine out there surfaced.”

He nodded slowly at her, his eyes lidded.

“And that, politically speaking, career-wise speaking, is a major crime,” she said.

He nodded again, sipping his coffee, watching her work it out.

“Compounded by the fact that he was having an affair with his Group Chief of Staffs wife, another major crime in terms of his professional judgement. So let me guess: they’ll offer to balance it out. Assuming he lives through all this, and provided he keeps his mouth shut about Libyan submarines, he’ll get a medal, one of those given in the privacy of some Admiral’s office, and then he’ll be helped to retire.”

“Bingo,” said the Commodore.

“And, let me see: I’ll bet my job is to go in there when he wakes up, and gently explain all this to him when he’s a little better, and if I do that, successfully, and we simply fade away, presumably together, then nobody will come after me, or Mike either, especially his highness, the Chief of Staff.”

The Commodore nodded again, watching her carefully.

“I love it,” she said bitterly. “The Navy way. Right way, wrong way, Navy way. But tell me: what about all these people, practically the whole crew of the Goldsborough, the hundreds of injured? What happens to them?”

“Victims of an act of God. A stray mine from a war forty years gone. The investigation will determine who were heroes and who were not. The Exec of the Goldsborough was a big hero — he kept her afloat until the Spruances got there. He’s going to come out of this with an early selection to Commander and a command of his own. He deserves it. Many others will get medals, everyone will get a unit citation medal for saving the carrier, and the injured will get purple hearts and a big commendation in their records, something vaguely worded as to how so and so made a gallant sacrifice when his ship saved a carrier by throwing itself on a mine. Something like that. Beyond the pain and suffering, what happened to Goldsborough will actually be a bigger boost to their careers than anything else they might have done on that ship.”

“The career; above all the career,” she said bitterly.

“Most of them are careerists,” he pointed out.

“But many of them knew there was a submarine. How will they cover that up?’

“There will be two kinds of witnesses. The great bulk of the crew, the engineers, the gun mount people, the fire control guys, people in the magazines and in auxiliary spaces, they had no role in this other than as victims. The investigating board will tell them that their CO was mistaken. After all, nobody saw a submarine. They thought they had a contact. They heard what they thought were torpedoes. It was a mine, all along. And the second category of witness will be the officers on the bridge and in CIC, who will be told that the mine story is a deception, a deception vital to national security.”

“How, for God’s sake, could they justify that?”

“You really don’t know? It’ll go like this: Gentlemen, we need to bury this incident because it is the right thing to do. This whole Navy, this whole Defense Department, operates on the theory of deterrence. Successful deterrence is heavily dependent upon image. The other side has to think you’re ten foot tall, that, if not perfect, you are close to it, and to try you on means certain defeat. The Navy simply can’t admit that a third world submarine came all the way over here, undetected, either at sea or by our superior intelligence systems, operated in our fleet opareas for weeks, successfully planted mines in the entrance to a major seaport, and almost successfully ambushed one of our carriers, who was, ahem — regrettably operating unescorted. And worse, that the local chain of command suppressed the warnings of a CO who caught on to what was going on and wouldn’t leave it alone.”

He leaned back in the couch, eyes closed, delivering his “speech.”

“It’s a major fuckup, all around. But not one we can have becoming public. Believe me, Gentlemen, there will be repercussions at very high levels over this, and some high ranking people are going to lose their jobs. But it is absolutely vital to national security that a thing like this be handled behind closed doors. We simply have to, or the thousands of officers and men of the Navy who are doing a superb job, day in and day out, would be tarred, and worse, would lose their confidence in the judgement of their national command authorities. We ask you to bury this whole incident, accept your medals with grace, and get on with your careers, which are now more promising than they were because of the outstanding contribution you and your ship made.”

She stared at him for a long moment. He raised his eyebrows, as if to ask, was that not convincing? She realized that his little speech, or something very much like it, was probably being polished by professional speechwriters even as they waited in the hospital waiting room.

“And what happens to you?” she asked, finally.

“I will not get a medal and I will also retire, but not right away. I was the real instigator and the chief accomplice in the major crime of embarrassing their lordships. I have to go because I should have known better than to put the Admirals in an embarrassing position. I should have ‘handled it’ better. Mike was in his first command, so he’s being given the benefit of the doubt. I was in my major command. The point of major command is to demonstrate that you’re one of them, or can be one of them, and I guess I demonstrated just the opposite. But they’ll be nice about it, because they know I’m old enough to maybe someday run my mouth.”

Diane shook her head slowly, in silence. He leaned forward.

“It takes something like this, usually in peacetime, to shake the tree. And believe me, if the tone of their voices yesterday, or last night, or whenever it was, is any indication, the whole forest is shaking. Mike and I are going to be down in the noise level, in the grass, as they say. And please believe me when I say that’s precisely where I, and where Mike and where you want to be.”

Diane put down her coffee cup and hugged herself, her eyes on the floor, while she thought about it.

“Will you be reassigned?” she asked, almost idly.

“If they have any sense of irony, they’ll make me the Group Twelve Chief of Staff,” he replied.

Diane found that funny. She began to laugh, softly at first, but then louder, with an hysterical edge. She was still laughing, with tears in her eyes, when the duty corpsman came out of the ICU. He had never, ever heard anyone laugh like that in the ICU waiting room. He stood uncertainly by the steel doors.

“Mrs. Martinson?” he called. “Commander Montgomery is awake. We told him you were out here, and he’s asking for you, Ma’am. The Docs say he’s going to be OK, barring all the standard stuff. I’ll take you in, if you’d like.”

He caught sight of the Commodore. “Sir, can I help you?”

“No, young man,” said the Commodore. “Take this lady to see Commander Montgomery. Mrs. Martinson, Diane, will you think about what I said? Will you try to convince him? Anything else will be like sweeping against the tide.”

Diane stood up, smoothing out the wrinkled Gray Lady uniform, running her hands through her hair. She put her arms straight up and stretched, revealing in one smooth gesture her beauty and intelligence and vitality all in one graceful motion. The Corpsman looked on admiringly. Then she smiled at the Commodore, a radiant, 50,000 watt smile, and turned without answering to follow the corpsman into the ICU.