Scorpion in the Sea

by P. T. Deutermann

  Mike spoke to the back of the big chair.

  “The thing that I keep hanging up on is what XO has been calling the motive. If there is a gomer hiding out in the opareas, why the hell is he here? I mean, Chief Mac thinks it’s a Foxtrot. OK, say it’s a Foxtrot—is it reasonable that the Soviets would deploy a diesel electric antique into one of our fleet operating areas? It simply doesn’t wash. We speculated that it might be a test of some kind, something the Fleet Commander set up to see if we would notice, you know, his big readiness kick. Like the Barry business with the EW signal. But the USN doesn’t have any conventional boats. I’m stumped.”

  The Commodore remained silent. Outside his office three phones began ringing at once. Monday morning. Except it was Thursday, Mike thought irrelevantly. The Commodore swivelled the chair back around again. It occurred to Mike that the Commodore suddenly looked older.

  “So what do you recommend, Captain?” he asked softly.

  Mike recognized the ploy—when you don’t know what to do, ask your subordinates for a recommendation. They might even come up with something. He took a mental deep breath.

  “I recommend that Commander Barstowe come over to Goldy later on today and listen to the whole pitch, from start to finish. I presume he’s reasonably cold on the subject, so maybe he can give us an unbiased look. Maybe even come up with a course of action. I, for one, am not ready to go to the Group with this—there are too many technical ambiguities, even if we could get past the biggest question of why would this guy be here.”

  The Commodore nodded.

  “I concur. And, yes, Bill Barstowe is cold on it because I’ve kept him out of the loop so that at some point he could do just this kind of an appraisal. He knows we’re working an issue, but not the details. And I guess I have to go do some snooping up at Group to see who might be playing the backfield on this issue. When can you go to sea again?”

  “The snipes tell me they’ll have that pump set back together by tomorrow, so we can light off probably Monday, and if everything tests out, get out to sea by Wednesday. We can go faster, but we’d have to work all weekend—”

  The Commodore shook his head impatiently.

  “No, no, I don’t want to get into that. It’s not like we’re talking about a deployment here. Keep an even strain going, but don’t bust your guys’ humps. Meanwhile, I’m gonna have to go scratch around on this submarine deal. The thing is, if we all decide down here that there might in fact be an unidentified boat out there, the next question is who do we send out. I mean, we have the world’s supply of heloes here, P-3’s over in Jax, Spruances—the best ASW forces in the Lant fleet. If it comes to it, we can probably find this gomer and smoke him out.”

  “In shallow water, on the margins of the Gulf Stream, Commodore?”

  The Commodore opened his mouth as if to speak, and closed it again. He paused, thinking.

  “Yeah, you’re right. This whole deal’s been over the shelf, hasn’t it. What we’re talking about here is active sonar. Shit, Goldy’s the only straight stick active pinger we’ve got down here—all these other guys would just blow each other out of the water with those monster, low frequency sonars. But the heloes, now, the heloes could catch his ass, ’cause they can dip an active sonar into the water or drop active buoys. But I’m getting ahead of myself: we still haven’t concluded that there is a boat out there. Or why.”

  “The why bit is the hard part,” said Mike, getting up. “You want me to talk to Bill?”

  “No, I’ll brief him. Plan on this afternoon. I may even come along. Your people keeping this under wraps for now?”

  “Yes, Sir, although we gained some more converts to the cause once Chief Mac showed the Deyo’s waterfalls to the other sonar girls.”

  “OK; we’ll take a look this afternoon. You do understand that, if we all agree there’s the possibility of an unidentified submarine lurking in the opareas, we’ll have a national issue on our hands, not a local problem?”

  “Yes, Sir,” said Mike glumly.

  “OK. And before we get to that, of course, we’ll have to go up the mountain to see your good buddies at Group.”

  “Yes, Sir. But I thought you were going to mention it to them up in Norfolk.”

  The Commodore shook his head.

  “The time wasn’t right—we were so wrapped up in budget drills and scheduling fights that I couldn’t bring myself to raise a Weird Harold like this. And before you say anything, yes, basically, I procrastinated—I wanted to see what Deyo came up with. This whole thing remains so ambiguous. But now I think we have enough data points that I have to take it up the line.”

