“What’s that, XO?” said Mike, grabbing for the charts.
“The business of shooting. So far this whole thing is conjecture on our part, that there’s even a submarine out there, waiting for the Coral Sea. And that it means to attack the carrier. Under peacetime rules of engagement, we have no authority to shoot anybody without making a pretty substantial effort to identify him first and then prove that he was hostile. I mean, suppose this is a colossal screw up, and that’s a Canadian sub out there, practicing shallow water ASW under a NATO OpOrder for the defense of the eastern approaches to U.S. harbors?”
“Surely we’d have known about a friendly foreign submarine operating here, XO. Hell, they would have provided
some live sub training time for the Spruances as quid pro quo for letting him operate here.”
“You have to admit that it is feasible that there’s something we don’t know, Captain. It’s more likely that this guy is a Canadian or a Brit than he is a Libyan …”
Mike gave a short laugh. The Exec had a point. He piled the papers into a stack on the deck, and put one of the classified pubs on top as a paper weight.
“OK, but if this guy is what we think he is, he may solve the problem for us. Under the rules of engagement, if he takes a shot, either at us or the carrier, then we’re weapons free on his ass. And that might be how we in fact classify him in the end analysis.”
“Yes, Sir. We probably ought to talk to the Commodore about the R.O.E. before we leave port at the end of the week.”
The thunder rolled again, closer this time. Mike glanced at his watch. It was three-thirty. There seemed little left to discuss. What was required now were the actual search plans, the various attack patterns that could develop, and an acoustic prediction analysis of the area of operations. The Exec saw Mike looking at his watch. He stood up.
“I’ll work the details tomorrow; Sundays are dead quiet on the ship, and I can get to the pubs I need without attracting attention. I’ll tell the CDO I’m working up fitness reports.”
Mike stood up, lunging for the papers as the wind blew again, spilling his neat stack.
“Ben, I appreciate this very much; you call me if you hit any snags. Tell your wife we’ll get you a couple of long weekends after this is all over.”
The Exec gathered up his materials and the charts. The wind was visibly picking up across the surface of the waterway, and the rumbles of thunder were more frequent. The western sky was turning deep purple. Mike helped him gather up the charts and the pubs into an armload, and they went forward to the gangway. The Exec had to grab his hat in the stiffening breeze. Around them, the weekend sailors were busy stowing gear and deck chairs in anticipation
of the approaching squall. Shroud lines could be heard clanking against their masts over the wind; some of the girls looked faintly ridiculous in their skimpy bikinis as they grabbed loose gear to get it below.
“You go on home, Ben,” said Mike. “Start again fresh tomorrow, and call me around noon, let me know how it’s going. And maybe we ought to think about going out quiet, not pinging at all, until the carrier does show up. It occurs to me that a pop-up destroyer act might be more effective in screwing up his attack on the Coral Sea than an all night pinging operation.”
“Yes, Sir, you may be right,” said Farmer. He was having to shout over the wind. “If he knows we’re there and we don’t gain contact, he’d have all night to hide out. If we delay, and go out quiet, we might be able to take him by surprise, and then make him do something that allows us to classify him and short circuit the rules of engagement problem. I’d better mosey,” he concluded, eyeing the approaching thunderstorm.
He peered at the pile of charts and books in his arms. “I hope I got everything.”
“If not, I’ll bring it in Monday. But think on it; we’ll talk some more tomorrow,” said Mike.
“Yessir,” shouted Ben into the wind as he walked down the pier toward the marina office.
Mike went back into the lounge and called Maxie, who answered on the third ring.
“She show up yet?”
“No sign; I see your guy is leaving. So if she shows up, she comes straight through, right?”
“Right. I hope she beats this storm.”
“Yeah, I gotta go secure some shit.”
“You need a hand?”
“Nope; as long as I git off this phone, I’ll make it.”
“Thanks, Maxie.”
Mike hung up, and went topside to make sure his own porch furniture was secured. The screens kept out most of the weather, but a good blow could knock things around, and from the looks of the darkening sky across the waterway,
they were in for a good blow. As he stacked the chairs, he found one of the classified publications wedged between the couch and a chair. He looked quickly over to the parking lot, but Farmer’s car was just pulling out of the sand lot. Mike carried the pub to his briefcase and locked it inside. He wondered where Diane was.
