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Authors: David Poyer

BOOK: The Passage
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As they passed twenty knots, Sonar reported losing all contacts due to self-noise. The acceleration continued. The captain leaned on the plotting table, looking down at the moving spot of light and
the penciled tracks that hemmed it in. The paper was blistered. He wondered why, then saw another drop of sweat hit it.
“Answering ahead flank, sir, thirty-five knots.”
“Very well. We'll run for fifteen minutes at high speed, then cut the go juice and slew right, coast out to listen.”
Seconds ticked by. The diving officer and the exec and the plotting team members stood around the table, watching the lighted rosette creep across the paper. After five minutes, the captain said, “You know, a few more minutes here and we just might make it out of this catfight with our shorts intact.”
“We're making a hell of a racket.”
“I know that. The question is, now they know we're not going to surface, if they're willing to—”
The sonarman's voice crackled through the room. “Water impact! Multiple water impacts, three-sixty degrees, all around us!”
Every man in the compartment strained his ears, listening for the whine that meant an incoming torpedo. But complete silence succeeded the warning.
“Hard left rudder!” shouted the captain suddenly. “Now!”
But the helmsman never had time to acknowledge the command.
 
 
THE first salvo of RBU-25 rocket-thrown depth charges fell in a four-hundred-yard diameter circle imperfectly centered on
Threadfin.
Sinking through the sea, set to explode on impact, the closest one passed her madly milling screw fifty yards astern. The second salvo fell two hundred yards ahead of the first.
The first hit landed on the sonar dome. The molten jet of its shaped charge penetrated the inch-thick fiberglass. The seawater inside changed instantly to steam and exploded. The ruptured dome caught the high-speed laminar flow along the hull and peeled outward like a tulip blown apart by a jet of compressed air. The curved shards clattered and banged along the length of the speeding submarine.
The second hit detonated on the port stern plane, blowing half of it off the boat and bending the rest downward. A fifteen-foot chunk of steel spun aft into the prop, which was still driving at full speed.
The crew heard both explosions as muffled thuds, less than a third of a second apart. Then they felt themselves grow light as the boat nosed over, still at thirty-five knots, and headed for the bottom, two hundred feet down.
The third shaped charge punched through the pressure hull just aft of the sail. The two divers, still locked helplessly inside the
escape trunk, heard it as a deafening slam, followed by the roar of pressurized water blasting into the engine room.
The men forward of the engine room transverse bulkhead heard it, too. They knew what it meant when the overhead lights went out and failure alarms flashed from every indicator. In the two or three seconds before they plowed into the bottom, some of them wondered what the Soviets would do with their bodies. Others wondered what would become of their souls. The comm officer, in the radio/crypto room, spent the last seconds of his life pulling the red toggles that would detonate the destruction charges.
The captain and the OOD, crouched in the hammering, slanting din, stared at each other in the weird red glow of emergency lighting. The younger man said, “Did we screw up, sir?”
“I don't think so.”
“What I want to know is, how the fuck did they
know?
We were quiet!
How did they know we were here?”
“I don't know, Woody,” said the captain. Turning to the rest of the men in the control room, he said the only thing he could think of to say. “Thanks for everything, guys. You all did a super job.”
THE COMMISSION
Pascagoula, Mississippi
T
HE gull gray hull towered up suddenly a mile from the sea, its main deck rising two stories above the sluggish eddies of the East Pascagoula. The squared-off, high-volume superstructure went up another fifty feet, topped by two rectangular stacks with screened intakes and cooling baffles. An echelon of pelicans slanted past the forward mast tip, 140 feet above the river.
It looked like a warship, but it wasn't—not yet.
Alone on the bridge, a thin, bearded man with gray eyes glanced at his watch, then at a walkie-talkie. He wore service dress whites, with choker collar, sword, and gloves.
Propping a shoe on a cable run, Lieutenant Daniel V. Lenson, U.S. Navy, looked down at the paved area inboard of the quay.
Half an hour to go, and the bunting-draped grandstands were filling. Above them, the flags of the United States, the U. S. Navy, the state of Mississippi, and Ingalls Shipbuilding stirred in a warm wind. On a raised dais, a technician chanted, “Testing, testing.” Below her, men in work clothes pushed brooms past TV vans, sending welding grit and paint chips sifting down into the muddy water.
Aft of the stands, the white-hatted mass of USS
Barrett
's prospective crew was shuffling itself into order like a pack of new cards. Dan didn't envy them, broiling down there on the asphalt. It would be a long ceremony. Politicians and flag officers loved commissionings. No better way to get your name in the papers.
He stretched, rubbing his shoulder, and glanced at the radio again. Then he strolled forward and looked down at the ship.
Barrett
was at attention for her first day in the Navy, launchers and guns aligned fore and aft, brightwork polished to a jeweler's glitter. Every flag she owned, a two-hundred-yard display of fluttering color, stretched from the bullnose aloft to the masts, then aft to the stern.
With a teeth-rattling crash, the band swung into Sousa, selections from
El Capitan.
Dan picked up a set of binoculars and undogged the starboard door. The thud … thud … thud of the drums echoed back seconds later from across the river, out of joint, out of step, as if two bands were playing, one real and true and the other false, counterfeit, always somehow lacking or lagging behind.
As he stepped out on the river side, the wind snatched his hat off. He lunged and caught it at the deck edge, just before the long drop to oily water, where anhingas bobbed like dirty bath toys. He jammed the cap viciously onto sandy brown hair, set the glasses to his eyes, and searched up and down the channel.
The shipyard surrounded him, lining both sides of the torpid estuary with an industrial ghetto of docks and plate yards and construction sheds. On the east bank, steel towers rose like rusty castles: jack-up rigs being built for offshore drilling. They'd delivered one last week. Without much ceremony, Dan thought. Just flood the dock and off it went downriver behind a tug.
The Navy did things differently.
The channel was clear except for a barge anchored upriver, where the Pascagoula moseyed east before wheeling south, oozing past the yard and surrendering to the Gulf of Mexico. He swung the round magnified field of the glasses past welding generators, stacks of steel plate, coils of cable, and mobile test equipment and steadied on Port Road.
The radio babbled into speech. “Bridge, XO.”
“Bridge aye.”
“Dan, keep a sharp eye now. Just got a call from the ship supe's office. The official party's en route.”
“Yes, sir, I have my glasses on the gate. Stand by—here they come.”
The sedans and limos rolled in like a funeral cortege, headlights on. Marines snapped to present arms as aides and chauffeurs opened doors. A saluting battery detonated dully across flat water. Amid handshakes and salutes, gold braid and gray suits searched for their seats. A frail woman with bouffant blue hair teetered at the edge of the dais and was hauled back by an usher.
The band crashed to a halt. The crowd quieted for the invocation. Dan stepped back inside the pilothouse. He didn't bend his head or close his eyes. He stared out at the river, then beyond it at the milled-steel edge of the open sea.
 
