by David Poyer
Fat and bluff, Leakham heaved himself up and smiled around. Muffin crumbs clung to the front of his shirt. “Well, that’s about all Commodore Jung and I had. Anything more before we break?”
Dan lifted his hand. Leakham looked away, but at last had to nod, though he frowned as he did so. “Lenson.”
“One thing I’ve noticed, sir.”
Another frown. “Go ahead.”
“I’m not sure we’re where we ought to be as far as prearranged signals for disengagement. We had an incident in event 27005 where a ship was getting out of station. It didn’t proceed to extremis, but if it had, how would we have stopped the exercise play and warned both sides to go to safety courses?”
Leakham chuckled. “I don’t see that as a problem, Mr. Lenson. There are standard disengagement signals in ATP 28.”
“Well, sir, those signals assume there’s several thousand yards, even miles, between the engaged units. The predicted direct-path ranges over the next few days here are so close I don’t feel entirely comfortable—”
“We’ll stay with the usual signals,” Leakham announced. “Red flares and the voice radio warning on VHF primary tactical. They’re perfectly workable. Everyone’s familiar with them. I don’t want to introduce new signals just for this exercise.”
Dan looked at Jung, who was sitting with legs crossed. The Korean was the OTC, not Leakham. But Jung wasn’t objecting, or even, apparently, taking much interest. Dan tried one more time. “I see your point, sir. But I’m not sure why having another emergency disengage signal would be confusing. The sub has to surface to use VHF radio. And if there’s patchy fog, or someone’s not looking in the right direction, he might miss the flare.”
The U.S. commodore was shaking his head before Dan was done speaking. “Matter closed,” Leakham said. “Any other questions? Substantive questions? Yes, there in back.”
“On the data-keeping requirements—we’ve only got the one rider. What happens when he’s down for sleep?”
Dan rose, ready to explain once more it was ship’s company’s responsibility to keep the data, not the riders’. With only one TAG member aboard each unit, he couldn’t be in four spaces—bridge, CIC, sonar, and underwater battery plot—the clock round. But before he could speak Leakham said pontifically, “Data keeping’s essential, but it’s more important to keep the exercise events moving ahead and on time. Especially if the weather degenerates. We can’t let this stretch out or we won’t get everything accomplished. Let that be your guide.”
“Sir, excuse me—”
Leakham didn’t even look his way. “Thanks for coming, good hunting, and there are still some muffins left,” he told the room. Put his arm around Jung and ushered him out, up to the flag quarters.
DAN got back to Chung Nam well steamed. What the hell was up with Leakham? He’d blown him off in front of the entire group on the emergency disengage issue. Then given the skippers carte blanche to push data recording to the back burner. Certainly they wanted to complete all the events. But without seamless and trustworthy data, TAG couldn’t evaluate the play later. The guy acted as if they had history. But Dan didn’t remember any fat, arrogant assholes named Leakham. The first thing he did was look for Henrickson. He found the analyst in the wardroom. “How’d the conference go?” the little analyst asked.
“It sucked, big time.”
He explained. Henrickson looked disturbed too. “That’s just fucking wrong.”
“So how do we fix it?”
“Well, Leakham’s not OTC for this exercise.”
“He sure as shit acts like he thinks he is.”
“Well, he’s not. The host nation’s officially in charge—we specifically write that into every SATYRE. Go through Jung. Draft a message from him outlining exactly how important getting the data is, and who’s responsible for it. Then he puts it out to everybody, problem solved.” Henrickson added, “I’ll draft it if you want.”
“That’s great. Could you do that, Monty? Just make it short—people don’t read long messages.”
“Absolutely. Three paragraphs.” The analyst pulled a pad of the pulp-paper ROKN message blanks out of his briefcase.
“You seen Cap—you seen Joe O’Quinn?” Dan asked, turning back at the door.
“Not today. He was pulling late hours on the last event. He’s probably catching up on sack time.”
Dan realized he hadn’t seen O’Quinn since the exercise had started. Just that one glimpse of him pondering the sea as they got under way. “Why doesn’t he eat in the wardroom? I haven’t seen him around much.”
