Ghost Sub

Prologue

The submarine continued westward at five knots, at a depth of 460 feet. Occasionally, natural forces tried to alter her depth. For three days, a huge tropical rainstorm raged above her, torrents of fresh rainwater diluting the ocean, making it less salty. A seagoing vessel’s buoyancy is determined by the mass of the water she displaces. Salty water is denser than freshwater, which is why it’s easier for a swimmer to float in the ocean than in a lake, and easier still in Utah’s Great Salt Lake. As the rain diluted the sea, the ocean around her became less dense; the boat started to sink.

When the rain ended, the same cold front that had carried the storm cooled the ocean, and cold water is more dense than hot. The boat displaced a higher mass of water, became more buoyant, and wanted to rise.

In both cases, the ship’s autopilot sensed the acceleration and efficiently adjusted the planes of the ship to maintain her programmed depth. Her destination, too, was programmed into the computer, along with an algorithm that randomly inserted maneuvers to make tracking her harder, even as she maintained her overall course.

She was a very quiet ship, by design. Her keel was laid in 1988 and she was commissioned in 1992, her construction straddling the end of the Cold War. So it was a Soviet enemy she was designed to fight, an enemy with sophisticated sonar and tactics, and the quest for silence influenced the design of every system. It was something the crews of these boats were drilled on constantly, that their machinery would not give them away; they were far more likely to be discovered by noise they created: a toilet seat dropped, a hatch slammed, a wrench dropped carelessly in the bilge. A sound like that was called a ‘transient,’ and could travel for miles underwater. Under the right conditions, when temperature layers in the ocean created sound channels, the sound could travel hundreds of miles. Anyone who was trained to track American submarines learned to listen for these random, careless noises as they were often the only audible sound a submarine made.

But no one walked the passageways of this boat, or maintained her machines, or watched television, so that innate, stubborn tendency of men to make noise didn’t give her away. Especially at such a slow speed, she was nearly silent.

At precisely 6:00AM (Hawaii-Aleutian time zone), in the Chiefs’ Quarters, a digital alarm clock began bleating. It was generally regarded as poor shipboard etiquette to have an alarm clock, because it would wake up everyone around you, and no one had the same schedule onboard a ship that had to run day and night. The beginning of your work day was undoubtedly the middle of the night for the person sleeping next to you. Courtesy dictated that you leave a wake up request with the messenger of the watch who would wake you up at the requested time without waking up those around you. But this alarm clock belonged to the Chief of the Boat, the senior enlisted man on the entire crew, and no one begrudged him his clock. Besides, he was surrounded by other chief petty officers, men who’d been at sea for decades, and who could sleep through anything. The COB had been a machinist for twenty years before becoming a master chief. His hearing had been dulled by years of engine room noise, and he had the alarm’s volume turned to the maximum setting.

With no one to silence it, the alarm bleated, its sound echoing through the passageways of the forward compartment and off the steel bulkheads that separated them from the sea. After thirty minutes, it shut itself off.

Twenty-three hours and thirty minutes later, it did it again.

Honolulu

Master Chief Cote was in his office at Tripler, finishing up his paperwork for the day. Never far from his mind… he was also finishing up his last tour of duty in a thirty-year career. It was time to conclude, he recognized, a journey that had started in Vietnam and culminated, just two years before, on Alabama, a submarine he loved even though at times it seemed determined to kill him. He’d had a longer, more exciting career than any recruiter had ever promised him. His mind went back for the first time in years to the grinning Chief Petty Officer who had recruited him, in an office above the Seymour, Indiana, post office that reeked of Old Spice and pipe tobacco, a garish framed print of the Constitution adorning the wall. His phone rang and the memory disappeared.

“Master Chief Cote.”

“Master Chief, it’s Petty Officer Wills. Can you come down to D-3? We’ve got a sailor here who needs a medical DQ from his next patrol. Ship sent him here late last night.”

It was one of Cote’s primary duties — as the resident submarine corpsman, he needed to sign off whenever a sub sailor missed a deployment for medical reasons. The original reason, he supposed, was to ensure that no one was malingering to get out of sea duty, a determination that the submarine force, with its stubborn pride, wanted made by one of its own. In reality, that was not a large concern; sailors were far more likely, in his experience, to hide a serious ailment to avoid letting down their shipmates than they were to fake an illness. And the ship’s command was certainly not inclined to send sailors home for mild ailments and start day one of a patrol short-handed. When a ship voluntarily sent him one of their own, Cote knew, it was usually dire.

“I’ll be right there.”

He took the elevator down to the third floor. He was at Tripler Army Medical Center, the Army hospital in Honolulu known affectionately to generations of military men as “Crippler.” It was the largest military hospital in the entire Pacific sphere, treating all the horrible things that can happen to a soldier or sailor, or an aging veteran for that matter, responsible for an area that covered roughly 50 % of the earth’s surface. The elevator doors slid open and Cote saw the young petty officer waiting for him with a concerned look on his face.

“Master Chief, thanks for coming quickly.”

“Sick submariner?”

“Very sick,” he said as they walked down the hall, their black oxfords clicking on the tile. “And getting worse by the minute. Ship sent him here late last night, he had a fever and cramps. I’m waiting for his test results.”

“Any ideas?”

He shrugged. “Flu? I don’t know. He seemed stable last night… I guess that’s why they didn’t order any tests.” There was a note of scorn in his voice.

“What did his corpsman think? Did you talk to him yet?”

“Didn’t get a chance,” said Wills. “His boat pulled out this morning.”

Cote furrowed his brow at that, bothered. It smacked of abandonment.

They walked silently to a far corner of the ward surrounded by a curtain. The young petty officer threw it open, revealing to Cote a breathtaking view of Honolulu in the background, while a young man was dying in the fore. His face was gray, contrasted sharply by the blood that was dribbling from his mouth.

“Here’s his chart…” said Wills, but before he could reach it, the sick sailor coughed so hard he almost convulsed. His back arched severely and he groaned in pain.

“Code!” said the master chief as he ran to his bedside. Wills jumped for the wall and pushed a button, setting in motion an emergency process that the master chief knew would be too late.

He stepped up to the young sailor and put his hand on his forehead — it was hot to the touch. White spittle had dried around his lips. His eyes searched without seeing anything. His hospital gown was soaked through with sweat. Cote noticed a stuffed green seabag leaning in the corner.

“Son… it’s okay,” he said.

“No…”

Lacking any better ideas he took the young man’s hand. In contrast to his forehead, it was clammy, cold, lifeless. The skin was rough, and his fingernails were dirty and cracked, the hand of a mechanic. He saw what he thought was a badly bruised fingernail, then realized to his surprise that it had been painted black with nail polish.

“Where are you from, sailor?” He urgently wanted to keep the conversation going, feeling that any loss of consciousness would be the end.

“Boise,” he gasped.

“Is that your hometown? Or your boat?”

