Barracuda: Final Bearing mp-4

by Michael Dimercurio

  The explosion went on for a long time, roaring and ebbing and roaring again.

  “Officer of the Deck,” Phillips said to Court, “secure battlestations. I’ll be in my stateroom.” He clomped out of control and disappeared into the door marked CO STATEROOM.

  CHAPTER 36

  EIGHTY MILES EAST OF HITACHI, JAPAN

  USS BARRACUDA

  In the sonar room just forward of control. Chief James Omeada sat at his console glaring at the sensors. He checked his watch. In two minutes Lt. Chris Porter would come barging in to ask the usual questions — “Any contacts?” and “You us in’ the right search plan?” and “What’s the status of the BSY?” Omeada and Porter had worked together as sonar chief and sonar officer for almost two years. Secretly Omeada liked and admired Porter, but for reasons long forgotten he was crusty with the young chubby officer, regularly throwing verbal barbs at him, especially in front of the other enlisted men, which most officers would strongly object to. At first Porter had taken the insults, since most of them were based on Omeada’s correct assertion that sonar officers didn’t know squat about the BSY-2 combat-control system, the combined firecontrol, sonar suite and navigation computers. Sure, they knew how to play with their little knobs in the control room and stack their little dots, but the real work of nailing down an enemy sub was done in sonar, and Omeada felt Chrissy needed to know that.

  However, inadvertently Omeada had created himself a monster. Chris Porter had taken aboard each insult about his dangerous lack of knowledge, withdrawing from sonar to study. The next day he’d be back, exploring the same question he’d asked the day before, but now armed with knowledge and often challenging Omeada’s own knowledge, more than once sending the sonar chief to the tech manual. It was almost spooky how Porter did it — he sure as hell didn’t spend any extra time on the ship. The sonar officer was notorious for leaving the ship at five p.m. every day, no matter the crisis, and at sea, he rarely missed sleep, reliably counted on to be in his rack when he wasn’t standing officer of the deck watch.

  In fact, Porter slept so much that Omeada had taken to calling him Bunky. Porter hadn’t reacted, had never threatened Omeada in spite of his elevated rank. He took Omeada’s taunts as if he himself were just another of Omeada’s seamen striking for sonar technician. Porter’s acceptance of Omeada’s criticism and the way he responded to it by learning rather than resenting had gained Omeada’s unconditional respect. This was something that had never happened to him, respecting an officer. The other chiefs in the goat locker gave him tremendous grief about it. After all, Omeada had spent years putting down officers and their lack of knowledge coupled with the fact that they got all the credit, all the glory, all the medals and all the money. Omeada, in his defense, kept saying that Chrissy Porter was different, that he was “heavy,” submariner’s respectful term for knowledgeable. The other chiefs had just laughed and made noises about Omeada and Porter having some kind of weird thing going on. Now that it was Omeada’s turn to take the heat, he learned a lesson from Porter and accepted it, and soon the sarcastic taunts of his fellow chiefs died down.

  Omeada was still amazed, after twenty years of frustration with officers, how much he did admire Porter. So much so that he felt duty-bound to disguise that feeling in front of the men, doubling his cuts at the twenty-six-year-old lieutenant. As for Porter, an odd thing had happened to him during the course of their association— he became bitingly sarcastic, to the point that the other officers accused him of being Omeada with lieutenant’s bars, which he met with Omeada-style wit.

  In addition to the growth of their professional relationship, Omeada could now closely predict Porter’s rhythms. Of course, it helped that Porter was a soul who loved routine, always coming on watch at midnight, going off watch at zero six hundred hours, sleeping until he could no longer sleep, then coming into sonar to check the status of the equipment prior to taking his watch. Porter would be coming into sonar now to get his prewatch brief in about ten seconds. Five seconds.

  Two. One. Zero.

  “Hello, Chief,” Porter said. Porter, of medium height, paunchy with pasty skin, a five o’clock shadow, a double chin and a receding hairline, looked fifteen years older than his age. “Any contacts?”

  “A thousand of them, Bunky. All over the map. All high-value Destinys. I just forgot to tell control about them.”

