by Shock Totem
“Sonar?” Pierce repeats yet again.
“What?”
Everyone jumps at Hoag’s shout like it’s a shot, necks and chairs twisting as they stare. He’s still hunched over the display, one hand clapped to the side of his headphones like he’s trying to push the damn thing right into his ear.
“Is there a problem, Petty Officer?” the skipper asks, voice hard. Again the con trembles with his footsteps as he moves to stand beside Hoag’s station.
“No, sir. I’m sorry, sir, really. It’s just... I swear there’s something. Active sonar’s not picking anything up, but I can hear something in the water out there...”
“Singing again?” I think it’s Malhotra who asks, but I’m not sure. A couple of the guys chuckle, but it sounds forced—and even those fade away at the expression on Hoag’s face.
“Skipper?” Hoag says softly, and I swear he sounds like a little boy asking for his mommy. “I think maybe—”
The entire boat slews sideways, twisting off course and rocking on its axis. The skipper grabs onto Hoag’s chair, keeping his feet, but I see the XO and several of the seamen go staggering across the con like it was an old episode of Star Trek. I don’t black out, exactly, but it takes a few seconds for my brain to catch up with my body, to fight through the sudden vertigo. When I can see again, Franks is helping Malhotra back into his seat, and the XO’s pulling himself up against the far wall. A thin trickle of blood winds its way down the side of his face.
“Report! Did we hit something?”
“Negative, skipper!” Malhotra and Franks fight with their helm controls, stabilizing course and depth. “Least, I don’t think so. Some kind of crosscurrent; came out of nowhere!”
Or at least, it might as well have, since sonar didn’t fucking warn us about it!
“Petty Officer Hoag!” Pierce twists back to the man sitting before him. “What the hell do you... What the fuck?”
Let me tell you, hearing the skipper like that... Think about your gramma, or your preacher reacting that way, you might have an idea how we feel. Every damn one of us stands and turns, ignoring our own stations, trying to see.
If you know anything about Navy subs, you know that we’re all supposed to be proficient with every duty station. Not expert—can’t be an expert at everything, right?—but competent enough to take over if we have to. So every one of us who can see Hoag’s sonar station can read the display.
At least, sort of.
That strange underwater current has slewed the San Jacinto around to face a rock wall some distance dead ahead. Nothing really special about it; just part of the topography of the ocean floor. Nothing except for a huge archway—natural, uneven, but damn near big enough for the San Jack to pass through sideways—gaping open in the rock face.
We can tell that much, you see, from the active sonar. The bounce-back of those annoying little pings draws a shape across the sensors and the display.
But through the arch? That’s fucked up something fierce. Parts of the image are completely blank, like the sound’s not echoing back at all. Other sections are fuzzy, the edges of the images unclear. In some cases, they’re even overlapping, like some of the sound waves were knocked straight back while others punched halfway through the rock before bouncing.
You ever seen a reel of film stutter and burn? If you can picture sound doing that, and then the sonar trying to make a visual “blob” out of it, maybe you can imagine what we see. I barely can, and I’m looking at it!
And we see something else, too. Something the active sonar’s pinging back to us, something we don’t need Hoag’s headphones to read.
“We’ve got movement!” the skipper shouts, peering over the Petty Officer’s shoulder. “Hoag, range and bearing to target? Hoag!”
And Hoag straightens in his chair—and begins, in a cracking voice, to sing.
“Hush, little baby, don’t say a word. Mama’s gonna buy you a hummingbird...”
Does it say something about me that my first thought—once I can manage one—is He’s singing it wrong; it’s supposed to be “mockingbird”?
“Petty Officer Hoag, God damn it!” Commander Pierce grabs the chair in both hands, spins it around so he can stare Hoag full in the face, and then falls back with a cry.
Hoag’s head is tilted sideways, listening intently to whatever he’s hearing through the passive sonar. Tears flow freely through his tightly squeezed eyelids; a trail of snot glistens across his upper lip; and a thick trickle of warm, rich blood bubbles up from beneath his headphones, painting his sideburns in thick shades of crimson.
