5. STORM
The Gnat was off and the Prospect submerged and cruising at depth before the first molten blob of malevolent red sun percolated up on the horizon. Shakes was running the Gnat hot and loud, standing in the pilot’s chair with his head above the hatch in the wind, trying to blow the bleary sleep out of his eyes. He sucked on a cigarette, but the wind was feeding oxygen to the coal on the end so that it glowed a color not totally unlike that of the sun coming up on the horizon behind him. His cigarette was quickly disappearing into itself. A long shadow of the short sail of the Gnat with his round head on top stretched out in front of him on the slate-colored water.
One-hundred meters below in the Prospect, it was nearly silent as the crew eased into their more relaxed daytime shifts. Percy was in the control room smoking with Bastian. Cassandra had just woken when the boat dove and was making her way with a coffee to the sonar station for the long day watch.
The first few hours passed with dull regularity. Shakes had nothing to report during diesel stops, and by her third cheroot Percy was settling into the comfortable state of mind-blanking boredom that was her most familiar association with life aboard submarines.
Mid-morning of the third day out from the depot, Shakes was shutting down the diesel of the Gnat for the fourth time that morning to check in with the Prospect.
On sonar, Cassandra could hear the Gnat’s diesel putter away to a halt — leaving a silent relief in her headphones. As usual, she called up to the control room to let them know the Gnat was shut down for a listening and check-in session. “Captain Percy, the Gnat just went silent.”
“Alright. Thanks Cassandra.” Percy called back down to her. Percy took down the ship-to-ship mic. “Captain Shakes — the usual: how’re things looking up there?”
“Well, for lack of anything else to report, I’ll tell you that the weather is thickening up a bit. The haze has really set in, and there’s a bit of a fuckin’ chop coming on.” Percy could hear Shake chewing leaves and sucking saliva as he held the transmit button. “It looks to me like the kind of things that could turn into real weather later.”
Weather was not generally a concern for Percy, submarines could pass under even the worst weather at depth. But she could not guess at what the Gnat was capable of handling. “Does that give you anything to worry about with the Gnat?”
“Naw,” Shakes voice crackled, “the Gnat’s been through the very fucking worst. If it gets bad, I’ll dive and ride it out underwater. With all this running on the surface, the batteries are always fully topped up so I can stay down for a while.”
Knowing the Gnat could not dive very deep at all, Percy was unconvinced that this was a solution to big weather, but she also knew Shakes had taken the Gnat back and forth across the wide parts of the oceans many times. She decided to trust his experience. “Alright then, Captain Shakes. If you…”
“Captain Percy!” Cassandra interrupted with a shout from sonar. “I think I’ve got a contact.”
“Hold on Shakes. We might have a contact. Don’t start your diesel.” Percy hung up the mic and slid down the ladder.
Cassandra had her eyes closed and was concentrating intently on the sounds in her headset. She had the mics pointed towards the Prospect’s hard rear starboard quarter, and the signal strength indicator gauge was nodding weakly just a bit above the pin. “It feels like I’m only on the edge of the signal. They might be directly behind us.”
“Bastian,” Percy called up to him, “throttle down. Stop the props. Cassandra needs to hear what’s behind us.”
A moment later the perennially resonant electric motor sounds died away. Cassandra turned the sonar mics back to face the dead stern of the boat. The signal strength indicator immediately shot up to a definite contact. “Absolutely confirmed, Captain Percy. I can hear the engine in the water. Sounds like another diesel.”
Percy looked at the signal strength dial and knew immediately that the contact had subversively crept closer to them under the sound of the Gnat’s diesel when it was running, and then even a bit closer than that by aligning themselves dead astern of the Prospect, where Cassandra could not hear well over the sound of the Prospect’s own prop turning. Based on the signal strength indicator, the contact was likely far closer than Percy was comfortable with now — maybe twenty nautical miles. “Fuck,” was all she said.
She climbed up to the control room and got Shakes back on the ship-to-ship. “Definitely a fuckin’ contact, Shakes. Now it’s your turn. Fire up the Gnat and see if you can lead them off and away from us. Let’s see if this scheme of ours works!”
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“Absolutely! Motherfuck…” The end of his oath was cut off by the whining start of the Gnat’s diesel engine, which came blaring over the ship-to-ship radio for a moment before Shakes took his thumb off the transmit button.
Percy flipped on the red night lighting. “Bastian — don’t move the fuckin’ boat. Don’t trim anything or let her make any fuckin’ sounds at all.”
“Dead-silent-crypt drift, got it Captain,” said Bastian.
