by Ian Slater
The Petrel was proceeding so slowly that her props barely created a wake, all her off-duty crew out on deck. Frank Hall was on the bridge, the oceanographic ship’s two side-scan sonar technicians in the aft dry lab two decks below. The side scan’s pictures did not come in via the clear color TV screens so beloved by Hollywood producers to make them more visual, and more believable, but rather in a dull, monochromatic series of dark gray lines on lighter grayish-white paper. Each line recorded the depth of the sea bottom, which at times was flat and at other times creviced by canyons formed millions of years ago. The end result was a two-dimensional view of the sea bottom, as if someone with a very sharp pencil — in this case the recorder’s stylus — had drawn a look-down sketch of the strait’s seabed.
Nothing but seabed was turning up on the return pings, the echoes of the sound strikes sent down from the electrically buckled plates in Petrel’s “fish”—a squashed and single-finned, tear-shaped transponder towed astern, its fin barely visible in the huge breaths of sea fog that one second seemed to swallow the Petrel, only to release her moments later. Cookie, the cook’s helper, en route to delivering a late lunch sandwich to Jimmy and Tiny on the stern deck, sneaked into the aft dry lab, manned by the two sonar technicians, to take a peek at the side-scan profile. “Any sub, guys?”
“Six so far,” one of the technicians replied dryly. “How ’bout bringing us some coffee ’stead of asking us dumb questions?”
Cookie sullenly retreated.
“Shouldn’t piss him off,” the other technician told his colleague.
“He’s a dumb ass.”
“I don’t care. You get on the wrong side of these guys, they can make you sick — piss in your coffee. I know one skipper — grumpy old bastard — all he did was criticize, so one day when Cook was making custard, this kid grabbed a Playboy centerfold, took the old man’s bowl, and went to—”
“Hey!”
“What?”
“You see what I see?” His colleague watched the stylus racing back and forth with the speed of a weaving machine’s shuttle, giving them a profile from thirty-two fathoms—180 feet. Stuck in the background of a mud slope and looking like a blurred double exposure was an outline of what could conceivably be a slab of metal — either that or a slab of rock.
One of the “techies” called the bridge. “Captain, you better come down and see this.”
Frank Hall walked in less than a minute later, took one look at the profile, and told the technicians, “Zoom in. High resolution.” The zoom made it bigger, but not as sharp as they’d hoped.
“There’s no base to it, sir. I mean, it looks like it’s a slab sticking up from the mud. Maybe an old bulkhead — a wreck?”
Hall thought that the technician was right; the Strait of Juan de Fuca was littered with the metallic skeletons of marine disasters from long ago. And it would be much worse if Navy salvage and retrieval ships such as the Petrel didn’t clear the massive hulks of the ships sunken by the terrorist sub.
“Its base could be a sub,” proffered Frank, looking at the slab profile. “Some anechoic tiles could have fallen off the sub’s sail. Water flow is powerful at that depth — at any depth in the strait. If the tiles on the rest of the hull are still intact, sucking up our sonar signals, we wouldn’t see the base of this slab.”
The recorder’s stylus never ceased, but the machine’s amber light was flashing, the roll of paper almost used up.
“Not now!” said one of the technicians, his exasperation echoed by his colleague, who ran toward the lab’s paper locker situated high up to avoid any possibility of water damage, in the event of the ship’s scuppers overflowing on deck and flooding over the dry lab’s sill and into the lower cabinets.
Frank said nothing, calmly watching the stylus keeping up its busy work, dashing from one side of the recorder to the other like some frenzied, animate being. Sometimes it had made him smile, like the busy little “office assistant” in the corner of his computer. But the oceanographer wasn’t amused now, his eyes focused on the profile, his heart punching the wall of his chest. “What are the dimensions of that slab?” he asked the attending technician, who quickly worked the recorder’s control panel.
“It’s about the size of a garage door. Not very big, Captain. For a sub, I mean.”
“No,” Frank agreed, hands behind his back in what the crew, he knew, referred to as his “Horatio Nelson” bit. “Slab isn’t big for a full-sized sub.”
