Scorpion in the Sea

by P. T. Deutermann

  “But we haven’t released anything about a bullet hole, have we?” asked Mike.

  “No, Mike, we haven’t,” said the Commodore patiently. “But you know those guys—they have a way of knowing what’s going on. Somebody’s been running his mouth; or the Coastie talked to District on his marine radio. Who knows. But that’s why we’re going to get the cops to have a look at the nameboard.”

  Mike shook his head. The others in the room were looking at him. He still didn’t get it. What was the Navy’s involvement?

  “It means, Captain,” said Martinson, a faint hint of triumph in his voice, “that if the police say it’s a bullet hole, we have to send a ship out there into the op-areas to look for a submarine again.”

  Now it all fell into place. Martinson had convinced the Admiral to use the excuse of his engineering problems to keep him here for this little sideshow. Mike looked at the Commodore for a moment as if expecting some help.

  “Does anybody here believe,” he asked, rhetorically, “that there is an unidentified, diesel-electric submarine operating offshore who’s going around sinking fishing boats?”

  “No, Mike, none of us believe that,” responded the Commodore, heading off the Admiral. “But if the fishermen believe it, and the newspapers pick it up and spread it, then we have to be seen like we care and that we’re proactively doing something about it; the Coast Guard doesn’t do windows or submarines.”

  “We are reporting this situation up the Navy’s public affairs chain right now,” said the Admiral. “I want to be out front on this one, rather than waiting for the local papers to clamor for action. We are also pulsing the intelligence system, to see if there are any Sov’s unaccounted for. Now, your engineering casualties preclude you from going on a three week fleet exercise, but not from local ops. So, on a contingency basis, we’re announcing that we’re going to assign Goldsborough to go back out Monday. By that time the police lab either will or won’t have corroborated the bullet hole theory, and Goldsborough will, or won’t, spend a week looking for our phantom submarine.”

  Mike looked down at the table and nodded. “Aye, aye, Sir. Only fair—we found the problem. But might you not want to send out a real ASW platform for this? Goldy is hardly a front-line subhunter.”

  “Goldy is as much ship as we want to commit to this effort, Captain,” said Martinson politely. “As even you made clear the other night, we don’t think there’s a whole lot of merit in this submarine theory.”

  Stung, Mike sat silent. Goldy was good enough for the shit details; that was what the Chief of Staff was saying. But not for fleet ops. The staff officers, taking their cue from the Chief of Staff, were smiling openly while looking innocently down at the floor. The Commodore, aware of the currents of antagonism flowing in the room, finally intervened.

  “It’s a shallow water operation, Mike,” he said. “The big sonars on the Spruance’s aren’t worth shit in shallow water in the active mode. Searching for something in these opareas, especially a diesel-electric on the battery, takes an active sonar, and you’ve got a 23; the 23’s were made for active work, and this calls for active work.”

  “And if you find one,” said Martinson, “you’ve even got depth charges, as I recall. You can classify him with an oil slick, like they did in World War II.”

  The staff officers smiled at his wittiness when Martinson looked around the room as he enjoyed his little joke.

  “You giving me permission to use depth charges to classify, Chief of Staff?” asked Montgomery, his face neutral. The Admiral made a sound of exasperation.

  “No, Captain, he is not. C’mon, Mike—this is a shit detail, OK? We’re not even bothering our bosses about it—just the public affairs people. Go out there, go through the motions. You get a contact, do the regulation peacetime drill to find out what it is and who it is. Peacetime rules of engagement all around. Come in next Friday and it’s over and done with, and we’ve made the effort. Sorry about the fishing boat, and all that. Let’s not make this thing into a bigger deal than it is; this is all just peacetime public affairs damage control. OK?”

  Mike sat back. Straight talk, at last.

  “Yes, Sir,” he replied. “Got it. We’ll be ready to go Monday morning.”

  The Commodore intervened again. “Let’s make it Monday afternoon—that way we can see what the midday supply run from Jax brings over. Maybe get some of your parts in.”

