“Identify yourself!” The voice had an English accent.
“Code name Beagle.”
“Proper name?”
“Edwards, first lieutenant, U.S. Air Force.”
“Approach slowly, mate.”
Mike went forward alone. At length he saw a vague shape half-hidden by a rock. The shape held a submachine gun.
“Who are you?”
“Sergeant Nichols, Royal Marines. You picked a bloody poor place to receive us, Lieutenant.”
“I didn’t do it!” Edwards answered. “We didn’t know you were coming until an hour ago.”
“Balls-up, another bloody balls-up.” The man stood and walked forward with a pronounced limp. “Parachuting’s dangerous enough without coming into a fucking rock garden!” Another figure came up.
“We found the lieutenant-I think he’s dead!”
“Need help?” Mike asked.
“I need to wake up and find myself home in bed.”
Edwards soon found that the party sent to rescue him–or whatever their mission was–had gotten off to a disastrous start. The lieutenant in command of the group had landed on one boulder and fallen backward on another. His head hung from the rest of his body as if on a string. Nichols had sprained his ankle badly, and the other two were uninjured but shaken. It took over an hour to locate all their gear. There was no time for sentiment. The lieutenant was wrapped in his parachute and covered with loose rocks. Edwards led the rest back to his perch on the hilltop. At least they’d brought a new battery pack for his radio.
“Doghouse, this is Beagle, and things suck, over.”
“What took so long?”
“Tell that Herky-Bird driver to get a new eye doctor. The Marines you sent here got their boss killed, and their sergeant ripped his ankle up.”
“Have you been spotted?”
“Negative. They landed in rocks. It’s a miracle they weren’t all killed. We’re back on the hilltop. We covered our tracks.”
Sergeant Nichols was a smoker. He and Smith found a sheltered spot to light up.
“Sounds rather excitable, your lieutenant.”
“He’s only a wing-wiper, but he’s doin’ all right. How’s the ankle?”
“I’ll have to walk on it whether it’s fit or not. Does he know what he’s about?”
“The skipper? I watched him kill three Russians with a knife. That good enough?”
“Bloody hell.”
33 – Contact
USS REUBEN JAMES
“Captain?”
Morris started at the hand on his shoulder. He’d just wanted to lie down in his stateroom for a few minutes after conducting helicopter night landing practice, and-he checked his watch. After midnight. His face was sweaty. The dream had just started again. He looked up at his executive officer.
“What is it, XO?”
“We got a request to check something out. Probably a snowbird, but well, see for yourself ”
Morris took the dispatch with him to his private bathroom, tucked it in his pocket, then washed his face quickly.
“‘Unusual contact repeated several times, have attempted localization without success’? What the hell is this supposed to be?” he asked, toweling off.
“Beats the hell out of me, skipper. Forty degrees, thirty minutes north, sixty-nine, fifty west. They got a location but no ID. I’m having the chart pulled now.”
Morris ran his hand through his hair. Two hours sleep was better than none. Wasn’t it? “Okay, let’s see how it looks from CIC.”
The tactical action officer had the chart out on the table next to the captain’s chair. Morris checked the main tactical-display scope. They were still far offshore in accordance with their orders to check out the hundred-fathom curve.
“That’s way the hell away from here”, Morris observed immediately. There was something familiar about the location. The captain bent over the chart.
“Yes sir, about a sixty-mile run”, Ernst agreed. “Shallow water, too. Can’t use the towed array there.”
“Oh, I know what this place is! That’s where the Andrea Doria sank. Probably somebody’s got a MAD contact and didn’t bother checking his chart.”
“Don’t think so.” O’Malley emerged from the shadows. “A frigate heard something first. The winch on their tail was busted. They didn’t want to lose it, so they were heading into Newport instead of New York because the harbors deeper. They say they copied a strange passive-sonar contact that faded out. They did a target-motion analysis and generated this position. Their helicopter made a few passes, and its magnetic anomaly detector registered right over the Doria, and that was that.”
“How’d you find that out?”
