Scorpion in the Sea

by P. T. Deutermann

  “But it may be dead wrong,” said Mike.

  “Yes, it might,” nodded the Commodore. “But then we did our best to convince him, and it didn’t fly. Remember that old rule about following orders: the guy giving the orders we disagree with might know something we don’t know. Anyhow, that’s it.”

  “Can we make one last check of something?” asked the Exec.

  “What’s that, XO?” asked the Commodore.

  “Can we check with the intel world to see if all of Muammar’s pigboats are in their pens?”

  The Commodore thought for a moment.

  “OK, I’ll do this: I’ll have my staff intelligence officer make an informal call to the N2 up at Surflant or maybe LantFleet. Informal sort of thing. Somebody will tingle a friend in Washington, somebody who prepares naval force locators, and they’ll have the latest pictures from the appropriate satellite. But that’s it, guys. Now let’s go home.”

  Mike said good night to Barstowe and the Commodore, and he and the rest of the Goldsborough officers went out the front door of the staff office. The entire Mayport basin could be seen from the front steps, the ships illuminated for the night, with bored little knots of watchstanders lounging around each quarterdeck. It was almost fully dark, and Mike paused at the top of the steps leading down to the waterfront street.

  “OK, people, I guess that’s that. Linc, take all the tapes and other materials and lock them up somewhere safe. I still think we were right, but, orders is orders, as they say. Thanks for all your efforts, and let’s hope the Coral Sea doesn’t go boom in the next few weeks.”

  The Exec shook his head.

  “I don’t understand why they won’t even go out and take a look—we’re always doing drills and exercises, why not make this an exercise?”

  “Because there’s barely enough money for the regularly scheduled underway ops; all the exercises are planned out and funded a couple of years in advance. The Group Commander just can’t get a ship underway for more than a sea trial anymore on his own authority, certainly not without explaining it up the line. I think the Admiral’s coming at this from a different point of view—he’s got an entire Cruiser-Destroyer Group to operate and keep at a specified level of readiness. What did the I.V. call this? A firefly? They can’t go getting a task unit underway to chase a firefly, I guess. And you know, I felt quite strong about this when we worked it out in the wardroom, but I felt kind of dumb in there when I pitched it to the Admiral. Think how he’d feel pitching it to the Fleet Commander. I think he’s wrong, but I can sure see his point of view.”

  “I wonder if they’ll even alert the Coral Sea group to be on the lookout?” asked the Chief.

  “I don’t think so, Chief,” said Mike. “The Coral Sea would have to come back and ask what they want him to do about it. Anyway, I guess we get back to concentrating on boilers and feed pumps. I’m going to go home and have a beer.”

  “Sounds good to me, Cap’n,” said the Chief. “Thanks for taking this up the line.” Linc Howard nodded his agreement.

  “Yeah, well, I don’t think I had too much to lose, based on the way the Admiral was looking at me when we were excused. But that’s why they pay me all this terrific money. Hang in there, Guys. I’ll see you tomorrow morning at whatever inspection inbriefing we have on tap.”

  The Chief and Lincoln Howard said goodnight and walked down the steps. Ben Farmer remained behind.

  “Damn, damn, damn!” swore Mike softly.

  “Yes, Sir,” said the Exec. “Are we just going to drop all this?”

  “I think the Commodore isn’t finished yet, Ben. I think—I hope—he’s gonna find a way to keep probing. It’ll depend on what the Admiral said to him when they chased us out. I keep saying to myself we did our best, but that doesn’t cut it, somehow. I think Coral Sea might be in real danger.”

  “Now who’s believing this shit, Cap’n?” said Farmer, softly.

  “Yeah, yeah, there you go being insolent again, XO,” grinned Mike. But then his face grew serious.

  “We need to put our thinking caps on. There has to be some way we can keep going on this thing until we either prove ourselves right or wrong.”

  “I wouldn’t mind being all wrong on this one,” said Farmer, staring out over the quiescent basin.