“And if that diamond ring turns brass...”
“Hoag!”
“Mama’s gonna buy you...”
“God damn it, get Bass up here!”
Lieutenant Commander Morgan’s already reaching for the nearest handset. “Senior Chief Bass, to the control room! Senior Chief Bass to con, ASAP!”
“Skipper!” Sam Demarco points a shaking finger at the sonar.
Again, with the active systems going, it doesn’t take a guy plugged into the board to see the signs of movement coming at us out of that fucked up stone archway.
“Damn it! Callen, get over here!” But Pierce doesn’t wait for Seaman Callen to relieve Hoag at sonar. With the boat off-kilter, an unknown target bearing down on us, the skipper shoves the singing Petty Officer from the chair and slaps on the headphones himself.
And just as quickly they’re off again, dangling loose from the chord as Commander Pierce launches himself back from the board like it’s bitten him. I don’t know what he heard, whether it was the same as Hoag, but just in that split second his face has gone pale, his eyes wide.
“Sir!” Seaman Jason Callen, red and freckled as an Irishman, skids to a halt, eyeing the station with more than a little trepidation. And just because the con’s not chaotic enough already, Senior Chief Hospital Corpsman Phillip Bass bursts through the hatchway, sprinting like a man half his age, a second corpsman close behind.
“What the hell’s going—?” He stops, staring down at Hoag’s tear-and-snot-and-blood-smeared face, singing up at him from the deck. “What happened to—?”
“Callen!” Pierce draws himself up, standing almost too stiffly, like he’s at attention. “Take over for Hoag. Shut down all passive receivers. Go active only. I don’t want you listening to anything out there but the sonar ping.
“Bass! Hoag just lost it. Heard something out there that... I don’t know what. Just get him out of here and stable for now. We’ll deal with the rest later.”
“What? But—”
“Skipper, I can’t treat a man properly if I don’t—”
“God damn it, just get to it!”
They get to it.
Pierce thumps back into his own chair, grabbing both arms. I swear it looks like he’s pulling his shoulders down, forcing them to stop hunching up around his neck.
“Callen,” he begins more softly, “range—”
“Skipper?”
Every movement, and I swear every sound, stops so we can hear that soft, shaking voice. I’ll admit, I turn away from my station—and I’m sure as shit not the only one—to stare at the sticky mask of Hoag’s face.
“Skipper?”
“Yeah, Hoag?”
“How can it know what she sang to me, Skipper? How can it know her name?”
And then, for long seconds, there’s only Hoag’s broken sobs.
“Get him out of here, Bass,” Pierce orders. “Do what you can for him.” Then, more forcefully, with a mental shake that every damn one of us can see, “All hands, battle stations! Sonar!” He’s shouting, now, over the voice of Bogdonovich—that’s Petty Officer Bogdonovich, standing Chief of the Watch—repeating battle stations on the 1MC. “Range and bearing!”
Callen’s gaze skitters over the display; I’m guessing he’s trying to accustom himself to using the thing without most of the system running. “Uh, bearing zero-one-niner, relative. Thirty-two hundred yards, cl
osing at...” He swallows audibly. “Closing at thirty knots!”
“Say again, sonar?”
“Confirmed, sir! Three-zero knots!”
“Jesus Christ... Get me a firing solution.” Pierce grabs a transmitter off to the side of his chair. “Torpedo room!”
“Torpedo room, aye!” crackles back.
“I want tubes one through four loaded and ready to flood!”
“Aye, sir!” For a moment, before the line closed, we all hear the clatter and clank of the weapons crew springing to life.
“Where’s my damn firing solution?”
“Skipper! Target is increasing speed! It—oh, shit!”
Not a man in the control room needs that oh, shit translated.
“Brace for impact!” Pierce calls. For once, the XO doesn’t have time to parrot the order—not that there’s a one of us who didn’t hear it the first time.
Except that, when it comes, it’s not an impact; not exactly.
