Debt of Honor - Tom Clancy [213]
"You make a living at this?"
Portagee nodded. "With my retirement pay, yeah, it's not a bad life. Thirty-some years I drove Uncle's boats, and now I get to drive me own—and she' s paid for."
Burroughs was looking at the commercial ships now. He lifted the skipper's binoculars. "You mind?"
"Strap around your neck if you don't mind." Amazing that people thought the strap was some sort of decoration.
"Sure." Burroughs did that, adjusting the focus for his eyes and examining Orchid Ace. "Ugly damned things…"
"Not made to be pretty. Made to carry cars." Oreza started the final turn in.
"That's no car. Looks like some kind of construction thing, bulldozer, like…"
"Oh?" Portagee called for his mate, a local kid, to come topside and work the lines. Good kid, fifteen, might try for the Coast Guard and spend a few years learning the trade properly. Oreza was working on that.
"The Army have a base here?"
"Give me a light and follow me on this," Jones ordered. He flipped another page, checking the 60Hz line. "Nothing…nothing. Those diesel boats are pretty good…but if they're quiet, they ain't snorting, and if they ain't snorting they ain't going very far…Asheville sprinted out this way, and probably then she came back in…" Another page.
"No rescue, sir?" It had taken fully thirty seconds for the question to be asked.
"How deep's the water?"
"I know that, but the escape trunks…I mean, I've seen it, there's three of them."
Jones didn't even look up, taking a puff off his first smoke in years.
"Yeah, the mom's hatch, that's what we called it on Dallas. 'See, mom, if anything goes wrong, we can get out right there.' Chief, you don't get off one of these things, okay? You don't. That ship is dead, and so's her crew. I want to see why."
"But we already have the crush sounds."
"I know. I also know that two of our carriers had a little accident today." Those sounds were on the SOSUS printouts, too.
"What are you saying?"
"I'm not saying anything." Another page. At the bottom of it was a large black blotch, the loud sound that marked the death of USS Asheville and all—"What the fuck is this?"
"We think it's a double-plot, sir. The bearing's almost the same as the Asheville sound, and we think the computer—"
"The time's off, goddamn it, a whole four minutes." He flipped back three pages. "See, that's somebody else."
"Charlotte?"
It was then that Jones felt even colder. His head swam a little from the cigarette, and he remembered why he'd quit. The same signature on the paper, a diesel boat snorting, and, later, a 688-class sprinting. The sounds were so close, nearly identical, and the coincidence of the bearing from the new seafloor array could have made almost anyone think…
"Call Admiral Mancuso and find out if Charlotte has checked in."
"But—"
"Right now, Senior Chief!"
Dr. Ron Jones stood up and looked around. It was the same as before, almost. The people were the same, doing the same work, displaying the same competence, but something was missing. The thing that wasn't the same was…what? The large room had a huge chart of the Pacific Ocean on its back wall. Once that chart had been marked with red silhouettes, the class shapes of Soviet submarines, boomers, and fast-attacks, often with black silhouettes in attendance, to show that Pacific SOSUS was tracking "enemy" subs, quarterbacking American fast-attacks onto them, vectoring P-3C Orion ASW birds in to follow them, and occasionally to pounce on and harry them, to let them know who owned the oceans of the world. Now the marks on the wall chart were of whales, some of them with names, just as with the Russian subs, but these names were things like "Moby and Mabel," to denote a particular pod with a well-known alpha-pair to track by name. There wasn't an enemy now, and the urgency had gone.