SUBJ CONTACT REPORT
SCI/TOP SECRET — EARLY RETIREMENT
//BT//
1. CONTACT REPORT NUMBER TWO FOLLOWS.
2. POSITION APPROXIMATE IN STRAIT OP SICILY AT DETECTED POSITION OF SLOT BUOY.
3. USS AUGUSTA ATTACKED DESTINY SUBMARINE WITH MULTIPLE MARK 50 SALVO. WEAPONS DID NOT DETONATE, WE SUSPECT, BECAUSE DESTINY HAD RELEASED A FULL-SPECTRUM DECOY THEN SHUT DOWN REACTOR AND STEAM PLANT TO HIDE WHILE WE SHOT AT DECOY.
4. DESTINY BATTERY CAPACITY LOW OR HE HAD DC ELECTRICAL PROBLEMS. REDETECTED DESTINY SNORKELING JUST PRIOR TO HIS LAUNCH OF APPROX FIVE LARGE BORE TORPEDOES. ALSO, DESTINY EMITS A 154 HZ DOUBLET.
5. CURRENTLY RUNNING PROM UIF TORPEDOES. WILL ATTEMPT COUNTERFIRE, BUT HAVE LOST CONTACT ON TARGET WHOSE LAST POSITION WAS IN OUR BAFFLES. PROBABILITY OF A HIT ON DESTINY SUB CONSIDERED LOW.
6. IF AUGUSTA SINKS, IN THE NAME OF OUR LOVE FOR OUR FAMILIES PLEASE TELL THEM AS MUCH OF THE TRUTH AS YOU CAN, AS SOON AS YOU CAN.
7. CDR. R. DAMINSKI SENDS.
//BT//
Donchez looked up at Rummel, his face pale.
“Who knows about this?”
“Message center crews, cincmed and sublant watch officers. They sent it on the SCI fax in your staff car. It’s only been seven minutes since it was first transmitted.”
Donchez read it again. “Get Traeps and Roy Steinman out here.”
Rummel returned with the admirals. By then Donchez had read the message from Daminski twice more. When the admirals arrived, Donchez handed the message over for them to read. Steinman, the slow-talking New Orleans submariner with the young face, spoke first.
“Daminski could be going down right now while we’re reading this. We need to find out what happened to him. Then we need to sink this SOB.”
“Phoenix is at Gibraltar,” Traeps said. “We could bring her up and ask if she heard anything.”
“Get a DSRV to Daminski’s last position,” Donchez ordered, wondering where the nearest deep submergence rescue vehicle was. “If Augusta went down, we might get someone out.”
Steinman shook his head while Rummel hurried back to the staff car. “I know you’re right, we’ve got to do that, sir, but if Daminski was on the wrong end of five Nagasaki torpedoes he didn’t stand a chance. We just completed an intel estimate we got from an insider at Toshiba. The Nagasaki can do seventy knots on a high-speed axial turbine and has a range of seventy-five nautical miles. It’s a big sucker, three feet in diameter and fifty feet long. Most of that is warhead. If it’s launched against you … well, I recommend we copy this message to the Phoenix so she knows about this playing-possum tactic. She might have to get out of the way if this sucker is as good as Rocket Ron thinks.” Or, he added silently, like he thought.
“Let’s wait on the death certificate until we hear more, Roy,” Donchez said. “John, get on a secure line to your watch officer and have him call Phoenix up to periscope depth and get a report from her on anything she heard from the bearing to the Strait of Sicily. Go ahead and copy Phoenix on this message but have it marked personal for commanding officer.”
Admiral Traeps left through the house to the front, where Donchez’s staff car waited. Steinman reread the message. He looked up at Donchez, the moon reflecting off the teardrop-shaped lenses of his glasses.
“Did you note that line about telling the truth?” Steinman looked out over the lake, swallowing hard.
“I agree with Rocket Ron. If we lost Augusta, I want to tell the families immediately.”
“How are we gonna do that, sir, let the world know a third-world sub put one of our best on the bottom?”
