Final Bearing

by George Wallace

  Temple flipped open his field notebook.

  "Hmmm, let's see. Here it is. CedarTech. Address is 1035 112th Avenue Northeast. Should be just off the 405 at the Sixth Street exit. Meet you there at nine?”

  Kincaid nodded and drew on his raincoat, dropping a five-spot on the table.

  "OK, see you at nine. And Kenny? Thanks for thinking of me."

  The big man winked and hooked the last doughnut off the plate as he headed for the door.

  Tom Kincaid stepped outside and into a steady mist of rain. The sun had struggled to back the rain clouds to the east with some light. It was going to be another blustery, rainy fall day. He turned and headed for where his car was still parked outside the yellow crime tape and amid several unmarked cars that belonged to the forensics people. The body was still there, anonymous beneath the tarp. That blonde-haired girl had been someone. Someone’s daughter, girlfriend, sister maybe. Kincaid knew what was next for them. There would be crying, sadness, a burial or cremation, another young life snuffed out while in pursuit of an illicit thrill.

  He was uneasy. His gut told him that Temple was right about something being very wrong here. The detective had the typical good instincts of any long-time homicide cop. And besides, Kincaid had learned long ago to trust his own intuition in such matters. It had never failed him in all those years in Miami.

  Well, once. It didn’t give him fair warning that Agency politics could be as powerful a threat to him and his career as any Colombian drug lord.

  Twenty years he had spent down there on the front lines, building the best network in Latin America. Finally, with everything in place, nothing moved that he and the Agency didn't know about. He was on top. There was even talk of moving him to D.C. to head the enforcement division. He resisted for all the right reasons. He was making headway. The war seemed winnable. The images of dull eyes and mottled skin were fading from his dreams once and for all.

  Then Rick Taylor was appointed to head the DEA. It was a pure political appointment. Taylor had kissed the right asses, played the correct cards, and slurped martinis with the right politicians.

  It was budget time and Taylor needed a bust to justify expanding his empire. Kincaid's current investigation was the ends to Taylor’s means. Never mind that Kincaid was a full year into an investigation that promised to break the backs of Juan de Santiago and the Colombian Connection once and for all. All he needed was another six months. All the pieces had been put together. Once he got his people clear his mighty hammer would fall and shatter the whole empire the South Americans had built along the ancient Inca trails.

  Kincaid refused to make the show arrests Taylor demanded. The new boss was not understanding at all.

  He transferred Kincaid to Seattle, to what was a relative backwater in the war against the major importers. Kincaid had not cleaned out his desk in Miami before Taylor had his own man in place. The bust happened the very next week. Over five tons of coke were seized. The table was piled high with some of the bounty for show at the press conference. Taylor and his new man smiled widely for the cameras, and the politicians approved the new budget. That bust ultimately cost six of Kincaid's best people their lives. And silenced a maze of informants for who-knows-how long.

  Now Tom Kincaid was languishing in the “Siberia” of the DEA world. Nothing big ever happened up there in the Pacific Northwest. He certainly wouldn’t get in the way of Rick Taylor and his featherbedding from way out there. And, as Kincaid often reminded himself, it was probably best he was in a quiet corner of the world since he had no assets with which to go to war anyway.

  Kincaid pulled up the collar of his raincoat and double-timed to his car. The pungent smell of dead, wet leaves hung in the air. The last street light flickered out overhead just as Kincaid unlocked his car door.

  It was six o'clock now. That would be nine AM in Miami. Time to make some calls.

  He pulled out his cell phone and punched in a number he had long since committed to memory. The number was ringing all the way across the country as he pulled away from the curb and out into the sparse early-morning traffic, leaving behind Sandy Holmes and her cold, staring eyes.

  4

  The broad blue Pacific was hardly disturbed by the zephyrs of the shore breeze. A few puffy clouds rode the wind in an otherwise azure sky. Off to the east, almost at the horizon, the beautiful blue of the sky paled, changing to an ugly tan-brown where it met the sea in the Los Angeles Basin. To the south, the gray-green silhouette of San Clemente Island was barely visible, riding low, guarding the Gulf of Santa Catalina. Beyond there lay the coast of Southern California north of San Diego.

