“Hey, Mike,” Admiral Ross yelled into the phone. “How are you? How’s Gloria and the daughter?”
“Fine,” Brannon answered. “Little Gloria isn’t little any more. She’s given us two grandchildren. How’s your family?”
“Great. My oldest son just made XO on his destroyer. Phoebe is fine. What can I do for you, Mike?”
“A damned big favor and I have to ask you to keep it quiet. That is, I don’t want you to tell anyone I asked you to do it.”
“Fire away,” Admiral Ross said.
“Can you call a Quiet Alert for all the submarines in your command?”
“I could. Any reason that you can tell me”
“That’s the sticky part,” Brannon said slowly. “I can’t tell you at this time. Later.”
“Okay by me. Time we had a readiness drill anyway. When do you want it called?”
“Now.” Brannon said quietly.
“Will do,” Admiral Ross said. “Must be important. Something big breaking?”
“Something very damned big may break,” Brannon said. “I owe you one, my friend. I won’t forget.”
“Give my love to your lady,” Ross said. “I’m due in for meetings in Washington next month. We’ll have dinner?”
“On me,” Brannon said. He put the handset back in its cradle.
CHAPTER 12
Captain Miller finished sticking the gummed strips of the message the Devilfish had received onto a sheet of paper and went into the Wardroom.
“Please tell the officers off watch to assemble here,” he said to the Officer’s Cook. He waited, the message face down on the green baize cloth, until the officers came in and took seats.
“We have been ordered to go on Quiet Alert,” he said. “Our function in the exercise is to patrol just west of the SOSUS array off the Strait of Gibraltar. We will patrol in company with the Orca.”
John Carmichael, the Executive Officer of the Devilfish, looked at his Commanding Officer and read the warning in Captain Miller’s eyes.
“I figured when they told us to get out here on the double and then threw that damned electronic dummy target at us that old Iron Mike was going to work our asses off,” Carmichael said in an offhand tone. “Maybe when the drill is over we’ll get to go in to a good port in Spain or Portugal.”
“Electronic dummy target?” Lieutenant Rory Delahanty, the Sonar Officer, shook his head, “John, I listened to that target. I watched the screens. That was a damned submarine that we and the Orca were after or I’ll eat my hat.”
“You prefer salt and pepper or maybe some salad dressing on the hat?” Captain Miller said.
“Well, sir,” Delahanty said, “I mean, I’ve worked with all sorts of electronic dummy targets and I’ve never heard anything as realistic as what we were listening to out there. It changed speeds, it even reversed course when we went to full speed to run it down and get a shot at it. At one point our computers were giving it a speed of more than fifty knots! I never heard of a dummy target that could go that fast.
“Just as the Orca’s missiles hit the water the target’s sonar transmitter started up. If that had been a submarine the sonar operator would have keyed his transmitters when he heard the missiles striking close aboard to try and confuse the missile’s electronics, sir. But it wasn’t a submarine so I don’t know what to think.” Delahanty’s round Irish face was almost cherubic as he looked at Captain Miller.
“We’ve been away from the States for what, six months?” Captain Miller said. “We really don’t know what new gadgets they’ve developed for us to practice with. All we have to concern ourselves with now is carrying out the rest of the exercise. I want you to tell your people in the crew that we’re on the exercise and that we’re in competition with Orca. She beat us to the target and I don’t want Orca beating us again, at anything. And I don’t want Iron Mike Brannon breathing down my neck if we fuck up. That’s all, fellas.”
He left the Wardroom and went to his cabin. There was a buzz of conversation after he left that Carmichael stopped with a warning frown. Carmichael finished his coffee and stood up.
“A word to the wise, gentlemen. Don’t talk about this to the crew, don’t talk about it among yourselves. This is an exercise, that’s all. Don’t speculate.”
A few minutes later, sitting in Captain Miller’s cabin, he looked at his Commanding Officer.
“How much longer can we keep up the charade, Captain? Damn it, Delahanty knows we were chasing a submarine. He’s no fool. He can guess that the other submarine was a Russian. What’s more, you don’t waste two SUBROC missiles on a dummy target.”
“I know,” Miller said. He rubbed his chin. “I just don’t know what to say. We’re supposed to keep this to ourselves, between you and me. I went down to the Sonar Compartment to tell the Chief and his people that they’d done one hell of a job and the Chief looked at me and the way he looked at me I know that he knows that was no dummy target. We may have to tell the Wardroom people the score. I have to think about that. I hate to think of what Iron Mike would do to me if he found out I told them.”
“What do you think this Quiet Alert means, sir?”
“Oh, hell, Iron Mike is making sure that if the other side decides to strike back we’re in a position to blow them out of the water,” Miller said. “The Quiet Alert went out to all units, Atlantic and Pacific.” He sat back in his chair, his face dark.
“I’ve been thinking about Captain Reinauer,” he said slowly. “The Russian attack subs must carry a crew about the size of ours, a few over a hundred. I’ve never fired a torpedo or a missile at another ship. Neither has Reinauer. I wonder what it feels like to know you’ve killed that many people?”
“Submarine skippers in World War II sank a lot of ships, killed a lot of people,” Carmichael said. “I don’t think they worried about that.”
“That was during a regular war, after Japan had pulled the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor and killed about two thousand of our people,” Miller answered. “We’re not at war. There’s something damned funny going on, John. I wish I knew what it was.”
Aboard the U.S.S. Orca Captain Reinauer read the message he had run through the decoding machine and looked at his Executive Officer.
“Get all the officers into the Wardroom. Tell the OOD to turn the watch over to the Chief of the Boat.”
Eckert looked at him. “You going to tell the Wardroom what the score is?”
“I think I have to,” Reinauer said. “ComSubLant has ordered all attack and missile submarines on a Quiet Alert. ComSubPac has done the same thing. Admiral Brannon or someone else must think the Russians might retaliate to what we did. If we’re about to go to war I’m not going to keep up the pretense that we fired at a dummy target.”
Captain Reinauer sat at the head of the Wardroom table, his face grim. He waited until his officers had seated themselves around the table and the Officer’s Cook had served coffee.
“Leave the coffee pot on the table, Emil,” he ordered. “I want the Wardroom area sealed off. No one is to go through the compartment until I say so. That includes you.”
“Gentlemen,” he said after the Officer’s Cook had departed. “We did not fire those two missiles at a dummy target. Let me give you the background and bear in mind this is highly secret.” He recited the facts succinctly and then watched the faces of his officers, looking for signs of alarm and seeing none.
“All submarine units of the Navy are now put on Quiet Alert,” he said in a low voice. He looked down the table at Lieutenant Bill Reiss.