  “I can hardly wait,” said Mike.

  “I don’t want to, either. But maybe Bill can see the flaw in this mess.”

  Mike shook his head. “I feel like we ought to be going to GQ over this, not just sitting here talking about it. I realize that—”

  “Yeah, that’s the problem,” interrupted the Commodore again. “We have barely enough steaming hours and flight hours allocated these days to keep basic readiness up to snuff, and nobody would give this story the time of day unless we have a very convincing case—like you said, we can make the various data points fit the curve, but the data points themselves don’t necessarily produce the curve.”

  “And the basic question—if he’s there, why is he there?”

  “Beats the shit out of me,” said the Commodore with a sigh. “But when we figure that out, then we may go to GQ.”

  “I just don’t want to find it out the hard way,” said Mike.

  “I’m open to suggestions, Captain. But until you or somebody thinks of something, let’s take another look at the ASW data. Absent the smoking gun, we’ll have to take this thing one step at a time. I’ll have Bill come over this afternoon.”

  FORTY-THREE

  USS Goldsborough, pierside, Mayport Naval Station, Thursday, 1 May; 1700

  The DesRon Twelve Chief Staff Officer leaned back in his chair and rubbed his eyes. Sitting around him at the wardroom table were Mike, the Exec, Linc Howard, and Chief Mackensie. They were waiting for Barstowe’s reaction to their two hour presentation. The voices of the sweepdown crew could be heard on deck outside; the announcing system on the ship next door called away supper for the crew. The smells and sounds of evening meal preparation in the wardroom galley could be sensed through the pantry window.

  They had gone through the whole thing, from the first reports of sighting to the Deyo’s passive sonar tapes that suggested a possible snorkeling submarine. Mike had watched the Chief Staff Officer, trying to gauge his reactions as the briefing progressed. A nagging thought had been twitching at the back of his mind about the whole subject, something that Diane had said, but he could not get his mental claws on it. Barstowe had asked few questions, preferring to concentrate on the data being presented. He had made only a few notes, which Mike had tried to read from the head of the table, but Barstowe wrote in the tiny script of the professional meeting goer. He leaned forward now, consulting his notes.

  “I’m inclined to believe that there is—maybe was is more precise—something there,” he began. “I’m still hung up on the why question, just like everyone else.”

  Mike and the Exec exchanged glances. Bingo, Mike thought, as Barstowe continued.

  “Most of the data is, as you’ve pointed out, ambiguous. It is possible that the Deyo contact is a merchie at long distance, and that the sound carried through some anomaly in the waters offshore. But we all know that you don’t normally get convergence zones over the continental shelf, nor can we see a deep sound channel—the water is simply too shallow. The other thing I noticed is the timing and the placing of the Deyo’s sound contact: three hours, more or less, from start to finish, and the source is somewhere along the western, inshore margins of the Gulf Stream, in the vicinity of the Mayport fishing fleet. Right where and when a guy would choose to snorkel if he wanted to mask what he was doing, and timed to catch any potential listeners at the ebb o
f human effectiveness. I also note that everything that’s happened in connection with this business has been in this same general area where we have permanently turbulent sound conditions. The fishing boat went down in the same longitudinal area. This suggests to me a chain of related events, not coincidence.”

  He looked up. “I think there’s somebody out there.”

  The other four men around the table let out a collective sigh.

  “I’m still curious why Deyo didn’t see it that way—” began Mike.

  “That’s a separate issue,” interrupted Barstowe firmly. “Let’s stay on the Soviet sub issue for the moment.”

  Mike was surprised at the sudden authority in Barstowe’s voice. Barstowe was supposed to be cold on the submarine matter, but it sounded as if he knew something about the Deyo’s reporting discrepancy. The Exec spoke up.

  “You suppose this is some kind of test?” he asked. “You know, the Fleet Commander gets a guy to hang around, and he sees how long it takes all these Mayport ASW hotshots to tumble to the presence of an unident in the area?”

