by Gordon Kent
Lennox coughed into his mike.
“He’s g-going to t-turn.”
Bubba cut the comms to backseat only.
“What do you mean he’s going to turn?”
“I heard—his auxiliaries—look at this line.”
“Speak up, son, I can’t understand you.”
“I think he’s going to turn.”
Bubba hit the comms switch again.
“Cunner, give me a new line. I’m marking it now.”
“Roger.”
The deep hum of the two turbofans increased, the Hoover noise that gave the plane its nickname. The plane dropped down near sea level and turned sharply.
“We’re losing him,” said Bubba, now fully engaged. He was trying to push the new sonobuoys into position by body English while tracking the sub and simultaneously running the grams, comparing them on the screen to known U.S. and foreign types.
“Number sixteen,” said Lennox, without a trace of a stutter, and there was the sub, clear as day, with a heavy line in the 40dB and another line way down by 5dB.
Nothing like a U.S. sub.
“He’s going fast,” Bubba said.
“He’s going to turn and drift.” Lennox sounded confident.
“If he turns west, he goes right back into our practice pattern.”
Bubba mashed the comms button with his thumb. “Turn east,” he said. He watched the screen as the contact on buoy 16 began to fade. The plane was racing east to get ahead and lay another line of sonobuoys.
“F-fading . . .” said Lennox.
Bubba counted his buoys, as excited as he had been in a year. He had forgotten the joy of hunting a real sub. The new S-3 community was all about war-at-sea exercises and doing Elint and giving gas. Mostly giving gas. The MARI detachments seldom even used their sonar. As the plane passed his waypoint on the screen, he pressed the drop toggle on his panel and was not rewarded with the heavy k-klunk of a launching sonobuoy. Instead, there was a small high-pitched squeak, punctuated by a sharp metal sound.
“Jammed,” he said bitterly.
They all listened to the submarine fading, vanishing from their buoys.
“Contact lost,” said Lennox, sounding as if he might weep.
And then he threw up on his screen.
Airborne off the Oregon Coast.
Rose stood the C-12 on one wingtip and looked down before putting the plane into a steep dive. The C-12 was NASA’s weather-plane version of a popular private jet. As an astronaut, she had to be familiar with it. What she found in her first flight was that she loved it.
“Am I making you nervous, Jack?” she asked her copilot, the field pilot from Edwards. He only shook his head and took a pull from his water bottle. “It’s your plane, Rose. I’m just along for the ride. I just want you to think of the age of those wings.”
Rose grunted. She could feel that the plane was solid, and the descent was exhilarating. The C-12 had its moments. It was small and reliable and it was going to get her home.
“Want to get permission from ATC for us to go whale-watching?”
Jack picked up his mike and rattled through a long exchange with Seattle air-traffic control. She took them down to the operations area’s ceiling and cruised, looking for signs on the water. It was an overcast day with rain coming, but for now the sea was flat and calm, at least from the top of nine thousand feet.
“Area’s clear. We can go right down to the deck if you want, but tower says turn to one-five-zero first. Two EA-6Bs coming through at twelve thousand in a few minutes. There’s an S-3 down on the deck about six miles east.”
She turned, barely looking at the compass. Alan lived by the gadgets when he flew, and she supposed that there had been a time when she flew the same way, but she could feel the turn and the course change. Of course, she glanced down at the compass at the end of her turn, just to check.
Right on.
“Spouts!” said Jack. “Right over to starboard. See ’em?”
Rose turned and dove, looking for the EA-6B flight at the same time. She saw them up high, their contrails clear against the cloud cover. Only then did she look down for the whales. Then she put the nose on them and gave the plane some throttle.
Jack winced a little.
“Relax, Jack. You’ll never get to do this in the airlines.” His ambition was to be an airline pilot.
“Yeah,” said Jack, suggesting that might be one of the attractions.
At two thousand feet they could see the great shapes perfectly in the water, four of them swimming along in a shallow crescent.
