He was now fifty-one and technically not physically qualified in submarines. He had had a bad heart attack during shore duty while teaching the kids out of high school the science of sound propagation and the BSY-2 combat-control system’s sonar suite. The result had been an emergency quadruple bypass, more than enough to cashier him from the service, except Gambini’s mind had been too valuable to lose. He had been assigned to the old Pacific Fleet Submarine Command HQ before the submarine force reorganization, before the Muslim war, serving as the command master chief to Comsubpac, the commander of the Pacific Fleet’s submarines. Admiral Donchez. He and Donchez had hit it off, talking over beers in a back street bar away from the base. Gambini and his wife Maureen were prominent at Subpac, giving frequent parties at their seaside home. It had been evident that the two of them were one of those rare married couples who were inseparable, two halves of one soul. At one of the Gambini parties Maureen had buttonholed the admiral and whispered in his ear about how much Gambini missed the submarines.
Donchez had used his powers, being the bureaucracy’s equivalent to a 500-pound gorilla, to reinstate Gambini’s submarine qualification. Gambini was entirely too senior to go back to sea, especially in submarines, but the reinstatement meant he could at least ride submarines to help train their sonar crews. Donchez would move on from Subpac to become the Chief of Naval Operations, and Gambini left HQ to stay home with Maureen when she was diagnosed with brain cancer. The doctors gave her only a few months to live. Gambini’s face became hollow, his clothes hung on him. The cancer progressed. Gambini was beside her night and day as she slowly slipped away, finally becoming a different person, no longer able to recognize her husband or their three children. It was a Thursday night when she came out of the coma long enough to look at Gambini, this time with recognition. She had gripped his hands, hard, just before she shut her eyes for the last time. The moment of lucidity had been so brief, so startling and unexpected, and so close to the end, that Gambini had said he wasn’t sure if it had really happened, but a nurse in the doorway had also witnessed it.
After her burial Gambini had been lost. He couldn’t eat, sleep or work. On the rare occasions when he showed up at HQ he stared into space or put his head on his desk. Donchez’s replacement. Admiral Carson, had convinced Gambini to retire. The same year Donchez — then the number one admiral in the navy, the Chief of naval operations — on a trip to Pearl Harbor stopped over to see Gambini. One dinner with the man was enough — Donchez pulled the strings, and Gambini was sent back to sea as a sonarman, a trial assignment to the Piranha since the Piranha was a new construction ship not expected to spend much time at sea the first year of its commissioning. At first Gambini had been slow to adjust to shipboard life, but it had been a key that unlocked a vital part of himself from his prison of grief. Within four months of the assignment Gambini was back, almost. Weekends and holidays remained black times for the master chief, typically finding him on the ship, but the worst day was the first anniversary of Maureen’s death.
When the ship was bumped up in readiness condition by Admiral Pacino, Gambini was supposed to be separated from ship’s company and assigned back to Electric Boat. Official Navy orders remained paper, even in the era of electronic communication. They had arrived by courier the week before Piranha was to sail for the Oparea. Comdr. Bruce Phillips had signed for them and promptly fed them into the shredder. Piranha sailed with one unauthorized enlisted man, the best sonar tech in the US Navy, possibly in the world.
“Captain, I’m doing better today that I guess I have a right to,” Gambini said.
“Master Chief, don’t feel guilty for feeling good. And if you have to feel any guilt, feel it for not finding me a Destiny target.”
“Don’t you worry, sir, we’ll get him.”
“What’s that on the display?” Phillips was not one of the submarine captains who knew it all, nor was he one who didn’t but claimed he did.
“I’ve got six frequencies I’m looking for. Captain. The graphs, they’re the frequency tones that Destiny should put out.”
“How do we know what he’s going to put out?”
“Good question. Skipper. We don’t know and we god damned well should.”
Phillips bit his lip. Not good. Usually a submarine they were searching for was catalogued with the tonals it put out and the transients it was known to put out. This data came from a sound surveillance done by a US sub that shadowed the new target submarine on its sea trials, listening and recording while the new sub went through its paces. Then, armed with the tonals the target emitted, later searches for that sub class could concentrate on just the tonals he put out, rather than guessing or looking at a whole range of frequencies. It was a paradox — to find a sub you had to know exactly what you were looking for. It was like walking through a dense forest and trying to identify a specific bird out of the noise of all the animals and insects and wind through the trees. If the bird’s song was known, finding it would be easy.
“We had a sound surveillance of the old Destiny One class,” Phillips said.
“Right. That’s what this is based on.”
“So we never did one on the Two class.”
“It was scheduled for the Barracuda to do this next month.”
“That was crappy scheduling. Who left us with this bag of cow manure?”
“Admiral Pacino, sir. He decided he wanted the surveillance done by a Seawolf class instead of one of the newer 688s. But Barracuda was the only Seawolf in the Pacific, and we were still unavailable at Electric Boat and in the wrong ocean.”
“So what is this graph?” Phillips pointed to the screen. On the graph the trace of the incoming sound looked like a fat lopsided finger pointing upward. “This one is looking for fifty-eight to sixty-two cycles per second.”
“There’s a spike there. That’s a tonal coming in. What is it? Is that him?”
“No. That display is trying to catch Destiny’s electrical grid. If his sound signature is like the Destiny I class, he puts out a sixty-cycle tonal that comes from his grid frequency. Problem with that one is that we put the same tonal out there, so it’s hard to tell if that’s my ship or the bad guy’s ship. Every once in a while I pick up this phone and call the boys back in the teapot, and they shift our electrical grid’s frequencies around. If the spike moves, that’s not a Destiny, just the Piranha.”
“Did you call on that one?”
“Just before you came clomping in with those shit-kickers.”
“What happened?”
“The nukes changed their frequency and my tonal spike moved with it.”
“Okay, so that’s not him. What about this one? 155 cycles. There’s a hump on that one.”
“A hump but not a spike, sir. The system looks out at the ocean, and not the whole ocean, just a slice of it, and looks for this one frequency. The ocean’s so full of noise that there’s noise at every frequency. The sounds in this range are more concentrated in the middle of the frequency gate, that’s all.”
“I don’t know, it looks like it’s growing.”
The hump in the center of the graph from 153 to 156 cycles per second was growing taller. Gambini watched it, slurping coffee from one of the dirtiest coffee cups Phillips had ever seen. Phillips leaned over, watching it.
Aft, in the control room, Lieutenant Meritson stood before the attack center on the starboard side of the conn, hands on his hips, looking up at the sonar display screen. Meritson, in addition to being this watch’s officer of the deck, was the ship’s sonar officer. He squinted hard at the screen center, at the frequency graphs that Gambini was examining in sonar. Meritson frowned at the graph, watching the spike in the center grow. “Chief of the Watch,” he said quietly, not moving his gaze from the sonar screen.