Echo Class

by David E. Meadows

  “Of course you do, Skipper. Besides, I’m sending the Gearing out on a reciprocal course to the northwest just in case the Soviets start doing something unusual like being innovative.”

  The USS Dale tilted slightly as the destroyer turned starboard off the base course to the new one. MacDonald looked up at the OOD, raised his finger, and made circles in the air.

  “If he’s out there, we’ll find him.”

  “There is no doubt in my military mind that you will, Danny. So go get the son of a bitch and scare the shit out of him. And, Danny . . . stay with him until you can force him up or you lose him.”

  “If he’s out there, we’ll find him,” MacDonald repeated.

  “Sounds to me like déjà vu, Danny. Listen! I’m going to let you go. Don’t let an old sailor down.”

  “Aye, aye, sir,” MacDonald replied, knowing Green would stay on the line longer, hoping to hear some inadvertent comment.

  “Right full rudder!” Goldstein shouted.

  “The Dale never loses a contact.”

  There was slight laughter on the other end. “Just like you to never put me on mute and order a course change, Skipper. What was that? The OOD not put enough rudder on?”

  “Sir, you are a psychic.”

  “No, I’m just a destroyer sailor who has been there, done that, and envies you this opportunity.”

  “We’ll get him, if he’s still out there.”

  “That’s the spirit. Wish I could afford another ship or two to help, but our mission is to get the Kitty Hawk off Vietnam as soon as possible. We still have a port call in Olongapo for a brief fueling stop and to pick up the Tripoli and her cargo of angry, fire-breathing marines. Operation Beacon Torch could be the turning point in this war.”

  “I know the crew is looking forward to the port call.” Every Pacific Fleet sailor knew the joys of this Philippine town where the U.S. Navy had its largest Asian port.

  “My EA has just handed me a note. Seems you’re at twelve knots. Isn’t that a little fast for the sonar to work?” the admiral asked, referring the capability of the sonar to work passively in detecting noise in the water.

  “We’ll slow down a couple of knots once we are over the horizon.”

  “Probably one of these Echo class submarines.”

  “Shaddock missile,” MacDonald offered.

  “Shaddock missile,” Green concurred. “Wait one!”

  A few seconds later, Green was back on the circuit. “VQ- 1’s visual on the submarine identified it as an Echo class. A formation of Phantoms on combat air-patrol point overflew the submarine. I am sending them back to orbit the area on the off chance the clappers the Willy Victor dropped worked. If I were a submarine skipper, I’d want to surface as soon as I could and pull them off my hull.”

  The ship’s intercom blasted across the bridge. “OOD, is the skipper up there?”

  “Admiral, we are getting the data over NTDS, sir,” MacDonald continued, ignoring the voice box.

  “I’m letting you go, Danny. Go get the bastard.”

  “We will.”

  “One last thing: Don’t fire on him. We don’t want a war started out here with the Soviets. Let’s finish one war at a time.”

  MacDonald slipped the handset into the cradle after bidding Green good-bye. He should have an hour or so before the old man called back wanting to know his status. He leaned forward, pushed the CIC button on the 12MC console. “Combat, Skipper.”

  “Combat here, Skipper.”

  “Have you set the blue gold watch?”

  “We have the gold antisubmarine team on their way to station, sir.”

  “Good. Does Sonar have any contact-convergence zone, etc.?”

  “No, sir. Too much noise from our battle group.”

  “Repeat the contact information for the bridge, if you would, Lieutenant Burnham.”

  “VQ-1 reports its visual as an Echo class submarine on the surface. Bears two-one-zero degrees distance, two hundred nautical miles.”

  “OOD, you get that?” MacDonald asked.

  “Aye, sir. Right ten-degree rudder, steady up on course two-one-zero,” Lieutenant Goldstein sang out.

  “Keep me appraised,” MacDonald said, leaning back in his chair, watching the bow of the Dale cut through the light waves of the South China Sea, listening to the repeats from the helm as Mr. Goldstein attempted to steady up on the new course. Two hundred nautical miles. Good thing they had topped off from the Mispillion yesterday. He looked out the port-side door. The Kitty Hawk was sliding left. Meant they were opening up distance between them.