“I’m hoping your Phoenix can take care of the Destiny.”
“At least Sugar Kane knows more than Rocket Ron did about this guy’s tactics.”
“Kane?”
“David Kane, captain of the Phoenix. Crew calls him Sugar, a title I regret to say I thought up. Kane was a junior officer of mine back on the Archerfish.”
“Small world,” Donchez said. He’d never heard of David Kane. “Your man Kane. Is he good?”
“He knows his stuff,” Steinman said cautiously, knowing Kane wasn’t Donchez’s blood-and-guts kind of sailor. Kane was a politician, ever tuned to his own advancement — he’d always looked like he belonged on Wall Street wearing a $2,000 business suit rather than oily-smelling khakis on a nuclear submarine. But his squadron commanders and crew seemed to love him. Kane was a crowd-pleaser, adept at saying what his bosses and juniors wanted to hear. He was a new generation of captain, and Steinman wisely kept that to himself, knowing a single misinterpreted remark to the C.N.O could torpedo a career. Besides, Kane was good, he was just good in a self-serving kind of way.
Traeps and Rummel returned by the stairs to the patio from the lawn by the lake. They were covered with snow.
“You’d better check this out. Admiral.”
Donchez held the faxed message Rummel handed him up to the porch light and read. It was from the Phoenix. The meat of the message dashed his hopes.
SONAR DETECTED MULTIPLE DISTANT EXPLOSIONS ALONG BEARING LINE TO STRAIT OP SICILY. SUBSEQUENT TRANSIENTS BELIEVED TO BE HULL BREAKUP. USS PHOENIX REMAINS ON STATION EAST OF GIBRALTAR WITH NO FURTHER DETECTS.
Donchez held out the message to Steinman.
“Let’s get Barczynski,” he said. “We’ll have to come up with a story on this. I don’t want this UIF thing brought out, not till we kill him. Roy, I guess lost-sub cover stories are your responsibility. Sorry.”
“I know, sir. We’ll have a statement ready for the morning. We’d better get going on the notifications. I guess I’d best visit Daminski’s wife myself.”
“I’ll do that, Roy,” Donchez said. “He’ was one of my boys from the Dace. Maybe you could see to his XO and wardroom.”
Steinman nodded, trudging back into the house.
Donchez walked around to the front, where his staff car was parked, following the path made by Traeps and Rummel. The car’s engine was idling, the big black Lincoln bristling with antennae. The front door of Clough’s house opened and Barczynski came out, his overcoat thrown over his shoulders. After asking Donchez what was up, the look in Donchez’s eyes telling him the matter was grave, he read the messages, Daminski’s and Kane’s.
“General, we’ve got this message going out to the second sub in the western Med. He knows how the enemy fight their ship and he’ll be ready. Sihoud and the Destiny will be on the bottom—”
“Dick, I’d like to believe that. But I heard the skipper of Augusta was a damn good man. An expert at getting top performance out of a crew.”
“He was one of the best,” Donchez said, thinking he ought to be, I trained him myself. “His professionalism shows in his last message, sir. He knew he was a dead man but he took the time to tell us how to beat the Destiny.”
Donchez looked hard at Barczynski. “I want to declassify that Augusta sank. General. Tonight. We couldn’t keep a lid on it too long anyway, she’s due back in a couple weeks. It’ll give us a black eye if we let the next of kin celebrate New Year’s and wait on the pier and we tell them then she’s been gone since December. We sat on sinking news back when Stingray went down in ‘73 and the press and the families beat the hell out of us. And rightly so.”
“Dick, we can’t be saying anything about the Destiny sub—”
“We won’t. Steinman’s working on a story now. Augusta sank because of a faulty torpedo or a flooded main seawater system or any of a thousand things that can sink a submarine. It’s known to be a dangerous business. We’ve lost three nukes in the past, sir, we’ve done this before, I’m sorry to say.”
“I don’t want any salvage divers coming up next week saying we lied.”