by David Poyer
She stopped listening, her attention concentrated now not on what lay ahead but on what was happening within her body. Gripping the gunwale, she stared up into the racing darkness, hoping that the child would wait until Miami to be born.
25
Guantánamo Bay
SILENT, darkened except for running lights, part of the shore detached itself from the black loom of the hills. Black upperworks wheeled through the scarlet tatters of dusk. Water began a muted chuckling as the bow swung in a long outward curve. From the bridge, eyes and binoculars peered into the heart of night.
Dan strained his eyes, fighting to stay awake. Sweat oozed from his armpits, crept down his back. The night air was stiflingly hot, like an oven on low. Beside him, the lookout straightened, muttering into his phones, “Yeah, I’m awake, Rectum Face. Are you?”
Two weeks into training, they were all walking in their sleep. They fought fuel fires, topside damage, flooding, loss of power, fractured piping, helicopter crashes. They treated compound fractures, chest wounds, abdominal wounds, amputations, burns, mass casualties. They evaded torpedoes, cleared shells jammed in hot guns, rigged emergency power, towed and were towed. Then the exercises compounded: loading weapons and treating wounded while the decks were contaminated by fallout, meanwhile conducting an attack on a surface raider. And every moment he wasn’t on watch or on deck, he spent in the computer room with Mainhardt and Dawson, Williams and Shrobo and sometimes Harper, when the chief warrant wasn’t on watch. Living on two or three hours of sleep a night …
Dan saw the NIS agent talking to men in the passageways, and once, in the wardroom, talking to Harper. They’d gone silent when Dan came in. Diehl smiled when they met and turned sideways to slide past. But they hadn’t talked since their discussion in his office. And then for the last few days, the agent hadn’t been aboard at all.
He stared into the dark, mind scraped clean. By now, every action, every moment and phrase had been scripted and drilled and corrected and drilled again. When they weren’t drilling, the men just stopped, sat down on the deck wherever the last order had left them, or stood vacantly, waiting for the next command. Barrett was no longer a machine manned by individual men. She had become all machine.
Dan wondered tiredly why it was men resented becoming machines. They didn’t think or suffer. They never agonized over what to do. They didn’t have moral quandaries or feel sad or afraid.
It was easier, being a machine.
Around him, Barrett turned slowly, and the lightless mass of Fisherman Point wheeled past like the night around the spinning earth. A muted bell pinged and the chuckle of water increased to a roar.
He stood at the rail, staring out at the passing shadows, then turned away, feeling his way aft, fingertips tracing hot, smooth enamel, till they brushed the raised coaming of the watertight door.
CIC met him with a blast of air like the wind off a glacier. After the featureless night, the tote boards and displays were a carnival fairway of blinking green and yellow. His wet clothes stuck to his skin as he hauled himself into his chair. He’d slammed his leg into a hatch coaming, running full tilt down a passageway, and his shin ached so that even when he had an hour to sleep, sometimes he couldn’t. Most of the men around him had shaven heads. A gunner’s mate had started it and now half the crew looked like Zen zombies.
“Dan.”
“Evening, Captain.”
Leighty checked the surface scope. “Feels different, getting under way in the dark,” he muttered. “What’s the order of events?”
“Night sea detail; one-on-one against Corpus Christi for area search, passive tracking, close-range attack; long-range antisurface gunnery; night helo refueling.”
“Are we set for this SEPTAR shoot?”
SEPTARs were self-propelled targets, high-speed radiocontrolled boats. “I think so, sir.”
“But we’re not sure?”
“We’ve isolated the missile and gunfire-control systems from the rest of ACDADS. It’ll run slow; we have to do manual inputs when the program asks for data, but I think it’ll work.”
“That’s the electronic placenta Doc was talking about?”
“That’s what he calls it. We’ll detect with the SPS-forty-eight and hand off tracking and identification manually.”
Dan examined his profile as Leighty asked a couple more questions—nothing he didn’t know the answer to. The captain hadn’t shaved his head, but his haircut was shorter than it had been in Charleston. He had black circles under his eyes and his hands shook as he flipped the board closed and hung it up again.
