USS Deyo, northern Jacksonville operating areas, Tuesday, 29 April; 0145
Sonarman Third Class Francis McGonagle was trying hard to stay awake. It was always the same on a midwatch: the agony of getting up at 2330, the zombie-like walk through the messdecks for some coffee or, occasionally, hot soup, the climb through darkened passageways to the Combat Information Center, and then the turnover in sonar control,
where he and his teammate, Petty Officer Paul Barney, went through the motions of assuming the watch, checking the display equipment, adjusting their console chairs and the ambient lights, and then, finally, having burned up a grand total of twenty minutes of their four hour midwatch, came the realization that they had another three and half hours to go. Another cup of coffee to keep the heart turning over; five more minutes used up.
“God, I hate this shit,” muttered Barney, blinking his eyes in the blue light of the CIC.
As usual the air conditioning worked especially well at one in the morning; both men wore jackets over their dungarees to ward off the chill. Barney sat the active sonar console, which contained three large black and white video screens and four panels of control equipment. The active console was side by side with the passive array console, where McGonagle sat, rubbing his eyes for the tenth time in the past ten minutes.
“Yeah, I hear that,” said McGonagle. “This coffee ain’t working, Man.”
“Well, at least you have something to do,” said Barney. “I’m shut down.”
McGonagle grunted. Recording the passive displays on surface diesel engines was not his idea of modern antisubmarine warfare. The night orders, passed on to them by the 20—24 watchstanders, were short and explicit: keep the active sonar in standby, and conduct a passive search in the acoustic frequency bands where marine diesel engines emitted. The night orders did not say what they were looking for, only that they were to cover the entire internal combustion engine frequency band, and record everything, from 2300 until 0600. The previous watch had focused the passive array into the correct frequency bands, and now there was nothing to do but watch the displays and ensure that recorders did not run out of paper.
Sonar control in the Deyo was located in one module of the Combat Information Center, which was four times the size of the CIC in Goldsborough. The CIC in Deyo was compartmentalized into modules, with sonar control and
the ASW weapons control center located on the port side of the CIC, which itself was only one deck down from the bridge. At general quarters there would have been twelve men in the sonar section alone, but for an independent steaming situation, there were only two watchstanders. One could have managed with the big, active sonar shut down; there were two to ensure that they both stayed awake.
The active and the passive displays were all synthesized digital video which looked nothing like the older displays in Goldsborough. In place of the expanding ring of light that Goldsborough’s sonarmen studied, Deyo’s active sonar equipment produced what were called waterfall displays, dozens of parallel light lines streaming down a gray screen display that looked very much like a computer graphics depiction of a waterfall. The sonarmen were trained to pick out changes in the gradations and character of the lines which indicated the presence of a return echo. The passive displays were also waterfall screens, but the screen remained blank until the sensitive passive detection array computers actually picked up a sound in the underwater environment, and began drawing a line down the screen. Each line represented both a discrete frequency of sound and a bearing, or direction from which the sound was emanating.
Deyo’s sonarmen were trained to recognize certain frequencies, such as the unique line emitted by all Soviet Navy electrical equipment. Or the equally characteristic line generated by the Soviets’ older, six bladed submarine propellers. Unlike Goldsborough, Deyo’s main sonar armament was the passive array, which capitalized on the same principle that passive electronic warfare used: a signal could be heard well beyond the range at which that signal could tell its originator anything. Goldsborough’s sonar had to push a sound wave out into the water, and then wait for that wave, which was dissipating in power with every spherical meter it travelled from the sonar dome, to hit a contact, bounce off, and return to the sonar receiver. Since the return wave also dissipated with every meter it travelled back from the contact towards the ship, the initial hit had to be pretty strong
to complete the cycle. Deyo, on the other hand, listened for the tiny sounds emitted into the water by a submarine’s own machinery or propellers. These sounds ranged in frequency from the very low frequency sound of a propeller beating in the water to the very high frequency, and inaudible to the human ear, squeal of a worn out bearing in a submarine’s pump. These sounds only had to go one way, dissipating in power as they went, of course, but detectable thereby at ranges many times that of active sonar. The target had to cooperate for this system to work, which meant that it had to make noise. Modern, nuclear submarines, with their steam plants and pumps and turbines, were ideal candidates for passive tracking. Diesel-electric submarines, running on DC motors powered by silent batteries, made almost no sound at all. Unless they ran their diesel engines.