  “Steady on course two-one-zero!” the helmsman reported.

  MacDonald felt the tilt of the ship right itself. Two hundred miles meant the Dale would be late in arriving in Olongapo. That was enough for his crew to want to sink the submarine; a day lost in Olongapo was a day lost in paradise.

  One day the United States and the Soviets were going to stare each other eyeball-to-eyeball and neither was going to blink. What would happen then? he wondered.

  Since 1962, when America backed them down over the missiles in Cuba, the Soviet Navy had become more and more confrontational. Cutting across their bows to force American ships to maneuver and avoid collisions had been a common theme when the Dale was in the Mediterranean last year. Yeah, no doubt about it. One of these days there was going to be an incident at sea, and then America was going to have to kick some serious Soviet Navy butt. The sooner they did it, the better the outcome would be. MacDonald wanted to fight them now instead of leaving it to his children or his children’s children to have to do it.

  “LIEUTENANT,” Chief Caldwell said, handing a message board to Burnham.

  Burnham glanced at the radar repeater, then at the naval tactical data system screen, double-checking how the blips on the radar compared with the NTDS. The ship had been outfitted with NTDS during the last upkeep period. There was something about those comfortable with the old technology that made them suspect of the new.

  “What is it, Chief?” Burnham asked as he took the board.

  “Sir! Do you want us to set up a time-motion analysis—?”

  “What do you think, Ensign?” Burnham said over his shoulder to young Hatfield, his voice betraying the boredom he’d found after joining the navy to avoid the draft. “Are you going to wait until the team is set and then prepare for it? Probably a good idea, but we can’t do a damn thing until Sonar has contact, and we won’t have that until we slow down to under twelve knots.”

  “The EC-121 reconnaissance aircraft gave us a datum on the submarine,” Hatfield replied enthusiastically.

  Burnham ignored the reply. Why in God’s name did they have to send him an ensign who wanted to do everything at once at the speed of sound?

  “Would you keep still, Peppercorn? You move around the place like someone with a nervous twitch. It gives me a nervous twitch.”

  “Sorry, Lieutenant. Just that we have a lot to do to get the chart table set up for doing TMA.”

  “A second of standing in one place when you’re talking to me would help.”

  Burnham turned to the radioman chief. “Did you say something, Chief?” Burnham asked.

  “No, sir. I was waiting for a moment to tell you the communications officer sent this,” Caldwell replied.

  Burnham flipped up the metal cover of the message board and scanned the machine-typed message. He pulled a pen from his pocket and initialed the red router stamped haphazardly on the front of the message. It was God’s way of making sure everyone who ever read the damn thing was marked for life. He had lost count over the two years on the Dale of the number of messages he had initialed. Being the operations officer was supposed to be more fun than this. He had yet to see a message that was worth his time to read, much less initial, but with only fourteen months, two weeks, and three days left in the navy, he’d do it the navy way.

  “Anything to take back to Mr. Taylor?”

  He shook his head. “No, Chief. It’s just
a message from CINCPAC Fleet telling us the Tripoli has arrived in Olongapo. We’ll join her for Operation Beacon Torch.”

  “Beacon Torch?”

  Burnham motioned Chief Caldwell away. “You probably know more about it than I do, Chief. Ask the good communications officer. He reads all this stuff.”

  Caldwell laughed. “He used to, sir. Then a slew of supply messages arrived the other weekend and I think he got a migraine trying to decipher the national stock numbering system.”

  “NSN gives me a migraine.”

  The two men laughed. Caldwell took the message board and quickly departed the small CIC.

  Burnham sauntered over to the plotting table. Ensign Hatfield, his tongue between his teeth, was busy taping down a see-through sheet of white trace paper over the navigational chart of the area.

  “You’re going to bite your tongue off one day, Peppercorn.”

  Hatfield looked up, smiling. “This is exciting, Lieutenant.”

  “Then you haven’t been to Olongapo, my young virgin friend.”

  Hatfield looked around to see if anyone heard that. “Lieutenant!” he whispered.

