The Lieutenant Colonel pulled out a notebook and made a quick note. “It shall be asked.”
“They will probably have to time her arrival to meet high tide in the basin, and the time of the least river currents in the entrance. This fixes the attack window more precisely than just a known date. If I can get into 6000 meters attack range, and fire six type-50 torpedoes, I will tear her guts out. If they all hit on the same side, we might even capsize her. Inshallah.”
The Lieutenant Colonel stood up.
“In God’s hands; yes. What a coup this will be. Especially if you can get clean away, so they have no way of knowing who did it. We owe these arrogant bastards. It was the
American Navy which first came to Tripoli in the early 1800’s to ‘suppress,’ that’s the word their history books use, our corsairs in the Mediterranean. They have been coming ever since. Now it is our turn to come. Well, let me get you the sealed envelope, with the date of the carrier’s arrival. And then you should probably go. There is a ship coming, the Master informs me.”
“I must get the word out to my crew to re-board the boat.”
The Lieutenant Colonel worked the combination of his desk safe.
“I have already done that, if you will pardon my presumption,” he said, over his shoulder. “Your ship should be ready to go. Here.”
He gave the Captain a single, brown envelope, sealed across the back with red sealing wax. The Captain fingered the oily wax. The Lieutenant Colonel smiled.
“Very traditional, yes? Someone saw this stuff in a movie, I think. But now only you know the date; I have not been told, and I have not opened that envelope. It comes from Him.”
The Captain did not have to ask who Him was. He took the envelope, and shoved it in his trousers pocket.
“One final matter,” said the Lieutenant Colonel.
“Yes?”
“I have been instructed to remind you of the final paragraph of the mission orders and to obtain your acknowledgement.”
The Captain’s face hardened. The final paragraph of the mission orders had been short but explicit: if the mission failed, and the submarine did not achieve an attack on the carrier, the Captain was directed to ensure that no physical evidence could be obtained by the Americans that would point to the origins of the mission. He was directed to destroy the submarine and everyone in it if that were necessary. Outside, he could hear the sudden rumbling of the submarine’s main engines coming to life.
“I alone onboard the Al Akrab am aware of those conditions,”
he replied carefully. “And I will do what must be done if and when the time comes.”
The Lieutenant Colonel nodded. “I am sorry to have to bring it up. But we cannot afford any more fingers pointed at us.”
He looked down at the carpeted deck for a moment, as if trying to remember his lines. Then he looked up with a brief smile.
“We are of course confident that no such measures will be necessary,” he said.
The Captain looked at him for a moment, but said nothing. He stood up, put on his hat, and opened the cabin door to leave. The Ibrahim’s Master was waiting outside in the passageway.
“That contact will pass within ten miles, it appears,” he said. “That should not present a problem, yes?”
The Captain nodded. “We will depart anyway; your hospitality has been excellent. You will go back home now?”
The Master laughed. “No, we go to Aruba, for a load of specialty crude. Part of the cover. The Americans track us now, ever since the Red Sea mining business. They track every one of our ships, harbor to harbor. So we must show up somewhere on the other side of the Atlantic, to keep this business secret.”
They began the walk back to the ladder on the starboard side, crossing the empty tank deck.
“How will you prevent your crew from talking?” asked the Captain. “In Aruba, I mean.”
“We do not go ashore; we mate to an offshore pumping terminal buoy. Load up in 18 hours, and then head home.”
They arrived at the sea ladder. The Captain turned to the ship’s Master.
“My thanks to you. It was good to get a hot bath, and my crew appreciated your hospitality.”
The Master smiled and nodded. The Captain turned to the Lieutenant Colonel.
“Tell Him that we understand how this mission must end, one way or the other, and that we trust in God to see justice done.”
“God go with you, Captain,” said the Lieutenant Colonel. “Your mission is just; strike them hard.”
“I shall.” They embraced in the traditional fashion, and the Captain went over the side to the submarine waiting below in the darkness.
