Seawolf Mask of Command (52 page)

He stepped to the squawk box by his desk and keyed the microphone. “Brodie.”

Kristen didn’t linger. As the remnants of passion faded, she felt panic and guilt come in its place. Cruel reality and cold reasoning replaced wanton lust as she realized the line she’d just crossed. She turned from him and opened the door leading to the passageway.

“Kris, wait,” he called to her as she closed the door behind her.

Female Officer Quarters, USS Seawolf

K
risten leaned against the bulkhead, her head pressed against the cold metal. “What an idiot!” she berated herself.

Images of the recent incident in Brodie’s cabin had replaced both the pain-filled memories from her past and Vance’s suicide. But, with the welcome release of that pain, came the torture of the guilty pleasure. He was her captain. He’d been exhausted. He’d been under tremendous stress.

And she’d taken advantage of him.

She’d allowed her own emotions and secret desires to replace logic and reason.

“You stupid hussy,” she cursed herself once more under her breath.

“What was that?” she heard Terry’s playful voice.

Kristen turned and saw the roguishly handsome lieutenant had pulled her curtain back slightly and was standing in the opening.

“Not now, Terry,” she warned him. “I’m too tired for any games right now.”

“In the past I’ve found that persistence pays off,” he answered with a friendly, but also slightly concerned smile.

“Persistence?” she asked. “Is that what guys call it?”

“What else would you call it?” he asked and stepped into her cabin.

“How about annoyance?” she countered as she turned to face him, wishing she could dismiss the moment with Brodie as quickly as she would dismiss her current conversation with Terry. “Or how about exasperating?” she asked. “Or maybe irritating? What about chafing? I don’t know. I’m too tired to think of any other synonyms, so let’s just leave it at that.”

He smiled at her good naturedly. “All righty then,” he said accepting this latest setback, “but I warn you, I’ve the patience of an oyster.”

Kristen stepped away from him as he moved a little closer. “Get some sleep, Terry. You’re far more charming when you’re not yawning and your breath doesn’t smell like old gym socks.”

“Ouch,” he grimaced.

“You’d best be going,” she told him, motioning toward the opening in the curtain.

“I just wanted to stop by and check on you,” he admitted, showing a hint of the decent guy he could actually be when he wasn’t being a hound dog. “I heard what happened. Are you okay?”

The last thing she wanted at the moment was sympathy. “I’m fine,” she snapped a little more sharply than she would have liked.

He paused, and she saw his worried expression.

“I’m fine,” she repeated, trying to reassure him.

“All right,” he nodded.

“You’d better be going,” she reminded him.

“I know,” he admitted. “But on my way here to see you, I stopped by the Con…”

Kristen suddenly had the feeling the captain had sent for her. The idea of seeing him was terrifying. She wasn’t certain how she could ever look at him again. But instead of the captain, Terry explained that he’d been passing through and saw Fabrini.

“He wanted to know if you could come up to the shack.”

Kristen glanced at her watch and realized, with all that had happened, she’d forgotten about her watch rotation. She knew she could probably get away with blowing off Fabrini. No one would likely fault her, but she dismissed the thought out of hand. She hadn’t slept in… forever. But the idea of a few hours listening to the ocean was far more appealing than lamenting her recent folly alone in her cabin.

They exited her cabin, and Terry walked with her toward the shack. As they walked Kristen noticed that the
Seawolf
was moving. “Are we diving?”

Terry nodded. “We’re heading back out into the Sea of Japan to rendezvous with a medivac bird from the
Abraham Lincoln.”

“Lieutenant Cheng?” Kristen asked, feeling a little guilty. She hadn’t yet gone to sickbay to check on him.

“Yeah,” Terry replied. “I guess the Blade is getting soft. Not long after the drones left the tubes, he ordered us back out to international waters where we might be able to get Cheng to a real hospital.”