“Hey, that’s a calf. They must be heading north! Cool! I saw something last night on TV.”
Rose throttled way down and trimmed up to keep her plane slow. Then suddenly and together, the whales dove. They watched the whales go down, straining their eyes to follow them into the deep blue. Rose had to keep glancing up and away to her horizon to make sure that her hands weren’t following her line of sight. Newbies crashed planes that way, and her reflexes were still adjusting to the response of the fixed-wing aircraft.
“Something spooked them. They were basking.”
“One TV show makes you an expert?”
“Hey, I know a basking whale when I see one.”
Rose was putting power in and climbing, her eyes looking all around for anything in their area, scanning the instruments from habit. Jack was still leaning forward, looking down at the water where the whales had vanished.
“I think one is coming back.”
Rose started to turn.
“If we spooked them, we shouldn’t stay.”
“I’ve never bothered them before,” said Jack. “Whoa!”
Rose tracked his glance, and watched the cigar shape right at the limit of vision, just a mile aft of where the whales had dived. It was deep, and even as she gave the plane more throttle and raced toward it, it seemed to glide deeper and vanished into the same blue that had swallowed the whales.
“Cool,” said Jack. “I’ve only seen a sub one other time.”
Rose turned again over the area and clucked in frustration.
200 NM ENE of Mombasa, Kenya.
Twelve thousand miles away, Soleck took his airplane through another hard turn to the right. They were close to the water, not close enough to cause him the perpetual fear that low-level flight gave him, but low enough that every detail of the waves and the seabirds was visible.
He turned again. In the back, AWCM Craw kept his eyes locked on the magnetic anomaly detector, a piece of high-tech gear that seldom functioned and required constant adjustment to keep in tune. The long, retractable boom was an antenna to detect the most sensitive fluctuations in the earth’s background magnetic field. It was a piece of technology invented in the early seventies and heralded as a great leap forward in submarine detection, but Craw didn’t put much faith in it.
Despite which, every month, their crew got to fly a complex compass rose, with tight turns every few seconds, as the computers recalibrated the magnetic anomaly detector. It was a kind of flying that made some people sick, challenged pilots, and bored the rest of the crew.
Craw was fixed to the screen, as much to have something to think about as because he was the man who could declare the fickle boom to be calibrated. Or not.
Soleck turned again. He didn’t lose any altitude and he added speed out of the turn to compensate for the loss of speed in it. He was becoming a more proficient pilot all the time, if you ignored his landing grades. Craw would have liked to say something gentle to young Soleck or ream Stevens for the way he had treated him since he had come aboard. Except that today, Stevens was down sick. And Soleck was visibly more relaxed.
“That’ll do her,” said Craw, as the nose of the plane passed through north again after thirty cuts across the water. “MAD looks sweet and sweet.” He spoke with a heavy New England accent. Soleck leveled the plane.
“Everybody take a stretch. That was a killer,” Soleck said. In fact, they’d run a compl
ete calibration set only to find that, despite airsickness and boredom, the boom was still not calibrated. Two MAD comps back to back were something of an achievement. The second should have done the trick.
LT Campbell, the Tacco, had already thrown up, so he felt better. And he needed to show that he was unaffected by his own airsickness. “If we go for three, we might score something like a record,” he said with evident sarcasm. The other aircrew groaned.
Master Chief Craw groaned with them.
“I have a spike.” Everyone who had a screen up looked at it—the sudden manifestation of another failure. A spike was a magnetic anomaly—a spike of green intensity on the computer screen. Any spike meant that something had caught the boom’s attention. Here, in the quiet Indian Ocean off Africa, it meant that their boom was still not calibrated correctly.
“Maybe it’s a whale,” said Campbell.
LT Cohen, the copilot, superstitious like all sailors, muttered something about Campbell and his ill-fated comment about a third MAD comp.