“Well, we’ve got at least two of these suckers out there,” said McGonagle, looking up at his waterfall, yawning again.
There was a group of squiggly lines trailing down the paper on the recorder. The screen showed that the sounds being picked up were all similar in frequency, differing only in their bearing from the Deyo.
“Looks like they’re all to the south of us, and pretty close in bearing,” observed Barney.
“Yeah that’s probably the Mayport fishing fleet; one guy finds a school of fish or shrimp, and the others drift over to where he’s working and pretty soon you got a gaggle of ’em. There’s no way we’re going to break out individual contacts when they bunch up like that.”
“You ever go over to Mayport and get a bushel of shrimp and boil ’em up in the backyard? They’re cheap as hell that way.”
“Naw, I hate shrimp. I guess I’m allergic or something. Shellfish tear me up inside, Man.”
“That’s too bad; makes for a good excuse to drink a pony of beer.”
“I don’t need any excuses to drink beer; wouldn’t mind one right now.”
“That’s for damn sure,” said Barney. “Look at all that shit, would you—”
Barney slid his chair over on its tracks to study the passive display. The lines were more numerous now, drawing over one another now, creating a black smear on the recorder’s paper trace, and a confusing jumble of light lines on the video displays.
“I’m gonna have to expand this display,” McGonagle complained.
He made some adjustments, and shifted the frequency scale, which had the effect of separating each line being displayed into a quarter-inch of vertical space. Several new lines began to draw even as he opened up the display.
“Look, there’s another one,” he pointed. “A lot bigger engine, too. Maybe there’s a merch coming out of the St. Johns, and we’re seeing it on the same bearing.”
“What bearing is that?”
“From us, 170 to the centroid of the sound sources.” Barney flipped down an intercom switch.
“Surface, sonar, gimme a bearing to the mouth of the St. Johns.”
He waited for a minute while the surface plotter in the adjacent module ran the bearing, and then said, “Sonar, aye, thanks.”
“That ain’t the St. Johns, Man—river bears 195.”
McGonagle squirmed in his chair. All the coffee was beginning to accumulate. He watched the lines drawing down the plot, beginning to merge again as the sound sources overlapped. He shook his head.
“I can’t see anything useful in all that shit,” he said. He took off his intercom headset.
“I gotta go take a piss. We’ll let the recorder run; the Chief can make out of that whatever he wants. I don’t even know why we’re doing this shit.”
“You know how it is, Man; the officers gotta pretend we’re out here for some reason other than boring holes in the water.”
“Right. Well, tell ‘em we found the fishing fleet for ’em.”
“Roger that.”
McGonagle took off his intercom earphones and departed for the head. Barney watched the waterfall displays, and studied the last set of lines to begin drawing. Deeper tones in that stream, with some heavy harmonics in the low frequency bands. Bigger engine, he thought. Much bigger than the Jimmie V1271’s they usually heard out here. He stood up out of his chair and flipped back along the paper trace coming out of the recorder. There. It had started up right there, after the other two began to draw. Maybe a harmonic set adding from the sound lines of the first two. Naw. Too big. He extracted a red pen from his shirt pocket, and made a little tick mark next to the timeline on the left side of the paper trace. McGonagle would probably laugh at him, but he’d mark it anyway. That way if something came up, he could always say he did in fact see it. They had, after all, said to record any variations in the normal sound patterns. This one was fading in and out of the other two sound groups, like a deeper bass note thrumming in and out of an audience’s audible consciousness. He rolled the paper trace back up to the current drawing, and sat back down to watch the maze of light lines squiggling down the video display like the streams from a leaking paint can cover. It was going to be a long freaking watch.
USS Goldsborough, pierside, Mayport Naval Station, Wednesday, 30 April; 0900
“OK, Gents, let’s hit it,” said Mike, breaking up the morning engineering staff meeting.
The Chief Engineer, his machinist mate and boiler Chiefs, the ship repair superintendent, and the ship’s department heads rose from their chairs and filed out, refilling paper cups of coffee on the way. Mike and the Exec remained seated at the head of the wardroom table while the officers and chiefs left. They had been meeting for almost an hour, as they did every morning during the week of repairs in the main propulsion plant. Mike got up and
brought the stainless steel coffee pot over to the table and refilled both their cups, put the pot back on the warmer, and sat down again, rocking back in his armchair at the head of the table. The sound of a pneumatic chipping hammer could be heard chattering up forward on the forecastle.
