"What's that?" Sorensen asked.
Fogarty listened. "I don't know."
"Turtles," Sorensen said cheerfully. "Fishing at one hundred fifty feet. Unusual for them to be so far north, but it sounds like they've struck it rich."
Still in shorts and wearing sunglasses in the darkened room, Sorensen scrunched up his face and contorted his voice, trying to reproduce turtle noises. He glanced up to make sure a tape was rolling.
"Attention all hands," Hoek's voice came through the intercom. "Prepare for slow speed."
Fogarty stared at the screen and fiddled with his film badge.
The ship began to move, making just enough way to maneuver. The turtle sounds faded. A moment later weird beeps and hoots came through the speakers.
"Right whales," Sorensen said, and began to hoot and beep himself. Every few seconds his fingers reached for the keyboard as he altered the combination of arrays, filters and enhancers, playing the sea like a vast water organ.
Fascinated, Fogarty asked, "What are you doing?"
Sorensen only tweeked and buzzed a little louder.
A minute later the whales went silent.
Fogarty said, "You turned the whales up, Sorensen. In sonar school they told us to filter them out."
Sorensen grinned. "I like whales." He flashed a smile. "Ever watch Star Trek?"
"A couple times. So?"
"Well, think of me as Mr. Spock, the Vulcan, all right? I'm not human, Fogarty, I'm an alien. I'm weird. When we're on watch, just keep your eyes on the screen and your ears on the big phone. And watch out for them Klingons, boy. They bad dudes."
Fogarty persisted. "In sonar school they called all marine noises signal interference. They said to filter them out."
Sorensen took off his glasses. "Listen, Fogarty. Forget school. Forget the navy. Read the sign: Leave your mind behind. This is the real ocean. If you're going to be a good sonarman, you listen to everything and you think about everything you hear. Are you following me?"
"I am."
"All right. I'm going to keep you on the first watch until you qualify. If you're any good that will be in about thirty days, just before we get back to Norfolk. If you aren't, I'll keep you just to make your life miserable. We're in for the duration, Fogarty. We're watchmates… Tell me, Fogarty, how come you volunteered for subs?"
"I quit school. I was going to be drafted, was at loose ends."
"But why volunteer for subs? Why not the Coast Guard?"
"I looked around. The Submarine Service had the best deal. Best food, best pay, most interesting working conditions—"
"Don't feed me a line of shit."
Fogarty shrugged. "Okay. I've wanted to get on one of these things since I was a little kid. That's the truth. I must have built fifty models of Nautilus when I was a kid."
"So what? Every kid in America builds models."
"Yeah" — Fogarty grinned—"but mine worked. Servos, radio control, watertight seals, the works."
Sorensen nodded. "I see. I suppose you were first in your class in sub school, too."
Fogarty shook his head. "No. Second."
"Shame on you. Where'd you screw up?"
Fogarty smiled. "Navigation. In the simulator I drove the sub right up onto the beach."
"Yeah, navigation is a bitch. That's why I like computers. When we fuck up we can blame it on them."
"That's what I told my instructor. He didn't buy it."
"So you came out second out of how many?"
"Four hundred."
Sorensen raised his eyebrows.
"Four hundred twenty-seven."
"Ah ha! Okay, you're a genuine sub freak. How come?"
"During the war my dad was a radioman on Yellowtail."
"No shit?"
"He's a very proud man. He always wanted my brother and me to join the Submarine Service."
"So where's your brother now?"
"He joined the Marines. It broke my dad's heart. He hates jarheads."
Sorensen chuckled, "Oh, boy, a tough guy."
Fogarty grinned. "What about you, Sorensen? Why are you here?"
"Me? I'm a native. I was born here."
"C'mon, tell me. Why did you join the navy?"
"You want to hear the story of my life, kid?"
"Yeah. Where's your home town?"
"Oakland, California."
"Home of the Raiders."
"That's right. Also the home of Fast Eddie, the pool Shark in The Hustler, of Sonny Barger and the Hell's Angels, Reggie Jackson, Huey Newton and the Black Panthers, former home of Jack London, noted oyster pirate and liar, to mention a few illustrious citizens. Ever been there?"
"No."
"Well, it's California, but it ain't Hollywood." Sorensen swallowed a long draught of coffee. "I had no sense, no real education, although I read a lot. I got married when I was seventeen. There I was with no job, nothing but an old lady who thought life was driving up and down East Fourteenth Street showing off your new car. Her brain was lost in the wrong decade. I needed a job, so on my eighteenth birthday I walked into a navy recruiter's office and said, 'Man, I built my first sonar when I was twelve out of a microphone, a plastic bag and a tube of rubber cement.' He said, 'Son, sign on the dotted line.' I signed. I was fresh meat for the fleet."
Sorensen paused to light a cigarette, and Fogarty asked, "Where's your wife?"
"She divorced me when I reenlisted. She hated the navy. A few years ago, the night before the ship was leaving for a sixty-day cruise, she told me she'd be gone when I got back. I didn't blame her. She was looking at two months of lonely nights in crummy bars in another crummy navy town, getting hit on by horny sailors, horny civilians, horny WAVE dykes. She didn't have much use for submarines, either. I think she went back to California. She still gets a piece of my check."
They continued at slow speed for two hours. Springfield stopped once to transmit a position report as part of the SOSUS deep submergence detection test.
Sorensen assigned Fogarty the elaborate, time-consuming task of checking all the circuits that ran from the sonar room through cables to the torpedo room in the bow. The sonars were mounted on the hull all around the bow and Fogarty spent an hour inspecting the main panel in the torpedo room.
Alone in the sonar room, Sorensen popped open his console and gazed at the maze of circuitry. Over the years he had modified it extensively, sometimes without authorization.
On his trip to Japan he had acquired not one but two of the miniature tape recorders, one of which he now inserted into a disguised panel. A quick twist of a screwdriver, and Sorensen became a criminal.
4
The Strait of Gibraltar forms one of the great bottlenecks in the world ocean. Historically, control of the Strait has meant control of the Mediterranean. Since the end of World War Two the U.S. Navy has considered "the sea in the middle of the earth" an American lake.
Seven days after leaving Norfolk, Barracuda approached the Strait at slow speed.
"All right," said the captain. "Send up the buoy."
A jet of compressed air fired a capsule from the top of the sail toward the surface. A few seconds later a radio transmitter floated two hundred feet above the sub. Springfield beamed a position report to the naval station at Rota, Spain, and received an immediate reply.
US NAVAL STATION ROTA: BARRACUDA SSN 593:
SOSUS DEEP SUBMERGENCE DETECTION TEST
SUCCESSFUL. FOLLOWED YOU ALL THE WAY ACROSS.
PERMISSION GRANTED TO CLEAR STRAIT. NETTS.
In the sonar room Sorensen listened to the sonic beacon fixed to the bottom of the Strait, which guided submerged ships through the deep channel. He locked on and the ship slowly passed into the Mediterranean.