Ward smiled as he watched. This drill had gone well. He finally let go of the control column.
As he turned to congratulate his crew, he found himself face to face with a livid Cookie Dotson. The sub’s cook was wiping dark brown cake batter from his face and angrily flinging it wherever it might fly.
"Dammit, Skipper! Can't you ever tell me when you're gonna do these things? I was just about to put the XO's birthday cake in the oven when you sent me ass-over-tea-kettle into the mixing bowl. The damned thing is splattered all over the galley now. It looks like a chocolate bomb went off in there!"
Ward couldn't help it. He burst out laughing. With all the tension of the last few weeks, with the near disasters out of San Diego, and with the tragic accident in the torpedo room, there had not been much chance for levity lately aboard Spadefish. The chocolate-covered sailor was, to tell the truth, one comical sight. Besides, all the crewmembers gathered around for the drill were doubled over with laughter as well.
"Cookie, I'm sorry," the skipper finally managed to gasp once he got his breath back. "I'll come down and help you mix up the next one as soon we get to PD to get the message traffic onboard.” He paused a beat. “Yellow cake okay? Chocolate doesn't seem to be your color."
And that simple remark set the whole bunch of them off on another laughing jag.
Ward finally turned to Stan Guhl.
"Mr. Guhl, secure from stern planes jam dive drill. Make your depth one-five-zero feet and clear baffles to come to periscope depth."
"Yes, sir."
Ward, still chuckling, walked back to his stateroom. He yelled through the joining doors at Joe Glass.
"XO, you missed it. You wouldn't have believed Cookie, covered with chocolate batter, wiping it out of his eyes and mad as hell and blaming it all on me and the jam dive drill. Tell you what. I'm appointing you my official food taster until he calms down a bit."
Glass stepped into the stateroom, both hands raised in defense.
"No way! Submarining may be hazardous duty, but that’s suicidal," he laughed.
"Okay, I guess I'll subsist on crackers and cold cuts for a while. Changing subjects. We're almost in area. I want to test our systems one more time. Get the ESM party manned and run a full search this time at PD. I want to know that our electronic surveillance systems are at one-hundred percent."
Glass nodded.
"No problem, Skipper. I'll sit with them and make sure myself.”
The JA phone buzzed. Ward grabbed the handset and keyed the talk button.
"Captain."
"Captain, Officer of the Deck Under Instruction. Depth one-five-zero feet, speed six knots. Made a careful baffle clear to the left. No contacts. Request permission to come to periscope depth."
Ward smiled. Durgan would be all right.
"Thank you, Mr. Durgan. I'll be out in a second."
The skipper stood and turned to leave.
"You know, XO, Chris is going to make a damn fine OOD one of these days."
“Agreed,” Glass said.
They were both thinking the same thing: not on this old boat, though. Ward patted the bulkhead affectionately as he exited the stateroom. He couldn’t help being sentimental. One last mission and Spadefish would be jerked right out of the ocean she seemed to love so much.
Ward resolved one more time to make this final operation as good as it could be. He owed the old girl at least that much.
20
"Conn, ESM, request you raise the ESM mast."
Joe Glass's voice was hollow and metallic as it spilled from the open mike speaker. Chris Durgan lifted his eye from the periscope eyepiece. He had been observing one of his favorite sights while he circled around, looking for anyone approaching Spadefish. Outside, the western sky was ablaze in the pinks, oranges and golds of the departing sun. The heavens darkened to a deep indigo to the east. A few stars were already starting to twinkle through the gathering darkness. Venus rose bright and bold in the east, just below the sliver of the new moon. The darker blue sea was empty, calm.
Inside Spadefish’s control room, the Quartermaster had already turned off the bright white fluorescent lights and switched on the dim red ones, “rigged control for red.” Doc Marston was little more than a shadowy form, seated at the ballast control panel over to the port side of the control room.
In a quiet voice, his tone seemingly dictated by the half-light, Durgan ordered, "Raise the ESM mast."
Marston stood, reaching high up on the vertical section of the panel to flip a switch.