  Porter leaned over a console and punched some softtouch function keys, flipping the display through several channels, spending only a moment looking at each.

  “You us in’ the right search plan?”

  “Oh, my God! I knew we forgot something. The search plan. Williams, get the damned plan entered in.”

  “Come on. Chief.”

  Omeada pointed to the computer running in the corner of the room. Porter nipped through the windows, seemed satisfied with the plan.

  “What’s the status of the BSY?”

  “Broke-dick, sir. Down hard. I just neglected to tell control.”

  “Chief.”

  “Nominal, okay? Jeez, you’re worse than my mother-in-law. Although, come to think of it, you do kind of look like her. She’s got a gut just like you.”

  “We can’t all be skinny and beautiful like you. Chief.”

  “Don’t forget young-looking. With silky skin.”

  “And great legs.”

  “I try.”

  A serious look crossed Porter’s face. “I’ve got a feeling about this watch.”

  “I don’t want to hear about your feelings, sir. This isn’t an encounter group.”

  “Oh? You wouldn’t know it from all the moaning and groaning in here. Let me know what you get. Today’s the day.”

  “Have a good watch, sir,” Omeada said. Porter stared at him for a moment, realizing it was the first statement made in a month by him without sarcasm. It seemed to confirm Porter’s feelings. Today was the day, this was the watch.

  Porter took a detour from his usual prewatch tour and went below one deck to the torpedo room, went forward past the shining green-painted Mark 50 torpedoes stacked neatly on the hydraulically controlled racks. He stopped at one of the torpedoes and touched its flark, its surface cool and smooth. Stenciled on the side were the words “MK 50 MOD ALPHA WARSHOT.” Porter walked again to the forward bulkhead to examine the tubes.

  All eight had large white phenolic tags with red letters proclaiming “warshot loaded.” Porter stood there for a moment, then walked back up the ladder to the upper level, arrived back in control and nodded to Lt. David Voorheese, the man Porter would relieve as officer of the deck. Porter scanned the status boards, the navigation plot, took a final look at the sonar display and told Voorheese he was ready to take the watch.

  “Nothing going on. The Oparea’s empty. Captain’s racking, XO’s got the command duty officer, the place is dead. Midwatch as usual.”

  “Captain’s night orders?”

  “Same as last night’s. Find the Destiny. Don’t wait to shoot at him while you’re manning battlestations.”

  “Hell, maybe I’ll just shoot his ass and let you guys keep sleeping.”

  “Fine. You got it? I’m tired.”

  “One more thing. Where’s the admiral?”

  “He haunts the place, hangs out in sonar or the crew’s mess. Guy works the crowd a lot. Never seen a guy with two stars shoot the shit with a third-class petty officer for a half-hour.”

  “That shows you he’s got nothing to do. You know these riders. No responsibility, no worries, just leave the driving to ship’s company and watch movies, eat ice cream and sleep, maybe diddle themselves while looking at some of that Tahitian porn we picked up the last run.”

  “If I had nothing to do I’d get about twenty hours of sleep. Well, the engineer calls.”

  “You working aft tonight? We’re rigged for ultraquiet.

  You can’t take anything apart, Voorheese. Hit the bunky, man.”

  “Good point. Helm, Quartermaster, Mr. Porter has the deck and conn. See
you, buttface.”

  Porter raised his voice. “Helm, Quartermaster, log that Lt. Christopher Porter the third has the deck and conn for the midwatch on December 26, the watch in which we expect to put at least one Destiny submarine on the bottom of the Pacific.”

  CHAPTER 37

  100 KILOMETERS NORTHEAST OF HITACHI, JAPAN

  SS-810 WINGED SERPENT

  Lt. Comdr. Hiro Mazdai heard the dressing-down that the captain was giving one of the junior officers. Mazdai was in his first officer’s stateroom, trying to concentrate on the chart of the offshore waters, but only hearing Tanaka raging at the officer about his failings and how weak he was. In Tanaka’s view everyone but himself was weak.

