Silence for a moment, then, “Lookout, Combat. Hold on, we’re getting the signalmen on it.”
“You can’t shoot at him until you know,” the lookout blurted out. Sure, he was just a junior seaman, but this was his contact. He’d found it, he’d noticed the lights, and he’d been the one to figure out it might be important. Even the officers on the bridge hadn’t noticed that.
“Stand fast, lookout,” a new voice said over the circuit, slightly amused yet chiding. “You did a good job. Now let us do ours. TAO out.”
The tactical action officer. A shiver of pride ran up the lookout’s spine. Usually he only talked to the petty officer running the surface plot, maybe occasionally the chief if he screwed up. But an officer!
“You getting anything, honey?” he asked.
“Nope. The radio’s clobbered,” she answered. “Everybody with a radio’s screaming for information. Even if the carrier’s listening, she’s not going to be able to pick us up out of the noise.”
He swore silently. Maybe they should just head back into port. But no, he couldn’t see that as an option, not until they knew what was going on. They had food, water, enough fuel to survive out here for a week if they had to. He’d head for another island before he’d put in to home port.
“I see the carrier,” he said out loud. “She’s headed toward us. And something else — there’s a small craft headed directly toward her. And what the hell — is that flashing light I see?”
“Does the carrier see it?”
“She has to by now. They’ve got a lot more lookouts that we do.”
“You complaining about my performance, Skipper,” she asked with a slight smile.
“Of course not. It’s just that — ”
“I know. You want to do something and you can’t.”
“Yeah. Listen, let’s make another circuit a little closer in to land. Try to gather some intelligence. With a little luck, a lot of these weekend boaters will start heading in and clear the frequency,” he said.
A weekend boater, he thought. A foolhardy one, if they’re headed toward the carrier at a time like this. Those gunner’s mates have got to have itchy fingers right now. I wouldn’t want to be the poor SOB that makes them the slightest bit nervous.
TEN
It had only taken a quick look at the entrance to the harbor to dissuade Captain Tran from even considering entering it. If the long-range view of smoking ships half-sunken in the water and otherwise empty piers had not convinced him, the message traffic that they downloaded from the satellite would have. One message sent over the battle group’s dedicated circuit was of particular interest — and oddly enough, rather than go through the communications facility on the island, it came over the LINK.
Centurion was directed to break off training and independent operations and support the battle group in ASW. Admiral Wayne had assigned her a wide swath of water between the carrier and the shore, postulating that any diesel submarine in the area would most likely be lurking around the entrance to the harbor, acting as a gate guard or early alert platform.
None of the higher-level planning made much difference to Otter and Renny. Searching one piece of ocean was pretty much like searching any other spot, except for a few local differences. For the most part, it was as exciting as watching grass grow.
After another hour on the sonar stack, Jacobs finally heard a sound that brought him bolting upright in his chair. He shut his eyes and concentrated for a moment. “Bilge pump,” Jacobs announced confidently. “No doubt in my military mind.”
“Let me double-check with engineering,” the chief said, nodding his agreement. “Make sure they haven’t got something lit off we don’t know about.”
“I think I’d know if it were ours, Chief,” the sonarman said, his voice slightly offended. “I mean, after all.”
“I know, I know. But it never hurts to double-check.” The chief turned away and spoke quietly into the sound-powered phone. A moment later, he left the sonar shack for a few moments, then returned with a satisfied look on his face. “General Quarters and quiet ship,” he said. “Skipper wants to track this baby down and get her moving. If it’s a nuke, it’ll make enough noise for us to get a good classification on her. And if it’s a diesel, we’ll force her to suck down some battery power. Sooner or later, she’ll have to snorkel and light off her engines to recharge the batteries. Then we’ll have her.”
There was nothing noisier beneath the water than a diesel submarine recharging batteries.
“She’s coming left,” the sonarman said. “Down Doppler.” The chief relayed the information to the OOD. “Losing contact — damn! I think she’s cross layer now.”
“Let’s follow her,” the chief said, still holding the sound-powered phone up to his lips. A moment later, the deck tilted down at the bow slightly. “Sing out when you regain contact.”
The sonarman shut his eyes, concentrating on the flow of noise into his ears. Off in the distance somewhere, a pod of whales were singing quietly to themselves, the eerie wail of their song echoing through the ocean. Closer by, shrimp snapped and popped, chittering away at their mating rituals.
The submarine herself added a bit of noise to the spectrum, although filters in place reduced known frequencies emanating from her hull. Still, even apart from the discrete frequencies, the flow of water over the hull and the limber holes, the holes through which water was pumped out, increased the overall ambient noise.
Just at the edge of his hearing, he caught the faint hum of the bilge pump. It was a slow, methodical thump punctuated by a whine between strokes as the slow speed pump drew water up from the bilges and forced it out of the submarine. Not his, no — their submarine never needed to pump bilges, or so the engineers claimed.
It was getting stronger now, easily discernable over the noise of the biologics and the distant shipping. It beckoned to him like a drumbeat.
“He’s moving to the left,” he said quietly, hating to even make that much noise for fear of losing the sound again. “Stern aspect.” He heard the chief repeat the words.
Next to him, Pencehaven was setting up a firing solution, inputting the contact into the fire control computer, coordinating the actions with the torpedo room. Soon, very soon.
“Open outer doors. Flood tubes one and two,” he heard the chief say quietly, and swore silently as the words forced him to miss a few beats of the bilge pump.
“I have a firing solution,” Pencehaven announced. “Ready for weapons free.”
“Hold fire, weapons tight,” the bitch box over their head said quietly. “We don’t know for sure who it is yet, but I’m going to try to spook him. The second you have a refined classification, you yell.”
Yell. Right. Like there was going to be any yelling on a submarine at quiet ship. Still Jacobs held his tongue and waited.
A quiet shudder ran through Centurion as her propeller speed increased. Noise, more noise, and Jacobs quailed involuntarily at it. It went against every instinct ingrained into his body since the first days of sub school. He looked over at Pencehaven, and saw that his friend was shaking his head.
“She’s got to know we’re here,” the chief said. “Unless she’s deaf or stupid.”
“And if she’s deaf or stupid, she ain’t ours,” Pencehaven replied.
The bilge pump ceased abruptly.
“She’s gone quiet and is running. That clinches it,” Jacobs said softly. “Whoever she is, she’s not on our side.”