Larry Bond - Cold Choices

By lunchtime, Jerry had a draft master plot with all the data mixed together. He looked at the plot he’d been working on for hours. Seawolf’s track was a solid line; gently curving except for the hard turns Rudel had made to avoid the Russian. Lines radiated out from different points along the track, showing the bearing and range information to the Russian sub. Data tables along the margins listed other information. Unfortunately, no matter how neatly he arranged it, he still had squat.

Even with the data he had, the likely errors in the information made it difficult to make the conclusive case the XO wanted. This wasn’t going to be enough to convince the captain. A gurgling sound from his stomach made it clear that the sticky bun he had early just wasn’t enough. Jerry needed a break, and he needed some more eyes on the problem.

He took the plot and a printout of his timeline to lunch and showed it to the rest of the wardroom. They passed the diagram around, chewing over the dry facts, reviewing the collision again. The most concrete data that had come out of Jerry’s work had been that their relative speed at the time of contact was eighteen knots, and that the angle between the two boats’ bows at impact was about sixty-four degrees. Useful but unsatisfying.

Jeff Palmer traced the UUV’s movements, looking for any relationship between them and the Russian. He didn’t see any, but he did find a problem. “This track isn’t right,” he told Jerry. “Our data show a lot more maneuvers.”

“The deck log shows all the commands we sent to LaVerne,” Jerry said, a little defensively.

“And they were all brilliantly executed,” Palmer agreed, “but she also maneuvered on her own. When the Russian showed up, all big and noisy and closing fast, her collision-avoidance routines kicked in. If the UUV senses a potential collision risk, it locates the offending unit and moves to open the range.”

“And she found out where the sub was. ” Jerry started.

“. by using her active sonar,” Palmer completed. “We can get range and bearing readouts for both Seawolf and the Russian from LaVerne for most of the Russian’s maneuvers.”

Jerry kicked himself. The UUV’s sonars were high-definition imaging sets, with wonderful resolution but very short range. They were not designed for general search, so he hadn’t thought of using La Verne’s sensor logs.

Jerry and Palmer stood up from their seats at almost the same moment. “It’ll take some time to print out the logs from LaVerne’s memory,” Palmer reminded him.

“Then I’ll work off the console until you have them,” Jerry answered. He left his lunch unfinished.

He reported to Shimko’s cabin three hours later, beaming, with Palmer in tow. “It was better than we thought, sir,” Jerry explained. “Not only did LaVerne track the Russian with her active sonar, but her imaging sonars also intercepted the Russian’s mine-hunting set. They overlapped frequency bands.”

Armed with this new data, Jerry had completely redrawn the plot. The fan of passive bearing lines with a range dot here and there was gone, and two dark lines ran across the paper. The black line, Seawolf’s , was curved in places, but was the straighter of the two by far. The red line spiraled and danced across Seawolf’s track. LaVerne’s line was a dark green, like an innocent bystander. Her track now showed two arcing turns as she avoided the advancing Russian, before finally heading northwest.

Shimko took it eagerly, praising both of them. Then his face fell as he comprehended their maneuvers. “My God.” He paused and looked up at the two officers. “I’m assuming you’ve double-checked these tracks — scales, bearings. That I’m reading these distances correctly.”

Jerry quickly nodded. “Yes sir, the data from LaVerne is of better fidelity, but it closely matches our own. The distances are correct.”

On the first pass, the Russian had approached to 372 yards, not a lot compared to Seawolf’s length of 360 feet. The second pass had been at only 186 yards, frighteningly close when combined with the Russians’ speed of nearly thirty knots.

“Wise man says ‘If dancing with crazy person, listen to crazy music.’ There’s no way we could have dodged this guy.” He stood up abruptly, rolling up the plot, and began marching toward the door. Jerry and Palmer stepped back so Shimko could walk into the passageway. “Let’s go brief the Skipper.”

The lights were on in the captain’s cabin this time, and Rudel was at his desk. He was pale, almost white, and his face was deeply lined. Jerry remembered a friend who looked that way after he’d broken an arm. He knew the captain hadn’t slept.

Shimko handed Rudel the plot. “Please, look at this, sir.”

The captain cleared a spot on his desk and laid the plot out carefully. All three officers watched as he studied the chart piece by piece. First the label and legend, then the supplementary tables, and then, finally, the tracks of the two submarines and the UUV.

“This is where I turned right to open the range on the first pass?” Rudel pointed to a mark on Seawolf’s track.

“Yes, sir,” Jerry answered.

“And this is the second turn,” Rudel observed, but this time he said it as a statement, not a question. He picked up a straightedge and laid it along Seawolf’s track. “If I hadn’t opened the range, the closest point of approach would have been 250 yards the first time.”

He moved the straightedge. “The second time it would have been”—he checked the scale—”less than a hundred yards.”

“It reminds me of when I visited Naples. The Italians all drove like that.” Jerry regretted the joke as soon as he’d said it, but even Rudel laughed.

“Maybe the Russians have been studying Italian submarine tactics,” Rudel observed. Jerry knew Rudel had a good sense of humor. It was one of the reasons, and one of the ways, he’d connected so well with his crew.

Rudel looked at the three officers, then slowly paced in the small space allowed to a sub’s commanding officer. “Seawolf was a dream assignment for me. A top-notch crew and a first-line sub in its prime. I’ve worked my whole life to be here.

“I realize why you wanted me to see this plot, and what you wanted me to know. I understand now that the collision was not my fault, or more properly, not the result of a bad decision by me. But Denny Rountree is still dead, and there could have been more, possibly many more. It has to make you stop and think. Question your choices, and your motives.”

Jerry listened to the captain carefully, absorbing and trying to understand. He too had been walking down that same road of self-pity.

Nobody said anything for a moment. Then the XO said, “Dwelling on the negative simply contributes to its power.”

“More fortune cookie philosophy, Marcus?” responded Rudel with a weary smile. “I hear what you’re saying, but it’s hard for me to admit that I couldn’t get us out of that situation. That I had so little control.”

Shimko shrugged his shoulders, “We like to think we are in control, but the truth is, we can’t eliminate every risk.”

Even as he nodded, Rudel said, “This was a stupid risk, one nobody should have had to take. Part of me wants to throttle the idiot Russian captain. He endangered his boat as well as ours, and he’s back home, getting a pat on the back from the Commander of the Northern Fleet for chasing us off.

“Meanwhile, we go home with a crippled boat, a man dead, and many more injured, on what was supposed to have been a cakewalk. And we failed to complete our mission.”