“I’m telling you now.”
“I meant when you found out.”
“It was hard for me to keep the news to myself, but I thought it was the right thing.”
“How can it be the right thing?” Henri asked. “We’ve known each other for years. You could have trusted us with the information.”
The bulkheads closed in on Jake until LaFontaine shook his long index finger at his colleagues.
“I know why he did it,” he said. “He’s too gracious to say it, and so I will say it for him. It’s because this is an embarrassment to all of us, and he absorbed the shame for us.”
“You weren’t even there,” Henri said. “You live in the engineering spaces. You’re saying this is an embarrassment to those of us involved in the tactical decisions.”
“It’s hardly an accusation,” LaFontaine said. “It’s merely a statement of truth. Jake may have made the decision to risk revealing ourselves to the Ambush, but from what I heard of it, the protests were minimal. We as a crew stood behind him. We need to accept it. You need to accept it.”
With the length of the submarine normally separating the Frenchmen, Jake’s first witnessing of them arguing caught him off guard. But with their strong personalities, he found their disaccord obvious in retrospect, and he was grateful that they sat on opposite sides of the wardroom table.
He was also grateful for his fluency in French as anger drove the adversaries to their mother tongue.
“Don’t be a son of a whore,” Henri said in French. “Get your hide back to the engineering spaces.’
“Don’t tell me how to behave,” LaFontaine said. “I will speak my mind. You’re just as wrong as he is, and you should thank him for bearing the burden of the defeat.”
“Shut your snout.”
“I will not. Stand behind him and figure out a way out of this mess. You’re as guilty as he is.”
Jake interceded in English.
“There’s nothing to figure out!”
Silence. Jake continued.
“The Ambush has us by the balls, and there’s not a damned thing we can do about it. But it’s only forcing us to do what we agreed to do. It changes nothing. We keep hunting the San Juan.”
“And if we fail?” Henri asked. “The Royal Navy is sending a task force. They can’t wait forever. What if we don’t find the San Juan before the Royal Navy grows impatient waiting for us?”
“I really don’t have any idea,” Jake said. “All I know is that it would get messy. I imagine that every British submarine on the planet would be within five hundred miles of the Falklands, shooting at anything that moves. I’m hoping we can prevent this.”
“Are we done here?” Henri asked.
“Henri?”
“I mean no disrespect. We’ve been through too much together for me to challenge you. But given the circumstances, you’ll have to excuse me so that I may process this.”
Jake pushed his chair back and rose to his feet.
“No disrespect taken. My standing orders still stand. We continue to follow the search pattern I prescribed. I’ll be in my stateroom if anyone wants to talk more.”
LaFontaine, shaking with a combination of irritation and nicotine deprivation, stopped Jake in the passageway.
“I thought I’d be the last person to defend you.”
“No shit. Thanks for that, by the way. I thought Henri was going to rip my head off.”
“I suppose I’m the slowest in our submarine family to forgive but the fastest to protect.”
“I guess so,” Jake said. “Let’s see if I can keep our family protected. Any ideas on what I should be doing?”
“I run the engineering spaces, Jake. I’m sorry, but the rest is up to you.”
Reflecting his next move in his stateroom, Jake leaned his chair back and propped the crown of his head against the bulkhead for balance. When a knock on his door startled him, he lost his balance and arched his back to regain it, slamming the chair legs against the deck.
“Come in,” he said.
Remy’s toad head jutted through the door.
“Is now a good time?” Remy asked.
“The world would have to be ending for me to not have time for you, Antoine.”
Jake kicked his guest chair in Remy’s direction, and the sonar expert squatted in it.
“You know that Henri is just being himself, right?”
“Yeah. Putting up with his periodic protests is a small price to have him on our team. And for that matter, I count my blessings that you always manage to stay calm. I’m lucky to have you.”
“I credit my faith in God,” Remy said.
“I wish it was that simple for me,” Jake said. “You didn’t come here to preach, though, did you?”
“About God? No. About our chances of success? Yes.”
“I didn’t tell the guys, but we do have a time limit. We have a little more than three days left.”
“That compounds my concern, Jake. This search for the San Juan may be in vain, at least with passive sonar.”
“You think we should go active?”
“You need to consider it.”
“Well, shit, Antoine. That may require divine inspiration, or at least divine protection. That would be announcing our presence to the San Juan and begging it to shoot a torpedo at us.”
“Not exactly, if you trust our secure active mode.”
Jake considered secure active transmissions, milliseconds-long clicks of acoustic energy, like splitting the difference between passive listening and an active search.
“It could work,” he said. “Especially if the San Juan isn’t expecting it.”
“With its old equipment, it probably doesn’t have the processing power to distinguish a secure active transmission from natural sounds. I urge you to use it.”
“Okay, Antoine. You have a point. Go ahead and set it up. Transmit every ten minutes covering a hundred and eighty degrees.”
“Thank you, Jake. This could make the difference.”
“Well, since your God isn’t looking down on us and telling us where the San Juan is, this is our best option.”
“Maybe He is looking down on us, and maybe He just inspired me to ask you to use the secure active technique.”
“We’ll never know, Antoine, will we?”
“I will take it on faith.”
Five minutes after Remy departed, Jake again risked balancing the combined mass of himself and his chair on its rear legs and his head as he pondered a God looking down upon him.
A thought struck him, like divine inspiration, and he fumbled again to land the chair on its four legs.
“Shit,” he said.
He trotted to the control room and darted to the central navigation table, which showed an overhead view of the Specter’s search pattern. Twenty minutes separated him from the next turn.
“Perfect,” he said.
Scanning the room, he noted the absence of Henri and Remy. The fast-learning Taiwanese sailors handled the systems.
“Petty Officer Kang,” he said. “Have you seen Antoine?”
“He was just here. He told me he was going to line up Subtics for secure active after he ate.”
“Fine, let him eat. You can handle this. I want you to line up to transmit a three-burst secure active sequence. The frequencies and duration of each transmission are already stored in the system as an alert.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, I set them up. That’s how the Ambush would communicate with us if it needs to. It would be an order to surface and communicate via radio.”
“So you want to instead order the Ambush to surface by sending it the order?”