by Jeff Edwards
Flying well in front of the formation, E-2C Hawkeyes scanned the sea and sky for potentially hostile radar contacts. The disk-shaped radome mounted on the back of each Hawkeye was so hugely out of proportion to the rest of the aircraft that a running Navy joke accused its designers of trying to mate a twin-engine commuter plane with a flying saucer. The sensitivity and power of the strange-looking radar dish were no joke, though. The Hawkeyes really were the eyes of the fleet.
* * *
In Flag Plot, aboard the carrier, Admiral Joiner stared up at the large-screen tactical displays, evaluating the positioning of the colored symbols that marked the ships and aircraft under his command. Between them, the aircraft he had deployed extended the carrier strike group’s sensor and weapons ranges well beyond the coverage envelopes of the ships. But he would have gladly traded one of the stars on his collar for another pair of frigates or destroyers.
CHAPTER 20
USS TOWERS (DDG-103)
NORTHERN ARABIAN GULF
THURSDAY; 17 MAY
2239 hours (10:39 PM)
TIME ZONE +3 ‘CHARLIE’
Chief Lowery pushed a technical manual to the side, sat on the workbench, and waited for the rest of his technicians to straggle into Combat Systems Equipment Room #2. The three men came in slowly, one at a time, exhaustion weighing them down like lead.
The chief yawned. The compartment was nearly the temperature of a meat locker; it had to be to keep the rows of electronic equipment cool. Like all high-powered radars, SPY generated a tremendous amount of heat. It took the majority of the output of an industrial air conditioning skid to cool it off.
The shelves above the workbench were lined with technical manuals, and the stretch of bulkhead immediately adjacent was given over to large-scale color schematics of the air, water, and power systems that fed the radar. They had been through every one of the manuals at least once, and some of them two or three times. So far, to no avail.
His techs were wiped out. One glance at their faces was enough to tell Chief Lowery that Fisher was the worst, or at least he looked it. Fish, whose clean-cut Boy Scout handsomeness could have ordinarily been used to sell Mother’s Farm Fresh Bread, looked like a crack addict on a three-day comedown. His eyes were nearly slits, half-closed with fatigue, bloodshot and underscored with dark circles. Burgess and Gordon weren’t going to win any beauty contests either. The chief yawned so hard that his ears rang. How long had they been going now? Four days?
Fish flipped absently through one of the tech manuals without bothering to look at the pages. “We need some fucking chicken bones, Chief. We need to go down to Supply Berthing, wake up one of the cooks, and make them get us some chicken bones from the galley.”
The chief yawned again. “Chicken bones?”
Fisher nodded. “Chicken bones. We need to do the secret voodoo ritual.”
“I see,” the chief said. “And what, pray tell, is the secret voodoo ritual?”
“We had some on the Paul Foster,” Fish said. “Dried up chicken bones. We kept them in one of those purple velvet bags like Crown Royal bottles come in. Whenever we came across a radar problem that was kicking our asses, we’d get out the chicken bones. We’d turn on one battle lantern and shut off all the lights, so things would get real dark and spooky looking. Then, we’d shake up the bag really good and dump the chicken bones on the deck.”
Chief Lowery grinned. “This helped somehow?”
“Hell yeah,” Fish said. “One of the bones was bigger than all of the others, and one end of that bone was bigger than the other end. See?”
“Like a leg bone?” Gordon asked.
“Yeah,” Fish said. “Like a drumstick. Anyway, whichever way the big end of the big bone was pointing, that’s where the problem was. We would go to the nearest piece of equipment to where it was pointing and start troubleshooting.”
“Bullshit,” Gordon said.
Burgess grabbed the crotch of his own coveralls and squeezed theatrically. “Yeah, Fish. I’ve got your big bone right here!”
Fish grinned and gave Burgess a wink. “No thanks, Cowboy. I’ve seen your bone, and it didn’t look very big to me.”
Chief Lowery tried not to grin. “Knock it off, you knuckleheads. We’ve still got a radar to troubleshoot.”
