“Get some rest, Antoine,” he said.
The sonar expert slipped his headphone behind his ear.
“You want me to rest now, Jake?”
“Yes. Let your Taiwanese understudy handle this drone deployment.”
“You would trust him with this?”
“If there’s someone out there who heard our transient noise, he’s far away. He’s going to be curious and making speed to chase us down. I expect that we’d hear even the Ambush if it’s coming to investigate us, and I trust your understudy to notice it — and that’s if the sound analysis algorithms don’t automatically flag the noise.”
“I’m fine, Jake. Really.”
The lines and shadows stretching across Remy’s aging face contradicted his claim.
“I know you want to stay glued to that seat, but I need you rested so that you’re one hundred percent refreshed when we ambush the Ambush. I’m going to lay down the law on whoever the kid is who made the noise, but really, it didn’t cost us anything. We’re alone out here.”
“I hope you’re right, Jake.”
“I am, Antoine. Go to bed.”
Remy stood, stretched his legs, and offered the seat to the eldest of the Taiwanese naval crew. A slender man with pronounced cheekbones took his place.
“Petty Officer Kang,” Jake said, “listen to the world around us, and prove to me that we’re alone.”
Jake returned to the elevated conning platform and flopped into his captain’s chair. He let himself doze off, and when he awoke, he tasted stale copper.
He stretched his legs and then pushed himself to his feet. A glance at the nearest monitor showed the Specter’s second drone finishing its outer leg of its outward spiral search.
“Anything on sonar?” he asked.
Petty Officer Kang shook his head.
As Jake waited for the second drone to complete its task, Henri escorted a young sailor into the compartment. The forlorn look of shame on the Taiwanese man’s face revealed his guilt.
“This is our culprit,” Henri said.
“I see,” Jake said. “How did you find him?”
“I could tell by the look on his face that it was he who made the noise, and he could tell by my demeanor that I sought him. He came forth without my asking.”
Jake stiffened his back and added shrill tenor to his voice.
“What happened?”
Looking to Henri for a queue on how to react, the Taiwanese sailor stayed silent.
“He remembered leaving a wrench on the deck after performing maintenance,” Henri said. “He then returned to pick it up to avoid allowing it to rattle. Then he dropped the wrench by accident. Sad irony, really, that he created a noise while trying to assure our silence.”
“He’s lucky that nobody was close enough to hear us. Six hours later, and he may have ruined our entire mission.”
“I’m sorry, Jake,” the man said.
“I know you are. I expect that guilt will be your primary punishment, but it can’t be your only punishment. Henri will assign you to scrubbing the toilets during every cleaning session for the remainder of this deployment.”
The man’s face tightened in disgust but softened in realization that his blunder had cost him no more.
“Yes, Jake. Thank you,” the man said.
“Back to your station,” Jake said.
As the man departed, Jake replayed the punishment in his mind, wondering if he’d swiped too gingerly at the man with his claw of justice. But then he decided that it meant nothing compared to his upcoming performance against the Ambush. If he nailed that, the entire crew would respect him as much as the French veterans who had witnessed his past miracles.
“The outward spiral search is complete for drone two,” Kang said. “I’m ready to position drone two for delousing.”
The sailor’s words brought Jake to the present moment, and he glanced at the monitor. The inverted blue triangles appeared where he expected. In an hour, the third triangle representing the second drone would settle twelve miles to the east, setting a perfect triangular trap.
Drone one to the north, drone two to the east, and the Specter, with its vast arrays of hydrophones draped across its hull, bunched in its bow, and trailed behind it, would establish the most sensitive mobile listening post in the ocean.
And either the first Argentine submarine or the one following it six hours later would bring the Ambush to it.
“Deploy drone two to the delouse point,” Jake said.
Having not slept in a bed for a day, he collapsed onto his captain’s chair again and toggled in and out of consciousness.
“We’re half an hour from the first delouse, Jake.”
The familiarity of Henri’s voice calmed the rush of anxiety that surprised him as he awoke.
The disquiet in his soul troubled him. Desperation and anger had insulated him from fear in his earliest victories, and his striving for selfless contribution had driven him through any dread he faced in his recent successes.
But this fight felt different. Something new harkened him to it — something beyond his personal motivation that he thought he had forgotten.
Morality.
It felt wrong, it bothered him, and he couldn’t fathom a single reason to be aboard the Specter other than he had heard a greater authority calling him to do it. His anger lingered a distant world away, and any spirit of charity within him seemed inapplicable to his plight. He wasn’t doing this for vengeance, and he wasn’t doing it for people he cared about. He was only doing it because he intuited that an imbalance in the world needed righting by his hand.
For the first time since wearing the uniform of a United States naval officer, the noble call to duty compelled him forward, and he couldn’t quell it.
But it left him vulnerable to his fear, and he wondered if the charm that Renard thought protected him had vanished.
“Half an hour, you say?” he asked.
“Slightly less,” Henri said.
“Wake Remy and get him ready.”
“He’s already at his seat,” Henri said.
“The other sonar men?”
“By his side. We have ears listening to every array.”
“Great,” Jake said. “Then we wait and listen.”
Time oozed like molasses, and nothing happened. Jake stepped down from his conning platform and slid behind the seated bodies hunched over sonar screens. Letting his team listen, he stifled the urge to ask questions and stared at the lines on the Subtics monitors showing the surrounding aquatic sounds.
As his patience waned, Jake saw the tiny telltale twitch in Remy’s finger that indicated that he heard something.
“What is it Antoine?” he asked.
The finger and its cousins rose to the headphone on the Frenchman’s head, pressing it against his wide, toad-like shape. Remy curled his head down in thought and listening, running the sounds he heard against his inventory of auditory memories. Jake held his breath as his guru drew his conclusion.
“Something on the towed array sonar,” Remy said.
Jake envisioned the line of hydrophones trailing behind the Specter, their distance from the ship separating them from its interfering noise and their length allowing them to hear lower-frequency sounds.
“What do you have?” Jake asked.
“Low-speed screws,” Remy said. “Clean, cut by precision machinery. It’s a warship.”
“A submarine?” Jake asked.
“Yes. The blades are deep enough that seawater is preventing cavitation. I hear no such bubbling.”
“Do you have number of blades? Blade rate? How fast are they going?”
“Based upon revolutions per minute and the number of blades on a Type Seventeen Hundred submarine, I calculate six knots.”