“Well, XO, they gonna fix these main feed pumps or was this all smoke and mirrors?”
Ben Farmer reviewed his notes.
“An awful lot of wishful thinking going on,” he said. “They’re going through all the correct repair procedures and motions, but I haven’t heard anybody say they’ve found the problem in each pump and that they know for a fact what’s wrong and how to fix it. This is just a quick and dirty overhaul.”
“Which is better than nothing, I suppose,” Mike said. “I’m almost surprised they’re doing it, given that Goldy’s going out next year.”
“I think that’s because they’re never sure about decommissioning—remember Vietnam, when all those old cans from Willy Willy Twice were extended in ‘67 for six months to go on the gunline? They were still all there in ’73.”
“Yeah, I suppose,” said Mike. “But this has to be costing megabucks—new twelve hundred pound steam seals, new regulating admission valves, all that level one welding to get access to all this shit, the X-rays after the welds, and then they’re not positive they know what’s wrong with the goddamn pumps!”
“I think it’s a case of age, Cap’n: those hummers’ve been turning and burning for twenty three years. That’s main steam: 1275 psi and 980 degrees, pumping water at 1500 psi into a steaming boiler for two dozen years.”
“Yeah, I reckon. Well, what else we got going on?”
“We have the preparations for the next 3M inspection, which I’m guessing is coming up pretty soon. Chief Taggard from Squadron has been nosing around the Chiefs’ Mess, which usually means a ‘surprise’ 3M inspection is inbound. The Chiefs all have the word, but we’ll need an all-officers meeting on it. And then there’s a medical assist team coming
Friday for a sanitation inspection, and that will be followed by the TyCom medical officer’s ‘surprise’ inspection within the next thirty days. And then—”
“OK, OK—!” Mike threw up his hands in surrender. “That’s enough inspections and assist visits for one day. Christ! I wonder how the 10,000 ships we had in World War II ever managed to win the war without all these staff assist visits and inspections.”
Mike blew on his coffee, as if that might improve the taste. The Navy had been buying progressively cheaper coffee over the past few years; some of it was genuinely awful.
“I think it’s what miners call overburden,” said the Exec. “In those days they had one Admiral and his staff for every 200 ships in the Navy. Today we have one Admiral and his staff for every three ships. With no war on, we have to justify the existence of all those brass hats, which is where I think all these ‘command attention’ programs come from.”
Mike sighed. The constant stream of rudder orders from the high command on how to run every aspect of a command’s daily life was the bane of every Commanding Officer’s existence, ashore and afloat.
“Well, XO,” he said. “It’s a hard monster to get your hands on. Each of the Navy’s mandated management programs is, in and of itself, justifiable and possibly even necessary. The problem comes when you aggregate them. I spent six weeks going through a Prospective Commanding Officer school in Newport prior to coming here, just like you spent six weeks in your Prospective XO course. The whole curriculum was focused on this enormous array of special management programs required of every ship. They did a good job of explaining where each program came from, and how each one evolved from the discovery of problems in the fleet, ranging from poor engineering maintenance to ineffective oversight of personnel records.”
“So each time a fleet-wide problem is discovered, the Navy charges the Fleet Commander or the Type Commander to design a special management program to fix it.”
“Right. And each program gets designed by a whole staff of people as if the ship were going to do nothing else but
that one program. Nobody ever coordinates all the programs, and the resulting paperwork requirements. You read the directives: the Commanding Officer shall personally devote X amount of time and attention to seeing to it that the Personnel Qualification Standards program is, etc., etc. I keep hoping someday the CNO will sit down and add up the total paper requirements of all these programs.”
“If he does,” snorted the Exec, “we’ll get another program, a paperwork reduction program, complete with reports, how many pounds of paper got reduced today, and so on.”
“You got it, XO. Watch out, they’ll make a staffie out of you for thinking that way.”
They were interrupted by a knocking on the wardroom door, followed by the radio messenger bearing a steel clipboard.
“Personal For, Cap’n,” he announced, passing the clipboard to Mike.