Fish held his hands palm up and let them drop. “That’s what I’m trying to tell you, Chief. There’s nothing left to troubleshoot. There is nothing wrong with this fucking radar. We’ve run every on-line test, every off-line test, and every dynamic and static load test ever invented. We’ve swapped every circuit card in Array #4 with every circuit card in Array #3. If the problem was in one of those cards, or even several cards, the interference should have moved to Array #3 with the cards.”
Burgess nodded. “We’ve checked video processing, wave guides, primary and alternate power, and all of the digital multiplexers. We’ve checked for thermal problems, phase angle calibration errors, electromagnetic cross-talk between cable runs, signal shedding, and digital sync pulse errors. We’ve also tested the sweep raster initiators, and every clock pulse and digital incrementer that’s even remotely related to SPY.”
“Fish and Shit-for-Brains are right,” Gordon said. “We’ve swapped every disk pack, and reloaded the software from scratch three times. I’ve used the secure sat-phones to make four tech-assist calls to the engineers at Lockheed Martin who built the system, and the software bubbas who wrote the program code. None of them have ever heard of anything like this problem. They’re going to fly a tech rep out to help us troubleshoot it, but they’ve already pretty much said they don’t have a clue of how to tackle this. In fact, one of the engineers as much as told me that we’re full of shit. He said we can’t have this problem, because the system isn’t capable of generating this type of sector-specific interference.”
The chief snorted. “What? Does he think we’re making this shit up?”
“I don’t know what he thinks,” Gordon said. “But I’ll tell you what I think. There is nothing wrong with this radar, Chief. Not a fucking thing. It’s clean as a whistle.”
“So where is the interference coming from?” It was the captain’s voice.
Chief Lowery leapt off the workbench. “Attention on deck!”
They all scrambled to attention.
“Sorry, Sir,” Chief Lowery said. “We didn’t see you come in.”
Captain Bowie motioned for them to relax. “Don’t worry about it, Chief. Carry on. Please.”
All four men relaxed their postures, but no one made any move to sit down.
“Let’s get back to my question,” the captain said. “If there’s nothing wrong with the radar equipment and nothing wrong with the software, where is this interference coming from?”
“We don’t know, sir,” Chief Lowery said.
“But you agree with your techs that there’s nothing wrong with SPY?” the captain asked.
Chief Lowery shook his head. “No, sir, I don’t. SPY is not designed to lose sixty degrees of coverage every day or two. And, if SPY is operating outside of its design parameters, by definition something is wrong. I don’t know if it’s hardware or software, sir. But something is sure as hell wrong somewhere.”
The captain nodded. “Well said, Chief.” He reached out and patted the side of one of the gray radar equipment cabinets. “Our primary anti-air and anti-surface sensor seems to be in the habit of losing its mind every day or two. There are no two ways about it, gentlemen. That’s unsatisfactory.”
Fisher squinted his eyes and opened his mouth. Then he appeared to think better of it, and he closed his mouth.
“Go ahead, son,” the captain said. “Whatever it is, you can say it.”
Fisher looked at his chief and then back to the captain. “Sir, it’s only for a couple of minutes …” He waited, and when it became apparent that no one was going to say anything, he cleared his throat and continued. “The … um … the interference only appears for two or three minutes every other day
or so. And it’s only a sixty-degree arc. It’s not like we lose the entire quadrant. Just sixty degrees or so, for a couple of minutes.” He cleared his throat again. “I mean, I understand that there’s something wrong with SPY, even if we don’t have any idea what it is. But we’ve been killing ourselves for four days now, over a two-minute glitch that only eats up sixty degrees of our coverage.”
The captain nodded. “I know you’ve been knocking yourselves out, son. I’ve talked to a couple of the engineers at Lockheed Martin, and they say your troubleshooting efforts so far have been excellent. First rate. But we can’t afford to minimize the impact of this casualty. We’re in some of the most hotly contested waters in the world, and every day or two, a significant sector of our radar loses its ability to scan for ships, aircraft, and missiles.”