Percy slid down to the sonar compartment again and tapped Cassandra on the shoulder. “Stay on both the new contact and the Gnat, Cassandra. I’m going to wake Hemi.” Percy disappeared down the ladder to crew quarters and returned a minute later with Hemi’s big form following her up from below. He was still pulling on his tweed jacket and fixing his spectacles while he sat at the sonar station and put on the second headset.
Cassandra looked at him and pointed at the signal strength gauge and the bearing without saying anything. Hemi nodded while listening.
After a minute, Percy broke the silence. “Well, Hemi… is that our fucking creepy sub with the fuckin’ ram?”
Hemi sighed. “It is — the Grackle. Absolutely. The ram gives it a distinctive and entirely identifiable hull noise.”
“Fuck me!” said Percy. “So much for the theory that they wouldn’t fuckin’ follow us this far into another Authority’s territory. Ah, fuck. It doesn’t matter — what matters is our current situation. Next order of business, you two: are they following Shakes away from us?”
Hemi took over the sonar directional control wheel from Cassandra and made some slight adjustments to center the signal. He flipped some switches to engage filters, and a moment later turned them off again. “You see, Cassandra,” he explained, pointing to the switches and dials, “with these filters engaged I can better hear the Gnat, and with them disengaged it is easier to focus on the pursuing sub.”
She nodded.
After a few minutes of listening, Hemi reported to Percy: “It…seems like it is working, Sylvia. The Grackle is definitely following Shakes. And…” He paused for a moment to continue listening, “Shakes seems to be able to stay well ahead of them.” He pointed to the mic directional indicator. “They are already ten degrees off our course, and moving away quickly.”
“That’s fucking excellent, Hemi,” Percy said.
“Can’t they like, shoot at Captain Shakes or something?” asked Cassandra.
“It is difficult to hit such a small fast-moving target as the Gnat with a torpedo. Though the Gnat’s engine is so loud that it is doubtful Shakes would hear an incoming torpedo. Hopefully he is experienced enough to make random course changes every five miles or so, to make aiming a torpedo more challenging…” Hemi looked doubtful.
“Well, keep the fuck on them,” said Percy. “Let me know if anything changes…or what the final result is.” She stuck a cheroot between her teeth and climbed the ladder to the control room.
“Cassandra, keep tracking them,” said Hemi. He stood up, still wearing the second sonar headset, and turned to lean over the navigation table. He measured the angle of the bearing to the contacts off their current position marked on the chart, and then drew a line marking Shakes and the pursuing sub’s course. Listening carefully to what the sonar was picking up in his headset, he could estimate Grackle and Gnat’s distance from the Prospect.
He and Cassandra tracked the two sound sources like this for over an hour. Then he stood to his full height and stretched. He took off the headset and hung it on the peg, and patted Cassandra on the shoulder before climbing up to the control room.
“Shakes and the Grackle are already far off and moving further out of range. I can no longer estimate distance on the sonar,” said Hemi. “What is the end game in this maneuver?” Shakes cannot run forever.”
“Well, hopefully that fuckin’ pursuing sub realizes they are on the wrong target at a good distance away from us. Then, presumably, they will leave off chasing Shakes and turn around to try to reacquire us here where they lost us. We will, of course, be long gone by then.”
“So now would be the time for us to make a course change.”
“Indeed. But my question for you, Hemi, is: how do we find Shakes again? You think you can raise him with that fuckin’ bird?”
“I think Herschel will prove better than trying to reconnect with Shakes via radio. To get him on the radio, we both have to be on the surface at the same time, and he has to have his diesel off. Not to mention the radio could be monitored. We can let Herschel go with a message and dive immediately. The message would be extremely unlikely to be intercepted.”
“OK. We’ll surface tonight, and you can send the pigeon out after Shakes then.”
Cassandra kept listening to the sonar for another half hour, occasionally reporting that she thought she could still hear the Gnat or the Grackle when the conditions were favorable. At that point Percy decided it was time to leave, and had Bastian throttle the electric motors up to fifteen knots. They moved off on a southerly course that Percy selected at random to move them away from the area.
The rest of the hours of the day ticked by with nothing to break the monotony and no changes to make other than occasional minor adjustments to the trim of the boat. Whereas earlier Cassandra had been cursing the noise of the Gnat’s engine polluting the water, now she found she missed it. Somehow it had been comforting to know Shakes was up there on the surface. And his hourly check-ins were at least a way to mark time and shift her attention. Now they were down in this dark cold pit of water, blind and alone, and it began to feel like they were doomed to remain like this until the end of their days.