by Larry Bond
But the Russians didn’t put lunatics in command of nuclear submarines. He’d certainly disrupted their survey. “Could he have been trying to ram the UUV?” asked Wolfe.
Shimko quickly shook his head, chewing. He swallowed and said, “His aim couldn’t have been that bad. His mine-hunting sonar would see it. That’s a precision set, accurate to within a couple of yards. He was a lot closer to us than to LaVerne.”
Everyone at the table agreed that the Russian had “conclusively won” the encounter by disrupting their survey. “But he disrupted our operations the instant he announced his presence,” Jerry said. “He didn’t need to run circles around us.”
“Is that what you call it?” Lavoie grumbled. “ ‘Announcing his presence,’ he says. Might as well have used a torpedo.”
“He was trying to herd us,” Constantino observed. “He cut across our path as we headed northwest.”
“That was on his third run,” Jerry countered. “On the first two, he passed down our port side, west of us. Was he telling us to sail east, toward the Russian coast?” Even as he said it, Jerry knew that was wrong. Russia was a hundred-plus miles away. Way too far.
“Was he herding us away from something else, then?” Wolfe asked.
“What’s out here?” Constantino asked. But they all knew the answer. Nothing but them.
“The UUV. He was trying to herd us away from LaVerne,” Wolfe said.
“So he could capture it?” Lavoie asked. “We had it under control the whole time. We could have kept it away from him.”
“He didn’t know that,” Jerry realized. “He must have assumed we had a wire to it. Break the wire, and it goes dead. Then he sits on it until someone arrives to salvage it.”
“And the Russians have an intelligence coup,” Shimko concluded. “It might have worked, if LaVerne had a tether.” He looked around the table. “Anybody see any holes in his theory?”
Jerry couldn’t. The Russian captain didn’t know that LaVerne was controlled by an acoustic modem. It explained a lot, and Jerry kicked himself mentally. He should have thought of that. It would have been simple to deceive them . . .
“I’ll take it to the Captain,” Shimko concluded, and stood. Everyone else turned to finishing dinner. There was still a second seating, and the discussion seemed to be finished.
It was Will Hayes who finally asked the one question that had eluded everyone. “What about the Russian? What do you think happened to him?”
Jerry’s first thought was reflexive: He didn’t want to know about him, and he didn’t want to think about him. But the question demanded an answer. He’d been damaged, certainly, but Russian subs were double-hulled, with internal compartmentalization that U.S. boats lacked. Their design philosophy had a significant emphasis on survivability, while U.S. designers focused predominantly on stealth. All other things being equal, the Russian sub was probably in better shape than they were.
“He wasn’t waiting for us when we submerged,” Lavoie reported. “If he headed south, toward home, while we were headed west, then we’ll never see him again.”
“Fine with me. He’ll be back in his home port before we get to Faslane,” Wolfe concluded.
“He found us easily enough out here,” Jerry remarked pessimistically. “I hope none of his friends know how to do that trick.”
“Which is why we’re headed westward at our best speed,” Shimko remarked, standing at the door to the wardroom. “Mr. Mitchell, the Captain has some questions for you.” He didn’t ask whether Jerry was finished with his meal.
Jerry followed the XO back up to the captain’s cabin. The door was closed, and Shimko knocked, but hardly waited before opening it.
For a moment, Jerry thought the XO was waking Rudel, because the only light was from the lamp over his desk. But that didn’t make sense. The captain had just asked to see him.
Rudel was sitting in his chair, tipped back against the bulkhead, a pad of paper in his lap. Jerry could see a few lines scrawled at the top, but the pen lay on the table next to him. He didn’t speak, or even look up when Shimko opened the door.
“Sir, here’s Mr. Mitchell. You wanted to ask him about tethered vehicles,” Shimko prompted.
Rudel raised his head without moving the chair. It was hard to see in the dark, but from what Jerry could tell, Captain Rudel looked terrible. His face was drawn, and there were dark areas under his eyes. He saw Jerry and the XO, then straightened up in the chair but didn’t stand. “Mr. Mitchell, do you think the Russian sub was trying to cut a line between the UUV and Seawolf?”