No one said anything.
“Suppose it happened to you while you were on the freeway,” the captain said. “You’re driving along, doing seventy-five or eighty, and a slice of your vision goes pitch black. Not all of it. Say it’s just twenty degrees. The rest of your field of vision is fine, but your eyes are totally blind within that twenty-degree arc.” He looked around. “Are you with me?”
Everyone nodded.
“Good,” the captain said. “So, every couple of days—while you’re cruising down the freeway—a twenty-degree sector of your vision goes on the fritz. It’s just twenty degrees. And it’s just a couple of minutes.” His eyebrows went up. “How safe are you?”
“Not very, sir,” Fisher said. “Point taken.”
“Good,” Captain Bowie said. He looked at Lowery. “Chief, you guys have been at this long enough.” He looked at his watch. “I want you and your men to hit your racks for at least the next three hours.”
The chief looked surprised. “But sir …”
“No buts, Chief. That’s an order. Come to think of it, make it four hours. I don’t want anybody getting electrocuted because his brain is too tired to think properly. And, I want you to set up a sleep rotation. One man in his rack at all times, and you can swap out every couple of hours. That way no one has to work for more than a few hours before he gets a chance to recharge his batteries.”
The chief nodded. “Aye-aye, sir.”
The captain looked at each of the men in turn. “You’re all doing excellent work,” he said. “Keep looking. You’ll find it.” He cocked one eyebrow. “And, if you don’t, there’s always the chicken bones.”
CHAPTER 21
GULF OF ADEN (SOUTH OF YEMEN)
FRIDAY; 18 MAY
0647 hours (06:47 AM)
TIME ZONE +3 ‘CHARLIE’
Wolfhound Eight-Seven was the call sign for an MH-60R helicopter working the outer edge of USS Kitty Hawk’s formation. The gull-gray helo hovered fifty feet above the water, close enough for the edge vortexes down-drafting from its rotors to whip a swirling mist of salt spray off the wave tops.
The pilot, Lieutenant Ray Forester, checked his instruments and, when he was satisfied with the positioning of his aircraft, he turned to his copilot. “Your show, Ted.”
Ensign Theodore Dillon nodded. Out of habit he scanned the instrument panel himself, and then said, “Down dome.”
From his console at the rear of the cabin, the Sensor Operator responded, “Down dome, aye.” He pressed a fingertip to a highlighted rectangle on the touch-sensitive control screen. The floor of the cabin vibrated slightly as the high-speed winch built into the underside of the fuselage began reeling out cable at a rate of sixteen feet per second.
At the end of the cable, the cylindrical sonar transducer slid out of a formfitting cavity in the bottom of the aircraft and began its rapid descent toward the ocean. A little over three seconds later, the rubber-coated sensor plunged into the water, disappearing quickly beneath the waves.
“The dome is wet,” the Sensor Operator said. “How deep do you want it?”
The copilot looked over his shoulder. “How deep is the sonic layer?”
The Sensor Operator studied his screen. “Just a second, sir. We haven’t hit it yet.”
His eyes stayed locked on the digital temperature readout relayed back from the descending sonar transducer. For several seconds, the numbers on the green phosphorous screen showed only tiny fluctuations, never varying by more than a tenth of a degree. When the depth readout passed 130 feet, the temperature began dropping rapidly. The transducer had passed from the surface duct, a zone of nearly constant water temperature near the surface of the ocean, into the thermocline, a zone of rapidly decreasing water temperature that extended down to about two thousand feet. Below that, the temperature would become nearly constant again at just above the freezing temperature of water.
The drastic temperature differential between the surface duct and the thermocline formed a barrier to sound energy. Submarine hunters called it the sonic layer, or sometimes just the layer. A well-trained submarine captain would know the depth of the layer at any given time—as well as his boat’s position in relation to it. Properly exploited, the layer could make submarines—which were difficult to detect under the best of circumstances—even harder to locate.
The Sensor Operator looked at the readout. “Layer depth looks like about a hundred and thirty feet, sir.”