Mayport Marina, Saturday, 3 May
Ben Farmer was almost all the way back to the base when he realized that one of the two classified ASW publications was not in the stack of materials spilled on his front seat. He pulled over into a convenience store parking lot and made a quick inventory to make sure. The wind was whipping up clouds of dust and sand around the parking lot, and the proprietor, an elderly oriental man, was pulling in signs from the front porch area as the afternoon sky darkened.
He knew that he had brought two classified references, both with white, plastic covers. Only one was on the front seat. He remembered putting both of them on the floor under the table on the porch. But the Captain had used one to weight the paper stack. He checked under the seat, and in his briefcase without success, and then looked out the window. The edge of the squall line was visible over the tops of the trees to the west, but that main bang still looked to be about five miles west of the river. He might just have time to go back.
He turned his car around, waited for a white, four door sedan to go by, and pulled out onto the highway back to Mayport. The woman in the sedan had looked familiar, but he dismissed the thought as he kept an eye on the approaching storm. It took him five minutes to get back to the Marina parking lot, and the squall line seemed much closer now that he was back on the waterway itself. The palm fronds were standing straight away from their trees, and there was a lot of sand blowing around the parking lot. The sky looked and sounded ominous.
The white car he had been following had preceded him into the parking lot. As he was gauging whether or not he could make it to the Lucky Bag before the rain started, the woman got out of the car. The wind whipped her summer skirt up around her knees, and she clutched a small overnight bag and a wrapped package under her arms. He watched her make a run for the Marina office; she had a dynamite figure. He could not see her face because she was wearing sunglasses. As she made it to the Marina office door, however, she took her glasses off before going inside, and then Ben recognized her. Mrs. Martinson. The Chief of Staffs wife. What the hell was she doing at the Marina?
The wind began to gust, rocking his car, and the first few fat raindrops cratered the sandy dust in the parking lot. There was a washboard of whitecaps standing up across the intracoastal waterway, and all the boat traffic had disappeared. The sky was dark enough that the buoys had begun to blink in the channel. Ben decided he would make a run for the office and call the Captain. The Captain could bring the pub up from the boat and meet him halfway. He could barely see the Lucky Bag, three piers over from the office. He had just opened the car door when he saw the Captain come running across the piers towards the office. Then to his astonishment he saw Mrs. Martinson make a similar dash from the office. They met halfway, she crouching under the protection of his broad shoulder while they both turned and dashed, laughing, back to the Lucky Bag. The rain swept across the waterway at that instant and drew a noisy curtain over the entire Marina.
Ben Farmer closed the door and sat back in his seat in shock as the rain drummed on the roof of his car. The windows fogged over after a minute, completing the obscuration of everything outside. A flash of lightning speared the waterway to his right, and the clap of thunder made him wince.
The Exec had been happily married since he was a junior Lieutenant. He and his wife had three children, and lived in quarters on the base in the CO-XO housing area near the beach. He had, of course, noticed Diane Martinson. Every
adult who lived in CO-XO housing, male and female, had noticed Diane Martinson at one time or another. His wife had caught him looking for just a shade longer than marital propriety permitted and had pinched him just above his belt line for staring. Diane’s arrival at the Marina, on a Saturday afternoon, complete with an overnight bag, was evidence of a situation that he fervently wished he did not know about. The rain drummed louder.
Navy ship wardrooms had a well defined hierarchy among the wives. The Captain’s wife was socially in charge, and organized, usually with the help of the Executive Officer’s wife, most wardroom functions such as the annual Christmas party, charity events, cocktail parties, and homecomings when the ship had been away. The CO and the XO’s wives also handled a myriad of family problems, officer and enlisted, that inevitably cropped up when the ship was out of home port for extended periods.
