sonar waves in a deep channel and carry them away from the skimmer
hydrophones. The cities of Murmansk and Severomorsk poured quantities
of industrial waste, cooling water from nuclear reactors, and raw sewage
unimaginable in any Western country directly into the waters of the
Tuloma River; this made the upper water layers much warmer than in the
deep of the central shipping channel, creating a sharp-boundaried
thermocline beneath which Galveston lurked. The situation was further
aided by the huge quantities of organic and inorganic waste particles
collecting along the boundary layer. Sound waves passed through from
the surface, but they became trapped in the deep channel, unable to echo
back to the surface and reveal Galveston’s presence.
At least, that was Sonarman First Class Rudi Ekhart’s theory. When he’d
told Commander Montgomery his idea, the skipper had laughed and said,
“So you’re saying we’re hiding under a layer of Russian shit?”
An inelegant way of putting it, but essentially true. Soon after that,
Montgomery had taken Galveston even deeper into the inlet’s mouth,
taking advantage of this man-made sonar blind.
Safe, perhaps, from surface sonar, the U.S. attack sub was still
running a fearful risk penetrating so far into Russian territorial
waters. The seabed here was littered with hydrophones and compact
undersea listening devices, not to mention encapsulated torpedoes set to
fire at an electronic command from naval listening posts ashore. The
slightest mistake–a wrench dropped on the deck in engineering, a piece
of gear adrift in a berthing compartment, or a loose pan in the
galley–would give away their presence to the listening Russians,
calling down upon the American submarine a fusillade of deadly mine and
torpedo fire. Every man aboard wore rubber shoes or went barefoot; the
official order was “silence in the boat.”
Rudi Ekhart remained at his post in Galveston’s sonar compartment, a
long, narrow room where several sonar operators sat side by side, heads
embraced in padded earphones, their eyes on the cascades of flowing
light on their displays where sound was made visible. There, the
silence was dragging out in an ongoing and unendurable test of skill and
will. Through his headphones, he could hear the susurration of the
river’s current flowing past Galveston’s hull and across the uneven
bottom, the far-off boom of some kind of heavy machinery, transmitted
through the water. There were precious few “biologicals,” the sounds
made by sea life, here, for the Tuloma was dead, and in the process of
poisoning the sea for scores of miles beyond the mouth of the inlet.
And he could also hear … something else, something very, very faint
but definitely mechanical.
Ekhart was one of the best sonar technicians in the U.S. naval
submarine service. Like many other sonarmen, he had a special love for
classical music–especially Baroque–which he claimed sharpened the ear,
and a complete disdain for rock, which could actually damage hearing.
His shipmates found him distant sometimes, and a bit standoffish, and it
was well known that he had a large ego.
But such character flaws could easily be overlooked, because he was very
good at what he did. A Navy man for the past ten years, he would be
going up for chief soon. His likeliest career option at that point
would be to take a post as a sonar instructor at the Navy sub school at
Groton, Connecticut.
He was also homosexual.
Rudi Ekhart was a man of strong will and strong purpose. He’d long ago
decided that sex was not only a distraction aboard ship, it was a
definite threat, Especially aboard a submarine, where a man’s only
privacy was the curtain he could draw to wall off his rack from the
eight others stacked three-high in his tiny berthing compartment. Just
getting into one of those backbreakers took a certain amount of
gymnastic skill, and the headroom was so small it was all but impossible
to turn over.
No, there was no room for sex aboard a submarine. Worse, because of the
crowding and also because of constant occupational pressure that each
man felt from the moment the boat first submerged, there was no
tolerance for gays in the submarine service. Anyone in a sub crew who’d