Scorpion in the Sea

by P. T. Deutermann

  Fuck it, he thought; we do the best we can. Old ship, dwindling parts support—which made sense, when you thought about it. Goldy was going to the mothball fleet in a year. Good people, but not the very best people. The very best people traditionally went to the brand new ships as pre-commissioning crews, which also made sense. All very sensible, and right in line with how we do business, but … disappointing.

  It’s peacetime, he kept reminding himself. What do you want, a war? He realized that he was condemned to spend his entire command tour doing nothing but routine training evolutions in home waters. Might as well have gone to a reserve training ship. He wondered what it must have been like to skipper a tin can in wartime. Had to beat this dull business. Unexpectedly, his mind conjured up the image of Diane Martinson standing hipshot at the top of the float pier at the marina, her lovely body silhouetted in the afternoon sun, unconscious of her effect on mortal males while she rummaged through her purse for something. Or was she? Was a beautiful woman ever unconscious of her effect on men? Forget it, dickhead—she’s married, she’s Navy, she’s the Chief of fucking Staffs wife, and you don’t go crapping in your own foxhole, as the Army guys daintily put it. Lots of pretty women out there on the beaches. Still the image persisted, stirring him. It was more pleasing than main feed pumps.

  “Captain?”

  He sat up, surprised by the appearance of the Operations Officer. “Yeah, Ops?”

  “Sir, remember we’re supposed to be keeping a lookout for that missing fisherman while we do the sea trials?”

  “Yup. As I recall, you’ve worked up a general search area track, right? We’ve been executing that track?”

  “Yes, Sir, we have, and we’ve covered about seventy percent of it. Two extra lookouts topside all day, too. Well, now there’s a formal missing vessel report in from Coast Guard District. We’re action on it, ’cause they know we’re out here. There’s a coastie coming out to assume on-scene commander for a real search tomorrow, and then we got this in from the Group.” He handed Mike a message.

  Mike fished in his jacket pocket for a red flashlight, switched it on, and scanned the message. He sighed, and handed it back.

  “OK,” he said. “So we go on over there and do a concentrated search, but I don’t think we’re gonna see anything at night in the rain. And I think they’ve got the area wrong, too. Mayfield works right here on the edge of the Stream, not thirty miles inshore of it. How’m’soever, get the XO to set up a track to rendezvous with the Coastie. If Group Twelve wants a concentrated search, we’ll give them a concentrated search. About all we’re good for these days, anyway. Tell the XO.”

  “Aye, aye, Sir.” The Operations officer left the bridge.

  Ten minutes later, the bridge phone talker announced that one of the topside lookouts reported smelling diesel oil. The Officer of the Deck went out on the bridge wing, which was the upwind side. The rain had dwindled again to a mizzle. The ship was creeping along at five knots while the Engineers worked out the problems in the steam plant.

  “Cap’n,” he called in from the bridge wing. “I think we got an oil slick out here. All engines stop!” he ordered. “Spin main engines as necessary.”

  “All stop, spin as necessary,” repeated the lee helmsman, snapping the brass handles of the engine order telegraph back to the straight up and down position; the engine order telegraph bells rang in response.

  Mike got out of his chair and went out onto the bridge wing. The stink of diesel oil was suddenly strong. The oil slick could not be seen in the gathering darkness, but the smell was unmistakable on the normally pristine sea air.

  “You’re right, Jimmy, that smells like a slick. Have CIC mark it down, and let’s take a look around here.”

  He felt the beginnings of concern in his belly; from the smell of it, this was more than somebody pumping a dirty bilge over the side.

  He called up to the signalmen on the next level to light off the two twelve inch searchlights. “Sweep either side, Sigs—we’re looking for anything floating.”

  “Sigs, aye,” came a voice from the gloom of the 04 level above the bridge.

  Moments later, a yellow cone of light stabbed out into the darkness, the light rain glinting in the beam as it jerked this way and that, until it pointed down onto the sea surface. The telltale multicolored sheen of oil sprang into view. The ship drifted slowly to a stop, and then began to roll slowly as she lost steerageway.