The young man’s eyes focused on him for a moment, and after a thirty-year career that began as a medic in a war zone, Cote recognized a man who was ready to die.

“Boat,” he sighed.

It was the last word he ever spoke.

Near Morristown, Tennessee

Danny Jabo and his young cousin were walking slowly through the cornfield, crunchy with snow, their shotguns held loosely at their sides. Little Mike wouldn’t shut up. He was from the talkative cohort of the Jabo clan, and Danny thought the boy’s chatter would be a suitable replacement for the noise normally generated by a team of good dogs.

“Over there?” he asked, pointing.

Danny nodded, as they walked toward a fence line that the farmer, yet another distant relative, had indicated was thick with cottontails.

“How close do we need to get?” he asked.

Danny put his finger to his lips, shushing him.

“Closer?”

Danny was finishing up three weeks of leave, his all-too-brief shore tour at the Purdue University ROTC unit complete. He’d spent every minute he could on that shore tour with Angi, his wife, even declining to get an MBA on the Navy’s dime while he was there. His fellow officers thought he was crazy to decline, but to Danny the thought of life in a corporate office building was horrifying even if it was, they all told him, inevitable and financially worth the misery. So instead of finance classes and group PowerPoint projects, he savored twenty-four months of coming home at night and sleeping in the same bed with his wife, home-cooked meals, and especially being present for their daughter’s birth: such was certainly not a guarantee to anyone in the nuclear navy. To him that was the biggest gift of his shore tour, not a degree in business. But with the shore tour drawing to a close, and orders to the USS Louisville in Pearl Harbor in hand, they’d headed back to Tennessee to visit the relatives a last time. Danny felt a familial obligation to teach his young cousin how to hunt, even if the kid did seem incapable of shutting up long enough to aim.

Danny stopped, about thirty feet short of the fence row.

“Did you see one?”

Danny shook his head. “Not yet,” he whispered. “When you see one, don’t aim for the white of the tail, even though you’ll want to — you’ll shoot behind him and miss.”

Little Mike nodded his head, his eyes alive with excitement. “Should we get closer?”

“We’ll take a few more steps and stop again,” said Danny.

“Will they bolt if we get closer?”

“If they’re in there, they already see us.” And hear us he thought. “Sometimes they bolt when you’re moving, but sometimes they move when you stop, because they think they’ve been spotted. It scares’m out of hiding. You ready?”

Little Mike nodded.

They took three steps forward and stopped again. Mike raised his gun as Danny did. They waited, held their breath for two seconds, and then a group of rabbits broke free from the undergrowth, running crazily in all directions.

Danny let Mike shoot the one that ran right toward them. Mike fired, snow flew up, and the lifeless rabbit popped backwards. Danny swung around to follow the rest of them.

“I got him!” said Mike. “Holy shit, I got him!”

“Watch your mouth,” said Danny, as he lowered himself to one knee, the Remington 870 shotgun on his shoulder. The boy’s cursing was a recent problem, and the whole family was working to cure him.

“There’s four of them!” said Mike. “Four!”

Danny shut out the boy’s voice as he focused, he knew he had maybe a second to make a decision, less if he wanted to get off two shots. He quickly pulled the trigger, cleanly hitting one that was speeding by from right to left, dead before it stopped cart-wheeling in a snowy clump. The boy shouted something in excitement but Danny didn’t hear a word. He pumped the gun, the spent yellow shell flying as a fresh one replaced it in the chamber.

There were three left, and their terrified zigzags were not as random as they appeared: all three were moving rapidly away. Danny saw that one was running almost straight away, while another angled away, falling in behind it. The third rabbit was the lucky one, as it departed his view and his mind at a right angle, just like the excited chatter of his cousin.

He waited until the two remaining rabbits pulled into line, one in front of the other, about two feet separating them. He followed them for a millisecond, then pulled the trigger.

They seemed to be struck at the same instant, both of them flying into the air and landing lifelessly next to each other.

“Great shot! You got two in one shot! Jesus Christ!”

Danny stood up and looked down at his beaming cousin. With his left hand he lightly slapped him on the back of his head, knocking his hunting cap off.

“I told you to watch your mouth, boy.”

He picked up his hat, grinning from ear to ear. “Will you show me how to dress them?”

Danny smiled now. “Got a knife?”

The boy proudly pulled a hunting knife from his boot, its blade shining in the winter sun.

They tromped up the stairs to the farmhouse and Little Mike burst through the door, two rabbits in each hand, as Danny made sure both guns were safe and propped them on the porch. Mike was regaling his aunts and uncles with tales of the hunt already by the time he got in, talking so fast and excitedly that Danny wasn’t sure the older folks could follow it all. He was suddenly very glad he’d taken the kid, as he absorbed some of his thrill and the place swelled with the voices of talkative Jabos, while the quiet half of the family just nodded and smiled. The house was toasty warm and filled with the combined smells of a roaring blaze in the fireplace and something sweet in the oven.

“You kill some bunnies?” Angi walked toward him from the kitchen, their baby girl tucked in her arm. She still took his breath away, always the prettiest person in the room, whether they were in a farmhouse or a black tie Navy Ball.

“Yeah, me and the youngster took four.” Danny took the baby from her, looking down at her head. He longed for her hair to be red like her mother’s. It didn’t show signs of redness yet, but Danny had heard that could change in infants, and he hopefully inspected her noggin every day.

“Did he cuss at all?”

“Shit yes he did,” said Danny. Angi slapped him in the back of the head.

“Not in front of the baby. I’d rather that not be her first word.”

“My bad.”

“You should check your phone,” she said. “I heard it ringing a few times while you were out playing.”

Danny walked over to the coat hooks by the door still holding the baby. He fished his phone out of his jacket pocket with his free hand.

Three missed calls and a voice mail. Caller ID: COMSUBPAC.

Danny sighed. They rarely called three times with good news.

Pearl Harbor, Hawaii

Danny stood at the foot of the brow for a minute, looking the Louisville over. Angi had gone back to Indiana to supervise their move while he got on the next flight to Hawaii. He’d spent the flight wondering about his wife and baby, this being the first time the three of them had been apart — he knew it wouldn’t be the last. He’d also speculated about what was going on with his boat, what required him to get out there so quickly. Speculating was all he could do: on the phone they would tell him nothing. He landed in Honolulu, took a cab to the sub base, and now here he was staring at the boat that would be his home for three years. It would be the last time, he knew, that he could look at it with no sense of ownership, no sense of responsibility, no long list or anxiety about what needed to be done. All that, for a few moments more, was a mystery. For now, he could just look at her: SSN 724.

To an untrained observer, it looked very much like all the other submarines that lined the piers around the base: black, mysterious, undeniably deadly. Someone with a passing knowledge of warships would be able to see quickly that she was an attack submarine, as opposed to a missile sub, or boomer, like Alabama where Danny had spent his first sea tour: the lack of a long, flat missile deck easily gave that away. Danny’s previous submarine had been designed to launch long-range nuclear missiles. His new boat was designed around the more traditional submarine mission of shooting torpedoes, both at other submarines and surface ships.

