Boomer, page 8
Each step had been covered many times before, and Buck Nelson knew he would take his crew through the same process many more times before he received orders to his next duty station. He was anxious for transfer after eighteen months of this existence, and at this stage he wasn’t as concerned about his next assignment as he should have been. There were days of such boredom that he had to convince himself that not every new billet would be better. The first two or three patrols had been well worthwhile, even exhilarating at times. Although there was no guarantee that he would make admiral, a good many men who commanded boomers had a hell of a fine chance if they didn’t screw up. But the monotony gradually seeped into his bones, as it did with each of his peers, and there were times when a maximum effort was required to push himself after the first couple of weeks on station. It demanded more mental effort each day to convince himself to jog a mile or more. Perhaps it was the sameness of the track—nineteen laps around the missile compartment was equal to one mile; the scenery never changed.
If there was a primary, unspoken responsibility for Buck Nelson, it was to set an example. Perfection on a boomer was the key word, or as damn close to perfection as possible. Nothing else would do. This perfection, coupled with leadership, was supposed to flow downhill—from the captain to the XO to the engineer to the weapons officer and on down to the lowest man who was studying every waking minute to qualify for his dolphins. When his seniors on shore reviewed Florida’s promotions, her crew-retention rate, the number of newly qualified men, her exercises—their review and this information was passed on to a board in Washington that would decide whether Buckley Nelson would be selected for admiral, or whether they would send him a message by way of a dead-end billet.
Buck Nelson did not look like a submarine captain. His appearance was undistinguished. In civilian attire, most people might have guessed him as a college professor with his rimless glasses, thin brownish hair, rather gaunt features, and almost colorless mustache. Yet he approached his job like a professional football coach, tough, demanding, and unsmiling. He also possessed a master’s in nuclear engineering from MIT, which was followed by a doctorate in reactor design. It was no wonder that boredom overtook him so quickly on station, but his seniors in the Navy considered this a necessary step in preparing for greater things.
So this day was a good one to take his crew right through to the firing sequence. Florida’s missile-control officer reported the system cycled for launch. Each member of the crew reacted almost instinctively to his responsibilities as the minutes passed. The red firing key was removed from the safe and inserted. Continuous target information was keyed into the computer along with their current position from the inertial navigation system. The backup computer checked and rechecked every byte of data to ensure that information from each system was correct. When completed, the three-stage rocket would be ready to hurl its sixty-three tons as far as six thousand miles. Its eight warheads would be programmed to land within four hundred feet of their targets.
What was it that Nelson’s father had once told him? The United States pays fantastic sums of money to geniuses to design sophisticated weapons to be operated by underpaid idiots. They weren’t idiots; not the crew of Florida. They were all sharp, intelligent young men, more dedicated to their profession than most Americans. But to comprehend the power of Florida, to understand how each piece of equipment functioned in relation to the next—that was beyond him or anyone else on board. There were certain things one had to take for granted—and the first was that the system worked.
And it did work once again, right down to the final step when Buck Nelson watched the system abort the sequence as it always did, with the data that had been entered into the computers. It always worked that way. Thank God it always worked that way! The geniuses that designed even the exercises knew better than to trust human frailties.
“This is Captain Nelson,” he spoke into the IMC. “I thought it was a good idea on such a nice sunny day to continue what Florida does best—drill. Now that we’ve obliterated eight separate cities in the Soviet Union with a single Trident, we have to assume that the Russians don’t want us to fire the other twenty-three missiles.
“So.…” It was almost cruel to tease them that way. “The moment that missile broke the surface, it was detected by a satellite. We gave away our position. That data was relayed to an underground command center in the Soviet Union. There are no surface ships in our vicinity, but there are two submarines nearby, one only two hours away. The nearest is now closing on us at high speed. I thank you now know how precarious our situation really is. You also see how our next exercise will evolve.
“Mr. Cross has already inserted tapes in the computer, and soon sonar will pick up the first target. The game takes about three hours to complete, and we will remain at battle stations until the end. If the computer reports us sunk, the XO will bypass and we will continue. Realism is a vital part of this particular game. While we will not waste real torpedoes or decoys, we will fire actual noisemakers. Damage-control parties will react exactly as if we had taken a torpedo or experienced a close-in detonation. Casualties will be treated at aid stations, and none of them will be allowed to return to duty before the drill is complete.”
There was silence as the IMC clicked off, followed thirty seconds later by a report from sonar—the initial contact! The next three hours were the most rigorous Florida’s crew had experienced since they departed their Bangor, Washington, pier. Within ten minutes each man was willing to believe they were under attack. Realism was the key to a successful exercise, and the designers had programmed this one as a heart-stopper. There was no time for pondering the situation. As the first target fired two torpedoes at long range, a second was isolated in sonar, too distant to classify. But rough cross fixes indicated it was also closing them.
