Danny was startled a moment, and then he complied: flipping over his left hand and so they could see the bright scars. He flexed his fingers so they could see the incomplete range of motion. They all leaned in, fascinated, except for the XO who flipped through one of his binders.
“The last time Danny was on a high speed transit across this ocean, he lost those fingers for a few days,” said the CO. “But I was nicer back then. If any of you shitheads screw this up, I’ll cut your whole hand off.” They all laughed.
“At some point in the next few days,” continued Michaels, “Danny will satisfy your curiosity and give us wardroom training about the legendary USS Alabama. In the meantime, I’d like us to focus on the mission at hand. Got it?”
“Yes sir,” they all said.
“Where’s our operating area?” said V-12, pointing at the chart.
Danny nodded. “We don’t have one. We have this line in the ocean that we know she travelled on.”
V-12 sat back in his chair. “So we’re trying to find a modern, friendly submarine, somewhere in the western Pacific, with no NAU, and no operating area to even limit her?”
“That’s correct,” said Danny.
The junior officer smiled. “Cool.”
The first sonarman to hear it was Petty Officer Third Class Ivan Bradley. He was called by all, inevitably, “Crazy Ivan,” the name given to a radical submarine maneuver that Soviet captains made famous during the glory days of the Cold War. Bradley was twenty years old, brand new on the boat, as is often the case for men making a crucial, subtle discovery via sonar. More jaded sonarmen looked at every trace on their screen as ambient noise, commercial shipping, or their own ship’s noise, and had to prove to themselves that they’d found a submarine. The young men fresh out of the trainers of New London had spent hundreds of hours in a simulated ocean filled with sinister schools of Akulas, Kilos, and Chinese diesels. They looked at every trace in the water as if it was a submerged submarine and sometimes… it was.
They had heard whispers of her twice before in the last twenty-four hours. Just a few seconds the first time, before she disappeared into a cloud of biological noise. Six hours later, they heard her again, held her for about forty-five minutes. They thought they were closing in when she just vanished from their sonar screens, a chimera, the sound of her screw replaced by the cursing of Commander Michaels in the control room. They stood down but kept the tracking party in Control, and every man on the boat remained tense, ready to go, unable to sleep or relax when they knew, and hoped, that at any second they might be called to battle stations again.
Crazy Ivan heard her on the towed array, a long cable containing hundreds of hydrophones that dragged behind the ship. Well behind the Louisville and its own noise, it could peer far into the ocean the same way a telescope in space, above the earth’s streetlights and murky atmosphere, could see all the way back to the beginning of time. He closed his eyes and listened on his headphones just a moment more, hearing again the distinctive whoosh whoosh of a propeller barely audible above the background noise.
“Submerged contact, Sierra One,” he said, digitally marking it on his console.
The sonar supervisor turned a switch and immediately began listening to what Bradley had heard. He nodded his head briskly and grabbed his microphone.
“Conn, sonar, submerged contact Sierra One bearing two-seven-eight.” You could hear the adrenaline in his voice — it was what sonarmen lived for.
“Battle Stations!” called the chief of the watch on the 1MC for the third time in the last day, and they could hear feet pounding all around them as every man on the boat took his position.
“This is Lieutenant Jabo,” they heard on the mike. “I have the conn.” While he was brand new to the boat, the men of sonar nodded at each other upon hearing his voice: they’d unanimously decided earlier in the watch that Jabo’s presence on the conn would give them the best chance of success.
He’d taken the conn from Captain Michaels, who’d beaten him to control by just seconds. The XO stood in a corner of the control room, a stop watch around his neck, the freshly-laminated pages of the special procedure in his hands.
“Right full rudder,” said Danny. “Steady on course zero-three-zero.” He spoke into the microphone above his head that had been switched on. “Sonar, Conn, coming right for TMA.”
“Sonar conn, aye,” they responded. The Louisville needed to turn, so they could see how it affected the relative motion of the submarine in front of them, a necessary step in determining its course and speed: it was an art called Target Motion Analysis. A skilled officer, like Danny, would turn the ship in a way that maximized the information they got out of the move, in the least time, while also putting the ship in a better attack position. Two maneuvers were better than one, and three better still, but Danny had carefully studied the charts after the last two failed approaches. He was going to make one maneuver, turn toward the target, and close rapidly. It evoked the aggressive Soviet tactics of old, a contrast to the scientific, patient approaches of most American captains. The Soviets, it was said, trained their men to need just three things in order to shoot an enemy: a torpedo, a bearing, and a will to shoot.
The ship turned as Danny had ordered, and the towed array behind her became unstable. As they knew it would, the trace of their target disappeared. They only hoped this time, as the towed array stabilized, it would reappear. With a few seconds to wait, Danny looked at the screen in front of him trying to glean what historical information he could. Michaels tapped the screen.
“That her?” he said, pointing to the faintest of white lines.
“That’s it,” said Danny.
The sonar supervisor had made his way to control. “I listened myself before we turned. I definitely heard propeller noises.”
“Very well,” said Danny, peering at the screen. While sonar was sound, outside the sonar room it was most often converted into a visual display, lines whose brightness varied with the intensity of the volume. The trace they were all studying intently was barely visible before they turned, and had now disappeared entirely. Danny was quietly worried that they would lose their target while turning, as they’d done twice before in the last day.
The helmsman spoke. “Sir, ship is steady on zero-three-zero.”
“Very well,” said Danny. They waited for the sonar array behind them to straighten out and stabilize so they could see once again.
After what seemed like an eternity, an amplified voice from sonar: “Sir the towed array is stable.”
“Very well.”
As Danny stared at the screen, the captain stared over his shoulder, so close Danny could smell the coffee on his breath.
“That’s it,” they said at the same time, tapping the screen. The trace had reappeared off their port bow, incrementally louder as they were closer.
At least three people in the control room ran a calculation based on the submerged contact’s change in bearing rate with the Louisville’s new course, to estimate its range and speed. These were consolidated on the Time Range chart at the front of the control room, so the OOD could see an aggregation of all the estimates of range.
“Two thousand yards?” said Michaels.
“Looks like it,” said Danny. He was picturing the sub in front of them.
“Conn, Sonar, we’re starting to pick it up on the sphere.”
Danny turned a switch on the display and they could see. The spherical sonar array was a fixed ball of hydrophones on the very front of the ship, encased with an acoustically permeable fiberglass dome. It couldn’t see as far as the towed array, or see behind the ship at all, but it also didn’t get unstable every time the ship moved, and when it gained contact, it provided more precise data. More importantly, the target’s visibility on the sphere confirmed that they were getting closer to each other.