Ian Slater: Choke Point

Satisfied with the efficiency level at both the MSE and the Explosive Handling Wharf, the admiral was driven the mile or so south along the shoreline road to the triangular-shaped Delta Refit Pier, with its docking facilities for two boomers and room for another one in its dry dock. Jensen, continuing to reassure himself that all was well — as it needed to be for a prospective CNO — headed for the “mange,” the deforested clear-cut areas in the otherwise heavily forested seven-thousand-acre site where the stocks of C-4 and D-5 missiles were housed deep underground. He worried about the vulnerability of the area, despite the presence of the heavily alarmed security fence that ran around the huge base. He’d assured Washington after 9/11 that even though the “manges” were as visible from the air as any clear-cut area in a commercially logged forest, they were safe. The protective sheath around the missiles was so far underground that no bomb — not even their own state-of-the-art guided bunker-busting GBU-15s — could penetrate. Except a nuke.

The secure phone in his Humvee rang. It was the 0800 to noon watch duty officer reporting another anomaly. It spooked the admiral, though he took care not to show it as he waved nonchalantly to the skipper of the sleek tug that was gently nudging a boomer into position in the azure blue water that lapped peacefully against the Delta Refit pier.

Switching to open voice so his aide in the Humvee could hear him, Jensen asked the duty officer for more details of this latest Darkstar photograph.

“It’s in the same general area as before, Admiral — a bit farther north, in the direction of our San Juan Islands.”

“Where exactly?” Jensen demanded as his aide brought up the Canadian Hydrographic Service 1:80,000 scale chart of Juan de Fuca Strait. It showed the waters between the Olympic Peninsula and Admiralty Inlet to the southeast, and north to the edge of the 172 San Juan Islands.

“Exact position,” reported the duty officer, “latitude forty-eight degrees twenty-two minutes and three seconds, longitude 123 degrees and four minutes.”

Jensen’s aide punched in the coordinates and immediately had a red circle on the map, depth reading plus or minus 364 feet.

“How big an area?” asked Jensen.

“Irregular shape — discoloration—’bout two hundred yards in diameter—”

“Wait a minute,” said the admiral. How the idea came to him, he didn’t know. Maybe it was the jolt of his breakfast coffee, waking him up after the long night. “Enter ’Kelp beds location,’ “ he instructed the aide, explaining how such discoloration could be caused by large vessel traffic through the strait, ships’ bow waves pushing brown kelp before it was scattered again by wind and current.

In milliseconds the laptop’s screen was pockmarked with brown splotches along the long western coastline of Whidbey Island north of Hood Canal and in the funnel-shaped area of sea bounded by Whidbey in the west and narrowing eastward into the long Juan de Fuca Strait between Vancouver Island and the Olympic peninsula. Still, Jensen was so anxious about his possible promotion that he ordered the Coast Guard to check it out, and started imagining everything from a hostile sub being in the area to hostile antisubmarine mines being placed on the bottom — which, when he thought seriously about it, made no sense. For one thing, there was the extensive underwater SOSUS microphone array the U.S. Navy had in the area, as well as all around the Pacific. For another, this second anomaly’s location, which was now being investigated by Albinski and Dixon, was not in the egress channel for his subs, unlike the first location. But to be absolutely sure, he demanded that the Coast Guard do a depth-sounding run of this new anomaly, as well as a visual check. Yes, he told himself, admittedly it was a very small area. The duty officer said it was a hundred yards or so across in the 625-square-mile area. But again he thought of Admiral Kimmel, C in C Pacific, who hadn’t been given the report of a radar anomaly north of Oahu on the morning of December 7, 1941.

He called the duty officer. “Any report yet from the deep dive at anomaly one?”

“Not yet, sir. Petrel is on station now.”

“Very well,” said the admiral. “I still think—”

He was interrupted by the DO. “Sir, Coast Guard has seen kelp in the vicinity of anomaly two.”

“By God,” said Jensen, turning to his aide. “Why didn’t anyone else think of kelp beds before me, Davis?”

The aide shrugged. “Not as smart as you, Admiral.”

Jensen laughed, the first time he’d done so in over forty-eight hours. “You sucking up, Davis?”

“I’d like a posting to Hawaii, sir.”

“Well, you’re not gonna get it.” They both laughed. Ahead was the Explosives Handling Wharf. At its apex, two fully armed Marines manned an M16 machine gun behind sandbags. Another two stood guard as line handlers, in their orange life preservers, as tugs secured boomer SSBN 659, the USS Will Rogers , into which one of the big, white, tree-trunk-diameter D-5 missiles was about to be lowered. Jensen was once again aware of the awesome responsibility he had. Little wonder he worried about everything, from the safety of the missiles to the guards on his sub base’s perimeter.

“Must have been kelp,” he assured Davis. Though Davis said nothing, the admiral sensed that his assistant wasn’t convinced, which uncaged his obsessive streak once again. “All right, then,” he told Davis. “Call the DO. Have him send a burst UHF message to the Utah and have Captain Rorke pick up a sample of that damned kelp from the site on his way into base.”

It was 1100 hours when the admiral’s Humvee pulled up at the Trident Refit Facility. It would be hours yet before he’d hear anything from Petrel . He glanced at the forest on the other side of the 2.5 mile-wide canal, and the Olympic Mountains beyond. Wild and beautiful. Inside the TRF shed there was no sub, but a search periscope that carried cameras and radar sensors was being tested along with a smaller attack periscope. Nearby, a boomer’s 8J scope was having its hermetic seal checked for any possible water, air, or gas leakage.

Looking at the boomer, preoccupied with thoughts about his own days at sea during the Gulf War and the mixed emotions he used to experience on his way out from the base during the eight-hour, fifty-five-mile-long transit up through the canal and the strait into the Pacific, Jensen didn’t see the Marine guard and his German shepherd dog coming around the corner of the building. The dog suddenly lunged at him, snarling, baring his teeth. Jensen stopped dead in his tracks. The guard, jerking the dog’s leash, apologized. Jensen swallowed hard. “It’s all right, soldier. Good to see you doing your job.”

“Yes, sir.”

Aide Davis saw that the admiral’s hand was trembling. Jensen’s cell phone rang. “Christ!” His aide walked discreetly away. “Jensen!” the admiral barked into the phone.

“Duty officer, sir. Coast Guard reports nothing unusual. They suspect you’re right. Darkstar must have picked up a floating kelp bed. They say kelp can act like oil on water — smooths out a patch so it looks calm compared to the surrounding chop. That would register an anomaly.”

“Very well,” said Jensen, his voice strained.

“Everything all right, sir?” inquired his aide.

“Yes,” answered the admiral. “Seems as though Darkstar gave us a false alarm. That damn thing’s too sensitive. Like the temperature gauge in my SUV. Damn thing changes every hundred yards.”

His relief after the adrenaline surge caused by the German shepherd, together with the Coast Guard’s confirmation of his kelp theory, suddenly gave the admiral a burst of confidence, if not an unusually aggressive, almost arrogant air. During his inspection of one of the boomer’s exteriors, he pointed to an abrasion on the sub’s anechoic coating — the rubber sonar-absorbing layer applied to the hull to reduce the possibility of detection by enemy sonar pulses. “Make a note, Davis. I want that fixed.”