“To our new watchstander,” said the captain, raising a glass. “By my calculation, this should give each of us twenty-five percent more time in the rack, and Hamlin seventy-five percent less.”
They clicked their glasses together and drank.
“What now?” said Ramirez.
“Now — we have a mission to complete.”
“Are we getting close?”
The captain nodded. “We’re getting close.”
Suddenly the phone buzzed at his knees, a direct line to the control room. He picked it up.
“Captain.”
He nodded as he listened, his brow furrowing with concern. “OK. I’m on my way up.”
“Something wrong, Captain?”
He nodded. “We’ve got a submerged contact. Moody thinks she’s following us.”
The next two weeks were a blur of evasive maneuvers, countermeasures, and stifling tension. But they couldn’t shake the shadow boat. Pete watched a change come over the captain as he tried to evade the enemy boat, but couldn’t. One night prior to taking the midnight watch, he spent some time with the captain to discuss the situation in the wardroom.
“You’re certain it’s the enemy?”
He nodded. “No Alliance boats would get this close to Eris — trust me. It’s crazy to get this close, and if I didn’t have your assurances that you knew some backdoor in, I wouldn’t be trying it either.”
“Why don’t they shoot us?”
“I’ve thought about that,” said the captain. “Maybe they want to see what we’re doing. Maybe they want to shoot us after we pick up our cargo.”
“So why don’t we shoot them?” Pete asked.
At this, the captain’s demeanor darkened. “Have you been talking to them?”
“Who?”
“Hana and Frank,” he said. “They think I should just fire two torpedoes at her, make all our problems go away.”
“They haven’t said a word to me about it,” said Pete. “But why don’t you?”
“At this range — they’ll shoot back immediately. And they’ll hit us, sure as shit. Firing a torpedo at them is a murder — suicide. As long as we’ve got a chance to evade, and complete our mission, I’m going to keep trying.”
“Unless they shoot us.”
“If they shoot at us first,” said the captain, “I’ve got a torpedo in tube one with their name on it. We can say goodbye to each other as our torpedoes cross paths.”
The next morning, the captain called them all to control. He looked like he hadn’t slept all night. Ramirez and the captain stood on one side of the plotting table, Frank and Hana on the other. Pete stood to the side, equidistant between the adversaries.
“OK,” he said. “We’re going to try something new. We’re going to launch the MOSS.”
Hana rolled her eyes. Frank looked to her for approval, then snickered.
“The MOSS, Captain?” Moody was incredulous. “That thing is archaic. It’s a waste of time.”
“What’s the MOSS?” Pete asked.
“It’s a submarine simulator,” said Ramirez. “Basically a fake submarine we launch from a torpedo tube. It broadcasts our same acoustic signature. The bad guy follows it.” But even Ramirez didn’t sound optimistic.
Moody continued. “Captain, respectfully, we’ll never fool a modern boat with that thing.”
“We’ll rig for ultraquiet,” he said. “Then we’ll launch countermeasures and push out the MOSS. While Typhon is trying to figure it out, we’ll peel away to the north. If we’re quiet enough, and the MOSS works like it’s supposed to, we’ll slip away.”
“Waste of time,” said Hana again, frustration in her voice.
“You have any better ideas, XO?” said the captain. They were glaring at each other.
“I do, sir,” she said, emphasizing the word. “Instead of firing that dusty MOSS, launch a real torpedo down their throats. If you want to evade, a torpedo in the water will make that a lot easier. Let’s get the first shot off in this fight.”
“She’s two thousand yards away, Hana. At this range, she’ll fire right back on a dead bearing.”
“So we evade!” she said. “That’s what you’re planning on doing anyway! Let’s take a shot and then evade!”
“I’ve made my decision,” said the captain. “Frank, load the MOSS in tube three, and prepare for battle stations.”
“We’re not going to discuss this anymore?” said Moody.
“Discussion is over,” said the captain. “Now, follow your goddamn orders.”
For a second, they all stared at each other. Then Frank stormed out of control without a word, while Hana continued to glare at the chart.
Frank pushed his way past the doctor on the ladder on the way out. He’d been standing there the whole time, listening.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Commander Carlson kept waiting for the shot, but it became clear to her that the Alliance boat was trying to evade her, not willing to engage in any suicidal actions: smart. In the meantime, she would follow. She was proud of shooting that little plane down, and she would stick to that philosophy. Better to shoot the enemy ship on her return trip from Eris Island.
Polaris was a good, quiet ship, with a skilled captain, she could tell. Acoustically, they had two things she could hold on to. At very close ranges, inside of one thousand meters, they could hear a 60 Hz tonal. It could be anything electrical that was sonically sorted to the hull, broadcasting that slight electric whine into the sea. It traveled a very short distance, its high, narrow frequency attenuating quickly in the ocean. But it was distinctively man-made and therefore invaluable, a sound they could pluck from the cloud of natural noises that surrounded them: the roar of the ocean, the tides, the shifting of the ocean floor, and the mournful cries of whales a hundred miles away. Moreover, it was distinctively Alliance, as the Typhon boat operated on a 50 Hz electrical system, so they could quickly distinguish any of their own noise from the enemy’s.
Secondly, they had discovered a sound made from the ship’s reduction gear, a slight chirp. It could have been a chipped tooth along one of the many gears, and it clicked reliably with every full rotation of the screw. This sound had the added advantage of being directly related to the speed of the reduction gear, and therefore, the speed of the ship. Over many days of tracking Polaris, they had even constructed a formula to convert the frequency of the chirping to the speed of the ship.
Both noises disappeared entirely outside of about two thousand meters, so they worked hard to stay inside that range. It was difficult because the Polaris tried all the standard evasion techniques, changing speed and course often. Polaris was hampered here by the fact that Carlson knew their destination: Eris Island. Still, sometimes they drifted out of range. When they did, Carlson had a third sound she could count on to reel the Polaris back in: the voice of their spy. It almost felt unsporting to rely on it, but there you go. War is hell.
Carlson was in control with Banach and two of her officers whom she trusted only slightly less. They were staring at the small-scale plot in the corner, looking at their estimate of the Polaris’s course and speed. Suddenly a starburst of noise lit up their sonar display. Banach quickly put headphones to one ear.
“They’re launching countermeasures,” he said, quickly putting down a red X on the chart at the position of the launch. “And another,” he said, making another red X.