To Kill the Potemkin (6 page)

"Attention
all
hands," Hoek's voice
came through the intercom. "Prepare for slow speed."

Fogarty
stared at
the screen and fiddled with
his film badge.

The
ship began to
move, making just enough
way to maneuver. The turtle sounds faded. A moment later weird beeps
and hoots
came through the speakers.

"Right
whales,"
Sorensen said, and
began to hoot and beep himself. Every few seconds his fingers reached
for the
keyboard as he altered the combination of arrays, filters and
enhancers,
playing the sea like a vast water organ.

Fascinated,
Fogarty asked, "What are you
doing?"

Sorensen
only
tweeked and buzzed a little
louder.

A
minute later
the whales went silent.

Fogarty
said,
"You turned the whales up,
Sorensen. In sonar school they told us to filter them out."

Sorensen
grinned.
"I like whales."
He flashed a smile. "Ever watch
Star Trek?
"

"A
couple times.
So?"

"Well,
think of
me as Mr. Spock, the
Vulcan, all right? I'm not human, Fogarty, I'm an alien. I'm weird.
When we're
on watch, just keep your eyes on the screen
and your ears on the
big phone. And watch out for them Klingons, boy. They bad dudes."

Fogarty
persisted. "In sonar school they called all marine noises signal
interference.
They said to filter them out."

Sorensen
took off his glasses. "Listen, Fogarty. Forget school. Forget the navy.
Read the sign: Leave your mind behind. This is the real ocean. If you're
going
to be a good sonarman, you listen to everything and you think about
everything
you hear. Are you following me?"

"I
am."

"All
right. I'm going to keep you on the first watch until you qualify. If
you're
any good that will be in about thirty days, just before we get back to
Norfolk.
If you aren't, I'll keep you just to make your life miserable. We're in
for the
duration, Fogarty. We're watchmates... Tell me, Fogarty, how come
you
volunteered for subs?"

"I
quit school. I was going to be drafted, was at loose ends."

"But
why volunteer for subs? Why not the Coast Guard?"

"I
looked around. The Submarine Service had the best deal. Best food, best
pay,
most interesting working conditions—"

"Don't
feed me a line of shit."

Fogarty
shrugged. "Okay. I've wanted to get on one of these things since I was
a
little kid. That's the truth. I must have built fifty models of
Nautilus
when I was a kid."

"So
what? Every kid in America builds models."

"Yeah"—Fogarty
grinned—"but mine worked. Servos, radio control, watertight seals, the
works."

Sorensen
nodded. "I see. I suppose you were first in your class in sub school,
too."

Fogarty
shook his
head. "No.
Second."

"Shame
on you.
Where'd you screw
up?"

Fogarty
smiled.
"Navigation. In the
simulator I drove the sub right up onto the beach."

"Yeah,
navigation
is a bitch. That's why
I like computers. When we fuck up we can blame it on them."

"That's
what I
told my instructor. He
didn't buy it."

"So
you came out
second out of how
many?"

"Four
hundred."

Sorensen
raised
his eyebrows.

"Four
hundred
twenty-seven."

"Ah
ha! Okay,
you're a genuine sub
freak. How come?"

"During the war
my dad was a radioman on
Yellowtail.
"

"No
shit?"

"He's
a very
proud man. He always wanted
my brother and me to join the Submarine Service."

"So
where's your
brother now?"

"He
joined the
Marines. It broke my
dad's heart. He hates jarheads."

Sorensen
chuckled, "Oh, boy, a tough
guy."

Fogarty
grinned.
"What about you,
Sorensen? Why are you here?"

"Me?
I'm a
native. I was born
here."

"C'mon,
tell me.
Why did you join the
navy?"

"You
want to hear
the story of my life,
kid?"

"Yeah.
Where's
your home town?"

"Oakland,
California."

"Home
of the
Raiders."

"That's
right.
Also the home of Fast
Eddie, the pool Shark in
The Hustler
, of Sonny
Barger and the Hell's
Angels, Reggie Jackson, Huey Newton and the Black Panthers, former home
of Jack
London, noted oyster pirate and liar, to mention a few illustrious
citizens.
Ever been there?"

