by Mark Joseph
A Navy tug nudged Barracuda into the well of the floating dry dock. A canopy was stretched over the sail, the gates locked, and the water pumped out. Gently, the sub settled onto the steel braces of the huge repair ship. Naked, with the entire 252 feet of teardrop hull exposed. Barracuda was a beached Leviathan of massive proportions.
The tiger team from Portsmouth, a polished and professional assortment of specialists in the art of submarine repair, turned on portable floodlights and began to erect scaffolding over the bow and eighty feet down the starboard side where the Russian sub had scraped along the hull.
While the scaffolding was under construction, Sorensen went up on deck to see what the Russians had done to his ship. He had to lie on his belly and skitter crablike over the hull to get a look at the damaged sonars. For half an hour he lay spreadeagled, trying to match what he saw with what he had heard during the collision. It looked as though Godzilla had walked across the bow, gouging out steel with every step.
The point of impact was directly in the center of a torpedo tube door. The Soviet sub had sideswiped two torpedo doors and six sonar transducers. The outer hull, the thin shell of steel that contained the ballast tanks, had sustained a small puncture, but none of the tanks was ruptured. No vital piping was damaged.
He tried to imagine what had happened to the Russian sub. How had she sustained enough damage to sink and implode? Did her reactor scram? Did she suffer stern plane failure? Was her hull ruptured? Did she lose her prop? He climbed back through the hatch and into the ship, his mind racing through the possibilities. He stood in the control room, watching the electricians, pondering what to do. Finally he knocked on Pisaro's door.
"Come in. What is it. Ace?"
"Sir, I request permission to listen to the tape of the collision. I would like you to listen with me, Mr. Pisaro. I want to edit the tape."
"What do you mean, Sorensen?"
"If we could just listen to the tape, sir, you'll hear what I mean."
"All right."
A minute later Sorensen and Pisaro were alone in the sonar room. Pisaro broke the seal on a reel of tape, and Sorensen threaded it into one of the big recorders.
They listened to the voices on the command intercom, the machinery noises, and then the clash of the collision reverberated around the room, followed by the torpedo motor and the implosions. When it ended, Sorensen reversed the tape to the point where the Russian fired the torpedo, and again they listened to the high whine of the torpedo's gas turbine motor.
"What does it sound like to you, sir?"
"It sounds like a Russian torpedo, Sorensen. I think hearing that sound and living to tell about it is a fucking miracle."
"It appears that way, sir. I heard the motor, and I saw a guide-wire on the screen, but I won't swear that is a torpedo."
"What else could it have been?"
"I don't know, but everything that sub did was strange. It was trying to make us think it was Swordfish when it wasn't. I don't trust any of the sounds I heard from that sub. Just because it sounded like a torpedo doesn't mean it was a torpedo."
"Please explain."
"Maybe they jettisoned some secret equipment. I don't know. I don't think they were trying to sink us. It doesn't make sense, unless there was an electrical circuit failure that fired a torpedo accidentally. But in that case the torpedo already would have been armed and loaded in a tube. Look, Commander, everything that boat did was an acoustic trick. Suppose they thought they weren't going to implode. They thought they could blow their tanks and surface, which would have put them right in the middle of the fleet. In that case they might jettison all their secret equipment, acoustic gadgetry, code books, ciphers, everything. Only, for some reason, they couldn't blow their tanks. They had no power. All the machinery noises had stopped. Maybe in the collision they ruptured their ballast tanks. Who knows? On the other hand if they were sure they were heading for the deep six they might have jettisoned all the equipment in order to prevent us from going down and salvaging it with the Trieste, like we did the Thresher."
"All right. Now what do you want to do?"
Sorensen quickly made a copy of the tape and gave the original back to Pisaro. He ran the duplicate forward to where the Russian fired the torpedo, then played it at a slow speed up to the sound of the first implosion, where he stopped it. With the filters built into his console he laboriously removed each implosion and explosion from the tape, then took out the sounds of the ship breaking up, the wrenching of metal, the screaming of the sea. It was tedious work but after an hour he had a tape of the sounds that were left.