Mike opened the clipboard, initialled the record copy of the message, and then took the back copy, dismissing the messenger.
“It’s from Pierce, in Deyo,” said Mike. “Addressed action to the Commodore, info to me. And it says: ‘have recorded underwater sound survey in diesel bands for two successive nights. Not surprisingly, have detected several diesels, but nothing to indicate unusual characteristics or anything but the normal anomalies of the Jax opareas and fishing grounds. Unless otherwise directed, intend to continue survey for one more night prior to return to port Thursday, unless engineering trials completed Wednesday, in which case will return to port Wednesday P.M.’ Rest of it is on his engineering trials, which went, unlike ours, swimmingly. ‘Very respectfully, etc, the IV.’” Mike tossed the message over to Farmer, who scanned it briefly.
“So nothing to write home about there, either, XO. I think now maybe this thing’s dead. Or gone. Or both.”
“I wonder what he means by ‘normal anomalies,’” muttered the Exec.
“Shit, I don’t know. The professional ASW guys tend to
speak in tongues,” said Mike. “As everybody seems to know, ASW is an imprecise business.”
The Exec put the message down on the table, and drank some more coffee.
“This stuff is getting worse,” he commented, peering suspiciously into his cup. “Navy gets cheap on coffee; we’re really getting down there.”
He studied the message form, as if by looking at it he could compel it to explain the mystery submarine. Mike stared off into space.
“I wonder,” said Farmer, “if we’re not running into the same thing on Deyo that we got up in Norfolk.”
“Like?”
“I mean that the IV may have dismissed this whole project a priori as something from fantasy land. Maybe we ought to send Linc and his Chief over to Deyo tomorrow when they get in to actually look at their tapes. Informally, of course. Let the Chief set it up; matter of fact, don’t send Linc, just send the Chief. Chiefs are forever coming and going along the waterfront, so nobody would notice. See what we get.”
Mike nodded thoughtfully.
“That’s probably not a bad idea, although from the sound of things, he’s coming in tonight, so we’ll only see two nights’ worth of tapes.” He looked over at the Exec. “And if we see something on his tapes that he didn’t? Then what?”
“Then we hold another skull session with the Commodore and we figure out what to do next. We’re going to be back out there ourselves next week,
if
they fix these fornicating feed pumps.”
“That’s not on the schedule.”
“Yes, Sir, but we’ll need an engineering trial to prove that the feed pumps can handle steaming loads.”
Mike pushed away the coffee.
“If the higher ups conclude that there is something to all this,” he said, “they sure as hell are not going to send Goldsborough to deal with it.”
“But if they conclude that it is all bullshit, we can go out
and screw around some more, see what we turn up, and nobody has to know.”
“The Commodore would have to know. But what the hell can we do that the Deyos of the world can’t do? I mean, shit, she’s an ASW specialist. Sonars up the gazoo, carries a helicopter, and they can even process sonobuoys. All we can do is ping.”
“Yes, Sir,” said Farmer, leaning forward. “But that’s precisely it: we can ping in shallow water where the Deyo’s sonar is useless: it’s too damned big. So far, everything that’s happened has happened inside the continental shelf: the U-boat sighting, the fishing boat going down with a bullet hole in her nameplate, our two contacts, all in water 300 to 500 foot deep, and all inside the Gulf Stream, too. Spruances like Deyo need water 6000 foot deep for their sonars to reach out there and touch someone.”
Mike sat back in his chair, a surprised look on his face.
“You’re back to believing this shit, aren’t you,” he said.
Farmer nodded once.
“I go back and forth on it. I’ll admit that. But I want to know what Deyo means by normal anomalies—that’s an oxymoron. If our guys can see something on his tapes that might be a sub on the snort, then I think we ought to go out there and try to find the sucker, before—”
“Before what?”
Farmer sighed and started rubbing his eyes with both hands.
“I don’t know,” he said, his voice muffled by his hands. “We’re still missing something here.”
The wardroom door opened and the Chief Engineer came back into the wardroom with the shipyard superintendent.
“Cap’n, we think we’ve found out what’s eating those steam seals,” he announced.
Mike looked at Farmer for a moment, and nodded his head fractionally, acknowledging that the Exec might be right. He then turned to the Engineer.
“OK, Snipe, sit down and tell me all about it. You know how I love main feed pump steam seals.”