“Master Chief, I think we need a breather before we go around again.” Soleck wanted a victory, however small. He wanted to go back to the boat and face the landing with a successful MAD comp, if nothing else, because if he couldn’t get the plane down well, he thought it was about time to hand in his wings. The thought made tears come to his eyes, but there wasn’t a position in the Navy labeled “copilot.” He had to get his landing scores up or he would become a permanent embarrassment to himself and his unit. Or get them all killed. He had to face how bad his landings were.
Don’t dwell on it, Commander Rafehausen had said. Let the landing come to you.
Yeah. He swore, swore that if he ever got through this, he wouldn’t give a nugget such trivial, meaningless advice: Don’t dwell on it. Jesus, Soleck thought to himself. What the hell else should I think about, sir?
“That spike is still there, sir. No, she’s weakening. Gone.” Craw was very contained, but there was something under the New England calm. Excitement?
“Huh?” said Soleck, torn from his thoughts.
“The last time we blew the comp, she only spiked for a second. Now, she’s spiking like she means it. We had a MAD trace for about sixty seconds, if I read her right.”
“What do you want to do, Master Chief?”
“Pop a few buoys, sir.”
“Roger that,” he said, and began to turn back over the area. Anything that put the deck off for another few minutes was okay with him.
Craw dropped a temperature buoy immediately. It didn’t have to be near the target to give him the temperature and salinity of the water, important issues in searching for a submarine with sonar. And Craw was already sure it was a submarine.
Then he laid out a pattern of sonobuoys on his screen in a rough vee with the open end to the north. He had nothing to guide him except the instinctive belief that if it was a submarine, it must be headed for his battle group, and that was well to the north.
Soleck saw the pattern come up on his screen in the pilot’s seat. He bent low and cupped his hand over the screen to take a better look.
“West to east or east to west, Master Chief?”
“Humor an old man and start west, Mister Soleck.”
“Roger that.” They turned again. Craw split his computer screen, watching the MAD on one screen and preparing his sonobuoy drop on another.
Campbell was calling the ASW module on the ship. “Alpha Xray, this is Gopher, over.”
“Roger, Gopher, go ahead.”
“Alpha Xray, Gopher advises”—he fumbled with his kneeboards—“Golden Apple.” Golden Apple meant that they had a pos contact I, the lowest level of submarine contact report, the level that most people ignored, except when you were in the middle of the Indian Ocean and trying to keep your presence a secret.
“Copy Golden Apple,” said the ASW watch officer, a Tacco from the S-3 squadron. He didn’t sound very interested.
Craw watched the spike grow and he hit the record button on his tape and prayed that it actually recorded. Their tapes were sealed boxes with an early form of eight-track inside, the best of 1965 technology.
He reached over his head for the buoy-drop toggle and began to count to himself, and then he started to drop his buoys. He dropped twelve, scrambling with Campbell to get them all up on the radio link and to read their signals. He looked over the sonograms himself and transmitted them back to the boat while Soleck turned and turned and they dropped more buoys. The MAD didn’t spike again.
Less than ten minutes later, Craw got a hit on the 40Db line and passed it to the boat, raising the contact from Golden Apple to Black Knight, or pos contact II. But the contact lasted for only seconds. They dropped more buoys until their light peacetime load was expended. Back on the boat, the ASW module tried to convince the tactical action officer to launch an additional S-3 Viking from the squadron, rather than the MARI det. The VS squadron ought to have more guys who didn’t have the flu—and more guys with hands-on ASW experience. Then the ASW module tried to get the TAO to put a helicopter in the air. The TAO was less than enthusiastic. He didn’t believe in a submarine out here. He didn’t believe that the battle group could be detected this far from the normal routes. He wanted an uneventful watch and no trouble from the aviators.
Craw kept them at it until Soleck revolted at their fuel state. “Master Chief, I’ve got to take us in.”
Craw cocked his head, invisible behind the pilot. Sometimes you didn’t need to be an officer to get a point across. Craw intended to focus young Soleck on his fuel. Really focus him. “One more pass, sir.”