When the CO did not have a wife, the “duties” of the CO’s wife fell upon the Executive Officer’s wife, as was the case in Goldsborough. The Captain contributed funds for many of the functions, and Ben’s wife, Carol, ably ran the show. The fact that the Captain was a bachelor lent spice to some of the social occasions, as the wives were always eager to see what he might bring along as a date. Some of the bachelors’ dates had found the Captain to be more interesting than their escort for the evening, which usually caused the Captain some acute embarrassment.
As Exec, Ben kept himself in the know about which officer’s marriage was in trouble, who had a chronically sick child, and which of the ship’s bachelor officers was in danger of getting himself hooked. But Ben had carefully eschewed knowing anything at all about the Captain’s private life. The Captain kept all of that to himself, which was just fine as far as Ben was concerned. And now this little discovery. His CO was seeing the wife of the Chief of Staff, and from the way he had sheltered her from the squall, their relationship was well advanced.
He decided to get the hell out of there while it was still raining. The Captain could bring in the pub, and he recognized
that the only thing worse than knowing what he now knew would be for the Captain to know that he knew. The bulk of the rain squall was passing, and he could just begin to see across the parking lot again. Just when you think you’ve seen all the problems that an XO tour can throw at you, something bigger and better smacks you in the face, he thought. He started the car, turned the wipers on high, and began to navigate his way through the downpour very carefully across the parking lot and out onto the road back to the base. He wondered how long he could keep this from Carol.
The Al Akrab, seaward approaches, St. Johns River, Sunday, 4 May; 0100
The Captain wiped the rain out of his face and tried to clean the optics on his binoculars. He was wedged into the conning tower cockpit, bent low behind a makeshift plexiglass windscreen which did very little to keep the weather out of his face. The two lookouts perched above and behind him on the periscope shears were shapeless bundles of raingear in the dark. A warm wind streamed over the conning tower as the submarine plowed steadily through a heavy chop, the air redolent with the scents of the shoreline ahead. He had decided to bring the Al Akrab in partially flooded down after all, so that the usual shape of the bows and the foredeck ahead of the conning tower were missing, revealed only when larger waves broke over the black, rounded hull like the roils of water in a river over barely submerged rocks. The rain came in intermittent sheets, followed by slack periods when the night sky opened to reveal a large thunderstorm booming its way out to sea to the south. The lights of Mayport and the naval base were visible as an orange glow against the base of the low flying clouds up off the port bow.
The Captain was grateful for the shield of the foul weather, but he knew that the Deputy, as Navigator, would
be not so grateful. He could hear the periscope swivelling in its tube as the Deputy in the attack center attempted to take bearings on the navigation aids ashore. The Captain peered again through his Russian binoculars. The lighthouse at Mayport was clearly visible, beaming a strong flash of white light every twenty seconds from atop its man-made hill on the base. But he had not yet detected the two river range lights. Without radar, and without those lights, their position was essentially a guess. They knew that they were somewhere on a line of bearing from the lighthouse, but the all critical factor of range from the river’s entrance was missing. They had to find at least one more light for a cross bearing. He felt a tightness in his gut as the submarine advanced inexorably on the darkened shore at four knots.
“Navigator, Captain,” he growled into the intercom box.
“Sir,” replied the box, barely audible over the noise of a new squall of rain and wind rattling on the plexiglass shield.
“Can you see the river range lights?”
“No, Sir. Not yet. We are searching on high power, but there is too much weather.”
“When was our last good fix?”
“Uh, some time ago, Sir. We have now only an estimated position. We are using a dead-reckoning plot, bearings from the lighthouse, and the depth sounder. The range to the river’s mouth is estimated at ten thousand meters, and there is sixty feet of water beneath the keel. We need—”
“Yes, yes, I know what we need—another light!” the Captain said. He brought his binoculars back up to his eyes and continued to sweep the shore, or at least the sector of the horizon ahead where the shore ought to be. He realized that the navigation team was doing the best it could. The wind was from dead ahead, but the local currents along the Florida coast set northerly. With the submarine flooded down, the current’s effect would predominate over the wind, and the nearest shoal waters were to the south of the channel, away from the direction of drift. He glanced at his watch. If they could not get a fix within the next twenty minutes, he would have to break it off. He needed one accurate fix to give him the intercept course to the sea
buoy; after that they could buoy hop their way into the channel. He scanned the shore again, starting with the lighthouse and moving right, to the dark sector to the right of the naval base lights that had to be the river, and then searching inshore of the river’s mouth. One of the lookouts gave a low shout.
