Barracuda- Final Bearing

by Michael Dimercurio

  “Did you call on that one?”

  “Just before you came clomping in with those shit-kickers.”

  “What happened?”

  “The nukes changed their frequency and my tonal spike moved with it.”

  “Okay, so that’s not him.

  What about this one? 155 cycles. There’s a hump on that one.”

  “A hump but not a spike, sir. The system looks out at the ocean, and not the whole ocean, just a slice of it, and looks for this one frequency. The ocean’s so full of noise that there’s noise at every frequency. The sounds in this range are more concentrated in the middle of the frequency gate, that’s all.”

  “I don’t know, it looks like it’s growing.”

  The hump in the center of the graph from 153 to 156 cycles per second was growing taller. Gambini watched it, slurping coffee from one of the dirtiest coffee cups Phillips had ever seen. Phillips leaned over, watching it. Aft, in the control room. Lieutenant Meritson stood before the attack center on the starboard side of the conn, hands on his hips, looking up at the sonar display screen. Meritson, in addition to being this watch’s officer of the deck, was the ship’s sonar officer. He squinted hard at the screen center, at the frequency graphs that Gambini was examining in sonar. Meritson frowned at the graph, watching the spike in the center grow. “Chief of the Watch,” he said quietly, not moving his gaze from the sonar screen. “Sir?”

  “We got a phone talker set up in every space?”

  “Yes sir. It’s part of the rig for ultraquiet.”

  “Good. Get on the phones to every phone talker. Get them awake. On their feet. Get a report from every watchstander. I mean it, I’m gonna need those guys in about two minutes.”

  “Aye, sir.” The chief of the watch spoke into his boom microphone, sounding irritated. “All spaces.

  Control. All watchstanders report status of rig for ultraquiet.” The chief listened as his phone talkers reported in one by one. “They’re all alert, Officer of the Deck. What’s on your mind?”

  “Chief, in about one minute the captain’s going to come crashing through that door and he’s going to man battlestations.”

  In sonar, Phillips glared hard at the screen, dumping his old cigar and finding a new one, this one as homespun as the previous stogie. He lit it, not with his lighter but with a wooden match, in keeping with his 1859 El Paso outfit.

  “Captain?”

  “Yes, Master Chief?”

  “I think we’ve got a bite on the line. Be careful that you don’t Spook him, okay, sir? It would be nice to set the hook.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “I think that… is new sonar contact Sierra One, possible submerged submarine.”

  Phillips felt a chill crawl up his spine, shivering in the air conditioning of the compartment.

  “Is this him?”

  “I think so.”

  “Destiny II?”

  “I think so.”

  “Any bearing?”

  “I’m getting a weak signal. Don’t do anything yet. I’m shifting to the forward beam.”

  “The end beam is terrible. You’ll just pick up our noise.”

  “No, not the end beam, just a more forward-looking one. Hold on.”

  “I’ll be right back. I’ve got things to take care of.

  Master?”

  “Yes, Captain?”

  “Set the hook. I want this son of a bitch.”