The torpedo motor was still there. It was faint, but it was clear, and the sound continued to the end of the tape.
"Son of a bitch," Pisaro swore. "I'll have to show this to the skipper right away."
* * *
After Pisaro left the sonar room Sorensen popped open his console and removed the tape from his concealed recorder. He was about to take it back to Sorensen's Beach when Fogarty came in, slumped in his seat and stared, brooding, at the large X drawn through the Viktor on the profile sheet.
"What's buggin' you, kid?"
"What do you think, Sorensen? For example, is this going to get us into a war?"
Sorensen shrugged. "Only a little one."
"C'mon. The electricians were in here this morning. They said every sub in Portsmouth and Groton has put to sea. There's an alert. World War Three could start any minute. The whole world could blow up and no one will know why it started."
"Fogarty, the Russians are not going to start World War Three over one lost sub. If it had been a missile sub, that would be different. Besides, it was an accident."
"But it's crazy. Back home nobody is coming on the six o'clock news to say, 'Well, folks, kiss your mama good-bye. We just sank a Russian sub and the Russians don't like it.' "
"We didn't sink a Russian sub."
"The Russians might not see it that way. If it were out in the open, if people knew the truth, that might defuse the situation."
"What good does knowing about this do anybody? It will just get people excited. Look, kid, you can't be the conscience of the navy or even of this ship. You're a pain in the ass."
"Doesn't it matter to you whether we have a war or not?"
"Sure... still, I figure at worst we'll have a little skirmish. If we're lucky we might get a chance to see if any of this shit works. The world isn't going to end, if that's what you're afraid of."
"I don't know," Fogarty said, "the people at home have the right to know—"
"They do? Since when?"
"You think they don't?"
"I know they don't, not since the National Security Act. Reality is classified, kid."
"But that's crazy."
"Fogarty, the only thing worse than spying for the Russians is telling your own people the truth. Look, everybody who has ever been on this ship has thought the same thing. Me, too. Wow! What if people knew about all this stuff, you know? All this secret stuff and all the games with the Russians. But the truth is, they don't want to know."
"That's what you say. I say they'd sure want to know about something like this—"
"Don't be so sure. Look, here's Joe Blow sitting at home watching his TV and he hears, 'Sub Sinks. War Threatens,' and he goes nuts. And when you tell him, you also tell the guy watching the news in Moscow. Did you give him two seconds' thought? He learns that ninety of his country's finest are lying dead on the bottom, and he starts screaming for war. Is he going to believe it was an accident? Is that what Pravda is going to say to him? Don't be a dummy. It works both ways. If it was us down there, would you want every maniac in America to know about it? Don't you know what they would do? Half the United States Senate would vote to nuke the Russians in a minute. So we don't tell people anything. It might be wrong, but the other way is worse."
"So we just forget about it, like it never happened."
"Something like that. Yeah. Learn to live with it like I have. I ju
st ride around in my submarine, and when I go ashore I act like every other stupid drunken sailor you ever heard of. That way I don't have to think about all this shit. Wise up, Fogarty. Look at it this way, if the Russians were going to start a war over this they already would've done it."
"Maybe they don't know about it yet."
"Don't bet on it. They know more than you think, and so do we." Sorensen bit his tongue. "Look, kid, I know you feel bad about the Russians. It was just their tough luck."
"It could have been us, Sorensen."
"I know." He thought about telling Fogarty he now had evidence that maybe the Russian sub didn't sink. But he wasn't positive, not yet, and he wanted his point to sink in.
There was a knock on the door. "Comin' through." Willie Joe came in, followed by a pair of electricians carrying coils of cable over their shoulders. One was wearing a Boston Red Sox baseball cap. "You the sonar guys?" he asked.
"No," Sorensen replied. "I'm Captain Nemo."
"Right, chief. You ready to test about five hundred circuits?"
