The Passage

by David Poyer

  “It’s lousy with it, Hank.”

  “Bad code?”

  “Are you kidding, bad? It’s … garbage, garbage, garbage, garbage.” Williams turned a suspicious eye toward him. “And it’s in the sections I already patched. We got gun shoots and tracking drills tomorrow. What are we gonna do? This ain’t gonna cut it.”

  “I know.” He sat down and took a breath, thinking about it. The more he thought, the more certain he felt. Everything fit—the good tapes that mysteriously went bad; the patched code that over time slowly degenerated back to noise; the origin of whatever it was in one module of the tape, but then, as they looked, gradually revealed itself in more and more segments, more and more cells, more and more modules. It was as if the very act of looking for it spread it.

  “I think I have an idea what might be going on,” he said tentatively, looking up at the rows of flashing lights. “And you know what? I sure hope I turn out to be wrong.”

  23

  THE machinists stopped talking the second he stepped through the door the next morning. Dan looked around the shop: racks of hammers and mallets, machines for bending and cutting metal. Smells of oil and acid flux and hot coffee surrounded him.

  “Morning, sir. Help you?” said a tired-looking first-class; his dungaree shirt said BAKOTIC in Old English script.

  “Wondered if you had any scrap wire, strapping iron, anything like that.”

  “We got rid of most of our good scrap before we got here, sir. Inspectors don’t like a lot of crap layin’ around the shop … . Studie, can you help the lieutenant out? What you need it for, sir?”

  “I just need some scrap wire, but it’s got to be heavy.”

  He left the shop with five feet of battery wire, soft copper cable half an inch thick. He twisted its heavy ductility into a coil as he went aft. He stuck his head into the laundry as he passed. Despite fresh paint, the smell of fire still lingered.

  He emerged on the afterdeck, into the lingering cool of dawn. The sun bulged out of the sea like a thermonuclear detonation, glinting and winking off glass or metal far down the coast in Cuban territory. Dan rubbed his eyes. He’d been up past midnight fixing the casualty routes; then at 0400, reveille again … .

  The Kidd-class destroyers, like the Spruances from which they’d inherited hull and machinery layout, had a dropped weather deck at the stern. The twin tapered rails of the Mark 26 launcher rose above him, pointed straight up; the tapered barrel of the after gun aimed at the departing land. He stepped over flemished-out mooring lines and around bitts and scuttles. After so long locked inside, in CIC and office and wardroom, he had a moment almost of agoraphobia as he stopped on Barrett’s broad, open fantail.

  Back here, at fifteen knots, the rumbling vibration of the screws was like riding a tractor over a potato field. Twin whip antennas drew circles on the sky. The wake tumbled under the counter, a white-green maelstrom thirty feet across. The sharp-cornered stern dragged little whirlpools after it, then left them spinning and rocking in a sea the color of chrysoprase till they dissolved into a welter of hissing foam.

  Dan half-trusted his weight to the rail. There was one patch of turbulence about ten feet back from the stern where the sea seemed to be sucked downward, as if into a huge open mouth just below the surface. He nodded to the after lookout, who gave him one incurious glance, then lifted his binoculars again.

  Wondering if he was the one who’d spotted Sanderling, Dan took the diary out of his pocket. He wrapped the cable around it tightly, then twisted the ends together till they locked.

  He looked out at Cuba, the low hills sinking astern. A dark speck caught his eye above a gleam of white. He frowned, then understood; it was the submarine, following them out. Barrett was headed straight out to the operating areas today. As he recalled the chart, the hydrography was fairly steep here. The hundredfathom curve was only about half a mile off Windward Point.

  Leaning out, he tossed the diary into the sea. It curved out and fell into the vortex and disappeared, sucked down into the continuously beating froth. He shaded his eyes, watching for it to reappear farther aft, but it didn’t.

  It was gone. When he straightened, it felt like some heavy yoke had been lifted from his shoulders. He should never have kept it, never have read it. Maybe the legal officer, Arguilles, was right. He was too quick on the trigger when it came to taking responsibility.

  He turned from the lifeline, to find a man in civilian slacks and short-sleeve shirt watching him from the deck above. He had closecut dark hair and muscular arms crossed over a middle-aged paunch. They stared at each other for a second. Then the man looked around, found the ladder to the afterdeck, and let himself down it.

