The submarine Al Akrab, Jacksonville operating areas, Friday, 9 May; 1205
The Captain stood behind the sonarman, his face intent. Everyone in the control room was listening to the sounds of the approaching ship, a steady beating noise coming from the speaker above the sonar console. The Captain shook his head.
“Single screw; this is not the carrier,” he pronounced, and the control room crew relaxed slightly.
“Depth,” he asked.
“Depth is sixty five meters,” responded the Musaid from his chair behind the planesmen. “On course 090; speed is four knots.”
The Captain tapped the sonarman on one shoulder.
“Evaluation,” he inquired.
“Sir, the contact is east of us, bearing 145, exhibits up doppler, single screw, making high speed. A power screw, which indicates a large ship.”
“Could this be a deception?” asked the operations officer from his position near the attack director. “The Coral Sea on one screw?”
The Captain frowned. It was possible, but unlikely. Why would the carrier be operating in a deception mode? If she had been warned of Al Akrab’s presence, there would be a mob of escorts out here, and very likely no carrier at all. He shook his head slowly, still concentrating on the hydrophone effects coming over the speaker. The big ship was going to come fairly close to them; the bearing had been steady and then had begun to drift right only slightly in the
past five minutes. But what was it? Who was it? He decided they had to take a look.
“No. This is something else. What is the CPA?”
“Sir. The closest point of approach will be to starboard, approximately 3000 meters, based on passive bearing analysis.”
“Very well. Secure the speaker, Musaid. Go to periscope depth.”
“As you command, Effendi,” replied the Musaid.
He touched the shoulder of the depth control planesman, who nodded and pulled back on the yoke. The submarine tilted slightly up at the bow, and began to rise silently on electric propulsion. The members of the control room battle stations team made way for the Captain as he took his position at the periscope well. The control room was steamy in the heat of the tropical sea; the ventilators fought a losing battle with all the main compartment hatches latched shut. The Captain watched the depth gauge in front of the planesmen as Al Akrab came up to a keel depth of sixty feet. As the bow levelled off and the deckplates returned to horizontal, the Musaid nodded at the Captain, who turned once more to the sonarman.
“Report,” he ordered.
“Sir. The large ship is almost abeam, bearing 195, and passing down our starboard side; I have no estimate of range, but the bearing drift indicates she is not close aboard. There is something else.”
“Yes?”
A sudden silence in the control room, all eyes on the young man siting the sonar stack, as he listened carefully, his hands clasped over his earphones. The silence became prolonged.
“Sir. I think there is another ship. Very quiet, but something I can hear. Also east Bearing 095. Distant. I could not hear it over the noise of the large ship, who now exhibits down doppler—she is going past us.”
“Classify,” ordered the Captain.
“Sir. I cannot classify, other than one screw. I may be
wrong. But I think there is something there. East of us, and very quiet.”
The Captain took a deep breath. They had made their approach into the attack zone from the north, slowly and silently, on the battery, well below the acoustic layer. They had detected a couple of fishermen and small craft on the way, and then, an hour ago, the large ship, a steady drumming sound coming from the southeast, headed in toward the Jacksonville approaches. The intelligence report had said Coral Sea was due that evening, but it was only midday. Had there been a change of plans? A warning? And now the report of something else out there. His hackles rose.
“Depth control is stable at periscope depth,” reminded the Musaid.
“Sonar, what is the sea state above?” asked the Captain.
“From the sound, it is flat calm. I hear no waves,” replied the sonarman.
“Up scope,” ordered the Captain. “Hold at fifty five feet for manual control.”
The periscope came up swiftly, but stopped short of its full height, its bronze tip remaining five feet beneath the surface above. The Captain took a switch cable in his hand, and lowered the periscope control arms, squatting down on the deckplates to meet the eyepiece. He pushed his forehead against the eyepiece headrest, and then closed the trigger switch. The periscope started up again, but very slowly. The Captain took little duckwalking steps around the compass as the scope came up. At first he could see nothing, and then light, a blue haze everywhere, and then a lighter blue as the optics neared the actual surface. He released the button for a moment.
