Deep Whisper

by Henry Martin

  Castillo frowned, remembering the sonorous beat of the submarine’s screws slicing through the ocean, the single emerald line cutting through the waterfall display.

  The single emerald line.

  “She came out alone,” said Castillo.

  “Yessir, sure looks that way to me.”

  A boomer by herself, especially a new one, ran counter to Russian doctrine. Typically Russian SSBN’s were escorted out by attack submarines to screen out enemy fast attacks.

  Castillo patted Busfield on the shoulder. “Nice work, Petty Officer. Very nice. You have a bearing for me?”

  “Yessir, three four two.”

  Castillo nodded. “Very nice.”

  He stepped out of Sonar, thinking furiously. His orders required him to stay in the box and play with Kirishima and Amagiri for another 28 hours and there wasn’t any give in those orders. If he ran after the Typhoon he’d be bringing SCARLET GOALPOST to a premature end. On the other hand, he had a golden opportunity to slip up to the Russians’ newest ballistic missile submarine and write the book on her.

  American submarine commanders spent a lot of time beyond the reach of their chain of command and so they were trained to think for themselves. It was a trait Castillo had no trouble with. By the time he had stepped back into Control he had made up his mind.

  “Officer of the Deck,” he said, “make your depth two hundred feet and come up to a two-thirds bell when you reach depth. Steer new course, three four two. Secure from Battlestations.”

  “Aye aye, Captain,” snapped Glazer, who immediately repeated the orders for his control team. Once again, Control was filled with the sound of repeatbacks as Pasadena slipped silently beneath the waves.

  The Japanese destroyer Kirishima never even knew she was there.

  Castillo stepped into his tiny stateroom and shut the hatch behind him. There was room for a single, narrow rack up against the bulkhead opposite the hatch. Across from his rack was a gray storage unit that included a closet, four drawers, a fold-down desk, and a wall safe. Castillo had taped pictures of Dianne and the kids up over the little compartment that served as his work space. Inside the closet, behind his uniforms, he’d hung a crucifix. Sometimes he pulled aside his khakis and service dress blues to find the device hiding there, to remind himself that God was always present, whether he saw Him or not.

  When Pasadena was on deployment, this small, Spartan space was his home.

  Castillo tried to always remember that no matter how cramped and bare his stateroom was, every other man aboard Pasadena had less.

  He realized he still had a coffee cup half-filled with Coke in his hand. (Castillo didn’t drink coffee.) He stepped over to the small, steel sink where he shaved and dumped it out. The last thing he needed was more caffeine.

  Before departing the exercise op area he’d released a SLOT buoy, reporting that he was breaking off from SCARLET GOALPOST to pursue the Typhoon. He didn’t wait around for an answer. Castillo was certain that CINCPACFLT would validate his decision—if he actually found the Russian boomer.

  And that would be a problem.

  Because she had been a CZ contact, there was no way for Pasadena to continuously track the Typhoon. Instead, Castillo would have to run toward her last known posit and then reacquire the Russian boat. Because he had a bearing to the Typhoon and he knew she had to be coming out of Vladivostok, Castillo had a rough position on the boomer. But every second that ticked by carried the Typhoon farther and farther away from that posit. If Castillo took too long to reach the datum, the Typhoon would fade away like a ghost. On the other hand, if he ran in too fast, the boomer would hear him coming.

  It was a difficult dilemma.

  Castillo had ordered turns for twenty knots. He’d run for two hours toward the datum and then stop to listen. Castillo was betting that the Typhoon was moving north, either toward her op area in the Arctic or the Russian boomer base at Rybachiy.

  Rybachiy was more likely. It was beyond strange for a Russian boomer to come out of Vladivostok. Russian ballistic missile boats were homeported out of the Kamchatka peninsula to the north. Castillo figured the Typhoon had some kind of engineering casualty that had forced her to make port in Vladivostok and she was now making her way back to Rybachiy.

  Either way she had to be moving north, and Castillo thought she’d be going slow and quiet.

  He would find her.

