The trip down from 3000 feet under canopy took him six minutes. It took Todd seventeen seconds. Todd’s main chute had deployed automatically instead of by his ripcord, the altimeter rigged to do that at 900 feet in the event that the jumper failed to pull before 3000 feet, but it had malfunctioned, and at the time Todd was doing body barrel rolls, still goofing off, so that the main chute wrapped around his neck and extended up into the slipstream, his rolling body turning the silk of the parachute into a death shroud. He fell like that, choking on the cords of the chute wrapped around his throat, looking like a tumbling cocoon, until he impacted the ground on a patch of concrete driveway.
After that the tingle was on Porter’s black list. The next time he felt it was the October of his first class year at Annapolis. For two days he sweated, wondering what would happen this time, until the company commander had called him to his office for a phone call. Who died? was all Porter could think when he picked up the phone. The voice at the other end said his grandfather had passed on after a stroke hit him an hour before.
They buried his grandfather in his native Wyoming, in a graveyard with cactus and sagebrush, the walks made of river stones, facing a mountain ridge. It had been a beautiful ceremony, and Porter had to smile at the memory of his grandfather’s jokes. He had thought that had been the meaning of the tingle, but the feeling of premonition stayed with him even the day after the funeral, up to the moment they read the will.
Grandfather had left Porter a defunct gold mine in South Africa, a bit of a family joke, but the week before his death the old man’s mining company had found platinum in the mine. Porter’s net worth grew from a few thousand dollars — the price of his five-year-old sports car — to several million overnight. Actually, by the year before, the estimate had been found to be low, the mine potential estimated in the hundreds of millions of dollars. None of that changed Porter, none of it seemed to reach him. No one outside the family even knew about the mine. Porter didn’t really believe it until he made a trip there to see it with his own eyes. But the role of rich kid wasn’t of interest. He was, he thought, put on earth for something different, and it had nothing to do with money.
The next and last time Porter had felt the odd tingle was days before, when Barracuda had been heading for the Japan’ Oparea. Something was happening to the ship. Hours later the message came that the ship was to rendezvous with a helicopter to receive a visitor. Admiral Pacino himself. Kane had been angry, his kingdom invaded, but somehow Porter felt this was the positive side of premonition. Whatever, in the admiral’s presence he felt it biting at him.
And now, timed with the takeover of his watch, the old tingle was hitting him full force. This was the day. This was the watch. If only he could tell if it was a good portent, or a bad one.
Lt. Comdr. Seiichi Kami had the section-A watch in the control room. For the last two hours, since midnight, he had stared at the same consoles, looking at the same displays, all of them empty. The hours since the sinkings of the first Americans had been filled with both boredom and tension. Boredom because the screens were empty. Tension because the Americans still hadn’t given up.
The Americans, Kami decided, were doing this on purpose, trying to exhaust them before coming back into the area with more submarines.
He thought about his newborn son Kosaku waiting for him at home. He had never spent much time thinking about his MSDF duty, but now that Kosaku was here he found himself jealous of every moment away from him. He was thinking that MSDF duty was no longer for him; the other men seemed somehow different from who he was, they no longer had much in common.
Kami stared now at the sonar data screens, the data filtered by the computer, and seeing nothing, sat down in the deep cushioning of the control seat to continue to watch and to wait.
Lieutenant Porter stood on the conn and snapped his fingers at the chief of the watch, calling for coffee. The sonar display was selected to the thin wire narrowband towed array sonar, the beam looking forward as the ship continued to sail northeast. The sonar repeater was selected to the time-integration feature of the narrowband sonar, the graph of 152 to 155 Hertz in screen center.
Chief Omeada had just zeroed the frequency bucket, wiping out all previous data. Now the computer was going to wait and collect sound in that specific tonal range, display noise that it received at a higher level vertically. The graph was almost like the bottom of an hourglass, the sand representing each piece of sound at a particular frequency. If the graph line rose horizontally with time, the line flat, then there was no one out there.
If the graph line became a spike with a narrow peak at a particular frequency, there was a pure tone out in the sea constant with time. And the sea did not generate pure bell tones that lingered as time passed. Only machines did.
Porter received his coffee and slurped it, the tingle running through him as he stared at the sonar screens.
If only he could detect the Destiny and beat out Omeada he would never let the chief forget it.
He flipped through the sonar displays, but seemed to feel a resonance of the tingle at the time-frequency display.
He watched the six frequency buckets on the screen, barely blinking, until his scalding hot coffee was gone and the frequency at 154 cycles per second had spiked into a narrow finger of sound.
The Destiny was out there and by God he had found it. He put down the coffee mug and ran toward the door to sonar, colliding with Omeada, who was running out of sonar into control.
“We’ve got him,” they said at once, rubbing their foreheads from the collision.
Admiral Pacino woke up from a sound sleep at the prodding of Paully White.
“Sir, it’s two a.m. Kane’s manning battlestations. We’ve got a Destiny.”
“About time,” Pacino muttered, slipping into coveralls and leather deck shoes. He rubbed the sleep from his eyes, feeling the gauze of his injured eye, wondering when if ever the eye would heal. He pulled on the eyepatch as he left the stateroom, careful to avoid the rushing watchstanders.
The large control room was packed. Kane stood on the conn with his officer of the deck, Scott Court. XO Roger Whatney stood below between the conn platform and the attack center. The consoles of the attack center were filled with officers, adjusting their solutions, trying to find one that fit the data to the Destiny.
Kane nodded curtly at Pacino and Paully, then addressed the watchsection. Pacino strapped on a battle headset so he could listen to the conversations in the room.
Again he felt he was watching from the sidelines, and with it the thought that this action should be his. He shook his head to concentrate on the battle in front of him.
“Attention in the firecontrol team,” Kane announced from the conn. “We have designated the sonar contact as Target One, Destiny-class submerged submarine. We now hold Target One weakly on the thin wire towed array forward-looking beam, his 154 Hertz tonal coming in clearly. We hold him at bearing west, approximately two six five. There’s no broadband from this bearing.
This isn’t much to go on but we will be putting out multiple salvos of Mark 50 torpedoes on the bearing to the target. That’s all, carry on.”
Tanaka looked at his watch. It was after two in the morning and he had been staring at the Second Captain screen for what seemed forever. He was tired and frustrated.