  “Put left full rudder on, Jimmy, and then bring her up to three knots. We’ll do a slow spiral right here, see what we get.”

  “Aye, Cap’n.”

  The Officer of the Deck called in the orders. It took a few minutes for the ship to respond; they had to look over the side to watch the trail of an overboard discharge to see that she was in fact moving. Three knots; think you can handle that, Mike asked mentally. Oldy Goldy, the crew called her. Then he saw something in the water, as the light flashed over it from the level above.

  “Hey, Sigs, go back, forward there,” he called out. “I saw something.”

  The signalman pointed the searchlight beam back up to the bow illuminating a sea of heads on the bridgewing; most of the bridge watch had come out on the wing to help look. They strained to see what had caught the Captain’s eye. A small crowd had also gathered up on the forecastle as the Bosuns passed the word that a slick had been found. Finally, two men saw it at the same time. “Hold it,” they yelled simultaneously, but by then the signalman had seen it too, and was holding the beam steady, right on the bow. It looked like a plank of some kind, shiny and dark in the oil stained water. The ship’s head was slowly swinging past it.

  “Get the big dipper up on the forecastle; back her down easy, so we stop right here, Jimmy.”

  The word went out over the phones for the boatswain mates to bring up the big dipper, a large dip net attached to a long handle, designed to scoop up debris from the sea from the ship’s weather decks. Destroyers were often tasked to recover debris, especially when a carrier plane went down. The dip net was easier than putting a boat down. The ship trembled gently as the Officer of the Deck backed the offboard screw, keeping the propeller wash on the other side, and pulling the bow slowly back towards the plank in the shimmering water below. There was a flare of light on the forecastle as the hatches came open, and a crew of boatswain mates came topside, carrying sections of the dip net handle and the net itself.

  The Executive Officer appeared on the forecastle. Mike smiled mentally; the XO had the right instincts—always go where the action is. He was lucky to have Ben Farmer for an Exec. Finally the forecastle crew had the big dipper assembled and pointed over the side. The net was six feet deep, but the plank was still an awkward object to retrieve. They pulled it up on deck after another few minutes of bad language and lots of direction. The signalman kept the searchlight centered on the net as it came up, and everyone saw the brass lettering at the same time.

  “Oh, shit,” said the Officer of the Deck. “That’s a name board.”

  The deck crew turned the board face up, and the brass letters gleamed out the name of Rosie III. The letters were big enough to be read clearly on the bridge.

  “I’m going down there, OOD,” said Mike, his face grim. “Instruct the bosun mates to put an anchored marker buoy over the side; water’s not that deep, and I want to mark the spot where we found that.”

  “Aye, aye, Sir. Quartermaster, gimme a depth of water under the keel. Sir, shall we tell the Coast Guard?”

  “Yes, right; tell them we’ve got a datum,” ordered Mike as he left the bridge.

  He went down two sets of interior ladders and out onto the main deck, and then forward through the breaks to the forecastle. The boatswain mates made way for him as he walked up the sloping steel deck. The oil smell was even stronger down here; the wet plank was covered in a thin film of oil; it looked like a corpse of some kind, lying on the deck in the folds of the net. The Chief bosun saluted as Mike stopped at the net.

  “That who we�
��re looking for, Cap’n?”

  “That’s him,” replied Mike.

  What the hell have you done here, Chris, he thought. These were the signs of disaster. He stooped down to inspect the board, as if looking at it might somehow undo the stark import of finding a name board in an oil slick. Three bosuns began affixing a boat anchor to a coil of manila line, while a fourth disconnected an anchor buoy from the lifelines. The Chief pointed to the edge of the board.

  “That looks like a bullet hole, Cap’n.”

  Mike bent closer. Six inches to the right of the last roman numeral was a round hole with smooth edges. He reached into the net and turned the board over. The hole came through the other side with very ragged edges; there was a long splinter of wood missing on the back side of the hole. He looked up, and down the length of the board, but there were no other signs of damage. It did look like a bullet hole, about a thirty caliber round, with enough energy to have torn the wood up on the other side pretty good. He stood up, wiping the oil off his hand on a handkerchief. There was a splash as the bosuns threw the anchor over the side, and the manila coil whistled as it uncoiled to the bottom, 350 feet below.