  He held out his hand. “Lieutenant Lenson, I presume.”

  “That’s right.” Dan met flat blue eyes. “Who are you?”

  “Bob Diehl, Naval Investigative Service. Looking into ETSN Benjamin Sanderling, USN, decease of.” Dan looked at the ID card and nodded; Diehl flipped the case closed. “Pretty morning.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I like riding the ships. Put in eight years in diesel boats myself, Carbonero and Medregal, then the old Rocketwolf. Ever heard of her? USS Requin, SS-four eighty-one?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “I remember I was the lookout in a hurricane once. Nineteen hours stuck on the bridge. Couldn’t get down. We had twenty feet of green water breaking over the top of the windshield; that fiberglass sail kept shuddering like it was going to break off. Well, I know you have a busy day planned. I thought I’d try to talk to some of the men who knew this fella jumped overboard, in the inbetweens. The XO—hey, what kind of name is Vysotsky? Sounds Russian.”

  “It is,” Dan said, wondering why every ex-sailor you met had to tell you all about his old ship.

  “That so? Well, he said okay. That all right with you?”

  “Sure,” Dan said. He gave the guy a second to ask anything else, unsure whether he’d seen him get rid of the diary. When he didn’t, Dan added, “Will you want to interview me?”

  “I don’t think that’ll be necessary. Division officer, leading chief, the guys bunked with him—that’s the usual procedure. I don’t imagine you saw much of him.”

  “No. Not much.” Dan checked his watch. “We’ll be going to GQ for a local firing pretty soon—”

  “Sure, Lieutenant. See you later.”

  DOORS and hatches slammed as he went through the by-now-mindless motions of donning battle dress. He checked the gas mask, making sure the snap on the cover didn’t stick and that the rubber “spider” was prefolded so he could slap it on his face, pull the webwork down, and have an instant seal. The requirement was fifteen seconds from “go” to breathing through the activated-carbon canister.

  “Harpoon, manned and ready.”

  “SSWC, manned and ready.”

  “UBFC, manned and ready.”

  “Sonar, manned and ready.”

  “AAWC, manned and ready.”

  Lauderdale hit the intercom near Dan. “Bridge, Combat; Combat, manned and ready. Can you give me a visual range and bearing to the sub?”

  “Roger, stand by.”

  “Mr. Lauderdale, I’ll be in Sonar,” Dan told him. The CIC officer said, “Aye aye, sir.”

  The sonar room was separated from the rest of CIC by a black folding curtain. When he closed it, he found himself in a blue-lighted space the size of a camping trailer, completely filled with the three huge sonar stacks, chairs, safes, racks of pubs and tape reels, and the sonobouy and passive-tracking cabinets. A Barbie doll in a sailor hat, naked legs spread, dangled from an overhead light. Fowler glanced up as he slid in. “Mr. Lenson, howzit going? … Start a standard beam-to-beam search. Depression angle two.”

  There was the eerie song of the outgoing pulse, three notes repeated over ten seconds, then a click from the speaker by the port stack.

  “What are we doing in active, Chief?”

  “They’re starting us out in active mode, sir.
See how good the tracking team does, I guess.”

  Barrett carried one big SQS-53 sonar. The radiating elements were far below the waterline in the bow dome, a huge bulge beneath the sharp overhanging cutwater. The sonarmen “listened” from up here, but not with their ears. On the number one console a ring of white light expanded slowly from the center to the limits of the round scope, then disappeared. Below it on the B-scan, amber lines marched from the bottom to the top of the screen. The number two console operator sat glued to a jade shimmer like moire silk, fingers resting on a joystick. He looked drawn. Dan leaned against the safe, thinking they were all going to be exhausted before this was over. He noticed the sign on it. NO ONE WILL REMOVE ANY PUB FROM THIS SAFE WITHOUT MY PERMISSION. CHIEF FOWLER.

  “You and the chief warrant getting along better these days?”

  Fowler molded an invisible snowball. “We got an understanding, sir. He stays out unless I ask him in. He comes in, one of my guys stays with him. Hey! Freeze that, around two-one-six. Tweak your gain up.”

