“Did she indicate that she was transporting a patient to the Navy hospital for treatment?” The question was delivered with a calm that was almost deadly in its intensity.
How was this happening? How the fuck was this happening? The bitch had tried to put one over on Hightower. Smart mouth, trying to sidestep his authority. Trying to push him around on his own turf… How in the name of holy fuck was this happening?
“I’m sorry,” the colonel said. “I didn’t catch that.”
It was all Hightower could do to form the words. “Yes, sir.”
The colonel nodded. “I see. Then maybe you can tell me why the best Fleet Marine Force Corpsman I’ve ever served with is standing here zip-tied like a fucking terrorist?”
Hightower’s tongue was suddenly and completely dry. “It’s… uh… It’s… kind of a long story, sir.”
“I’ll just bet it is,” said Colonel Dawkins. “And I can’t wait to hear it.”
CHAPTER 38
There was something going on in the port quarter of the array.
The aft towed array operator, STG2 Denisha Jenkins, edged forward in her chair and scrutinized her upper display more closely. The AN/TB-37U Multi-Function Towed Array was in passive mode now, the string of transducer/hydrophone modules sliding silently through the water at the end of their tow cable, trailing a thousand yards behind the ship like the tail of a kite.
Denisha’s upper screen was currently showing an A-BAB display. Short for All-Beams/All-Bands, A-BAB was intended as a real-time summary of acoustic contacts, cramming every frequency detected by the array into a single visual presentation.
It was an article of faith with most sonar techs that A-BAB was worthless: the brainchild of an overeager Lockheed Martin development team who had continued charging ahead (and — no doubt — charging Uncle Sam) long after it became clear that their brilliant concept was a steaming dog turd.
When Denisha had taken the operator’s course, the instructors had spent less than ten minutes demonstrating the A-BAB format. The more politically correct of them referred to A-BAB as the ‘Grab Bag’ or the ‘Trash Can.’ Some of the less reserved instructors preferred the term ‘Ass Rag.’ No matter which label they used, the instructors unanimously considered A-BAB to be a complete waste of time.
The format was hard to read; Denisha couldn’t argue with that. The chaotic false-color display looked like a bucket of confetti under attack by a leaf blower. A riot of colored dots shifting rapidly and continually, with no discernible pattern or meaning.
But the display wasn’t meaningless to Denisha. A-BAB communicated information to her in a way that she could never explain — not even to herself.
The other STs had given her all kinds of shit when she’d first started using A-BAB, but the laughter and the ribbing had stopped a long time ago. Somehow, Denisha’s mental wiring allowed her to extract contact cues from a display format that no one else could read. The mechanics of the extraction process were a mystery to her. She had no idea what her brain might be reacting to in the visual turmoil of A-BAB, and she’d given up trying to figure it out. All she knew was that the display worked for her sometimes.
And it was working for her now…
There was something going on in the port quarter of the array. She wasn’t sure what yet, but she had an instinctive certainty that it wasn’t ambient noise.
Denisha’s fingers danced across the soft-keys and icons of her lower screen, calling up five adjacent beams focused on the area of the “something.” The acoustic data took a minute or so to populate — frequencies appearing first as pinpoints, then elongating into vertical lines as new information at the top of each beam pushed older information downward. It was a classic “waterfall” style display, with the most current contact data at the top, the oldest data on bottom, and the area between illustrating changes to the various frequencies over-time.
This new contact — and Denisha had little doubt that it was a contact — was showing four clear freq lines, six more that were much fainter, and several others that we so weak she could barely make them out.
Denisha studied the pattern of tonals. The grouping looked familiar. There were no alerts from the system’s automated threat library, so the contact wasn’t anything that the classification algorithm expected to see operating in this area.
She rolled her cursor to the brightest tonal line and set a marker. This created an attached callout box, with tiny digits showing the actual frequency value to the nearest tenth of a Hertz. She quickly worked her way through all of the lines, progressing from strongest to weakest. When she was finished, her screen contained markers with numerical values for every visible freq in the contact’s acoustic signature.
A tap of a soft-key captured and stored her current screen image, in case the contact suddenly faded, as they were prone to do.
That done, she began sorting through a different threat library — the one between her ears. Maybe not as fast or fancy as Lockheed Martin’s software version, but capable of making intuitive associations that no system application could equal. (Not yet, anyway.)
And Denisha’s mental threat library had seen this grouping of tonals before. Or something very similar.
It almost looked like… No… It couldn’t be… Not here. Besides, those boats were all retired, weren’t they?
She turned the idea over in her mind for another ten seconds, and then looked around for the Sonar Supervisor, STG1 Wyatt.
He was standing near the compartment’s tiny work desk, discussing something with Chief Scott.
Denisha lifted a hand. “Hey, Supe. Got a second?”
Wyatt met her eyes. “Sure. What’s up?”
“You remember the old Chinese Han class attack subs? They’ve all been scrapped, right?”
Wyatt responded with a one-sided shrug. “There might still be a couple of them on China’s active rolls. Probably don’t get much sea time, though. Why do you ask?”
Denisha turned back to her lower display. “I could be wrong, but I think I’m tracking one now.”
This brought a frown from Wyatt. He started to respond, but Chief Scott was already moving toward Denisha’s console. Wyatt took a couple of long steps to catch up.
With the Sonar Supervisor standing over her right shoulder and the chief standing over her left, Denisha pointed to a pattern of tonals on the screen. “Look at the AC power structure.”
She moved her finger to the right. “And this would be the reactor coolant pump.”
Her finger shifted to a cluster of weak and fuzzy frequency lines. “Don’t these kind of resemble that weird heat-exchanger rumble you get from a Han class?”
Wyatt and Chief Scott were both nodding thoughtfully.
“Not a spot-on match,” said the chief. “But that does look a lot like the plant noise from a Han.”
“Since when does China deploy attack subs to the Caribbean?” Wyatt asked.
“I don’t think it’s really a Han,” said the chief. “It’s missing some of the harmonics we should be seeing, plus it’s got a few extra tonals down in the lower freqs.”
“Alright,” said Wyatt, “but if it’s not a Han, what does that make it?”