 
DAN had joined
Barrett
two days before, his third duty assignment. His first tour out of Annapolis had been aboard USS
Reynolds
Ryan.
After the court of inquiry following her loss in the North
Atlantic, he'd finished his division officer tour aboard
Bowen,
a
Knox-
class frigate, then reported to Commander, Amphibious Squadron Ten, for deployment to the Mediterranean.
With his fitness reports from Commodore Isaac Sundstrom added to the letter of admonition for
Ryan's
loss, he'd been surprised to make lieutenant. But he knew why. After Vietnam, the officer corps had decimated itself in a mad rush to leave a shrinking Navy. Now that the fleet was building up again, there were billets galore, but not many bodies to fill them.
Not that he was due anything wonderful. His detailer had explained that he could forget the good jobs—cruisers, destroyers, and the flag aide billets and postgraduate schools the golden few were picking up. He was headed for a tender or an oiler, the bottom of the surface Navy's pecking order.
He'd thought about whether it might not be better just to get out. But the trouble was, there wasn't anything else he wanted to do.
He decided to give it his best shot and see what happened. After his wife left him, he'd sold the furniture, hauled the leftovers to the dump, and moved into the Bachelor Officers' Quarters. Transient personnel got a twelve-by-twelve room with a dresser, desk, and bed. He didn't feel like dating. So he stayed in nights and weekends and plunged into his textbooks like a man leaping into the sea from a burning ship.
Department-head school was six months long. First came administration, then antisubmarine, antiair, and antisurface warfare, then tactical action officer training—four weeks of high-pressure memorization and drill in handling a ship in combat.
But halfway through, a funny thing happened. His midcourse grade put him in the top 10 percent of the class. The day after that, the school's commanding officer called him in. They talked for a while about what kind of ship he really wanted. Then Captain Chandler had pointed to his phone. “Call your detailer, Lieutenant. I believe he has something to discuss with you.”
Lieutenant Commander Veeder had the clipped glibness of a man who spent eight hours a day on the phone talking people into things. He said he had an unexpected opening aboard a
Kidd-
class destroyer. Dan said, buying time, “That's one of the Iranian
Spruances,
right?”
“Same hull as a
Spruance-
class, but the Shah wanted more bang for his buck. The beauty is, it has cruiser weapons, but you don't have to deal with the fucking nukies. With that weapons suite, it's a second-tour department-head job.”
Dan stroked his beard as he tried to figure out whether this was a good deal or a trap. Lieutenants did two eighteen-month tours as department heads. The first was on a simple, technically less demanding
ship, a frigate or auxiliary. The second tour you fleeted up to a bigger ship, with more complex weapons and systems.
He said cautiously, “You're considering me for a
Kidd?
What job?”
“Weapons officer. Combat systems, they call it now. I know we were talking a gator freighter or oiler, but when this opened up and I called Chandler for a recommendation, you were the highestranking guy with the lowest-ranking expectations.”
“Where is it?”
“USS
Barrett,
DDG nine-ninety-eight. Commission in Pascagoula, home port in Charleston. Beautiful city. Sue'll love it.”
“Sue?”
“Isn't that your wife's name?”
“She goes by Betts. Anyway, we're divorced. What happened to the regularly scheduled guy?”
“Divorced? Sorry … . What happened was, he fell off the brow. The ship was in dry dock, fixing seals on the sonar dome, and he went sixty feet down and splattered himself over the concrete … . Before you answer, uh, downside: Trying to learn all the systems while they're in predeployment work-up, it's gonna be easy to fall on your sword. Hear what I'm saying? You don't wanna sweat blood, work thirty hours a day, say no and I'll send you to an oiler.”
“I hear you, sir.”
“Be make or break careerwise, but I figured you might go for a gamble … . We'll cut you two-week orders to Weapons Direction System school. That'll get you to Pascagoula for the commissioning. Okay, you talk now. Want it or not?”
Dan remembered how he'd gone quiet inside. He looked across the desk at Chandler. The old man was watching him, eyes narrowed.
“Yes, sir,” he'd told Veeder. “Thanks for the chance. I want it, and I'll give it everything I've got.”
 