  The curtain rattled back and then closed again; Lieutenant Woollie loomed up through the dimness. “Got a track yet?” he asked briskly.

  Fowler pulled the mike down. “Evaluator, Sonar: Active contact bears two-one-six, two point five kiloyards, bow aspect, up doppler. Recommend we come left; he’s nearly in our baffles.”

  “It doesn’t do any good if we’re the only ones know about it, Chief,” Dan told him. Fowler grimaced.

  Woollie quizzed the sonarmen about equipment settings, power out, depression angle, and pulse length and asked to see their sound-velocity profile. Then he left. Dan searched around for a place to perch, and someone handed down a folding chair.

  Corpus Christi dived shortly after that, and they did sonar detection and tracking exercises through the morning. Active pinging went okay, but when they went to passive, to listening, everything fell apart. Corpus Christi was a new boat. Everybody expected her to be quiet. But when they passed within five hundred yards of her without a detection, the captain called down and roasted Dan. As soon as Leighty hung up, Dan dialed the computer room. Williams answered. “DP center.”

  “Lieutenant Lenson, in Sonar. We’re not getting shit on passive tracking here. How’s the program look?”

  “Sir, all you’re getting on the fifty-three is straight-stick passive output. I told Sonar that.”

  “Are you telling me we’re not running any digital processing?”

  “Sir, the Doc says we run those programs, we lose them. Until we get the diaphragm in place—”

  “The what?” Dan said to Fowler, “What the hell’s he talking about?”

  “I don’t know, sir.”

  “Stand by. I’m coming down.”

  When he got to the computer room, he looked around for Shrobo. He was about to ask for him when he came out from behind one of the UYK-7s. His glasses gleamed blankly, filled with light. “Uh, Hank,” Dan said, “I know you’re trying to figure out what’s wrong, but you can’t just shut the computers down till you find out. We’ve got to keep working with what we’ve got, okay?”

  “Sorry. Can’t be done that way.”

  “Uh … sir, I’m gonna break the guys for lunch, it’s almost time for the mess line to close.”

  “Okay, Chief.” When they left, Dan turned on Shrobo. “What is this? You’re supposed to be here to help us, not shut us down!”

  “That’s what I’m trying to do. But if you keep running these computers, there’s not going to be any system.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Shrobo gazed at the overhead for a second, as if receiving divine guidance, then reached for a pencil. “Let me show you.”

  DAN sat in CIC, worrying about what Shrobo had just told him. Things were worse than he’d thought. Everything was affected, not just the fire-control systems but everything that the computers controlled. And it was getting worse.

  Finally, he clicked the light on and checked the schedule.

  They were well offshore now, fifty miles south of Guantánamo Bay. The afternoon’s drills would begin with antiaircraft target designation, followed by tactical antiaircraft exercises. A-4 Skyhawks from Fleet Composite Squadron Ten would simulate attacks on the formation while the ships practiced tracking them and handing off engagement responsibilities. At the same time, an EA-6 over the horizon was testing their electronic surveillance capabilities. On completion of the tracking exercises, the ships would split into two parallel lines and another plane would report on-station with a towed target, making runs on each ship in turn for live firing.

  He clicked the light off, slid down, and leaned over the surface scope. It showed four pips on a line of bearing, steaming southwest at fifteen knots. Dahlgren was guide, followed by Barrett, Manitowoc , and Canisteo. “What’s our watch zone?” he asked Lauderdale.

  “Port and starboard, thirty degrees to one-five-zero degrees from the bow.”

  “And how are we tracking?”

  “The usual way, sir, on the UYA-fours—”

  “We’d better practice our manual plotting. Shut down the consoles. Get the guys up on the phones. I want a surface status board, tote boards, and air plot.”

  “We can’t just shut down the NTDS, sir. They’re going to be throwing a lot of targets at us during the battle problem.”

  “We’ve got serious problems with the combat direction system. I don’t know if we’re going to be able to count on having it up.”

  “It’ll be awful slow.”

