“I have one niner zero, sir.”
Shipley spun the periscope in that direction. He saw the vessel. Raised forward and aft superstructure with a bridge superstructure center. It was a merchant. White topside with rusty red main hull. An array of antennae, including direction-finding apparatuses, dotted the top of the bridge area. “Mark! Distance?”
“Ten thousand yards.”
“Set.”
“Set!”
Figures of a few merchant seamen moved across the deck of the merchant. He saw no fingers of congregating seamen along the safety rails pointing his way. He turned the periscope away from the merchant vessel to look at the snorkel. No black or white smoke coming from it. Thank God for small favors. Maybe. . just maybe, Shipley thought. But then he realized he would not see any smoke coming from it. The cloud of gray-black smoke that would have coughed upward through the snorkel would have come in the first few seconds of the diesels cranking up.
“Down periscope.”
“Tell the control room to take the boat down, Chief.” His voice was calm, completely opposite to the empty-pit feeling around his midsection. If the vessel has seen them. .
“Sorry, Skipper,” Lieutenant Logan said. “I saw it was a merchant vessel and thought it would be a good training exercise for us to photograph it.”
Shipley spun on the intelligence officer. In a seemingly calm voice he said, “Lieutenant Logan, you know what our merchant captains are instructed to do while at sea?”
Logan shook his head.
“You should. You’re an intelligence officer. Even if you weren’t an intelligence officer, I’d expect you to know. Our merchant captains report every contact they encounter; especially submarines.” He pointed up. “You think they don’t do that shit in the Soviet merchant fleet?”
Logan blanched. “No, sir; I mean yes, sir. I guess I didn’t think.”
“Who is the captain of this boat?”
“You are, sir,” Logan replied, his voice shaken as he took a step back.
“Don’t forget it. No one does anything on the Squallfish without my permission, especially having to do with anything that may put the boat onto the surface during daylight. You understand?”
“Yes, sir, but—”
“What did I tell you about ‘buts’ on board Squallfish?”
“Yes, sir.”
Shipley turned. “Lieutenant Van Ness, would you go ask Lieutenant Commander Weaver to join you and me in the wardroom?”
“Yes, sir,” Van Ness replied weakly. The officer quickly left the conning tower.
Relieving an officer of the deck was for a major infraction, but on board a warship examples had to be set to ensure that everyone understood what could and what could not be done.
“Tell engineering to switch back to battery,” Arneau ordered. “Then prepare to make our depth one hundred feet.”
Where had the XO been when Van Ness was off on cloud nine bringing this boat to the surface? Wasting time chewing out Ols-son instead of making sure the boat was safe. He’d talk with the XO privately later. And what or who gave Van Ness the belief he had the authority to change depth without his permission? He still had training problems with this crew, and here he was about to take them into a hostile area where this sort of thing would mark their grave on the bottom of a Soviet bay.
Within a minute the Squallfish was heading deeper, at a sharper angle than he would have liked, but well within the safety parameters of the boat. The whys he would find out. Ultimately he was the reason why anything happened on his boat.
He turned to Arneau. “I will send Mr. Weaver up to relieve you, XO, once I’ve had a little chat with him and Lieutenant Van Ness. By then you should have us settled on course, speed, and depth.” He nodded at the signalman who was manning the navigation table. “Have SM2 Smuckers double-check our projected route to Kola Bay, if you would.”
“Aye, sir.”
“And XO, make appropriate changes to my standing orders that no change to course, speed, or depth — unless necessary for the safety of the boat — is to be done without my or your express permission.”
Arneau raised his hand in a mock salute and acknowledged the order. “Aye, sir.”
On the merchant vessel, the captain lowered his binoculars, reached up, and pushed the collars of his foul-weather jacket up along his neck. He was sure it was a submarine periscope. He scratched his heavy beard. A few bits of ice fell from the tips of it.
His first mate had looked through the glasses and saw nothing. It could have been a whale, but whales at this time of the year were farther north. This didn’t mean they weren’t here, though it would be unusual for one to be this far south and to be alone.
“It would be January before the ice forced them this far south,” he said aloud.
“Force what?”
The captain shook his head. “I was thinking maybe it was a whale I saw.”
“Not time for them,” the first mate replied crisply. “What are you going to do?”
If he reported it, he would have to sit through endless hours of interrogation by the Soviet Navy’s GRU.
GRU stood for Glavnoe Razvedyvatel’noe Upravlenie, meaning Main Intelligence Directorate. The full name for the Soviet Navy’s intelligence arm was Main Intelligence Directorate for the General Staff: GRU GSh. But everyone referred to it as the GRU.
He let out a heavy sigh. He did not want to report it. He was the only one who saw it. He would like to continue his trip to Murmansk without a nervous eye toward Severomorsk. He should have kept his mouth shut. It had been months since he had seen his family.
“Should I get the sighting forms for you, Comrade Captain?”
“Sighting forms?”
“Yes, sir. According to instructions, we are to report any sightings, whether we are sure or not.”
That answered his question for him. His first mate could be KGB. Many citizens did their patriotic duty for the Komitet Go-sudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti, which in English stood for Committee for State Security. He did his, and if he was standing in the shoes of the first mate and someone failed to do his patriotic duty, he would report him. Loyalty transcended all else when it came to protecting the motherland.
“Yes. I am not sure it was a submarine. Most likely if it was, it was one of ours.” He let out a deep sigh. “If so, I fear the young captain of the submarine will have a heavy lesson to learn in letting a poor merchant seaman spot him, don’t you think?” He forced a laugh.
The first mate grinned. “I am sure it is one of ours. Who else would be out here on such a day?”
“It looked as if it was heading in the same direction as us.”
“Then maybe we will see it surface when we enter the channels. Maybe it is going to the Navy base.”
Within thirty minutes, the merchant skipper had transmitted the sightings report to the Soviet Northern Fleet headquarters. Messages seldom instantaneously arrive at their destination. They pass through a series of buffers, bottlenecks, and handling until some radioman on the other end prints it off and routes it manually to whichever department he believes should receive it.
An hour later, the radio operator for the merchant vessel handed the captain a receipt. He showed it to the first mate, standing beside him. “There; that should alert our Navy.”
"Da."
At Severomorsk, the report was eventually delivered to the inbasket of the on-duty officer who had gone to an early lunch. Two hours later, when he returned, he read the report. Northern Fleet headquarters received many of these every week, so it was with a sense of the routine why the message of a possible submarine off the mouth of Kola Bay elicited no surprise or sense of urgency in the lieutenant commander.