  The P3-C Orion aircraft circled slowly, hardly three hundred feet above the wave-tops. Three of its four Pratt and Whitney turbo-prop engines easily drove their large propellers. That’s all it took to keep the plane aloft and on the job. The fourth propeller windmilled slowly, feathered to conserve fuel. The crew of the Orion stared intently at their computer screens, searching for the “foe” they knew was below them, hidden beneath the glassy cobalt surface of the sea.

  "Skipper!" the young petty officer sitting at the ISAR radar yelled excitedly. "Pop-up contact bearing two-one-seven, range seven miles. Signature of a periscope. Contact designate Romeo two-six"

  "Roger, Sheppard," Lieutenant Jim Pruitt answered. "Good work. Stay locked onto him." Shifting from the intercom to a voice radio frequency, Pruitt reported the contact with their quarry for this exercise. "Mission Control, Victor-Four-Tango. Pop-up contact on ISAR. Possible hostile sub. Going in for MAD run."

  A disembodied voice from Mission Control, stationed in a concrete bunker deep inside San Clemente Island, acknowledged Pruitt’s transmission: "Roger ISAR contact. Good hunting."

  Pruitt banked the big bird sharply to the left and dropped down to only about a hundred feet above the water’s surface to use the magnetic anomaly detection sensor. Simultaneously, Randy Dalton, his co-pilot, reached up into the overhead between them and flicked a couple of switches. The number-four engine coughed, spat smoke and its propeller began to turn with purpose. As it came up to speed, Dalton corrected the propeller pitch so it would carry its share of the load.

  Victor-Four-Tango was ready for battle.

  Sheppard stared at his screen. The blip disappeared. It didn't fade out. It simply went away.

  "Skipper, Romeo two-six went sinker."

  Pruitt keyed his mike on the radio frequency and spoke.

  "Mission Control, Victor-Four-Tango. Contact sinker."

  "Roger, Victor-Four-Tango."

  Pruitt keyed the intercom and spoke to the Orion’s crew.

  "Heads up, everybody. We're making a MAD run then we’ll do a drop. Sensors, let me know what you get."

  The P3-C was about to make use of the world’s largest metal detector. They weren’t looking for lost change or jewelry on the beach. This mechanism was designed to detect a far bigger and more deadly find in the ocean below.

  Jess Carmon, riding in the sensor operator seat on the other side of the bulkhead behind the co-pilot, heeded the skipper’s words, pressing the headset even more tightly to his ears with both hands. His eyes never left the needle on the meter in front of him as he watched for the smallest sign of movement. All the way aft in the P3-C, a twenty-foot-long boom protruded from the tail of the aircraft. Inside the boom, extremely sensitive coils sensed the earth's magnetic field. Those coils were wired to the needle in front of Carmon. As long as the plane flew over open ocean, the needle rested straight up. If the coils passed near a large metal object, the needle would swing wildly.

  As Victor-Four-Tango roared over the spot where they had lost the radar contact, Carmon’s eyes grew wide as he watched the needle swing all the way to the left peg then to the right peg before again coming to rest in the middle of the dial.

  He yelled, "Madman! Madman!" the signal that there was a submarine directly below where they had just flown.

  Pruitt steeply banked the low flying aircraft while he pull
ed back on the yoke to climb. Dalton reached for the throttle quadrants on the console between them and yanked all four down to full throttle. The Pratt and Whitneys responded, roaring with power as the P3 climbed gracefully and turned back to retrace its route.

  Pruitt keyed his mike and tried to keep his voice calm as he spoke.

  “Confirmed hostile sub. Request weapons free."

  The reply from Mission Control was instantaneous.

  "Victor-Four-Tango, you are weapons free."

  Pruitt leveled off at one thousand feet and yanked a handle on his left side. The bomb bay doors beneath the aircraft rumbled open. Next he keyed both the intercom and radio mikes simultaneously.

  "Commence attack run. Drop on sensor's mark."

  Carmon switched his gaze to the large computer screen in front of him. It recorded all the information from the encounter with the big, submerged, metal object and did precise calculations at lightning speed. He watched as the little aircraft icon tracked toward the large "X" that marked for them the drop point where the MAD rig had detected the “enemy” sub.