“When’s the prefiring brief?”
“As soon as we secure from sea detail.”
“I’ll be there.”
“Aye aye, sir.”
THE brief was just that: brief. By now everyone knew the procedures. Dan put out the essentials—times, safety bearings, openfire ranges—and repeated the mandatory safety precautions. The men listened dully, making ballpoint notes on hands or arms. A few minutes later, the GQ alarm went.
THE ship no longer thundered with men running, hatches slamming. They were already at their stations. Setting material condition for battle took only seconds now. Sealed, alert, darkened, Barrett glided out into the open Caribbean.
In Combat, Dan gathered with the plotting team around the dead-reckoning tracker. He watched the lighted pip of the ship creep down a sketched-out lane as Shuffert briefed that night’s play.
Tonight they were matched one-on-one against Corpus Christi, which had sortied during daylight and now lay submerged somewhere along a transit lane starting twenty miles southeast of Guantánamo and stretching sixty miles into the Windward Passage. The nuclear boat was restricted in speed and depth to simulate a Soviet Juliet-class diesel submarine. That was loading the dice, Dan thought as Shuffert covered the rules of engagement. But Barrett was handicapped, too; during deployment, she’d have two helicopters dropping sonobuoys and sweeping magnetic anomaly detectors across the surface of the sea. This exercise was one-on-one, hand-to-hand, and Leighty was determined to win. He wanted to detect the sub first and attack it before they knew Barrett was there. Just as the skipper of USS Corpus Christi, SSN-705, was going to try to close to torpedo range without Barrett hearing a whisper.
Dan rubbed his face. They weren’t deaf anymore. They could run digital signal processing now, so they could hear. But the sub’s ears were sharper. Barrett had only two choices: to steam as quietly as she could, searching in passive, and hope the sub screwed up or to go active, pinging her way along, and attract the sub like a cat to a squeaking mouse. Crap, he thought, his tired mind searching for alternatives.
Then he had one.
ON the forecastle, the electricians mates cursed the boatswains, who cursed them back. Then they all hoisted together, and the twenty-foot spar rose into the darkness. “Forward stay fast” came back on the wind.
“Aft, fast.”
“Okay, give her power.”
The erected pole blazed suddenly into brilliance. Barrett’s sidelights and masthead lights went to full brightness. Then her sides, too, flared up as the dress ship lights, draped along her lifelines, glowed on, each bulb backed by a paper plate taped to the socket.
On the wing, Dan blinked in the sudden glare, sweeping his gaze from bow to stern. The deck-edge lights shone in gay colors behind plastic filters from the signal shack. The paper plates glowed just like the round cheery disks of lighted portholes. He ducked back inside and asked Harper, “Okay, how about the screws?”
“Starboard engine, stop,” the chief warrant said. “Left five degrees rudder; carry left rudder to steady on course zero-four-five.” He pressed the intercom. “Secure the radars. Secure all electronic emissions. Boatswain’s Mate, start the music.”
A hiss, then the strains of a marimba band boomed out from all the topside speakers. And suddenly Barrett was a cruise liner, portholes glowing, the pool area lighted, the slow beat of a single screw throbbing out into the oc
ean.
“All we need are some women out on deck in bikinis.”
Dan turned, to find the captain looking out beside him. Another shadow looked like Vysotsky. The XO was muttering something that didn’t sound too positive. It finished, “ … not in the manual.”
“The class tactical manual is not the universe of tactics, George,” said Leighty mildly.
“It’s an artificiality. There wouldn’t be any cruise liners out here in wartime.”
“It’s a stratagem, George,” said the captain. “A ruse de guerre, like sailing under a false flag. They’re acceptable in war, why not in exercises? Anyway, lighten up. The worst that can happen, the sub lets us go by. The best case, he picks up our screws, can’t decide what we are, and comes in close for a visual ID. We get a passive detection, ping once for a solution, and nail him.”
Dan excused himself and slid down the ladder.
