Seaghost

by William H. Lovejoy

  “I got it.” Hell, the guy was right, after all, Chambers admitted to himself.

  “So you keep following the trail. And you call me a little more often.”

  “I got that, too.”

  *

  2340 hours, Washington, D.C.

  “Ted, this is Kevin.”

  “I recognize the voice,” Daimler said dryly. “You know it’s almost midnight here?”

  “Almost midnight here, too. I had a thought.”

  “That’s troublesome.”

  “From the papers, the Navy’s out there looking for terrorists with two boats.”

  “That is true, my friend.”

  “When, in actuality, the terrorists have only one boat.”

  “The Navy’s still looking for two.”

  “Well, their search strategy might change if they knew they were only looking for one.”

  Daimler thought about that. He did not know what the Pentagon was doing, of course, but McCory might have a point. Astoundingly, he sometimes did. Hell, Kevin had kept him from dropping out of undergraduate school at one time, had hauled him on his back for six miles after Daimler broke an ankle during night jump. The points added up.

  “I was thinking,” McCory said, “of placing an anonymous call to the Navy.”

  “They’re never anonymous for long.”

  “Maybe just let Norfolk know they were only looking for one SeaGhost.”

  “Incorrect, Mac. They’re looking for two, though I admit they’re probably expected to find them in the same place. You’d just confuse them.”

  “Well, hell. I want to do something to help.”

  “This is a hell of a time for you to get all patriotic again,” Daimler said. “The two of us have already done our time. Keep in mind that you’re a thief, please.”

  “Only for the moment. I have a good motive.”

  “From your point of view, you mean? Oh, hell, probably from mine, too. Did you finish examining the boat against Devlin’s drawings?”

  “It matches, point for point. It’s Devlin’s boat, all right, Ted.”

  “Okay. I have to admit that I thought you were right all along. Let me think about this for a couple more days before you do anything.”

  “I hear your fee meter clicking,” McCory told him.

  “It’s a nonstop meter. Don’t do anything.”

  “As long as you’re charging me, do some work, will you? Check on Advanced Marine Development.”

  “I’ll see what I can find out about them,” Daimler said. “You talk to Ginger?”

  “Showed her the boat.”

  “Jesus Christ!” McCory’s attitudes sometimes alarmed Daimler, made him wish the man was not the best friend he’d ever had, or probably would have. “You’d better get hot on composing a marriage proposal.”

  “That might be tough. You don’t know her as well as I do.”

  “I hope she doesn’t know you as well as I do.”

  “Why?”

  “I’d never marry you,” Daimler said, and hung up.

  Chapter 7

  0445 hours 30JUL53, Pensacola, Florida

  Chief Petty Officer Devlin McCory’s face was a mottled red, confused between anger and frustration. He did not know where to direct his anger.

  The tears streamed unabashedly down his cheeks, streaking the dirt caked on his right jaw. His red hair was messy, a glob of grease caught in it on the left rear side. His eyes stared at the wall opposite the one he leaned against.

  He was in uniform, but it was stained with oil and tar and paint splotches. The polish on his left shoe was eradicated by gasoline. He had come right from the docks.

  People moving down the bridge corridor gave him plenty of leeway. There seemed to be a lot of people. Back and forth. Going nowhere in a hurry.

  At the far end of the corridor, a chrome-plated floor polisher whirled on the linoleum. If it got much closer, McCory was going to kick the damned thing into small pieces.

  The odors. Medicinal. Chloroform. Antiseptic. Iodine?

  “Chief?”

  He looked up, bleary-eyed.

  The man floated in front of him, all furry-edged and green.

  “I’m Commander Hartford, Chief. I’m sorry as hell.”

  “Jesus.”

  “We did our best. It wasn’t enough.”

  “Oh, Jesus Christ!”

  “You all right, Chief? Maybe I can get you something?”

  McCory pushed off the wall, coming to his full six feet. “Where’s the son of a bitch who killed her?”