O’Malley handed over a message form. “Came in right after the XO went to get you. They sent an Orion to check it. Same story. They heard something odd, and it faded out.”
Morris frowned. They were chasing after a wild goose, but the orders came from Norfolk. That made it an official wild-goose chase.
“What’s the helo status?”
“I can be up in ten minutes. One torpedo and an auxiliary fuel tank. All the gear’s on line.”
“Tell the bridge to take us there at twenty-five knots. Battleaxe know about this?” He got a nod. “Okay. Signal them what we’re up to. Winch in the tail. Won’t do us any good where we’re going. O’Malley, we’ll close to within fifteen miles of the contact and have you search for it. That puts you in the air about 0230. If you need me, I’ll be in the wardroom.” Morris decided to sample his new ship’s “mid-rats.” O’Malley was headed the same way.
“These ships are a little weird,” the flyer said.
Morris grunted agreement. The main fore-and-aft passageway was on the port side instead of the centerline, for one thing. The “figs” broke a number of longstanding traditions in ship design.
O’Malley went down the ladder first and opened the wardroom door for the captain. They found two junior officers in front of the TV set, watching a taped movie that had mainly to do with fast cars and naked women. The tape machine, Morris had already learned, was run from the chiefs’ quarters. One result of this was that a particularly attractive chest was instant replayed for all hands.
Midwatch rations, or “mid-rats,” was an open loaf of bread and a plate of cold cuts. Morris got himself a cup of coffee and built a sandwich. O’Malley opted for a fruit drink from the cooler on the after bulkhead. The official Navy term for it was bug juice.
“No coffee?” Morris asked. O’Malley shook his head.
“Too much makes me jumpy. You don’t want shaky hands when you’re landing a helo in the dark.” He smiled. “I really am getting too old for this crap.”
“Kids?”
“Three boys, and ain’t none of them gonna be a sailor if I have anything to say about it. You?”
“Boy and a girl. They’re back in Kansas with their mother.” Morris went after his sandwich. The bread was a little stale and the cold cuts weren’t cold, but he needed to eat. This was the first meal in three days he hadn’t eaten alone. O’Malley pushed the potato chips over.
“Get all your carbohydrates, Captain.”
“That bug juice’ll kill you.” Morris nodded at the fruit drink.
“It’s been tried before. I flew two years over ‘Nam. Mostly search-and-rescue stuff. Got shot down twice. Never got scratched, though. Just scared to death.”
Was he that old? Morris wondered. He had to have been passed over for promotion a few times. The captain made a mental note to check O’Malley’s date of rank.
“How come you were in CIC?” the captain asked.
“I wasn’t very sleepy and I wanted to see how the towed array was working.”
Morris was surprised. Aviators didn’t generally show this much interest in the ship’s equipment.
“The word is you did pretty well with Pharris.
“Not good enough.”
“That happens, too.” O’Malley watched his skipper very closely. The only man aboard with extended combat experience, O’Malley recognized something in Morris that he hadn’t seen since Vietnam. The flyer shrugged. It wasn’t his problem. He fished in his flight suit and came out with a pack of cigarettes. “Mind if I smoke?”
“I just restarted myself.”
“Thank God!” O’Malley raised his voice. “With all these virtuous children in the wardroom, I thought I was the only dirty old man here!” The two young lieutenants smiled at that, without taking their eyes from the television screen.
“How much experience you have on figs?”
“Most of my time is on carriers, skipper. Last fourteen months I’ve been an instructor down at Jax. I’ve done a lot of odd jobs, most of them with the Seahawk. I think you’ll like my bird. The dipping sonar is the best I’ve ever worked with.”
“What do you think about this contact report?”
O’Malley leaned back and puffed on his cigarette with a faraway look. “It’s interesting. I remember seeing something on TV about the Doria. She sank on her starboard side. A lot of people have dived to look at the wreck. It’s about two hundred feet of water, just shallow enough for amateurs to try. And there’s a million cables draped over her.”
“Cables?” Morris asked.