The truth was, neither of them knew how big the sail of a midget sub would be. They’d never seen one up close. Few people had.
“Where’s that friggin’ paper?” the technician called out. “We’re almost out here!”
“Easy,” said Frank. “Let’s not get excited.” That’s what Nelson would have said, he knew, but like the two technicians, he knew too that when they changed the paper, which had only about four inches of lateral scroll remaining, they would have no picture at all for ten to fifteen seconds. Frank calmly summoned the bosun, telling him to cut a length of fuse for a hundred-pound pack of LOSHOK set to detonate at thirty-two fathoms.
“Sheesh, Skipper, that’s about all we have on the ship!”
It had been a measure of the men’s discipline, and perhaps their distance from Little Bird’s demise, that it had not preyed on their minds. Instead, they’d done what they were supposed to do without either protest or second-guessing the captain. Even so, now was not the time for the bosun to point out what he must know the captain already knew: that a hundred-pound charge would just about exhaust their supply of the explosive. And so, instead of commenting either verbally or by facial expression, Frank maintained his steady gaze on the stylus. It helped that the stylus had a mesmerizing effect, like watching highway lane reflectors at night.
“ ’Bout two minutes of paper to go, Captain,” said the technician next to him.
“When the amber goes to red,” Frank instructed quietly, his voice barely audible above the sherp, sherp of the stylus.
“Amber to red,” said the technician, “right,” his lips so dry that not even the moisture of the ghostly invasions of fog could prevent them from cracking, the faint metallic taste of blood in his mouth.
“Captain?” It was the mate on Petrel’s bridge, looking quickly from the radar out into the late evening fog and calling down to the aft dry lab. “We have a surface blip — small, no bigger’n a dory. Coming in on the starboard aft quarter, five o’clock.”
At that moment, Frank saw the side-scan recorder’s light go from amber to red, the machine emitting a piercing squeal. It was a sound some of the LOSHOK slingshot party outside the dry lab hadn’t heard before, and they momentarily thought it might be a fire alarm.
“Fire flares! Starboard aft!” ordered Hall, his voice so loud that it seemed to those on deck as if the whole world could hear, including the crew of a submerged sub. “Have slingshot packs ready to—” Damn, he remembered he’d told the bosun to pack a hundred-pound charge for what might be the sub. The insistent squeal of the recorder had panicked him, something he’d always believed his SEAL training would override. Admonishing himself to “get a grip,” and, on the verge of telling the side-scan operator to “Hurry the fuck up” and finish changing the damn paper, he paused. Then, with a face suffused with self-assurance, he strode briskly to the lab door, hands behind his back.
“Bosun?” Hall said. “Have you made up that hundred-pound pack?”
“Just about finished, sir,” the bosun replied, busy recounting the fuse length for the LOSHOK pack that would serve as an ad hoc depth charge to be dropped atop the sub — if it was the sub. “I made it about seventy pounds, Captain,” the bosun added. “That leaves us with about half a dozen slingshot charges of—”
“Better call than mine, Bosun,” cut in Frank. “Well done.”
Hall’s admission to the bosun impressed Jimmy, Malcolm, Tiny, and the other slingshot party on deck.
“Captain!” The side-scan’s squealing had sto
pped, the stylus busy again converting Petrel’s ping echoes into more dull gray lines, the flat section that might either be a slab of sheared coastal rock or the midget sub’s sail still standing alone, as if anchored in mud. There were no sound echoes that would signify anything else but ooze.
The thump of the flare gun made Tiny jump. “Did you fart?” Jimmy asked Malcolm.
But Malcolm was too wound up to see anything remotely humorous in Jimmy’s comment. No doubt Jimmy wanted to appear cool, but he didn’t mind voicing his fear of the boat, the radar’s dot, coming in from the starboard aft position at about five o’clock. If the terrorist sub had been damaged by the SpecFor team, flooded maybe, and some terrorists were making a run for it in the sub’s inflatable — well, everyone knew how fanatical terrorists were — fight to the end. And what terrorists would want to be captured by the Americans after what the CIA boys did to their al Qaeda prisoners at the U.S. Bagram base in Afghanistan? As the CIA guy had told Marte Price on CNN, “There was before 9/11, and after 9/11. After 9/11 the gloves came off.”