“Make minimum speed,” he ordered. If there were no waves, the periscope would be visible to the naked eye, and even more visible to a surface search radar.
“Minimum speed,” acknowledged the watch officer. “Setting for three knots.”
“Can you hold depth at three knots, Musaid?”
“Yes, Effendi. I must pump two trim tanks, but we can hold depth control.”
“Permission granted to activate trim tank pumps. I’m breaking the surface—now,” he declared, pushing his forehead tightly against the headrest, revolving the scope quickly, and then pulling it back down one meter below the surface.
“Some kind of large merchant ship,” he announced. “Not the Coral Sea.”
There was a collective sigh of relief in the control room from everyone except the weapons officer, who was staring at the Captain, aware of the pained expression on the Captain’s face.
“Sir. How big a merchant ship?” he asked the Captain.
The Captain gave him a slight nod, acknowledging the weapons officer’s acumen in asking the important question.
“Very large, weapons officer,” replied the Captain in a tight voice. “Very large indeed.”
The Deputy, who had been watching this interchange intensely, suddenly figured it out.
“The mines,” he said.
The Captain turned to stare at him, and then trained his cold eyes around the control room.
“Yes,” he sighed. “The mines. Now it is up to us. If that ship is going to Jacksonville, it will eat the mines. Now it is entirely up to us. Prepare yourselves.”
“Sir,” called the sonarman. “I have heard it again. Bearing east, by a half south. Something is there, Captain.”
The Captain rotated the periscope to 120. He waited. Two minutes later the swell made by the passing car carrier began to gently rock the submarine.
“His wake is passing by; I will expose the periscope,” the Captain said.
He squatted again, and pushed the control button at the end of its wire, timing the periscope to come up out of the sea coincident with the passage of the merchant’s wake. To a radar, the sudden return would be taken for the wake. He hoped.
He turned the periscope to high power, and stared as it
neared the surface, the image of the turbulence right at the surface causing him to blink. Then daylight, bright sunlight, flashed through the optics. He drew back reflexively, and the control room crew could see the bright ring of sunlight around his eyes for an instant. He pressed his face against the optics again, and stared, rotating the scope right and left ten degrees. Again. Nothing. Right and left twenty degrees. And hold.
There. On the horizon. The unmistakable shape of a warship’s top hampers, the dark, lattice masts and the multiple radar antennas. Hull down. A destroyer. Not moving, keeping quiet. A chill filled his belly.
“Periscope down,” he ordered. “Make your depth sixty meters, course 180, speed five.”
He looked up at the faces of the control room crew as the periscope sank into its well, the deckplates pitching forward and down as the Musaid took her below.
“It seems,” he announced, “that we have company.”
Atlantic Fleet headquarters, Norfolk, Virginia, Friday, 9 May; 1430
Captain Larry Desantes, the staff intelligence officer, was standing in front of Vice Admiral Bennett’s desk. He was not having a particularly good afternoon. The Admiral was reading a secure telefax obtained from Washington ten minutes ago. Admiral Bennett was shaking his head from side to side, as if to will away the information in the fax. He looked up at the staff intelligence officer.
“According to this, N2, the senior photoanalysis committee has met in emergency session and are now saying that one of the six subs tied up at Ras Hilal may not be a real submarine.”
He pitched the piece of paper down on his desk, and swivelled his chair to stare out the window, where he had a fine view of the Navy Exchange across the parking lot.
“And then, of course,” he continued, “in the inimitable fashion of all intel weenies everywhere, it may, on the other
hand, be a submarine and the photo might be bad. Or it may be a fox terrier and the satellite is bad, or it may be a rainy day in Washington and the weather is bad!”
He swivelled back again.
“What the hell am I supposed to do with this?”
Before the perspiring N2 could answer, the Admiral yelled past him to the open doorway.
“Mike, where the hell is Aronson—I want to talk to him now, goddammit!”
“Working on it, Admiral,” came the voice of the EA.
The Admiral looked back at his intelligence officer.
“Well?”