  northwest pacific japanese OPAREA, forty-five kilometers east-northeast OF point nojimazaki SS-808 Eternal Spirit The Eternal Spirit sailed at a keel-depth of 200 meters, speed ten kilometers per hour. Her crew, a dozen officers of the Japanese Maritime Self Defense Force, comprised some of the best in the squadron. The commanding officer, Comdr. Soemu Toyoda, was a Tokyo graduate and widely regarded as the flotilla’s captain to beat. His ship had been neck and neck with the Winged Serpent for the flotilla’s battle quality award, something Toyoda coveted. Toyoda was reading in his stateroom’s bed, the reading lamp the only illumination in the room. The report he was studying was an evaluation of the Destiny II class versus the Destiny III class, the leadership of the MSDF trying to decide the future of the force. Toyoda was forty-five years old and had spent his entire career at sea in submarines, first in the Harushio-c diesel boats built by Mitsubishi and Kawasaki, the ships streamlined and formidable-looking on the outside but crippled by the lack of a nuclear reactor. Batteries and a stinking sulfury diesel were no match for a nuclear power plant. Toyoda had been an engineering consultant for the construction of Japan’s first nuclear submarine, the Destiny class. At first the project had been exciting, Japan taking the next step in the technology curve, although the project had required the nation to take the next step, the embracing of nuclear technology for the military. After Hiroshima and Nagasaki were bombed by nuclear weapons at the end of the war with America in 1945, the very idea of using nuclear science was repugnant to an entire generation of Japanese. But one generation gave way to another, the younger generation tired of hearing about the holocaust of nuclear destruction. This generation had felt responsible for Japan’s emergence into the world scene as an economic contender. Products labeled “Made in Japan” went from being scorned to being state of the art. The generation after them went further, not happy with economic prominence but intent on economic domination, taking over one world market after another until the trade sanctions by the West had put a stop to that ambition. But a generation’s ambition couldn’t be turned off like a switch, and within two decades a desire to rule the world’s markets had given way to an unspoken desire to rule the world itself. Full circle. The Destiny submarine had been launched and found to be better than expectations.

  The ship was built for export sale, Japan five years before intent on meeting the spirit of its military-banning constitution if not the letter. But when the trade war escalated, Japan realized the West was more enemy than ally, and it stood alone with the might of Russia and the two Chinas facing it to the west, the new regime of terror in India, and the country’s leadership had called on engineers like Toyoda to manufacture its own military hardware. Admiral Ta-naka—Akagi Tanaka, not his arrogant social misfit son Toshumi—had asked Toyoda to take a building-yard assignment to command the first Destiny II-class submarine, built by Japanese for Japanese in the Yokosuka shipyard. The ship was named the Eternal Spirit and was world class. More than world class, a world beater. Toyoda took the ship to sea on its initial sea trials. A week later he wrote a memo to the elder Tanaka that with a supersub like the Destiny II, Japan could again rule the seas. In the next five years the yards had pumped out Destiny IIs as if war were imminent. Toyoda had been pleased, watching the Maritime Self Defense Force move from a second-rate navy to a killer force. It was two years before that the development divisions of the MSDF made their most crucial mistake. Toyoda sat back against the fluffed-up pillows of his bed, continuing to contemplate the report. Two years ago the hull of the Divine Firmament was ripped open and the command module compartment amputated except for a few meters, just enough to contain the cabinets of a new computer system designed by a prominent research scientist named Onasuka, a biocomputer pioneer who took the previous technology of the Destiny II ship control system, the Second Captain, and modified it.

  The Second Captain was already in the forefront of computer technology, able to run the ship in the absence of the crew for routine straight-line steaming, but was not able to fight the vessel in combat.

  It was a layered neural network floating on a conventional distributed control system. Onasuka took the neural network and replaced the upper functions with parallel processors, multiplying the processing speed by a factor of ten thousand, with the use of biological DNA soup processors. The soup processors were composed of genetic material taken from the brain stems of small animals and cultured into the liquid soup that functioned as a biological process-control module. It was revolutionary and radical. The Divine Firmament was renamed the Curtain of Flames and
became the first Destiny III class. And the unit performed admirably, if expensively. The Destiny III was matched against various Destiny II-class ships in exercises. The Two-class crews were literally fighting for their jobs; to lose an exercise against a Three class would signal the admirals that the time had come for the computer to replace manned crews. Unfortunately, although the manned crews invariably came out on top in combat, the MSDF leadership had still decided on committing the fleet to the Three class. Perhaps it was all the promises they had given the government, or the men standing to make a profit from the computerization. Whatever the reason behind the decision, the MSDF admirals had decided on the Destiny III, spending the next two years building nothing but Three-class ships, neglecting even to maintain the Two-class vessels. The result had been disastrous, Toyoda thought. The intelligence message on his personal pad computer told the complete story. The Three-class computer-driven ships had triumphed in sinking the enemy surface fleets, but in the process they had been sunk, smashed to bits by the fleet-escort submarines. After spending the time and resources to build more than a dozen Three-class ships, they were now gone, not responding to their orders to transmit their locations to the Galaxy satellites. And now the defense of the Home Islands was left to the Two-class submarines, which were capable but neglected for two years by the shipyards of Japan. There were dozens of American submarines sailing for the Home Islands, and only a limited number of torpedoes on the Destiny II-class ships deployed to guard Japan. What would happen when those torpedoes were gone? Less capable American submarines would survive to fire overwhelming numbers of torpedoes at the Two class. The American torpedoes were small and slow and relatively ineffective, but ten of them together could certainly sink a Two class, double hull or not. If the leadership had built more of the Two class and less of the Three class. But there was no sense thinking that way. Toyoda got up, put on his shoes and took his evening walk through the ship, going first into the control room, where his first officer Ryunosuke Kusaka presided over the modified battlestations section watch. Toyoda waved Kusaka over to the forward door of the room, where the other officers in the watch section couldn’t hear their conversation. “Any contact?”