Someone with slightly more experience could discern that she was a 688, or Los Angeles-class submarine, the nation’s largest class of submarines, a workhorse of the Cold War that had proven very useful for the new missions the force had found itself handed since the fall of the Berlin Wall. A close look at the bow, and the barely visible outline of the hatches for twelve vertical-launch cruise missile tubes, marked her as one of the “second flight” 688 subs, with the cruise missile capability that was an enhancement from the original design. The Louisville had, in fact, conducted the first war patrol of any US submarine since World War II, in the first Gulf War in 1991. On January 19 of that year, she fired the first shot of that conflict, a Tomahawk cruise missile that struck the Al Muthanna chemical weapons factory. The fact that the boat still had planes sticking out from her sail meant that she was not the most recent version of the 688, the “688i,” as in “improved.”

But Danny, with his experience and his expertise, saw far beyond the silhouette of the Louisville. He saw that the deck was painted and clean. There were few obstructions on the deck, and the only thing that connected her to shore were the shore power cables, the brow that he would soon walk across, and the two lines forward and aft that held her to the pier. The two young petty officers on the quarterdeck were clean-shaven, fit, and were resisting the urging of the tropical breeze to relax. In fact Danny knew they’d spotted him and were waiting for him to either come aboard or keep moving. Not all the seagull shit had been removed from the black hull of the boat, because that would be impossible, but they had diligently kept up with the relentless birds as best they could. The pier alongside the boat was clean too, the trash barrels were not overflowing and a load of zinc bricks had been neatly stacked. The flying bridge was erected atop the sail, and not a speck of rust was visible anywhere. Danny knew two things as he took a deep breath, stepped onto the brow, and crossed a small sliver of the Pacific onto his new home. With the Louisville, he’d once again found himself aboard a good boat. And: it was going to sea very, very soon.

He saluted the Petty Office on the quarterdeck. His name tag read Warner.

“Lieutenant Danny Jabo requests permission to come aboard.”

“Come aboard, sir,” he said, saluting back. “You must be our new navigator.”

Danny lowered his hand and stepped forward. “That’s what my orders say. Is the captain aboard?”

“Yes sir, I believe he is. Would you like an escort to help you find him?”

Danny detected a slight smirk in that, wondered if it was the attack boat sailor’s scorn for the new officer whose previous tour had been aboard a missile submarine: Boomer fag.

“No I’ll find him myself,” said Danny. “Just tell me where the elevator is.”

Warner hesitated at that, then realized he was being screwed with. He nodded his head and smiled. “Good one, sir.”

“Glad you liked it…”

He dropped his seabag down the hatch, then climbed down after it.

It was the smell that brought it all back more than anything else: a combination of diesel exhaust, amine, a lot of hardworking men in close proximity, and the smell of somebody cooking a large amount of calorically dense food; Danny guessed sloppy joes or beef stew. Despite what his new fast boat shipmates might think, Danny could find his way around the boat just fine. In fact, it was considerably easier since the boat was smaller than Alabama along any dimension: length, width, or, the measure with which maritime people preferred to compare total size, displacement. His old boat, the Alabama, had displaced 18,000 tons, more than some World War II aircraft carriers. His new boat displaced less than half of that: 7,000 tons. Despite the vast difference in size, however, the crew wasn’t all that much smaller: 154 men on the Alabama, 129 on Louisville. He was squeezing by a large number of those men as he made his way aft, and they mutually sized each other up as they rubbed by. They were in all shapes, sizes, and colors, and Danny liked them already, because they were his shipmates now. At the end of the passageway near the engine room watertight door, he found the man he was looking for.

He glared at a stack of orange kapok life preservers that Danny knew automatically had not been stowed to his satisfaction. He still had the same combative expression, the same gleaming bald head, and the muscular arms that he denied being vain about. This was his new commanding officer and his old friend: Commander Joe Michaels.

On Danny’s final patrol aboard the Alabama, they’d been on a high-speed run to Taiwan when their navigator went crazy and decided to sink the ship. Danny had been the communicator, Michaels the XO. It had ended with four dead bodies, including the navigator, and a collision that had nearly killed them all. In the aftermath, the Navy’s institutional wisdom had ended the career of their Captain. But they promoted Danny and Michaels, and made them heroes. When Danny first learned that he would be serving with him again on Louisville, he knew that it would be a tour filled with exhausting hard work, unreasonable demands, and profane insults. He wouldn’t have been happier if he’d been awarded another Navy Cross.

“Captain?”

Michaels turned. “Oh Christ… not you again? I told them to send you back to another boomer where you’d be more comfortable. Told them you liked those big toilet seats.”

“Danny Jabo, reporting for duty sir.” He dropped his seabag to the deck and saluted, and smiled despite himself.

“What are you so happy about?”

“Glad to be back on a boat.”

“Yeah bullshit. I’ll call Angi and tell her you said that.”

“She’s still in Indiana for now…”

“Then I’ll wait ‘til she gets to a place with telephones.” He extended his hand and Danny shook it. “I hope you’ve got your affairs in order, Jabo, because we’re going to sea in a hurry.”

“You know sir, that’s exactly what you said when I reported to the Alabama.”

“Don’t mean it ain’t true,” he said. “Follow me.”

They walked forward to his stateroom, and in what was too quick to be called an introduction, the CO shouted the name, or more often the nickname, of every man as they passed. Some were named, obviously, for how they looked: Bear, Red, and Stump. Some he called with the time-honored name for their positions on the boat: the corpsman was Doc, the supply officer was Chop, and the radioman was Sparks. Other nicknames were more mysterious, like Easy Money, Heavy Weather, and a Lieutenant jg he called “V-12.”

“Shut the door,” said Michaels as they entered his stateroom.

Danny did, and sat down.

“You meet the XO yet?”

“Not yet,” said Danny. “Where’s he from?”

“Did his JO tour on the east coast: I forget which boat. Was engineer on the Bremerton out here, was on the ORSE board before he came here.”

“Heavy nuke,” said Danny, carefully stripping all judgment from his voice.

“Heavy nuke,” said Michaels, nodding. “He’s been here about six months longer than me. Got along famously with the previous Captain.”

“Another heavy nuke?”

“I don’t know what you’re implying Jabo!” He playfully pounded the small fold-out desk. “Are you saying I can’t get along with these engineering types? Think they’re smarter than me?! Anyway, yes, he was a heavy nuke too, did a tour at Naval Reactors, blah blah blah. So I need to beat that shit out of him, teach him how to be a warrior.”

“Like me?” said Jabo.

“Warrior? You don’t get to call yourself this early in your second tour.” But Jabo could see approval in his eyes. “Anyway, that brings us to our mysterious mission…”

“Which is?”

“We’re going to Subpac in about an hour,” he said. “Get our orders. They’ll tell us all the details. Certainly I don’t know much yet, other than the fact that I’ve been told to go to sea in two days. But I’ve heard some weird shit.”

