When he was fourteen a new laser surgery technique had given him sight. It wasn't perfect — he would always wear glasses — but the shapes now had solidity and meaning. He could see.
And yet Queensly's primary modality remained his hearing, perhaps because his brain had simply been rewired that way. When he joined the Navy at eighteen, a standard test of his hearing had shown he could recognize faint mechanical noises behind a susurration of natural noise, could pick up on acoustical patterns others missed, could distinguish easily between sounds that seemed identical to others. In short, he was a born sonar technician, and in due time, after attending C-school at New London, that was what he'd become.
Perhaps the strangest part of the story of which Queensly was aware was that there were plenty of sonar techs in the Navy who were as good or even better than he was, yet had never been blind. Some people, it seemed, had simply been born with supernatural hearing, and the Navy recruit testing was designed to identify those people so that they could be properly trained.
Queensly was using every bit of his expertise now, both natural and trained, as he sat in his chair at the sonar console, head encased in earphones, eyes closed, reaching out with his mind…out…out… listening.
He could hear the whisper of Seawolf moving through the water and easily discounted that. He could hear a forest of clicks and snaps in the distance… shrimp, or other biologicals. He could sense the bottom, a kind of dead feeling, flat and muddy and very shallow beneath the Seawolf's keel. Far off, there was a rumble of sound, many vessels, he thought, and the pounding of what might have been gunfire transmitted through the water.
And closer… just a few miles off… a steady beat of sound, a kind of chugging noise…
He opened his eyes and studied the waterfall on the console screen in front of him, reaching out after a moment to flick selector switches that narrowed in on the low frequency end of the signal. There… a faint, faint straight line against the background hash. But he'd heard it first.
"Chief? New contact. I've got a diesel boat snorkeling."
Each of the four sonar stations was manned. Queensly was listening to broadband signals from the towed array, while Rog Grossman handled the broadband input from Seawolf's spherical bow array, Tommy Juarez watched the high-frequency input from the port and starboard hull sensors, and Chief Toynbee ran the spectrum analyzer and served as watch supervisor. The sonar officer, Lieutenant j.g. Neimeyer, stood in the doorway, apparently doing his best to stay out of the way.
Toynbee called up the signal on his screen. "Got it. Conn, Sonar," he added, speaking softly over the intercom circuit.
"Go ahead, Sonar."
"Designating new target, Sierra One-eight-three, Skipper. Bearing two-nine-five."
"Do you have a range yet?"
Queenie looked at Toynbee, who nodded. He touched the intercom button on his console. "Sir? Range uncertain, but I think he's close in to shore. I'm getting a bit of back-echo that's kind of…muffled."
He couldn't explain what he heard or how he knew what he knew, but in his mind's eye he could sense that diesel engine chugging along with the muffling presence of the shore just beyond.
"Got it, Queenie. Thanks." There was a pause. "Outstanding job."
"Thank you, sir."
He felt a small warm thrill at that. Queensly was in danger of falling in love with the captain. At least, that's what Toynbee and the others laughingly said. It didn't make sense that a submarine skipper should be able to walk on water, but Garrett inspired that kind of loyalty. Jesus! The man had come down to that filthy, stinking jail himself and charmed them right out from under the noses of those Hong Kong cops….
Right now, he would follow Captain Garrett anywhere, and he would certainly give the skipper his very best. He continued trying to pierce the dark waters about the Seawolf. There was something… something….
Seawolf possessed the most advanced, most sensitive underwater listening equipment in the world, gear so sensitive the sonar crew liked to joke about what they heard on surface ships or other submarines — snatches of conversation, scenes of passionate sex aboard a cruise ship… or the fall of thirty-seven cents — three dimes, a nickel, and two pennies — on the deck of the ship's store aboard a Los Angeles-class sub passing miles away. Toynbee swore he'd once been able to tell the chief snipe on board the DDG Arleigh Burke exactly what was wrong with a pressure coupler on his number three LM-2500-30 gas turbine simply by the sound it transmitted through the water as the Burke passed the Seawolf off the California coast.
Seawolf's sonar suite was the brand new BSY-2(V), affectionately known as "Busy-Two." Computer enhancements and electronic filters allowed the sonar techs to strain each individual thread of sound from the background, clean it up, strengthen it, stretch it for analysis. Nicks, dents, and out-of-balance shafts gave each turning screw a slightly different quality of sound that could be used to identify one ship from another, as individual as fingerprints even on sister vessels. A library of recorded sounds let Seawolf's sonar crew match up the sound prints of thousands of ships from countries around the world.
And yet, despite all of the technical gimmicks, all of the bells and whistles, the most delicate, sensitive, and vital listening device on board any American submarine was the Mark I Mod 0 ears of the sonar tech, and the brain between them. Electronics were wonderful… but the human brain was capable of feats that seemed nothing short of sheerest magic.
What Queensly was picking up now, pulling it away from the background hash and the slow chug of the diesel engine snorkeling up ahead, was less a distinct sound than a feel, almost an absence of sound, a dead zone in the water. Sonar techs sometimes joked among themselves about hearing holes in the water, but there was, sometimes, something about the quality of background noise that seemed to change in a particular direction, suggesting that there was something there in a manner that felt more like extrasensory perception than mere hearing.
Seawolf's TB-23 towed passive array was particularly sensitive to sounds to either side of the boat, though Queensly could hear that snorkeling submarine which was just a little off the port bow now.
"Chief?"
"Yeah?"
"I think I have something to port. Off the port beam." He looked up at his screen, adjusted the frequency input. Nothing there that he could identify by eye. And yet…
"I don't see a thing, Queenie."
"It's there, Chief." He was certain of it. "It's big, and it's moving. And… it's quiet."
"You sure?"
"Absolutely."
"Sonar, Conn."
"Go ahead, Sonar."
"Uh, sir…Queenie has a possible new sierra… bearing…Queenie?"
"Bearing one-nine-zero. Extreme range."
"Bearing one-nine-zero, extreme range. Designate Sierra One-eight-four."
"You got a make on it yet?"
"Negative, sir. It's real stealthy, whatever it is."
"Okay, Chief. Stay on it."
"Will do, sir."
"Tell Queenie he's got a free shore leave if he can hear them talking over there and tell me what they're saying."