USS Goldsborough, Jacksonville operating areas; Friday, 25 April; 1200
The sound of eight bells, ringing out in four groups of two, echoed through the ship, marking the official arrival of noon. In the wardroom, the officers were finishing lunch, turning over coffee cups in their saucers to let the mess attendant pour coffee. At the head of the table, Mike declined dessert. The Exec, sitting next to him, accepted; it was banana cream pie, his favorite. Bright sunlight streamed in through the front portholes, and the ship rolled gently in generally calm seas.
“That shit goes straight to your middle, XO,” said Mike.
“Yes, Sir, it does; it’s nice to see at least one system that’s efficient on this ship. But so far, it doesn’t stay there.”
“Just you wait, Henry Higgins; one day it will.”
“You seem to be avoiding it pretty well, Captain. All that pumping iron doesn’t hurt, I’ll bet,” said the Operations officer.
Mike winced inwardly; Ops tended to be obsequious at times.
“Yeah, well, the iron keeps the muscles fit, but I need to run to keep banana cream pie from settling in; kinda hard on a tin can, though. Maybe this weekend.”
“We going in today, Captain?” asked one of the Ensigns. Mike stirred his coffee for a moment before answering.
“We sent out a sitrep at 0900 this morning; if they want us to stay out over the weekend, we should get the word in the next few hours. It kind of depends on how the PR guys have been playing this thing. Lord knows we’ve given them enough purple prose to work with.”
“My guess is we’ll go in this evening,” said the Exec. “We phrased this morning’s sitrep to sort of conclude things, and they’ll have to come up with a pretty good reason to have us stay out into the weekend. With this new policy about saving fuel and impacting personnel retention with weekend ops, my bet is we’ll go in.”
“Maybe they’ll redesignate Goldy as a hydrographic research ship,” grumbled the Engineer.
“Well, they might. That thing Linc dreamed up has produced a pretty interesting collection of bottom data. I had no idea there were so many wrecks out there, for one thing,” said Mike.
“The east coast was a tough place for tankers in 1942,” said the Exec. “They say they used to be able to see them burn from the beaches up and down the coast. Damned U-boats had a field day for a while.”
“What finally beat ’em?” asked the Supply Officer.
“Radar and convoys,” replied the Exec. “As long as they sent tankers out by themselves, the Germans picked them off one by one. When they sent them out in groups, with some tin cans and maybe a light carrier with radar equipped planes, the free ride was over. Then it was the U-boats that got picked off. There’s a sunken German submarine in our collection, by the way. The sonar girls had a lot of fun mapping that one.”
The Weapons officer joined the conversation.
“I’ve heard there’s a dive charter guy up in Charleston who’ll take you out to a U-boat off the Carolina coast; you can go inside and crawl around, at 160 feet. Still has torpedoes onboard; dead Germans’re still in there, too.”
“Really terrific,” said the Engineer. “Just what I’d like to do—bump swim fins with skeletons. They ought to just leave them alone. A sunken warship is a national tomb, for Chrissakes.”
“Yeah, the German government complained about that charter guy; I was in OpNav when we worked the action to get him shut off; he used to keep some skulls from the sub in his dive shop window. Kinda insensitive.”
“Well,” observed Mike. “That’s what happens when you
lose an ASW action; one or the other of you gets to spend eternity in a drowned ship.”
The officers at the table shifted uncomfortably at this reference to death at sea.
“There’s some tin cans out there along the coast along with those U-boats,” Mike continued, “not to mention a lot of dead merchies who were deep fried in burning oil when the U-boats got lucky. A torpedo hit on a destroyer is usually the end of the world; our training battle problems, where the script reader calls out, Torpedo hit, forward, does not begin to convey what it would be really like. We have to train for it, of course, but in most cases we’d have a minute or so to collect our hat, ass and overcoats and step into the sea.”
