“Good enough,” Jake said. “All stop.”
Seated at his panel on the starboard side of the control room, Henri maneuvered a joystick. Jake thought that the Frenchman appeared disheveled versus his norm, an out of place tuft of hair and an oil stain on his collar marring the otherwise impeccable image.
“We are at all stop, Jake” Henri said. “Drifting at three knots.”
“Very well, Henri.”
He shifted his gaze to the small room’s other side and locked eyes with a Taiwanese sailor seated at a control panel. Jake remembered ignoring the man’s name when they had met, but after a week and a half inside the Specter’s steel shell, he decided that each crewman’s name deserved memorization.
The young Taiwanese, none of whom had spent extended time underwater, were earning his respect while gaining their sea legs. They ran their daily emergency procedure drills, cleaned the spaces, and kept positive spirits as they integrated with the experienced French team.
He had made his drone operator the primary object of his observation.
Despite his acne, Min Kang reminded Jake of an X-Games athlete — a dirt bike-flipping, skateboard-twisting, snowboard-launching conqueror who had too much ability to realize that he had too much bravado. The youngster walked with a swagger, and Jake suspected that his jet-black hair, parted to a side and slicked down with gel, exceeded the length regulations of the Taiwanese military.
“I’m ready, Jake,” Kang said.
“You mean the drone is ready.”
“We both are.”
“Very well,” Jake said. “Launch drone one.”
“Launch drone one, aye.”
Jake admired the subtlety of a drone launch. Unlike torpedoes, which needed high-pressure air to thrust them out of the tubes, drones operated free of safety protocols that required rapid accelerations to unlock. He sensed nothing as the Specter’s first mechanized spy slipped into the ocean.
“Drone one is launched, Jake,” Kang said. “Normal launch, all systems normal, normal control.”
“Very well,” Jake said. “Send it two miles straight ahead of us at two and a half knots.”
“Don’t you want to go faster, Jake?” Kang asked. “The drone is designed for five knots without degrading its ability to listen and without being heard by adversaries. You can cut the search time in half.”
The youngster’s recommendation startled Jake. He stared at the sailor trying to determine if his words conveyed disrespect. Per his training and his grasp of a millennium of history, a captain of a warship at sea equated to God. Nobody questioned a nautical commanding officer’s direction.
Then he realized that the kid came from a new mold of youngsters who belied the military model that the United States Naval Academy had taught him. Taiwan’s newest crop grew up in a world of information overload, and self-expression oozed from everyone’s pours as a birthright.
Jake had grown weary of playing God, and he decided to change his tack and respond with the wisdom of understanding.
“Not quite five knots,” he said. “We’re in no hurry, and the worst thing we can do is be heard or fail to hear something around us. But I agree we can go faster. Drive the drone at four knots.”
“Four knots, aye. Thank you,” Kang said.
Jake couldn’t remember having been thanked for an order, and he braced himself for an odd dynamic leading the blend of his French veterans and the Asian newcomers into a hostile exchange.
“Don’t thank me, Petty Officer Kang,” he said. “Just use your drones to make sure we know who’s out there.”
Thirty minutes later, Jake sat on his foldout chair rubbing his eyes. He called out to his sonar expert.
“You got anything, Remy?”
“Nothing, Jake.”
The news relieved Jake, although he knew the Ambush could slide through the water without the hydrophones of the Specter or its deployed drone hearing it.
“Are you ready for the drone to begin its spiral search?” Jake asked.
“Yes, Jake. It’s time.”
Jake stood and looked at a monitor. Eschewing the Subtics tactical computer system’s high-end graphics, he preferred the two-dimensional representation of the world with simple symbols. Far from shipping lanes, the Specter and its drone appeared as inverted blue triangles, adrift and alone. He aimed his nose at his drone operator.
“Steer drone one left, five-degrees rudder. Conduct an outward spiral passive acoustic search.”
Kang acknowledged, and during the next hour, Jake watched the drone’s blue triangle carve an expanding spiral around the Specter’s stationary symbol on his liquid crystal display.
When the drone had circled outward eight miles from the Specter, Jake ordered Kang to send it in a straight line. When it reached ten miles away, he had Kang turn it around and point it back at the Specter.
He checked his watch and calculated that the first Argentine submarine, the San Juan, would pass between his ship and the drone in six hours. He decided get some rest before the delousing, but as he turned, Remy’s shrill announcement froze him in place.
“Metallic transient noise,” Remy said.
Defensive instincts dominating his mind, Jake sought data.
“Bearing?” he asked.
“Bearing one-nine-three from the drone,” Remy said.
“Show me a line of bearing on Subtics,” Jake said.
Jake darted to his monitor and watched a red line appear as the Subtics system overlaid it on the display.
As understanding released him from fear’s grip, he exhaled and slumped his shoulders.
“That’s us,” he said.
“Yes, I think so,” Remy said.
When the relief of knowing that another vessel hadn’t created the metallic noise ebbed, ire grew in Jake. He roared with a dominance he hadn’t showed in years.
“Who the fuck is banging metal while we’re rigged for ultra-quite operations and deploying a delouse trap?”
The silence and blank faces confirmed that he had asked a rhetorical question. Henri conveyed comprehension of his meaning by standing, directing a Taiwanese sailor to sit in his place, and scurrying by Jake on his way out of the control room.
“I shall find our culprit,” he said.
Jake grabbed the Frenchman by his arm, stopping him cold, and pulled him in so that he could whisper.
“Chances are this was a young Taiwanese kid,” Jake said. “Go easy on him. I’ve already established myself as the bad cop, but if we’re both bad cops, it all becomes noise on deaf ears.”
“I understand the concept, but what would you have me do?”
“Whoever it is, bring him to me when you find him. Make sure he knows I’m pissed off and that he’s going to pay for it. I want him to remember the fear of punishment to avoid making critical mistakes. I want his fear to be an example.”
“Yes, Jake. I will find him. I’ve been at this long enough that I can read the guilt on a man’s face.”
As Jake heard Henri move through the door behind him, he again looked to his drone operator.
“Okay, Kang,” Jake said. “You know what this means, don’t you?”
“No, Jake. I’m afraid to ask.”
“It means you don’t get to directly deploy drone number two. Since we just announced ourselves to anyone within twenty miles, you get to do it the hard way.”
“Another spiral out search?”
“Correct.”
Kang’s face darkened, but he held his tongue as he launched the second drone. Jake stepped down from the conning platform, slid by bodies, and knelt beside Remy.