Deep Whisper

by Henry Martin

  Deep Whisper

  Henry Martin

  “Captain,” said a voice in the darkness. “Captain, are you awake, sir?”

  The world came back to Commander Mark Castillo like a slap, his heart racing, sucking up air in sharp, shallow breaths, his mouth coated with something bitter and metallic. He sat up in his rack, propped up on his hands. A blurry sliver of light cleaved the darkness in two, the messenger of the watch a shadowy silhouette against the cracked-open hatch.

  This couldn’t be his regular wake-up. It felt like he’d only just shut his eyes. His gaze flickered to the little digital clock perched on the bracket that ran alongside his rack. Red numbers glowed in the darkness: 2217. He’d only been asleep for fifty minutes.

  For a moment he felt nothing but the painful thud of his heart. If the OOD was waking him up early it had to be bad news. And he took no comfort from the absence of alarms. There were plenty of things that could kill a submarine slow and quiet before a deck officer realized the full extent of the danger.

  Still sleep-addled, Castillo fumbled for a name. “What is it . . . Fireman Anderson?”

  “Sir, the Officer of the Deck sends his respects and reports that he has found Kirishima. She bears zero nine seven at 43,000 yards.”

  Kirishima!

  Castillo was suddenly wide awake, all thought of sleep banished from his mind.

  “Thanks, Anderson. Would you mind hitting the light on your way out?”

  “Yessir.”

  There was a click and horrible, burning light filled Castillo’s stateroom, stinging his eyes. He stood up, thinking hard, and shrugged into the dark blue coveralls that submariners called “poopie suits.” Then he bent down and reached for the sound-powered phone set mounted on the bulkhead by his rack and gave the phone’s crank a quarter-turn, generating a little mechanical whoop.

  The officer of the deck, Bob Glazer, must have been waiting for his call, because he picked up at once. “Yes, Captain?”

  “All stop,” said Castillo.

  “All stop, aye aye, sir” said Glazer. Castillo heard him turn away from the phone and say, “All stop.” He came back on the line. “Maneuvering answers all stop, Captain.”

  “She hear us yet, Bob?”

  “Don’t think so, Captain. Sonar said she just sort of popped up. Busfield says she has a one-third bell on. I think she was drifting and then came up in speed to move to the next grid in her search pattern. I’d bet good money she has a Seahawk up.”

  “At least,” said Castillo, thinking hard. The pair of Japanese destroyers they were dueling were being supported by U.S. Navy P-3 Orions out of Kadena. The destroyers’ embarked helos were dangerous enough, but if there was a P-3 out there laying sonobuoys, Pasadena might already be caught. He could come up to pee dee and use his ESM mast to lock down the air picture.

  Or…

  “OOD, pass the word by messenger, Battlestations Torpedo.”

  “Aye aye, sir.”

  Castillo hung up the phone and thought, Kirishima. A grim smile curled across his dark, handsome face.

  At last.

  Main Control was a submerged boat’s nerve center and by fast attack standards Pasadena’s was spacious.

  It didn’t feel that way.

  Compared to a surface ship’s bridge, Control felt cramped and uncomfortable. Harsh blue-white light cast hard-edged shadows. The air was dry and oily and tasted of ozone. The periscope stand dominated the space’s center, the Ship Control Station sat port forward, the chart tables aft, and a series of tactical consoles ran along the starboard bulkhead. Even the overhead was cluttered with pipes and valves, conduit and EAB manifolds.

  Mark Castillo loved it, every inch of it.

  He stepped into Control and was greeted by near perfect silence. It was the kind of silence you might encounter in an old cemetery on a bitter February morning when even the hardiest of mourners wouldn’t venture out and the trees’ bare branches robbed the wind of its voice, stealing away even the faint whisper of rustling leaves. It was a silence that was cold. Menacing.

  Determined.

  Not a man, not a single man, made a sound.

  Castillo kept his face impassive, but inside he felt a fierce pride. These were his people and he had trained them to be quiet in exactly this way.

  In submarine warfare, the difference between life and death could actually be measured in decibels. On Pasadena, quiet was a deadly serious business and it wasn’t just about securing ventilation fans or trading out the 1MC announcing circuit for sound-powered phones.