In CIC, men leaned back from dead displays, faces blank as their screens. Only at the SLQ-32 did a petty officer frown as he listened for the whine of a submarine’s periscope-mounted radar. The “Slick-32” told you instantly if anything within a hundred miles emitted an electronic signal, identified it, and gave you a bearing. In Sonar, Fowler and his men were equally intent on the passive display. A yellow tag-out hung on every switch that would put sound in the water identifying them as a warship.
The captain came in and stood by the DRT. Dan joined him and Kennedy and Shuffert. They leaned silently, like late-night drinkers at a quiet bar, watching the rosette creep northeast. Barrett’s course meandered left, then right, a shallow zigzag toward the Windward Passage. If Corpus Christi was here—
“Racket,” said the EW operator. “Mark! Time three-three: a Snoop Tray radar, bearing one-nine-seven.”
“There she is!”
“Suckered ’em in. Stupid bubbleheads.”
Chief Kennedy was drawing the line of bearing in red pencil when Dan blinked. “You mean a simulated Snoop Tray—right?” he called to the operator.
“No, sir. Racket ceases! Time three-four, Snoop Tray ceased radiating.”
“Check the characteristics.”
“L-band radar with a pulse repetition rate and frequency match. It’s a Snoop Tray all right.”
A Snoop Tray was a Soviet submarine radar, carried on their latest nuclear-attack sub classes. “Can Corpus Christi alter the output characteristics of her radar?” asked Leighty at last.
Neither Hiltz nor the sonarmen had any idea if a U.S. sub could detune its radar to imitate a Russian boat. Dan remembered the Kirov battle group. It was still reported in port, in Cienfuegos. But what if it had a sub attached and they’d decided to do a little scouting?
He went over to the 32 and put a hand on the EW’s shoulder. The petty officer lifted an earpiece. “How many sweeps did you get before he shut down?” Dan asked him.
“Four, sir.”
“Was there a bearing drift?”
The man typed in a couple of commands and regarded the screen. “There was a right drift.”
Behind him, Leighty said, “So he’s headed down the Passage.”
“Toward us, yes, sir.”
“Okay,” said the captain slowly, cocking his head in that slightly theatrical way. He walked his fingers across the chart, measuring.
“Here’s my reading. He’s doing the same thing we are: trying to fox us. He popped up, radiated a Soviet signature, and went deep again. He’s on this line of bearing. Got to be at least twelve miles off Haiti, right? That puts him … here.” Leighty laid a finger across an area of sea that did, if you looked at it right, block the lane Barrett had to transit. “Actually, he’s playing fair. He’s imitating a Soviet. He’s running slowly southwest, popping up and looking for us, then going back down.”
“I vote we go over there,” said Vysotsky.
“What’s predicted active sonar range?” Leighty asked Dan.
“Ten thousand yards.”
“So we’d have a detection diameter of ten miles. He can be anywhere in this roughly thirty-mile area. If we go in and suddenly start pinging, we’ve got a thirty-three percent chance of nailing him.”
“Unless he’s under the layer,” said Dan.
“Let’s head on over,” said Leighty. “If he radiated once, maybe he’ll do it again. Then we run another line of bearing and up our probability. Drop a bathythermograph. Whoever’s our best guy on gram analysis, get him up here.”
“Increase speed, sir?”
“Hell no. We’re the Love Boat. Let’s cruise on over and play him some marimba.”
THEY steamed slowly east, burning all their lights, for forty-five minutes. The sonarmen listened till perspiration glowed green on their faces in the light of the screens, but they got nothing. Dan wished again they had a helo aboard. Drop a line of sonobuoys ahead of the sub and nail him. Minute by minute, the lighted rosette of their position neared Corpus Christi’s estimated position.
Finally Leighty lifted his eyes. “Are we set to go active?”
“Yes, sir.”
“See if Woollie’s on the bridge. Underwater Battery, stand by to simulate firing.”
When the senior observer joined them, Leighty explained what was going on, how he planned to carry out the attack. Woollie nodded noncommittally. “Sound like a good plan?” Dan asked him.
