“And if you’re wrong?”
“Then you’re wrong, skipper. Mostly, though, Ivan’s predictable–if you think like a submariner and you look at his tactical situation instead of your own. You can’t keep him from running away, but his mission is to close on the target, and you can make life real hard for him if he does.”
Morris looked O’Malley hard in the eyes. He didn’t like having the loss of his first command analyzed so glibly. But there was no time for these thoughts. O’Malley was a pro, and if there was a man to handle another Victor, this might be the one. “You all ready?”
“The bird is at the air station. We’ll join up after you clear the capes. I wanted to talk things over with the ASW team while we had the time. We’re gonna play outside ASW picket?”
“Probably. With a towed-array, it doesn’t figure that we’re going to be in close. And we might be teamed with a Brit for the convoy mission.”
“Fair enough. If you want my opinion, we have a pretty solid ASW team here. We might just give the bad guys a hard time. Weren’t you on Rodgers a few years back?”
“When you were working with the Moose We worked together twice, but never met. I was ‘X-Ray Mike’ when we exercised against Skate”
“I thought I remembered you.” O’Malley came closer and dropped his voice. “How bad is it out there?”
“Bad enough. We lost the G-I-UK line. We’re getting some pretty good SURTASS info, but you can bet Ivan’s going to be gunning for those tuna boats pretty soon. Between the air threat and the sub threat-I don’t know.” His face showed more than his voice did. Close friends dead or missing. His own first command blown in half. Morris was tired in a way that sleep alone would not cure.
O’Malley nodded. “Skipper, we got us a shiny new frigate, a great new helo, and a tail. We can hold our end up.”
“Well, we’ll have a shot soon enough. We sail for New York in two hours and take a convoy out on Wednesday.”
“Alone?” O’Malley asked.
“No, we’ll have Brit company for the New York run, HMS Battleaxe. The orders haven’t been confirmed yet, but it looks like we’ll be working together all the way across.”
“That’ll be useful,” Ernst agreed. “Come on aft, skipper, I’ll show you what we’re up to.” The sonar room was aft of CIC, closed off by a curtain. Here real lighting was on, as opposed to the darkened, red-light world of Combat.
“Jeez, nobody ever tells me anything!” growled a young lieutenant commander. “Good morning, Captain. I’m Lenner, combat systems officer.”
“How come you’re not at your scope?”
“We froze the game, skipper, and I wanted to check out the display on playback.”
“I brought the game tape myself,” O’Malley explained. “This is the track of a Victor-III that faked out one of our carriers in the eastern Med last year. See here? That’s the pump-fake. You’ll notice that the contact fades out, then brightens up. That’s the noisemaker inside the knuckle. At this point he ducked under the layer and sprinted inside the screen. Would’ve hit the carrier, too, because they didn’t get him for another ten minutes. That” -he jammed his finger at the display- “is what you look for. This tells you you’re up against a driver who knows his stuff, and he’s out for your ass.” Morris examined the screen closely enough to recognize the pattern. He’d seen it once before.
“What if they use the maneuver to break clear?” Lenner asked.
“Because if they can break contact, why not break contact towards the target?” Morris asked quietly, noting that he had a very young combat systems officer.
“That’s right, skipper.” O’Malley nodded ruefully. “Like I said, this is a standard tactic for them, and it rewards a sharp driver. The aggressive ones will always bore in. The ones who break off-that’s effectively a kill. We have to reacquire, but so do they. With a twenty-knot speed of advance, once we get past them, they have to play catch-up. That means making noise. The guy who runs away probably won’t run the risk, or if he does, he’ll do it badly and we’ll get him. No, this tactic is for the guy who really wants to get in close. Question is, how many of their skippers are that aggressive?”
“Enough.” Morris looked away for a moment. “How’s the helicopter complement?”
“Only one flight crew for the bird. My copilot’s pretty green, but our onboard systems operator’s a first-class petty officer who’s been around the block a few times. The maintenance guys are a pickup bunch, mostly from the readiness group at Jax. I’ve talked to them, they should do just fine.”
“We got berths for them all?” Morris asked.
Ernst shook his head. “Not hardly. We’re packed pretty tight.”
“O’Malley, is your copilot deck-qualified?”
“Not on a frigate. I am-hell, I did some of the first systems trials back in ’78. We’ll have to do workups on the way to New York, both day and night to get my ensign in the groove. Scratch team, skipper. The bird doesn’t even belong to an operational squadron.”
“You sounded confident a minute ago,” Morris objected.
“I am fairly confident,” O’Malley said. “My people know how to use the tools they got. They’re sharp kids. They’ll learn fast. And we even get to make up our own call signs.” A wide grin. Certain things are important to aviators. There was one other unspoken message: when O’Malley referred to the aviation department as “my people,” he meant that he didn’t want any interference in how he ran his shop. Morris ignored it. He didn’t want an argument, not now.
“Okay, XO, let’s look around. O’Malley, I expect we’ll rendezvous off the capes.”
“The helo’s ready to launch right now, Captain. We’ll be there when you want us.”
Morris nodded and went forward. The captain’s personal ladder to the bridge was a bare three feet from the CIC door, and his own. He trotted up-or tried to, his legs rubbery with exhaustion.
“Captain on the bridge!” a petty officer announced.
Morris was not impressed. He was appalled to see that the ship’s “wheel” was only a brass dial about the size of a telephone’s. The helmsman actually had a seat, offset from the centerline, and to his right was a clear plastic box containing the direct-control throttle to the ship’s jet-turbine engines. A metal rod suspended from the overhead ran completely from one side of the pilothouse to the other at a height that allowed it to be grabbed easily in heavy seas, an eloquent comment on this ship’s stability.
“Have you served on a ‘fig’ before, sir?” the XO asked.
“Never been aboard one,” Morris answered. The heads of the four men on bridge watch each turned a hair at that. “I know the weapons systems; I was part of the design team at NAVSEA back a few years ago, and I know more or less how she handles.”
“She handles, sir. Like a sports car,” Ernst assured him. “You’ll especially like the way we can turn the engines off, drift as quiet as a log, then be up to thirty knots in two minutes flat.”
“How quickly can we get under way?”
“Ten minutes from your say-so, Captain. The engine lube oil is already warmed up. There’s a harbor tug standing by to assist us away from the dock.”
“NAVSURFLANT, arriving,” boomed the announcing system. Two minutes later, the Admiral appeared in the pilothouse.
“I have a man bringing your gear up. What do you think?”
“XO, will you see to the provisioning?” Morris said to Ernst, then, “Shall we discover my stateroom together, Admiral?”
A steward was waiting for them below with a tray of coffee and sandwiches. Morris poured himself a cup, another for the Admiral, and ignored the food.
“Sir, I’ve never handled one of these before. I don’t know the engines-”
“You’ve got a great chief engineer and she’s a dream to handle. Besides, you have your conning officers. You’re a weapons and tactics man, Ed. All your work is done in CIC. We need you out there.”
“Fair enough, sir.”
“XO, take her out,” Morris ordered two hours later. He watched Ernst’s every move, embarrassed that he had to depend on another to do it.
But it was amazingly easy. The wind was off the pier, and the frigate had a huge sail area that invited help. As the mooring lines were slackened off, the wind and the auxiliary power units located on the hull directly under the bridge pushed James’s bow into the clear, then the gas turbine engines moved her forward into the channel. Ernst took his time, though he was clearly capable of doing it faster. Morris took careful note of this, too. The man didn’t want to make his captain look bad.