“Yes, sir, I do.” Admitting it made Jerry feel more guilty. Understanding that one fact could have changed everything. Rountree might still be alive.
The captain leaned back, seemingly satisfied, but the XO spoke up. “You’ve been to school on these ROVs, haven’t you?”
“Yessir, before I reported to Memphis.”
“Do most of our vehicles use a tether?”
“Many do, sir. Only the LMRS and our UUVs are untethered.”
“What about the Russians? Did you learn anything about their ROVs?”
“We spent some time reviewing their technology in class.”
“Is their stuff tethered?”
“Yes, sir. What little they have.”
The XO’s questions occupied Rudel’s attention but the captain didn’t ask or say anything else until the XO said, “That’s all, then.”
As Jerry started to turn, Rudel called him by name. “Jerry. I was sorry to hear about Dennis Rountree.”
“Yes, sir.”
“I want to have a short service when we pull into Faslane. They’ll take the body off then, and it will give the crew a chance to say good-bye. Please set it up.”
“Yes, sir.”
“I’ll make a few remarks, and some of his friends may want to say good-bye. But keep it short. This isn’t a funeral. That will come later, after we’re back.”
“I understand, sir. I’ll take care of everything.”
“Very good. Dismissed.”
Jerry left the captain’s cabin confused. Rudel had been more interested in Rountree’s memorial service than the UUV issue, and he hadn’t asked one question about the down equipment, which was his responsibility. And he looked like hell.
Jerry had watched Rudel in control during the encounter. Shoot, everybody had watched the skipper for orders, for guidance. He’d been in control, and he’d asked all the right questions, done all the right things. At least, Jerry thought so. But Seawolf was hurt and someone was dead.
Jerry made his rounds, visiting all his department’s spaces. He always did this before the eight o’clock reports. Chief Hudson was overseeing the work in the electronics equipment space. Electronics modules and test equipment were stacked against the bulkhead, almost blocking movement.
And there was a lot of movement. Jerry saw his ETs and ITs, and one of his off-watch quartermasters, but also sonar techs and even auxiliarymen. “Everybody’s helping,” Hudson explained. “We’ll work through the night, and with this many people, we can take it in shifts.”
Hudson’s cheerful attitude drove out some of Jerry’s gloom. He was able to give Shimko an upbeat report at eight that evening. It looked very good for one HF receiver to be up by early tomorrow morning. They weren’t sure about any of the transmitters yet. They were in worse condition, but Hudson and Morrison hadn’t given up.
The XO wasn’t as cheerful. “So we can get a weather report. Wonderful.” Then he remembered himself and added, “Tell your guys that they’re doing a great job. Keep me apprised. And I need the encounter timeline.”
“Yessir. I’ll start on it tonight.”
“Good, but don’t pull an all-nighter. Nobody’s life is at stake anymore. We’re on our way home. And this needs to be done right.”
“Understood.”
Jerry headed for control. That was where all the data was—logs, navigation and geo plots, fire-control chits, sonar tapes. It took some tim
e just to gather it all. It was the quartermasters’ responsibility to maintain the logs, and Jerry called QM1 Peters to properly label all the documents. At this point, they were legal records. Evidence to be used in an investigation.
By the time he’d assembled everything, it was late, and Jerry decided to make a fresh start in the morning. He made one more visit to the electronics space, then headed for his stateroom. Lieutenant Chandler was working at his desk, but they ignored each other as Jerry set his alarm for five and gratefully hit the rack.
It was bright, the sunlight from a clear sky doubled as it reflected off a concrete runway. His helmet visor was down, reducing the glare. Jerry watched the instruments as he advanced the throttle. He felt the engines pushing hard, fighting the brakes, but he counted carefully, waiting. The engine temperatures stayed in the green, and he released the brakes.