“Weird?”

Michaels rubbed his hand across his smooth bald scalp and sighed, then fixed Danny in his gaze.

“It sounds like we’ve got a submarine missing.”

“Missing? Sunk?”

Michaels shrugged. “Hell if I know. But we’re going to look for a friendly sub, and in about an hour we’ll all know more.”

Danny took a deep breath, suddenly feeling a sense of responsibility that he hadn’t felt in the past twenty-four months. He and his captain looked at each other for a moment, aware of the irony, or the fate, that had brought them together to look for a missing boat after what they’d been through together on their last patrol on Alabama.

“We’ve got an hour,” said Michaels. “Why don’t you go on the pier and call Angi? It might be a while before you get another chance.”

Danny looked at the boat as his phone dialed Angi, watching a Mark 48 torpedo being slowly lowered into the boat. The dark, forest-green color of the weapon struck him, not for the first time, as oddly beautiful. Angi answered.

“You see the XO yet?”

“He’s my CO now,” said Danny. “That’s going to be hard for me to get used to, too.”

“How is he?”

“The same. Called me a motherfucker about five times. The crew loves him of course.”

“Of course.”

She paused, awaiting the bad news. Danny could hear the baby fussing in her arms.

“You’ll need to handle the movers by yourself…” Danny was limited in what he could say on the phone by security rules.

“I know,” she answered. “Jenny called me.” Jenny was the Captain’s wife. Angi’s tone was flat, not angry. But she did sound tired in anticipation of what was in front of her: packing up everything they owned, then a drive cross country, then a six hour flight to Hawaii where, if everything went according to plan, all their stuff would show up and she would get to establish a new home, their third in two years. All with a baby in her arms. Moments like this reminded Danny that while he had knowingly volunteered for both the navy and submarine duty… his beautiful wife hadn’t signed up for this shit.

“You going to be ok?”

“We’ll be fine,” she said. “Call us when you can.”

They walked across the sub base together, the captain, the XO, and Danny. To the captain, everything they passed in Hawaii prompted a story, a tale of a bar that no longer existed, a stand- off between a drunk petty officer and shore patrol, and reminders of the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor that Michael’s recounted as if he’d been there himself to repel the attackers. The XO was quiet, shuffling a stack of files from one hand to another, occasionally peeking inside to verify he hadn’t forgotten some document.

“Didn’t you serve on a boat out here, XO?” Danny asked, when the captain was between tall tales.

He nodded, pausing in his search through a folder. “Bremerton. I was Engineer.” He stopped there, but seemed to sense that the CO and Danny were both waiting for him to contribute a sea story. “We did a refueling overhaul,” he said.

They turned toward one of those beautiful old art deco buildings that dotted Pearl Harbor, gleaming white in the tropical sun. The building, like the sub base, pre-dated Admiral Rickover and his nuclear navy, so it also pre-dated his Spartan ideal of plain, unadorned buildings in which form strictly followed function. And the function was, always, to slavishly labor toward the old man’s ideal of engineering perfection. The architecture of this part of the sub base was old, grand, and comfortable with the most traditional role of any navy: defending an empire.

“I thought we were going to Subpac?” said Danny, not recognizing their route. He had been to the headquarters building before and knew the way.

“No,” said the captain. “That’s not what I said. We’re not meeting at Subpac, we’re meeting Subpac.”

Danny tried not to look startled. They weren’t going to Subpac the building. They were meeting the two star admiral himself: the commander of every submarine in the Pacific.

“You ever meet him?” Michaels asked the XO. “You were out here the last few years. What’s he like?”

“Never really met him,” said the XO. “Saw him at a change of command once.”

They both waited for more, but the XO seemed to have difficulty taking the reins of a conversation. They marched up the coral steps of a two-story building at the edge of a courtyard.

Inside the foyer their eyes adjusted to the dim light as a yeoman checked their IDs. The walls were lined with black and white photos of the base during World War II. One showed a tender surrounded by dozens of tiny diesel subs, probably more in one frame than made up the entire modern Pacific fleet. They made so many of them, Danny knew, because they were vital to the navy’s Pacific mission, the only thing holding back the relentless Japanese advance. And because large numbers of them tended to disappear.

“Right this way, gentleman,” said the yeoman, and he led them down a narrow hallway that was lined with faded battle flags, many of them adorned with tiny rising suns for every Japanese ship they’d sunk. They stepped through a doorway at the end of the hallway.

“Gentlemen.” Admiral Wells stood in his dress whites to greet them with a grim smile. He was extremely trim, his shoulder boards with their two stars extending slightly past his narrow shoulders. It was easy to picture him running Hawaii’s famed Ironman race, which he had completed three times. He shook each of their hands in descending order of rank, finishing with Danny.

At the admiral’s side was a lieutenant with the gold braid on his shoulder that marked him as the admiral’s aide. On the other was a commander from the Naval Investigative Service whom Danny took just a moment to recognize. They stared at each other a moment.

“Commander Carr!”

“Lieutenant Jabo.” They shook hands enthusiastically. Although they’d met only once, it had been a memorable day.

“You two know each other?” said the admiral.

Carr explained. “I did the preliminary investigation onboard the Alabama. After the collision. Lieutenant Jabo was the first man I spoke to.”

“Of course,” said the admiral, remembering, looking from Michaels to Danny. “You two were both on there. With Captain Sellers. We went to the Academy together.”

They both nodded their heads, silently acknowledging that among the lives that had been sacrificed during that patrol, so had their CO’s career.

“Danny, you lost a finger, didn’t you?” He mildly amused by the idea.

Danny felt the XO, next to him, tense up as the admiral called him by his first name.

“Yes sir, two fingers actually. Lost them and got them back.” He extended his left hand so they could see the scars around the base of his ring finger and middle finger, dark pink lines like rings around the bottom. Everyone except the XO leaned over it so they could get a better look. Danny made a fist as best he could.

“I didn’t get back the complete range of motion,” he said. “But still pretty remarkable considering they spent two days in a zip lock bag of ice.”

“They shut a hatch on it, right?” asked the admiral.

“Yes sir, that’s right.” The surprise was evident in Danny’s voice.

“Don’t be surprised,” said the admiral. “I’ve read that incident report many, many times. Everyone in this building has. That’s the closet we’ve come to losing a boat since the San Francisco ran aground.”

“The corpsman cut them off,” said Michaels. “Lieutenant Jabo went right back to fighting the fire after he bandaged it up. Danny got those cool scars to go with his Navy Cross.”

The admiral shook his head in admiration. “What you did — what you both did — was a credit to the submarine force.”

“Thank you sir,” said the Captain and Danny simultaneously, equally embarrassed by the praise.

There was a pause, and then the admiral sighed heavily. “Well I’ll give you young men credit. You have a knack for landing interesting assignments.” He nodded at Carr, and Carr stood to speak in front of the large chart of the Pacific that hung in front of the room.

