He nodded slowly at her, his eyes lidded.
“And that, politically speaking, career-wise speaking, is a major crime,” she said.
He nodded again, sipping his coffee, watching her work it out.
“Compounded by the fact that he was having an affair with his Group Chief of Staffs wife, another major crime in terms of his professional judgement. So let me guess: they’ll offer to balance it out. Assuming he lives through all this, and provided he keeps his mouth shut about Libyan submarines, he’ll get a medal, one of those given in the privacy of some Admiral’s office, and then he’ll be helped to retire.”
“Bingo,” said the Commodore.
“And, let me see: I’ll bet my job is to go in there when he wakes up, and gently explain all this to him when he’s a little better, and if I do that, successfully, and we simply fade away, presumably together, then nobody will come after me, or Mike either, especially his highness, the Chief of Staff.”
The Commodore nodded again, watching her carefully.
“I love it,” she said bitterly. “The Navy way. Right way, wrong way, Navy way. But tell me: what about all these people, practically the whole crew of the Goldsborough, the hundreds of injured? What happens to them?”
“Victims of an act of God. A stray mine from a war forty years gone. The investigation will determine who were heroes and who were not. The Exec of the Goldsborough was a big hero—he kept her afloat until the Spruances got there. He’s going to come out of this with an early selection to Commander and a command of his own. He deserves it. Many others will get medals, everyone will get a unit citation medal for saving the carrier, and the injured will get purple hearts and a big commendation in their records, something vaguely worded as to how so and so made a gallant sacrifice when his ship saved a carrier by throwing itself on a mine. Something like that. Beyond the pain and suffering, what happened to Goldsborough will actually be a bigger boost to their careers than anything else they might have done on that ship.”
“The career; above all the career,” she said bitterly.
“Most of them are careerists,” he pointed out.
“But many of them knew there was a submarine. How will they cover that up?’
“There will be two kinds of witnesses. The great bulk of the crew, the engineers, the gun mount people, the fire control guys, people in the magazines and in auxiliary spaces, they had no role in this other than as victims. The investigating board will tell them that their CO was mistaken. After all, nobody saw a submarine. They thought they had a contact. They heard what they thought were torpedoes. It was a mine, all along. And the second category of witness will be the officers on the bridge and in CIC, who will be told that the mine story is a deception, a deception vital to national security.”
“How, for God’s sake, could they justify that?”
“You really don’t know? It’ll go like this: Gentlemen, we need to bury this incident because it is the right thing to do. This whole Navy, this whole Defense Department, operates on the theory of deterrence. Successful deterrence is heavily dependent upon image. The other side has to think you’re ten foot tall, that, if not perfect, you are close to it, and to try you on means certain defeat. The Navy simply can’t admit that a third world submarine came all the way over here, undetected, either at sea or by our superior intelligence systems, operated in our fleet opareas for weeks, successfully planted mines in the entrance to a major seaport, and almost successfully ambushed one of our carriers, who was, ahem—regrettably operating unescorted. And worse, that the local chain of command suppressed the warnings of a CO who caught on to what was going on and wouldn’t leave it alone.”
He leaned back in the couch, eyes closed, delivering his “speech.”
“It’s a major fuckup, all around. But not one we can have becoming public. Believe me, Gentlemen, there will be repercussions at very high levels over this, and some high ranking people are going to lose their jobs. But it is absolutely vital to national security that a thing like this be handled behind closed doors. We simply have to, or the thousands of officers and men of the Navy who are doing a superb job, day in and day out, would be tarred, and worse, would lose their confidence in the judgement of their national command authorities. We ask you to bury this whole incident, accept your medals with grace, and get on with your careers, which are now more promising than they were because of the outstanding contribution you and your ship made.”
She stared at him for a long moment. He raised his eyebrows, as if to ask, was that not convincing? She realized that his little speech, or something very much like it, was probably being polished by professional speechwriters even as they waited in the hospital waiting room.
“And what happens to you?” she asked, finally.