  No, it was about crewmen remembering not to slam the door when they finished up in the head and cooks tying down and pots and pans so they didn’t rattle in their cabinets. On a vessel where the clank of a dropped wrench on a deck plate could conceivably bring a torpedo racing in, no crewman could be excused from the duty of stealth.

  So Castillo was gratified to step into Control and hear nothing but the electronic hum of equipment.

  Lieutenant, j.g. Glazer was standing just in front of the periscope stand. He nodded at Castillo. “Battlestations Torpedo is set, Captain,” murmured Glazer. The boy stepped over to a chart table that showed a northern slice of the Sea of Japan. “Kirishima’s right about here,” Glazer said, pointing at a pencil mark east of the Korean peninsula, southwest of Vladivostok, and north of the Yamato ridge. “I’m going to need a turn to firm up her course, but I think she’s moving west.”

  West. Castillo thought Glazer was right about that. He looked at the OOD. Glazer was just a kid, 24, but among Castillo’s JO’s he was the best tactician. He had come out of MIT and he looked it: thick glasses, mousy brown hair that was just barely on the legal side of regulation, and it looked like the kid loved that good submarine chow. He’d put on an extra ten pounds since the beginning of deployment. But when it came to hunting ships and submarines, the kid had ice water in his veins.

  “What would you recommend?” asked Castillo, using the situation as a training opportunity.

  “Come up to one-third,” said Glazer at once. “Turn quickly. If she is sprinting into position, she’s going to cut her engines soon and I want to nail down her course before that happens. If she is coming west, we do a quick excursion to pee dee to get the air picture, then dive beneath the layer and wait for her to come to us.”

  It was a sound recommendation. In fact, it was textbook.

  But it was not what Castillo was going to do.

  He pointed at the deep blue color of the chart. “We’re over the Japan Basin. We have better than 9,000 feet of clear water below us.”

  To his credit, Glazer saw it right away. “You’re going to dive below the deep layer and run up on her.”

  “If we wait here, Kirishima can marshal her air assets to hunt us down. If we run in, we’re more likely to catch them out of position. Besides,” Castillo smiled, “I’m not a big fan of waiting around to see what happens.”

  Chagrined, Glazer nodded.

  “Officer of the Deck, make your depth eight hundred feet,” said Castillo. “When we reach depth, we’ll come to new course zero nine six and put on a flank bell for two zero minutes.”

  “Make my depth eight hundred feet, aye aye, sir,” said Glazer. “Diving Officer, make your depth eight hundred feet.”

  For a moment, Control was noisy as the diving officer, Senior Chief Ezekiel Washington, issued orders and his charges repeated them back.

  Castillo grabbed an EAB manifold in the overhead to anchor himself as his boat took on a distinct down angle.

  At last Castillo’s watchstanders fell silent, all the orders given and executed. Pasadena dove, slipping down into a dark, still silence more complete than anything her crew could ever hope to replicate.

  The Japanese destroyer w
as already dead—she just didn’t know it yet.

  Castillo leaned across the dead reckoning table, studying the relative positions of the two vessels. The DRT tracked every course and speed change Pasadena made. Every three minutes a petty officer leaned over and marked the sub’s position—as well as the position of all her contacts—on a scrolling piece of trace paper. What emerged was a birds-eye view of the tactical situation, pencil tracks snaking across the paper showing the deadly dance of submarine and destroyer.

  After the run, Castillo had brought Pasadena up above the deep layer, but not above the shallow layer. What submariners called the layer was actually a border between two masses of water with different sound velocity profiles. Variations in pressure, temperature, and salinity gave neighboring regions of the ocean distinct acoustic properties. As a result, surface ships couldn’t see below the layer with their bow-mounted sonars.

  Unfortunately, hiding beneath the layer wasn’t a guarantee of safety. A destroyer with a towed-array sonar could listen below the layer. So could a Seahawk’s dipping sonar. Castillo had Kirishima dead to rights. But Amagiri could be out there too, drifting silently, waiting for Pasadena to engage her sister.

  Complacency was the constant enemy of a submarine commander.