“Three days ago, both emergency distress buoys were launched from the USS Boise, SSN 764. They began transmitting here,” said Commander Carr, tapping the chart with a telescoping pointer he’d pulled from his pocket. It was in the middle of the biggest, most remote part of the Pacific, equidistant, it seemed, between Japan and Hawaii.

“You know what that sounds like, right?” said the admiral.

“Yes sir,” said both Danny and the captain, two of very few men alive who’d heard the sound of those beacons launching and lived to tell about it. Danny heard the XO clear his throat, perhaps an unconscious attempt at getting the admiral to direct some of his comments to him, the Louisville’s second-in-command.

“We believe they were launched due to timer reset,” said Carr.

The buoys were designed to announce a dire emergency onboard a nuclear submarine. Three conditions could cause the buoys to fire the explosive bolts that held them to the hull, after which they would float to the surface of the ocean and begin transmitting on a frequency monitored at designated listening posts on three continents. One, a large positive pressure inside the hull, indicating an explosion or fire. Two, excessive depth, well in excess of the ship’s test depth. And finally a timer that had to be reset manually at least once a day in the ship’s control room.

“That means twenty-four hours without action. And ignoring a fairly obnoxious alarm.”

“Accidental?” said Danny. “The ET’s forget to reset them?” It was inconceivable to him, but it had happened.

“We don’t believe so,” said Carr. “The ship had also missed a routine transmission a day earlier. Subpac had just sent a query message across the regular broadcast when the buoys began signaling. We haven’t heard a word from her since.”

The Captain spoke. “What do we think happened? Did she sink? Reactor accident? Are we going on a salvage mission?”

The Admiral and Carr shot a look at each other. “We don’t believe she’s sunk,” said the Admiral.

“We caught a trace of her on this SOSUS array a day later,” said Carr, pointing to a position on the chart. SOSUS arrays were extremely sensitive listening devices fixed to the ocean floor at key points throughout the world. “This was west of the BST buoys. She was still running quiet and deep at that point: they heard good screw turns indicating five knots. But remember — the buoys launched on the timer, not for collapse depth, or high pressure. In addition, if she sunk in ocean that deep, every tank would have imploded and that we should have heard loud and clear on the SOSUS net. We have no reason to think the submarine is not intact.”

“She’s just not responsive,” said Danny.

“And overdue,” said Carr. “As of noon today. So we have a ship that’s not responding, that we believe has not sunk. Based on that, we have three theories. One, some kind of catastrophic accident that has killed the crew, but somehow didn’t damage the equipment.”

“Like what?” said the Captain.

“Maybe some kind of gas leak,” said the admiral. “Johns Hopkins has been working with us on this, and the best they could come up with was a fire in one of the charcoal bed filters: it would burn quickly, and release enough carbon monoxide to kill everyone, but leave the ship more or less intact.”

“And she’s still steaming?”

The admiral spoke. “The geniuses are gaming this out for us as we speak, but we know it’s possible. With the equipment in good working order and the autopilot engaged, she could maintain course and speed for days. Maybe weeks. Especially at slow speed.”

“You’re not buying it?” said the captain.

“Not really. If it is some kind of equipment casualty, obviously it’s something we’ve never thought of. Or we would have fixed it.”

Carr continued. “The second theory is some kind of virus that’s wiped out the crew.”

“Any evidence of that?”

“No evidence,” said Carr. “But there are a couple of precedents. A Trident two years ago was hit so hard by the flu that they had to return to port — half the crew was incapacitated and two men ended up dying.”

“The Nevada,” said Michaels. “I remember that.”

“Thirty years ago, a sturgeon-class boat had meningitis outbreak that killed four men.”

They mulled that over for a moment.

“What’s your third theory?”

“Maybe she’s okay. Maybe she’s just suffered a catastrophic equipment failure, a complete loss of power, and is adrift and on the surface. Crippled but alive.”

“Seems like they would come up with some way to send an SOS,” said the captain. “Christ, they still have a flare gun, right? Battery powered VHS radios?”

“No one has heard anything, no one has reported anything, and we’re combing satellite photos for any sign of her. But it’s a big ocean — maybe she is out there adrift. Let’s hope so. The only thing we know for certain is that she’s in trouble.”

“So what do you want us to do about it, Admiral?” asked the captain.

“Find her and track her. And as far as your crew is concerned — everybody but you three — it’s an exercise. The details are in your orders.”

“And after we find her?”

“Attempt to contact her as described in the special procedure.”

“And if we can’t?”

“We haven’t decided yet.”

The trio of officers from the Louisville walked back across the base.

“Are we ready to go to sea?” the captain asked the XO.

“Yes sir. The reactor is shut down but the plant is warmed up. We could pull out in two hours.”

“Looks like we’ve got until the morning. Let’s rig for dive tonight, brief the wardroom after dinner. Do a reactor start up at five. Danny, you get ready for a nav brief tonight.”

“Aye aye sir,” they both said.

“Any questions?”

The XO said nothing, but after a few steps, Danny said “Yeah, I’ve got about a hundred questions.”

“I’m a busy man, Jabo. Give me your top one.”

Danny thought for a moment. “Why do we need to keep this a secret from the crew?”

The captain mulled it over for a while. “What do you think, XO?”

“Perhaps because they don’t want the crew to think about what’s happened to the Boise.”

“Could be,” said the captain. “Or maybe they don’t want the crew to think about what’s about to happen to the Boise.”

On board, Danny found Stateroom 2, his new home. He threw his sea bag on the bare mattress. His new roommate appeared at the doorway just as he was getting ready to turn around and start preparing for the nav brief.

“Sir! Lieutenant Vijayvergiya!” he extended his hand.

“Say that again?”

“Call me V-12,” he said. “Get it? Starts with ‘V’ and has twelve letters. It’s Indian. I’m your roommate!”

The kid exuded enthusiasm. And youth — Danny couldn’t believe that just one sea tour separated them. “Well, V-12, it’s a pleasure to meet you. I’m sure we’ll get to know each other soon.”

“You were on Alabama, right sir?”

Danny nodded. He wasn’t used to this. On his shore tour, the highly classified incident on the Alabama was unknown. But apparently, in the two years that he’d been away, it had become part of submarine lore, studied and debated by every man on a boat. “Yeah — I was there.”

“Can I see your fingers?”

“Maybe later.”

V-12 took the hint and stepped backward so Danny could exit. “No problem sir. Looking forward to it.”

Honolulu

Master Chief Cote walked into the windowless conference room on the seventh floor of the hospital where the investigators awaited him. They sat on one side of an enormous conference table. Directly across from them on the table sat two business cards, lined up precisely together. Cote knew they’d been placed there to show him where to sit. If the two civilians thought they were intimidating him, they were wrong. Master Chief Cote didn’t have a business card. But he had four inches of ribbons on his chest, topped with the silver dolphins of a submariner and a Republic of Vietnam Service Medal.

