Final Bearing

by George Wallace

  Behind the three, Master Chief Mendoza sat on a tall stool, looking over their shoulders. He watched all three screens and listened to the sounds of the sea outside through his headset. He was the conductor, orchestrating every move his three sonar men made. He had over twenty years of listening and learning about the symphony of sounds in the sea, and especially the machines that caused the manmade noises. It seemed to Ward that Mendoza could eavesdrop on another boat and tell what it was going to do even before the boat had a chance to do it.

  He was holding the earpieces tightly against his head, listening with deep concentration while staring at the middle sonar screen.

  "What's he doing, Master Chief?"

  Mendoza scowled in Ward’s direction, annoyed at being disturbed while performing such a tedious chore. When he saw it was Ward standing there, he raised a finger to tell the Skipper to wait for a second. He listened for several more seconds and nodded, confirming some mental evaluation he had made. He pushed one of the earpieces back off his ear.

  "Damned if I know what he's doing, Skipper. He just stopped. We're still a hundred miles from the Straits. No other contacts except those fishermen over at two-one-zero and they’re at least twenty thousand yards away." Mendoza shrugged. "No reason I know of to stop way out here."

  "Anything else?"

  "Yeah, I just started to pick up some auxiliaries. That's what I was listening to when you came barging in."

  Ward stepped over to have his own look at the center sonar display. Mendoza was very good, but no one got to command one of these boats without being pretty damned good, too. The operator handed Ward his headset.

  "Here, Skipper. Analog broadband. It's on the bearing for that merch."

  Ward held the earpiece to his head and listened to the noise of the ocean. He could hear the distinctive rising and falling tones of killer whales singing somewhere off in the distance. There was the unmistakable snapping of shrimp somewhere in that same direction. But through the background noise, the biologics of the ocean, he could also hear what sounded like water rushing from a pipe and the rotating beat of some kind of mechanical device. He listened harder. Whatever it was, it seemed to be a little out of balance. He could hear the frequency rise and fall a bit with each rotation.

  "Sounds like he might be flooding down. I hear water. He has a pump running. The impeller bearing is rubbing. He needs to grease it before it seizes up on him."

  Mendoza grinned.

  "You haven’t lost your ear, Skipper. Yep, that pump only has a few more hours to go and that’s about all she wrote. What has me stumped are the chains. Hear them, real faint-like?"

  Ward listened again, even more intently, if that were possible. He could barely make out the rattle. Or maybe he was only imagining it. It was so faint he couldn't be sure.

  "Okay, Master Chief. I hear it, I think. Keep listening. We're going in closer and take a look."

  Ward stepped out of the sonar shack, back in to the brightly lit passageway that led past his stateroom and into the control room. Joe Glass and Ed Beasly stood together on the periscope stand, staring attentively at the sonar repeater. Chris Durgan sat in front of the fire control computer, tweaking the dials, playing with the data, always watching every move the Helena K made.

  "What you think, XO?" Ward asked Glass.

  Glass looked up, startled by the skipper’s sudden appearance.

  "We were just getting ready to call you. You're supposed to be asleep. Looks like our friend just stopped." Glass stepped over to the plot table. The quartermaster was plotting Spadefish's position and their best guess of Helena K's. The plot showed them at the mouth of the Straits of Juan de Fuca, the waterway that led to Puget Sound, Seattle and Vancouver, British Columbia. They were right in the center of an area marked as fishing grounds. "May be time for him to send his little friend ashore if he really has one on board. He's in about the perfect place, in the middle of these fishing grounds, so he's away from other traffic. And he’s far enough from Port Angeles harbor traffic control so they won't be tracking him on radar yet."

  Ward stared at the chart and nodded agreement.

  "Yep, perfect place. Time for us to get to work. Let's go take a look." Ward looked over his shoulder and ordered, "Officer of the Deck, proceed to periscope depth. Man battle stations silently."

  Beasly reached into the overhead and snapped the scope control ring to the raised position. He squatted and waited as the greased shaft rose out of the scope well. When the control section emerged, he popped the black handles down, stuck his right eye to the eyepiece and slowly began walking a tight circle. Without moving his eye from the scope, he called out, "Diving Officer, make your depth six-four feet."