  “No, Captain. You know I would have called you if there were.”

  “It just seems odd. The computer files—are they set correctly?”

  “Sir, the Second Captain is scanning the sea for the known characteristics of all flights of American 688 class, with a secondary scan in action for any units of the British Royal Navy or the French Navy. There has been nothing, nothing at all.”

  “Maybe our job is over, maybe the enemy will pull back.”

  “I think there will be more action. Captain. I feel it.”

  “I feel it too, First. They are out there and they’re coming for us.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  There seemed little more to say. Toyoda left and took the stairs to the middle level and the messroom. He was amazed at the officers awake in the messroom, some of them studying for the next rank, some writing haiku, some in a lively discussion that died when he came in.

  Toyodo thought of the loneliness of command, that he had no one to confide his own thoughts to. He smiled at the men, wondering why these off-watch men didn’t sleep. In another six hours they would be on watch with him in the control room. Probably they were awake for the same reason he was—tension. He spoke a few words, wondering if Toshumi Tanaka—the lead commanding officer of the flotilla and a flaming maladjusted martinet—ever took time to speak to his men. Not that it mattered, Toyoda thought. He said good night to the men and returned to his stateroom.

  He shut the door behind him, deciding to take a last look at the Second Captain’s sonar displays. The computerfiltered data was empty. He scanned the raw unprocessed data, realizing there was too much to examine and what there was was random. He was reminded of a time in his youth when he had been in love with the television set and his parents were gone and a thunderstorm had knocked out the cable system, but he had not accepted that, and in his desperation to watch television he went through every channel, looking for a show. He flipped through channel after channel, seeing nothing but snow, but sometimes seeing a shadow of a face, a hint of printing, a glance at people walking, but then the snow would prevail, leaving him wondering if he had just imagined it. The raw sonar data was like that, all random noise of every frequency and tone and duration.

  Looking for the noise made by a machine in that mess was like looking into a rainy jungle for a camouflaged soldier. He snapped off the console and got back into bed.

  SS-808 Eternal Spirit

  Comdr, Soemu Toyoda pulled his uniform off, draped it on his chair and climbed into the bed wearing only his shorts. Back in the control room the first officer had orders to continue to patrol the waters offshore until contact was gained on the next enemy sub. Toyoda’s Eternal Spirit had already put three enemy vessels on the bottom, each of them easily detected on sonar, but since then the sea had been empty. Completely empty. Toyoda wondered why, if there were no more enemy ships, there had been no word on the radio command and control circuits about what was going on. It seemed odd, but then so had this entire mission. He turned off his reading lamp, feeling tense and nervous. There was something not right about the situation but he couldn’t put his mind on what it was.