After some perfunctory handshaking, Cote sat down and read the cards. Joshua King of the Naval Investigative Service was the young, earnest man who seemed eager to start. The professorial older man, who appeared to be in charge, was C. David Connelly of the Center for Disease Control.

“Ready?” asked King.

Cote nodded.

With a flourish, King pulled from his jacket pocket a small digital tape recorder. He carefully turned it on, and positioned it on the table so its small blinking green light pointed directly at the master chief.

“Your name?”

“Master Chief Richard Cote.”

“Your billet?”

“Subpac Medical Liaison, Tripler Army Medical Center.”

“And you were with the victim when he died?”

“I was.”

“Did he say where he’d been in the previous twenty-four hours?” asked King.

Cote sighed. He’d been through all this before, many times. With his entire chain of command at the hospital in the first twenty-four hours after the death, even as the crew from the CDC was spiriting away the body of the sailor from the Boise. Afterwards, of course, as rumors swept the hospital, he’d been asked the same questions by his colleagues. He kept telling everybody the same thing: he knew nothing.

“By the time I got down there, the petty officer was already crashing. He told me he was from the Boise, that’s about it.”

“Did you go through his belongings? His sea bag?”

“Of course not,” said the master chief.

“Did you make physical contact with him?”

“I touched him. His forehead. And his hand. I’m assuming that’s why you guys,” he said, pointing to the older man, “took about a quart of my blood for testing. Hopefully the fact that I’m still sitting here means I don’t have what he had.”

The NIS man reviewed his list of questions, ignoring Cote. “Have you had any contact with his friends or relatives since?”

“Friends or relatives? You guys won’t even tell me his name.”

“Could you answer the question, Master Chief?”

“No. No friends or relatives.”

“Who else did you personally see in physical contact with the victim?”

“Petty Officer Wills, that’s it. But he’d been there all night, I’m sure there were others.”

“Have you had a fever since in the incident? Coughing? Sore throat or diarrhea?”

Cote reached forward for the recorder. King flinched.

“Hey…” said the NIS agent. Cote found the tiny on-off switch, and flipped it with his thumbnail, tossed the recorder back on the table.

“Can we talk like men for a few minutes?” he said.

“Master Chief, this investigation…”

The older man finally spoke. “It’s okay,” he said raising his hand.

“Can you tell me what the hell is going on?”

He sighed. “Master chief, I’ll tell you everything I can. And if I can’t answer you, I’ll tell you so, I won’t lie to you.” He turned to King. “Josh, if you’re uncomfortable with this, you can leave the room.”

The NIS agent pouted as he put the recorder back in his pocket, and then slumped in his chair in defeat.

“How about you start with his name?” asked Cote.

“Petty Officer Third Class Bill Dunham,” said Connelly. “He was an A-Ganger from Bakersfield, California. Smart, hardworking, but recently a bit of a screw up. Had been AWOL a few days before, reported back to the boat after being gone three days, a former shipmate thinks it had something to do with a girl. We think the captain was getting ready to take him to mast when he got sick. They brought him here, to Tripler, right before deploying.

“What was wrong with him?”

“We’re really not sure. Something fast, and obviously virulent. We’ve identified similar strains in east Asia but we can’t figure out exactly what he got or where he got it.”

“Had the boat been to Asia?”

“Not in four years, and the entire crew has turned over since then.”

“Contagious?”

“By the time you saw him, it obviously was not. Or you and I would be having this conversation through a wall. We’ll continue to keep an eye on you and your coworkers, but so far no one is symptomatic at all. We haven’t figured out the method of transmittal. We’re not even sure how deadly it is — so far we have only one victim, and for all we know his immune system might have been compromised.”

“One of the reasons you keep talking to me, and the others.”

“Correct.”

“What else?”

“We’re trying to figure out exactly where he caught this and how,” said Connelly. “That’s the most important thing. Obviously this is a deadly illness of some kind and we need to know more. The rate of transmission. The fatality rate. To do that, we need to keep track of everyone who could have come into contact with him during the contagious phase, whatever that was, if there was one. The only thing worse than a mystery illness is a mystery pandemic. So far, we haven’t identified any other victims, but it’s imperative that we find them if they’re out there. That’s why we need to know if you hear from any of Dunham’s friends or family.”

“Why don’t you start with his boat?” said Cote. “Isn’t that a logical place to start? See if his shipmates are sick?”

The NIS agent looked up at that, and he and Connelly made eye contact.

“Master Chief, you’ve finally asked me a question I can’t answer.”

“Can’t or won’t?”

King stood. “Thank you for your time, master chief. You have our cards, please let us know if you remember anything additional. Or if you start to display any symptoms. Especially coughing.”

“Will do.”

Cote stayed in the conference room a few minutes after they left and ruminated. He tried to think of how many men he knew aboard Boise.

Seven floors below, a young woman timidly approached the welcome desk. She wore low-cut jeans and a loose top that exposed a sliver of her taut, tanned stomach. Like every young woman on the island, she felt constant pressure to stay fit, because swimsuit season ran year-round. But while her body was young and beautiful, her eyes were red from crying, and she looked exhausted. The receptionist, a kindly older woman with a natural sympathy that suited her work, looked up from her Sudoku book to greet her.

“Hi, um, I’m looking for a patient,” she said. “I mean, I want to see if he’s here?”

“Are you family, sweetheart?” asked the receptionist.

“Um, no, I’m his… girlfriend.”

“And you’re not sure he’s here?”

“No, I’m not…” she choked on the words a little bit, trying not to cry. “It’s just — his boat pulled out, and he promised he would send me a letter on that last mail call. I haven’t gotten anything yet… so I thought maybe he was sick and I should check here.”

Sympathy welled up in the receptionist — could anyone possibly be this innocent? The poor girl was so in love that she thought the only reason for a missed letter was a hospitalization. She considered carefully what to say next. She decided on the spot that she would not be the one to dump an ice cold bucket of reality all over this poor thing.

“How long ago did he pull out, dear?”

“Four days ago.”

“Well that’s not very long is it? Maybe you just need to give the mail a couple of days!”

The sad girl nodded, and pulled a strand of blonde hair from her face. “Maybe.”

The receptionist briefly considered asking for a name and actually checking to see if he was in the hospital, but decided against it. She knew what the result would be. The boy wasn’t sick: he was just an asshole.

“I’m really not supposed to tell you if he’s here or not, if you’re not family,” she said.

“Ok.”

“But why don’t you wait a couple of days, come back and check again, okay?”

The girl sighed, defeated, but grateful for the older woman’s kindness. “Okay,” she said, walking back to the front door and into the unending tropical sunshine that always seemed cruel to the heartbroken.

The receptionist sighed too and watched her leave. She remembered that feeling so well, despite the years. She’d lived on Oahu her whole life and she, too, had had her heart broken by a sailor on one of these ships, despite the warnings every islander had given her prior to giving herself away. Maybe she’d given the girl two more days to think that the boy was still in love with her, two days of false hope. She was okay with that.