“I will not get a medal and I will also retire, but not right away. I was the real instigator and the chief accomplice in the major crime of embarrassing their lordships. I have to go because I should have known better than to put the Admirals in an embarrassing position. I should have ‘handled it’ better. Mike was in his first command, so he’s being given the benefit of the doubt. I was in my major command. The point of major command is to demonstrate that you’re one of them, or can be one of them, and I guess I demonstrated just the opposite. But they’ll be nice about it, because they know I’m old enough to maybe someday run my mouth.”
Diane shook her head slowly, in silence. He leaned forward.
“It takes something like this, usually in peacetime, to shake the tree. And believe me, if the tone of their voices yesterday, or last night, or whenever it was, is any indication, the whole forest is shaking. Mike and I are going to be down in the noise level, in the grass, as they say. And please believe me when I say that’s precisely where I, and where Mike and where you want to be.”
Diane put down her coffee cup and hugged herself, her eyes on the floor, while she thought about it.
“Will you be reassigned?” she asked, almost idly.
“If they have any sense of irony, they’ll make me the Group Twelve Chief of Staff,” he replied.
Diane found that funny. She began to laugh, softly at first, but then louder, with an hysterical edge. She was still laughing, with tears in her eyes, when the duty corpsman came out of the ICU. He had never, ever heard anyone laugh like that in the ICU waiting room. He stood uncertainly by the steel doors.
“Mrs. Martinson?” he called. “Commander Montgomery is awake. We told him you were out here, and he’s asking for you, Ma’am. The Docs say he’s going to be OK, barring all the standard stuff. I’ll take you in, if you’d like.”
He caught sight of the Commodore. “Sir, can I help you?”
“No, young man,” said the Commodore. “Take this lady to see Commander Montgomery. Mrs. Martinson, Diane, will you think about what I said? Will you try to convince him? Anything else will be like sweeping against the tide.”
Diane stood up, smoothing out the wrinkled Gray Lady uniform, running her hands through her hair. She put her arms straight up and stretched, revealing in one smooth gesture her beauty and intelligence and vitality all in one graceful motion. The Corpsman looked on admiringly. Then she smiled at the Commodore, a radiant, 50,000 watt smile, and turned without answering to follow the corpsman into the ICU.
EIGHTY-TWO
The Submarine Al Akrab, Saturday, 10 May; 0545
The Captain awoke slowly, prompted back to consciousness by the throbbing pain in his shoulder and a sensation of breathlessness. He was stretched out on the sloping deckplates, his legs wedged into a grid space to keep from sliding on the wet deck. He was not quite stuporous, but close to it as the oxygen levels shrank in the humid, dark confines of the wrecked control room. He could now definitely smell chlorine gas. His eyes felt like burning coals in the hollowed sockets of his face. The light from the two battle lanterns that were still working was very weak.
During the course of the night, he had maintained contact with the surviving engineers in the
engine room, shifting over to sound powered phones when the intercoms died for lack of power. They had begun preparations for escaping to the surface after darkness fell above, at around 2200, but the sudden appearance of minehunting sonars had aborted their preparations. The sonars were close enough to be heard through the hull. At 0130 they drifted away, but at 0150 there had been another mudslide, and the Al Akrab had slipped further down the canyon’s slope in a long, groaning rumble of metal, ending up still pitched nose down and canted over to port. The mud had continued to move outside the hull for an hour after the submarine stopped moving.
The Captain had listened to the mud and tried to visualize where they were. He was convinced they were in a ravine or canyon cutting the bottom. He was almost sure that the reason the sonars had drifted away was because the submarine had been buried by the mudslides. If that were true, the escape trunks were already useless. He wondered if the engineers realized that. They were further aft; perhaps they had not detected the moving veil of mud. He looked over at the diving control console, at the still figure of the Musaid, who had died sometime around 2100. It was now almost daybreak on the surface. It was time to put an end to it.
He pulled the sound powered phone headset over to him, and slipped the earphones over his head. His movements were slow, and it took a few minutes of fumbling before he could snap the chest strap holding on the earphones.