“We’re at three thousand pounds right now, Master Chief!”
“One more pass.” Like a devoted fisherman begging for one more cast.
Soleck turned the plane, grudgingly, the whole crew feeling the pilot’s displeasure.
They didn’t get a sniff of a sub.
Soleck tried to keep his eyes from the fuel gauge, but he couldn’t. He turned them back toward the boat and flew straight for the stack, although the late-afternoon calls meant that they would be the last plane on deck, and it would be dark for their approach. Soleck tried not to worry about a day trap becoming a night trap. He boresighted on the fuel and flew every inch of the distance back to the boat on max conserve, trying to get every last mile out of his fuel. It would be no use telling Stevens that Master Chief had wanted to stay aloft. Not if he dropped one of their two aircraft in the water for lack of fuel. He sweated inside his already clammy flight suit and looked at his fuel gauge every scan he made of the instruments.
Craw, deprived of his prey, fiddled with knobs until the last sonobuoy ran out its battery and sank. He couldn’t get a thing, so he switched to ESM gear and searched the ocean for anything that might get him back on his contact. But they were low on fuel and out of buoys, and the TAO wouldn’t launch another plane.
He got an ESM hit along a promising vector. He played with it, massaged it, but it was well within parameters for a cell phone. Someone on a fishing boat talking to the beach. It struck him as incongruous, but nothing more.
The last light of the sunset over Africa showed Soleck the boat. He had the fuel to make the landing. It occurred to him that what he didn’t have was the fuel to fuck up the landing, but he decided that he couldn’t do that to himself and he turned out of the stack and headed for his break, which was not shit hot but was accurate, right over the bridge and into his clearing turn.
Of course, he always did this part well.
He began his turn for the deck, his eyes glued to the fuel gauge. He heard Campbell call the ball and heard a little gasp in the mike as the boat got the full implications of their fuel status, and he knew right then that he’d be standing tall before the CAG whether this worked or not. It was all fine. He looked for his lineup and found that it was right there.
The LSO watched the last plane and cursed under his breath, because he wanted the day to be over and he had to deal with one of the worst pilots
in the air wing as his last call of the day. And now the stupid bastard had no fuel.
“Fuck him,” he muttered. If the idiot went in the water, it was his ass.
On the other hand, Soleck was a stand-up guy and had really been working his buns off, and all the LSOs wanted him to make it. Every one of them felt a little to blame every time he blew a landing.
“Come on, you dickhead,” he said gently.
The S-3 floated into its lineup as if a real pilot were at the controls. The LSO crossed his fingers and took a swig of water from his bottle.
“Just stay like that,” he whispered.
Half a mile and steady as a rock. At a quarter-mile just seconds later, the wings waggled and the plane seemed to sag, but before the LSO could even think the word “power,” the nose was up. The engines sounded just right and the whole attitude of the plane screamed right on the money as it crossed the stern.
Steady as a rock, Soleck sailed into the three wire at one hundred twenty knots and went to full power as his hook caught.
“Three wire and okay!” shouted the LSO over the blast of Soleck’s engines. Inside the plane, there was something like a cheer.
Safe on deck, Craw smiled to himself and shook his head.
“Good landing, sir,” he said, and pushed past Soleck to get to the ASW shack.
Fifteen minutes later, when Soleck’s okay was posted in the ready room, there was another muffled cheer from the Det 424 spaces. Soleck was high on it, ready to high-five the CAG himself, ready to get reamed for being low on gas.
Sixty frames aft, the staff was wrestling with the notion that there was a live submarine with them in this empty ocean.
Whidbey Island.
Alan was in his room at the BOQ, showered, hungry, and missing his wife. He’d have been at dinner, but he was waiting for her phone call. When it came, he started to say something loving, and she rode over him with the words, “I saw a submarine today!”
It made him smile. “You and everybody else. We have a busy undersea Navy.”