  The captain was driven to find and sink the Americans.

  For the sake of his own sanity Mazdai wished he’d get it over with, put them on the bottom so this mission with Tanaka could come to a conclusion.

  SEVENTY MILES NORTHEAST OF POINT OSHIKAHANTO

  USS PIRANHA

  Bruce Phillips picked up the phone from a sound sleep.

  He listened for fifteen seconds, said, “Man silent battlestations,” and tossed the phone on his desk, then headed out for the control room.

  “Gambini’s got another one, skipper,” Scott Court said.

  “Very well,” Phillips said, putting on a headset. “Sonar supervisor, Captain, report status of the contact.”

  It took only forty-five seconds for Phillips to plug into the tactical situation. Target One was a submerged Destiny class off the point of Oshikahanto, contact faint on narrowband, bearing nailed down at one nine seven degrees true, with little else known.

  The limiting factor on the attack was the time for the Vortex missile to get ready. Within two minutes from battlestations being called, the missile was away. Phillips took a digital stop watch from his vest pocket. The time of flight of the Vortex through the water was less than five minutes, putting the target some twenty-five nautical miles away.

  The explosion from this Destiny was as spectacular as the first, the noise easily audible to the naked ear. Phillips nodded, returned to his stateroom. Court looking after him.

  The cloud of steam and vaporized iron of the Vortex fireball had once been the Destiny II-class submarine Winter Dragon. The crew of the Piranha would never know that. Piranha sailed on southward, closing on Tokyo Bay.

  SS-810 WINGED SERPENT

  Comdr. Toshumi Tanaka sat at the Second Captain console in his stateroom, eyes bleary, dark circles under his eyes. He had stayed awake all through the previous night and on into the day, and was still awake now well after midnight. His consumption of tea had been a record, but nothing next to the amphetamines the Yokosuka doctor had given him. The uppers kept him going after all these hours, letting him stick at the console. He hadn’t eaten, slept or spoken to his crew for almost thirty hours, with the exception of Lieutenant Ito, who had come into the stateroom to give his view of the American forces’ deployment. Tanaka had ripped into him for thinking he could express himself any way he felt to the ship’s commanding officer. It was something that would happen on an American ship, he had said. Ito had never seen discipline before, not from his parents or his teachers or his previous commander, Tanaka told him. The younger generation was soft. Weak.

  Which was why he insisted on standing watch at his own Second Captain. He believed he couldn’t trust the officers. The Americans had probably been lost while he was on the last sleep cycle. Well, not this time. He would not sleep until he had a detection on the screen.

  He stared at the console as the clock ticked into the night.

  USS PIRANHA

  The third and fourth Vortex missile launches had gone off much like the first two — a faint narrowband detection on 154 Hertz on the towed array sonar, a sniff of the enemy, battlestations silently manned, the Vortex missile warmed and ready while the battlestations team was still relieving the watches, Phillips in the control room, the missile roaring away, then exploding, the shock wave and noise of the explosion deafening.

  The last two Vortex missiles had blown up Destiny II hull numbers SS-807 and 814, the Godlike Snowfall and the Heavenly Mist.

  Phillips proceeded to work his way south, on toward Tokyo Bay, uncertain what the hell he would do when he got there.

  CHAPTER 38

  USS BARRACUDA

  The ship was dead quiet, the way Porter liked it. There was something special to him about the midwatch, the officers in their racks, the captain and admiral sawing logs, the enlisted men bedded down, every space deserted except for the watchstanders. Porter scanned the sonar repeater screen, able to send it through every display that Chief Omeada had forward in sonar. Nothing on the displays. The sea was deserted.

  Or was it? He felt an electricity, the same he had felt before on both good and bad occasions. He’d felt it the day before he got his acceptance letter from the academy. And the Thursday night before the Friday he met his first serious girlfriend Diane. He’d begun to think this tingle of premonition could only mean good things, but he’d also felt it the week before he and his roommate Todd had gone skydiving.