  But until then he was going to get some sleep. The hunt for Kirishima had been grueling; Castillo had gotten only four hours of sleep in the last thirty. He had left orders with the OOD to wake him immediately if Sonar detected the Typhoon but otherwise he was going to grab a couple hours of much needed rest.

  Someone rapped on his stateroom door.

  Castillo looked daggers at the gray hatch and then he sighed. “Come.”

  Senior Chief Ezekiel Washington poked his head in. “Sorry to bother you, Captain, but I was wondering if I could have a few minutes?”

  “Of course.” Castillo gestured at one of the two straight-backed steel chairs that graced his stateroom. The cob closed the hatch behind him, and sat down. Castillo settled into the other chair.

  Pasadena had three lay readers, a Catholic, a Mormon, and a Southern Baptist, but the chief of the boat was as close as the submarine came to having a priest. The cob’s job was to look out for the welfare of the crew, to use his experience to smooth over the kind of conflicts that inevitably arose when men were tired, under pressure, and living on top of each other. A good cob was worth his weight in gold. This was Castillo’s first deployment on Pasadena, but near as he could tell after two months, Ezekiel Washington was one of the best.

  If the chief of the boat needed to talk to him, he would make time to listen.

  “What can I do for you, Senior Chief?”

  The cob dragged his hand across the smooth, chocolate skin of his skull. “Captain, I have an¼observation. I was wondering if I could talk to you about it, man to man?”

  Castillo nodded. “Of course. Some kind of problem with the crew?”

  Washington tilted his head to one side and fixed Castillo with his wise, brown eyes. “More a problem with the submarine.”

  Castillo frowned, but said nothing.

  Washington spread his hands out. “When Rickover fathered the nuclear navy he had to be worried about accidents, nuclear accidents. So he created the most rigorous training program in the navy. He wrote the book on nuclear reactors and he made every officer memorize that book, down to the punctuation. He had to do it that way, because the consequences of a nuclear accident, even one, would be disastrous.”

  “That sounds like philosophy to me,” said Castillo smiling. “I thought you wanted to talk to me man to man.”

  The cob broke into a big smile, a flash of bright white against his dark skin. “You got me, sir. Sorry, I know you need to get some rest.”

  “Speak plain,” said Castillo. “I’ll listen.”

  “All right,” said Washington. “You ever fail at anything, sir? Ever flat-out fall on your face? Ever blow something that really mattered to you?”

  Castillo stared at the chief of the boat for a long, cold moment. “No,” he finally said.

  Washington nodded, like that was the answer he had been expecting.

  Castillo didn’t like this. He’d expected the cob to have some concern about the function of the submarine.

  Not her captain.

  “I’m not sure I am following you, Senior Chief.” Castillo’s voice was tight.

  “Accidents happen, Captain,” Washington said softly. “Failures. Disasters, even.”

  “And you think I don’t know that,” said Castillo and his voice was soft.

  “I think you know it, sir. But I think you know it in your head. Until you’ve royally, uh, screwed something up, you don’t really know it in your gut. You can’t.”

  The rules of discipline on a submarine were more lax than those on a surface ship, they had to be. Submarine crews were small an
d the men lived in close contact. And enlisted submariners were the brightest sailors in the navy, smart enough to govern themselves. But there were still lines.

  And the chief of the boat had just stepped over one of them.

  “I will not have anyone question my fitness to command this boat,” said Castillo coldly.

  Washington pushed away Castillo’s words with a raised hand. “I did not do that, Captain,” said the senior chief and there was a warning in the tone of his voice. “And I would not do that. I was just offering you an observation.”

  For a moment the two men stared at each other. Washington was a formidable man, Castillo could see that. “Then what exactly were you doing, Senior Chief?”

  “Skipper, you’re new to Pasadena and you don’t know me too well. So let me tell you a little story. Most people, they look at my skin tone and hear the Georgia twang in my voice and they assume I come from a poor family. Or maybe I joined the navy because some judge offered me a choice between the military—or jail.”

  “But that’s not true.”

  Washington smiled broadly. “No, sir. My father is a partner in the third largest corporate law firm in Atlanta. My two older brothers are lawyers, too. One of them, Samuel, is a state senator.”