The San Jack jerks to an abrupt halt, just like you’d expect. Braced or not, men tumble forward, smacking arms or chests or heads on control panels. The control room turns red under emergency lighting; fills with groans and blaring alarms, the stench of small electrical fires and sweat and just the tiniest whiff of blood.
And then, as we’re hauling ourselves back into our seats, the sounds go away, overwhelmed by the creaking and screeching of compressed metal.
Not from the prow, like you’d expect in a collision, no. First from the starboard; then above; to the port; back to starboard; and always, always, further and further aft. Almost—almost—like the boat compressing in the pressure of deep waters, but slower, so much more gradual.
This isn’t the sound of anything that might’ve struck us. This is the sound of the San Jacinto being squeezed. Crazy images of sea serpents and krakens pass in front of my eyes, and damn if I don’t actually laugh out loud; kind of an ugly, high-pitched cackle. Thankfully, I don’t think any of the guys hear me.
“Helm?” The skipper’s voice is almost steady; I don’t know how he manages it. “What’s our speed?”
“Speed...” Malhotra clears his throat, twice. “Negative. We’re not moving, sir.”
“Go full throttle. Give me all ahead full.”
“All ahead full, aye.”
The San Jacinto shakes and shimmies, like we were all at a big dance somewhere, and the walls reverberate with the propellers’ cavitations—but we barely move. A brief sensation of motion, another sudden jerk, and then nothing. Either we really have run into something this time, or whatever’s holding us is stronger than 35,000 horsepower!
“All astern, full.”
“All astern full, aye, sir.”
Are we moving this time? It’s hard to tell...
“Helm? Quartermaster?” Pierce says. “Give me something.”
“Engines are showing astern full, Skipper, but...” Malhotra clears his throat again. Petty Officer Demarco scoots over to stand beside him for a quick conversation, then back to his charts and his own display.
“We’re, uh, showing movement, Skipper. But no better than maybe two knots.”
“Jesus... Sonar?”
“It’s—it’s moving with us, sir,” Callen whimpers, just a little hysterical. “Whatever the hell it is, we’re dragging it with us.”
Around us, the hull of the San Jacinto continues to creak and whine and scream under the pressure. I swear she’s starting to sound like a wounded animal.
Pierce and Morgan trade glances. “All right, cut ‘em. All stop.”
“All stop, sir.” The cavitations in the water and the hum of the struggling engine fade, leaving—once again—just the creaking of the hull.
A moment, a moment more. And then...
“XO? Chief? Time to shake this fucker loose.” Pierce takes a deep breath. “Surface, emergency blow!”
Now we can’t even hear the hull anymore, not over a dozen shouted orders at once, and the screaming aaaa-OOOO-gaaaah of the diving alarm.
“Surface, surface, surface! Emergency blow! Helm, full rise on the planes, all ahead flank! Stern, full rise on the planes, forty-degrees up bubble!”
“This is Chief of the Watch on the 1MC. All hands, emergency surface!”
Bogdonovich reaches over his head, twists a pair of valves—and the entire boat shakes with a bang loud enough to give a bullet performance anxiety. All along the boat, compressors fire air into the ballast tanks, displacing the seawater in a matter of seconds.
And the San Jacinto begins to rise. Not as quickly as it should—emergency blow is normally like an express elevator from Hell—but enough.
“Depth is now five-zero-zero, and rising,” Sam Franks announces; whether the shaking in his voice is fear or just the rumbling of the boat, I can’t guess. “Four-five-zero, and rising...”
“Sonar?”
“It’s still with us, sir.”
“Four-zero-zero, and rising... Three-five-zero, and rising...”
“Still with us, sir! Why won’t it let go? Why—?”
“Steady, Petty Officer!”
“Y-yes, sir!”
“Two-five-zero, and rising...”
“God damn it, it’s still—wait! Skipper, it—”
I can only figure that Callen’s about to tell us the thing, whatever it is, has let go—but it’s not like he needs to. The San Jacinto trembles and then we’re shooting upward, fast enough to drive my stomach pretty much into my left big toe. The boat noses upward, a bunch of the guys fall back. For an instant, gravity seems to shut down entirely, and I know we’ve breached the surface.