  He had piled into Todd’s ‘02 two-seat T-bird with the retro tailfins and they had gone out to the field, packed their chutes, saddled up and gone up in the Cessna. As usual, at 14,000 feet he and Todd had left the plane, goofing off all the way down until the altimeter buzzed at 3000 feet and he pulled the ripcord, the mattress-shaped parasail deploying above him and jerking him up by the crotch. He smiled with the sheer joy of flying without wings — until he saw Todd in trouble.

  The trip down from 3000 feet under canopy took him six minutes. It took Todd seventeen seconds. Todd’s main chute had deployed automatically instead of by his ripcord, the altimeter rigged to do that at 900 feet in the event that the jumper failed to pull before 3000 feet, but it had malfunctioned, and at the time Todd was doing body barrel rolls, still goofing off, so that the main chute wrapped around his neck and extended up into the slipstream, his rolling body turning the silk of the parachute into a death shroud. He fell like that, choking on the cords of the chute wrapped around his throat, looking like a tumbling cocoon, until he impacted the ground on a patch of concrete driveway.

  After that the tingle was on Porter’s black list. The next time he felt it was the October of his first class year at Annapolis. For two days he sweated, wondering what would happen this time, until the company commander had called him to his office for a phone call. Who died? was all Porter could think when he picked up the phone. The voice at the other end said his grandfather had passed on after a stroke hit him an hour before.

  They buried his grandfather in his native Wyoming, in a graveyard with cactus and sagebrush, the walks made of river stones, facing a mountain ridge. It had been a beautiful ceremony, and Porter had to smile at the memory of his grandfather’s jokes. He had thought that had been the meaning of the tingle, but the feeling of premonition stayed with him even the day after the funeral, up to the moment they read the will.

  Grandfather had left Porter a defunct gold mine in South Africa, a bit of a family joke, but the week before his death the old man’s mining company had found platinum in the mine. Porter’s net worth grew from a few thousand dollars — the price of his five-year-old sports car — to several million overnight. Actually, by the year before, the estimate had been found to be low, the mine potential estimated in the hundreds of millions of dollars. None of that changed Porter, none of it seemed to reach him. No one outside the family even knew about the mine. Porter didn’t really believe it until he made a trip there to see it with his own eyes. But the role of rich kid wasn’t of interest. He was, he thought, put on earth for something different, and it had nothing to do with money.

  The next and last time Porter had felt the odd tingle was days before, when Barracuda had been heading for the Japan’ Oparea. Something was happening to the ship. Hours later the message came that the ship was to rendezvous with a helicopter to receive a visitor. Admiral P
acino himself. Kane had been angry, his kingdom invaded, but somehow Porter felt this was the positive side of premonition. Whatever, in the admiral’s presence he felt it biting at him.

  And now, timed with the takeover of his watch, the old tingle was hitting him full force. This was the day. This was the watch. If only he could tell if it was a good portent, or a bad one.

  SS-810 WINGED SERPENT

  Lt. Comdr. Seiichi Kami had the section-A watch in the control room. For the last two hours, since midnight, he had stared at the same consoles, looking at the same displays, all of them empty. The hours since the sinkings of the first Americans had been filled with both boredom and tension. Boredom because the screens were empty. Tension because the Americans still hadn’t given up.

  The Americans, Kami decided, were doing this on purpose, trying to exhaust them before coming back into the area with more submarines.

  He thought about his newborn son Kosaku waiting for him at home. He had never spent much time thinking about his MSDF duty, but now that Kosaku was here he found himself jealous of every moment away from him. He was thinking that MSDF duty was no longer for him; the other men seemed somehow different from who he was, they no longer had much in common.

  Kami stared now at the sonar data screens, the data filtered by the computer, and seeing nothing, sat down in the deep cushioning of the control seat to continue to watch and to wait.

  USS BARRACUDA

  Lieutenant Porter stood on the conn and snapped his fingers at the chief of the watch, calling for coffee. The sonar display was selected to the thin wire narrowband towed array sonar, the beam looking forward as the ship continued to sail northeast. The sonar repeater was selected to the time-integration feature of the narrowband sonar, the graph of 152 to 155 Hertz in screen center.