  "Standby,” he called as the two blips converged on the screen. “Drop now. Now! NOW!"

  Pruitt pressed the little red button on the right of his control yoke. The large plane lurched upward as seven hundred seventy-five pounds of Mark 50 torpedo dropped out of the bomb bay and fell away. As the torpedo dropped free, a lanyard, still connected to the P3, jerked taut, tearing open the chute pack on the back of the torpedo and deploying a small, white parachute.

  The weapon was away. The P3 crew had done its job. Now, they would see how well.

  The submarine’s periscope broke the surface. Commander Jonathan Ward jerked it around quickly, first with the crosshairs on the horizon to see if there were any ships close by. All clear. Nothing but light chop as far as he could see.

  “Why couldn’t we have had open water like this for the first test?” he said aloud. “We could have done one hell of a job for Hunsucker and his TRE team if we had only been given the opportunity.”

  He swung the scope around again. The crosshairs were elevated about forty-five degrees, scanning the sky for any threatening aircraft. He had almost completed his second 360-degree rotation when he saw it. There was no mistaking the P3 that was bearing down on him. The aircraft filled his entire field of view.

  It was close and the bomb bay was open! And it knew he was there. He had to get out of there and he had to do it fast!

  He yelled, "Emergency deep! P3 close aboard!"

  The order "Emergency Deep" started an immediate and automatic chain reaction of carefully schooled responses by the watch-standers. Chief Lyman, the diving officer, reached down to the engine order telegraph and spun the little dial to the "Ahead Full" mark. He punched a button that rang a buzzer by the throttle man, standing at his post in the engine room one hundred feet aft, telling him to open the throttles as fast as he could spin them.

  “Cavitation be damned,” Ward said. “We need speed!”

  Seaman Cortez, standing watch as the fairwater planesman, was sitting directly in front of Chief Lyman. At the call, the young sailor pushed forward hard on his control yoke. Giant hydraulic cylinders pushed the huge wing-like planes protruding from the sides of the sail, rotating them downward until they were in the full-dive position. The sub began to rapidly descend back into the deep.

  Seaman MacNaughton, the stern planesman, was sitting right beside Cortez. He, too, shoved his control yoke forward. The stern planes, all the way aft on the sub, just in front of the huge bronze propeller, rotated upward, helping to push the sub's nose down toward the sea bottom. MacNaughton began with a seven-degree down-angle. Too much slant and the screw would break the surface of the ocean, showing the world Spadefish’s tail, and telling the P3 or anyone else above exactly where they were. He gradually pushed further forward as Chief Lyman called out the depth.

  "Six-two feet. Seven-zero feet. Eight-zero feet. Nine-zero feet.”

  The chant was almost hypnotic, the chief’s tone even and measured. By the time the sub passed through one hundred feet, the dive angle was at twenty degrees down and she was hitting twenty knots.

  As these maneuvers were set into motion, Chief Ralston, the chief of the watch, reached above his head and yanked the red handle of the collision alarm. The piercing blast of the alarm told all the crew to immediately begin shutting every one of the watertight doors and ventilation dampers, to make the submarine as ready for flooding as possible. The COW reached for the large chrome joystick on the desk section of his panel. He pulled it toward him and watched as the meter for the depth control tanks, located in the bilge two decks below him, as they began filling with seawater. The extra weight of all that water would do its part to pull the sub downward more quickly.

  The USS Spadefish was sinking like an anvil, just as its Commander intended.

  The sub was doing what she was built to do, diving to the safety of the deep at the first sign of danger. Hiding in the black vastness beneath the ocean until it was once again safe to return to the surface and hunt. At one hundred fifty feet, both Cortez and MacNaughton pulled back on their control yokes. The sub rocketed ahead at over twenty knots forward speed, quickly vacating the area where the P3 had spotted them.

  Fifteen feet aft of the control room, in a small, narrow cubicle illuminated only by dim, bluish lights, Master Chief Sonarman Ray Mendoza searched the waters around Spadefish, trying to detect the sound of anything that might pose a threat to the boat. He watched the display of his discrete frequency analyzer as it showed him the four Pratt and Whitney turbo-props as they passed overhead the first time, then again when the plane came back around.

