“Man, there’s real shit going on out there under the waves all the time. It’s a whole’nother world.
“Anyway,” she quickly said, noting Skibicki’s growing impatience, ‘what the Navy did not too long ago was really smart. The various systems could pick up subs, but they weren’t too exact in pinpointing location.
Some whiz brain figured that since the hydrophones are real sensitive that if all the systems could be coordinated, they could get accurate fixes using triangulation from various SOS US systems.”
She pointed down at the map.
“Say the one off Hawaii picks up a sub. All they got is one direction and the sub is somewhere along the line. But if the one off the West Coast can pick up the same sub, then you got two directions.
Draw a second line and bingo.
“They hooked all the SOS US systems together using FLTS — that’s Fleet Satellite Communication System. The Navy’s got five satellites up there in fixed orbits. Well, my buddy is hooked into FLTS and when I discreetly inquired if there was any weird shit going on, he told me they picked up a bogey sub this morning on SOS US only it wasn’t a bogey, it was a friendly.”
“You’ve lost me,” Boomer said, his head still spinning from all her acronyms.
“Well, here’s the point,” Vasquez said.
“Most Navy subs patrol at the discretion of their own skippers within a large designated area, particularly the boomers, the nuke firers That way no one can find them and no one can give up the secret of where they are since the only ones who know where they are are on board. But the Navy realized after hooking the SOS US system together that they had to be able to tell friendly subs from unfriendly. I mean, since our own Navy doesn’t know exactly where half its own subs are, and certainly doesn’t know where the Russkie subs plan to be, then when SOS US pinpoints a sub, there has to be a way to know whether it’s friendly or enemy.”
Vasquez smiled.
“After all the friendly-fire hoopla after the Gulf War, the Navy figured it would-be bad to sink one of their own subs if we ever fought the big one. So every U.S. and NATO sub has an ID code painted in special laser reflective paint on the upper deck.”
“What good does painting a code on the deck do?” snorted Skibicki.
“They stay submerged all the time.”
Vasquez waved a finger under his nose.
“Modern technology, sergeant major. The Navy can read the codes by pinpointing a sub’s location using the SOS US then using one of the FLTS satellites firing off a laser downlink. They use a high-intensity blue-green laser. It penetrates the ocean to submarine depth and gets reflected by the paint and the satellite picks it up and reads it. It’s not useful in finding subs without the SOS US because the ocean’s a damn big place and a sub is pretty small.
“So now every friendly sub has this code. The satellite beams down where SOS US says there’s a sub and they get no reflection, then they know they have a bad-guy sub.
“Well, the computer dinks at Pearl had them an underwater vehicle on their SOS US about 400 miles off the coast, southwest. When they checked with FLTS and flashed the laser on it for an ID they got a hit and a friendly prefix, indicating it was one of ours, but the identifier code wasn’t in their book.”
“Meaning?” Boomer asked.
“Meaning that there’s a friendly sub off the coast, but it’s not one of the subs the Navy, or any of our allies, say they got.” Vasquez shrugged.
“So, I’d call that kind of strange. My buddy says when he talked to his watch commander about it, he was told in no uncertain terms to forget about it.”
Boomer glanced at Skibicki. “What do you think?”
Skibicki looked like he had a bad headache.
“I think we can’t do diddly squat about a sub 400 miles off-coast and I don’t have the slightest clue what it might have to do with all that’s going on. But we can go eyeball a parachute drop a mile off.” He tapped Vasquez on the shoulder.
“Good job on the KC-10 stuff.”
CHAPTER 11
2 DEC Trace felt like she was the only one in the terminal other than the people cleaning the floor. She’d landed two hours ago and she had two and a half hours to go before continuing on the last leg of her journey. The runways outside the large windows were lit and there was activity as an occasional plane made its entrance or departure, from what she could see, mostly UPS and Federal Express cargo planes, but it was only a tenth of the traffic daylight would bring.
Trace had slept on the flight in from Honolulu and she felt marginally refreshed. The departure from the island had been unusual. She felt that she and Boomer were entering new territory. He’d always seemed to be there in her life at important, turbulent junctures, but then he was gone when the sailing was smooth. She didn’t think it was deliberate, but she wondered how it would be if they could spend time together when circumstances were a bit more normal.
She remembered the second time she’d run into him at West Point. It was two months after their first meeting on the ramp leading to New South Barracks. The first weeks of the academic year had passed in a tension-filled blur. As one of five female plebes assigned to I-1, Trace and her gender comrades had indeed been shit magnets as Boomer had predicted. She’d drawn duty as head mail carrier during Reorganization Week, the first week of the academic year.
It was the harshest job a plebe could be assigned.
Contrary to the federal law not allowing a third party to control mail, an interesting attitude for a school funded with federal dollars, cadet mail was delivered by the plebes of each company. The Cadet in Charge of Quarters (CQ) went to the cadet mail room and picked up the mail for all the cadets in the company. Bringing it back, he dumped it in the orderly room and waited for the head mail carrier to come back from class at 11:30 a.m.
That first week Trace quickly learned one of West Point’s unwritten axioms: cooperate and graduate. She’d walked into the barracks, squaring corners and walking along the inside wall as required, to be handed the heavy bag of mail accumulated from a summer of mis routes and girlfriends already missing their boys.
She’d staggered to her room with the precious cargo and dumped it open on her bed. She’d been given a listing of all room assignments by the company first sergeant when he’d briefed her. She began sorting, trying to get it organized as her two roommates scuttled about the company area, grabbing their classmates and corralling them into the room to help deliver. It all had to be dispensed prior to lunch formation and the clock began ticking almost immediately as the plebe minute caller outside her room sounded off:
“Sir, there are ten minutes until lunch formation. The uniform is as for class. For lunch we are having hot dogs, trench fries, iced tea, and Martha Washington sheet cake.
Ten minutes, sir!”
Trace tried to ignore the echoing screams of upperclassmen hazing the minute callers for real or imagined mistakes as she thrust mail into her frightened classmates’ hands and told them which room to deliver it to. The fact that they weren’t supposed to be “gazing about” as they moved out at 120 steps per minute in the hallway made looking for room numbers a perilous proposition. God help the plebe who entered the wrong room or got caught looking around to make sure it was the right room.
Trace wasn’t quite sure how she survived that first week.
Those fifteen minutes each day before lunch twisted her gut and kept her awake at night with worry. She spent her evenings reporting around to upperclassmen rooms to explain every single screw-up in delivery. She also learned a lot about her classmates as she noted who was willing to put their neck on the line to help her in her duties and those who covered their own ass and made it out to formation ahead of the ten-minute bell in order to try and beat the “plebe chasers,” second-year cadets assigned to harass plebes not making it into formation on time.