17
Liberty Call
After a week in dry dock, the welding of the bow was completed and new sonars and torpedo doors installed. Barracuda was moved to a finger pier where electricians continued to work on the circuitry.
Sorensen and Fogarty were in the control room, pulling hundreds of feet of inch-thick cable up from the torpedo room and arranging it in coils. "This is going to help you qualify in record time," Sorensen said. "You might even make second class."
Panting with exertion, Fogarty said, "Pulling cable? You're nuts. You're just trying to keep me busy, keep my mind off what's happened—"
"C'mon, quit yer bitchin'. Heave."
They grunted and moved four hundred pounds of cable six inches. Fogarty wiped his brow.
"I sure could go for a cold beer."
Sorensen dropped the cable. "That's the most sensible thing I've heard you say since you've been aboard. I could go for a dozen myself."
"You been in Rota before?"
"Once."
"What's it like?"
"It's just another scumbag Navy town, kid. Don't get your hopes up." Sorensen raised his voice. "Willie Joe."
The redhead leaned out of the sonar room.
"Yo."
"You finish the circuit test on the new down-searching array?"
"Not yet."
"Forget it. Come give us a hand."
Willie Joe picked up a coil of cable. For an hour they dragged the coils out of the ship and stacked them on the pier. When the last coil was placed on top of the pile they lounged on the pier and watched the civilians work.
A light warm rain started to fall. They could see running lights on the bay. The Russian trawler moved along its picket line from Cádiz to Rota, then turned around and went back.
"What are they so interested in?" Fogarty asked.
"The Vallejo," Sorensen replied. "What else?"
The USS Mariano G. Vallejo, a missile submarine, was berthed at the next pier. Her sixteen Polaris A-3 missiles and their warheads represented more firepower than all the bullets and bombs in all the wars in history.
One of the missile hatches was open, and a team of technicians was removing the nose cone from a missile. The yardbirds stared inside at the bundles of wires and warheads. One grinned and whooshed his hands in a gesture of explosion.
Willie Joe sat down next to Fogarty, who appeared concentrated on the big missile ship.
"Say, Fogarty," he asked, "where'd you learn that karate?"
"It's not karate, it's tae kwan do."
"Tie what? What's that?"
"Korean martial art."
"I never figured a guy like you would know that stuff."
"Oh, yeah? What kind of guy are you supposed to be to know it."
"I dunno. Mean."
"Maybe you've seen too many movies, Willie Joe."
"Did you go to a school and all like that?"
"Sure."
"Will you teach me some of those moves?" Willie Joe tried to smile, but his teeth were bad and his attempt to hide them twisted his smile into more like a smirk.
"Why do you want to learn?"
"So I can whip your ass. Why do you think?"
Before Fogarty could answer, they heard pipes followed by the quartermaster's voice blaring from the loudspeakers on the pier.
"Now hear this. Liberty call, Liberty call. Liberty for the first division will commence at twenty hundred hours. Cards will be good for twenty-four hours. Be advised that by order of the base CO, all personnel are restricted to the naval station and the town of Rota. The city of Cádiz is off limits. That is all."
"That's us," said Sorensen. "I'll buy you sweethearts a beer."
Pisaro came down the gangway hollering, "Sorensen, what are you jawing about?"
"How much we love the navy, sir!"
"Is that a fact. Listen, Ace, I want you back here tomorrow night at twenty hundred hours. Make sure you're on time."
"Aye aye, sir."
"And sober."
"Yes, sir."
By the time they changed, members of the third division were straggling in. Among them was Corpsman Luther.
"I was hoping you'd show up," Sorensen said. Luther nodded and they slipped quietly into the tiny dispensary where the medical stores were kept.
"What's happening in town, Eddie?"
"The usual. A new guy named Buzz took over the Farolito."
"What's he like?"
"He's an old bubblehead with a red nose."
"That figures."
A moment later Sorensen emerged with enough Desoxyn to keep him going all night.
"Let's go, let's go," he said, hustling up the ladder. He popped a pill into his mouth. "Where's Willie Joe?"
"He caught the bus," Fogarty said. "We have to walk."