"No."

"Well,
it's
California, but it ain't
Hollywood." Sorensen swallowed a long draught of coffee. "I had no
sense, no real education, although I read a lot. I got married when I
was
seventeen. There I was with no job, nothing but an old lady who thought
life
was driving up and down East Fourteenth Street showing off your new
car. Her
brain was lost in the wrong decade. I needed a job, so on my eighteenth
birthday I walked into a navy recruiter's office and said, 'Man, I
built my
first sonar when I was twelve out of a microphone, a plastic bag and a
tube of
rubber cement.' He said, 'Son, sign on the dotted line.' I signed. I
was
fresh meat for the fleet."

Sorensen
paused
to light a cigarette, and
Fogarty asked, "Where's your wife?"

"She
divorced me
when I reenlisted. She
hated the navy. A few years ago, the night before the ship was leaving
for a
sixty-day cruise, she told me she'd be gone when I got back. I didn't
blame
her. She was looking at two months of lonely nights in crummy bars in
another
crummy navy town, getting hit on by horny sailors, horny civilians,
horny WAVE
dykes. She didn't have much use for submarines, either. I think she
went back
to California. She still gets a piece of my check."

They
continued at
slow speed for two hours.
Springfield stopped once to transmit a position report as part of the
SOSUS
deep submergence detection test.

Sorensen
assigned
Fogarty the elaborate,
time-consuming task of checking all the circuits that ran from the
sonar room
through cables to the torpedo room in the bow. The sonars were mounted
on the
hull all around the bow and Fogarty spent an hour inspecting the main
panel in
the torpedo room.

Alone
in the
sonar room, Sorensen popped open
his console and gazed at the maze of circuitry. Over the years he had
modified
it extensively, sometimes without authorization.

On
his trip to
Japan he had acquired not one
but two of the miniature tape
recorders, one of which he
now inserted into a disguised panel. A quick twist of a screwdriver,
and
Sorensen became a criminal.

The
Strait
of Gibraltar forms one of the great bottlenecks in the world ocean.
Historically, control of the Strait has meant control of the
Mediterranean.
Since the end of World War Two the U.S. Navy has considered "the sea in
the middle of the earth" an American lake.

Seven
days
after leaving Norfolk,
Barracuda
approached the
Strait at slow speed.

"All
right," said the captain. "Send up the buoy."

A
jet of
compressed air fired a capsule from the top of the sail toward the
surface. A
few seconds later a radio transmitter floated two hundred feet above
the sub.
Springfield beamed a position report to the naval station at Rota,
Spain, and
received an immediate reply.

In
the
sonar room Sorensen listened to the sonic beacon fixed to the bottom of
the
Strait, which guided submerged ships through the deep channel. He
locked on and
the ship slowly passed into the Mediterranean.

Presently
they
heard engine noise from
another sub nearby. Before Sorensen could ask, Fogarty said, "British.
HMS
Valiant
."

"Very
good, very
good, indeed. Be glad
we're not a Russian or he'd blow our ears out."

"Full
speed
ahead," said the
captain. "We're through."

Two
days later
Barracuda
was 250 miles
from Naples. Springfield and Pisaro studied the CRT in the navigation
console,
which displayed an electronic chart of the Tyrrhenian Sea between
Sardinia and
the Bay of Naples. A blip in the center of the screen represented the
ship. A
flickering digital readout reported the changing longitude and
latitude. The
quartermaster sat quietly at the console, eyes following the blip, the
only
visible evidence of
Barracuda
's progress.

Springfield
had
ordered a burst of flank
speed. Driving
Barracuda
at forty-seven knots was
like flying blind
underwater. The noise rendered her listening sonars useless, and there
was
danger of colliding with another submerged vessel. Every fifty miles
Springfield slowed the sub to a crawl and quieted all machinery to
allow the
sonar operators to "clear baffles." While the ship slowly turned 360
degrees, the sonarmen listened through the hydrophones, the passive
sonars.