  “Not if we get them drilled right. Anyway, I want to give it a try. Get them all up on the phones. Use red for hostiles or unknowns, white for friendlies. Plot everything inside two hundred miles. That includes commercial air out of Jamaica and Haiti. Draw big—I have to be able to read it from here. Get on it fast, Herb; they’re gonna start the first run in seventeen minutes.”

  One by one, the edge-illuminated boards came on and the men took their positions behind them. Dan caught more than one doubtful glance through transparent plastic. Hell, he thought. I don’t know if it’ll work, either.

  If antisubmarine work was chess, antiaircraft defense was jai alai. It took more computer power and electronics than anything else a surface combatant did.

  Modern warships weren’t designed to fight alone. They fought in formation, defenses interlocking to form a vast shield hundreds of miles from edge to edge. But to take its place in that phalanx, each had to drill and report to a common standard. Radar, radio nets, patrol aircraft, lookouts, electronic sensors, and intelligence estimates all fed the stream of data. The task group commander stationed his ships to make the best use of their weapons and sensors. The force antiair warfare coordinator controlled the combined air defense. The outer edge of the shield was carrier-launched jet interceptors. Then came long-range missiles, point defense missiles, and last, gunfire.

  It all moved so fast that Dan wondered if manual plotting was still possible. The plotters worked from behind the boards, so everything had to be written backward. You got used to that, but updating everything every three minutes, a skilled plotter could still only keep six contacts current. Two could work at one board, ducking and whirling around each other, but still that made twelve the upper limit of human ability.

  In three minutes, a Soviet SS-N-7 cruise missile traveled thirty miles. Launched from a submerged submarine, at a maximum range of thirty-five miles, it would be manually plotted once before it crashed into the ship.

  As the first event started, a murmured chant began behind the hum of the blowers, the crackle of radio transmissions.

  “Mark, bogey track three, green zero-six-zero one-five-zero, altitude thirty-five, course zero-six-four, three-fifty knots.”

  “Say again, didn’t catch that … no … gimme the next one.”

  “Bogey track four designated to Alfa X-ray.”

  “Bogey track five in a fade, handing off to Sierra Lima.”

  “EW reports racket, Ice Drum radar bearing two-five-three.”
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  The men leaned into the boards, eyes abstracted as they listened, then intent as they etched in symbols and information. They gradually warmed to the task, but it was still dreadfully deliberate. Midway through the exercise, one of the instructors came in, clipboard under his arm, sat down near Dan, and began writing.

  THE faces in the wardroom that night were haggard. Leighty looked exhausted. Dan, looking at him, realized the captain had been everywhere; the engine room, the hangar for fire-fighting drills, then the bridge again as they came in at dusk. Vysotsky looked just as wrung-out. He blinked, making himself concentrate as Woollie started to speak.

  “The exercise with Corpus Christi. Active tracking was adequate, but the passive tracking was unsat. Based on your grades to date, I don’t think you’re going to stand a chance of passing the antisubmarine portion of the battle problem.”

  “Mr. Lenson?” The captain pointed at him, and for a second Dan regretted he’d broken him of his habit of calling on Harper. He stood up.

  “Sir, what he’s calling a degradation in performance is due to the fact that we weren’t running any digital processing. It’s part of the overall problem in the ACDADS.” As he spoke, he wondered where he should stop. It was never good to give the commanding officer bad news in front of the troops. But then he thought, Hell, he asked me. “It’s worse than we originally thought, sir.”

  “What’s our new ETR?”

  “We don’t really have an estimated time of repair yet, XO,” he said, turning to face Vysotsky. “If you don’t mind, I’d like to let Dr. Shrobo brief on the problem.”

  Leighty raised his head from the test results. “Is he here?” he said. Shrobo stood up in back. “Can you enlighten us as to what’s going on?”

  “I’ll try, Captain.”

  As the angular figure stalked forward, Dan realized how out of place Shrobo looked. “Dr. DOS” was still wearing scrub greens, which apparently had become a uniform for him. At least he had a clean set on, but he still hadn’t shaved, and his hair dangled, snarled around his bald spot. Half-inch-thick glasses transformed his eyes into polished gemstones under a magnifying glass. As he reached the front, he unsnapped a rubber band from a scroll. He handed one end to Vysotsky, who looked surprised and not overly pleased, but he stood up to help display it.