Breaking up with a guy was always difficult, but this hadn’t been her choice, and she hadn’t seen it coming. It put her in an uncertain mood. And continuing to cross paths with Kevin Taggert at work was too high a price to pay for her peace of mind. It was time to leave.
She’d put off the decision for weeks, for she enjoyed working at NOAA’s Marine Geology and Geophysics Division. But her task of mapping the seabed of the world’s oceans using satellite data was essentially finished. She’d solved the last technical problem, incorporating the earth’s gravity map with the radar data. The algorithms were finished, and now it was just processing time. A set of detailed seabed maps for the Pacific were complete, and they were beautiful in their exquisite detail. They were already in use by the Navy. The rest of the world’s five oceans would follow as computer-processing time was available, and her colleague Ashley had that task well in hand.
The maps were a major step forward in knowledge about the oceans. The satellite data significantly improved both accuracy and coverage, so much so that in two years of work she’d managed to render obsolete the accumulated knowledge of decades of previous maps of the ocean floors created by surface ships using side-scan sonar. Her maps were practically works of art. But not many would get to appreciate the full impact of what she’d accomplished. The military was exercising its right to classify the resolution of her maps and would only release a version to the public with a lower level of detail.
She understood the reason the data would be classified. Telling an enemy—or for that matter, even a curious ally—the depths and locations of the underwater trenches and seamount formations along the Pacific Northwest would give them the ability to hide their own submarines more easily, to watch who entered and exited the Strait of Juan de Fuca, headed for the Naval Base Kitsap at Bremerton or the Naval Submarine Base Bangor. Other naval bases around the world would similarly become more vulnerable. Keeping the higher resolution maps classified would give the U.S. an advantage at sea that was worth protecting.
Gina accepted the military decision, even though it complicated matters for her personally. Her résumé wouldn’t be able to show the true extent of her work, but those who appreciated what she could do with large data sets would see the notation on the page and know the actual work product was classified. At least this project wasn’t being classified at a level where she couldn’t even reference the work in her résumé—something that had happened with her sonar work.
But she hadn’t taken this project on for the scientific credit it would give her. She’d taken on the seafloor mapping project to keep submariners—Jeff Gray, her brother, chief among them—safer. An accident like the USS San Francisco, which had hit an underwater formation, killing a crewman and nearly sinking it, wouldn’t happen again. Seamounts everywhere in the world’s five oceans would now be clearly marked on the new navigational charts incorporating her seabed data.
Her brother was out on the USS Seawolf somewhere in the Pacific tonight and wasn’t due back in Bangor for a few weeks. She couldn’t use him as an excuse to head to the West Coast, though that was where she most wished she could be—at Jeff’s place, tucked in safe with the last member of her family.
Her dream of being married by the time she was 30 looked further away than ever before. Her options were fading. As painful as it was to absorb the breakup with Kevin, she couldn’t afford to pull back from dating again if she was going to keep her dream alive. She’d have to shake it off, patch together her self-confidence, and move on. Kevin hadn’t meant to cause her so much turmoil. He’d broken things off as gently as he could, done it with kindness by saying it wasn’t her; it was simply that it wasn’t going to work out for the long term and it would be better to conclude that now and keep their relationship a friendship.
It was her. This was the third serious relationship to end in essentially the same way. And she was at a loss for the reasons and what to do about it. She didn’t understand what had gone wrong, so she didn’t know what to fix. She was adaptable, willing to change, willing to make adjustments. She just needed a guy to like her enough to stick with her while they figured out how to make a relationship work for the long term.
She wanted to get married. She was 29, reasonably pretty, she had a good smile, her weight was under control, she could converse on most subjects with some knowledge, she went to church, she was nice to people, and the fact she wasn’t married when she wanted to be just didn’t make sense. It was the kind of failure that fit into the bucket of things she simply couldn’t understand.