“Well, Sir,” he began, nervously. “I listened to the tape of the phone conversation. She said they had several scraps of “evidence,” but no one thing that’s conclusive. I would say that this estimate could be considered another scrap, and one that’s just as ambiguous as the rest of them. But the whole thing, Admiral, is so—I mean, Khadafi would have to be out of his fucking—”
The Admiral’s flat stare cut him off.
“Muammar Khadafi,” he said. “Out of his mind. What a novel concept.”
The EA appeared in the doorway. “Line two, Sir. Commodore Aronson.”
The Admiral punched a button violently on his phone console, pointing the red faced N2 and the EA into chairs, and putting line two on his speaker. The Admiral wasted no time with polite preliminaries.
“Eli, what in God’s name have you got going down there in Mayport? What’s all this shit about a submarine and the Coral Sea—you guys been getting downwind of all those dope smokers down there in Florida, or what?”
“Hello, Admiral,” replied Aronson in a subdued voice. “And, no, we’re not doing any dope. I almost wish we were. Bill Barstowe told me you called and said the magic word. Before I tell you our side of it, may I ask a question of my own—what prompted your call?”
“A very disturbing, thirty minute phone call from one Mrs. Diane Martinson, wife of your Group Commander’s
Chief of Staff. How she knew about this is a second Mayport mystery, but it involves the CO of the Goldsborough somehow. I’ll leave that little problem to you Mayport types; I suspect that’s going to be easier to solve than this submarine mystery. Now lemme have it—what’s going on? I haven’t told the CinC anything yet, but I’m getting the feeling that I’m going to have to go see him pretty soon.”
The Commodore sighed and went through the story from the very start to their current situation. He covered his and Mike’s joint presentation to Admiral Walker in detail, and described the net result of that presentation. He reviewed all of the tendrils of evidence indicating that there might be a threat to the Coral Sea, and then, to preserve balance and to show that they had thought of other possibilities, postulated alternative explanations for each one of them.
“As you can see, Admiral,” he concluded, “each of these little indicators is pretty flimsy; it’s the fact that there were so many of them that gave me pause. It has cost me nothing to send Goldy out there, because she had to do a sea trial anyway. I would have preferred to get a crowd out there for a real look, but, well, my boss thinks it’s all bullshit, and he’s the boss.”
Admiral Bennett thought for a moment.
“And if you guys are right, and there is a Libyan pigboat out there, then what happens?” he asked.
It was Aronson’s turn to be silent for a long moment.
“Mike Montgomery is a pretty good guy,” he said. “No E-ring ballerina by any stretch of the imagination, but he had a solid, combat operations record in Vietnam over several tours. He’s one of those warriors we talk about a lot but don’t promote so much, you know? And Goldsborough? Well, Goldy is a bit of an antique—she’s going out next year, you might remember—but she’s got a good, medium power active sonar, and this situation needs a medium power active sonar more than the fancy, new passive stuff. If we’re right—big if, I admit—this is a diesel-electric boat. Not even the Spruances would have much of a chance hearing him when he’s on the battery, and the reverberation
from their own active sonars would blow their own sonarmen out of their chairs in that shallow water. But, still: one tin can versus one sub is bad odds. I just didn’t know what the hell else to do, except that I couldn’t sit back and do nothing. I guess that says it all.”
Admiral Bennett nodded thoughtfully to himself. He respected Aronson’s instinctive approach to an ambiguous problem, and, given the circumstances, was rapidly concluding that he himself might have done the same thing, but with one important difference. He would never have done it on his own.
“When’s Coral Sea due in?” he asked.
“At 1900 tonight in the basin, to make the high slack water. Which means sometime in the next three hours we ought to know if this was a drill or for real.”
“And you say the Group Commander doesn’t know anything about this?”
He heard Aronson sigh.
“About Goldy being out there looking? That’s correct, Admiral. If it’s a drill, I figured no one had to be the wiser, and if it’s not a drill, then there’s going to be hell to pay anyway you look at it.”
“Eli, Eli—basic rule,” intoned the Admiral in a chiding voice. “Gotta keep the boss informed. Now there’s going to be a rocket coming down from CincLantFleet, and we’re going to catch ComSecondFleet, ComNavSurflant, and ComCruDesGroup Twelve all off base.”