It’s an amazing sight: Plumes of whitewater and a six thousand-ton whale that you’d swear was taking flight. I kinda wish I’m somewhere outside where I could see it.
The San Jacinto comes down in the water with a tremendous crash and roar, one we hear clear through the hull. And then, just like that, nothing more. It’s calm.
Everything but the skipper, anyway.
“Sonar, you keep an eye on that damn thing! Radio, get me command now! All stations, damage report!”
It takes a few to sort everything out, but best as I can overhear, we’ve actually gotten off pretty lucky so far. A few bruises and contusions, a few electrical fires and a single small leak; but no broken bones or serious injuries, no damage that we can’t fix.
“No joy, Skipper,” McKenna reports. “I’m not finding any damage to the radio, but I’m just not getting any response, either. Either there’s some kind of interference messing with the signal, or there’s nobody left to answer.”
He’s probably kidding with that last option, but not a one of us feels like chuckling.
“Keep at it,” Pierce orders. “Sonar?”
“Still just floating there, sir, about 250 feet down.”
“What can you tell me about it?”
“Not a thing, sir. Still just a blob on the display.” Callen pauses, frowns, swallows. “I could, uh... I could turn the receivers back on, sir, see if I can—”
“No!”
Everyone else jumps; Callen just looks relieved.
For a few minutes, then, everything’s the clack and clatter of boards and displays, the grunts of guys making minor repairs, the droning repetition from McKenna over at radio. We’re all freaked and trying not to show it, but it feels like, just maybe, the worst of it is over.
“Still nothing, Skipper,” McKenna announces. “Maybe we—”
“Skipper!” Callen leans over his display. “It’s moving away, sir!”
Pierce practically comes out of his seat. “Speed and bearing!”
“About twenty-five knots, sir! Bearing one-seven-seven relative, and diving fast!”
The skipper doesn’t even need to consult the charts for that one. “Back to the arch.”
“Looks like, sir.”
Another brief pause, as Pierce rubs a knuckle across his lips. Then, “Helm, bring us about, one-seven-seven. All ahead flank. Chief of the Watch, pr
epare to dive.”
“Sir?” I’m not sure who says it, but damn if it’s not the closest I’ve ever heard to one of the crew questioning a direct order.
“That thing’s proven itself hostile, gentlemen. We still don’t know what it did to Hoag, or what happened to the civilian operation we were sent to find. Get after it!”
Again the repeated orders and the cross-talk, again the dive alarm, and we’re off.
“Depth three-zero-zero and passing, sir!”
“Sonar?”
“Target speed increasing to thirty knots. Bearing dead ahead.”
“Get me a firing solution. Torpedo room?”
“Aye, sir!”
“Flood tube one.”
“Flooding tube one, sir.”
Pierce drums his fingers on the side of the transmitter. “Sonar?”
“Firing solution laid in, sir.”
“Torpedo room! Open the outer doors on tube one. You have permission to fire.”
A faint thub rocks the San Jacinto, followed by the inevitable “Torpedo away!”
Every eye that doesn’t absolutely have to remain on its own display turns toward Callen at sonar.
“Range to target two thousand yards and closing,” he recites. “Nineteen hundred... eighteen hundred... seventeen hundred...”
I’m staring across the con, straight at the sweeping arm on the sonar display, when it happens. On one sweep, the torpedo’s closing on target, Callen calling out a distance of less than a hundred feet... And on the next, just before detonation, it’s simply heading elsewhere, moving away at a sharp upward angle. We hear the faint “thrum” of the shockwave through the hull.
“Target... Target remains, sir. Torpedo missed.”
Pierce doesn’t ask how. Neither does anyone else. Probably because nobody wants to actually give voice to the idea that the fucking thing just batted the torpedo aside.
“Torpedo room,” the skipper says, his voice hoarse. “Flood tube two.”