He glanced up at the pressure gauges of the main air banks. Both he in the control room and the survivors in the engine room had been tapping the primary ballast air banks to restore oxygen to their compartments. The gauges for the forward group showed less than fifty percent air remaining. The Captain had decided hours ago how to put an end to the Al Akrab. He called the engine room. The Engineer answered.
“What is the pressure remaining in your air tanks?”
“We are at forty-two percent, Captain. We must begin the escape procedure very soon, or there will not be enough air to bring her up. The oxygen levels are very low. We are all getting stupid back here.”
“I understand,” replied the Captain. “The forward tanks are at sixty percent. We can blow the ballast tanks at this depth with thirty percent of the air tanks, so we have enough air to try it once, and to let it blow for a good minute. But you will need more oxygen to get your wits about you. We can share some of our excess air with you. Open the interior ventilation valves on the main induction pipe. I will cross connect one of our air tanks to main induction, bleed down some of our extra air, and we can refresh your whole group. Then we will begin the escape procedure. We will just have to take our chances on the surface with the Americans. It will be daylight in one hour.”
“As you command,” said the Engineer, with the first hint of enthusiasm. The Captain sighed, and took off the headset, and crawled over to the bank of valve operators on the port side of the control room, past the bodies of the Musaid and the two planesmen.
The valve bank was on the downhill side of the boat, so he had to climb up onto a hull strake to reach the valves. The pain in his shoulder brought him wide awake. He had to rest for a minute until his head stopped spinning. The main induction pipe ran from the snorkel mast in the control room straight back into the engineroom to the diesels. There were two additional large valves that allowed snorkel air from the surface to be bled into the boat while feeding the diesels, to refresh the crew’s atmosphere after weeks of submergence. One of these valves was in the engineroom; the other was in the control room. They were hydraulically operated valves, but they had handwheels as well. Upstream of the two ventilating air valves was the main induction valve itself. Above main induction was the snorkel mast, with its bronze float ball seated firmly at the top of the snorkel tube, held fast by tons of seawater pressure.
The Captain watched the valve indicator panel, which was still lighted by the battery circuit, although growing dim. He saw the indicator change showing that the engineroom had opened the ventilating valve off the main induction line. It was a large valve, six inches in diameter. His plan was simple. He would now open the six inch ventilation valve in the control room. Then he would crawl forward and release the dogs on the forward hatch of the control room. Seawater would thunder into the control room, flooding it in less than a minute. As the control room filled, the remaining air would be driven back up into his ventilation valve, down the main induction pipe to the engineroom, filling the engineroom with new air.
They would never suspect. They would sit up on the deckplates, turning their faces to the stream of air flowing in, and they would still be sitting there when after about a minute the air was followed by a six inch stream of seawater at full depth pressure. Not a hundred men could close that valve against such a stream, and it would be all over in a minute.
He took a deep breath, and struggled one handed with the handwheel. Slowly, the wheel turned, and there was a faint hiss of air as the pressure equalized between the engineroom and the control room. He slid back down the bulkhead, and pulled himself over the pile of stiffening bodies to the forward hatch. He positioned himself at the bottom of the hatch, facing the vertical steel door with its six hatch clips jammed down onto bronze wedges. The steel surface of the hatch was sweating visibly, as the cold seawater on the other side condensed the stagnant humidity in the control room. There was a faint halo of seawater mist around the hatch, as water at depth pressure leaked by the hatch seals. He had to pull two bodies away from the hatch to get at the bottom clips.
They had almost pulled it off, he thought, as he placed an undogging wrench on the first hatch clip, and pulled down with his good arm. It barely moved under the intense pressure from the other side. He had to lift his whole body and hang on the wrench to make it begin to move off the wedge. The whole hatch groaned, and the mist of water hissing around the edges of the hatch grew into a hard spray as the clip slowly rotated. He stopped it while there was still a quarter inch of metal to metal contact.