“Anything that works is good. This is a free-play exercise.”
“Sounds fair.” At Leighty’s nod, Dan said, “Simulate deploying the Nixie. Go active.”
The sonar sang out. Seconds later, Fowler’s voice came through the speaker above their heads. “Evaluator, Sonar: sonar contact! Bearing one-niner-five, range five thousand, two hundred yards. Classification: possible submarine. Confidence value: high.”
“Remember, I want an ID before we shoot,” Leighty muttered.
Dan went over to the curtain. The sonarmen looked back at him. “Hey, can you guys get anything on passive? A turn count, blade count?”
“We’ll give a listen, sir. But those six eighty-eights are awful quiet.”
Kennedy plotted the datum as Dan told the bridge to put both engines on the line, come right to 195, and increase speed to fifteen knots. Casey Kessler hovered tensely as his men set up the shot.
“Up doppler. Bow aspect. Contact’s increasing speed.”
“Can we get any kind of identification?” Leighty said again.
“They’re trying to, sir.”
“Evaluator, Sonar: contact has two props, strong radiated noise level, broadband machinery noise—”
“That’s not Corpus Christi,” said Shuffert.
“All stop,” said Leighty. “Secure pinging. Come about!”
“You backing off, sir?” said Woollie.
“We’ve got to. The Agreements for Preventing Incidents at Sea. We’re not supposed to ping on a Soviet boat, track it, or harass it.”
“Are you sure it’s Soviet?”
“There’s no way a six eighty-eight can fake two screws. Dan, make it clear we’re departing the area. Come all the way around and increase speed.”
“Range, three thousand yards. Still holding a bow aspect.”
“Bridge, this is the TAO. Come about. Come about—”
“Reciprocal is zero-one-five—”
Leighty barked, “Come to zero-one-five; go to flank speed. Now!” Barrett shuddered as her spinning props suddenly went to full pitch, chewing into the sea. She rolled as she came beam to the easterly swell.
“Green flare! Two green flares, fine on the starboard bow!”
“Turn toward!” Leighty barked, then, instantly: “Belay my last—do not turn toward. Steady on zero-one-five.”
“Sir, that’s Corpus Christi over there. We’ve got to evade—”
“Steady on zero-one-five, I said.”
Green flares meant a simulated torpedo attack. Woollie raised his eyebrows, made a note. Dan couldn’t help grimacing. That was a major gig, not taking evasive action. “Sir, why are we—”
Dan clutched the edge of the DRT, wondering if the next words out of Fowler’s mouth were going to be “Torpedo in the water.” A minute stretched by, long as a week, and then another.
At last Leighty sighed. “I guess we’re clear. Dan, draft a Firecracker message.”
“Aye aye, sir.” The Firecracker system reported contacts with Soviet and Warsaw Pact vessels at sea.
THEY resumed pinging twenty minutes later, well to the north, but never made contact with Corpus Christi.
At 0300, they broke off play and set course for the firing area. Barrett ran at flank speed for nearly an hour. Dan sat in Combat as the ship rolled and buzzed.
He had to admit it, he was tense. Would Shrobo’s fix work? Or would the system crash again, exposing Barrett as a billion-dollar high-tech paperweight? Maybe it would be better just to engage in manual, forget about the weapon direction system … .
Fuck it, he thought then. Let’s do like Leighty wants. Take a risk for a change.
When they crossed the border of the firing area, they made radio contact with Evelyn Kay, the control tug for the self-propelled targets. Dan told them Barrett was ready, that they could start the event at their pleasure. “Attention in Combat!” he yelled. If he’d overlooked anything, it was too late now. “This will be a long-range radar-controlled gun engagement. Mount fifty-one will fire first.”
As the others rogered, he fitted the earphones to his ears and clicked the selector to the fire-control circuit. He made sure all stations understood the revised designation procedures. Then he turned the shoot over to Horseheads, watching the screen anxiously as the glowing pip of the remote-controlled boat drilled inward at them. It wasn’t a big target.