“Stay on it!” ordered the Captain, craning his neck to see which way the man was looking. The man’s binoculars were trained well to the right of where the Captain had been looking. He put his glasses up to his eyes, swept right, and saw the blinking red light, down low on the surface. A buoy. They were going to pass it close aboard to their starboard side. Very close.
“Left full rudder!” he shouted into the intercom box. “Navigator, we have a buoy close aboard to starboard!” He watched as the rudder angle indicator dial, a green blur on the rain soaked instrument panel, swung left. The boat ploughed on for a few heart stopping moments before finally answering the helm. He looked up anxiously as the buoy came down the starboard side, only some thirty feet away. They could hear the metallic clank of its buoy bell as it bounced in the windswept chop.
“Shift your rudder,” he ordered, to swing the stern and the screws back away from the buoy now that the boat had begun to swing. “Steady 270.” He yelled to the lookouts to get the buoy’s number if they could.
“Two,” called the starboard lookout, as the submarine’s head swung slowly back to the west.
“Mark buoy number two abeam to starboard,” yelled the Captain into the intercom. His whole body listened anxiously for the rumble of a propeller hitting the buoy’s anchor chain, but they slipped safely past. The wind whistled around the conning tower, as if in appreciation. The rain suddenly stopped in a final sweeping gust of wind, and moments later the periscope stopped swinging.
“Contact on the river range,” called the Deputy from below. “Stand by for course recommendation.”
The Captain straightened up as the Al Akrab came out of the squall line, and let out a long breath. There were
many lights suddenly visible ahead as the air cleared; they were closer in to the shoreline than he had thought. He scanned ahead to find the range, aligning his binoculars with the glass face of the periscope, and found it almost at once. They were to the right of the range. As he prepared to make a course adjustment, the intercom sounded off.
“Recommend come left to 267 to regain track,” said the Deputy. “We hold ourselves 7200 meters from the turn point, and we have a good fix.”
“Very well; come left to 267,” replied the Captain. He turned around to the lookouts. “We have found the river range; search now for small boats coming down the river; look for running lights.”
The lookouts acknowledged, and the Captain resumed his own surveillance of the river’s entrance. He could see the pattern of red and green buoy lights now that the rain had passed, and the channel into the river was clearly marked, even against the brightening backdrop of the shore lights.
“Depth beneath the keel?” he asked of the intercom.
“Depth is forty five feet beneath the keel and conforms to the charted depth,” replied the box. Behind the conning tower the rumble of thunder and lightning was diminishing in the distance as the storm cell passed out to sea. The wind had freshened in its wake, veering around to the submarine’s starboard quarter as she approached the shoreline, returning to the normal on-shore breeze pattern after the squall line. The submarine was dead quiet, running on the battery with electric propulsion.
“Turn on the navigation lights, dim position,” ordered the Captain. If there was radar surveillance, the only substantial echoes would be returned from the conning tower, as the rest of the submarine’s shape was awash. The dim navigation lights, red and green on the sides and one dim white light on the front of the sail, would look like a fishing boat to any watching eyes. So far, the electronic surveillance console had reported no radar signals sweeping across the Mayport approaches. He continued to watch for
several minutes while the submarine thumped and bumped its way through the choppy waters.
“Based on a good fix at time 24, range to the turn point is 4200 meters; recommend come back right to 271,” spoke the box.
“Very well, come right to 271,” replied the Captain. Another buoy was shaping up in the darkness, to port this time, its green light winking comfortably in the rapidly clearing night air. The squall seemed to have scrubbed the coastal atmosphere; all of the lights ashore were now unnaturally bright. The Captain suddenly felt very exposed. He could make out the red aircraft warning lights atop the masts of the ships bunched together in the Mayport basin. He could even make out the vast bulk of the aircraft carrier moored to the bulkhead pier along the river. It was incredible: they were within a few miles of the American Navy’s largest southern naval base, and operating on the surface with total impunity. The Captain felt a surge of pride at their achievement.