  Burnham laughed. “Just kidding, Peppercorn.”

  A sailor walked up to the two officers. “Sir, I’m a member of the Gold Team.”

  “Well, well, well, if it isn’t Petty Officer Banks from the great state of Tennessee,” Burnham said, slapping Banks on the back. He was one of the few on board who knew that this young man held a bachelor’s degree from Duke University and was one year away from his master’s in English literature. Unfortunately, when old Uncle Sam invited Banks to learn the ways of the infantryman, taking time off for the navy seemed the right thing to do.

  The army’s loss had been Burnham’s gain. The two had found a harmony in intellectual discourse that only those with superior degrees could understand. At least, that was Burnham’s opinion. He enjoyed the arguments with Banks, who was a dyed-in-the-wool Democrat to his Republican.

  “There,” Hatfield said, stepping back. “What do you think, Petty Officer Banks? Think we can use this for tracking our bearings?”

  The unassuming Banks bent over the plotting table and ran his hands over the top. “That’s a good job, Mr. Hatfield. We should be able to use this without the paper bunching or pulling away.”

  Hatfield smiled.

  Another member of the Gold ASW Team had arrived silently and started sharpening pencils. Pencils would be used to mark off the lines of bearing to the contact once they had it on sonar.

  Led by the versatility and “deep experience” in passive tracking of Ensign Hatfield, a couple of operations technicians such as Banks could calculate the submarine’s course and speed based on common distances between several lines of bearing. It was easier than it looked, and it was definitely easier than trying to explain or describe how “target motion analysis” was done. Even he, the one and only “Great Burnham,” had been amazed how simple he found TMA to be while others thought it was hard. Let the others discover it like he did. He saw no reason to share his insight. If the did, the others would never learn it.

  “I’ll get the clappers and compass, Mr. Hatfield,” Banks said, reaching up and pushing several long strands of black hair off his forehead.

  “Good idea, Petty Officer Banks,” Hatfield said.

  Burnham crossed his arms, rolling his eyes upward when Hatfield ran his hand across the top of the trace paper, almost a loving gesture.

  TMA was something Burnham appreciated. No one could fail to watch a good ASW team whip out a submarine course and speed in minutes based only on lines of bearing taken from the sound the submarine had generated in the water. Of course, those minutes could turn into hours, if the submarine decided to do a lot of course and speed changes. The key was to sneak up on those sons of a bitches who hid beneath the waves, locate them, drop a grenade over the side to scare the shit out of them, and then—head for Olongapo.

  Or, most likely, the Dale would follow the sub forever, or until eventually they lost it. Submarine skippers knew about the layer where the warmer waters of the surface and the cooler waters below clashed. That layer was like a curtain blocking off direct noise. Made it harder to locate and track a damn submarine.

  “’Bout got it, Lieutenant,” Hatfield said, interrupting Burnham’s thoughts.

  Burnham glanced at Hatfield as the ensign rubbed the tape edges down again.

  “There, sir. That should do it.”

  Burnham grunted. Fourteen months, two weeks, three days, and he would be home in Crewe, Virginia. Whatever had caused him to join the navy? Vietnam did, you asshole. Men your size are too big to hide; they become targets. He’d already be back in Virginia, only he would have returned in the belly of a plane with tens of others.

  “How long do you think until we reach the datum? Think we’ll detect the datum once we get there?”

  Burnham rolled his eyes again. “Ensign Hatfield, when are you going to learn the proper terminology of your navy?” He leaned down, his face inches from the young ensign. “Tell me the truth, Peppercorn. You’re not going to make the navy a career, are you?” It would not surprise him if Hatfield ironed his Skivvies; he was so damn navy-fied.

  “I don’t know, Lieutenant. I hadn’t thought of it. Are you?”

  Burnham rolled his eyes again. “Please. Give me a break.”

  Banks leaned forward with his pencil and made a small circle in the center of the trace paper. “Last known location.” Then the petty officer glanced at the navy twelve-hour clock on the bulkhead and wrote in the time. “Time—seventeen twelve hours.”

  “There’s our datum,” Hatfield said, a hint of excitement in the comment.