  Castillo leaned back in his chair. “Is this where you tell me you’re a sea lawyer.”

  Washington chuckled. “No, sir. Anyway, not really sure why I decided to join the navy. Maybe because it was as far away as I could get from the law. If NASA had been hiring, I’d probably be an astronaut now.”

  “All right,” said Castillo. “So you enlisted. What’s the punch line.”

  “The punch line is that I didn’t enlist. My pop was a big wheel, remember? He got me an appointment to the Naval Academy.”

  “No,” said Castillo. “Now I know you’re pulling my leg.”

  Washington raised his right hand. “Honest to God.”

  “What happened?”

  “Threw me out my sophomore year. For drinking and cavorting with women of low moral character.”

  “Cavorting?”

  The cob arched an eyebrow. “There’s something to be said for a woman of low moral character.” He raised his hands. “Now, Captain, I know you’re having some fun at my expense and that’s just fine, but I got a serious point. I ended up an enlisted man on a ship, chipping paint. Nineteen years old and I was already a failure.”

  “At nineteen,” said Castillo.

  “Well, my father always did insist I was precocious. It takes most men three, four decades before they fail as impressively as I did at nineteen.”

  Suddenly Castillo was laughing and Washington was laughing with him. For a moment, Castillo felt warm and happy and a little bit loopy.

  “All right, Cob. That was good enough that I’m almost willing to forgive you for cutting into my rack time. Is that point you promised somewhere in my future?”

  Washington grew serious. “Here’s my point, Skipper. Failure happens. All the planning in the world won’t prevent it. The real measure of a man is not that he never fails. The real measure of a man is what he does with himself after he fails.”

  Castillo suddenly felt cold, ice cold.

  “All right, Cob, you told me a story. Let me pay you back.”

  Washington nodded, but said nothing.

  “I did grow up poor. I’m from East Colfax in Denver. He paused for a long moment thinking back. “Growing up, my best friend in the world was a kid named George Fuentes. George was a dopey looking kid. He had ears out to here.” Castillo stuck his hands on the side of his head, palms out. “It didn’t matter though, because George had a mouth on him.

  “He could talk himself into and out of any kind of trouble. He was a real charmer.” Castillo caught Washington’s eye. “Maybe you know the type.”

  “I am sure I do not know what the captain means,” said the cob with a perfectly straight face.

  “He was the kind of kid who could talk Aurelia Lopez with her fine body into going to the movies on a Friday night and talk her out of killing him when she learned that he already had a date with Gloria Mejia on the same night.”

  Castillo paused, ran a hand through his hair. “Anyway, one night, he met this girl—I don’t even remember her name—but she was fine. We were walking down the street and she was the kind of chica that would stop traffic. Everyone on that street just turned as she walked by, but George, George, had the cojones to try to pick her up.”

  “Get a girl in trouble, did he?” asked the cob.

  “Probably wouldn’t have even been nothing, except George made her laugh. He was so damn funny, the laughter just came bubbling out of her and if she was fine walking down the street she was an angel when she laughed.”

  Castillo was silent for a long moment, his stomach twisted into knots and heavy with acid. He felt strung out, exhausted and wired on caffeine.

  “It sounded like popping,” he whispered, “I’ll never forget that, not loud and dramatic, just pop, pop, pop, like a bottle of Champagne and then George crashed to the sidewalk. He was wearing a Bronco jersey, old and faded orange and I saw it was stained black and his face was white, like someone had poured all the blood right out of him. I was sixteen, I didn’t—” He shook his head. “Didn’t know what to do, anyway, I shouted for help and then I grabbed him, I don’t know what I was thinking, maybe if I could hold onto him, maybe if I could just hold on to him he would be okay until help… He was shaking so hard, looking up at me with frightened eyes and it wasn’t like it was even him because he wasn’t talking, couldn’t talk, and if there was one thing George could do it was talk, and I just wanted him to stop shaking.”

  He looked up. The cob sat across from him, ramrod straight, his jaw locked shut, his face grim.