"ESM mast coming up," he confirmed.
One of the bars of green lights that were lined up in a row in front of him blinked out. Durgan knew that the light said "ESM mast housed," but he was too far away to read the tiny letters.
Now, Durgan spun around to take a look aft and down at the faint phosphorescent wake of the scope. He was just in time to see a strangely shaped object break the dark surface of the sea. It looked like a black beer barrel with a flat hat and bent rods sticking out at odd angles.
"ESM mast breaking the water."
Joe Glass, sitting on a bench locker in the ESM bay forty feet aft, watched as Al Carlos and Dan Larson carefully adjusted their electronic equipment, like a couple of piano tuners trying to strike only perfect notes. Glass heard Chris Durgan's voice over the open microphone system, which had been installed years before. It picked up voices in the vicinity of the periscope so the ESM watch could hear what was going on. Likewise, the microphone above Glass's head allowed Durgan to just as clearly eavesdrop on conversations in ESM.
The ESM bay constituted the after half of the radio room. Even in the highly classified atmosphere of Spadefish, the radio room was special territory. It was the only room onboard that was kept permanently locked. Only crew members with a special clearance and a “need-to-know” were given the seven-digit code necessary to open the cipher-locked door.
The real secrets of the room were in this back corner. Spadefish and her sisters of the Sturgeon class had been designed more as spy ships than as offensive weapons. With their endurance and stealth, they could sit off the coast of an unsuspecting country for months at a time without being detected. The sophisticated sensors housed in this room allowed her to sweep the electronic spectrum, gathering, decrypting, translating, and interpreting.
During the long years of the Cold War, several of these boats were always on station, just outside the territorial limits of the old USSR, hidden but listening attentively. It had been a very dangerous game of cat and mouse. The secrets that had been gathered in this room and others on boats like it had helped to win that war. The “Silent Service” had certainly lived up to its name, and even now, few knew of its contributions to the eventual fall of the Soviet Union.
Larson looked up from the tiny CRT. The squiggly lines on its green screen commanded his complete attention, despite the tight quarters. He faced a bulkhead crowded with a myriad of black boxes, barely inches away. Another bulkhead behind his crouched form was equally close and similarly cluttered with equipment. The blue overhead light gave the packed out closet a surreal glow.
Dan Larson, his eyes shining, glanced over at Glass.
"Got a signal already, XO. Looks like the receivers are working."
Al Carlos sat on a bench locker, facing the other way. He wore a headset and fiddled with a tiny keyboard on the vertical face of one of the black boxes. His face was scrunched up, his mouth crooked as he listened hard. He finally glanced sideways at Larson.
"Dan, you may be gettin’ sumthin’, but I ain't got squat."
He punched some of the buttons in front of him once again.
"You sure, Al?" Larson asked.
"You think I'm deaf? ‘Course, I'm sure."
Larson looked over at the shorter, darker technician. The two had worked as a team for years and had the easy familiarity of an old married couple, but with the same tendency for nagging. These two men weren't part of the normal Spadefish crew. They were special hitchhikers.
"Spooks," the crew called them, on loan from the Naval Intelligence Service. They were specially trained to operate this equipment and to analyze its output. Sometimes they rode the boats, sometimes they flew in specially equipped planes, and often they manned lonely listening posts on hilltops far from civilization.
"Okay, okay,” Larson said with a wave of a hand. “Ain't nothing between you and me except for four feet of coaxial cable. Everything hooked up right?"
Carlos reached behind his black box and felt around for dangling connectors or non-plugged sockets.
"Yep, all hooked up over here."
"Time to go to the last line o' the troubleshootin’ manual then, buddy."
Carlos looked at his friend, his brow furrowed.
"What that be?"
"It's highly technical,” Larson said with a smile. “It says, 'Wiggle here, wiggle there, wiggle, wiggle everywhere.’"
Carlos laughed.
"You damn hillbilly! You fished me in again."
Larson reached behind the black box he was watching. Grabbing one of the cables attached to it, he gave it a vigorous shake and a sharp tug.