  Chief Laskowski answered, "Make my depth six-four feet, aye," and turned, directing Cortez and MacNaughton while they brought Spadefish smoothly up from the depths.

  "Chief of the Watch, man battle stations silently," Beasly called to Chief Lyman.

  Lyman reached over to his left to a chrome-plated switch labeled “Emergency DC Lights” and flicked the switch on and off three times. Ward heard the soft pounding of feet as men rushed to their battle stations in response to the flashing lights. When submarine sonars became sensitive enough to hear the blast of the general alarm on another boat, submariners invented the silent method to warn the crew quietly. The reason for manning silently here wasn't to keep from alerting the Helena K. If the merch even had sonar, they likely would not be using it. Ward simply didn’t want to disturb his people who were driving the sub up to periscope depth.

  Ward watched the video monitor as it showed him an image of what Ed Beasly was seeing through the scope. The deep blue slowly lightened to turquoise as the sub came up. There were a few quick flashes of white as the scope broke the surface, then Ward was looking at the stern of the Helena K, no more than six thousand yards away. There was no telltale white wake behind her, no frothing, churning white water under her high stern. Helena K's screw was not turning. She was dead in the water, not making way. There wasn’t anyone on deck.

  "Ed, come around to course zero-one-seven," Ward said quietly. "I want to slip up along her starboard side and see if there's anyone on the bridge or the main deck."

  The sub eased forward until Ward could see the bridge of the rusty freighter. "Ed, shift to twenty-four power."

  Beasly snapped the periscope optics to its highest power. The view changed. Ward was looking into the door of the deckhouse, almost as if he was standing on Helena K's bridge wing. It looked empty. There wasn’t anyone there. The main deck was equally empty. The thing was all but a ghost ship.

  Ward was satisfied that whatever was happening on the drug smuggler, it was happening below decks, down where they couldn't see.

  "Alright, Ed. I've seen enough. Let's drop down to one-two-zero feet." As the scope dropped below the surface, Ward stepped over to the plot table. Joe Glass stood there, intently studying the situation. Ward put his hand on Glass' shoulder. "What do you recommend, XO?"

  Glass continued to stare at the plot.

  "Skipper, he's got to be deploying that mini-sub. I can’t imagine any other reason he’d be sitting out here like this. We should get in close and set up to trail that sucker. Something tells me he'll either be on a battery or maybe one of those new air-independent systems. That'll make him real quiet. We need to be close to make sure we find him right away when he gets launched. Otherwise, we're out of luck."

  Ward chewed on his lip for a few seconds, lost in thought.

  "The towed array is useless in this shallow water. Too much chance of snagging it on the bottom. With all the other traffic around here, passive tracking would be just about impossible." Ward paused for a long second before continuing. "I'm thinking maybe this is a place to use active sonar. He’s not going to have an intercept receiver. As long as he doesn't hear the pings through the hull, we can keep tabs on him and he’ll never know we’re tailing him."

  "But we still need to stay close, and to keep
the transmit power down," Glass commented. "Even if that guy doesn't hear it, too much power will just blank everything with all the biologics this close to shore."

  Ward nodded agreement.

  "Okay, XO. Get Spadefish in a thousand yards astern of that rust bucket. I'm going to sonar and talk to Master Chief Mendoza."

  Philippe Zurko reluctantly followed Rudi Sergiovski down the metal ladder through the little round hatch and into the Zibrus. The fat, obnoxious Russian plopped into the pilot's seat and plugged his headset into the communications system. Zurko was left to fend for himself, ignored by Sergiovski, as the pilot flipped switches, slowly bringing the little boat to life.

  Zurko stowed his satchel and watched from a stool at the rear of the cramped space. He already felt the walls pressing in around him and they weren’t even out of the boat and submerged yet. Only the thought of El Jefe’s anger if this mission failed gave him the impetus to crawl back into this fetid crypt once again. The ride out to meet the Helena K had been bad enough, at the very edge of his endurance. This trip would be over twice as long, each way. And they were sneaking into America, right past one of that country’s most protected submarine bases. Even if they made the delivery successfully, they would have to come all the way back out to rendezvous with the Helena K once more, pick up Sui’s heroin, and do the whole thing over again.