The first parachute flare had deployed and was slowly descending, the fiercely burning flare suffusing the fog around the Petrel with a flickering orange light, the thump of the second flare making Tiny jump again. No jokes from Jimmy now, because the light from the second flare, allied with that of the first, had illuminated the approaching boat. Not a dory, as was thought, but a long, twenty-four-foot inflatable.
Up on Petrel’s bridge, Hall’s first mate looked through his binoculars at the approaching craft and rang down to the dry lab, where Frank took the call.
“Captain,” the first mate informed him, “it’s an RIB, about three hundred yards off. Barely visible but looks like a landing party.”
“Uniforms?” Hall asked.
“Greenish khaki.”
“That’s not Coast Guard.”
“No. Could be that SpecFor team.”
“They armed?”
“Like Pancho Villa,” answered the mate. “Bandoliers.”
“Can you make out their faces?”
“No, only war paint. Camouflage.”
“Caucasian, Hispanic, what?” pressed Hall, knowing the moment he said it that it was a silly question. Canada and the United States were full of minorities, particularly in the Northwest. Racial features wouldn’t prove a damn thing. But they sure as hell weren’t SEALs. All that bandolier crap looked good for the media and in the movies, but was scorned by all Special Forces. Bandoliers in a firefight, as Hall’s old buddy Aussie Lewis used to put it, were about as useless as “tits on a bull.” By the time you unraveled the macho crisscross bandoliers to reload, you’d be meat.
“If they’re ours,” said the first mate, “why haven’t they tried to radio us on sixteen? They’re moving slowly.”
“I’m coming up,” Frank told the mate. He took the short route, straight up the ladder from Petrel’s stern deck to its Little Bird hangar deck, then up the four steps to the chart room immediately aft of the bridge.
“Doesn’t add up,” Frank told the mate, taking up the binoculars. “If they’re terrorists and they don’t know sixteen’s the open channel in these waters, they haven’t done their homework. But they’ve caused more damage to us since Pearl Harbor and 9/11, so they sure as hell must have done their homework.”
“Well, who the hell—”
“They’re within hailing distance now,” cut in Frank. Snatching the megaphone’s mike, he moved quickly to the bridge’s starboard wing, the first flare now fizzling out in the fog. “Stop your vessel! Identify yourself!”
“Wanna bet they speak Arabic?” said the helmsman.
The megaphone response startled everyone on Petrel. “We’re Coast Guard from the USS Skate. Stand by for boarding!”
“Screw you!” came the voice of one of Petrel’s crew, audible to Hall but probably not to the inflatable carrying what looked to be six or seven men.
“What are we going to do?” asked the first mate, then answered his own question with a nervous laugh. “Let ’em board, I suppose.”
“Not yet,” said Hall, whose great-grandfather had regaled him with tales of the awful Pacific war after Pearl, when American-educated Japanese who spoke American English had on more than one occasion duped gullible young GIs into coming out into the open. The Nazis had done the same thing even more effectively, since they were Caucasians, dressed up in American uniforms, penetrating the American perimeter in the fierce counterattack through the Ardennes in 1944.
All right, so Hall knew it would sound corny, but better safe than—
“Prepare to be boarded!” came the insistent voice from what was now 150 yards away, the RIB a black shadow in the fibrous fog.
“Screw you!” yelled one of Petrel’s crew.
Hall strode back to the stern edge of the hangar deck. “Shut up!” he warned his crew. “Get ready to fire those LOSHOKS when I give the word.”
“Stand by to be—”
Hall raised his megaphone. “You come any further and we’ll ram you!” To make the point, he ordered the chief to bring engines to full power, but as yet did not engage the prop, hoping the sudden rumble of the engines would produce the desired effect.
“Looks like they’ve stopped!” the mate said, unsure and wondering aloud what sort of trouble Petrel would be in afterward if it was a Coast Guard officer who’d hailed them, and not an English-speaking terrorist.
Frank brushed the mate’s concern aside. “Navy trumps the Coast Guard!”