“He hates Korean food. He brought a bunch of granola bars and stuff.”
“Guess I can understand that.” The same kimchi and pickled fish meal after meal was getting to him too. Unfortunately, as the ranking TAG guy, he felt bound to eat with the Koreans.
“They give you anything good on McCain?”
“Blueberry muffins.”
“Bring me one?”
“Sorry,” Dan said. “Guess I should have, huh? Next time.”
HE went up to check on the 19, made the rounds to encourage the data keepers, then went back to the bridge.
The afternoon sky was overcast. Chung Nam and Dae Jon charged along at fifteen knots through a three-foot chop kicked up by a slowly increasing wind. The chop wasn’t good news, he thought. Waves generated low-coherence background noise. With the water as shallow as it was already, that would make a sub, especially a quiet one, that much harder to pick up.
Event 30001 kicked off Phase II. A step up in complexity, a barrier exercise with subsequent two-ship play. The Korean 209 was offline to the east, snorkeling—running submerged, but with an air intake the size of a wastebasket above the surface to run her diesels and charge her batteries. Hwang said it took her about forty minutes to do a full charge.
So San Francisco was playing target. The nuke boat would start at the northeast corner of the op area and head southwest. The barrier, consisting of Chung Nam, Dae Jon, Gushing, and Vandegrift, would align on a bearing of 300 degrees true and conduct an intercept search while steaming slowly northeast. They’d be preceded by Cushing’s helicopter, dropping sonobuoy patterns. San Fran would attempt to slip through. The surface units would use standard search procedures. Once they made contact, they’d separate into two teams, Yu in charge of one, Cushing’s CO honchoing the other, and take turns carrying out deliberate multiship attacks. Dan thought it should prove interesting. In water this shallow—only three hundred feet through most of the exercise area, heavy mixing and no layer—the sub would be very difficult to pick up.
Hwang was talking over the barrier intervals with Jung. Dan stood at the edge of that conversation, left out of the Korean, but tracking its drift as they did the math and summarized in English for him from time to time. The sticky wicket was that with passive detection ranges so low, the ships would have more frontage to cover than they could actually search. An interesting problem; he wondered if he could write a program to generate the optimal tactic. It’d have to have a graphical user interface, and maybe a menu, and use regression analysis.... He got a couple of notes down in his PDA.
Finally Jung decided to deploy SAU 1—Surface Action Unit 1, Chung Nam and Dae Jon—to port, then leave a gap between them and SAU 2, to starboard. Both SAUs would go active, pinging hard, flooding the sea with noise and radar too, just in case San Francisco popped her scope up. But Cushing’s helo, flying at two thousand feet, would drop six sonobuoys, set to passive, into the gap. “The sub’ll pick up the gap and drive for the hole. Once the sonobuoys pick her up, we wheel in and she is in the bag,” Hwang said. “Is it a good plan, do you think?”
They looked at him expectantly. Dan doubted it would be that simple. U.S. nuclear submarines, which were both very covert and capable of high submerged speeds, were notoriously slippery. He figured it was about the best they could do given the wretched sound-propagation conditions. But he couldn’t say so. “I’m not actually supposed to, uh, vouc
hsafe a tactical input.”
“Vouchsafe?” Hwang frowned.
“Sorry. It means advise. I can’t comment on your plan. Just record it.”
Jung’s face darkened. He opened his mouth, then closed it and sat back instead. ”Ke ro ke ha ko, jeon mon bo nae,” he said to Hwang. He sounded angry, but then, Dan thought, almost all Koreans sounded enraged. It was just how the intonation struck an American ear.
“The commodore approves,” the willowy Korean told Dan. “We are ordering the units to their comex stations.”
“Yes sir,” Dan said to Jung, hoping he didn’t get ticked off that he hadn’t signed off on his plan. He felt like he was dancing on a tightrope. The Koreans seemed so concerned with face.
He went down at lunchtime and confronted the usual. Hot tea, fish, kimchi, cigarette smoke, ten guys chattering in Korean, or worse, trying to tell him jokes in their fractured English. Kim #2 got off a real roarer. “Once upon a time, Tarzan lived in jungle,” he said. “Understand?”