The officers filed into the wardroom at 1900. Dinner had been cleared but the pleasant smell remained, underpinned by a fresh pot of coffee that had been brewed in anticipation of a long night, the hundreds of check lists that had to be complete before the ship could go to sea.

Danny took note of his new shipmates as they arrived. He didn’t know any of the officers other than the captain personally, although in the small world of nuclear submarines, he was sure he would know some of their friends, their former ships, their former shipmates. Learning everyone’s names would be his first priority, but the boats they’d served on would be next.

Of course for the majority of the officers that filed into the wardroom, there were no previous boats — they were junior officers on their first sea tour, just like he’d been on Alabama. Of the 129 men on the boat, 12 were officers, which included the XO, the CO, and three departments heads: Danny, the engineer, and the weapons officer. That meant that of the twelve officers that filed into the wardroom that evening, the leadership of the boat, seven had never served on a boat before Louisville, and were probably in their early twenties. It was a sobering thought.

One of them was V-12, and Danny couldn’t help notice the way the other JOs deferred to him, listened when he talked, and greeted him first when they entered. While a little goofy, Danny thought, he possessed that great intangible that the nuclear navy sought so hard to instill in its young men: leadership.

The captain and the XO arrived together, the Captain sitting at the head of the table and the XO literally at his right hand. The XO, as always, came in carrying a thick stack of documents, which was beginning to seem almost like security blanket.

“Alright, let’s get started,” said the captain. “We have our orders. As many of you know, we are pulling out at dawn tomorrow. After a day of training at the Kauai torpedo range, we will proceed to Papa Hotel, submerge, and then commence a high speed transit to the western Pacific, where we will attempt to locate and track a friendly submarine.”

V-12 spoke up. “Is she wearing a NAU?”

“No NAU,” said the captain. “She’s going to be quiet.” Often friendly subs were given a Noise Augmentation Unit, or NAU, in exercises like this, to simulate the noisier boats of their enemies. And because, in reality, it was nearly impossible to track a modern US submarine unassisted.

The XO spoke up. “Part of the exercise is to see if we can do it. See if we can track one of our own with no help.”

Danny noticed how the captain had carefully avoided lying to them so far. They were going to track and find a friendly submarine — that was true. The XO didn’t seem to have as much trouble. Maybe the deceit was something that he and the CO had discussed, maybe it was even necessary. But it was interesting.

Danny rolled out a small scale chart of the Pacific across the wardroom table. JOs at either end held it down. He’d carefully drawn two neat lines upon it. The first was a blue great circle route that represented their high speed transit to the last known location of Boise: where the SOSUS array had heard her.

On the western edge of the chart was the second line, in red, one that connected the dots from the launch of the BST buoys to the SOSUS hit. The line connecting those two points of data represented the best estimate they had of Boise’s course and speed.

“We should be on station in four days,” said Danny. “That’s an SOA of twenty knots.” Those were the first words he’d spoken to his new shipmates in his capacity as navigator. Every one of the junior officers was staring at his hand where it hit the chart. He traced the blue line of their route with his finger and their eyes followed it intently.

“Alright,” the captain sighed. “Let’s get this over with. Danny, show them your goddamn fingers.”

Danny was startled a moment, and then he complied: flipping over his left hand and so they could see the bright scars. He flexed his fingers so they could see the incomplete range of motion. They all leaned in, fascinated, except for the XO who flipped through one of his binders.

“The last time Danny was on a high speed transit across this ocean, he lost those fingers for a few days,” said the CO. “But I was nicer back then. If any of you shitheads screw this up, I’ll cut your whole hand off.” They all laughed.

“At some point in the next few days,” continued Michaels, “Danny will satisfy your curiosity and give us wardroom training about the legendary USS Alabama. In the meantime, I’d like us to focus on the mission at hand. Got it?”

“Yes sir,” they all said.

“Where’s our operating area?” said V-12, pointing at the chart.

Danny nodded. “We don’t have one. We have this line in the ocean that we know she travelled on.”

V-12 sat back in his chair. “So we’re trying to find a modern, friendly submarine, somewhere in the western Pacific, with no NAU, and no operating area to even limit her?”

“That’s correct,” said Danny.

The junior officer smiled. “Cool.”

The first sonarman to hear it was Petty Officer Third Class Ivan Bradley. He was called by all, inevitably, “Crazy Ivan,” the name given to a radical submarine maneuver that Soviet captains made famous during the glory days of the Cold War. Bradley was twenty years old, brand new on the boat, as is often the case for men making a crucial, subtle discovery via sonar. More jaded sonarmen looked at every trace on their screen as ambient noise, commercial shipping, or their own ship’s noise, and had to prove to themselves that they’d found a submarine. The young men fresh out of the trainers of New London had spent hundreds of hours in a simulated ocean filled with sinister schools of Akulas, Kilos, and Chinese diesels. They looked at every trace in the water as if it was a submerged submarine and sometimes… it was.

They had heard whispers of her twice before in the last twenty-four hours. Just a few seconds the first time, before she disappeared into a cloud of biological noise. Six hours later, they heard her again, held her for about forty-five minutes. They thought they were closing in when she just vanished from their sonar screens, a chimera, the sound of her screw replaced by the cursing of Commander Michaels in the control room. They stood down but kept the tracking party in Control, and every man on the boat remained tense, ready to go, unable to sleep or relax when they knew, and hoped, that at any second they might be called to battle stations again.

Crazy Ivan heard her on the towed array, a long cable containing hundreds of hydrophones that dragged behind the ship. Well behind the Louisville and its own noise, it could peer far into the ocean the same way a telescope in space, above the earth’s streetlights and murky atmosphere, could see all the way back to the beginning of time. He closed his eyes and listened on his headphones just a moment more, hearing again the distinctive whoosh whoosh of a propeller barely audible above the background noise.

“Submerged contact, Sierra One,” he said, digitally marking it on his console.

The sonar supervisor turned a switch and immediately began listening to what Bradley had heard. He nodded his head briskly and grabbed his microphone.

“Conn, sonar, submerged contact Sierra One bearing two-seven-eight.” You could hear the adrenaline in his voice — it was what sonarmen lived for.

“Battle Stations!” called the chief of the watch on the 1MC for the third time in the last day, and they could hear feet pounding all around them as every man on the boat took his position.

“This is Lieutenant Jabo,” they heard on the mike. “I have the conn.” While he was brand new to the boat, the men of sonar nodded at each other upon hearing his voice: they’d unanimously decided earlier in the watch that Jabo’s presence on the conn would give them the best chance of success.

He’d taken the conn from Captain Michaels, who’d beaten him to control by just seconds. The XO stood in a corner of the control room, a stop watch around his neck, the freshly-laminated pages of the special procedure in his hands.

“Right full rudder,” said Danny. “Steady on course zero-three-zero.” He spoke into the microphone above his head that had been switched on. “Sonar, Conn, coming right for TMA.”