  FORTY-FIVE

  Mayport Marina, Thursday, 1 May; 2130

  Mike stretched out on the chaise longue in his bathing suit and sneakers and watched the boats go by on the intracoastal. The back porch of the boat was hot and humid in the early darkness. He sipped the remains of a gin and tonic, absently letting the cold glass sit and sweat on his bare midriff. Two piers over a couple was having an increasingly loud argument over whether or not one of them was going to leave in the morning. One of you leave tonight, he thought, and then we can restore the peace. He wished Diane were there; he badly needed somebody to talk to. The Admiral had probably gone back to his office and called the Bureau to get a new CO for the Goldsborough. Or, better, had Martinson do it. Martinson would like that.

  He wondered about the Commodore, giving up so easily; it wasn’t like him. He had seemed genuinely convinced that there was something worth looking into. But he had folded like a napkin when the Admiral dismissed the whole thing. Preposterous. OK, maybe it was preposterous. But what if it were true? What if Mrs. Khadafi’s bouncing baby boy, Muammar, had sailed a submarine to Mayport to exact some vengeance. So it wasn’t a modern, atomic powered submarine. But after the Second World War the Russians had modelled their F series class on the last (and best) class of the German U-boat fleet. German submarines had sailed with impunity to the east coast of the United States, and farther than that during the war. They had lingered for forty-five day patrols, without support ships, and then sailed all the way back to occupied France. Routinely. Less capable American submarines had sailed all the way across the Pacific to conduct long patrols off China and Japan. The diesel boats were capable then, and more capable now. It was feasible.

  But was it likely? That’s the rub, thought Mike. Would he do it? Would he risk war? Or was this simply a very high tech Arab suicide squad, steeled to deliver one fatal attack and then implode the boat at depth to guarantee anonymity and entrance to raghead heaven? Depending on where they made the attack, the boat would only have to evade for two hours at full underwater speed to reach the edge of the continental shelf, and then go down in 10,000 feet of water, to be lost forever in the ancient slime at the bottom of the sea.

  It would be a terrorist attack on a grand scale, unless the Navy could find them and force them to the surface almost immediately in order to produce a suspect in hand. Otherwise, big explosions along the carrier’s side, mass confusion outside and in the harbor, escorts going everywhere, not knowing what had happened—which of the current skippers had ever seen a submarine torpedo go off under a ship? And the bad guy snaking seaward on his silent electric motors, hugging the bottom until he reached the acoustic safety of the swirling biomass of the Gulf Stream. If he actually got away into the Atlantic, all the guy had to do was get into the shipping lanes and go back to the Med among the hundreds of ships that traversed the Atlantic.

  It was feasible. He kept coming back to it. It was feasible. It was possible. They ought to go out and take a look. They sure as hell ought to warn the Coral Sea group that there was the possibility of trouble when they came home.

  No way, the Admiral had said. No frigging way. We don’t have the money, we don’t have the assets, and I might look stupid. I might be wrong, but I will not look stupid. Mike shook his head in the darkness. The appearance of things had become so important. We don’t have any problems here, Boss. And if we do, tell ’em we don’t, and fix them, out of sight and behind the scenes, but we never, never, let it show. You gotta look good, regardless of whether or not you are good. Look good and everyone would smile, and say, yeah, good looking ship, smart crew, must be a top skipper. Unlike that weirdo that thought there was a submarine hiding out offshore. Some poor toad
who had command of the oldest ship in the basin, the one they were going to decommission, the guy who never had to deploy and show his stuff with the first team overseas. So he dreams up this little fable about a submarine, gonna get some attention, some visibility. Gonna get relieved early and sent ashore was more likely. He drained the rest of his drink, and headed back inside to make another. He wished Diane would call.

  FORTY-SIX

  Mayport Marina, Thursday, 1 May; 2345

  Mike lay awake in his bed, uncomfortable in the air conditioned darkness. A thunderstorm had passed over a half hour ago, waking him with its sharp cracks of thunder and a sudden, sweeping rain across the deck above. He had awakened with a headache from too much gin, a queasy stomach, dry mouth, and zoo dirt breath, as the Boatswain Mate Chief liked to call it. He had never had a big capacity for alcohol, and he knew that his age was showing. He had taken a quick shower, popped two aspirins, rinsed out his mouth, gone back to bed, but could not go back to sleep.

