Caswell took a seat at the COB's gestured invitation. "Sorry to interrupt," he said, "but a familygram just came through for you. I thought you'd want to see it in private."
Caswell instantly felt a cold fist clench in his stomach. Familygrams — instituted by the legendary Admiral Zumwalt thirty years before — were intended as morale boosters: short, often maddeningly cryptic messages sent to and from a sub with the regular radio traffic, which helped keep the crew in touch with their families.
Normally, this was a good thing… a twenty-five-word announcement of the birth of a daughter, a first tooth or a first step, or even of the need to get a plumber to fix the frozen pipes at home. Familygrams from home helped keep the men going, helped remind them of what was really important. But when the Chief of the Boat delivered one personally, and in private, the damned thing was more like the traditional telegram, almost certainly bearing unpleasant, even disastrous news. We regret to inform you…
He took the flimsy from O'Day's hand and opened it.
PARENTS RIGHT. RELATIONSHIP NOT WORKING OUT, TIME TO END IT. LUCK WITH THE LIFE YOU'VE CHOSEN. DON'T CALL ME. DON'T WANT MY MIND CHANGED.
FAREWELL.
SIGNED: NINA
The words blurred for a moment. Damn… damn… damn! He'd been more than half expecting this to happen, but the reality…
"You okay, son?" O'Day asked.
Caswell nodded, not trusting himself to speak. He wadded up the message flimsy, looked around for a waste receptacle, and seeing none, stuffed the ball into a pocket of his blue poopie suit.
"Life sucks," O'Day said. "You need some time to yourself? I'll square it with your division chief."
"N-No, Master Chief," he said. "I think I'd better get back to my watch."
"Suit yourself. If you need to talk, though, my office door is open."
"Yeah… "
Somehow, thoughts reeling, he made his way back up to the sonar room.
12
Roger Caswell had never known such pain.
Four long days had dragged by since he'd gotten that familygram, and each day he'd settled a bit deeper into depression. It was the helplessness more than anything else that hurt. Ohio's early sailing date had been beyond his control, and now Nina had arbitrarily decided to call off their marriage without giving him a chance to discuss things, to talk, to negotiate in any way. If her parents had argued her into changing her mind, he hadn't been given the chance to answer.
He really didn't understand her refusal to listen to anything he had to say. Don't call me. Don't want my mind changed. What did that mean… that she was afraid that if they talked again, he would convince her to give him another chance? That if her parents had convinced her he was wrong for her, he might be able to make her change her mind again?
That was crazy. Caswell was a rational sort, the kind of man who thought things through carefully and wanted to know the whole story. If he was wrong, if he'd made a mistake, he wanted to know so he could correct it. To deliberately refuse to listen to someone else because to do so might lead you to change your mind… that was just fucking nuts.
Somehow, somehow, he had to get through to her….
"Cassie!"
"Huh?"
Dobbs had placed a hand on his shoulder and was shaking him. Caswell realized, belatedly, that the other sonar tech had been trying to get his attention for several seconds.
"Watch your screen, man!" Dobbs said, pointing. "You got a contact!"
"Uh, yeah. Thanks." A thread of white light had just begun slanting across the cascade of green up at the top. It was a weak contact, a distant one, but loud enough to emerge from the background static.
Damn. He hadn't been paying proper attention. For two weeks Ohio had been racing through the ocean depths at such a high speed that broadband sonar was all but useless. During the last three watch periods, though, the skipper had slowed them to twelve knots— slow enough that the rush of water past the hydrophones didn't drown out nearly everything else.
"Control, Sonar," he said. He glanced at his log, then made a notation. "New contact, bearing three-three-zero. Designate Sierra Two-five-one."
"Sonar, Con. New contact, Sierra Two-five-one. What's your guess?"
He closed his eyes and listened for a moment. He could hear the contact over the headphones now, a very, very faint churning of the water.
Dobbs, who was manning the narrowband towed array, tapped in some commands on his console, trying to tune in on the contact. The narrowband rig let him submit a little more data. "Sir, I make it twin screws. Probable civilian target. It's very faint. I think we're getting a CZ contact here."
"Very well."
Sommersby had been out of the control room for several moments. He returned now, the trademark mug of coffee in his hand, and picked up a set of headphones for a listen. "Sounds like a supertanker," he said. He glanced at Caswell's waterfall. "We're close enough to the Gulf of Oman proper here… ninety miles, close enough, which would put them within the third CZ. Sounds like she's coming out of the Gulf of Oman."
CZs, or convergence zones, were a useful phenomenon in the science of sonar detection. Under certain conditions, sound from a distant target reflected off the surface toward the depths, then was bent back toward the surface by the extreme pressure of the deep ocean, or by a thermocline, a sound-reflecting layer of deep, cold water. Convergence zones were the points where a listening submarine could detect sounds focused from far beyond their normal range of hearing; CZs occurred at roughly thirty-mile intervals, which was how Sommersby had deduced that Sierra Two-five-one was emerging from the Gulf of Oman, ninety miles ahead.
Ohio's passage of the Indian Ocean had been uneventful, with few contacts. Now that they were nearing the Gulf, however, they could expect commercial traffic to pick up.
They could also expect to begin picking up Iranian patrols. The word had been passed to Ohio via satellite radio traffic some time ago that the American SSN operating in the area — the Pittsburgh—had been tracking the new Iranian diesel boats in and around the Straits of Hormuz. There'd been intense speculation among the crew ever since they'd left the Straits of Juan de Fuca about that attack on the Ohio. If the Iranians knew about Ohio and her mission, or even if they'd simply guessed, they could expect to encounter the enemy's outlying pickets any time now. Ohio had just crossed the Tropic of Cancer; a hundred miles to the north was the border between Pakistan and Iran. A hundred fifty miles to the southeast lay Ra's al Hadd, the westernmost point of Oman.
The Gulf of Oman, while it had no hard-lined demarcation, could be said to begin in another ninety or one hundred miles. Here, an arm of the Arabian Sea stretched for 250 miles northwest to the Straits of Hormuz. At the southeastern end, the Gulf of Oman was two hundred miles wide. At the northwest, it narrowed sharply and twisted north into the straits, which at their narrowest were only about twenty-five miles wide.
The Gulf of Oman, then, offered a taste of what Ohio could expect on the far side of the Straits of Hormuz — shoaling water, rapidly narrowing to a tightly constricted bottleneck, with no room for maneuver and no room for mistakes.
If the Iranians were hoping to ambush the Ohio before she reached Iran, they would try it here, in the Gulf of Oman, or within the straits themselves.