Ghost Sub

Jabo looked at the captain as the control room behind him lapsed into a shocked silence. V-12 stared at his feet to avoid looking at the seething XO. Their second-in-command suddenly turned to leave, but as he did so he ran right into the messenger, who was holding a tray full of steaming coffee mugs for the morning watch section. Coffee spilled everywhere and the XO stomped right through it as he stormed out.

“Congratulations,” said the captain after a pause. “You’re an OOD now. Usually we have a little ceremony.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“You can thank me by finding the Boise.”

“Aye, aye, sir.” He tried to think of something intelligent to say. “Who’s taking my slot in the engine room?”

The captain looked around. “Lieutenant Bannick can do the duty.”

At first Jabo thought: great, another officer in the wardroom pissed at me. But when he turned, he saw nothing but gratitude on Bannick’s face.

Not knowing what else to do, Jabo decided to attack the problem. “Let’s take a look at the chart.”

He traced the course of the Boise, his red line, with his finger. “Ok. We have several pieces of data that show her along this track.”

“Several?” asked the captain.

“Two. More if you count the SOSUS hits and the BST buoys. I want to stay on this course, at five knots, stay right behind where we think she is.”

“But not gain on her.”

“Exactly. I don’t think she’s going slower than five knots, and this way we won’t run into her.”

“That would be lovely.”

“Let’s man battle stations at 0530, and wait and see if we hear that pinging again at 0600.”

“You mean wait and see if you’re right?”

“Correct, sir.”

“You’re going to have to eat a lot of shit from the XO if you’re wrong.”

“Captain… I really don’t care.”

Michaels sighed. “I know you don’t, Jabo. We’ve been over this.”

“Captain…”

“Let’s talk about that bullshit later. Trust me, it’s as tiresome to me as it is to you. But I feel I owe you some fatherly advice on that front. There’s more to a naval officer’s career than saluting the flag and giving rudder orders.”

“Aye, aye sir.”

“Anything else I need to put in the night orders?”

“Yes sir, one more thing. I’d also like to go down to 720 feet. For the rest of the day.”

The captain furrowed his brow, calculating. “That’s in the envelope,” he said. “But barely. Awfully deep for that slow speed. Why?”

“Exactly because it is a screwed up depth. I doubt the Boise will be that deep. So if we creep up on her for some reason, we won’t run into her.”

The captain nodded. “Good thinking Jabo. There are more elegant ways to locate a submarine than running into her.”

James was going forward, bar of soap in hand, when he ran into Lieutenant Jabo coming out of the control room.

“Sir.”

“Petty Officer James — how are you?”

“I wanted to see you, actually, sir.”

“I don’t know anything about fixing copiers.”

“None of us do. I wanted to see what our plans were for the next twenty-four hours.” He held out the soap bar so Jabo could see it. The broken gear had been pulled out, and the cavity had been carefully cleaned and smoothed. Tiny new teeth, to replace the broken ones, had been meticulously carved in the soap.

“I need to pour the epoxy in, and it takes twenty-four hours to cure. I want to make sure we won’t be taking any major angles in the meantime, or it’ll spill out. Have we got any drills like that planned? Any emergency blows on the plan of the day? Sir?”

Jabo nodded. “Should be smooth sailing. Plan on going to battle stations about 0530 tomorrow morning, then things should start to get interesting.”

“So we found what we’re looking for?”

“Let’s hope so,” said Jabo. “Both for the sake of our mission and my career prospects.”

“Sounds good sir,” said James. He started aft.

Jabo looked at his watch. “You going to pour the epoxy in that thing now?”

“Yes sir, I need to, if we’re going to start rocking and rolling in twenty four hours.”

“Mind if I watch?”

Back at the machinist’s work bench, deep in the engine room, Jabo looked over James’s shoulder as he worked. He put the bar of soap directly under the strong work light, picked it up, and blew into it to dislodge a speck of soap that had fallen into the mold. From a drawer he pulled out a small tin can of epoxy, and unscrewed the lid. Jabo smelled the paint-like odor.

“Ready?” said James.

“My heart is pounding,” said Jabo, and it actually was, a little bit.

James carefully poured the epoxy into the mold. It was thick and black, like motor oil. He poured it until it just swelled over the edge of the rim of the mold, but not a drop more. The black liquid shimmered, shaking slightly with the vibration of the equipment that was all around them: a fetal gear.

“Now what?”

“Twenty-four hours until it’s completely cured, like I said. It should set up somewhat in two.”

“What are you going to do with it for the next two hours?”

“I’m going to sit here with it, make sure it doesn’t spill and that nobody fucks with it. Sir.”

“If you do this right, the XO will be jacked. There may be a Navy Achievement Medal in it for you.”

“Great, I can’t wait to explain to my grandkids how I won my medal.”