  Mike returned to the bridge and summoned the operations officer.

  “Make a report, Ops; we’ve got the Rosie III’s nameboard, and an oil slick. We’re going to stay in the area tonight and search for people and any other debris. Tell ’em we’ve put an anchor buoy down and give ’em the posit. I assume that Coastie will come out here and take over, so include a local weather summary so he’ll understand there’s no real big hurry; we’re not going to see anything tonight, and I strongly doubt that we’re going to find Mayfield and his two guys.”

  “Aye, aye, Sir. Should we set up a fathometer watch? The water’s not deep here, and maybe we can detect the boat on the bottom.”

  Mike nodded. “Yeah, we can do that, although our bottom charts aren’t going to show the level of detail we’d need to pick the boat out of the normal bottom return. But go ahead; we’ll plot anything we find, and let the Coasties follow it up. Set up an expanding square search around this position, slow speed, real tight—I don’t want to go more that five miles from this position.”

  “Aye, aye, Sir.”

  “And, Ops—tell ’em we found what looks to be a bullet hole in the nameboard. Make the message classified, and make it op-immediate. Info the Group and the Commodore.”

  “Aye, aye, Sir. A bullet hole? Rosie mix it up with some drug runners or something?”

  “I don’t know, Ops, and the sea isn’t telling.”

  SIXTEEN

  Cruiser-Destroyer Group Twelve headquarters; Friday, 18 April; 1800

  Mike shook out his raincoat as he entered the Group headquarters building, a white, World-War II “temporary” building one block down from the Commodore’s office. A yeoman sitting at a desk literally covered in papers showed him where to put his hat and coat, and then pointed him in the direction of the Admiral’s office.

  “Everybody’s down there, Sir,” he said, returning to his typewriter. “Just waiting for Goldy to get tied up.”

  “Thanks,” he replied, and headed down the hallway.

  He wondered who ‘everybody’ was. The messenger from the Commodore’s staff had been waiting on the pier; meeting at Group Twelve as soon as Goldsborough is tied up. He had left at once, leaving the remainder of the return-to-port operation to the Exec.

  He found the door to the conference room open, and went in. The conference room contained one long table with ten armchairs in the center, a podium and screen at one end, and chairs around the rim of the room for straphangers. Two air conditioners hummed quietly in the shaded windows. The Admiral, sitting at the head of the table, was talking to the Commodore and the Chief of Staff when Mike walked in. Some of the Group Twelve staff officers were sitting around in the chairs against the wall. The DesRon Twelve Chief Staff Officer, Commander Bill Barstowe, saw Mike, and pointed a finger at the chair opposite the Commodore. He then caught the Commodore’s attention discreetly, and indicated that Mike had arrived.

  “Captain,” nodded the Commodore, as Mike sat down. The Admiral and Captain Martinson broke off their conversation, and the Admiral turned to greet Mike.

  “Captain,” he said, formally. “Thank you for coming right over. This meeting concerns the Rosie III and your schedule. The Commodore and I have been digesting your engineering sitreps; you’ve turned up quite a few main plant casualties. I was hoping that Goldy could go south next week, but I’m thinking now that might not be such a good idea. Comment?”

  Mike was aware of the smug look on Martinson’s face, and he felt a tinge of anger creeping into his face. The Commodore was giving him a significant look. Not the time to light fuzes. He took a deep breath.

  “Yes, Sir; no one of our problems is fatal, but the aggregate makes at least the forward fireroom a doubtful proposition for a three week operation. My guys have gone ’round the clock on the feed pump controls, but we’re down to needing parts now, and parts take time. The purifier in two engineroom presents the same problem.”

  The Admiral nodded sympathetically. “I know you and your crew were looking forward to getting out for some fleet time, but I think what would happen would be that you’d limp into Gitmo or San Juan and clamp on to a pier for the better part of the three weeks. I’m afraid that Goldy is simply showing her age, and I fully understand that parts are becoming hard to find for that steam plant. I think you’ll agree that that’s simply not worth it.”