  “Good idea,” said the Admiral. He began to gather up his papers, signalling that the meeting was over.

  Mike had a fleeting thought, about something Mayfield had said in the bar. Maxie Barr had called it a U-boat, not a submarine. Do you suppose … But the Commodore got up at that point, breaking up the meeting.

  “C’mon back to my office, Mike. I want a full brief on your engineering problems. Maybe we can expedite some of those parts.” He turned to Commander Barstowe. “CSO, you work with Captain Martinson here on that other matter we were talking about.”

  The two officers took their leave, and headed back to the DesRon Twelve office. The rain had stopped. The ships tied up along the bulkhead pier glistened in the glare of the quartz halogen streetlights. Neither of them spoke on the walk back. Mike was still angry about the whole thing, the decrepit machinery in his engineering plant, cancellation of the cruise to the fleet operations in the Caribbean, and embarrassed that his ship didn’t run. And now getting stuck with this submarine charade. If this is what command is all about, they can stick it. He belatedly remembered his crew; they had worked hard, inspired by the prospects of real fleet ops and some Caribbean liberty ports. They would be really pissed off, too. He would have to go back and put the word out tonight. The Commodore must have been reading his thoughts.

  “Sometimes command gets pretty disheartening, Mike,” he said, as they entered the darkened offices. There was only one yeoman working late in the squadron staff building; the rest of the staff had long since gone home. The Commodore made a quick phone call to his wife, telling her he’d be home in a few minutes. They went into his office, and the Commodore sat down at his desk, indicating a chair for Mike.

  “Now, on all these engineering casualties: I want a composite report made up in a message. List the top ten hard spots, describe what’s wrong, and what you need to fix it. Get that on the street tonight, so the Type Commander guys up at headquarters in Norfolk get it in their Saturday morning message traffic. You keep the plant steaming this weekend, so you can get back out there Monday, let’s say for a 1600 departure. That’ll give you time to refuel, load stores and all that stuff Monday morning.”

  “Yes, Sir,” Mike nodded. “The engineer should have that message done already. But I need to call the ship and let the snipes know right away not to shut down.”

  The Commodore pointed to his desk phone, and Mike made the call.

  “Now,” he continued, as Mike hung up. “I’m going to assume you were correct about the bullet hole business. You must have seen one or two in all those years in Vietnam, yes?”

  “Yes, Sir, I certainly did.”

  The Commodore sat back in his chair, looking at him. Only his shirtfront was visible in the desk light; his face was in shadow. Mike could not see his expression. The Commodore was silent for a long minute. Then he leaned forward, his face showing his age in the light of the desklamp.

  “You don’t have a lot of friends over there, you know,” he began. Mike knew that over there meant the Group Twelve headquarters.

  “That Martinson fella keeps making remarks,” continued the Commodore, “like Goldy is on a downswing, can’t make her commitments, even the easy ones like this Fleetex, and now all this bullshit about a fishing boat and a submarine.”

  “We didn’t exactly start that one, Commodore,” bristled Mike.

  “No, but you are firmly associated with it; somehow this whole Weird-Harold is tied to Goldsborough. What I’m telling you is: take care. Martinson has the Admiral’s ear, lots more than I do. He obviously dislikes you, and y
ou surely know his reputation as a career killer. If he puts a drop of poison on your name every time it comes up, eventually the Admiral starts to get sick when he hears your name, and then Martinson will try to get him to yank you offa there for something that doesn’t warrant it.”

  Mike sat back in his chair, shaking his head in disbelief. “I know I’ve done some things to get on their shitlist, Commodore. But the problems I’ve been squawking about do exist!”

  The Commodore sat silent for a moment. “You’re in command, Mike,” he said, his voice flat. “You’re in command, in peace-time, in an old ship without a mission. You’re competing with guys in newer ships who are in the mainstream of fleet ops, who get to go overseas on deployment. That alone puts you at a real disadvantage. Also, you haven’t helped your case with some of those shittograms you’ve sent out over the past year, blasting the supply department and the repair department and the shipyard and anyone else who didn’t measure up to your standards of support to the Fleet. I cautioned you about that after the first one, but then you let another one go three months after that.”

