Sea of Shadows

USS TOWERS (DDG-103)

SOUTHERN STRAITS OF HORMUZ

FRIDAY; 18 MAY

2200 hours (10:00 PM)

TIME ZONE +4 ‘DELTA’

Chief McPherson ran her fingers down the back of one of the Mark-54 torpedoes. She’d been chasing submarines for nineteen and a half years, first as an Ocean Systems Technician Analyst, then as a Sonar Technician, but she had never fired a torpedo.

The weapon’s anodized metal skin was smooth and cold, perhaps as cold as the bottom of the sea. As cold as the torn, lifeless bodies of the German Sailors would be.

First would come the fire, the shaped charge blasting through the steel hull, burning everything its white molten plasma jet passed close to. Then the sea would burst in through the broken hull, flooding compartments with the roar of a tidal wave, drowning the few men not already killed by the explosion, or crushing them to a pulp. And then the cold would come, the intense cold of the sea. Quenching the fierce heat of the man-made volcano, leaching the warmth from the still-twitching bodies of the crew, until everything — the twisted steel, the mangled flesh, the terrified screams of dying men — were all the same temperature as the frigid water of the ocean bottom.

Behind her, the air drive motor started up with its characteristic hiss.

The huge armored door to the torpedo magazine began to swing slowly open.

Chief McPherson looked over her shoulder. Who would be coming into the magazine at this time of night?

She popped to attention as soon as she recognized the figure standing in the widening gap of the doorway. “Good evening, sir.”

Captain Bowie smiled and stepped into the magazine. “Carry on, Chief.”

The chief relaxed and turned back toward the rack of stowed torpedoes.

She laid her hand on the top weapon again. “I can see their faces, sir.”

The captain waited a second before asking, “Whose faces?”

“The faces of the German submarine crews.” She took a heavy breath and released it. “I’ve been chasing subs as long as I can remember, and I’ve always pictured them as these sort of dark, foreboding shapes, sneaking through the depths, hiding in the shadows.” She patted the torpedo twice with the palm of her hand. “I’ve been training to kill submarines, and talking about killing submarines, and planning the best ways to kill submarines since I was nineteen years old. And now that I’m going to actually do it, I can’t picture the submarines at all any more. All I can see are the faces of those German Sailors. Faces of people I’ve never even met before … never will meet.”

The captain nodded slowly. “What do these faces look like?”

Chief McPherson’s eyes locked on the captain’s for a half-second and then flitted away. “Young, sir. Trained and confident. More than a little scared, but trying like hell to be brave. But young. Too goddamned young to die.” She looked up at her captain again. “They look like the faces of our crew, sir. And in a few hours, I’m going to have to kill them.”

The captain was silent for several seconds, and Chief McPherson began to wonder if she had said too much. “I’m sorry, Captain,” she said, finally.

“Maybe this is a woman thing. I shouldn’t have said anything. I’ll do my job when the time comes. I’ll be ready, sir.”

“I know you will,” the captain said. He laid his own hand on the back of a torpedo. “And don’t worry. It’s not a woman thing. It’s a human thing. And believe me, Chief. You are not the only one feeling it.”

CHAPTER 34

USS TOWERS (DDG-103)

NORTHERN GULF OF OMAN

(SOUTH OF THE STRAITS OF HORMUZ)

SATURDAY; 19 MAY

1830 hours (6:30 PM)

TIME ZONE +4 ‘DELTA’

In Combat Information Center, Ensign Patrick Cooper stood near the Computerized Dead-Reckoning Tracer and looked down at the digital flat-screen display that covered the unit’s entire upper surface. Five feet wide and nearly six feet long, the CDRT display screen was much too large to fit on a regular operator’s console. It had to be large, because Anti-Submarine Warfare was complex and intricate. Displayed on a normal-sized operator’s console, a typical ASW engagement would clutter the screen with so many tracking symbols and trial target geometries that it would quickly become impossible to sort anything out. The large CDRT display allowed the symbols to spread out enough to remain legible.

Cooper shifted his weight from his left leg to his right. The large size of the display had a downside. It was impossible to see the entire screen clearly from a sitting position. To take in the complete display, it was necessary to stand close to the unit and look down, directly into the screen.

Consequently, the CDRT was the only watch station in Combat Information Center without a chair for the operator. Cooper had been on watch for less than an hour, and he could already feel his leg muscles beginning to tighten up. The hours of standing made for some long watches.

Ensign Cooper shifted his weight again and scanned the display.

Friendly ships appeared on the display as small green circles, each with a single line sticking out from its center, like the stick of a lollipop. The lines were called speed vectors. The direction of each vector indicated the course of the ship it represented, and its length indicated the ship’s speed through the water. Fast-moving ships had long speed vectors; slower ships had shorter vectors. The circles and lines were called NTDS symbols, short for Naval Tactical Data System. (Although the NTDS system itself had long been superseded by more advanced technology, its easy-to-read catalog of symbols had carried its legacy into the twenty-first century.) The particular NTDS symbol that represented USS Towers was marked by a bright green cross that divided the circular part of the symbol into four equal quadrants.

Each symbol on the display was trailed by a small three-character code in capital letters: the tactical call sign for that particular ship. Today, Towers’ call sign was Y7M, pronounced “Yankee Seven Mike.”

To Ensign Cooper, the deployment of ships looked excellent. Spaced at eighty percent of their predicted sonar ranges, Towers, Benfold, and Ingraham formed a moving wall of acoustic sensors. They would sweep west in a locked-step zigzag pattern, searching every inch of water between themselves and the probable position of the enemy subs. In the “pouncer” position, Antietam would run behind the advancing barrier.

When a submarine was detected, Antietam would come to flank speed and drive around the end of the formation to engage the unsuspecting sub with Vertical Launch Anti-Submarine Rockets. Then, while the sub was on the run, Antietam’s helicopter, Samurai Seven- Nine, would swoop down out of the sky like a hawk and drop a torpedo right off the target’s bow. Running at high speed to escape the ASROC, the sub should run right into the helo’s torpedo before it even had time to react.

It was a good plan, maybe even a great plan. Unfortunately, it was right out of the book. Ensign Cooper felt uneasy about his captain’s idea of abandoning established doctrine. But the thought of facing an enemy who knows your moves ahead of time had him really scared. No matter how good the Pouncer Plan looked on the color-coded screen of the CDRT, it bordered on suicide.

* * *

A voice broke over the encrypted Navy Red radio circuit. “All units, this is SAU Commander. Execute Passive