Cabin of P-8A Poseidon of VP-5, the Mad Foxes
27,000 feet above the Atlantic
387 miles east-northeast of the Virginia coast
AW1 Levi Prescott arched his back and rolled his neck, letting out a little sigh and blinking a few times. The mission was nothing new to him—he’d been flying long patrols in the P8 since he’d graduated A School and had been with VP-5 through the block 2 upgrades. But today, the stakes of the mission changed everything. He’d been razzed by friends for years after being assigned a mission many thought antiquated. With twenty years of hunting terrorists in the Middle East, hunting submarines seemed like Grandad’s Navy, and in fact his grandad had been a submarine sailor.
Prescott wasn’t fully read in on all the details, but he knew today’s op was different. The tension was high in the cabin of the Navy’s most advanced maritime surveillance jet, and even the normally laid-back practical joker Lieutenant Commander Brenner seemed quiet and steely-eyed. The officer was even sitting at his own station, working as hard as the rest of them to find whatever it was they were hunting.
“What the hell kind of submarine goes seventy-five knots, bro?” the aviation warfare specialist to his right, a kid from Hoboken, New Jersey, named Tony Gallo, said softly. He liked Tony, and not just because they were both from Jersey—they were “the Jersey Boys” among the rest of the crew.
“I don’t know, bro,” he answered, “but if we get close to it we should find it. I mean, it must be making a helluva lot of noise at that speed, right?”
“Yeah,” was all Gallo said, then he looked with envy at Prescott’s workstation. Gallo was working the active sonar buoys, which meant he received very little data this far out, mostly a school of fish or other biologics, and the contours of the ocean floor. Prescott worked the passive sonar. His job was to just listen to the ocean, and the ocean, it happened, made a lot of noise. Normally, he adjusted his filters pretty narrowly to remove any biologics and wave action. Today, he’d been ordered to broaden the filters, so he was receiving tons of data, which at least made the time go by. The military version of the Boeing 737-800 ERX could, with aerial refueling, which they had already done once, stay on mission almost indefinitely, but at least for a full twenty-four hours. It was good to have something to do . . .
“Hey, Prescott,” LCDR Brenner said.
“Yeah, boss?” Prescott answered. He liked that he could be casual with this crew. He’d worked with a lot of officers who were uptight assholes. As long as the crew got the work done, Brenner liked to be one of the boys.
“You still have the pass seven data coming to you?”
He checked his screen and then moved his mouse to open up a dialogue box and bring the pass from a good while ago back into his dataset.
“I do now,” he said.
“They want us to listen in that area.”
“Who the hell is this ‘they’ we keep talking about?” Gallo grumbled.
“I don’t know, Gallo. It all comes through UNSEA,” Brenner said, using their slang for Commander, Undersea Surveillance or COMUNDERSEASURV in the aronym-laden Navy parlance, “but it definitely has a new vibe, like someone else is driving the boat. But this is a no-bullshit mission, boys, I can tell you . . .”
Prescott held up a hand and leaned in, and all chatter stopped. He pressed his hand to his headset, sealing it better from the cabin noise, and used the mouse to increase the gain. Then he drew a line to where sonobuoy-47 sat in the ocean below the surface, with its antenna poking out above the waves, sending him the data it was collecting.
“What in the hell?” he mumbled.
“Whaddya got, Jersey?” Brenner asked.
“Flight, turn left heading one-three-five and close on SB47.”
“Flight,” came the voice of the copilot, Lieutenant Derek Hines, from Florida.
The plane closed the distance on the sonobuoy to the east, and the intermittent signal became constant as he adjusted his gain and then his filters.
“Holy shit,” he said and looked over at Brenner.
“What?”
He listened another moment, eyes closed, then opened them and smiled at his boss.
“Got ’em, boss,” he said. “We have something moving fast and cavitating like hell, bearing rate indicates westbound.”
He worked the mouse and added the contact to his screen, which shared immediately with the other stations.
“Get me something on active and triangulate,” Brenner said.
“Damn,” Gallo said. “It’s screaming through my active line now and . . .” He squinted at the screen. “That ain’t no great white shark, boss. This thing is moving at seventy-eight knots.”
“Tracking,” Lieutenant Sarah Beach said from the terminal beside Brenner. “This has to be what we’re looking for.”
Brenner smiled, but his smile seemed grim.
“I’m calling it in right now,” he said. “Don’t lose it, guys.”
Prescott glanced at Gallo, who smiled.
“I don’t think we gotta worry about that,” Prescott said. “That thing is screaming. Now that we have the signature in the computer, we can track it wherever it’s going.”
“What do you think it is?” Gallo said. “Has to be some sort of experimental high-speed UUV? One of ours, right? A test?”
Prescott saw worry on his crewmate’s face. He looked at the map, extending the track of the contact to the west as he zoomed out. The magenta line he created ended at Norfolk Naval Base. “I don’t think so, dude,” he said and felt his stomach tighten. “Stay on this shit, bro.”