Phoenix Sub Zero

As for whether he felt confined in the sub, in truth he was more at home at sea — his routine restricted to the sonar display room, the sonar equipment space, the chief’s quarters and the crew’s mess — than at his Ghent home. His home life was enjoyable, he had a pretty wife, now showing some weight on her previously thin frame, two sons, one in high school, the star center on the basketball team, the other in junior high who hadn’t quite found himself. It wasn’t that Sanderson didn’t enjoy being in port, it was just that his wife and sons seemed to own the house, and he was a frequent visitor. Home was a busy port, he was a cargo ship that pulled in from time to time. The family welcomed him when he’d return from a run at sea, but after two days he felt like he was underfoot. Life had led him to the sea and made him a chief then, and he loved it.

At sea the actions of the men around him seemed centered on him. The ship to him was a giant mobile ear, built so that sonarmen could listen to and interpret the sounds of the sea, most of them random, others manmade and sinister. The rest of the vessel, her reactor and steam plant, her control room, her weapons, even her crew were all subordinate to the task of listening to the sea. This submarine, built for a dozen select sonarmen, was more his, he felt, than the captain’s.

After all, he was the chief sonarman, the one man declared by the Navy to be the best aboard at listening to that symphony of sound in the sea, best at leading the men who would listen under his instruction, best at attending to and fixing the monstrous ear and the surrounding equipment, best at directing the young officers who drove the ship in a way that would make his equipment listen optimally.

His title said it best — Senior Chief Sonarman Sanderson.

He sat now at the aft display console of the BQQ-5D sonar set, the seat just forward of the sliding curtain to the control room, where he could see the other consoles and talk to the officer of the deck in control without using the speaker system or the cumbersome boom microphone. As usual, he was dressed as if they had just pulled into the Norfolk carrier piers: starched khakis, his submarine dolphins gleaming above two rows of ribbons and his boomer pin, his nametag shining over his right pocket, his chief’s emblems new, his shoes shining. He always dressed this way at sea, never opting for the relaxed coveralls and sneakers of shipmates.

Some said it was because in his khakis he retained his authority, his formality, while in a poopysuit he would become just another crewman. The closest to a friend Sanderson had, a firstclass petty officer named Smoot, insisted that the khakis were more comfortable to the chief, but

Sanderson himself knew the first reason came the closest. In his more mellow moments he realized he had a streak of arrogance about him, but he maintained even to himself that it was a selfless arrogance born out of service to his country—after twenty-six years in the Navy he was the best sonarman on the god damned east coast. If he had limits they were only that he had to use the aging BQQ-5D sonar suite instead of the advanced BSY-1 of the Improved-688 boats, and that he was sailing aboard an older 688 submarine instead of a much quieter 688-1 class. But even so, he would pit his ship and his sonar against any in the fleet—if exercises meant anything he and the Phoenix were a match for any warship afloat or submerged.

Sanderson regarded the waterfall display of the Q-5 through squinted eyes. His fingers moved across a touch pad and called up the TB-23 thinwire towed array, selecting the beam going transverse across the array that looked east-west now that the ship was headed north. Any intruder sailing into the strait from the western basin would first show up on that beam, long before the broadband spherical array heard it. The question was, were they searching for the right frequencies? Captain Kane had referred to a 154 hertz double tonal, something from the message from the sunken Augusta, but the information was tainted—after all, how good could tactical data be from a crew that had gotten their butts shot to the bottom of the Med?

It did not occur to him that what happened to Augusta could happen to the Phoenix. He could not, after all, afford even to consider this.

He dialed up the athwartships beam’s frequency gate, spanning from 148 to 158 hertz, waiting to see the double tonal of the Destiny submarine. He stared at the graphs for two minutes, three, four. There was no doublet.