 
THE wind changed, carrying the public-address system up to him more clearly, and he came back to the present. One of the suits from the shipyard was speaking.
“We are here today to deliver the last of five ships built under a contract awarded six years ago. Originally, these were not intended as U.S. Navy ships at all. Under the military sales program, the
Kouroosh
-class destroyers were to be built to U.S. standards, equipped with U.S. weaponry and sensors, and sold to the Imperial Iranian Navy. Ironically enough, all the
Spruance-
class destroyers were originally intended to be armed as heavily as these ships are. Due to cost considerations, however, the U.S. units were cut back
to one short-range missile launcher apiece, and many other items were deleted.
“But events supervened. The lead ship was nearing delivery when revolution broke out in Iran. Following the new government's demonstrated hostility to America, Congress and the President authorized purchase of all five destroyers to fulfill the Navy's requirement for increased general-warfare capability.
“The basic
Spruance-
class hull and propulsion, already proven in fleet service, will provide
Barrett
with speed, maneuverability, and extremely quiet mobility. She is powered by four General Electric gas turbines, the same engines used in commercial airliners. Their eighty thousand horsepower can drive the ship in excess of thirty knots. Her weapons include five-inch guns, triple-barrel torpedo launchers, Harpoon surface-to-surface missile launchers, Phalanx close-in guns, and fore and aft twin launchers capable of firing surface-to-air and antisubmarine missiles. The ship is equipped with highly capable sonar, radar, and a remarkable new weapons-control suite … .”
 
 
DAN stared down at the audience—at the female guests, at the wives and girlfriends and mothers. Wind rippled their dresses, contrasting with suits and uniforms.
His white-gloved hand struck steel.
Betts and Nan had been taken hostage when he was in the Med. She'd done what she'd thought she had to to protect their daughter. After her release, they'd seen a chaplain; talked it out; cried over it. And for a while, he'd thought it was over and that their marriage was stronger for it.
He'd only slowly realized something else was wrong. She subscribed to feminist magazines, then joined a group. The more meetings she went to, the angrier she got. It seemed to him they were designed to make women unhappy with men and marriage. He'd tried to explain that to her, but she'd turned on him, angrier than he'd ever seen her.
He'd fought to keep her, tried to become what her magazines said a man should be like. He didn't object when she went out or ask where she'd been. But it didn't seem to work. Somewhere in there, the sex had stopped, too. Then one day, she gave him a choice. He was gone too often; it wasn't what she'd had in mind when she married him; either he left the Navy or she was leaving him.
It hadn't been an easy decision. But if it was that kind of choice, he'd lost her already. They'd had five years—not long by civilian terms, but a good run for a Navy marriage.
He'd come back from a two-week underway period to find the apartment empty. The note said she and Nan were going back to her parents till she decided where to live. She'd left his things, half the furniture, and the new vacuum was still in the hall closet.
He'd gone out and gotten a fifth of scotch, then sat on the floor, holding an old pair of her jeans and an old, outgrown set of Nan's jumpers, and cried. He drank till it didn't hurt anymore, till he felt nothing at all.
That had been months ago. He didn't miss his ex-wife now. In fact, he felt angry whenever he thought of her. But he missed his daughter, missed the little stocky body cuddled against his chest; the way her skin smelled, like sugar and butter; the way she saw the world new and fresh and told you about it, all excited, in ways that made you laugh and at the same time see it new again, too. When he thought about her, he had to stop or go somewhere so the men around him couldn't see. He missed feeding her and even changing her diapers, though she was long out of them now. He called every Sunday to talk to her, sent things on her birthday and at Christmas, but already he could hear forgetting in her voice. Who could blame her? She had so much to think about, school, new friends … .

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