“Let’s start below the layer this time,” the copilot said. “Take her down to about four hundred.”
“Four hundred aye, sir.” The Sensor Operator watched the descent of the transducer on his screen for another minute and then pressed a highlighted soft-key. The depth readout froze at four hundred. “Dome is at four hundred feet. Request permission to go active.”
The copilot nodded. “Go active.”
The Sensor Operator pressed a soft-key on his screen and was rewarded with a high-pitched ping in his headphones as the sonar transducer fired a pulse of sound energy into the water four hundred feet below the surface. He began scanning his screen for the telltale echo that a submarine would produce. “We are active, sir.”
The copilot keyed his radio circuit and waited a half-second for the crypto burst, a short string of garbled tones that the UHF transmitter used to synchronize its encrypted signal with the secure communications satellite. “Strike Group Command, this is Wolfhound Eight-Seven. My dome is wet. I am active at this time, over.”
The voice that answered a few seconds later had a strange warble to it. “Wolfhound Eight-Seven, this is Strike Group Command. Roger. Good hunting, out.”
The cartoonish voice modulation and the short delay caused by the crypto burst were unavoidable by-products of the encryption-decryption algorithm that scrambled the signal at the transmitting end and decoded it on the receiving end. Ensign Dillon liked to pretend that his voice came out of the speakers on the other end as a masculine baritone, but deep down he knew that he probably sounded just as silly over the secure satellite circuits as everyone else did. It was a small price to pay for secure voice communication.
At the rear of the aircraft, the Sensor Operator watched his screen carefully. Every time the sonar transmitted, a bright green line appeared at the bottom of the search display and began tracking upward. In its wake, the search raster left random scatterings of green dots in varying shades and intensities: ambient noise in the ocean caused by everything from fish, to wave action, to distant shipping. A contact would appear as a bright cluster of dots, generally accompanied by an audible echo in the operator’s headphones.
After about fifteen sweeps, the Sensor Operator said, “No joy, sir. Want to pull her up some and see what’s above the layer?”
The copilot paused for a second. As a general rule, submarines liked to approach surface ships from below the layer, where they would be shielded from the powerful hull-mounted sonars carried by most warships. Still, it didn’t hurt to check both sides of the fence. He shrugged. “It’s worth a shot,” he said. “Bring her up to about a hundred feet.”
The Sensor Operator pressed a soft-key and the floor rumbled again as the winch began retrieving cable. �
��One hundred feet, coming up, sir.”
Less than two minutes later, the Sensor Operator sang out, “Active sonar contact! Bearing zero-five-five, range three thousand eight hundred yards.” He watched the screen for another sweep. “No supporting data yet, but it’s a clear bearing. Could be a sub, sir!”
The copilot grinned. “Good job! Now stay on it!”
He keyed his radio circuit and waited for the crypto-burst. “Strike Group Command, this is Wolfhound Eight-Seven. I have active sonar contact, bearing zero-five-five, range three thousand eight hundred yards. Initial classification—POSS-SUB low, over.”
The reply came a few seconds later. “Wolfhound Eight-Seven, this is Strike Group Command. Copy your active contact. We are vectoring Wolfhound Nine-Three in to assist. Get ready to play leapfrog, out!”
The pilot and copilot both grinned. Helicopters were a lot faster than submarines. With two dipping sonars working together, a submarine’s chance of escape was virtually zero. One of the dippers could maintain the track, while the other one repositioned closer to the submarine. By alternating their dip cycles, they could maintain contact indefinitely. Dipping helicopters were every submariner’s worst nightmare, because—apart from their speed and tracking abilities—they could carry torpedoes. A skillful air crew could put a torpedo within yards of a submarine’s bow—much too close to evade.
Suddenly, the Sensor Operator shouted. “Launch transient! I’m getting some kind of launch transient! Same bearing as the POSS-SUB!”
“It’s probably a hydraulic transient,” the pilot said. “Our active pinging scared them, and they’re diving for the layer.”