  “But everything I described in those messages was true. They—”

  “Yeah, yeah, you told it like it was. But you put some senior Captains on report in the process, and they don’t care for that shit. They call Martinson and bitch and moan about how they have problems too, and they don’t need shit from some guy on the waterfront when there’s lots of ships that need support besides Goldsborough, etc. The Admiral pulls me aside at a party and says to get Goldsborough under control, that the way to get along is to go along—shit, you know the drill. But your biggest sin in the eyes of our very traditional Navy is that you’re different—you aren’t married, you live on a houseboat instead of in quarters, you go on liberty down at the beaches, you drive an expensive sports car—I know, I know,” raising his hand, as Mike sat forward in his chair, ready to protest.

  “But the Navy is a very conservative, straight-laced organization,” the Commodore continued. “In peacetime, it values conformity over just about everything else, and appearances even above conformity. In peacetime, when nothing very real is going on, appearances take on the role of reality, because all the Services go into a defensive mode —trying to stave off the budget cutters who want to gut the military now that the country doesn’t need them. I stress that word peacetime.”

  He got up, and began to pace behind his desk, looking out through the plate glass window at the basin full of gray warships. “I know what I’m talking about. I wanted one of the Norfolk DesRons, close to Fleet headquarters. For visibility purposes. Visibility is the key to promotion in peacetime, especially when you’re trying to go from O-6 to O-7 and an Admiral’s star. Instead, I’m down here in what is, relatively speaking, this Florida backwater. On top of that, I’m Jewish and I’m a little bit aggressive about that; that makes me different, too. I’m a short guy in a tall man’s world, and I’ve always been a little pugnacious about that, too. I’ve got a bad temper. And therefore, I have little hope of becoming an Admiral, not because I’m any of those things, but because in the aggregate, I’m different—do you understand the distinction there?”

  He paused for a moment, looking at Mike, a bitter smile on his craggy face.

  “Probably not,” he sighed. “Well, here’s a rule you can get promoted by: you can afford to be different as long as you—you meaning your command, whether it’s a ship, a squadron, or even a shore station—as long as you don’t have any problems. Today’s peacetime Navy doesn’t have any problems, see, and if we do, we keep them in-house, thank you very much. When I was a ship CO, I went up the line and got help with problems from a reasonably sympathetic Commodore. Now that I’m a squadron commander, now that I’m the Commodore, I get some not-so-faintly veiled threats when I take problems up the line. When you sit where I sit, the word that comes down from on high is: so you got problems? We don’t want to hear that, OK? So you take just care of ’em. Or we’ll get somebody in there who can, OK? That’s what so-called major command is all about. It’s important that the System sees whether or not you can play the game when you’re a Commander. But when you’re a Captain in command, or a squadron Commodore, they want to see if you can play the game without depending on going up the line for help.”

  “Surely,” Mike interrupted, “the big guys know that the ships have all sort of problems—people problems, machinery problems, supply problems. They don’t really believe that everything’s just fine and dandy down here on the waterfront, do they?”

  “Of course not; but remember, they came up the same road you’re walking, and they all got by the command hurdles without having problems they couldn’t solve, one way or another, either by fixing them, with or without help, or even by hiding them until the next guy came along. They understood early on that the key is to keep the problems, whatever they are, behind the scenes. By all means, work the problems, work ’em hard, and get help from the system, but do it discreetly, and do not make the Navy look bad.”

  The Commodore stopped again in front of his big plate glass window, looking at the ships through the darkened glass.