Kristen knew this was a tactical error. The
Seawolf
had managed to sneak through the North Korean anti-submarine patrols. Now they would have to fight their way back out, only to turn around and come back through the gauntlet a third time.

She walked with Terry as far as the sonar shack where she left him and entered to find Fabrini standing behind the class stack listening intently. He saw her and motioned for her to come in. “Hey, Lieutenant,” he greeted her as he removed one side of the headphones. “Would you mind taking the spectrum analyzer?”

“Has someone been smoking in here?” she asked abruptly as she picked up the lingering stench of tobacco.

“Uh….” Fabrini hesitated, not wanting to play the rat, “well I uh…”

“Forget it,” she replied easily and slipped by the others to make her way back to the spectrum analyzer. She spent the first few minutes getting acquainted with the various contacts they were tracking, including the sounds of the
Abraham Lincoln
battle group cruising northward at ten knots nearly one hundred nautical miles to the east. There were also distant North Korean patrol boats to the north and west, but they were far enough away to be no threat.

“Where’s the
Tral
class corvette?” she asked Fabrini, not seeing it in the sonar log any more.

“He moved off to the northeast at the beginning of the last watch. They lost contact about three hours ago,” Fabrini replied.

She was thankful for something to help take her mind off what had happened earlier in Brodie’s cabin. Operating a sonar station required her complete concentration and didn’t allow room for thoughts of anything else. She glanced around her station, noticing crushed cigarette butts on the deck and empty soda cans strewn about. The last few teams of sonar operators had been dealing with the challenging and, at moments, frightening journey into North Korean waters. The debris was a mute testament to the strain they’d been under.

“We have a thermocline below us at five hundred fifty feet,” Fabrini whispered as he leaned over her. “We’ve been picking up an intermittent contact off to the northeast. It’s probably nothing, but every now and then we get a mechanical noise.”

“Do you think the control room could dip below the thermocline so we can take a look at what might be down there?” she asked Fabrini, knowing something could be hiding under the layer a few hundred yards away, and the
Seawolf
might never hear it.

Fabrini relayed the request, and a moment later Kristen heard Graves’ voice,
“Sonar, con. Coming down, now.”

“Con, sonar. Roger that,” Fabrini answered dutifully.

Kristen stayed on her display, searching the waters around the
Seawolf
, focusing on her work and nothing else. They dropped below the thermocline and settled at a depth of six hundred feet continuing on their course as the mile-long towed array, dragging far behind them, slowly followed them down a few minutes later.

As the hydrophone array came below the thermocline, Kristen heard a sudden noise. Instantly, she began adjusting her dials. “Passive sonar contact,” she reported automatically. “On the towed array. Bearing one-seven-zero,” she told Fabrini.

“Con, sonar. Possible submerged contact on towed array. Recommend course change forty-five degrees to port to establish second bearing,” Fabrini requested. A course change would allow them a second bearing that could be used to triangulate the contact’s position.

Kristen tuned out everything else as she listened.

The XO suddenly appeared in the door. He had to bend down slightly as he stepped in to avoid the low overhead. “What is it, Fabrini?” he asked.

Fabrini briefed him on the new contact.

“We can’t be pausing to smell the roses,” Graves reminded everyone. “We’ve got a shipmate clinging to life, and we need to get him to the rendezvous. So unless you know for a fact this isn’t some school of feeding shrimp or a couple of whales getting busy, we need to hold our course.”

Kristen reached up and flipped on the speaker for her station and removed her headphones. “Sir,” she told him. “I know I’m new at this, but it doesn’t sound like a biological.”

Graves listened to the sound coming over the speaker. Fabrini listened too and shook his head, “Damn, that sounds distant.”

“I don’t hear anything,” Graves added.

Kristen pulled her headphones back on and made a few more fine adjustments. She paused, closing her eyes as she listened closely. The computer automatically filtered out normal background noises but was never able to remove it all, and Kristen was doing her best to act like another filter, removing everything else. Then she heard it again. “Sir, I’m hearing cooling pump noises on the same bearing. Classify contact
Sierra Seven
as a nuclear submarine running in quiet mode.”