  Right now Castillo was in a long, slow turn, firming up Kirishima’s course and speed.

  What his DRT trace showed was that his Los Angeles-class boat had worked her way to within eight thousand yards of Kirishima. Torpedo run time at four nautical miles was four minutes, 22 seconds. If this had been war, instead of an exercise, the beautiful Aegis-class destroyer would have been doomed.

  Castillo would have loosed a pair of the Mk 48 ADCAP’s in his torpedo room, sending the two ship killers on a brief wire-guided journey that would have ended when they broke the back of Kirishima and sent the two halves of the destroyer pinwheeling down to the deep, dark bottom of the Sea of Japan.

  Of course this was an exercise with an allied navy so the DRT trace was enough to prove his victory over the Japanese destroyer.

  But that wasn’t enough for Castillo. He turned away from the DRT table, and flashed a wolfish smile at Glazer. “Officer of the Deck, make your depth six two feet.”

  Glazer grinned. “Six two feet, aye aye, sir. Diving Officer, make your depth six two feet.”

  “Make my depth six two feet,” said the senior chief. Ezekiel Washington was the chief of the boat, the senior enlisted man aboard. The cob was as crusty an old salt as Castillo had ever met. He was a twenty-year veteran, an African-American from Georgia.

  Washington looked over at Castillo and, unlike everyone else in Control, he wasn’t smiling. For a moment the captain saw something in the cob’s eyes, not disapproval, surely, but maybe…assessment.

  And then the senior chief turned away, focused on the helmsman and stern planesman as they pulled back on their control yokes, watching the chief of the watch as he pumped ballast to sea.

  Castillo had his submarine at bare steerageway, about three knots, the slowest speed at which his submarine could hold a course, so she responded sluggishly to his command. Slowly, slowly, the sea flowed over the boat’s angled stern and fairwater plane’s generating lift that pushed the now-lighter submarine up.

  USS Pasadena slowly rose toward the sky.

  Coming to periscope depth was a dangerous maneuver, some would say a reckless maneuver. Kirishima was not easy prey. The Japanese Maritime Self-Defense Force was a tough, professional navy and the destroyer’s captain, Sakutaro Kagawa, was one of the JMSDF’s best. The destroyer might hear the sound of Pasadena’s ballast pumps or the submarine’s hull popping as she rose above the layer. Or Kirishima’s surface-search radar might pick Castillo’s periscope out of the sea clutter.

  Worse yet, the destroyer had been modified to carry helicopters and she had a Sikorsky SH-60J Seahawk up. Castillo held the Seahawk twenty-three thousand yards to the east, but that datum was nineteen minutes old—the ASW bird might be dangerously close. Even if it weren’t, even if the helo was exactly where he thought it was, it had a top speed of 146 knots. If the destroyer caught even a whiff of Pasadena, the Seahawk could be on station in 4.7 minutes, lashing the sea mercilessly with its active sonar, localizing his submarine.

  Turning Castillo’s victory into sudden, humiliating defeat.

  So there was significant risk in coming to pee dee and really no upside. Except …pencil markings on a piece of paper was a bloodless victory. Castillo wanted to walk into Kagawa’s stateroom and slap down an eight-by-ten glossy of Kirishima’s hull number centered in his attack scope’s cross-hairs.

  Castillo told himself that he wanted to show Kagawa and the Japanese just what they were up against.

  The rules of SCARLET GOALPOST were simple. Pasadena was restricted to a box a hundred nautical miles on a side. Two JMSDF destroyers, Kirishima and Amagiri were supposed to hunt and localize the submarine. Pasadena’s goal was to stay hidden.

  The Japanese held all the advantages. They knew the submarine was there and by the rules of the ex, Pasadena couldn’t slip outside the box. And the pair of destroyers not only had their Seahawks to rely on, but they were being supported by U.S. Navy P-3’s.

  And still his submarine had won.

  Castillo told himself he was coming up to pee dee because a picture would reinforce a very important lesson: the JMSDF and their USN allies needed to do better at ASW. But the truth was, a part of him just wanted to win.

