In The Navy (On the Boat), Part 20

We continued the grind of tracking this Boat for almost all of the rest of our deployment. After a few days we all began to notice the repetitiveness of the transient noises and their patterns began to emerge. We figured out what times they were serving meals. When they were going to blow sanitary tanks (dump their crap), when they would surface and almost every other facet of day to day life for them. It was like being a peeping tom, I felt almost guilty (not really).

I did wonder if the Diesel Boat knew we were there, watching, but didn’t care. They showed no sign of knowing, ever. More than once we had close calls with the Diesel Boat.

The first came one quiet and monotonous day, when out of nowhere, we had a slew of active sonar signals flood the very water we were in ..If you remember the old Godzilla movies, you remember Ghidrah. It kind of sounded like that.. http://www.godzillatemple.com/hidden/ghidrah.wav. Times 12.

It turns out a huge Russian task force, including a Kirov Battlcruiser http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_battlecruiser_Kirov was plowing through the area and just wanted to say “Hi” to their little buddy. It shocked a lot of us when Sonar reported that the Diesel went active too. That was not expected; they were saying “Hi” back. Now the bad news; as all of these surface ships approached, all going active, there was a real good chance that they could detect us.

The Captain had come to the Control Room and took in the plot and Fire Control situation really quick. He had obviously had intel about the visitors and just never told the enlisted men to be ready for it. A "Need to know" thing.

In the one moment of genius I ever saw out of the guy, he ordered a course and speed change to place our Boat perfectly in the shadow of our target.

We would appear as a ghost, which is commonly caused by layers of water with different temperatures or salinity. We would be seen as a faint excusable echo. It worked. The fleet of Russkies departed without slowing down and we had remained undetected. We did nothing, but waited while the much anticipated Sub Escort(s) for the Task Force passed too. We never heard it (them), but figured it was there, sniffing for anything before heading off to its main duty of shadowing the Surface ships.

After a few hours, things relaxed a bit and we got back to the target. Things at this point got boring, very boring. It was week after week of the same thing, over and over. Track the dummy, dummy eats Breakfast at 8AM, Lunch at 2PM, Dinner at 8PM. Dummy surfaces and recharges. It was a cycle, over and over.

We got complacent, sloppy. We had several occasions where someone dropped something and made a huge clang noise from below, but no one ever fessed up to it, when asked. At one point, we were below the target a bit and it was lucky that we were (there would have been a collision otherwise). We snagged a chain of whatever the Deisel was dangling down to the bottom of the Ocean and had that chain scrape down the side of the hull. Everyone heard it as it passed over their part of the Boat (ssccRRAAPpe). I can only imagine what was going through the minds of the people on the Diesel? How could they not know we were there? How else could they justify what just happened?

We had to make a quick turn to keep the chain from getting caught in the screw. That would have made for a bad day for everyone.

I was convinced we were busted, but we just broke contact for a few hours and moved away slowly. The Diesel kept up their routine, like nothing had happened. I figured the next time they surfaced, they would report what had happened. Then it would just be a matter of time until a state of the art Russian Boat came snooping for us. If found out, it was SOP that we would just run away…as quietly as possible.

Nothing happened though. Either they were stupid, or we were lucky. Toss a coin.