Barracuda: Final Bearing

That display is trying to catch Destiny’s electrical grid. If his sound signature is like the Destiny I class, he puts out a sixty-cycle tonal that comes from his grid frequency. Problem with that one is that we put the same tonal out there, so it’s hard to tell if that’s my ship or the bad guy’s ship. Every once in a while I pick up this phone and call the boys back in the teapot, and they shift our electrical grid’s frequencies around. If the spike moves, that’s not a Destiny, just the Piranha.”

“Did you call on that one?”

“Just before you came clomping in with those shit-kickers.”

“What happened?”

“The nukes changed their frequency and my tonal spike moved with it.”

“Okay, so that’s not him.

What about this one? 155 cycles. There’s a hump on that one.”

“A hump but not a spike, sir. The system looks out at the ocean, and not the whole ocean, just a slice of it, and looks for this one frequency. The ocean’s so full of noise that there’s noise at every frequency. The sounds in this range are more concentrated in the middle of the frequency gate, that’s all.”

“I don’t know, it looks like it’s growing.”

The hump in the center of the graph from 153 to 156 cycles per second was growing taller. Gambini watched it, slurping coffee from one of the dirtiest coffee cups Phillips had ever seen. Phillips leaned over, watching it. Aft, in the control room. Lieutenant Meritson stood before the attack center on the starboard side of the conn, hands on his hips, looking up at the sonar display screen. Meritson, in addition to being this watch’s officer of the deck, was the ship’s sonar officer. He squinted hard at the screen center, at the frequency graphs that Gambini was examining in sonar. Meritson frowned at the graph, watching the spike in the center grow. “Chief of the Watch,” he said quietly, not moving his gaze from the sonar screen. “Sir?”

“We got a phone talker set up in every space?”

“Yes sir. It’s part of the rig for ultraquiet.”

“Good. Get on the phones to every phone talker. Get them awake. On their feet. Get a report from every watchstander. I mean it, I’m gonna need those guys in about two minutes.”

“Aye, sir.” The chief of the watch spoke into his boom microphone, sounding irritated. “All spaces.

Control. All watchstanders report status of rig for ultraquiet.” The chief listened as his phone talkers reported in one by one. “They’re all alert, Officer of the Deck. What’s on your mind?”

“Chief, in about one minute the captain’s going to come crashing through that door and he’s going to man battlestations.”

In sonar, Phillips glared hard at the screen, dumping his old cigar and finding a new one, this one as homespun as the previous stogie. He lit it, not with his lighter but with a wooden match, in keeping with his 1859 El Paso outfit.

“Captain?”

“Yes, Master Chief?”

“I think we’ve got a bite on the line. Be careful that you don’t Spook him, okay, sir? It would be nice to set the hook.”

“What are you saying?”

“I think that… is new sonar contact Sierra One, possible submerged submarine.”

Phillips felt a chill crawl up his spine, shivering in the air conditioning of the compartment.

“Is this him?”

“I think so.”

“Destiny II?”

“I think so.”

“Any bearing?”

“I’m getting a weak signal. Don’t do anything yet. I’m shifting to the forward beam.”

“The end beam is terrible. You’ll just pick up our noise.”

“No, not the end beam, just a more forward-looking one. Hold on.”

“I’ll be right back. I’ve got things to take care of.

Master?”

“Yes, Captain?”

“Set the hook. I want this son of a bitch.”

NORTHWEST PACIFIC JAPANESE OPAREA, FORTY-FIVE KILOMETERS EAST-NORTHEAST OF POINT NOJIMAZAKI SS-808 ETERNAL SPIRIT