“Just one guy, God. Surely somewhere there is one guy for me,” she mentioned quietly as she gathered up the orange peels and dropped them into the trash. She even kept a fairly neat house. She wasn’t the best cook in the world, but she was decent enough with a cookbook.
Her speech could lock up on rare occasions, but it had happened only twice in the last two years with Kevin, and it was more an embarrassment for her than a concern. The doctors compared the phenomena she experienced to a stutterer who had difficulty getting the words out. She couldn’t believe that was the problem. The speech freeze would clear itself on its own in a minute or two. She mentally pushed away the concern. If she wanted to find reasons for Kevin’s decision, she could talk herself in circles. He hadn’t given her one.
Jeff would help her out. It’s what big brothers did. She could ask him to introduce her to Navy guys he liked. Surely on a base where more than ten thousand people worked, there would be a few eligible, nice, single guys whom Jeff thought might like her. She wouldn’t mind being a military wife.
She had worked on sonar projects in the past—her idea for cross-sonar now kept Jeff materially safer than he had been before. If she married a military man, there would always be ocean work she could do for the Navy, regardless of where they were based. If she got lucky enough to marry a submariner, she already knew she liked the Bangor area, in the northwest part of Washington State. The other home port for submarines stateside was at Kings Bay, Georgia. While she hadn’t visited it, Jeff had thought it a nice enough place for the year he had been stationed there.
Gina finished the orange.
She had a couple of new sonar ideas worth exploring. A phone call would put in motion the security clearances necessary to let her pursue them. She could be on the West Coast tomorrow, tucked into a lab at Bangor, have some time to herself to work. She could stay at Jeff’s place. It would give her physical distance from Kevin. It would keep her occupied until Jeff got back from his sea patrol.
If she retreated to Chicago, her other option, she ran the risk of giving up on her dream of marriage. She had held on to the family house there as her home base. She loved the science projects she could tap into at the university she had attended for so many years, and she felt at home at the church she had attended since her teens. But the five years working in Chicago were marked by two relationships that had not worked out, and she didn’t know who else in her circle of acquaintances there would think to ask her out on a date if they hadn’t done so in prior years. With the move to Boulder she’d had two years dating Kevin and a chance for what she dreamed of to come true. She’d just have to try again.
Go west, she decided. Work on her sonar ideas. Ask for Jeff’s help. It was at least a plan. Better than staying in Boulder and trying to find polite things to say when those encounters with Kevin brought back the sadness of a dream that was dying.
Have Jeff introduce her to Navy guys he liked, keep an open mind. She would make a concerted effort not to dismiss any guy who showed an interest, regardless of how unlikely she thought he might be from their initial introduction. She wasn’t dreaming about a perfect match anymore. A good guy would be fine. Someone willing to commit to building a good marriage. She just had to figure out where he was, put herself in his path, say hello, and hope for the best.
Bishop thanked the petty officer who brought him more coffee, put his fork through a stack of pancakes, and reviewed the drill plan fo
r the next watch. Fresh eggs, milk, and fruit ran out three weeks into a patrol, and the sub didn’t resurface for more supplies unless there was a major equipment failure aboard and provisions could be picked up as an incidental extra. Bishop chose to stick with pancakes and bacon, occasionally cinnamon rolls, rather than adapt to powdered milk and an egg substitute.
He wanted two more fire drills focused on the command-and-control center before this patrol was finished. They were complex drills, and he didn’t want to run them too close to reaching the continental shelf or when they were sailing under a shipping channel. He penciled in the drills for 6 and 18 hours out, added a note for the drill coordinator that he wanted to also have the sonar room face an equipment failure during the first of the fire drills.
Back on base they would run the fire drills at the Trident Training Facility with real flames, heat, and suffocating smoke. But at sea they would simply use waving red flags. The alarm would sound, the rush of the fire crew from all locations in the boat would jam ladders, fire suits would be donned, equipment would be hauled in, and tight places to work in would get even tighter as others in the crew raced to get the boat to the surface to vent the invisible smoke.