  “Yes, Sir,” sighed Mike, resignedly.

  He had half expected this, but the reality still disappointed him. The Commodore was looking down at the table. It was his job to ensure that his ships were ready to meet their commitments, even his elderly training destroyer, so there was some professional egg on his face as well. But the Admiral was also being realistic, and did not seem to be condemning anyone.

  “Now,” the Admiral continued. “This business about the fishing boat. That was a good job on finding the wreckage—your instincts on where to look were better than ours, but then I understand that you are acquainted with the Mayport fishermen.”

  Two of the staff officers sitting in the wall seats exchanged a smirk, as if to say what kind of a nut lives down in the village of Mayport, on a boat no less.

  “We have something of a mystery on our hands now, though,” continued the Admiral, holding a sheaf of papers in his elegant fingers. “You’ve heard about what the Coast Guard found?”

  “No, Sir, I don’t believe so; we did a turn-over with them this morning, ran some more engineering trials, and came straight back in.”

  “They carried a Tethered Eye on that cutter; are you familiar with that system?” said Martinson.

  “Yes, Sir,” Mike nodded.

  He had read about the Eye some six months ago. It was a miniature submarine television pod which could be sent underwater to depths of 600 feet, trailing a fiberoptic control and data wire. In addition to a tiny sonar transceiver, the pod had a high intensity light surrounding its spherical glass nose, and the camera lens inside gave the front of the pod an eye-like appearance. The Coast Guard had begun to use the Eye to do quick surveys of sunken vessels, to determine if there were signs of life from men trapped in a hull.

  “Well,” continued the Admiral, “they found the fishing boat, lying on her side on the bottom about a thousand yards from where you put down that buoy. She had her nets deployed, and not a mark on her. No signs of a collision, fire, explosion or any other kind of damage.”

  Mike frowned. So why had she sunk?

  “The complication,” said Martinson, “is your report that there was an alleged bullet hole in the nameboard that you turned over to the coastie. We haven’t released that to the press, yet, and we’re waiting for the coastie to get back in. We’re going to turn the board over to the local police labs to get their opinion on that purported bullet hole. The problem is, of course, what do we do about it, if it does turn out to be a bu
llet hole.”

  Mike sat back in his chair. Alleged? Purported?

  “It sure looked like a bullet hole,” he said. “Smooth entrance, ragged exit, long splinters of wood torn out on the back side. And no other damage to the board.”

  “We appreciate your opinion, Captain,” said Captain Martinson. “But we still intend to have forensic experts look at it. It makes a difference as to what happens next.”

  “How so, Sir?”

  “Well,” said the Admiral, “absent the bullet hole, the Rosie III is a closed case as far as the Navy is concerned; misadventure at sea. The sea is full of mysteries like that, and they are a Coast Guard problem, not a Navy problem. If there’s a bullet hole in the board, however, then there’s more to it, and there’s going to have to be an investigation of some kind.”

  “Yes, Sir,” protested Mike. “But that’s a Coast Guard matter, too—law enforcement within 200 miles of the coast. I suppose they can raise the boat and take a look, if they want to. Chris Mayfield was a friend, but what does this have to do with the Navy?”

  “Because,” said the Commodore, speaking for the first time, “the locals are saying that it might have been the submarine that did it.”

  “Submarine? What submarine?” asked Mike, forgetting for a moment that he had conducted a search for a submarine the previous week. “Oh, for Chrissakes, that submarine report?”

  He laughed in disbelief. But nobody else in the room even cracked a smile. The Commodore leaned forward and explained it to him.

  “Yeah, well, you think it was somebody having a bad dream, and, frankly, so do I, but the local fishermen, especially Mr. Barr, skipper of the good boat Brenda, swear that it was real. The way they see it, we couldn’t find it; if we had found it, Mayfield might still be around. They think the bullet hole in the nameboard proves he mixed it up with someone.”