  “He died at the scene of the accident,” the doctor said.

  McCory’s shoulders sagged in defeat.

  He felt entirely deflated. At Pusan, and earlier, at Guadalcanal and Bougainville and Midway, there had always been someone to strike out at when the ones you liked died.

  “Can I see her?”

  “You don’t want to, Chief. Believe me.”

  He just nodded. The tears continued to stream down his face. McCory had never been beaten before.

  He turned away and walked down the hall toward the nurse’s station, leaving Commander Hartford standing by himself.

  The nurses who had been tending and playing with his six-month-old son looked up as he approached. Their faces went carefully slack.

  McCory leaned over and picked Kevin up from the two chairs that had been shoved together. “Come on, ol’ son. Time to go home.”

  The boy’s blue eyes stared back at him, searching his own.

  For what?

  McCory pulled Kevin close to his chest and pressed his head against his shoulder.

  The nurse smiled grimly.

  And McCory and his son walked on down the long corridor looking for a door.

  Kevin started to cry, too.

  *

  0145 hours, 28° 41’ North, 79° 50’ West

  “Pretty late in the game for you to get so adventuresome, isn’t it, lady?”

  “No one’s going to see us, right? That’s what you told me.” Ginger’s eyes shone in the dim haze of red-blue light from the instrument panel.

  “That’s the theory,” McCory said.

  She was having a grand old time. Since leaving Ponce de Leon Inlet, Ginger Adams had taken over the helm. The speed seemed to thrill her, and while she managed an almost easterly course, she spent more time playing with the bow and stern cameras and with the computer than with the automatic pilot. The automatic pilot bored her.

  For the past hour, McCory had played a little himself. Carrying operating manuals back and forth, he had experimented with the various consoles. He figured out the sonar, wearing the headset that hung on the bulkhead. At their speed of nearly sixty knots, though, he mostly got feedback from the rotary engines. When he rested his forehead against the screen’s hood, he found that the screen was primarily one pale green blip. He estimated that the SeaGhost would have to be below ten knots in order to get a decent interpretation. Even then, it might require an experienced and master sonarman to read the ocean’s sounds. There was a computer link with the sonar set that he hadn’t been able to work out yet. He suspected that the computer could identify and match screw signatures, but he didn’t know how large the database aboard might be. Or perhaps there was a data link through a satellite to a shore-based data center.

  He had set the radar on automatic and random scan at thirty miles of range. The alarm had sounded off several times, jolting Ginger the first time, but the marine traffic was miles away from them.

  McCory also figured out the range of the SeaGhost. Before leaving Edgewater, he had brought the Kathleen in alongside the dry dock, snaked a hose under the sea door, and used an electric pump to siphon diesel fuel off the cruiser into the SeaGhost’s bladders. Fortunately, the rotaries used diesel.

  Based on topping off an empty cell of the four fuel bladders, he determined that the capacity was 880 gallons. His fuel consumption on the trip down from the Chesapeake had varied between 9.8 and 12.6 gallons per hour. Figur
ing a cruise speed of forty-five knots and a consumption of around eleven gallons per hour, the boat had a 4000 mile range. At sixty knots, while he was teaching Ginger the computer code, the consumption rose to 18.2 gallons per hour, which dropped the range to around 3300 miles.

  It was still respectable.

  The interior was dimly lit from a single red bulb recessed in the overhead and from the screens and readouts of the helm, radar, and communications panels. The AM radio was locked on a Tampa station, playing Billy Vaughn’s “Blue Tomorrow.” A compromise. McCory liked country and old rock. Ginger Adams liked jazz, classic and new wave.

  They had provisioned the galley with peanut butter, bread, orange juice, coffee, and few pieces of china from the Kathleen. McCory got a couple of mugs from the cabinet and poured coffee. The coffeepot was made of some kind of plastic with a ceramic base. It sat in a three-inch-deep recess in the countertop, so it wouldn’t slide around in heavy seas. McCory guessed the Navy paid a couple thousand for it.