Fabrini glanced at her skeptically. The computer had reported nothing. He took a second set of headphones and plugged them into an auxiliary jack on her panel, so he could hear exactly what she was listening to. The XO was growing anxious and pulled the ship’s phone from the overhead but paused and looked at Fabrini before calling Brodie. “Fabrini?” he asked, wanting confirmation that this wasn’t some wild-goose chase.

Fabrini was leaning over Kristen as she barely brushed the fine adjustment knob. “There is definitely something there, XO. But I can’t make it out.” He paused and shook his head in frustration. “It might be plant noises….” His tone of voice made it clear he wasn’t certain though.

“Dammit,” Graves replied and dialed the captain’s cabin.

A few seconds passed while Kristen heard Graves brief Brodie. After a short conversation, the XO hung up the phone and ordered a forty-five degree turn as Kristen had suggested. “I hope this isn’t a waste of time,” he whispered to Fabrini.

The door opened and Brodie appeared a few seconds later. “Whatcha got, Jason?”

“Nothing firm yet. The spectrum analyzer picked up a faint contact. It might be a sub, but we aren’t certain,” Graves reported.

“What’s the computer say?” Brodie asked.

“Zip, Skipper,” Fabrini answered.

Kristen could almost hear the doubt in their voices.

“Looks like the back of a taxi cab in here, Fabrini,” Brodie muttered. “Did you give the maid the day off?” Brodie picked up a cup of coffee that had been left behind by the previous watch. He drank it right down.

“Ma’am, the towed array should be straightened out by now,” Fabrini whispered to her.

Kristen nodded as she slowly checked the bearings where she felt the contact might be but heard nothing. She spun the dial one hundred eighty degrees in the other direction and began fine tuning, checking multiple bearings. “Got him! Contact
Sierra Seven
. New bearing two-three-five!” She turned and looked up at Fabrini and Brodie. Both were now behind her. “Definite plant noises.”

The other sonar operators glanced at one another questioningly, but they each just shrugged their shoulders at one another. They’d heard nothing. Fabrini pulled his own headphones back on to listen for himself. But, after a few seconds, he shook his head. “I don’t have it.”

Kristen glanced at the XO, who looked dubious about the contact. She then looked at Brodie. He was listening to the speaker and not looking at her. He said nothing, nor did he consult anyone. Instead, Brodie reached up and took down the microphone to the control room.

“Con, this is the captain. Ten degree left rudder, new course…” he paused to glance at a red plasma tactical display. “New course, two-seven-zero. Slow to one third.”

Kristen realized he was taking her word for it and was turning the
Seawolf
nearly back into its wake to check the rear where she’d heard the faint contact. Despite what had happened between them and everyone else’s doubt, he trusted her. She’d feared he might not believe her. The others surely didn’t.

“Get Chief Miller up here,” Brodie said softly to the XO.

“Aye, sir.”

The
Seawolf
slowed and executed a gentle turn to port to bring the submarines most powerful sonar system, the bowed mounted array, to bear on the contact. Kristen lost the sound as soon as they began the turn but kept adjusting her system trying to reacquire it, using the complex sonar array suite like a massive sound vacuum to literally suck in trillions of bits of sound from the water surrounding them. Five minutes later, a tired, and very grouchy looking, Senior Chief Miller arrived.

“Sorry to wake you, Senior Chief, but we might have a tail,” Brodie informed him as Miller struggled to squeeze his bulk through the confined space to where Kristen was seated.

“What’s the computer saying?” Miller asked as he scratched himself.

“Nothing, Senior Chief,” Fabrini answered. “She picked up something faint on the towed array. We changed course, and she picked it up again. But no one else has been able to verify what she heard.” Fabrini’s tone wasn’t quite questioning, but it wasn’t sounding very enthusiastic about the possibility Kristen was right either.