He was getting to feel as mean as Willie Jo figured he was.
* * *
Nothing looks more like a sailor than a sailor on liberty in civilian clothes. Fogarty had the haircut, the brand-new plaid shirt from the Navy Exchange, the creased Levis, the clumsy black leather shoes, and the all-American smile. Even Sorensen, who took pains to look like anything but a GI, was doomed to failure. The wraparound sunglasses and custom-made cowboy boots helped, as did the faded jeans and Guatemalan shirt, but there was nothing he could do about his swagger or his natural tendency to walk in step with his buddy.
The main gate to the naval station was in the middle of the town. Sorensen and Fogarty flashed IDs at the American and Spanish Marine guards in the sentry box and passed through the barriers. They repeated the process at a second checkpoint manned by the Guardia Civil, policemen with three-cornered leather hats and snub-nosed machine pistols. They crossed railroad tracks and skirted around a traffic rotary that spun off cars and trucks in five directions. Directly opposite the gate, at the foot of the Avenida de Sevilla, an eight-foot painted plaster statue of the Virgin Mary looked down on them from atop a thirty-foot pedestal. A halo of blue light surrounded the head of the idol. Sorensen looked up at the Virgin's merciless eyes and said, "That tells you everything you need to know about Spanish women. You leave them alone."
They stood on the Avenida de Sevilla, rocking on their heels, surveying the scene. A string of seedy bars and cheap hotels tailed away from the gate, their faint lights barely illuminating the dank slum. The rain had stopped, and the cobbled streets glistened. Tiny trucks and motorscooters buzzed past, sending a fine spray into the night. A few sailors in white hats, and many more in civilian clothes, milled from bar to bar, sharing narrow sidewalks with whores, hustlers, priests and old women dressed in black.
"So this is Spain," said Fogarty, staring into the darkness.
"They call this the Coast of Light," Sorensen said. "Light fingers, mostly."
"So where do we go from here, Sorensen?"
"Same old drill. Get drunk, get laid, get stoned, in that order."
"That's it?"
"
So what are we, tourists? C'mon."
They strolled through the Avenida de Sevilla, passing bars, cafes and bodegas. A hundred yards from the gate they stopped in front of El Farolito, "the little lighthouse," and pushed through the door.
A blast of loud rock and roll greeted them inside. They stood for a moment on a small landing, looking down into the partially subterranean bar, while their eyes grew accustomed to the cherry glow of an old diesel sub "geared for red." A white hat flew through the air and landed on a table full of beer bottles. In the rear a pair of castanets danced above a ring of clapping sailors.
Machinist's Mate Barnes reclined on the steps that led down to the saloon, playing a drunken air-guitar in accompaniment to Jimi Hendrix. They stepped over him and picked their way through the crowd to the bar.
The bartender was a blotchy man of fifty.
"Das cervezas," said Sorensen.
"You can talk American here, Mac. A Bud okay?"
"Two cold ones."
Two bottles appeared on the bar. "You fellas off the Barracuda?"
They nodded.
"Hear you're in for repairs."
More nods.
"Hear you sank a Russian boat."
Sorensen did his best to look surprised. "That so? Where'd you hear that?"
The barkeep looked around the room as if he were searching the horizon for a ship. "The word gets around. Guys from your boat been comin' in here for a week. Seems like everybody knows what you don't."
"Well," said Sorensen, "that's news to me."
"Sure, the silent service. I served in subs for thirty years, Mac. I know the score."
"So let me buy you a beer, Chief. To your happy retirement in sunny Spain."
"I never made chief. If you want to get along in here, call me Buzz."
"Okay, Buzz. Have a beer."
Buzz's face cracked a cheerless smile. "Never touch it." He moved on down the bar.
Sorensen looked at Fogarty and laughed. "You want to tell the world about the collision? Seems the world already knows. So much for navy security. If an old alky lifer knows, then everybody knows. The Russians, everybody. Drink up, Fogarty. To freedom, truth, justice and the right to know."