  If they were found out anywhere along the route, they would surely be sunk. He would drown in this awful thing. But even that prospect was less frightful than facing the wrath of Juan de Santiago.

  Sergiovski spoke into the headset.

  “Captain Novstad, Zibrus is ready. Open the doors."

  "Doors opening,” Serge Novstad answered. “We will meet you at the rendezvous in five days. Good luck, Captain Sergiovski."

  The doors in the bottom of the freighter opened, releasing the Zibrus to the sea. Sergiovski opened the vents for the mini-sub's ballast tanks, causing it to sink out of the bottom of the ship.

  Zurko couldn't suppress a shiver as he saw the water lap up and over the small, thick viewing ports on the side of the little sub's sail. He stared while the picture changed from the black sides of the freighter's hold to the deep turquoise of the open sea.

  "Phillipe, my friend, we will sink to fifty meters and drive into the American harbor as boldly as we please!” Sergiovski shouted. “The auto pilot will drive us straight and true for the next several hours. Time for some vodka to celebrate the beginning of our little voyage!"

  Phillipe Zurko gladly took the offered drink, downed it in one gulp, and handed the cup back for another belt of courage.

  A thousand yards behind the Zibrus, Ward stood in the sonar room next to Mendoza, listening to the mini-submarine’s noises on a headset.

  "Sounds like they're underway. XO was right. That sucker sure is quiet."

  Mendoza nodded.

  "Yep, it’ll be hard to keep a bead on him when we get in the middle of the in-shore traffic. We better map out all the noises this guy makes. When do you want to start active track?"

  Ward answered, "Let's start now. I want to get his course and speed down pat, then move in closer."

  Mendoza nodded and leaned over to talk to one of the sonar men. The operator began pushing a series of buttons arrayed around the screen. The screen picture changed to show a small sector of a circle and a couple of line graphs.

  "Ready to go active, four milli-second, low power twelve degree sector pulse," Mendoza announced.

  Ward nodded, his eyes focused on the screen.

  "Go active."

  The operator pushed a button. Ward heard the briefest click. A curved trace moved up the sector on the screen. A blip appeared behind the trace and a peak appeared on the line graphs. The operator shouted, "I have a positive return! Range one-one hundred yards, bearing zero-one-three."

  "Good, that's the bearing we hold the mini-sub on. Master Chief, let me know when you're ready to move closer. I figure we need to be about five hundred yards astern of this sucker when we get in the straits or we’ll lose him in the clutter for sure."

  "That ought to give us a little margin, Skipper," Mendoza commented. "But when we surface, active is going to get real hard. All that surface return will screw it up and I don't hold a lot of hope for passive broadband either."

  "Well, Master Chief," Ward chuckled dryly. "That's why they pay me the big bucks. We aren't going to surface. We’re going to run submerged until we run out of water."

  Ward turned and headed for control. Mendoza swallowed hard as he watched him go.

  A loud buzzer reverberated around inside the steel walls of the tiny space. Sergiovski roused himself, stretched, farted, and shoved the vodka bottle aside. He leaned forward and tried to read the auto pilot screen through bleary eyes.

  "Da, we are making good time,” he rumbled, then belched deeply. “We are abreast of Cape Flattery. Phillipe, my friend, we are now in the Straits of Juan de Fuca. We are going to drive right down the center of the traffic separation scheme."

  The Russian turned a small knob on the control panel and watched as the digital readout right above skewed around to read “one-one-zero.” He was steering the mini-sub to drive right down the median between the inbound and outbound lanes of the maritime superhighway that reached into Vancouver, Seattle and Tacoma. This was one of the busiest ports in the world. The huge radar at Port Angeles, Washington, on the southern shore of the strait watched the comings and goings of ships steaming through the ten-mile-wide waterway. Controllers there directed the ships, spacing them out safely in their lanes, much like air traffic controllers.