“They had their chance, Admiral,” said Aronson stiffly. Across the room, the EA rolled his eyes. He knew the sounds of political suicide when he heard them. The Admiral stared down at his desk.
“I think on the face of it,” he declared after a moment, “we need to send a warning message to Coral Sea, but I’m going to have to get to the CinC before I do that. And we also have the minor problem of figuring out how and what to tell those bit actors in Washington like JCS, the Secretary of Defense, and the President.”
“Yes, Sir,” said Aronson. “I realize that. I think that was the major underlying part of our problem down here. We
are postulating that a foreign power is going to attempt an act of war against one of our largest ships. That’s a lotta water to carry to Washington, and I just didn’t feel there was anybody in my chain of command who would be willing to carry it. I should also point out that even if something happens to Coral Sea, or Goldsborough, or both, we probably still won’t have any proof it was the Green Hornet over there that did it unless we pick up a boatload of Libyans. The way I see it, we’re all going to have to wait and see if anything happens out there, and then figure out a way to explain it if it does.”
Admiral Bennett shook his head.
“We might have been able to get away with doing nothing if Mrs. Martinson hadn’t called, Eli. But now that we know, and now that it can be shown that we knew about the possibility in advance, we gotta do something. How long would it take you to get a couple of Spruances and some heloes out there to where you think this action might take place?”
“I’m sitting in the Deyo right now, waiting for word from Mike that he’s turned up something. I guess I could—”
His voice was drowned out by the sound of thunder rumbling over the amplified speaker phone. The three officers in Norfolk sat up in their chairs as another and then another thundering blast echoed in the room.
“Eli? Eli? What the fuck is that?” yelled the Admiral.
“Hang on a minute, Admiral. It sounds like something’s just blown up out on the river. Wait one!”
They could hear the sound of a phone being dropped on a desk, and then a hubbub of voices in the background. Admiral Bennett began to get a cold feeling in his stomach.
“Did you turn on a crisis action team down at the Command center?” he asked the EA, holding his hand over the phone.
“Affirmative, Admiral, right after you heard the CSO say ‘Oh shit.’”
“Good man.”
After a very long minute, a new voice came on the line.
“Uh, Admiral Bennett, Sir—this is Ensign Purvis, Deyo CIC? Are you still there, Admiral, Sir?”
“Yes, goddammit!”
“Uh, yes, Sir, sorry. There’s a big merchie in the channel junction—one of those Japanese car carriers? She’s on fire from stem to stern, and looks like she’s rolling over in the river.”
“What were those explosions, Mr. Purvis?”
“Sir, the XO of the Fife—she’s nested alongside?—said it looked like the merchie got torpedoed. He told the Commodore up on the bridge just now that there were three big fu—, uh, real large explosions under the merchie, just like in the movies?—as she came into the channel. He said they lifted her right up out of the water, and these car carriers are fifty, sixty thousand tons!”
“What’s happening now, Ensign? Quickly!”
The EA had run out of the room to call the Command Center again.
“Buncha people running around topside, Admiral. They—”
His excited voice was interrupted by the sound of yet another blast, big enough to buzz the little speaker on the Admiral’s desk, and then the sounds of people yelling “Take Cover” in the background.
“Uh, Admiral, there’s shit landing all over the basin—pieces of the merch, it looks like. Whoa! Goddamn!”
There was a loud, metallic banging noise, and then the line went dead. The speaker hissed impotently in the office.
Admiral Bennett found himself on his feet, along with the N2. Another phone line buzzed, this one the red phone from the LANTFLT command center. The Admiral grabbed it.
“Bennett!” he said. He listened for a minute.
“Does the CinC know this? OK. Thank you very much.”
He hung up the phone as the EA came back into the office. He looked at the other two officers.
“That was the duty officer, reporting a major incident in the entrance to the St. Johns river. The river is apparently completely blocked, and so is the base channel. I’m going
down to the Command Center. The CinC is on his way down, too. Mike, get me that tape and meet me downstairs. You, too, Larry.”
Admiral Bennett left the room, his face grim as he pulled on his service dress blue blouse and headed for the Atlantic Fleet Command Center in the basement.