As the fire took out communications and navigation controls, the crew would find conditions rapidly deteriorating. With actions they needed to take no longer available by turning a knob or setting a switch on a panel, they would have to revert to coordinating manual overrides with crewmen elsewhere in the boat to conduct operations—all while the drill was running against the clock. Men would be sweating and adrenaline would be running high before it was over. In the after-action assessment, Bishop and the drill coordinator would declare the submarine lost or saved based on the speed and sequence of the crew’s actions.
The drills were intense for a reason. Bishop worried as much about fire as he did flooding. A fire became very hot, very fast, inside the confined circular construction of a submarine, the heat and smoke forced into a swirling, expanding inferno that would make it impossible to breathe in a matter of minutes. Fire was one of the nightmare scenarios, and when it hit the control room, the switch you needed to save your life could be on the panel that had just lit up in flames. Submarines were basically computer hardware, electrical equipment, audio equipment, power plants, missiles, rocket fuel, batteries—with a few people fit in around them. Unlike a pipe, where age and corrosion could be inspected and repaired, not much that was a fire hazard on a sub was visible before it failed.
The phone on the wall to his left buzzed. Bishop reached over to answer it.
“Captain, sonar. New contact, sound signature USS Seawolf.”
“Very well.”
He headed up to the command-and-control center. They were four days out from Bangor. The tempo of this day and the next three was destined to get progressively faster, even without the drills.
The officer of the deck gave him a summary of the current situation on the boat, and the chief engineer added details to the nuclear-plant update. Bishop paused by the navigation table to check the chart overview. “The captain has the deck,” he announced.
“The captain has the deck,” the weapons chief confirmed, passing back authority.
“Sonar, control. Where’s the Seawolf?”
“Control, sonar. Seawolf is bearing 076 degrees, range 41 miles, depth 520 feet.”
“Sonar, report all other contacts.”
“Eight surface ships, all distant. A tanker and four cargo ships to the north, three fishing vessels to the west.”
Bishop wanted to pass near the Seawolf—under the command of his friend Jeff Gray—coming in on her port side and below her. But he didn’t want to sail directly toward her. They would both be trailing towed sonar arrays that water currents would be pushing around, and if the Russian or some other sub was out there, they would need maneuvering room.
“Conn, come to heading 095 degrees, make your depth 825 feet.”
“Come to heading 095 degrees, depth 825 feet, aye, Captain,” the conn officer confirmed. He then handed the same order on to the helmsman and planesman.
“Passing 280 to the right, sir,” the helmsman called out, marking the turn. “Passing 045 . . . steady on course 095, sir.”
The planesman called out the increasing depths, “650 feet . . . 750 feet . . . leveling out at 825 feet, sir.”
Bishop looked over at his executive officer. “XO, give me all-quiet on the boat. I’d like the Seawolf to appreciate just how difficult we are to hear coming.”
Kingman smiled his appreciation. “All-quiet, aye, Captain.” He reached for the intercom and set it to 1MC to broadcast throughout the boat. “Nevada, this is the XO. Rig for all-quiet. We’re going to snuggle with the Seawolf. Let’s remind them who’s the better boat.”
Discretionary sources of noise like the trash compactor would be shut off, routine maintenance which might cause a pipe to be struck or a tool to be dropped would be postponed, men not needed on station would slip into their bunks to minimize movement, and all casual conversations would cease. The already quiet boat would turn into a silent ghost in the water.
Bishop walked forward to the sonar room.
Sonar Chief Larry Penn said quietly, “Our noise profile is dropping, Captain.”
The boat’s sonar was powerful enough to pick up the sound of snapping shrimp when they were in Dabob Bay, and in the ocean they used that same power to listen for changes aboard their own boat. It wasn’t uncommon for sonar to report a valve problem in the torpedo room moments before Weps called forward to report the same issue. Noise was a diagnostic tool in a sub designed for quiet.