Buck Nelson attempted to maneuver close to nineteen thousand tons of submarine like a cigar boat running from the feds. Florida dove and fired first noisemakers to mask his ship, then simulated decoys to attract homing torpedoes away from her. Then he rose rapidly toward the surface to confuse the enemy weapons-control coordinator on the next spread. She went entirely through her own firing sequence a number of times in retaliation. She made radical turns that forced men to grab for handholds as the huge submarine heeled one way, then turned just as sharply in the opposite direction to evade. Nelson treated her as much like an attack boat as possible.
At the end of three hours she had been devastated by a number of near misses. Torpedoes detonated close enough to spring seams, create shock damage to heavy machinery, devastate sophisticated electronic equipment, flood spaces, start fires, darken the ship, damage the steering gear, injure thirty men and kill another dozen.
She was also sunk three times.
When Mr. Cross’s game was completed, the men who had stood six hours of watch before the exercises began fell into their bunks without food. It was realism at its most terrifying. It would be another couple of days before they would experience boredom again.
Master Chief Tommy Lott understood Pasadena’s crew as well as any man, probably better even than his captain. That would be expected by anyone who had earned his submariner’s dolphins because Lott was chief of the boat. In that capacity, he served as the XO’s right-hand man, the sub’s master-at-arms for any disciplinary problems, and as the commanding officer’s advisor among the enlisted men. Wayne Newell could call every man aboard Pasadena by name, and he often knew their wives’ and children’s names, too. But Tommy Lott made it his business to know everything about every man aboard. If a negative factor existed, it was that Master Chief Tommy Lott was overly sensitive to the men’s innermost thoughts. The crew was as much his as the captain’s. Technically, when he became chief of the boat, he was no longer a practicing sonarman—but he couldn’t keep away from his first love and Newell had allowed the chief to spend some of the time in sonar.
Chief Lott was a sonar technician by trade, the man responsible for Pasadena’s ears. Sonarmen could sometimes be dilettantes, imagining they should be coddled because their acoustic talents could stand between life and death if their submarine was among the hunted. Some of them even grew so absorbed with their unique abilities that they talked their way ashore intending to end their careers in comfortable sonar-school billets. But most men who wore the dolphins also found they wanted to get back to sea after a tour ashore. Tommy Lott was no different. Being chief of the boat meant much more to him after his last few years ashore.
Aboard Pasadena Lott won the respect of every man on the boat because there was no ego involved. He accepted his native abilities and was thankful that they had brought him to the top of his profession in his early thirties. Lott looked like a bulldog, short, built like a fireplug, an expanding beer belly hanging over his belt. Even though his entire career had been aboard submarines, he walked with the exaggerated swagger of a surface sailor. But that was also show. He understood the computers utilized in sonar as well as any man in the Navy, but that was second to his talent for analyzing sound. That particular skill had, in turn, contributed to some sleepless moments in the past few days.
Tim Sanford, the chief torpedoman and Lott’s closest friend, stared at Lott across the Naugahyde-covered table in chiefs’ quarters and forced a weak laugh. “Tommy, you look like something I pumped out of the boat after breakfast.”
No reaction. Lott seemed not to have heard him.
“Except this turd didn’t have bags under its eyes like you do. What the hell’s bugging you, Tommy? You’re supposed to be setting an example for the crew of this famous boat.”
“You mean we’ll be famous if we ever get back home, and famous if there’s still someone alive to give a shit?” Lott stared back at Sanford without expression. The war on the surface, the loneliness of not knowing, was draining the spirit from his crew.
“Oh, come on, Tommy. The world hasn’t come to an end yet. They’re still in contact with us.” Sanford shared many of the concerns about the war on the surface with the rest of the crew. He had a family back in Pearl and he was as worried as any other man. But he also had spent enough years in the Navy to know there was nothing he could do for them and that his place was aboard his ship. Lott, too, had always shared the same feelings, until now.
“Who the hell’s in contact? We get coded messages from someone … somewhere. It’s not as if someone were actually talking with us.” He looked down at his fingernails and squinted as if they needed attention. “All that comes through, Tim, is orders to sink another boomer. And someone, or something, warns us that it’s going to sound exactly like one of our own … but don’t worry—sink it anyway!” Lott shouted with a look of agony crossing his features. He dropped his hands to his sides and looked first at Sanford, then at the other two men at the table, who had been sipping coffee and listening. “And it always does sound that way … exactly like one of ours. You ought to hear it.”
Chiefs’ quarters in a submarine were separated from the rest of the enlisted spaces in deference to their special position, but it was still tight living. Awake and off duty, the chiefs either socialized with their own or slept. There was no place else to go. They learned each other’s strengths and weaknesses rapidly, and it was always surprising, even shocking, when a trait appeared that none of them had seen before. Tommy Lott was chief of the boat, and the little bulldog had always been a symbol of strength and fairness since the day he reported aboard. But they had seen him change since Pasadena sank that first Soviet boomer. It started in his blue eyes, gradually spread across his plump face, and now expressed itself in his conversation.