  He could feel the oppressive weight of the humid night air even through the air conditioning, the atmosphere not quite wrung out in the wake of the thunderstorm. There was another episode of heavy rain, punctuated by rumbling thunder in the distance over the ocean. His bedroom was washed in a dim, half light from the pier lights.

  He thought about the submarine. Was there another Skipper out there even now, lying awake in his bunk, watching the clock and waiting for his big day? Going over the mission plan again and again, looking for the holes, waiting for the signal to get ready, to come up to periscope depth on a sunny afternoon amongst the Chris Crafts and the fishing boats to let loose a spread of Russian torpedoes? As he tossed and turned, he felt that he, they, somebody ought to be doing something. He recalled that terrible night on the bridge, the Captain yelling, the bridge watch fumbling around in the dark, and that terrifying black shape filling the windows just before the crash. Somebody ought to have done something; he should have done something.

  As the rain subsided, he felt the boat move under the unmistakable weight of someone coming aboard. He sat up in the bed, looked at his watch. Twelve thirty five. He kept a gun taped to the back of the night table, and was trying to decide between the gun and simply calling the cops when he heard a female voice swear softly out on deck. He grinned in the dark as he felt the “intruder” walk back to the midships hatchway, obviously making no attempt to be stealthy, open the door none too surreptitiously, and come down the stairs into the lounge. What was this crazy woman doing out here in the middle of the night?

  Diane slipped into the bedroom. She was wearing a stylish full length, white cotton raincoat, buttoned all the way to her throat. She carried a pair of sneakers in one hand, a small, clutch purse in the other.

  “You always go breaking into peoples’ boats in the middle of the night?” he asked.

  “I didn’t break in; I just walked onboard. Even your guard parrot didn’t care.”

  She stood at the foot of the bed, hands on hips. They looked at each other for a few seconds in the semi-darkness.

  “Well,” she said.

  He threw aside the sheet, indicating a space for her on the big bed. She looked at his naked body for a few long seconds, and began to unbutton the raincoat. She wasn’t wearing anything else. She let him look, and then slithered onto the bed and into his arms.

  “Needed to talk to someone, is that it?” he murmured into her ear. She covered his mouth with hers in a fierce, demanding kiss. Didn’t want to talk, after all.

  Afterwards, she still didn’t want to talk. But he was awake, and all the anxieties about the submarine flap flowed back into his mind. His headache was also gone, helped on its way by rapid blood circulation. He asked her how in the hell she had managed to get out of the house in the middle of the night. She mumbled something, snuggling closer. He partially sat up.

  “Hey, Diane, what did you do, slip him a mickey?”

  She opened one eye, closed it again. “Yes, actually, I did. He had a bad headache, so I gave him a couple of bufferins, only one was a valium.”

  “A valium? You keep valium around?”

  “It’s a prerogative of almost-forty year old women to keep valium around. J.W. never takes anything stronger than aspirin, so it put him out like a light. What time is it?”

  He snapped on a bedside light. “One thirty.”

  She snuggled in again. “Turn that off and set your alarm for five.”

  “I don’t believe you drove through the gate with no clothes on.”

  “Seemed like a good idea at the time.”

  “It did have a certain effect.”

  “Yeah, well, I had the raincoat on. My flasher uniform. I don’t think the gate guards are going to mess with a car with Captain’s stickers on the window. Besides, I cheated; I had a bikini in my purse just in case the stupid Volvo went swimming again.”

  He laughed and hugged her. “I’m glad you came.”

  “Well that’s good. I was beginning to wonder. Now, tell me what’s that bad dream sitting on your shoulder.”

  He told her about the day’s events, including the Admiral’s black look as he left.

  “Don’t worry about it, the Admiral, I mean. Wasn’t he the one that sent you out on this wild goose chase in the first place? After the fishing boat sank?”