  “We’re getting more and more like the Marine Corps, where the gravest sin is to bring any kind of discredit upon the Corps. Now: this submarine thing has the potential to blossom into a real story, and thereby make the Navy look bad, or worse, foolish. So you pay attention, and do it right —lots of tactical sitreps, search plans, fast paced operations razzle-dazzle: make it look really good. Write your sitreps using unclassified language which can be released to the newspapers, so the Public Affairs wienies don’t have to think, not that they could. Remember what this drill is all about. Because if you don’t, and this thing ends up making the Navy look bad, you are very vulnerable, because you’re on a ship that’s got problems, and because you are known as a guy who pours gasoline on the support fire instead of water, OK? Martinson and company are going to be looking for the first sign of intransigence from Goldsborough to put the axe into your command tour. You get the picture?”

  “Yes, Sir, I sure do,” replied Mike grimly, getting up from his chair. He stared out the window for a moment. Goldsborough was just out of sight to the left. The Commodore returned to his desk and sat down.

  “And, Mike—remember something else, before you tell me that they can take command and stick it. Remember that you’re the Captain. You feel like the world is picking on you, and maybe you want to say fuck it, and hang it up. But that would leave your guys, your officers and crew, hanging out there, at the mercy of some hotshot who would be brought aboard to fix everything up, and a lot of people would get hurt professionally by a guy who has nothing to lose, and no way to go but up, see? You accept command, you take it on for the whole trip, for the good times and for the bad times. They say a ship is like a woman—costs a lot to keep her in powder and paint. But command is really like marriage in the Roman church: you’re married to that gray bitch until one of you dies or your relief shows up on the pier.”

  Mike stood silently by the window for a long moment. “Yes, Sir,” he said, as if talking to his reflection. “I hear you. And thanks for the advice.”

  The Commodore grinned at him in the semi-darkness of the office. “Yeah,” he said. “And other than that little unpleasantness, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you enjoy the play?”

  Mike grinned back. “Right, Commodore. Good night, Sir.”

  Mike left the office and headed back across the waterfront to the ship. He hoped the XO was still onboard; knowing Ben, he would be hanging around until his CO got back with the word. Ben was a damned fine Exec; there was none of the eight to four-thirty mentality he found in many of his junior officers. The young ones today considered shipboard duty just a job, not a life, as he had been brought up to do. Maybe in peacetime, especially in an old, non-deploying ship, it looked more like a job than a life. A trio of his sailors came by, dressed in the liberty uniform of jeans, sneakers, and T-shirts. They greeted him politely in the darkness, bu
t their thoughts were obviously on the beach. The ship was back there and out of their minds. For him, the ship loomed ahead and was very much on his mind.

  The quarterdeck watch saw him walking down the pier, and, moments later, the four bells and “Goldsborough, arriving” rang out over the waterfront. The rain started up again as he walked up the brow. He could hear the old ship stirring against the pier, her steel sides scrunching the log camels against the heavily creosoted pilings. Hello, Gray Bitch.

  SEVENTEEN

  The Mayport Marina; Saturday 19 April, early afternoon

  Mike was stepping out of the shower after an hour long workout with his weight set when the phone rang. Grabbing a towel, he stepped into the master’s cabin to reach the phone.

  “Captain,” he answered, forgetting for an instant that he was ashore on his boat and not in his cabin.

  “Yes, Sir, Captain, CDO here. We’ve had a motor vehicle accident, Sir.”

  “OK,” Mike sighed, opening the towel out on the bed and sitting down. “What happened?”

  “Best we can tell, Fireman Quigley in B division—he’s an after fireroom guy—wrapped his Harley around a bridge abutment over in Orange Park. I don’t have any more details on how it happened. We got the call from NAS JAX hospital.”

  “Is he alive?”

  “Yes, Sir, but he’s racked up pretty bad. The B division officer is on his way over, and I can’t raise the XO.”

  “OK, I’ll go on over there. Send out the personnel casualty sitreps and all that. Does he have family?”

  “He’s single, Sir. Parents in Fall River, Massachusetts. I can give you their phone number; the hospital has it already and is going to call ’em. He’s like, twenty, maybe twenty one.”

  “OK, thanks. Make sure you inform the Squadron duty officer, and have him notify the Squadron Doc. Tell them I’m on my way over to the hospital.”

  “Aye, aye, Sir. Sorry about this.”