“James, I’m not shitting you: this is really cool. Good job.”

They looked at the shimmering surface of the gear, and then Jabo excused himself and went forward.

The ship filled its day with all the routine activities that had to be done, in anticipation of battle stations the next morning that might last for hours. Thin sheets of steel were rolled into cylinders exactly the same diameter as a can of Navy-issue coffee. Trash was compacted into them and shot to the bottom of the ocean. A watch qualification board was held in the wardroom, an oral exam for a young sailor who had completed the exhaustive requirements for putting on silver dolphins. The ship went to periscope depth and acquired its broadcast, which Jabo reviewed in radio. Among the pages of routine traffic, three messages stood out. Lieutenant Perez received the orders he wanted, to the ORSE board in Norfolk, Virginia. Machinist Mate First Class Steele had been promoted to chief. And Petty Officer Third Class Wise’s wife had given birth at Tripler: mother and baby girl were doing fine. It was an unusual amount of good news in one broadcast, and Jabo was glad that during the brief, one-day break, they all might get a chance to enjoy it.

As he left radio, he ran directly into the XO.

“Morning, XO.”

“Jabo.” A long pause. “Broadcast?”

“Yes sir,” he said, handing over a clipboard to the XO for review. A separate copy had already been routed to the captain. The XO flipped through each page, scanning it briefly, and initialing it with his green pen. When he finished, he handed Danny back the clipboard without a word.

Danny considered briefly that it might be a good opportunity for him to kiss some ass, or at least make some kind of conciliatory conversational gesture to the XO. There were plenty of pleasant things in the broadcast to talk about. But in the end, he came up empty, and didn’t feel like speaking to him that much anyway. He supposed this was one of the things the captain had counseled him on: he needed to get better at faking it.

Three enlisted men sat around a table in Crew’s Mess, a deck of cards between them: Brady, the reactor operator, Cartwright and Deacon from sonar. They were going to play Hearts, coners versus nukes. They’d been given the day off, or as close to a day off as you can get on a nuclear submarine underway: no drills, no maintenance, no training. Word had come down that the captain wanted them rested and sharp for battle stations in the morning. The crew happily complied.

“Where the fuck is James?” said Deacon.

“On his way,” said Brady. “He’s doing something in the engine room, said he couldn’t leave the workbench for a couple of hours.”

Cartwright sipped his coffee. There was so much milk and sugar in it that it looked almost white. “He’s missing out. They gave us the day off and he’s back there working on something.”

“Yeah, what’s up? I hear we’re going to battle stations tomorrow morning?”

“That’s what the chief said,” replied Deacon. “It’s not on the plan of the day or anything, but he says Lieutenant Jabo figured something out, and we’re going to battle stations at 0530. We’re supposed to chill until then.”

“What did he figure out?”

“Whatever we’re looking for — he thinks he found it.”

“It’s the Boise,” said Cartwright. “The ship we’re exercising against.”

“And what do we do when we find her?” said Brady. Despite his pervasive nuke snobbery, he was fascinated by all things tactical, sonar and torpedoes, approaching and evading. Like many nukes, he harbored a secret fear that aft of the watertight engine room door, they were missing out on all the real fun. “Are we going to shoot her?”

“Not quite,” said Cartwright. “Just shoot some water slugs, talk to her on the UT, get her attention. “

“I guess Lieutenant Jabo can explain it to us in maneuvering.”

Deacon shook his head. “Nope, not anymore. They moved him forward, finally. He’s the battle stations OOD for this.”

“About time,” said Cartwright. “He’s a bad ass.”

“I heard he chopped off his own finger to keep fighting a casualty on the Alabama,” said Deacon.

“I heard he killed his navigator,” said Brady.

They all laughed.

“Well whatever he’s doing, it got us the day off.” He raised his coffee mug in a toast.

James rolled in, got himself a cup of coffee — black — and scooted in across from Brady.

“Sorry I’m late,” he said.

“What the fuck are you doing back there?”

“Mission critical work. Fixing the copier. You guys talking about this sub we’re hunting?”

Cartwright nodded as he shuffled. “Lieutenant Jabo figured out that she was pinging every morning at the same time. That’s why we’re going to battle stations tomorrow at 0530.”

“She’s active?” said James. “Isn’t she supposed to be hiding?”

“It’s an NAU,” said Cartwright. “I’m almost positive.”

“NAU?”

“Noise augmentation unit. A noisemaker. Somebody decided to turn it on for a few minutes a day to give us a sporting chance.”

“Why?” said Brady.

“Because,” said Cartwright as he began to deal. “Without some kind of artificial noise we would never, and I mean never, hear a Los Angeles-class submarine operating at five knots.”