  “No, I don’t,” said Barstowe, shaking his head. “First of all, we don’t own any more conventional subs, except for one on the west coast that they use for oceanographic research. The US submarine force is a nuclear Navy. It would probably have to be a Canadian or a Brit to be enlisted for such a scheme, but that would be really risky—one of our guys might get trigger happy, and then we’d have a real mess on our hands.”

  “The rules of engagement wouldn’t permit somebody to just launch an ASW torpedo,” offered Linc.

  “Yes, but you could never be too sure about that,” said the Exec. “Catch an unident in our territorial waters, a U.S. destroyer might shoot first and ask questions later, especially if the submarine did something to make the destroyer think he’d been fired on.”

  Mike and Barstowe exchanged patient glances, acknowledging to each other that neither the ASW officer nor the Exec had it quite right.

  “It’s a little more complicated than all that, guys,” said Mike. “There are standard procedures for dealing with an unident or even a Soviet sub caught in home waters, and there are a lot of steps to walk through before anybody can start shooting. But back to the proposition: if this were a test, too many people would have to know about an operation like that in advance, especially if they were introducing a foreign submarine. I think at least the Group Commander would have been cut in, and then we would not ever have been sent out the way we were.”

  “And if you believe that the fishing boat incident was a part of all this, the exercise idea goes out the window,” added Barstowe. Mike nodded, and then addressed Linc Howard.

  “Linc, you and Chief Mac gather all this stuff up and put it in a safe place.”

  Howard quickly understood that the Captain wanted to talk to the CSO and the Exec alone. He and the Chief gathered up the briefing materials and left.

  Mike got up and stared out one of the portholes. He tried to remember what it was that Diane had said their first night together that had lit a small fuze in his mind. He turned around to look at the other two officers. Then he remembered: it wasn’t just the Russians who had Foxtrot class submarines.

  “This whole business has gone on over a period of a few weeks,” he began. “This would imply that, if there is a guy out there, he’s waiting for something. Now if this is a Fleet Commander’s drill, and it’s a Brit, Canadian, or other friendly, he’s waiting to be ‘discovered,’ and the Fleet Commander is waiting for a report. But if this is not a test, then what is this guy waiting for.”

  He paused for a moment.

  “What do submarines always wait for?”

  “Targets?” said Barstowe, studying Mike’s face.

  Mike turned to look right at him. The elements of a very disturbing idea had begun to take shape in his mind.

  “Right,” he said. “Targets. Or in this case, maybe one target in particular.”

  Barstowe frowned.

  “A target?!” he asked, incredulously. “Shit, Mike, you’re talking an act of war here. We’re not at war with the Russians or anybody else, for that matter. And if he wanted to shoot somebody, he sure as hell has had the chance for all this time he’s been out there, if we count the first reports as accurate.”

  “Maybe the target he’s waiting for isn’t here yet,” said Mike. “And that’s the distinction I’m making here: a specific target, not just any old ship that comes along. Something that would be worth all the waiting, and maybe even being caught afterwards.”

  Barstowe was silent for a moment, thinking.

  “Like one of the carriers,” he said, finally.

  The other two men looked at each other.

  “Well,” continued Barstowe, “the Saratoga has been inport for the whole time, and isn’t going to sea again for another month. The Forrestal is in the yard in Philly, and that leaves the Coral Sea, who’s down in the Caribbean. Now I can see a Soviet sub maybe wanting to bag a super-carrier, but Coral Sea? She’s a training carrier, older than Goldy, and probably going out of commission pretty soon.”

  Mike walked over to the counter to refill his coffee cup. Diane had maybe hit the nail on the head. It’s not a Russian sub.

  “If it’s a Foxtrot, you’re automatically assuming it’s a Soviet Foxtrot,” he began. “I agree that proposition is ludicrous. But what if it’s a third world gomer?”

  Barstowe looked at him blankly for a minute. Mike pressed on.

