Yes, it would have been. Even with Virginia's advanced sensor systems and computers, the submarine's radar would have been backscattering like hell — from the sea, from the shore and all of the buildings on shore, from radar reflectors on buoys, from dozens of small craft ranging in size from small sailboats to fifty-foot yachts and houseboats. The radar picture had been a tangle of green splotches and smears. He knew, because he'd already played the recording automatically made of the boat's radar pictures, to see for himself what Wallace had been seeing.
"So cluttered that an ET chief with seventeen years in couldn't read it? If that was the case, what the hell was the point of sticking a seaman with maybe six months of service under his belt in that chair?"
"Romeo One started off just as another pleasure boat, sir. There was nothing to pick him out of the regular traffic. He was just idling along the shore. When he swung bow-on to us, he didn't speed up right away. It could've just been a turn, y'know?"
"I know. But the fact remains that the billion-dollar technology on this boat failed us this morning, and that failure was due to human error. Radar is supposed to be better than Mark One eyeballs, Chief. You guys should have been on the 1MC the instant that bastard put his foot on the gas."
Kurzweil sighed. "I fucked up. Sir."
"Yes, you most certainly did. And unfortunately, Wallace is going to have to pay for it. It's not his fault, you know."
"Yessir. It was my responsibility."
"It's not his fault, but I can't let him off the hook because he did screw up. He had the chair. And he didn't spot that Cigarette boat or the fact that it was on a collision course with us for a good thirty seconds. I know. I've seen the tapes."
"Yessir."
"What's more, the automatic alarms were off. Why?" Virginia's computerized sensor suite could be set to sound an alarm if a radar contact was on a collision course with the sub, or if the contact closed to within a certain range.
"That was my fault, sir. With all the traffic inside the Thames, and with the tugboats and security craft and everything, the damned alarm was going off every five seconds."
"Shit, Chief! When's the most likely time for a terrorist to try to hit us? When we're out at sea, a thousand miles from land and five hundred feet down?"
"No, sir. It would be when we were in a crowded harbor or channel. When there was a lot of other surface traffic around. When we couldn't submerge or maneuver."
"Right." Garrett closed his eyes for a moment. "Chief, I'm going to be a goddamn bastard about this. I'm logging it. There will be a disciplinary letter in your personnel record."
"Yes, sir."
He saw the pain in Kurzweil's face, but he had no choice, really. There would almost certainly be an investigation of the incident, and Garrett was determined that the sacrificial lamb, if there was to be one, would not be a seaman just out of boot camp with barely enough experience to tie his shoes. Kurzweil, the experienced man, should have had a more experienced man on the radar this morning — or he should have been there himself.
"Get the hell out of my sight, Chief." Kurzweil got.
There were times, Garrett thought, when he hated this job.
6
"Seaman Wallace, do you understand that this is captain's nonjudicial punishment?" Garrett said. "A captain's mast, in other words. That means you tell me your side of the story, I tell you my side, and then I tell you what I'm going to do about it."
Wallace stood at awkward attention in front of the desk. He gulped and swallowed, managing an unsteady nod. "I… I understand, sir."
Damn. Wallace's voice was shaking. The kid must be scared half to death. But Garrett had to say these things. "You may request a summary or special court-martial instead, if you wish to have legal representation or call witnesses."
"My recommendation is that you take the mast, son," Chief Fred Giangreco said with a wry grin. "A court would hit you with everything a captain's mast would, plus maybe a lot more."
Giangreco, the boat's master-at-arms, sat wedged into the back corner of the office, squeezed in between the desk and the small coffee mess Garrett maintained for informal visits to this cubby. Two made it crowded; three was downright claustrophobic.
But the MAA was Virginia's chief of police, in a sense, the enlisted man responsible for maintaining order and making sure the rules were obeyed. And it was vital to establish the form and working of shipboard discipline from the very start.
"I'll go with whatever you say, sir," Wallace said.
"Good enough." Garrett tried to keep his voice gentle. It would serve absolutely nothing to terrorize the kid. "Do you understand why I put you on report?"
"Uh… because I screwed up on watch."
"What did you do? Or not do?"
"Well, sir, I didn't see that speedboat on the radar."
"Specifically, you didn't see it, designate it as a target, and report it to me or to the officer of the deck. Do you see why that was a problem?"
"Yes, sir! If that had been a kamikaze boat, he could've sunk us!"
"Maybe. But it's not just the problem posed by that one speedboat. The Virginia is a United States warship. And we are, whatever the civilians might think, at war with a vicious, determined, and cunning enemy. It is our absolute duty to our country, to this submarine, and to our shipmates to be alert, to be vigilant, to be situationally aware of what is going on near this vessel at every moment." He paused. "Tell me what you were doing when you had the board."
"Well, it was pretty confusing. Chief Kurzweil was showing me how to try and separate genuine targets from waves and buildings and stuff like that."
"You had a pretty complicated picture to sort out."
"Uh, I guess so, sir."
"Did you ever have to deal with a radarscope picture like that in training?"
"Oh, sure. I mean, yessir. But, well, I guess it wasn't quite the same as the real thing."
"I guess not. Were you confused?"
"I don't know, sir. Maybe, a little. I didn't notice the speedboat. The return was, well, Chief Kurzweil said it was 'intermittent.' "
"The target was low in the water, and the swell would mask it occasionally, sure."
"It was mixed in with the reflections from buoys and sailboats and stuff. I guess I just didn't notice it moving. If it had been on the screen all the time, maybe I would have."
"Did you know there was a control setting that would let the computer sound an alarm if an object was on a collision course with this boat?"
"Yes, sir. We learned about that in school. Chief K switched it off because it kept going off when we were in the channel. False alarms."
"Uh-huh. Chief Kurzweil and I have already had words about that."
He swiveled his chair to check the flat-panel computer screen mounted in the bulkhead. Currently, it was repeating the control room navigation screen, with the image of a nautical chart superimposed with colored lines showing the Virginia's past course and projected future course, along with blocks of navigational data — bearing, speed, depth, positional data taken from a GPS satellite. At that time, they were passing the island of Nantucket, moving northeast. Depth, one hundred feet. Speed, twenty-five knots. It was good to be in Virginia's natural element — running submerged. Even in home waters, a submariner never felt entirely safe on the surface.
What was the best way to proceed with Wallace?