Pisaro
blew
cigarette smoke away from the
console. "We're almost at the edge," he said, waving smoke out of his
eyes. "Five minutes."

Springfield
nodded and spoke into his
microphone. "Control to engineering, prepare for slow speed. We're
going
to clear baffles."

"Engineering
to
control. Prepare for
slow speed, aye."

Springfield
glanced at the blank screen of
the sonar repeater. Willie Joe had the repeater disassembled for
Fogarty's
edification.

"How
long, Willie
Joe?"

"Ten
minutes.
Captain."

"All
right,"
Springfield said to
Pisaro. "There's supposed to be a storm up above. If we're going to
hear
anything, we'd better get Sorensen up here."

"Aye
aye,
skipper." Pisaro spoke
into the intercom. "Control to engineering. Listen, Chief. Send
somebody
aft to drag Sorensen's butt back into the real world. I want him in
sonar in
five minutes."

"Engineering
to
control. Aye aye. The
ace will be in place."

In
the sonar room
Sonarman Second Class Emile Davic sat at his operator's console,
apparently watching the CRT
screen. He was
alone.

Davic stared
diligently at the screen, but
there was little to see except the green fuzz of ambient
noise—washed-out
signals from the passive array.

Three
hours into
his watch, Davic sipped a
sixth cup of coffee, devoured a second Hershey bar and daydreamed about
food in
Naples. Spaghetti putanesca, tortellini in broda. Davic hated Naples.
It was
dirty and reminded him of the worst parts of New York, but he relished
the
food.

As
a boy of
twelve Davic had emigrated from
Budapest to Brooklyn, where he lived alone with his mother. Confused
and
frightened by New York, Davic tried to insulate himself from the city.
Eventually he became naturalized, but he never became an American. He
didn't
know how to have fun, to relax, and devoted his life to the study of
modern
languages and the cultivation of a bitter hatred of the Russians.
Anything else
seemed frivolous.

He
had joined the
Submarine Service to get as
close to the Soviets as possible. When World War Three started, Davic
didn't
want to miss it. To him, serving on the sub
was a solemn
obligation that he approached with deep seriousness. On a ship where
most
sailors barely spoke one language, Davic spoke five: Magyar, German,
English,
French and Russian. He considered himself a dedicated cold warrior and
regarded
anyone less fanatic than himself a fool. Naturally, he despised
Sorensen, whose
open irreverence Davic found intolerable. Sorensen acted as if
Barracuda
were his personal property, provided by the navy for his amusement. In
spite of
himself, Davic envied Sorensen his talent and was jealous of his
privileges.

Davic was
contemplating now the photo of Admiral Gorshkov, examining the stony
face. He
was the one who had taped the Russian's portrait to the bulkhead.

Gorshkov,
architect of the modern Soviet Navy, was the officer who had dragged
the
Russian fleet out of the nineteenth century and transformed it into a
blue-water force. And that frightened Davic, who as
a young boy had witnessed Soviet tanks in Budapest. He
kept the
photograph of Sergei Gorshkov as a reminder.

Barracuda
was following a standard NATO deep-water route off
Sardinia, and her routine position reports had been forwarded to all
NATO
navies. The last time they had cleared baffles, the long-range sonar
had shown
nothing. Any moment now the captain would slow again. Davic felt that a
contact
was unlikely.

"Attention
all hands. Prepare for slow speed."

He
felt
the ship begin to slow and listened to the turbulence as it washed over
the
hull and swirled around the hydrophones. He reached up and turned on a
tape
recorder.

Barnes
banged on the door to Sorensen's Beach.

"Sorensen."

"Yo."

The
door opened.
Dripping sweat, Sorensen
stuck his head out.

"What's
up?"

"They
want you in
sonar."

"Where
are we?"

"Hey,
man, I'm
back here making chips
all damn day," Barnes said, flicking a shard of stainless steel off his
chest.
"I don't know. Switzerland?"

"Listen,
Barnes,
did you make my little
box yet?"

"Your
little
watertight box? It's next.
It's on the sheet."