  And so did his crew, which was why he saw smiles on the faces of his people. They liked to win just like he did, and they liked to be bad-ass about it. Grrrrr, we’re the Pasadena. Stay out of our way.

  Castillo stepped up onto the periscope stand and pulled down the Type 18. He turned the search scope in a quick circle, peering through green water, looking for the shadowy silhouette of a surface ship’s hull. He thought he had a good handle on the surface picture, but if he’d missed something and came up in front of a freighter a collision could send his beautiful boat straight to the bottom. He went around and around, looking, looking.

  The scope broke the water and he did another quick circle, making sure there wasn’t a hidden contact before he came back to Kirishima. The destroyer looked nearly identical to the U.S. Arleigh Burke-class destroyer on which it was based: the oddly angular superstructure that housed the powerful phased-array radar, the long bow loaded with deadly missiles, the two trapezoidal stacks aft. If not for the Rising Sun flying from her stern, Castillo might have mistaken her for a U.S. vessel.

  He had her. She was showing port quarter aspect, eight thousand yards, dead center in his sights. And look at that, the Seahawk was sitting on her helo deck, refueling, which meant he was relatively safe until the helo lifted off again.

  Castillo started snapping pictures, enjoying himself immensely, right up until the moment Glazer stepped up to him and said, “Captain, Sonar needs you right away.”

  The urgent tone of Glazer’s voice made Castillo look away from the scope. The young officer’s face was set into grave lines.

  “What is it, Bob?”

  “Sir, Busfield says he just picked up something coming out of Vladivostok. A CZ contact.”

  There were places in the ocean where sound waves generated beneath the ocean’s surface bounced off a sound layer and were deflected upward. A CZ contact could be heard twenty or even thirty nautical miles away in a band only a few miles wide, called a convergence zone.

  “So the Russians have a sub coming out,” prompted Castillo. The fact that a Russian submarine was transiting out of Vladivostok wasn’t exactly news.

  Glazer frowned. “Sir, Jimmy says it’s not like anything he’s ever heard before.”

  Now that was news. Petty Officer Second Class Jimmy Busfield was the best sonar tech on Pasadena. Castillo would have laid good money that he was the best in the Pacific.

  If Busfield was spooked…

  “Take the scope,” said Castillo. “If Kirishima makes a radical course ch
ange or the helo takes off take us down fast. Once we’re beneath the layer come to new course one nine three, full bell.” Castillo held up an index finger. “If you think they’ve found us.”

  “Yessir,” said Glazer crisply.

  Castillo squeezed the young man’s shoulder and stepped off the periscope stand. He stepped through Control’s forward hatch and leaned into the sonar shack which was immediately off the p-way leading out of Control.

  Sonar was little bigger than a closet and just as dark. The space’s only lighting came from a row of BSY-1 consoles. A faint green static filled the screens, coloring the faces of the sonarmen hunched over them a pale green. A sharp emerald line sliced through Busfield’s screen.

  “You got something for me, Watch Supervisor?” Castillo asked softly.

  Busfield turned around to look at him. He was thin kid from the American southwest. Castillo heard the west Texas in his accent. “Yes, sir, that’s affirm.” The kid reached out and touched the green line cutting through his waterfall display. “She looks like a CZ contact to me, think we’re getting her on the second bounce, so that puts her fifty, sixty miles out.”

  He reached for a pair of headphones and handed them to his captain. “Here, sir. I think she’s fixin’ to fade out. Better listen before she does.”

  Castillo pressed one of the ear pieces to his right ear and listened carefully. He wasn’t as gifted as his sonar techs, but he stopped by sonar to listen nearly every time they got a contact. He listened to the thak-thak-thak of a pair of screws pumping noise into the water until the signal faded out.

  Castillo put the phone set down and looked up. “Boomer,” he said.

  Busfield beamed, grinning wide. “That’s right, skipper. I have a job for you in Sonar, if this captain thing doesn’t work out. Blade count and rate make her a Typhoon.”

  “Which one?”

  Busfield shook his head. “One we don’t have on record, skipper.”

  “A Type IV,” Castillo whispered. One of the new Russian missile boats.

  “There’s something else weird,” said Busfield.