  “Yeah, but—”

  “So he can’t fire you for concluding that there might be something out there without revealing that he’s the one that started it. He’s not going to do that. Trust me.”

  Mike realized that, politically speaking, she was right. Captain’s wife, Dummy—what do you expect?

  “He sure looked like he was going to fire my ass by dawn’s early light.”

  “It’s harder to do that than you think. Do you really think there’s a submarine out there?” she asked, turning around to look at him.

  “Yeah, I kinda think there is, or has been, anyway. I think the Navy ought to at least go out and take a hard look. Too many little indicators point to more than coincidence. I guess we’ll find out when the Coral Sea comes home.”

  She sat up at last, tossing her hair away from her face. Her heavy breasts swayed as she tried to arrange her hair with her fingers. He sat behind her, and wrapped his hands around her front.

  “You’re not helping.”

  “Helping myself, sort of.”

  “You worry too much about your career, you know that? If he’s going to fire you, look at it this way—you can get on with your life. You’re obviously not having a very satisfying command tour anyway; he might be doing you a favor.”

  “I guess that’s one way of looking at it.”

  “What would you do—you’ve got your twenty, haven’t you?”

  “Yes. I hadn’t thought about it.”

  “You should. J.W. is very sensitive about the subject of retirement. If he doesn’t make flag I think he’ll just spin in place somewhere, become even more unpleasant than he is now, and hang on until they throw him out at thirty. There’s a whole world out there outside of the glorious Navy, and most of you serious lifers don’t even want to look at it.”

  “Just a lot of civilians out there. I’ve never talked to civilians. I don’t know what the hell I’d do.”

  “That’s what I’m talking about. It’s ironic—the Lieutenant Commanders who don’t make it to command spend their last five years setting themselves up for civilian life when they hit their twenty. The guys who do get command never give it a thought, and then when the grand career peters out, they’re suddenly confronted with the possibility that they’re not going to make Captain or Flag. None of you guys ever think past the Navy.”

  She turned to face him.

  “You’re not married, no kids in college, no mortgage—you could probably live right here and not even have to work, except when I come sneaking around after midnight.”

  “That’s not work.”

  “But you could make it a second career. Think of the benefits. Why don’t we practice.�
��

  “Right now?”

  “Yeah. It has to beat thinking about submarines. Or is that a periscope?”

  FORTY-SEVEN

  The Officers Club, Mayport Naval Station, Friday, 2 May; 1205

  “I’ll have the veggie-burger, no fries, a small salad, diet coke,” said the Commodore. He handed over the menu.

  “I’ll have the Navy bean soup and some French bread, iced tea,” said Mike.

  The waitress took their menus and departed to get the next table’s order. The dining room was full with the usual lunch crowd, which was about the only time the Mayport O’Club dining room was full. Everyone knew that evenings were heavily dependent on microwave cookery. There was the normal mix of ship’s company officers, shore pukes, staffies, and even some techreps in shirts and ties who were trying not to look like civilians. Mike and the Commodore were seated in a corner table near the seaside windows. The bright white sand of the Navy beach stretched a quarter mile to the Atlantic over low dunes dotted with saw-grass.

  Mike had arrived onboard at a little after eight o‘clock, his usual arrival time. The Exec had informed him that the Commodore had invited him to lunch at the Club. Mike and the Exec had speculated over coffee in the wardroom on the reasons for lunch, with Mike feeling sure that there was going to be some more fallout from the disastrous meeting with the Admiral. The Exec took the opposite tack, saying that the Commodore would do dirty work in his office, not at the O’Club.

  “Have a good night’s sleep, did you, Michael?” asked the Commodore. He had not missed the signs of a mild hangover, compounded by not much sleep.

  “I’ve had better, Commodore,” said Mike, smiling inwardly at the half-truth. Started off shitty but had a lovely finish. Diane had slipped away at just after five and presumably made it home without incident. Mike had wondered what the gate guards thought. Woman was getting out of hand.