“Yeah, I got that,” Dan said.
“One day his wife was in adversity. Tarzan catched a vine and was flying. Suddenly he was crying. ‘Ah! Ah!’ Why?”
“Gee,” Dan said. “I don’t know. Did he hit a tree?”
“His wife catched his middle leg,” #2 said, and waited for Dan to laugh.
He managed to smile. “That’s a good one all right. A real knee-slapper.”
“Knee-slapper.” #2 slapped his knee and giggled. “Knee-slapper!” He said something to the others and they just totally broke down. Dan shook his head in disbelief. What an audience.
“You tell one. You tell funny story.”
He didn’t think of himself as a teller of tales, but in the course of almost twenty years in the Navy, he’d heard a few. Most of the really funny ones were too raunchy to be retold. “Okay,” he said.
“One cold night in New Jersey this guy’s car breaks down on a hill. It’s a really foggy, drizzly night. He stands by the side of the road for a long time, but no cars go by.
“Then finally he sees a black limousine coming slowly through the fog. It comes right up to him and stops, and he realizes it’s a hearse. He bends down but can’t see anyone inside, the windows are tinted and it’s dark, so he opens the door and gets in.
“But when he turns to thank the driver for stopping, there’s nobody there. Nobody—except a big black coffin in the back.
“He’s staring at the wheel, shocked, when suddenly the car starts moving again. It moves very quietly, up the hill, then down, faster and faster. At the same time he hears moaning coming from the coffin. He’s paralyzed with terror. A curve looms ahead, with a drop-off on the outside of the curve, and he starts to pray. Just before they’re about to go off the side of the hill, a hand floats in through the window and turns the wheel.
All the Koreans were staring at him now, eyes wide. “So the next curve the same thing happens. The guy’s petrified. Like, turned to stone.
“Suddenly the car slows down, and he recovers enough from his terror to pull the door open and tumble out on the road. He rolls down the hillside and gets all torn up, but he’s just so glad to be out of that car he doesn’t care. He comes out on another road and runs down it till he comes to a tavern. Like a bar—you know? All wet, still shaking, he orders a couple shots of whiskey and tells everybody what just happened. The bar goes quiet as they realize he’s crying, and he isn’t drunk.
“About fifteen minutes later two guys walk into the tavern, panting and sweating, and one says to the other, ‘Hey, Louie, there’s that idiot who climbed into the car while we were pushing it.’”
They stared. Finally they smiled politely. Kim chuckled uncomfortably, glancing at his mates. But no one slapped his knee. Maybe humor just didn’t translate. Dan slurped the last of his tea, making it noisy to be polite, and was about to excuse himself when a voice crackled over the announcing system. They jumped up and left, pausing only for a hasty bow in his direction. Dan jumped up too. He didn’t grok the whole announcement, but he’d caught ”jam su ham”—submarine.
WHEN he got to the bridge it was dark. He hadn’t thought it was that late. But part of the darkness was rain. The wing doors were open, and cool freshness and wind filled the pilothouse. The little tight space was crowded with helmsman, lee helmsman, Captain Yu, the officer and junior officer of the deck, the rest of the watch, and the ASWRON 51 staff, Jung’s people, too. The disks set into the windshields hummed steadily, giving them three circles of visibility despite the rivers streaming down the windows. Jung wasn’t in his chair. Dan decided it was just too crowded and went back down to CIC. You could get a better tactical picture there anyway.
An hour later Cushing’s SH-60 reported a contact on one of the sonobuoys in the gap. The tracking team was still plotting it as the frigate heeled, cutting through the seas to a new course. A vibration wormed through the ship’s fabric, and a low whoosh built from aft.
“The turbines,” one of the JOs told him. Dan nodded, though he was surprised; at high speed they’d lose any chance of gaining sonar contact. The boys must be confident they actually had a sub. He pulled out his PDA to get down a note. He saw from the little blue penciled circles tracking alongside theirs on the DRT that Dae Jon was out to port, lagging a bit. That made sense. She was steam powered and didn’t have the frigate’s acceleration. But both elements of SAU1 were pelting hellbent down an intercept course. He checked the range to the datum and calculated a torpedo danger circle. This was the range inside which the submarine, at bay, could strike back.
