“I know the crew is looking forward to the port call.” Every Pacific Fleet sailor knew the joys of this Philippine town where the U.S. Navy had its largest Asian port.
“My EA has just handed me a note. Seems you’re at twelve knots. Isn’t that a little fast for the sonar to work?” the admiral asked, referring the capability of the sonar to work passively in detecting noise in the water.
“We’ll slow down a couple of knots once we are over the horizon.”
“Probably one of these Echo class submarines.”
“Shaddock missile,” MacDonald offered.
“Shaddock missile,” Green concurred. “Wait one!”
A few seconds later, Green was back on the circuit. “VQ- 1’s visual on the submarine identified it as an Echo class. A formation of Phantoms on combat air-patrol point overflew the submarine. I am sending them back to orbit the area on the off chance the clappers the Willy Victor dropped worked. If I were a submarine skipper, I’d want to surface as soon as I could and pull them off my hull.”
The ship’s intercom blasted across the bridge. “OOD, is the skipper up there?”
“Admiral, we are getting the data over NTDS, sir,” MacDonald continued, ignoring the voice box.
“I’m letting you go, Danny. Go get the bastard.”
“We will.”
“One last thing: Don’t fire on him. We don’t want a war started out here with the Soviets. Let’s finish one war at a time.”
MacDonald slipped the handset into the cradle after bidding Green good-bye. He should have an hour or so before the old man called back wanting to know his status. He leaned forward, pushed the CIC button on the 12MC console. “Combat, Skipper.”
“Combat here, Skipper.”
“Have you set the blue gold watch?”
“We have the gold antisubmarine team on their way to station, sir.”
“Good. Does Sonar have any contact-convergence zone, etc.?”
“No, sir. Too much noise from our battle group.”
“Repeat the contact information for the bridge, if you would, Lieutenant Burnham.”
“VQ-1 reports its visual as an Echo class submarine on the surface. Bears two-one-zero degrees distance, two hundred nautical miles.”
“OOD, you get that?” MacDonald asked.
“Aye, sir. Right ten-degree rudder, steady up on course two-one-zero,” Lieutenant Goldstein sang out.
“Keep me appraised,” MacDonald said, leaning back in his chair, watching the bow of the Dale cut through the light waves of the South China Sea, listening to the repeats from the helm as Mr. Goldstein attempted to steady up on the new course. Two hundred nautical miles. Good thing they had topped off from the Mispillion yesterday. He looked out the port-side door. The Kitty Hawk was sliding left. Meant they were opening up distance between them.
“Steady on course two-one-zero!” the helmsman reported.
MacDonald felt the tilt of the ship right itself. Two hundred miles meant the Dale would be late in arriving in Olongapo. That was enough for his crew to want to sink the submarine; a day lost in Olongapo was a day lost in paradise.
One day the United States and the Soviets were going to stare each other eyeball-to-eyeball and neither was going to blink. What would happen then? he wondered.
Since 1962, when America backed them down over the missiles in Cuba, the Soviet Navy had become more and more confrontational. Cutting across their bows to force American ships to maneuver and avoid collisions had been a common theme when the Dale was in the Mediterranean last year. Yeah, no doubt about it. One of these days there was going to be an incident at sea, and then America was going to have to kick some serious Soviet Navy butt. The sooner they did it, the better the outcome would be. MacDonald wanted to fight them now instead of leaving it to his children or his children’s children to have to do it.
“Lieutenant,” Chief Caldwell said, handing a message board to Burnham.
Burnham glanced at the radar repeater, then at the naval tactical data system screen, double-checking how the blips on the radar compared with the NTDS. The ship had been outfitted with NTDS during the last upkeep period. There was something about those comfortable with the old technology that made them suspect of the new.
“What is it, Chief?” Burnham asked as he took the board.
“Sir! Do you want us to set up a time-motion analysis—?”
“What do you think, Ensign?” Burnham said over his shoulder to young Hatfield, his voice betraying the boredom he’d found after joining the navy to avoid the draft. “Are you going to wait until the team is set and then prepare for it? Probably a good idea, but we can’t do a damn thing until Sonar has contact, and we won’t have that until we slow down to under twelve knots.”
“The EC-121 reconnaissance aircraft gave us a datum on the submarine,” Hatfield replied enthusiastically.
Burnham ignored the reply. Why in God’s name did they have to send him an ensign who wanted to do everything at once at the speed of sound?
“Would you keep still, Peppercorn? You move around the place like someone with a nervous twitch. It gives me a nervous twitch.”
“Sorry, Lieutenant. Just that we have a lot to do to get the chart table set up for doing TMA.”
“A second of standing in one place when you’re talking to me would help.”
Burnham turned to the radioman chief. “Did you say something, Chief?” Burnham asked.
“No, sir. I was waiting for a moment to tell you the communications officer sent this,” Caldwell replied.
Burnham flipped up the metal cover of the message board and scanned the machine-typed message. He pulled a pen from his pocket and initialed the red router stamped haphazardly on the front of the message. It was God’s way of making sure everyone who ever read the damn thing was marked for life. He had lost count over the two years on the Dale of the number of messages he had initialed. Being the operations officer was supposed to be more fun than this. He had yet to see a message that was worth his time to read, much less initial, but with only fourteen months, two weeks, and three days left in the navy, he’d do it the navy way.
“Anything to take back to Mr. Taylor?”
He shook his head. “No, Chief. It’s just a message from CINCPAC Fleet telling us the Tripoli has arrived in Olongapo. We’ll join her for Operation Beacon Torch.”
“Beacon Torch?”
Burnham motioned Chief Caldwell away. “You probably know more about it than I do, Chief. Ask the good communications officer. He reads all this stuff.”
Caldwell laughed. “He used to, sir. Then a slew of supply messages arrived the other weekend and I think he got a migraine trying to decipher the national stock numbering system.”
“NSN gives me a migraine.”
The two men laughed. Caldwell took the message board and quickly departed the small CIC.
Burnham sauntered over to the plotting table. Ensign Hatfield, his tongue between his teeth, was busy taping down a see-through sheet of white trace paper over the navigational chart of the area.
“You’re going to bite your tongue off one day, Peppercorn.”
Hatfield looked up, smiling. “This is exciting, Lieutenant.”
“Then you haven’t been to Olongapo, my young virgin friend.”
Hatfield looked around to see if anyone heard that. “Lieutenant!” he whispered.
Burnham laughed. “Just kidding, Peppercorn.”