There had been a lot of hype about the ship in the media, including some flagrant exaggerations of her capabilities. The Bowie was stealthy and tough, but she was not invisible and she was not invulnerable. To Heller’s mind, using either one of the I-words to describe a ship was just begging fate to bite you in the ass. Right up there with calling the Titanic “unsinkable.” Just a bad idea all the way around.
He shifted his eyes to the lower bank of display monitors. These screens were smaller and there were five of them — each displaying 72 degrees of real-time video from the topside camera arrays. Taken together, the screens provided a full 360-degree view of the world surrounding the ship.
Of all the ship’s cool new gadgets, this was one of Heller’s favorites. As with most warships, CIC aboard the Bowie was located in an internal compartment for maximum protection against hostile fire. On other ships, that would mean isolation from the outside world, leaving the captain to construct a mental picture of the battlespace around him from sensor feeds, status boards, and verbal reports. But Heller had a panoramic window into reality, a high-resolution view of the sea stretching to the horizon in all directions. He didn’t have to guess at what was going on out there. He could see it.
When the sun went down, he could toggle the cameras to low-light mode or the infrared band and keep right on seeing while the world was in darkness.
The Navy should have done this years ago. Decades ago. For now, Heller was content to have the capability on his ship. The rest of the Navy could catch up later.
His self-congratulatory reverie was interrupted by a voice in the earpiece of his headset. “Captain, this is the TAO. Your presence is requested in Sonar Control.”
Heller keyed his mike. “Sonar? What’s up?”
The Tactical Action Officer paused before answering. “Uh… I’m not sure, sir. Apparently they’re tracking… something…”
Heller thumbed his mike button again. “If they’ve got contact, why don’t they report it over the 29MC?”
The TAO hesitated again. “I… uh… I don’t think they’re calling it a contact, sir.”
Heller felt himself frown. “What are they calling it, then?”
“They’re just saying that they’ve got something weird, sir.”
“Did you say weird?”
“Yes, sir.”
Heller snorted. “Well, I guess I’d better shuffle on down there. I certainly don’t want to miss out on seeing something weird.”
Chief Michael Scott was leaning over an operator’s shoulder at a display screen when Heller entered Sonar Control. At the sound of the opening door, the chief looked up and made the traditional announcement. “The captain’s in Sonar.”
The ship’s Undersea Warfare Officer, Ensign Moore, stood over the Sonar Operator’s other shoulder.
Heller crossed the compartment in a few long strides. “What have you got, Todd?”
The ensign rubbed the back of his neck. “Something weird, sir.”
“So I’ve heard,” Heller said. “What is it?”
Chief Scott pointed toward the operator’s display screen. “We honestly don’t know, Captain. But you should take a look at this.”
Heller looked. The sonar was in passive mode — transmitting nothing into the water — listening for sounds made by possible submarines. The majority of the display was taken up by a scattering of green pixels in apparently random shades and intensities, representing the ambient acoustic sources of the ocean environment. Biologics, wave action, shipping traffic, seismic activity, oil platforms, and everything else making noise in the water column.
A contact would appear as one or more discrete lines on the mottled green display, running vertically if the source was maintaining a constant bearing, or slanting gradually to the right or left as the bearing of the source changed. And the screen did show several sets of contact lines, no doubt associated with the oil tankers and shrimp boats currently being tracked by the Bowie’s radar.
But Heller had not been called down to look at anything so prosaic as a routine surface track. The “something weird” stood out on the sonar display like a slash of green so bright that it was nearly white, running from the left edge of the screen toward the right edge at an angle close to horizontal.
The vertical axis of the display represented elapsed time, and levels of brightness were an indication of target strength. To generate that kind of intensity and bearing rate, the weird thing had to be both extraordinarily loud and incredibly fast. Maybe louder and faster than anything in the water could possibly be.
Chief Scott gestured to the Sonar Supervisor. “Put this thing on the speaker, so the captain can hear it.”
The Sonar Supervisor, a twenty-something second class petty officer, nodded in acknowledgement and pressed a soft-key on a touch screen control panel. Sound erupted from speakers in the overhead: a rush of high-register white noise, like the hissing rumble of an impossibly-enormous waterfall, or ten-thousand pans of bacon all frying at the same time.
Heller said the first thing that came to mind. “That is weird.”
Ensign Moore nodded. “Yes, sir. It’s definitely that.”
“I’ve been in the sonar game since Noah was a seaman-deuce,” Chief Scott mumbled. “I’ve never seen anything like this.”
As if his words had somehow broken a spell, the strange waterfall/bacon roar quickly died away to silence. Within a few seconds, the noise level in Sonar Control dropped back to the whir of electronic cooling fans and the background whisper of the air conditioning vents. On the display screen, the stripe of brilliant green began to fade.
The operator held up a hand. “Sonar Supe, it just dropped away to nothing. Contact has disappeared.”
The second class petty officer nodded. “Sonar Supervisor, aye. Log the time and last bearing.”
Heller looked at Chief Scott. “Any chance this is some kind of system error? Maybe a hardware problem, or a glitch in the software?”
“We’ll certainly check, sir,” the chief said. “But frankly, I don’t think it’s a gear problem. Whatever that was, it was coherent, it was always limited to a discrete bearing, and it showed consistent movement over time. That doesn’t sound like a system hiccup. That sounds like target motion.”
“How fast was it going?” Heller asked.
“We didn’t have time to do target motional analysis,” Ensign Moore said. “Without TMA or a bearing cross-fix, we can only guess at the range. Any speed estimate we come up with would be iffy at best.”
Heller nodded. “If that’s what we’ve got, that’s what we’ve got. So let’s bracket it. Give me your best-case, and your worst-case.”
The Sonar Supervisor and the USW Officer both reached for paper and pencil.
Chief Scott did the calculations in his head, and finished first.
“If the contact was close, say within a couple of thousand yards, speed could be as low as a hundred-fifty knots or so. If it was father away, like maybe ten or fifteen thousand yards, we’re looking at three-hundred or four-hundred knots.”
Heller was stunned. Even the low end of the chief’s guesstimate was insanely fast for an object moving underwater. And the thing had to be underwater. If it was on the surface, it would be visible on radar, not to mention the eyes of the topside lookouts and the lenses of the camera arrays. Even with perfect radar stealth and total invisibility — neither of which existed outside of science fiction movies — any surface craft moving that fast would be throwing a rooster tail like a rocket boat, and cutting a wake that should be visible for miles.