Cold Choices

“Yes, sir.”

“I’ll make a few remarks, and some of his friends may want to say goodbye. But keep it short. This isn’t a funeral. That will come later, after we’re back.”

“I understand, sir. I’ll take care of everything.”

“Very good. Dismissed.”

Jerry left the captain’s cabin confused. Rudel had been more interested in Rountree’s memorial service than the UUV issue, and he hadn’t asked one question about the down equipment, which was his responsibility. And he looked like hell.

Jerry had watched Rudel in control during the encounter. Shoot, everybody had watched the skipper for orders, for guidance. He’d been in control, and he’d asked all the right questions, done all the right things. At least, Jerry thought so. But Seawolf was hurt and someone was dead.

Jerry made his rounds, visiting all his department’s spaces. He always did this before the eight o’clock reports. Chief Hudson was overseeing the work in the electronics equipment space. Electronics modules and test equipment were stacked against the bulkhead, almost blocking movement.

And there was a lot of movement. Jerry saw his ETs and ITs, and one of his off-watch quartermasters, but also sonar techs and even auxiliarymen. “Everybody’s helping,” Hudson explained. “We’ll work through the night, and with this many people, we can take it in shifts.”

Hudson’s cheerful attitude drove out some of Jerry’s gloom. He was able to give Shimko an upbeat report at eight that evening. It looked very good for one HF receiver to be up by early tomorrow morning. They weren’t sure about any of the transmitters yet. They were in worse condition, but Hudson and Morrison hadn’t given up.

The XO wasn’t as cheerful. “So we can get a weather report. Wonderful.” Then he remembered himself and added, “Tell your guys that they’re doing a great job. Keep me apprised. And I need the encounter timeline.”

“Yessir. I’ll start on it tonight.”

“Good, but don’t pull an all-nighter. Nobody’s life is at stake anymore. We’re on our way home. And this needs to be done right.”

“Understood.”

Jerry headed for control. That was where all the data was — logs, navigation and geo plots, fire-control chits, sonar tapes. It took some time just to gather it all. It was the quartermasters’ responsibility to maintain the logs, and Jerry called QM1 Peters to properly label all the documents. At this point, they were legal records. Evidence to be used in an investigation.

By the time he’d assembled everything, it was late, and Jerry decided to make a fresh start in the morning. He made one more visit to the electronics space, then headed for his stateroom. Lieutenant Chandler was working at his desk, but they ignored each other as Jerry set his alarm for five and gratefully hit the rack.

* * *

It was bright, the sunlight from a clear sky doubled as it reflected off a concrete runway. His helmet visor was down, reducing the glare. Jerry watched the instruments as he advanced the throttle. He felt the engines pushing hard, fighting the brakes, but he counted carefully, waiting. The engine temperatures stayed in the green, and he released the brakes.

Jerry recognized the dream. He’d been here many times before. He watched the speed on the heads-up display shoot up, the numbers quickly passing one hundred knots, then one-twenty, one-forty, changing as quickly as he could read them. The runway became a white blur in front of the nose. He’d have takeoff speed any second.

There he felt the whole airframe shudder, and the nose swerved right. He’d blown a tire. Used to making feather-light corrections, he was slow correcting, but even full left on the controller didn’t stop the swerve. He’d chopped the throttles, but that didn’t help either. He was almost crossways on the runway, still moving, and he felt the right wing lift up. He was going to roll.

He reached for the loops at the top of the ejection seat, but they weren’t there, and instead of sitting in the cockpit of his Hornet, he was standing now, in the bridge cockpit of Seawolf, but they were submerged, and he could see the Russian sub. It was to his right, bow-on.

It was huge, and he could see every detail of the boat — the pattern of the anechoic tiles on the hull, the silver patch of the bow sonar window, the intake scoops back by engineering. In spite of the props furiously churning the water, it was almost motionless, pointing straight at him. Jerry frantically tried to avoid the oncoming vessel, but no matter which way he turned Seawolf, the Russian’s bearing never changed.

He never saw the collision, but suddenly he was hanging in the air from his chute over the twisted wreckage of Seawolf and the Russian submarine, lying together across the runway. Rescuers and emergency vehicles crowded around the two crushed hulls, reminding him of a train wreck.

Then he was standing next to an ambulance, and they were loading Dennis Rountree into it. He was looking at Jerry, and Jerry kept saying, “I’m sorry,” louder and louder, but Rountree kept shaking his head, as if he couldn’t hear. Then they started loading the rest of the crew into the ambulance, first Rudel, then Shimko, and then some of the chiefs, then.

The alarm woke him, shivering and disoriented. He lay in his bunk for several minutes, reaching out to touch the bulkheads and familiar objects around him. Jerry read and reread the time on the alarm clock. He recited the name of his boat, his billet, where they were. The images from the dream lingered, and he had to work to shake them off.

Jerry got up and silently dressed and washed. Chandler was asleep, but the red light in the stateroom was enough for his purposes.

His first stop was control. They were on course, on track for Faslane. QM2 Dunn seemed barely awake, but he’d tended the chart properly.

The electronics equipment space looked cleaner, but red danger tags hung from a lot of the gear, and two ratings were at work. He didn’t bother them. He’d get a report from Chief Hudson before breakfast. Instead, he headed back to control.

It was quiet at that hour, and he took over one of the plotting tables, used only when they were tracking a target. Will Hayes was the OOD, and after making sure that he couldn’t be of any help, left Jerry to his work.

He started building a timeline on his laptop, first working with the deck log. That recorded all the course and speed changes along with all the reports from other stations. The sonar logs told him when the other boat was detected, its bearing, and gave hints about its speed and direction.

Breakfast time came and went, but Jerry was on a roll. It felt good, satisfying, to patiently piece together the scraps of data into a coherent picture. Order from chaos, reason from insanity. And it drove out the unpleasant images from his dream.

He wasn’t looking for patterns or meaning, not yet. He didn’t have a lot of good information on the Russian’s position, only his bearing and range from Seawolf when the wide aperture array had a good lock on him. He didn’t know exactly when the Russian had changed course. That took time to compute, given the sparse range data to work with, and the Russian had maneuvered often and quickly.

STSC Carpenter showed up in control after breakfast. He brought Jerry coffee and one of the cook’s sweet rolls, and more data. Carpenter’s report was clearly an extract of their analysis, and Jerry wondered what they’d found out but couldn’t share with him. He noticed that their Russian was described as probably a new “first line nuclear attack sub.”

But what they’d shared with him was very helpful. Because they could see the narrowband tonals from the Russian’s propulsion train, they’d been able to figure out when his speed had changed, and calculated what his speed was as he passed by them. Like an ambulance with its siren blaring, the sound changes as the ambulance approaches you and then drives by. At the closest point of approach, the noise from the Russian submarine was what he really sounded like. With this data, the sonar techs were able to map his propulsion train and thus, determine his speed.

Hudson came by with a progress report, and Jerry asked him to brief the XO as well.

Jerry was adding in speed changes from the engineering log when he realized that the XO was standing behind him.

“Good morning, sir.”

“You’ve made a lot of progress, Jerry.”