Scorpion in the Sea by P.T. Deutermann Read Free Book Online

April; 1800
    The Captain sat in stony silence at the head of the minuscule wardroom table. There were five other officers in the wardroom: his Deputy Commander, who was also the political officer, the Operations officer, and the two department heads, the Weapons Officer and the Chief Engineer. Behind the Captain’s chair stood the Musaid, the senior Chief Petty Officer in the boat. The political officer was speaking. Still speaking.
    “The error, therefore, is a collective error. The fact that the watch officer lost depth control and broached the sail is nothing more or less than the grand summation of training errors, admittedly poor discipline on his part, and insufficient qualification time in his training program aboard Al Akrab. It is not politically responsible to blame only the watch officer. The operational error has its antecedents in the doings of the collective organization: just as the organization’s successes are always due to the efforts of the
group, so are the organization’s errors also attributable to the organization as a whole. That is my doctrinal position.”
    He sat back, and folded his arms. The Captain refused to look at him, but continued to stare straight ahead, his black eyes focused on the opposite bulkhead. There were times when every submarine commander had wanted to put his political officer into a torpedo tube and fire him into the abyss. This was one of them.
    The Captain was a tall, thin man, with a walnut brown, hawk-like face, all angles, ridges of muscle, and corners of fine bone. His eyes were wide set and jet black under pronounced eyebrows, the legacy of some Turkoman in his Bedouin heritage. His nose was short and boldly hooked, reinforcing the resemblance to a raptor; his lips were thin and set in a rigid, flat line. There was an air of latent tension about him, in the way he stared at things and people, and in the way he carried his wiry body, leaning forward, hands in front and moving, as if ready to seize something.
    His silence drew out the tension. The entire mission depended precisely and exactly on not being detected, and all the political officer’s socialist cant did not change that fact. The Soviets had provided excellent training in their submarine school; they had offset that excellence by draping the burden of socialist political camel dung across the shoulders of every military commander in the form of his political officer.
    “Does anyone else wish to speak?” he asked, softly.
    The political officer, who simply loved to hear the sound of his own voice, sat forward as if to start again. The Captain held up one finger in his general direction, as if in warning. Gauging the look on the Captain’s taut face, the political officer subsided back into his chair.
    “Does anyone else wish to speak?”
    There was silence around the table. The hum of ventilator fans, and the occasional creaking of the hull from the pressure of 85 meters depth were the only sounds. Outside the curtained entrance to the tiny wardroom, a steward was arranging plates and cups on the tray table, waiting to set
up the wardroom for the evening meal. The Captain looked at each one of them in turn.
    “Then I shall speak. And you shall listen. The mistake may be collective, but the punishment for the next such mistake shall be individually extreme. Most extreme.” He paused, while the four officers at the table looked at him in growing apprehension. Once again, the Deputy Commander opened his mouth as if to speak, and then shut it abruptly. The Captain continued, training his eyes around the table like a stereo-optic gunsight.
    “As all of you know, our mission here is to lurk in the sea, and to await the arrival of the American aircraft carrier Coral Sea, the carrier that bombed our homeland in 1986. Bombed the Jamahiriya, and killed a favorite child of the Colonel. Our sacred mission is to surprise that carrier, and to sink it if possible as it makes its way into port. The Coral Sea is now