Frank pressed the megaphone’s button and asked, “Who won the last World Series?”
There was silence from the stopped boat, and Frank uncharacteristically turned to the mate with a self-indulgent smile of victory, but the mate’s puzzled expression killed his smile, Hall seeing that the mate didn’t know the answer. Confounding his corny tactic further, Hall could hear what sounded like an argument on the stern deck, someone yelling, “It was the Yankees, goddammit!”
“Was it?” asked the mate. “I mean, the Yankees?”
“Yes,” said Frank, his cocky assurance of a few minutes ago quickly evaporating. Apart from the improvised LOSHOK packs, the Petrel was unarmed. Yes, it was much bigger than the other vessel, but it had no armor whatsoever. Plus, despite his threat to ram them, Frank and everyone else aboard, including the cook’s helper, knew an RIB could easily outmaneuver the bigger Petrel.
“Dry lab to bridge.”
“Come in, Lab,” said the mate.
“We’re picking up some funny spots on the side-scan since we changed the paper!”
Frank spoke into the intercom, an edge to his voice. “What do you mean, funny?”
“Echoes — not many, but some sort of square-ish.”
“Aft of that slab we saw?”
“Yes, sir, like I said — after we changed the paper roll.”
Frank noticed that the inflatable off the starboard quarter had stopped, for the moment, gyrating slowly in the offshore currents.
“Keep an eye on them!” Frank told the mate as he quickly left the bridge and went through the helo hangar. He slid down the aft ladder to the stern deck without his feet touching a single step, the metal rails giving his hands a friction burn, his senses so alert that in addition to the salty tang of the sea and the peculiarly distinctive smell of fog-saturated air, he could detect the faint odor of the sonar recorder’s paper before he stepped over the lab’s doorsill.
Frank saw that the spots on the trace, when they were magnified, did look square-ish, but that was all.
It was a fifty-fifty situation. Neither of the technicians had said anything yet, unwilling to commit themselves one way or the other. “Suggestions?” he asked the two men. “Any at all?”
“I–I dunno,” said one. The other, teeth clenched, giving his jaw an unappealing, undershot look, shook his head. Frank had left the lab-bridge intercom open for immediate communication.
“What are they doing?” he asked the mate.
“Just c
ircling.”
“Circling us?” Frank asked in alarm.
“No, I mean just — you know, going around.”
“No, I don’t know — that’s why I asked you, you idiot. Be specific, dammit!”
There was an awkward silence.
“Bridge?” Frank said.
“Yes, sir?”
“I apologize. I was way out of line.”
“That’s all right, sir. I’ve tried to identify any name on the inflatable but can’t see anything.”
“Good man. Keep looking.”
“Yes, sir.”
“LOSHOK packs all ready to go,” the bosun announced from the lab door.
“Very well.” Frank’s arms were back in Horatio Nelson mode.
“What’d he say?” Tiny asked the bosun as he returned to the deck.
“He said, ’Very well.’ “
“ ’Very well?’ “
“Yeah, like he was Captain Queeg.”
“Who’s that?” asked the cook’s helper.
Tiny, tightening the rope length he’d used to replace his belt, grunted, “Queeg was an old man on a cruiser—”
“Destroyer,” the bosun corrected him.
“Whatever,” said Tiny.
“So what happened?” pressed the cook’s assistant.
“What happened is he went nuts. Under pressure. Caved in. Paranoid. Talked to himself.”
The cook’s helper looked disquieted. “I do that sometimes.”
“Yeah, well, you’re nuts too.”
“Bosun,” called Frank. “Lower our runaround. I’m going out to talk to these jokers. See what the score is.”
“I dunno, sir,” said the bosun uneasily. “If you don’t mind my sayin’ so, they’re—”
“What would you suggest?” asked Hall. “If they’re terrorists, they probably wouldn’t try this caper unless they had antitank ordnance. One round of that could easily split us open at the waterline. You know, well as I do, that we haven’t an inch of armor on Petrel. We’d sink in minutes. I’ve seen enough dead Americans. More dead bodies than when I was on tour.”