With the Seawolf and the Nevada coming together on similar tracks, the distance between them closed quickly. When the two vessels had come to within 15 nautical miles, Bishop said quietly, “Let them know we are here.”
Penn typed in a command at the right console and turned on cross-sonar.
On the Seawolf a sonar technician likely hit his knee on the terminal rack and said a few words he would be glad his mother could not hear. He was, however, quick to report the new contact to his command-and-control center, for the Seawolf’s forward speed dropped abruptly.
“Link us,” Bishop directed.
Penn entered the command.
Bishop saw the cross-sonar link establish and watched as the radar screen display mapped out parts of the ocean the Seawolf had passed through recently, giving them a first look at the waters around the Strait of Juan de Fuca. All looked calm over the last 24 hours.
Cross-sonar was a set of elegantly simple ideas that, when put together, allowed two subs to share sonar data with each other while not being overheard. Their conversation couldn’t be distinguished from the ocean noise because it was based on and built into the ocean noise.
“Start the cross-sonar search.”
“Start the cross-sonar search, aye, Captain.” Penn entered the command.
The sonar dome and the towed sonar array on the Nevada paired up with the sonar dome and towed sonar array on the Seawolf. The effective range expanded as four hydrophone sets listened in concert to the ocean. Contacts began to appear at distances substantially greater than either sub could hear on its own. Most were surface ships.
“New contact, bearing 276 degrees, looks deep,” the spectrum sonarman in the far left seat said, excitement in his voice. He typed fast, running the search to match the sound and pin down the exact name. “Identified as Akula, class II, K-335. It’s the Cheetah, sir.”
“Go get him, Jeff,” Bishop murmured to himself.
The Seawolf had seen the Akula too. Cross-sonar dropped. The screen showed the Seawolf’s abrupt acceleration in speed on a direct vector for an intercept. The Seawolf was a fast-attack submarine designed for combat with just such an opposing submarine. The Cheetah’s captain was about to have a very bad day.
Bishop breathed easier. The obstacle he’d worried about for the return home was now a known quantity—and the Seawolf’s focus. Jeff would
be on the Russian sub until he was driven well out to sea.
“Bring up the data replay.”
Bishop watched cross-sonar paint in the Akula again. It was out at the edge of the range of what even cross-sonar could find. The Akula had never heard either the Nevada or the Seawolf, of that Bishop was certain. All the Russian captain would know was that he had a U.S. fast-attack submarine coming into firing position in his baffles. No shots would be exchanged, as both sides during peacetime used these skirmishes as interesting training exercises, but the Russian captain would still be smarting. He would have been slowly and carefully maneuvering for days to work his way into that trench off the continental shelf as a place to hide.
Allies and enemies alike were trying to figure out what the U.S. was doing that had increased the sonar range to such a degree. The assumption would be that new, more sensitive hardware had been deployed. Bishop thought cross-sonar might survive a decade unmatched before someone decoded what they were doing. Cross-sonar was just software and some very elegant reasoning. Espionage was the real threat. Someone on the U.S. side giving away the secret, someone stealing it by hacking into a server or physically making a copy of the algorithms were the more likely ways it would become known by other nations.
Bishop had been stunned when he got his first detailed, classified briefing on how cross-sonar functioned. It gave them a priceless advantage at sea and seemed so obvious once he saw the individual pieces and how they fit together. But it had taken a 20-year-old college student working on a Ph.D. sonar thesis—her brother in the submarine force having sparked her interest—to come up with the ideas and put them together into a powerful and operationally useful combination.
Bishop walked back to the command-and-control center. He’d take full advantage of the tactical advantage cross-sonar gave him, and be very grateful the U.S. had the capability before anyone else. “Conn, bring us to heading 010. Make our depth 400 feet.” He would turn the boat north of the shipping channel into water that would have less surface-noise clutter.
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