“Well,” interjected the XO, “if you got hit on the bow or stern, you could do some damage control and probably keep her afloat. But for a torpedo amidships, I agree, we’d be wasting our time trying.”
“Kinda like this little witch hunt we’re on, XO?” asked Ops.
He had apparently remembered the Captain’s initial comments about the fishing boat incident. Mike glanced at the Exec before answering.
“Well, it’s true we haven’t found any submarines; on the other hand, let’s review the facts: we’ve had a fishing boat Skipper sight what he thought was a submarine, and then we’ve had another fishing boat, skippered by a very experienced guy, go down for no apparent reason with no survivors or even a trace of the people onboard. Both of these events are unusual, and maybe, remotely connected. Some of what we’re doing is window dressing, of course; make the Navy look like it’s at least a little concerned. But, if nothing else, it’s been some good training, as well as producing some very unique knowledge about the local operating areas. If we ever had to fight our way out of Mayport in wartime, this stuff Linc’s team has put together would be invaluable, especially for shallow water ASW.”
The sound powered phone under the table at the Captain’s
chair buzzed twice. Mike picked it up, as the table went quiet.
“Captain.”
“Yes, Sir, Cap’n, Evaluator in Combat here; Linc’s guys think they have something worth looking into.”
“Like?”
“Yes, Sir. Sorry. An active sonar contact they’re classifying as possible, confidence low to medium, definition metallic. The guys got onto it about five minutes ago, and were about to drop it when it appeared to take off. Doppler went from no to audible down. Linc wants us to head back east, 110, to take a better look.”
“OK, I concur. Don’t change the keying interval or make any other indication that we might have detected something. And make no reports to the beach yet; if this is another false alarm, I don’t want to interfere with the come-back-home message we expect any time now.”
“Roger that, Cap’n.”
Mike replaced the phone under the table. He looked up at the officers.
“Line thinks they have something,” he announced to the table. “We’re gonna go take a look.”
He turned to the Exec as he pushed back from the table.
“XO, let me know when we hear from the Group. I’m going up to Combat.”
The Al Akrab, Jacksonville Operating Areas, Friday, 25 April; 1215
“Idiot!” hissed the Captain, bursting into the control room. “Reduce speed to four knots! At once!”
The alarmed watch officer relayed the order swiftly, and the boat quickly began to decelerate from the sudden burst of speed ordered only two minutes ago.
“Make your depth 120 meters; flood negative—we must get some more layers above us.”
The control room watch was tense, every man sitting upright in his chair. The Musaid, his face drawn and haggard,
loomed over the planesman, coaching him softly as they worked to get the boat deeper without making any telltale noises. Any further telltale noises. The distant destroyer had changed its search pattern suddenly, and headed directly towards them. The Watch Officer had reacted by ordering a burst of speed to get away, followed by a depth change. Only then had he called the Captain, who was already on his way to the control room when he sensed the boat surging forward on the electric motors.
The Captain scanned the gauges swiftly. “Sonar, report.”
“Sir, the enemy destroyer is closing from the west; I hold him on the port quarter, but he’s drifting in and out of my baffles. His speed appears to be unchanged. He’s still in omni transmission mode, no frequency change. No new keying rate.”
The Deputy looked up from the sound plot at the back of the control room. “Bearings indicate he has altered his pattern of search; bearings have steadied.”
The Captain cursed again. They were on the battery, so engine noises were not the problem. Doppler was the problem. If the enemy sonar operator had suspected he had a real contact, and focused on it at the same time the Al Akrab increased speed, the audio on the destroyer’s sonar would have shown down doppler, and thereby, motion away from the destroyer. Doppler was one of the crucial classification cues; marine life rarely showed doppler. As soon as he had entered the control room, the Captain had taken the speed off, and dived deeper to get more acoustic layers of water between the boat and the destroyer.
“Range?”
“Estimate the range to be 12,000 yards; there is no way to tell if he is closing or not,” said the Deputy from the plotting table.
“Bearing 280. Steady bearing.”
