“How close?”
“Four thousand feet. At a course of 220 degrees.” Lieutenant Callaghan’s face had paled. She swallowed, hard. “And, sir, it’s American.”
Belinda held her breath, waiting for the commander’s response.
Despite the implications of a sunken U.S. submarine, Commander Bower moved with a kind of considered grace, calm and contained. He leaned in next to the young STS, with his left hand on the console beside her, and his right on the back of her chair. He took a deep breath in and out and nodded his head in confirmation. He knew exactly what he was looking at.
He tapped the screen lightly with his index finger where the readout showed “60HZ,” and asked, “What depth do you have it at?”
“Hard to say for certain, sir.”
“Hazard an educated guess?”
“It could be somewhere between one and three hundred feet.”
He frowned. “Nothing more accurate than that?”
“No.”
“What’s causing the difficulty?”
Despite the circumstances, she smiled. He hadn’t asked her why she couldn’t do it. “We’re not getting a direct line of sight from the sound. It’s being blocked and bounced around some sort of submerged valley.”
“All right. You said it appears to be transmitting a repeated sound?”
“Yes. It’s similar to Morse Code, but I can’t decipher it.”
“Really?” The CO was already reaching for a second headset. “Can I hear it, please?”
She plugged the second set of headset leads into her hydrophone audio output. “You’re good to go, sir.”
She watched as he listened to the playback of the alien sound.
His focus was shifting fractionally in and out, his brows rising and falling a little, the shape of his mouth always changing, as if he was constantly thinking. He studied the sonar screen and listened, simultaneously taking everything in, as though there was a computer behind his eyes, running at full speed.
This was another reason the crew sometimes called him the Professor.
Every member of a submarine crew, of any rank, knew a little about every single station on board. It was set up so that in battle, particularly in the event of a hull breach, you never knew where people would end up. It was vital that people knew how to perform tasks and operate in roles they were not normally commissioned to work. This went double fold for a commander of a U.S. submarine, who needed to demonstrate leadership at every level of the ship.
The human ear of a healthy young person can hear at a range between 20 and 20,000 Hertz, but by the time a person reaches forty, their high-frequency range diminishes to below 12,000 Hertz. Professor or not, it seemed impossible to her, that the CO could discern and identify the sound that appeared alien to her well-attuned ear.
The CO bit his lower lip and removed the headset, handing it back to her. The lines in his face seemed to deepen and darken in the bare light. He took his time before he spoke. “I’ve heard that sound before…”
She cocked a well-plucked eyebrow. “Really?”
“Yeah. You were right. It’s similar to Morse Code but different. In fact, it is Morse Code after its been broken down using a cipher. The code is relatively simple. It had to be. You see, it was designed to be used by senior submarine officers, ranked XO and above, as a means of top-secret communication during an emergency.”
“Do you know what it says, sir?”
Commander Bower sighed heavily. “It says, we’ve been sunk by hostiles. Have tried to escape. Unable to reach surface due to attackers.”
Commander Bower was not known for reckless or fickle behavior.
Nor had he reached such a height in the U.S. Navy’s command structure by being careless. He understood the only fight you were ever certain to win was the one you didn’t enter. He would have never needlessly endangered his crew and the 30-billion-dollar piece of military hardware under his command. He should have surfaced to make an immediate satellite report to the Pentagon, who would have sent him another two submarines and an aircraft carrier at the least.
But for some reason, one he would never have the time to understand, he made the worst decision of his career.
In another three weeks, he’d complete his initial evaluation of the experimental stealth submarine. It would be his last command and a fitting send off after an exemplary career.
Commander Bower had always followed protocol. Forty-three years in the Navy — nearly thirty of those in Command — and he’d never broken from standard operating procedures… until today. It could have been because retirement was around the corner. In another four weeks, after the completion of the initial testing of the unique stealth technology and his brainchild, the USS Omega Deep would return stateside, marking the end of his final command.
In the back of his mind, all he could hear was the hull number at the end of the encrypted message:
SSN23 — The USS Jimmy Carter.
His first command.
Now, he was witnessing her first hand, destroyed at the bottom of the ocean. His submarine. His men and women. If it wasn’t for the chance discovery of the blackbody material used to construct the USS Omega Deep, he too might have been among those lost.
Either way, he made a decision then and there that went against the Navy’s protocol. Instead of surfacing to alert his superiors, he gave a very different order, the biggest mistake of his career.
“Pilot. New course, bearing: 220. Full speed.” Commander Bower swallowed hard. “Let’s come around and see if we can find any survivors.”
“Copy, setting a new course. Bearing: 220 degrees, full speed, sir.”
“Weapons control,” Bower said in a cool and even voice, “I want all available torpedoes ready to fire on my command.”
“Understood, sir.”
The Omega Deep raced toward the stricken American nuclear attack submarine. Inside, the command center was silent. Every member of the crew focused on the task at hand within their respective stations. They were riding near the surface, their keel just twenty feet shy of the massive submerged rocky tabletop.
Commander Bower turned to Lieutenant Callaghan. “Have you found our enemy target yet?”
“No, sir,” she replied.
“Keep looking. I know the CO of the Jimmy Carter personally. If he and his crew haven’t reached the surface in this shallow depth, mark my words, there will be an enemy submarine in these waters preventing him.”
“Understood, sir.”
To the navigation officer, he said, “Have you got a LIDAR map of the wreck site?”
“It’s just coming up now, sir,” Browning replied, pointing to an image — similar to a bathymetric map of the seafloor. “The Jimmy Carter appears to be at the bottom of this shallow ravine here, at a depth of 100 feet.”
“Is there room for the Omega Deep to descend to that depth?”
“Yes, but we won’t have a lot of room to maneuver if we get into trouble.”
“Understood,” Bower said. “I think it’s fairly safe to say, we’re going to encounter trouble.”
The Omega Deep slowed to a stop directly above the wreck site. Commander Bower stared through the downward facing spherical viewing dome. There, his eyes swept the scene below. A relatively narrow ravine — approximately one hundred feet wide and fifty feet deep — came to a rocky conclusion. The seabed was mostly black sand. Embedded in the middle of that sand were the wrecked remains of the USS Jimmy Carter.