  “Look, datum is where the submarine was last located. Datum isn’t the submarine, Mr. Hatfield. Datum is just the original point of detection.”

  “Sorry, sir. I knew that,” Hatfield explained, his face blushing in the blue light of Combat. “I was talking about the location, not the submarine.”

  This Hatfield had a lot to offer. Why would he want to make the navy a career? Burnham asked himself. He reached up and tweaked his nose, letting a huge sigh escape. Maybe because it was so easy? Maybe it was because the man was a shithead lifer seed and didn’t even know it yet. Maybe it was because he—Burnham—was a shithead and just hated to see someone enjoying the navy?

  A couple of sailors who’d heard the exchange between Burnham and Hatfield glanced at each other, their lips turning up as they moved away from the plotting table.

  “Good. My mistake, Peppercorn.” He motioned downward at the ensign, reaching up with his other hand and tweaking his nose again. “Don’t mind me, Peppercorn. It’s been a rough day.” He picked up the clipboard with the graph paper on it. “Have you ever done a live TMA or ASW before?”

  Hatfield shook his head. “Only at ASW School at Fleet Training Command.” He rubbed his hands together. “This will be my first one.”

  “Doing it ashore in San Diego isn’t the same thing as doing it live.” He looked at the ensign. Brown hair, closely cropped, tapered in the back. Sideburns even with the top of the inner ear. No mustache and he doubted Hatfield’s razor blade had even been dulled during these four months at sea. If the son-of-a-bitch momma’s boy was a virgin, he wouldn’t be after Olongapo. Now, there was a city where anything goes and usually did. Burnham reached up and rubbed his chin, pondering if there was anyplace in the United States similar to Olongapo; then he decided that the religious holy rollers would have long ago shut a “wonder of the world” like that down.

  “Peppercorn, is this your first visit to Olongapo?”

  Hatfield nodded. “I’m looking forward to it.”

  “Aren’t we all,” Burnham replied, then softly said it again, “Aren’t we all. Maybe I’ll take you with me into town.”

  Hatfield’s smile broadened. “I would like that, sir.”

  Master Chief Turnbull walked up to Burnham. “Afternoon, sir.”

  Burnham grinned. He
truly liked Turnbull. It was hard to believe the man was a lifer, unlike himself forced into the navy because of the draft. “What brings the mighty command master chief of the USS Dale up into the dark, blue-lighted cavern of CIC?”

  “I’m headed to the bridge. Felt the ship turn and steady up on a new course. My compass . . .”

  “Compass? You were on the signal bridge?”

  “No, sir. I have a compass in my office. I saw us swinging off the base course of the battle group. Means either the battle group has shifted course, which means it’s heading away from Olongapo, or the Dale is taking up a new position.” Turnbull nodded at the plotting table. “But I suspect we have a submarine contact.”

  Burnham shrugged. “Not yet, we don’t. Skipper said the tattletale—”

  “The small Kashin destroyer that’s been with us since Guam?”

  “Same and very one. For us it means either they are going to sink the Kitty Hawk,” Burnham said with irony, “or they are doing another anticarrier firing exercise.”

  Turnbull waved two fingers in the air. “So, it means the old man thinks the Kashin is the eyes of the submarine cruise missiles.”

  Burnham shook his head as Hatfield walked around the table to the end of the plotting table.

  “Afternoon, Mr. Hatfield.”

  “Hi, Master Chief. You going to help us with the TMA once we get on station?”

  Turnbull’s eyes narrowed and he smiled that “you don’t really expect me to do that” grin. “Most likely the skipper is going to want me nearby, sir. Though the offer is tempting.”

  Burnham shook his head slightly. At that moment, he came to the conclusion that Hatfield was dangerous. Having the crew like an officer too much was bad for good order and discipline, he decided.

  The rough-hewn face of the senior enlisted man on board the destroyer eased down toward the plotting table, his visage coming into the brighter red light highlighting the table. The forehead scar over his left eye seemed to glow in the cross lighting of red and blue.

  Once of these days Burnham was going to find out the story of the scar. No one seemed to know, but he was going to find out.