Carlos held his headset tightly to his ears.
"I could hear snatches of signal. The BNC connector must be bad. I’ll swap the whole cable."
Carlos fished a new cable from a nearby locker and tied the faulty one into a knot so it wouldn’t accidentally be reused before the bad twist-on connector could be re-soldered.
"Ahh, much better," Carlos reported with a contented sigh, as if he was now hearing beautiful music through his headset. He perked up, interested in whatever he was receiving. Larson saw the signs. His friend was listening to something that had grabbed him. Something out of the ordinary.
"Whadda you got?"
"Damn, that shouldn't even be here," Carlos muttered. He punched some more buttons on the keyboard and listened intently. Then he stood and reached over to another nearby black box. He flipped a switch that caused the squiggly lines on the CRT on the box’s face to start to dance, then he pushed a series of buttons on its keyboard. "I don't believe it." He reached over to a cassette deck and started a tape spinning then turned to Joe Glass. "XO, you speak any Spanish?"
"Si, studied it two years at the Academy and I’ve taken a few trips to Tijuana."
Carlos picked up a spare headset, plugged it in, then handed the other end to Glass.
"Good, listen to this."
Glass slid the headset over his ears and cupped them tightly with both hands. The Spanish was rapid-fire and Glass was rusty, but as best he could make out, someone was arranging a meeting somewhere. Didn't sound very exciting to him. A couple of merch captains in port trying to pick their brothel for the evening, maybe. He looked over at Carlos and raised an eyebrow as if to say, “So what?”
The spook chuckled.
"I see you don't appreciate my find, XO. Let me help you out. First off, the signal is coming in on an encrypted channel on a frequency reserved for deep ocean weather buoys. That means these guys ain’t up to anything good. Anyone hearing it without this li’l gizmo would just be getting static. Someone is going to a lot of trouble to hide what they’re talking about." Carlos glanced over at Larson. "Hey, how’s about gettin’ off your dead ass and DF'n this sucka?"
Larson ignored his partner’s jibe. He was already speaking into the open mike.
"Conn, request you lower all masts except the ESM. Need to cut a DF on a contact."
Durgan acknowledged, "ESM, number two scope coming down. Tell me when you're done. I don't like flying blind."
Even as he spoke, Durgan reached over his head and rotated the red wheel. The greased silver scope barrel slid smoothly into the well at his feet.
Larson watched the mast position indicator above his head. As soon as the green light came on showing the scope was down and out of the way of his direction-finding signal, he flipped a couple of switches on a black box to his left. In only a few seconds, a strip of paper that looked much like a cash register receipt popped out of an opening on the front of the equipment.
Larson glanced at the printing on the slip and handed it over to Carlos. He spoke into the mike, "Conn, DF completed. You can raise the scope and get your eyes back now."
Carlos studied the output of the radio direction finder for a half minute.
"See, XO. Just like I guessed. This guy is almost due south of us. Bearing one-seven-five. No land that way ‘til we see penguins. We got us a druggie lookin’ to set up a shipment is what we got."
Glass considered the evidence. It was slim, circumstantial at best. But this wasn't a court-martial. Hunches counted here. And Carlos and Larson knew their business. They had both spent a good part of their Navy careers eavesdropping on drug smugglers and their clandestine conversations.
Glass spoke in the direction of the mike.
"Mr. Durgan, ask the Captain to come to ESM."
Glass heard a deeper voice when he relayed the message.
"XO, on my way," Jon Ward said.
John Bethea chewed on his lower lip as he listened to Ward talk.
"John, we've got tapes we're analyzing now, but it all holds together. Our crypies' estimates are a high probability drug transfer. We've been getting intermittent hits for the last couple of hours. Direction finding lines of bearings puts them about six hundred miles south of us. The area of uncertainty is an ellipse with a hundred mile long major axis bearing one-seven-nine and a ten-mile minor axis."
Bethea tracked the mouse across his own computer screen, drawing the area Ward described.