  “Bueno,” the Colombian said without conviction.

  "Phillipe, if you are concerned about the Americans, you can stand against that bulkhead," Sergiovski said with a crooked grin, pointing to his left. "You will be in Canada there. I'll sit over here in the United States."

  The Zibrus cruised three hundred feet below the steel-gray waters of the broad strait even as the daily commerce of the world steamed overhead, oblivious to their presence.

  Sergiovski yawned and Zurko could smell his foul breath.

  "We have eight hours until our next turn. I'm going to take a nap."

  Within seconds the fat Russian was once again snoring peacefully.

  Zurko waited fifteen more minutes, watching the slobbering fool sleep. Finally he was satisfied Sergiovski would not likely rouse from his slumber. He picked up his little satchel and slipped through the hatch at the rear of the control room and entered the cargo bay. He opened the satchel and carefully removed the contents. Taking the first kilo package of cocaine, he inserted the hypodermic needle and injected a clear liquid.

  Zurko calculated it would take four hours to dose all the coke with the extra additive. There should be plenty of time. The Russian bastard was sleeping the sleep of the dead. Still, he kept an ear cocked for the awful buzzing of the man’s snores as he did his leader’s bidding.

  Five hundred yards behind the Zibrus and fifty feet deeper, Spadefish relentlessly followed her prey.

  "You still getting good active?" Glass asked Mendoza over the sound-powered phone.

  Glass was staring intently at the lines drawn on the chart in front of him as he waited for the reply. Dave Kuhn was busily drawing new lines and scribbling notes on the chart, recording every move the mini-sub made. Mendoza was looking at a screen that showed several line graphs slowly building in height.

  "Yeah, XO. Still getting solid returns. We’ve been picking up a couple of good narrow band lines on the conformal array, too. LOFAR on one gives a blade rate for five knots. That equates to your solution, doesn't it?"

  The conformal array was a series of sonar hydrophones mounted in a horseshoe shape around Spadefish's bow, conforming to its rounded shape. The array was especially designed to detect discrete frequency signals, particularly those coming from propulsion equipment. Its results confirmed they were still tracking the same bogey, the target they suspected was a mini-sub launched from
the Helena K.

  "Five knots, course one-one-zero. Been doing that all the way in." Glass leaned over Kuhn's shoulder and looked at the chart. "He should be turning to the south-south-east, course about one-six-five in about ten minutes if he is going to stay in the middle of the separation scheme. Otherwise he's going to run into a twenty fathom shoal in about three miles."

  Mendoza pushed the earpiece hard against his head. He had just detected a noise there that he hadn't heard before, a noise that his instincts told him shouldn’t have been there at all.

  He grabbed the 21MC microphone and yelled, "Conn, sonar! Chain rattle dead ahead and close! Come hard right, now!"

  Ed Beasly jumped up, startled. He had been watching the sonar repeater as its waterfall display showed the varying sounds of the straits. The mini-sub painted a thin but distinct white line down the screen. Then he saw a couple of much brighter white dots show up right below the little icon for Spadefish's course. Something new and loud lay dead ahead.

  He yelled, "Helm, right full rudder! Steady course one-six zero! All stop!" Only then did he jump over to the chart table. "What the hell is that?"

  Kuhn looked perplexed.

  "Only thing nearby is the turn buoy for heading into Victoria harbor. They must have moved the damn thing. We should be a couple of hundred yards south of it."

  "Well, we ain’t! We damn near hit it! That would've ruined our entire day," Beasly snorted as he slowly calmed down.

  "Conn, sonar. Report loss of contact on the mini-sub. We lost him when we came around. Don't hold him on any sensors. Commencing search."

  Joe Glass felt his stomach sink. Jon Ward dropped his head for a moment.

  The sonar team began the laborious process of trying to again find the quiet little mini-sub in the busy, noisy waters of the straits. It was like trying to locate the squeaky chair at a rock concert. Ward steered Spadefish around the confined waters while Mendoza and his team tried every trick they knew to make the swirling, noisy waters reveal the mini-sub once again.