  “George Fuentes was sixteen when he died,” said Castillo. “Shot dead because he put a hand on the shoulder of a gangbanger’s girlfriend and made her laugh. You see, Senior Chief,” and if Castillo’s voice had been cold before, now it was arctic, “that’s what happened in my neighborhood when you made a mistake.”

  Washington’s Adam’s apple bobbed as he swallowed. He hauled to himself to his feet, his face set into grave lines. He looked down, like he couldn’t meet Castillo’s eyes. “I apologize for disturbing you, Captain,” he said softly. Then he turned and left, shutting the hatch gently behind him.

  Castillo sat in his chair for a long moment, staring at the closed hatch. Then he got up and snapped off the light and laid down on his rack.

  It was a long time before he could get to sleep.

  When Castillo made his way up to Control, Lieutenant, j.g. Kenneth Green had the deck. Green was six-two and built, an African-American who was almost too big for submarine duty.

  “What’s it look like, Lieutenant?” he asked softly.

  “Good morning, Captain,” said Green and his face quirked in an ironic smile. It had been a while since anyone had gotten any kind of regular sleep on Pasadena—Castillo included.

  The kid stepped over to the DRT. “We’ve got a subsurface contact out here at three four nine, designated Sierra Six. We don’t have a range yet, Captain, sorry.”

  Castillo’s gaze flickered to the helmsman. The young sailor had his wheel over to the left. “You’re turning to get another bearing.”

  Green bobbed his head. “Yessir. We’re working to firm up Six. She’s awfully quiet, though. Sonar thinks she’s the Typhoon.” He tapped the tracing paper, pointing out another track. “This is an air contact, sounds like rotors. It’s running forward of Six. I’m guessing a Helix, though we’d have to come up to pee dee to check that with ESM.”

  Castillo nodded. “It’s a good thought, Ken, but I don’t want to risk detection by that helo. Helix is a good guess, good enough for what we’re doing. I suppose it makes sense that the Ruskies would send a helo out to screen a lone boomer, but why is she alone?” He shook his head. “It’s not like the Russians are running out of attack boats.”

  Gree
n laughed. “No, sir. In fact, we have one to the northwest. Sierra Four, classified as Victor Eighteen, the Daniil Moskovskiy. She’s making all kinds of noise, Captain, full bell. We’ve got a good solution on her, zero three two at sixty thousand yards.”

  Castillo blinked. What the hell? He glanced down at Sierra Four’s track, thinking maybe Vic-18 was running in to screen Pasadena off the boomer, but no, the attack boat was moving left to right, away from the Typhoon. He shook his head. First the Russians sent a boomer out by herself and then they had a fast boat running in the opposite direction.

  None of this made any sense.

  “You got a handle on this?” Castillo asked.

  Green opened his mouth, thought better of it and closed it. He shook his head. “No, sir.”

  Castillo rolled his answer over in his mind for a second or two. The Captain’s all-knowing mystique was a powerful tool in the command arsenal and he had peers who never admitted to their troops that they didn’t know an answer, but how was a JO supposed to learn if you locked them out of your thinking?

  Castillo sighed, “Me neither, Ken.” He tapped the DRT tracing paper. “In a situation like this we need to think about what we know—and what we don’t. The Russians are acting contrary to doctrine. It’s confusing to us, but there is a reason. I think we’ll find it when we get close to the Typhoon.”

  “What if we don’t?” asked Green.

  Castillo flashed the young officer a smile. “Then Ivan’s doing something different and Pasadena has the good fortune to lock it down and report it to CINCPACFLT.” He clapped Green on the shoulder. “We’re not out here to do the same thing all the time, Ken. The nav put us out here because we can think.”

  The kid grinned. “Well, in that case, sir, I suggest we—”

  He was interrupted by an excited voice from the gray speaker hung in the overhead. “Con, Sonar. I have an explosion at zero three three.”

  Castillo was on the move in an instant, punching through the hatch at the forward end of Control, stepping into the passageway and then shouldering his way into Sonar. “Report!” he barked.

  The sonar watch supervisor, STS2(SS) Thanh Pham, turned to look up at him. “Captain, we detected a large explosion, bearing zero three three.”