  He carried Ginger’s mug to her.

  “Thanks, Kevin.”

  “You tired?”

  “How could I be? This is just fantastic.”

  “I recall your telling me that you’re not a morning person. Several hundred times. You’re supposed to be asleep now.”

  “Are you kidding? And miss this?”

  The fingers of her right hand gripped the wheel almost lovingly. Her eyes scanned the panel even as she sipped from her mug. The monitors displayed front and rear views in the night-vision mode, but only a dim, dark green sea and lighter green sky were visible. Through the windscreen, there was only blackness, with an occasional whitecap reflecting the moon’s light. Long swells were running, but the SeaGhost skimmed them, with only a slight up and down motion.

  McCory went to the bunk room and found the toolbox he had brought aboard. He got a battery-powered electric drill and loaded it with a quarter-inch bit. Carrying it back to the commander’s desk, he put his coffee on the desk, then sat on the deck. He had to move his head to the side to keep a shadow from the overhead light off the drawer locks. Setting the tip of the bit against the top lock, he squeezed the trigger.

  “What are you doing?” Ginger called over her shoulder.

  “Breaking and entering.”

  It took ten minutes to drill all three locks. There was nothing in the bottom drawer. The middle drawer contained two nine-millimeter Browning automatics and a dozen loaded magazines. The armory. The top drawer contained a ring of keys and several thin books, and McCory rose to sit in the captain’s chair. He turned on a goose-necked reading lamp and leafed through the books.

  Uh-oh.

  “What’d you find?” Ginger asked.

  “Some books I wish I didn’t have.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like call signs and frequencies. Codes. Instructions for the black boxes back there.”

  “Top secret stuff.”

  “Very.”

  “Maybe we should burn them? Or throw them overboard?”

  “You’re quite right,” McCory said, but intrigued, got up and went to sit at the communications console. Flipping the pages of the first book, he found a VHF frequency for CINCLANTFLT operations, along with a series of numbers. He powered up the transceiver and punched the buttons until the digital readout gave him the frequency listed.

  The speaker in the panel jabbered in gibberish.

  He turned the volume down.

  On the scrambler box marked “ONE,” he punched mode two.

  Still gibberish, but clearer gibberish.

  On the encryption box, he tapped mode four.

  “…ask Force Two-Two, CINCLANT authorizes movement to Safari Sector Five.”

  “Copy that, Diamond Head. Safari Sector Five. Two-Two out.”

  The frequency went silent. McCory didn’t know what he had, but he did know that he ought to hang onto the books for a while. He couldn’t go around throwing away important documents.

  He experimented with more frequencies and scrambling modes. When he didn’t get silence, he got what he thought were ships talking to each other or to aircraft. He had been out of the Navy long enough that the radio lingo had lapsed for him, but parts of it came back slowly.

  He finally left the set tuned to CINCLANT, turned it down low, and brought Tampa back on another speaker. Chet Atkins doing “Faded Love.” That was better.

  Moving over behind Ginger, he rested his hands on her shoulders and asked, “Any idea where we are?”

  “Should I know?”

  “It’s sometimes helpful. On the computer keypad, on the top row, press the square marked ‘NAV MAP.’”

  She found the touch-sensitive pad and pressed it.

  “Now, press 3084.”

  “What’s that?”

  “That’s the latitude and longitude of the top left corner of the map grid you want.”

  “Sure it is.”

  “Now, press 2575.”

  “Bottom right?”

  “That’s correct. Now execute.”

  She pressed the pad labeled “EXC.”

  Ginger scanned the panel. “Nothing happened.”

  “The computer’s working on it. Finding the grid coordinates in the data base and checking with the NavStar satellite network. Press the number four pad under the main CRT.”

  There were eight numbered pads under each screen. McCory had learned that they selected camera views in normal, night-vision, and infrared modes, navigation maps, radar repeater, and a gunsight for the forward-mounted cannon. The last two buttons always came up blank. Either he had not determined their usage, or they were reserved for future enhancements.