“Sonar conn, aye,” they responded. The Louisville needed to turn, so they could see how it affected the relative motion of the submarine in front of them, a necessary step in determining its course and speed: it was an art called Target Motion Analysis. A skilled officer, like Danny, would turn the ship in a way that maximized the information they got out of the move, in the least time, while also putting the ship in a better attack position. Two maneuvers were better than one, and three better still, but Danny had carefully studied the charts after the last two failed approaches. He was going to make one maneuver, turn toward the target, and close rapidly. It evoked the aggressive Soviet tactics of old, a contrast to the scientific, patient approaches of most American captains. The Soviets, it was said, trained their men to need just three things in order to shoot an enemy: a torpedo, a bearing, and a will to shoot.

The ship turned as Danny had ordered, and the towed array behind her became unstable. As they knew it would, the trace of their target disappeared. They only hoped this time, as the towed array stabilized, it would reappear. With a few seconds to wait, Danny looked at the screen in front of him trying to glean what historical information he could. Michaels tapped the screen.

“That her?” he said, pointing to the faintest of white lines.

“That’s it,” said Danny.

The sonar supervisor had made his way to control. “I listened myself before we turned. I definitely heard propeller noises.”

“Very well,” said Danny, peering at the screen. While sonar was sound, outside the sonar room it was most often converted into a visual display, lines whose brightness varied with the intensity of the volume. The trace they were all studying intently was barely visible before they turned, and had now disappeared entirely. Danny was quietly worried that they would lose their target while turning, as they’d done twice before in the last day.

The helmsman spoke. “Sir, ship is steady on zero-three-zero.”

“Very well,” said Danny. They waited for the sonar array behind them to straighten out and stabilize so they could see once again.

After what seemed like an eternity, an amplified voice from sonar: “Sir the towed array is stable.”

“Very well.”

As Danny stared at the screen, the captain stared over his shoulder, so close Danny could smell the coffee on his breath.

“That’s it,” they said at the same time, tapping the screen. The trace had reappeared off their port bow, incrementally louder as they were closer.

At least three people in the control room ran a calculation based on the submerged contact’s change in bearing rate with the Louisville’s new course, to estimate its range and speed. These were consolidated on the Time Range chart at the front of the control room, so the OOD could see an aggregation of all the estimates of range.

“Two thousand yards?” said Michaels.

“Looks like it,” said Danny. He was picturing the sub in front of them.

“Conn, Sonar, we’re starting to pick it up on the sphere.”

Danny turned a switch on the display and they could see. The spherical sonar array was a fixed ball of hydrophones on the very front of the ship, encased with an acoustically permeable fiberglass dome. It couldn’t see as far as the towed array, or see behind the ship at all, but it also didn’t get unstable every time the ship moved, and when it gained contact, it provided more precise data. More importantly, the target’s visibility on the sphere confirmed that they were getting closer to each other.

“Sonar conn, coming left to continue to close range.”

“Conn sonar aye.”

Danny gauged their closing speed in his mind. “Left five degrees rudder, steady course zero-zero-zero.”

“A thousand yards,” said Michaels. “That’s what we are shooting for.”

“A thousand yards, aye sir.”

They watched the estimate of the sub’s distance decrease, and the growing brightness of the signal in front of them.

Danny counted off the range in his head, using the three minute rule. If they were closing at three knots, they would close at 300 yards every three minutes. One hundred yards every minute. That meant on current course it would take roughly… nine minutes to close to nine hundred yards.

It seemed like forever.

They stayed the course, watching as the signal grew stronger and clearer on their screen. Finally Michaels stood up straight and shouted out to the crowded control room.

“Everybody ready?!” He turned to the XO who now held the stopwatch in his hand.

“Go, Danny.”

Danny looked up to microphone above his head. “Fire water slug from tube one!”

The torpedo room acknowledged the order and instantly Danny felt the force of the shot in his feet, and his ears popped with the change in pressure.

The XO clicked his stop watch and waited. “Ten seconds!”

“Fire water slug from tube two,” said Danny. Again the order was instantly acknowledged and carried out.

“Ten seconds!” said the XO again after a brief wait. Danny picked up the microphone for the underwater telephone and read from the laminated sheet in his hand.

“Boise this is Louisville do you read? Boise this is Louisville do you read?”

Several seconds passed before they heard the garbled message return to them, a sound like a drowning man. “Louisville this is range control. All clear, return to station.”

“That’s what we’ve been waiting for!” shouted the captain, and the control room cheered.

The captain looked at Danny. “Good job, Danny.”

“Thank you sir.”

“I guess that completes our training phase.”

The XO had made his way toward them. “Just in time — they only gave us twenty-four hours. We should get our final orders when we get to periscope depth.

“Then away we go,” said the captain. “Let’s the three of us go debrief in the wardroom,”

Danny poured himself a cup of coffee and watched the XO fidget with his stopwatch.

“Well that was fun, wasn’t it?” said the Captain.

“Yes sir.”

“Nice work up there Danny. XO, did we miss anything?”

He nodded. “No sir. I’m sure Subpac will have some critique for us in this transmission. But to me it looks like we acquired the drone and then followed the special procedure perfectly.”

“It just took us three tries,” said the captain with a sigh. “And it’s only going to get harder.”

“How so?” said Danny.

The captain shrugged. “Well for one thing we had a very limited area to search out here on the range. We have no idea where the Boise is, really. And I don’t give a shit what those guys say, a real 688 doesn’t make that much noise. Especially at five knots.”

“We’ll have to track her on transients,” said the XO. “If they don’t know they’re being tracked, maybe they’ll be noisy.”

“Let’s hope they’re really fucking noisy.”

Danny wandered back up to control where the OOD was turning slowly on the periscope, and the ship bobbed almost imperceptibly near the surface of the calm Hawaiian waters. V-12 appeared at his side.

“Nice work, sir!” he said.

“Just following the script.”

“Well the two OODs before you couldn’t seem to get it done.”

“Just lucky,” said Danny. “What are you doing up here?”

“I’m communicator, remember? Waiting for the message from Subpac. It’s coming off-line encrypted, the captain told me to bring it personally to him.”

Danny and V-12 stared at each other for a second, V-12 waiting for him to offer something. “Why do you think that is?”

“Why what is?” said Danny.

“Why offline? Why would they send exercise notes to be personally decrypted by the Captain?”

“Who knows?” said Danny. “That’s why they send it offline. It’s a secret.”

V-12 kept smiling. “And why aren’t we using exercise names on the underwater telephone? Isn’t that weird, to call out our real names, in the middle of the Pacific, in the blind?”

“If you say so,” said Danny, shrugging.

V-12 saw he wasn’t going to get any new information, and ambled off to radio, the quizzical smile still on his face.

Danny sighed. It was a nuclear submarine, filled with smart men. He wondered again how long they would be able to keep their mission secret. He wondered how long they should.