  “Coral Sea’s a training carrier now. But she hasn’t always been a training carrier. And I know one guy who has a reason to do something dramatic to the Coral Sea. The guy in the green sheets over there in Libya, Muammar the K. Coral Sea was the carrier that bombed that phony tent he had set up in his headquarters compound, remember? Killed his adopted daughter or niece, or something. And created a bad day out at the capital’s airport and various parts of the city. Now, Libya has Foxtrots. Right, XO?”

  The Exec, startled, scrambled up from the table and went to the bookshelf.

  “I think so, Captain, but let me check Jane’s.”

  He flipped through the pages of Jane’s Fighting Ships for a minute, and then nodded.

  “Yes, Sir, six Foxtrot class submarines, although Jane’s says most of them are questionable in terms of being able to go to sea.”

  He looked up.

  “But a fully operational Foxtrot could get here, no sweat. Those diesel boats have long legs. The Germans did it routinely.”

  Barstowe let out a long, soft whistle.

  “You think maybe the Libyans have sent one of their subs over here to get even for something that happened, what, three years ago? Mike, we’re really reaching here.”

  Mike put down his coffee cup and began slowly pacing the length of the table.

  “I know, I know,” he began. “That’s a big jump to make with what little evidence we have, but look at it this way: we think we had a submarine out there, based on the contact and the decoy business. We think it’s a diesel boat—the ‘U-boat’ description fits. The Deyo’s tapes suggest, not prove, but suggest it’s a Foxtrot, based on engine configuration. Now—Foxtrots: only the Soviets and their Third World clients have Foxtrot class submarines. It’s been one of their more popular export items. The Russians wouldn’t do this; the stakes are much too high right now for them to be screwing around in our waters with any kind of submarine, much less a diesel boat. If it’s a submarine, and if it’s a Foxtrot, and if it’s not a Soviet, that leaves Third World. From our perspective, the Third World has good guys, neutral guys, and bad guys. Eliminate good guys and neutrals for a minute, and focus on the bad guys. Cui bono, as the cops say, right, XO? Who stands to gain? What country with Foxtrots would come to Mayport? Big Chief Green-sleeves over there makes a pretty good candidate. He has the motive, revenge, he’s got the ego to dream it up and then do it, and he has the means: six Russian Foxtrot subs, only one of which has to be seaworthy to pull this off.”

  He pa
used for a moment to gather his thoughts, oblivious now to the expressions on the other officers’ faces as they watched him silently. He reached for his coffee, drained it, and put the cup back down.

  “What’s happened on this end also makes sense in this scenario. Everything we have is ambiguous, admittedly, but: if there were a pigboat lurking out there waiting to attack just any old thing, it would have already happened. But nothing’s happened, except that we continue to get whiffs. This sucker’s waiting for something, and it’s not a destroyer, because he’s had several chances to bag a tin can, yours truly included, now that I think of it. It has to be something big, something worth all the effort of covertly sending a boat 6000 miles. And why Mayport? Because the target lives here in Mayport. She’s gone now, but will be back soon. Real soon.”

  He stopped as a sobering realization hit him. Coral Sea might be back in a week.

  “Ipso almost facto,” he concluded with his eyebrows raised. “Now all we gotta do is sell this to the rest of the Navy and then go get the bad guy.”

  “The rest of the Navy is going to ask what we’ve been smoking,” said Barstowe. “And who’s going to pitch this little fable to the Group Commander?”

  “Who’s junior man at the table,” said Mike with a grin, eyeing the Exec. The Exec began to look worried.

  “Just kidding, XO. But when’s the Coral Sea actually coming back to Mayport?” asked Mike.

  “I don’t think anybody knows yet,” replied Barstowe. “They’re still doing the investigation after the collision at Roosevelt Roads, and then they’ll come home after that. I’d guess end of next week, maybe beginning of the week after. Like that. I can check with Carrier Group Six.”

  “So between now and maybe a week from now, we have to convince the powers that be that there might be a hostile submarine waiting in ambush for the Coral Sea,” said Mike.

  “I think the Coral Sea is on her own,” muttered the Exec.

  “I think it’s time to call in the Commodore,” said Barstowe. “He’s the best guy to decide how to present this whole deal to the Group, if at all, and maybe higher than that, if it comes to it.”