“Look at them,” he mused aloud. “Dozens of destroyers, all asleep even as we bring our scorpion to their very doorstep.”
The lookouts grunted their acknowledgement, surprising him. With the wind no longer blowing in their faces, the Captain’s every word could be heard at the top of the conning tower. The Al Akrab pressed on, even as the shimmering rays of amber light from the sodium vapor streetlights on the base began to reach out for them across the surface of the St. Johns river.
“1500 meters to turn point,” spoke the box.
The Captain detected a note of apprehension in the Deputy’s voice that penetrated even the fuzzy sound of the intercom. He imagined what it looked like on the chart below, as the submarine crept into the outer channel along a series of small, pencilled X’s on the chart. He could see in his mind’s eye the tight knot of officers surrounding the plotting table in the red light below, looking fearfully at the chart’s depiction of the naval base. Into the lion’s den. He scanned the river range through his glasses, and saw that
they were back on track. At 1000 meters he would come right to allow room to make the turn in the river entrance.
A mile and a half ahead to port lay the junction between the St. Johns main channel and the dredged channel into the Mayport naval basin, which slanted off to the left in a Y intersection with the river. The junction that was the target for the mines. The Coral Sea had to turn left into that basin channel at precisely the right time to avoid the sandbar just upstream of the junction. He would plant the three mines in the river channel just downstream of the turn; they would tear the bottom out of the carrier and send her careening across the channel to run aground on the opposite shore, thereby blocking the entire river exit. Perfect.
“950 meters to turn point; recommend come right to 280 to offset for the turn.”
“Very well,” replied the Captain. “Navigator is to take control of the conn in the attack center and position the ship to make the turn; use power for standard speed to twist the boat.”
The Deputy acknowledged; with their navigation plot now accurately updated by the half-minute with buoys, the range lights, and the lighthouse, they had a much better picture on their chart than the Captain did perched in the darkness at the top of the conning tower. They could shoot bearings with precision through the periscope, determine their exact position on the chart, and maneuver the boat to come right into the mouth of the river, turn sharply, stop, back up if they had to, simulate firing the mines, and start back out. The submarine began swinging to the right.
The Captain looked at his plastic, Japanese watch; the lights from the shore were almost bright enough to read it without hitting the light button. 0155. An excellent time for this night’s work. He wished he could fire the mines tonight, but they still did not have a precise arrival time from fleet intelligence. He studied the layout of the river approaches, the lights, and the position of the stone breakwater. He had noticed the long wake each buoy was carving through the water, a wide V pointing upstream, indicating a stiff current from the river. They would have to note that
current when they put the mines down; it would not do to have them shoot out the stern torpedo tubes and go only twenty meters in the face of the current.
“Surface contact, bearing 350 relative,” sang out the port lookout. “I have running lights, and a red over white combination on the mast; contact is coming downstream.”
The Captain cursed, and then informed the Deputy.
“Begin the turn now,” he ordered. “We have company.”
Almost at once the submarine steadied, and then began her turn to port, although it seemed to the Captain to be exceedingly slow. Ballasted down as she was, and in shallow water with a river current on her head, Al Akrab seemed reluctant to swing through the turn. The Captain was reaching for the intercom when he felt the sudden rumble of a propeller shaft as the navigator increased the power on the opposed shafts to bring her around. He scanned ahead again with his binoculars, and finally picked out the dim red and green lights, low on the surface of the dark river ahead of them, upstream of the naval base. The boat was coming quickly, her speed augmented by the downstream current; her top lights indicated a fishing boat. Someone had waited to get underway until after the squall lines had subsided.
At long last the submarine began to swing with authority, as the current caught her starboard bow and shoved her around. After another minute and a half, she was pointed seaward.
“Increase speed to twelve knots; turn off all running lights,” ordered the Captain. “We will simulate the mine firing at high speed.”
He wanted very much to get away from the fishing boat that was bearing down on them from behind. The boat looked to be about two miles distant, enough distance to cover them, although her skipper might be curious about the contact coming upriver that had suddenly turned around. He had decided not to back up into firing position; having seen the current, he knew what he would have to do next time.