"Jon, that's almost two thousand square miles of ocean. Can you narrow it down any more than that? Could be a dozen or more ships in that area and there’s no way for you tell in a hurry which ones we want to make a call on."
"Sorry, that's the best I got right now,” Ward shot back. “We're doing this with only our line of bearings. If you can get anyone else in position to try to grab the signal, maybe we can triangulate it."
Bethea looked around the room. The Command Center was strewn with maps and papers. The large screen monitors were showing the progress of Bill Beaman and his SEAL team through Peru and southern Columbia. Several new satellite photos lay on the desk in front of him. They vividly pictured a mountainside with a raw, jagged scar of fresh rockslide down the face of it.
Bethea scratched the uncharacteristic stubble on his chin. He had not had time to run his electric razor across his face lately. He had simply forgotten to shave. He had also forgotten to eat and sleep.
They were getting close to the pay-off. Bethea could feel it.
"Don't know how much time we can give you to pursue this, Jon. Beaman is hot on the trail and should be getting close to a major processing plant. You have to be in position and ready to send over some Tomahawks when he gets the info. Otherwise, all this is wasted and we don’t have any way to turn that plant into sawdust."
Ward looked down at the chart once again. The ellipse looked so small and so close to where Spadefish sat. Every instinct in his body told him that they shouldn't let this sleaze get away when they were so near. A quick sweep through, a few hours diversion from the mission, that was all it would take.
He also knew Bethea was right to hesitate. Spadefish’s job was to be there for Bill Beaman. Together, they could destroy far more than a single boatload of contraband. It was tempting.
Ward finally pushed the talk button on the red handset.
"John, you're right, of course. It just sticks in my craw to let this guy loose when we’re so close."
"Well, we don’t even know for sure that he's a druggie, do we?"
"Have to go on what my people say. They’re sure it’s somebody up to no good, so I’m sure, too. These guys are good. If they say 'druggie,' you can write it down in the log."
Bethea leaned back in his chair. He rubbed his temples. The pressure was getting heavy now. They were near to breaking the back of de Santiago’s operation. If the boat they had heard was part of de Santiago�
��s fleet, if it held a load of that killer dope headed back for the States, it would be worth investigating. But Spadefish was not the posse he needed riding after the bad guys.
"If you're that sure, Jon, I can get somebody else to go out there to take a look."
Ward scrutinized the chart again. They still had to travel four hundred miles to the southeast before they would be in their assigned patrol area. The intercept with the mystery boat would be six hundred miles almost due south. If they maintained their current twenty-five knots, they would only be able to arrive in area in time. There was no leeway for diversions.
"I'm sure. We’ll take a pass. Get anyone you've got out there. We'll leave it to you, boss."
Serge Novstad was livid. That damn mini-sub was late. Rendezvous was in one hour and the bastards still had not left port. This was going to screw up the whole schedule. He could do nothing more than sit out here and bob around. Wait for them to show up on their own sweet time. Secure channel or not, he hated having to resort to all the radio transmissions they had been slinging around already. There were some big ears out there.
He stared out the bridge window of the Helena K. The beautiful star-studded night sky was lost on him. Novstad slid the side window open a bit to let the cool breeze in. It didn’t mollify his heated temper.
He spun around sharply to face the first officer, seated in a corner at the rear of the bridge.
"Anything new?"
The short, dark man slid back the earphones and turned to face his captain.
"No, Senor. They report they are still working on the problem with the navigation system. Zibrus reports everything is loaded. As soon as Senor Sergiovski gets it to work, they will depart port and head our way."
"Damn Russians!” Novstad paced angrily across the bridge, then turned and stomped back. “Never could trust the lazy bastards! Probably forgot to turn the damn thing on."
He strode over to the GPS repeater. The screen showed a chart of the waters off the northern part of South America. He punched in the Zibrus location. A dot appeared on the screen just north of Coji mi es, Ecuador. Moving the little black roller ball, he connected the dot to the "X" marking the location of where the Helena K rode on the open Pacific. They were over two hundred kilometers due west of the small isolated Ecuadorian port.
Final Bearing Page 25
