Well USS Bowie did have other military interests: the SAR effort surrounding the Mahan for one, and the ongoing blockade mission for another. He could make a reasonable argument that his current duties did not allow time for rescuing survivors from an enemy vessel.
If he did that, he was sure that his crew would back him up. He was confident that they would confirm his story, and allow him to get away with exploiting the ambiguous language of Article 16.
And that, he realized, was precisely why he couldn’t go through with it. He was commanding officer of a United States warship. It was not his job to look for escape clauses in the law. That kind of horseshit was the province of tax lawyers and shady politicians.
Leadership wasn’t just about making decisions and issuing orders. It was also about setting an example. Doing the right thing, even when your gut was screaming at you to do something very, very different.
On the display screen, the man in the camouflage jacket raised his head and tilted his face toward the sound of the drone’s rotors. He lifted one hand in a halfhearted wave.
Heller looked around and caught the TAO’s eye. “Let’s get a SAR swimmer and an armed detail in boat number two. I also want a security team and a Corpsman standing by on the boat deck.”
He turned back to the display screen. “And hurry. I don’t know how much longer those guys can hold on.”
CHAPTER 23
“How do you know they haven’t done it?” Jerry Catlin asked.
Seated on the other side of the break room table, Martin Quinn rolled his eyes. “Because it’s fucking impossible.”
“I’ve seen the tracking data,” Catlin said, “and so have you. And I know you’ve heard the recordings. Something is raising holy hell in the Caribbean. If that’s not a supercavitating submarine, then what is it?”
Quinn pulled a six-inch Turkey Italiano Melt from a plastic Subway bag. “I never said I know what it is,” he said. “I only know what it isn’t.”
Catlin unwrapped his own sandwich: homemade tuna on wheat, sweet pickle relish and extra mayo. “You’re really that sure? You have no idea what they’re dealing with down there, but you’re absolutely positive that it can’t be a supercav?”
Quinn removed the top layer of bread from his Turkey Melt and started picking out black olives, eating them as quickly as they were located. “Someone keeps stealing my Dr. Peppers out of the fridge,” he said. “Could be you. Might be that new guy, the tall one from Material Sciences. I wouldn’t rule out Gina Z., for that matter. She guzzles soda as fast as I do, and she never carries change for the vending machines. The point is… I have no idea who’s been raiding my Dr. Pepper stash. But I feel pretty safe in eliminating Scooby Doo from my list of suspects.”
“Because he doesn’t exist?”
Finished with the post-mortem on his lunch, Quinn reassembled the now olive-free sandwich. “Exactamundo.”
“Faulty analogy,” Catlin said. “By your logic, something that doesn’t exist at one point in time could never come into existence at a later date.”
Quinn chewed and swallowed a mouthful of Turkey Melt. “So Scooby might be real some day? There could be a no-shit talking dog who cruises around in a van solving mysteries? Old Man Witherspoon better get busy on his werewolf mask; Scooby and Shaggy are coming to town!”
“Don’t be an ass-hat,” Catlin said. “Of course I don’t expect fictional characters to manifest in reality. That’s just stupid. Though, now that you mention it, I wouldn’t mind meeting up with a real life version of Velma.”
“You mean Daphne.”
“No, I mean Velma. I’ve got a thing about smart women.”
“She’s jailbait,” Quinn said in a taunting tone.
Catlin shook his head. “Are you blind? Velma is college age. Early twenties. Nineteen at the very youngest.”
“Nope. Check your facts,” said Quinn. “According to Hanna-Barbera, Velma is fifteen years old. Daphne is sixteen. Fred and the Shagster are both seventeen. They’re all supposed to be high school juniors.”
Catlin stared at his coworker. “Why do you even know that?”
“Google is your friend,” Quinn said, and tore off another bite of Turkey Melt.
“Isn’t it kind of creepy that you’ve taken the time to research the ages of animated characters?”
“I’m creepy?” Quinn asked. “I hate to point out the obvious, but you’re the one with a fetish for cartoon jailbait.”
Catlin blinked several times. “You’ve got me sidetracked. What was I talking about?”
“Damned if I know,” said Quinn. “I never know what you’re talking about. But you don’t usually know what you’re talking about either, so I guess that makes us even.”
“We were discussing your faulty logic,” Catlin said.
“You said my analogy was faulty. You have yet to cast aspersions on my logic, which is fortunate for you, because my logic is bulletproof.”
“Let’s peel the onion and find out,” said Catlin. “If I understand what you’ve been saying, there can’t possibly be a supercavitating submarine in the Caribbean, because there’s no such thing.”
“That’s about the size of it.”
“How do you know there’s no such thing?”
“Because it’s fucking impossible,” Quinn said.
Catlin paused between bites of his tuna on wheat. “Which brings us back to where we started.”
“What’s your point?”
“Your argument is circular, but never mind. What makes you think a supercav sub is impossible? We have absolute proof that the underlying concept works, from torpedoes like the Russian Shkval and the German Barracuda. The U.S. even had a working prototype of a supercav torpedo, but the program got scrapped when the Navy decided to concentrate on the Mark-48 ADCAP. Seems like only a matter of time until somebody figures out how to scale the technology up to larger platforms.”
The last of his sandwich gone, Quinn balled up the paper wrapper and stuffed it back into the plastic Subway bag. “Ever hear of the Avrocar?”
“No. I don’t think so.”
“Google it sometime, when you’re not drooling over pictures of underage cartoon girls. It was a serious attempt to build a jet-propelled flying saucer for use in combat. Top Secret project at the time, but it’s declassified now. A Canadian aerospace company, under contract to the U.S. Air Force.”
“And?”
“And the powered scale models zoomed around like over-caffeinated Frisbees. Full thumbs-up in the proof of concept department. Then they built one at full scale.”
“It didn’t fly?”
“That depends on what you mean by flying,” Quinn said. “It was designed to reach high altitudes at supersonic speeds. Instead, it wallowed three or four feet off the ground, completely unstable, at about the speed of a bicycle.”
“You’re saying not everything is scalable?”
Quinn stood up. “Exactamundo, my friend. Not everything is scalable. And if a supercav sub does turn out to be possible, we’ll be the ones doing it. Or the Germans. Maybe the Swedes. They’ve done some pretty cool shit with their Gotland class boats. But not the North Koreans. They haven’t got the R&D smarts, the technical sophistication, or the industrial infrastructure. It’d be like building the Starship Enterprise in Tajikistan. Not fucking happening.”