Jerry recognized the dream. He’d been here many times before. He watched the speed on the heads-up display shoot up, the numbers quickly passing one hundred knots, then one-twenty, one-forty, changing as quickly as he could read them. The runway became a white blur in front of the nose. He’d have takeoff speed any second.
There he felt the whole airframe shudder, and the nose swerved right. He’d blown a tire. Used to making feather-light corrections, he was slow correcting, but even full left on the controller didn’t stop the swerve. He’d chopped the throttles, but that didn’t help either. He was almost crossways on the runway, still moving, and he felt the right wing lift up. He was going to roll.
He reached for the loops at the top of the ejection seat, but they weren’t there, and instead of sitting in the cockpit of his Hornet, he was standing now, in the bridge cockpit of Seawolf, but they were submerged, and he could see the Russian sub. It was to his right, bow-on.
It was huge, and he could see every detail of the boat—the pattern of the anechoic tiles on the hull, the silver patch of the bow sonar window, the intake scoops back by engineering. In spite of the props furiously churning the water, it was almost motionless, pointing straight at him. Jerry frantically tried to avoid the oncoming vessel, but no matter which way he turned Seawolf, the Russian’s bearing never changed.
He never saw the collision, but suddenly he was hanging in the air from his chute over the twisted wreckage of Seawolf and the Russian submarine, lying together across the runway. Rescuers and emergency vehicles crowded around the two crushed hulls, reminding him of a train wreck.
Then he was standing next to an ambulance, and they were loading Dennis Rountree into it. He was looking at Jerry, and Jerry kept saying, “I’m sorry,” louder and louder, but Rountree kept shaking his head, as if he couldn’t hear. Then they started loading the rest of the crew into the ambulance, first Rudel, then Shimko, and then some of the chiefs, then . . .
The alarm woke him, shivering and disoriented. He lay in his bunk for several minutes, reaching out to touch the bulkheads and familiar objects around him. Jerry read and reread the time on the alarm clock. He recited the name of his boat, his billet, where they were. The images from the dream lingered, and he had to work to shake them off.
Jerry got up and silently dressed and washed. Chandler was asleep, but the red light in the stateroom was enough for his purposes.
His first stop was control. They were on course, on track for Faslane. QM2 Dunn seemed barely awake, but he’d tended the chart properly.
The electronics equipment space looked cleaner, but red danger tags hung from a lot of the gear, and two ratings were at work. He didn’t bother them. He’d get a report from Chief Hudson before breakfast. Instead, he headed back to control.
It was quiet at that hour, and he took over one of the plotting tables, used only when they were tracking a target. Will Hayes was the OOD, and after making sure that he couldn’t be of any help, left Jerry to his work.
He started building a timeline on his laptop, first working with the deck log. That recorded all the course and speed changes along with all the reports from other stations. The sonar logs told him when the other boat was detected, its bearing, and gave hints about its speed and direction.
Breakfast time came and went, but Jerry was on a roll. It felt good, satisfying, to patiently piece together the scraps of data into a coherent picture. Order from chaos, reason from insanity. And it drove out the unpleasant images from his dream.
He wasn’t looking for patterns or meaning, not yet. He didn’t have a lot of good information on the Russian’s position, only his bearing and range from Seawolf when the wide aperture array had a good lock on him. He didn’t know exactly when the Russian had changed course. That took time to compute, given the sparse range data to work with, and the Russian had maneuvered often and quickly.
STSC Carpenter showed up in control after breakfast. He brought Jerry coffee and one of the cook’s sweet rolls, and more data. Carpenter’s report was clearly an extract of their analysis, and Jerry wondered what they’d found out but couldn’t share with him. He noticed that their Russian was described as probably a new “first line nuclear attack sub.”
But what they’d shared with him was very helpful. Because they could see the narrowband tonals from the Russian’s propulsion train, they’d been able to figure out when his speed had changed, and calculated what his speed was as he passed by them. Like an ambulance with its siren blaring, the sound changes as the ambulance approaches you and then drives by. At the closest point of approach, the noise from the Russian submarine was what he really sounded like. With this data, the sonar techs were able to map his propulsion train and thus, determine his speed.
