Pastor leaned over the central firecontrol display, the one known as position two, selecting it to line-of-sight mode. The way he figured it, he would have all of one minute to identify the target, put its bearing into firecontrol, set the bearing and assumed range into the torpedo, and fire before the target knew he was there. Maybe less.
Birmingham was not a new boat, and the newer Improved 688 class ships were much quieter, but then if Pastor felt his ship shouldn’t be here in the Oparea, ready for combat, he wouldn’t be in command of her. Admiral Pacino would replace him with someone willing to take the risk and fight.
Pastor looked over at pos one, the console furthest forward, selected it to geographic plot mode, a God’s-eye view of the sea, showing the coastline of Japan, their wolfpack partner ahead and to the east, the USS Jacksonville, the two submarines steaming on a parallel course up the coastline searching for Destiny submarines. The Jacksonville was the same vintage as the Birmingham, both at the tail end of their service lives. Pastor stepped to pos three, the third console aft, and selected it to line-of-sight mode with the target selected as the Jacksonville, just so that he could see where not to put a torpedo in case things got confused. That done, the firecontrol system was as good as it was going to get with no hostile contacts. Satisfied with the status of the control room.
Pastor moved on into the sonar room through the forward starboard door of control. Sonar was lit with blue fluorescents, its screens multicolored displays, the room’s light ghostly after the red of the control room. In charge of sonar was Petty Officer Hazelton, a skinny curly-haired farm boy from Iowa who loved to torture city kids with stories of butchering pigs at pig roasts, his stories of behind-the-barn sexual encounters equally lurid. In spite of his youth and odd interests, Hazelton knew the sonar suite. And Pastor, a sub captain who believed that sonar was the center of the submerged universe, knew more sonar acoustic physics and equipment knobology than many chiefs.
“Permission to take a console,” Pastor asked Hazelton, the formality in reference to the fact that Hazelton was in charge in sonar, and even the ship’s commanding officer needed to ensure that taking a console would not interfere with the sonar search. Hazelton replied in the affirmative, handing Pastor a headset. Pastor strapped it on, adjusted the microphone and looked down on his dual-screen console display. The upper screen was selected to the waterfall display of short-and medium-time broadband noise. It was a way of “seeing” what the ship’s spherical array heard, but with this display the user could listen to all directions at once and look back in time to compare this second’s noise with last second’s, this minute’s noises with the minute before.
A noise was shown with a spot of light, the brightness in proportion to the strength of the sound. As time went on, the noise heard at that instant moved down the screen to be replaced by new display traces, the noises falling down, a noise of a ship drawing a vertical line down the waterfall of the random-noise display. The lower screen was a number of graphs, the vertical axis of each graph sound intensity, the horizontal axis the frequency. The ship was searching for specific tones put out by the Destiny II-class, the intelligence tipping them off to search for a signature around 150 hertz, most probably generated by the ship’s turbine generators. Pastor slouched deep into the leather of the seat and listened to the various traces down the display, investigating each one for a man-made sound, selecting a narrowband processor on the traces he couldn’t confirm as biologies, as fish. He trained the cursor to the bearing of the Jacksonville, the trace very slight on the waterfall display. He could just make out her screw turning if he concentrated on it. The Jacksonville would be more detectable on narrowband, but as long as he knew she was there, there was no sense wasting narrowband processing time on the friendly sub.
Whenever Pastor operated a sonar console he thought about his family. He wasn’t quite sure why, except that perhaps it was that the sounds of the ocean sounded like his wife’s stomach when she was pregnant, the lazy Friday nights spent with him lying with his head in her full lap, her perfume caressing him, the sounds of her abdomen soothing him, the occasional kick of the baby pressing against his ear. The first child had almost killed Carol, the emergency C-section taking place at the last minute, the surgeon losing Carol’s heartbeat, spending endless minutes trying to revive her. Pastor had stood in the operating room, wearing his scrubs, openmouthed behind the surgical mask as they carted away his newborn baby daughter from the room, the baby’s mother clinically dead. Over and over they tried to start her heart but all they could see was the flat line of the heart monitor. Pastor, trained to handle pressure, had not been up to seeing his wife lying there dead, her abdomen cut open. Finally a nurse realized he wasn’t part of the team and had ushered him out of the room, and it was like he had been drinking all night — his memory trace just stopped. He never lost consciousness but it was almost as if the mental pain had been too much for him.
He came to an hour later in a waiting room outside intensive care. He stood, as if lost, and asked about his wife. At first the nurse looked at him blankly, then waved him to a room. Carol’s face was as hollow-eyed as a corpse, her skin as white, her hair wild, but when she opened her eyes and looked at him she had never seemed more beautiful to him. He had hugged her as hard as he felt she could handle, tears of relief coming from his eyes, shaking as he felt her hand patting his back. She had said only two words — “the baby?” — and Pastor had stood upright, at a loss. He had never asked about the child, and had kissed Carol’s cheek and said the baby was fine. He practically ran from the room to see the child, a normal and healthy seven-pound girl, short brown hair curled around her sleepy eyes. The baby accounted for, Pastor hurried back to Carol, but she was out cold and would not wake up for a day and a half, and when she did she remembered nothing, not even asking him about the child.
After that episode with tiny Adrianne, Pastor was unwilling to try again, but she had insisted, and two years later he had sweated out another pregnancy with Carol, this time twins. But that pregnancy had gone sour, too, one of the twins dying in utero, requiring them to induce labor, endangering the life of the healthy fetus. The living newborn was ten weeks premature, tiny, struggling for life. Carol had trouble coping, the dead twin constantly on her mind. As Darlene grew up, her name given her before birth, Carol insisted she saw an apparition of the dead twin Danielle. It had been a tough year, the first after Darlene was born, but that was five years ago, and it had been over a year since Carol had seen the apparition of Danielle playing with her living twin. Pastor had wanted Carol to get psychiatric help but she wouldn’t hear of it. At least things were calming now, Pastor thought.
He moved the sonar electronic cursor over to a new trace and listened hard. The groan of a whale could be heard in the distance, the sound eerie, surreal, echoing through the depths of the sea. Pastor continued his search, wondering if they would ever detect anything in the Oparea. The size of this chunk of ocean was huge in square miles, an area the size of California and Nevada combined, and so far there had been exactly nothing.
The officer of the deck in the control room turned the ship in a baffle-clearing maneuver to train the spherical array on the ocean that had been astern of them, in the blind spot behind the screw, although Pastor had ordered them to “drag the onion,” deploy the teardrop-shaped AN/T-47 caboose array that was designed to look aft, but he agreed with the O.O.D’s decision since the caboose was crude and small, only a supplement to occasionally turning the ship to see behind them. But for ten minutes after the turn there was still nothing. The O.O.D returned to base course and followed the coastline to the northeast. The sea was absolutely empty. Aside from the Jacksonville, there was no one there.