The destroyer was coming their way. Something had attracted his attention. Much would depend on what the destroyer did with his sonar. The next clue would be if he went to directional keying, pumping out all the acoustic energy in the direction of where he thought he might have
a contact, rather than his present mode of banging out the ping in all directions.
“Sir, depth is passing through 70 meters. Negative tank is flooded.”
“Make your heading 110; speed five. Level off at 120 meters.”
“Planes, aye, 120 meters.”
The Musaid was trying to get the Captain’s attention. There was a distinct note of apprehension in the planesman’s voice. Three hundred and sixty feet was approaching the submarine’s extreme operational depth capability limit. The boat’s hull was already beginning to make small groaning and popping sounds as the steel hull compressed under the increasing pressure of the sea.
The Captain cursed again, silently. This was partly his own fault: he had ordered the watch officer to stay within five to ten miles of this destroyer ever since they had returned from the mothership and heard the steady pinging of a searching sonar. He glanced over at the Musaid, who looked swiftly at the rate of descent dial.
“100 meters; preparing to blow negative,” he said.
“No!” interjected the Captain. “
Pump
negative; increase speed if you must to hold her, but no noise. No air.”
The men controlling the dive scrambled to line up the valve manifolds. The negative tank, a large seawater ballast tank with oversized water-admission valves, sat astride the submarine’s center of gravity, and was used to make quick changes in the submarine’s buoyancy. Flooding the negative tank made the submarine immediately heavy, thus rapidly accelerating a diving maneuver. When the boat approached its ordered depth, the normal procedure was to force compressed air back into the tank and thus blow the seawater out, thereby quickly restoring the submarine’s neutral buoyancy. Depth was then maintained with careful use of the trim tanks, much like an airplane is trimmed up to stabilize flight once the climb to altitude has been completed.
The Captain was aware that the blast of compressed air from the flasks would send out a transmission of broadband
noise. His order to pump out the negative tank with relatively silent electric pumps rather than using a blast of high pressure air was driven by the tactical necessity for silence. The price for silence was delay: pumping took much longer, especially against the pressure of almost 400 feet of depth. The delay, in turn, meant that the boat would settle past its ordered depth unless speed was increased so that she could be held at depth by the force of the water flowing over the forward and after planes.
“120 meters,” sang out the diving officer, his forehead glistening with sweat.
The hull was complaining audibly now, creaking and groaning throughout the boat. A fine mist had appeared in the air ventilating system, casting a thin aurora around the lights. The men in the control room tried hard to ignore the signs and sounds of the implacable grip of the deep.
“123 meters; I’m having trouble holding her. Request eight knots!”
“Eight knots,” replied the Captain.
His eyes, like those of every man in the control room, were fixed on the depth gauge. The black needle was inching around clockwise, past 125, 126, as the diving officer manipulated the bow and stern planes to put a shallow up angle on the boat, using the increased speed. The needle went to 127, and then to 128, as the boat mushed down into the depths. The boat inclined more sharply, and then levelled slightly. The diving officer had to take great care. He could put too large an up angle on the boat and cause it to stall like an airplane and even slip backwards. The key was to get the negative tank pumped out.
“We cannot hold her,” declared the Musaid softly. “You will have to blow negative.”
“No. Continue pumping. Ten knots.”
“Ten knots, aye.”
The depth gauge now indicated 130 meters, over four hundred feet of depth. The temperature was rising in the boat. At the back of the control room, a sailor surreptitiously closed the watertight hatch. The mist effect was more pronounced.
“Steady yourselves,” growled the Captain. “We have taken this boat to 170 meters before.”
He continued to watch the depth gauge; the needle was holding at 131 meters, as the extra speed took effect. His mind raced. The problem was now, once again, doppler. He could not maneuver the boat off the destroyer’s search axis until he had depth control back in hand, and the boat was now driving away from the enemy’s sonar at a speed which was definitely not typical of marine life. He desperately needed to make a turn.