They had done so well, staying undetected for weeks, silencing the fishing boat, evading the old destroyer, placing the mines in the river. He moved the wrench to the other side of the hatch, and fitted it to a second clip. Again he had to put his body weight onto the wrench to dislodge the clip. But the old destroyer had become his nemesis. He had dismissed it at first as being an unworthy foe, but it had returned twice to probe the waters of the Gulf Stream, and then again on the last, decisive day. The second clip began finally to move, and the hatch groaned again, the heavy steel beginning to deform. It began to bulge at the top, and the spray of water was now strong enough to reach all the way to the overhead of the control room. His right arm was soaking wet, and his eyes stung from the salt. He left the second clip barely attached like the first one and placed the wrench on the third clip.
But at least they had made the attack. Two actually, as the river mines had caught something in their jaws. The old destroyer had frustrated their attack on the carrier, although one torpedo had evaded the depth charges and hauled away to the east. He would never know if it found its target. But the final mine had found its target, even though it had killed the Al Akrab in the process. We will die like the scorpion we are.
He was sweating heavily now, his breath coming in short gasps in the oxygen depleted atmosphere. The hatch was bulging and creaking ominously now, and there was water streaming around half of its knife-edge coamings. The third clip would do it. He held the wrench on the third clip, and pulled himself right up to the hatch, face to face with it, the icy seawater streaming down his face now, washing his hair into his eyes, stinging his eyes with the salt, a cold ablution before death, a cleansing of his unworthy body and his eager soul. He took a deep breath, and called out for the last time “Allahu Akbar!,” and pulled hard on the third clip.
Ninety tons of sea pressure slammed the hatch into his face and flooded the control room in thirty thundering seconds. The engineers, waiting for the air pressure to rise, heard a rumbling thump forward and then felt the sudden stream of air blowing out of
the ventilation valve. The Chief Engineer was sitting on the oily deckplates of the engineroom, closest to the ventilation valve. His oxygen deprived brain tried to tell him that the noise from the control room was somehow wrong, that this was not the sound or the feel of oxygen rich air from an air tank, that it was something else, the sound of a ballast tank flooding, flooding, water not air, water was coming! He gave a shout and tried to untangle his legs and get up to reach the valve just as the column of water erupted out of the valve. The engineroom took a full minute to fill, the roaring black water snuffing out men and battle lanterns with equal efficiency. The maelstrom subsided when the sea pressure had compressed all the air in the engineroom into a tight, hot pocket up against the overhead. The submarine, now completely flooded out except for one battery compartment, rolled completely over on her beam ends, and slid further down the sides of the canyon, followed by another avalanche of mud that buried her fifty feet deep.
Two miles away, onboard the brand new minehunter, the USS Avenger, the audio frequency passive sonar operator listened carefully, and then signalled for his supervisor.
“Is there volcanic activity along this area, Chief?”
“Nope,” said the Chief, complacently. “The bottom contour map shows lots of canyons and ridges, so we probably get some seismic, but you gotta go to the mid-Atlantic Ridge to get volcanic. You’re probably hearing a mudslide, sort of a low rumble with what sounds like gravel chasing after it?”
“Yeah, that’s it. I heard a big bubbling sound, and then just what you described. Bearing 100, range medium. It’s all quiet now, though.”
“Yeah, that shit happens all the time. Disregard; it’s just mud. Things that go bump in the night, you know? It don’t mean a thing.”
EIGHTY-THREE
Naval Air Station Hospital, Saturday, 10 May; 0630
The orderly led her into the ICU, past the charge desk, and into the central bay area. The beds were lined up abreast in temporary bays, each bed nestled into racks of life support equipment surrounding the bed on three sides. The ICU was full, with every bed taken, and a double sized shift of green garbed men and women on duty. The air was cool, almost cold, and filled with the sounds of electronic monitors, respirators, and heartbeats of varying strength and intensity. The overhead lights were out, but each bay had a bedlamp. There were other visitors, some sleeping in chairs alongside shrouded figures in the beds. Diane wished for a sweater, and realized her chill was not all due to the ambient temperature. They walked down the line of beds to the last one in the line, to where Quigley had been.
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