  There was another sound. There was no mistaking the splash of the Mark 50 torpedo when it hit the water. He heard the distinctive whine of the torpedo’s lithium metal-powered SCEPS engine as it came up to speed and sent the projectile plowing through the water, in pursuit of Spadefish.

  Mendoza’s broadband display began to show a depiction of the torpedo’s noise on its screen. The sounds were unequivocal. Sweat poured from the sonar man’s forehead and trickled down his back as he grabbed the 27-MC microphone.

  "Conn, Sonar. Torpedo in the water! Bearing zero-three-three!"

  Ward grabbed the 1MC microphone and shouted, "Torpedo in the water!"

  This announcement kicked off another automatic response from the crew. Chief Lyman rang up "Ahead Flank" on the engine order telegraph. Scott Frost, the throttleman, spun open the large, chrome, ahead-throttle as fast as he could manage, his breath rasping as he worked furiously. Steam roared into both of the massive main engines as they whined up to maximum speed. The seventeen-foot-diameter bronze screw at the rear of the boat, weighing better than thirty tons, was now spinning at over two-hundred-and-fifty revolutions per minute. Spadefish leaped ahead, accelerating her forty-seven hundred tons to almost thirty knots.

  Chris Durgan jumped up from his small desk on the after bulkhead of the maneuvering room and stepped over between Frost and Bert Waters, the reactor operator. Durgan, the newest junior officer onboard, had only qualified to stand as engineering officer of the watch (EOOW) the previous week. This was his third time to supervise all the operations of Spadefish's S3G reactor, and certainly his first full-speed tactical readiness exam. The young redhead could feel his heart racing. The pulse pounding in his ears. He watched the reactor-power and steam-flow indicators climb up to one hundred percent. It was all happening so quickly and for a moment, it was more than he could watch at once.

  Waters looked sharply over his shoulder at Durgan. When the young Ensign didn't say anything, when he simply kept watching wide-eyed as the indicators climbed, Waters quickly reached down and pulled up on the handles for four of the six main coolant pumps. That move upped the pumps to fast speed an instant before the reactor power exceeded the safety limits for slow-speed pumps. The entire boat shuddered as the two-story-tall pumps shifted upward, slamming shut huge check valves and pouring mass
ive amounts of cooling water through the reactor core to remove its rapidly increasing nuclear heat.

  Durgan glanced at Waters. He realized he had been distracted by all the excitement and said, "Thanks. Too excited, I guess."

  Waters only nodded. It was not the time to chat about the gaffe. There was more to do at the moment. He hoped no one else had noticed.

  Spadefish raced through the depths as fast as she could go, attempting to outrun the on-rushing torpedo. Mendoza watched the sonar track on the incoming Mark 50 and yelled out the bearing.

  "Torpedo bears zero-three-three! No bearing change!"

  The captain yelled to Chief Ralston, "Shoot the evasion device in the after signal ejector! Reload and shoot again!"

  Spadefish raced along at a depth of three hundred feet. The cavitation, the tiny collapsing bubbles at the back edges of the fairwater planes, sounded for all the world like hail hammering on a tin roof.

  Chief Ralston reached over and flipped a switch. The electric light indicator for the seawater hull valve for the signal ejector changed briefly from "Shut" to "Open," then back to "Shut." All the way aft, in the port side of the engine room, a small cylinder that looked very much like a miniature torpedo tube, pushed its contents out into the sub's slipstream. The evasion device tumbled backward, past the screw, and generated a wall of noise in the water that was intended to hide the racing sub and its whirling propeller from the “ears” of the oncoming torpedo.

  Mendoza shouted into the 27MC microphone, "Evasion device functioning. Torpedo bears zero-three-three.” There was a pause. “It just blew right on past the device!"

  The evasive device had not deterred the torpedo. The unflappable Master Chief was shaking as he watched on the sonar screen as the torpedo’s trace merged with the one for Spadefish.

  The Mark 50 raced beneath the submarine. Ward heard a deafening noise from somewhere below him, followed instantly with a report on the 4MC Emergency Report System, "Flooding! Flooding in the torpedo room!" The sound of the Collision Alarm was almost anti-climatic.