  As Ginger pressed the keypad, the screen flickered, then changed to a map. Coordinate lines were shown in light green spaced at every ten minutes. A large orange dot was in the upper left corner. She reached out and tapped it with a clear-polished fingernail. “That’s us?”

  “That’s us.”

  “Neat.”

  “I thought so, too. Watch this.”

  McCory stepped to the radar console and switched it to active. Immediately, the interface between the radar and the mapping system put four yellow dots on her screen.

  “Those are other boats?”

  “Or ships, maybe. I don’t have the antennae aimed up very high, but that one to the far right might be a low-flying airplane, judging by its speed. The closest one is over fifteen miles away from us. And we’re about ninety-seven miles off the coast.”

  He flipped to the 220-mile range. Dozens of yellow dots came to life on the monitor.

  “That’s at two hundred and twenty miles of range,” he told her.

  “I can’t believe there are that many ships out here.”

  “Several of them are aircraft. We’re kind of in the track between South America and New York.”

  He shut down the radar, just in case some of those yellow dots belonged to Task Force 22, headed for Safari Sector Five. The Navy would be looking for active radar, especially an active radar that appeared where there was no other return.

  “Are we far enough out?” Ginger asked.

  “I suppose. There isn’t any traffic in the immediate neighborhood, anyway.”

  McCory was feeling a little anxious about this, like a kid with a fistful of firecrackers, scanning the alley for a place where the adults wouldn’t hear them go off.

  “Well, let’s do it!”

  McCory sighed. “The Navy will probably charge me fifty thousand dollars for expended ordnance. Probably more than that.”

  “They’re not going to miss just one.”

  “They keep careful count,” he insisted.

  “You don’t know how to make it work. Is that it?”

  He assumed she was pressing his male ego button, but said, “I think I can figure it out. I’m pretty mechanically minded, you know.”

  “Sure.”

  “Okay. Bring her back to around five knots and maintain headway. There’s a headset hangin
g under the instrument panel. You might see if it’s fashionable.”

  While Ginger slowed the boat, McCory went aft to the cargo bay. Outside the door was a headset on a long coiled cord. He put it on.

  “Can you hear me, hon?”

  “Aren’t you supposed to use some kind of jargon, like, ‘Missile man reporting in, Captain?’”

  “When did you get promoted?” he asked.

  It took him ten minutes to load a missile into the sling of the crane, position it over the launcher, and slide it onto the upper left launch rail. The connections were simple. A wire cable and multi-pronged plug hanging from the missile body plugged directly into a receptacle on the launcher.

  Forward on the base of the launcher was a small door marked, “POWER.” McCory opened it to find several switches and digital readouts. Knowing the Navy was super-conscious about safety, he thought there would be a disabling system that prevented missiles from being fired while the launcher was in the down position. He hoped that was the case.

  He flipped the switch for launcher power. Above it, a green LED came one.

  A switch for missile power. He threw it, also, and digital readout promptly came to life with numbers that were meaningless to him.

  GUIDANCE LINK. What the hell, he switched it on. Green light-emitting diode there, too.

  “Did you see anything happening up there?” McCory asked on the intercom.

  “I didn’t know I was supposed to be watching for something. I don’t think so, though.”

  McCory closed the small door, left the cargo bay, and closed that door. On the deck of the port cross-corridor was a small bundle. He bent down to open the duffle and pull out an old rubber raft.

  “Okay, Ginger, all stop.”

  She pulled the throttles back.

  McCory opened the hatchway, slid the raft outside, and while holding its line, pulled the CO2 cartridge. The raft inflated quickly, and he dropped it over the side. He leaned back for the duffel bag and dug around in it for the two rolls of aluminum foil he’d brought along. Ripping off long sheets, he wrinkled them and tossed them in the raft. When the bottom of the raft was full of crumpled foil, he let go of the painter.

  He thought it looked like a pretty good target.

  “All right, full ahead.”