  He shut his eyes and tried to think about the woman he had met just prior to sailing. Her name was Suni Ariga and she was half his age and beautiful, vital in a way he wasn’t, mysterious and sexual. She had made it very clear from the start that she wanted him sexually, and it was strange—her generation was so different from his own, so willing to say what they wanted. The young women were entering the work force and threatened to knock on the door of the military someday. But it was the women’s sexuality that was so difficult to accept, centuries of courting rituals being washed down the sewer pipe with other Japanese customs as the television set homogenized the world, the Western influence spreading more by the hour. He returned his thoughts to Suni, seeing her face, remembering how her eyes had looked into his, how her mouth had moved on his chest. He could feel himself getting hard and tried to ignore the feeling, one welcome in the company of an aroused woman but very unwelcome alone inside a ship filled only with men at war.

  USS Piranha Bruce Phillips came into control, his cotton poncho flying in the breeze of his passage, his boots clumping on the deckplates, coming to a halt in front of Meritson.

  “Man silent battlestations!”

  Meritson snapped his fingers at the chief of the watch, having anticipated Phillips’ next action.

  There was no circuit-one announcement. The word went out on the phone circuits to the watchstanders in the spaces, each of them wearing cordless phones that put them in touch with the control room. The forward compartment phone talkers woke up the section’s duty messengers, who went through the berthing compartments and woke up the crew. Men jumped out of their coffinlike racks, curtains sliding aside. They climbed into their coveralls, grabbed glasses, shoes, all in the tight dimly lit spaces that were a challenge just to walk through much less dress in. In twenty frantic seconds seventy men rocketed out of the berthing rooms, coverall uniforms wrinkled and stale with sweat, hair spiked from sleep, eyes puffy, all business.

  Those seventy men dispersed, some heading aft, others forward or below. In the control room two dozen watchstanders came silently in. Phone talkers strapped on headsets. Plotting officers took their stations at the plot tables snapping fresh sheets of tracing paper over the flat panel displays. The row of consoles of the BSY-2 attack center filled with officers, each trained to manipulate his panel in a unique way, each dancing with the computer to a different song but on the same dance floor. The arriving helmsman waved out the watch section’s helmsman, the new arrival the ship’s best, the regular watch helmsman getting up and muttering what the ship’s course and depth were, the battlestations helmsman sliding into the control seat, the yoke of the controller slippin
g into his hands.

  On the conn Scott Court, the navigator, took over the officer of the deck watch from Meritson. Their conversation was short as Meritson gave a rapid data dump in Court’s ear: “Target One confirmed Destiny II bearing two zero six on towed array narrowband’s 154 Hertz, bearing ambiguity resolved, own ship on one four five, depth eight hundred, speed all ahead two-thirds with turns for eight, ship rigged for ultraquiet, we’ve got a layer at 110 feet with a good sound channel between seven hundred and nine hundred. We’ve got weapons one through four up and warm, outer doors open, target solution programmed but weak. The Mark 50s are backups to the Vortex battery. We’ve got Vortex unit two coming up to speed now, gyro readback due in forty seconds.”

  “I’ve got it, get the hell out of here. I relieve you, sir,” Court said to Meritson.

  “I stand relieved, sir. Helm, Quartermaster, Commander Court has the deck and the conn.”

  “This is Lieutenant Commander Court, I have the deck and the conn,” Court announced to the room, his voice quiet.

  Meritson slipped into the seat at position two in the center of the attack center. He had already configured the display for dot-stack mode on Target One. He leaned back in the leather seat, looking at the upper and lower display, his fingers resting on the two circular knobs and the fixed function keys, feeling the fit of his function. He was a biological link in the submarine’s machine, the best man for this job. He was plugged into the tactical situation, the pos-two battle stations operator one of the most prestigious positions on the ship. He and the BSY computer were a two-brain team charged with finding the target, predicting exactly what he would do in five minutes’ time in the face of uncertain and conflicting data. Without his work, the captain would be helpless.

  Meritson smiled to himself, his mind becoming one with the BSY system, his senses reaching out into the sea with the sonar gear, the target in the palm of his hand.