Hudson came by with a progress report, and Jerry asked him to brief the XO as well.
Jerry was adding in speed changes from the engineering log when he realized that the XO was standing behind him.
“Good morning, sir.”
“You’ve made a lot of progress, Jerry.”
“It’s incomplete, XO.”
“And it will be, unless the Russian’s deck log is in that pile somewhere,” remarked Shimko with a broad grin. Then more seriously, “Still, it will be very useful.”
He leaned closer, as if to examine the plot, and spoke softly. “I’m hoping it will convince the captain that the collision was not his fault.”
Jerry had to fight to control his reaction. The encounter had been hashed over last night, and he heard it rehashed in the control room this morning. Most of the crew thought they were lucky to be alive, and that Rudel had been the only thing keeping them from an icy, wet end.
When Jerry didn’t immediately reply, Shimko explained. “You know how much the Skipper cares about this crew and this boat. They’re a part of him. He’s hurting because Seawolf is hurting. I checked on him a couple times during the night, and he didn’t sleep at all. He just sat there, writing draft after draft of a letter to Rountree’s parents.”
Jerry felt another pang of responsibility himself. In the back of his mind he’d been trying to see if he’d missed a chance to grasp the Russian’s purpose. It was hard to second-guess a “failure of the imagination,” but he kept thinking that he should have realized what was happening.
“I would like to show him, and anyone else, Jerry, that given the circumstances we were in, and the data we had on hand, Tom Rudel made the right calls.”
Shimko straightened up and Jerry saw that he didn’t look like he had slept much either. As if on cue, the XO stretched and stifled a deep yawn.
“Keep at it, Jerry. I need a logical, cogent analysis of the events leading up to the collision if I’m going to get through to the Skipper. Stay objective. I need an honest assessment based on facts, not sympathy. The Captain isn’t about to let us blow sunshine up his skirt.”
“Yes, sir. I’ll do my best.”
The XO nodded appreciatively. Then, reaching down and putting his hand on Jerry’s shoulder, he said, “A wise man once said, ‘The difficulties in life are intended to make us better, not bitter.’ Well, right now, our Captain is slowly gn
awing away at his stomach lining based on a belief that he made a mistake. We need to show him, if we can, that it wasn’t his fault. We owe him that much, at least.”
By lunchtime, Jerry had a draft master plot with all the data mixed together. He looked at the plot he’d been working on for hours. Seawolf’s track was a solid line; gently curving except for the hard turns Rudel had made to avoid the Russian. Lines radiated out from different points along the track, showing the bearing and range information to the Russian sub. Data tables along the margins listed other information. Unfortunately, no matter how neatly he arranged it, he still had squat.
Even with the data he had, the likely errors in the information made it difficult to make the conclusive case the XO wanted. This wasn’t going to be enough to convince the captain. A gurgling sound from his stomach made it clear that the sticky bun he had early just wasn’t enough. Jerry needed a break, and he needed some more eyes on the problem.
He took the plot and a printout of his timeline to lunch and showed it to the rest of the wardroom. They passed the diagram around, chewing over the dry facts, reviewing the collision again. The most concrete data that had come out of Jerry’s work had been that their relative speed at the time of contact was eighteen knots, and that the angle between the two boats’ bows at impact was about sixty-four degrees. Useful but unsatisfying.
Jeff Palmer traced the UUV’s movements, looking for any relationship between them and the Russian. He didn’t see any, but he did find a problem. “This track isn’t right,” he told Jerry. “Our data show a lot more maneuvers.”
“The deck log shows all the commands we sent to LaVerne,” Jerry said, a little defensively.
“And they were all brilliantly executed,” Palmer agreed, “but she also maneuvered on her own. When the Russian showed up, all big and noisy and closing fast, her collision-avoidance routines kicked in. If the UUV senses a potential collision risk, it locates the offending unit and moves to open the range.”
“And she found out where the sub was . . .” Jerry started.