But they didn’t reach it. Three minutes later, the sonobuoy lost contact. The plotters etched in the little kite-shaped datum symbol, marking last known location. Yes, there, they were drawing in the torpedo danger circle.
Dan gripped the edge of the DRT table as they leaned into a roll, then back the other way. The joiner bulkheads creaked. They were weaving at high speed. Presenting a more difficult target. The frigate’s motion in a high-speed regime was unsettling. She didn’t roll so much as abruptly lurch, as if she were balanced on her keel. The heat in the cramped close space didn’t help. Nor did the radish-and-garlic breath of the plotters. He took deep breaths, loosened his belt surreptitiously, and tried to think about something else.
Just short of the dotted danger circle Dae Jon broke left and Chung Nam right, wheeling in a yin-and-yang around the datum. The whoosh descended the scale. Dan felt deceleration tug him forward as they coasted out. It looked as if Captain Yu, who was the on-scene commander, was looking to hold contact with his own ship, and sending Dae Jon in for the initial attack.
He went into the sonar compartment for a while and discussed the search procedures with Henrickson. The ship leaned in a couple more tight turns while he was in there. He figured it was normal evasive maneuvering in the vicinity of a sub. He borrowed the sonar-men’s tables and worked out the effective acoustic range of their torpedoes. They were homing torpedoes, of course, Mark 46s, using a small active sonar in the nose to pick up and then zero in on their target.
This triggered another thought, and he ran down his attack checklist and went out into CIC again and checked that their own antitorpedo countermeasures were streamed. The SLQ-25 was the same decoy the U.S. Navy employed. It howled the identical noise spectrum into the water as a ship’s screw. A fish approaching from astern would home on it and explode, instead of going into the propeller.
He was occupied with this when he glanced at the DRT.
The green pencil trace—Dae Jon’s—was crossing almost directly over the datum.
He froze, not believing what he saw. His first thought was that the plotters had erred. He shoved between them and fingered the trace. “Is this good? Is this valid data?”
Even as he asked he knew it was. The track had diverged nine minutes earlier, about the time he’d gone into sonar. The evaluator gave him a blank look. Dan swore and wheeled, charging up the ladder to the bridge.
The pilothouse was absolut
ely dark and unfamiliar and he blundered into someone, who shot back abuse in Korean. Dan said the only phrase he could muster, “Sorry.”
“Commander Lenson?”
It was Yu; of course if you were going to run into someone, it had to be the captain. On the other hand, Yu had tactical command of both ships. Dan said quickly, “Sorry, sir, but I can’t see yet. Captain: Dae Jon is very close to San Francisco’s safety zone. Maybe inside it by now.”
“She is making attack.”
“I understand that, but your plot shows her far too close in, sir.” He peered out the windows, expecting any moment to see the red flare from the submarine that meant danger, disengage. But there was nothing but the black of midnight sea. The speed disks roared. Rain hammered on the windscreens. “I strongly advise you signal ‘disengage’ at once and withdraw to a safe distance.”
“Commodore is not on the bridge—”
“Sir, he’s not OTC for this event. You are.” At that moment a distant red-orange spark caught Dan’s eye out the starboard wing window. He swiveled instantly and pointed. “And the sub’s at periscope depth. Sir, you have to disengage.”
His eyes were adapting now and he could make out the men and equipment as black shapes against the faint luminescence from dials and indicator lamps. He left Yu standing and crossed the bridge and undogged the starboard door.
The warm rain cascaded down out of blackness. It smelled like a root cellar and like coal smoke and it soaked him within seconds. He ignored it. His face was welded to the little three-power scope on top of the pelorus stand. Through it he made out the orange wink of the strobe far away. He twisted the scope and made out the silhouette of a destroyer only a few degrees off it. Yeah. Showing a port running light. It was bearing down on the strobe, and by the distance intervals on the plot below, at flank speed.