“My friend,” Sanford began softly, “I’ll never have ears like those attached to either side of your head, but you’ll never understand the beauty of a perfect torpedo like your Uncle Tim—” He halted his attempt at humor in mid-sentence. What he’d been hearing from Lott had just come through to him, a combativeness that had never before surfaced in his friend, Tim Sanford recognized an odd, distant glint in Tommy Lett’s eyes that carried a simple message—shut up!
“I’m not shitting you, Tim.” Lett’s voice was sharp. “I’ve got it all recorded on tape. Why don’t you come down to sonar with me now and listen? I’ll tell you what to look for. If you’re worth anything, you’ll hear what I heard. They sound exactly like American boomers—right down to the beat of the props and the machine noises, they’re American machines.”
“Tommy, I’d never hear them,” Sanford protested. “I’m sorry I said anything about—”
Lott was on his feet. “Come on. Right now. Let’s go down there. I’ll tell you what to look for. I don’t know how anyone can reproduce sounds like that. You can imitate cavitation. You can imitate the standard sounds any boat makes. But each boat has its own personality.” He leaned forward with his hands on the table and glared down at Sanford.
“Perhaps they’ve recorded our signatures—you know, got it down to a science …” the other began weakly.
“If the Russians can’t quiet their own boats properly, how come they’re suddenly so damn good at designing masking equipment which makes them sound just like our own boats that they can sail away after a friendly bubble or two in the water?” His last sentence seemed to run together in a single phrase. He continued to stare at Sanford, waiting, almost daring him, for a response.
“Now, Tommy, I understand what’s bothering you.” He knew Lott had been chief sonarman aboard Nevada in her first gold crew. As a plank owner, Lott still retained an emotional attachment to her and the men who’d served with him. It was disconcerting to see the father-confessor of the boat on edge like this. “Believe me, I do. But you’ve got to loosen up. We can’t allow the best set of ears in the fleet to have a nervous breakdown.…”
“The best set of ears is still the best set of ears.” Lett looked at the other two men for the first time and saw the same look of concern that Tim Sanford had. His eyes returned to his friend, and he saw that Sanford was patiently waiting for him to say whatever he felt was necessary. There was no tension in Tim’s face, none of the anger that Lott knew was lurking just below his own surface. He sat back down. “I’m sorry.”
“Nothing to worry about, Tommy….”
“But what would you say if you found out we’d been conned and those were real American boomers we’d sunk? Bud Perini and Charlie Javier were on Alaska. You knew Tony Aldo was still on Nevada. Christ, who else.…” He silently began to tick off other individuals on his fingers who’d been aboard Nevada with him.
“They still are,” Sanford said. “The captain was warned well ahead of time about this new device the Russians are using. Remember, he used the IMC to announce it to the crew before we ever gained contact, so there’d be no surprises.”
One of the other chiefs, a machinist, spoke up for the first time. “You know, Tim, one of my first class said that another sonarman was just as concerned the other day as Tommy. They were talking about it during chow. It really is eerie as hell—this masking device, or whatever the hell it’s called. A lot of troops on the boat are talking about it. Everyone has a buddy aboard one of those boomers. Just imagine—” But he never had a chance to finish.
“Battle stations … all hands man your battle stations.…” The IMC echoed through every space on Pasadena.
It was a false alarm, set off by a sound that had traveled a tremendous distance across Pacific waters through some freak of nature and been picked up with the sensitive ears of Pasadena’s passive sonar system. It could have been a hundred miles away, or even three hundred. As Pasadena continued toward her next target, the sound faded forever and the crew returned to their work. But it was not the victorious crew that Wayne Newell wished for. It was a curious, introspective crew who worried about the fate of their families in a war they had been told was raging on the surface, and who were equally concerned about their friends sailing aboard American boomers.
The General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics requests the pleasure of your company at the skyburst of America’s initial multiple-reentry vehicle, courtesy of a Trident D-5 missile now less than forty minutes outside of Moscow. Smoked glasses will be issued to protect the eyes of those who might survive….
The General Secretary snickered silently to himself. The only sound in the room was the voice of the evening newscaster in the background. If anyone had seen his face, there would have been no alteration in his expression as he considered how hilarious that invitation might be to another generation, one not attuned to anticipating a devastating nuclear exchange with the Americans.
He looked over to his wife on the off chance she might have noticed this weird, silent little joke with himself. Married people got like that after a while. They could tell when the other was happy or sad, introspective or carefree, tired, hungry … every sensation a human being might experience. He reflected on their relationship over the years. That was one of the most pleasant aspects of their marriage, seemingly an extrasensory experience—not the ability to read the other’s mind, but a sense of how the other felt. It was a benefit he had not expected, and one that he relished as he grew older.
It was wonderful to have her there, even when she quietly watched the television news and forgot that he was present. There was a feeling of warmth, of security perhaps, which he could not define, but understood without putting it into words. He poured another small glass of vodka from the bottle set in ice. The liquid was thick and reddish-colored and gave off a faint background aroma of the hot peppers that flavored the drink. Pertsovka was his favorite. The aroma, not an especially strong one when the vodka had been in the freezer for so long, tickled his nose.