USS Boise

The ship’s propulsion machinery continued smoothly pushing the ship forward along its programmed route. Nuclear fission turned mass into energy, which turned water into steam, which turned the ship’s main engines and propelled her across the Pacific. The air conditioners had failed, however, and the ambient temperature in the engine room would have soon killed any watchstander, had any stayed alive. It was 140 degrees in engine room upper level.

Other systems throughout the ship had also been affected without caretakers. Fluorescent lights flickered and went out without watchstanders to replace them. A bilge overflowed, sloshing dirty water over the lower level decks, with no one to manually operate the bilge pumps. The ship’s atmosphere was oxygen rich, as the oxygen bleed continued to provide O₂ to a ship that had no humans to breathe it. While not as hellish as the engine room, the entire ship was hot, one hundred and ten degrees in the control room.

With no cooling water, the operating fire control computer in the control room heated up until it began to destroy itself. The acrid smell of burning electronics soon permeated the forward compartment, as did a thin layer of greasy smoke that hung near the overhead. The image on the computer’s monitor began to distort and display nonsense, as its brain overheated, and then it finally went dark. Still, the computer inside refused to die as electricity poured into it and no heat could leave.

Finally temperatures inside the machine reached the point where wire insulation began to melt. With no plastic around them, bare wires in the dying machine touched each other and sparked. In the oxygen-rich atmosphere of the Boise, the sparks flared into electric flames that burst from the machine. Some landed on Lieutenant Dwyer’s beloved book of procedures, which quickly ignited. It was a thick book, and with nowhere to go, the white smoke quickly filled the forward compartment as the book burned and burned, the vinyl tile on the deck beneath it melting.

The ship’s autopilot efficiently maintained course, speed, and depth as the control room was filled with smoke, darkness, and the sound of tripping circuit breakers. All over the boat lights shut off as the ship’s electrical system tried to save itself.

USS Louisville

Jabo rolled out of the rack at 0300, too excited to sleep. V-12 was snoring lightly in the rack below, and Jabo decided for the moment to let him keep sleeping. He’d be awake soon enough.

He walked into control where there was a tense silence. Word had raced through the boat about Jabo’s theory, and everyone had an opinion. Some thought it was a set up, that the game had been rigged in their favor by an NAU. Others thought the opposite, that it was too easy, that they were falling for some kind of ploy and would fail in their pursuit because of it. They’d had all day to talk about it, and every man had an opinion. Either way, everybody knew something interesting was going to happen at 0600: either they were going to find their target, or Lieutenant Jabo was going to get humiliated. There was an air of nervous expectation in the control room, the planesmen and the dive all focused intently on their indicators, with none of the usual midwatch malaise.

Van was on his feet, Jabo was happy to see, alertly watching his team.

“Morning,” said Jabo. “So you’re the OOD?”

“Yes, sir,” said Van. “This is like… my third watch ever. And my first midwatch.”

“I hope it was all you expected it to be.”

“Yes sir,” he said laughing.

“Van… you don’t need to call me sir.”

“Nav?”

“Better. Although I’m not exactly used to that yet either.”

“Are you relieving me?”

“I will soon enough,” said Danny. “Give you a few minutes to eat, if you want, or shower. But probably not both. I’m calling away battle stations at 0530.”

Jabo glanced quickly at the bearing repeater indicator and saw that all was in order. They were going five knots, along the course that matched his best guess for Boise. And they were at that odd depth he’d ordered: 720 feet. Even though it made absolutely no tangible difference inside the boat, seeing that big number had an effect: combined with the quiet of the midwatch, and the anticipation of the crew, it felt like they were deep.

“You think we’ll hear her?” said Van, almost whispering.

“We keep hearing that pinging, whatever it is. It’s happened the last two mornings about the same time. So that’s what I’m hoping. If I’m wrong, I guess I’m going to be spending a lot of time in the engine room this patrol.”

“Anything but that,” said Van, laughing anxiously.

Jabo could see that Van was nervous around him, he had clearly tagged him as adult supervision. He felt a little bad about it. If for no other reason, he was worried that the young officer might not be completely forthcoming, for fear of fucking up. Fear of fucking up could lead to paralysis, even though it was a behavior that permeated some parts of the officer corps.

“You hear anything?” said Jabo. “Sonar got anything out in front of us?”

Van nodded vigorously. “No — nothing at all.”

“You excited?”

Van looked at him, smiling, afraid it was a trick question. “Yeah, of course.”

“You should be. This is going to be fun.”

“Can I ask a question?” said Van, nervousness in his voice.

“Of course.”

“Can I get a head break? My bladder is about to explode.”

“Of course,” said Jabo. “It’s about time I did something useful up here.”

He and Van exchanged course, heading, and depth, and then Jabo said, “I relieve you.”

“I stand relieved.”

Jabo turned to the watchsection and announced, “This is Lieutenant Jabo. I have the Deck and the Conn.”

It was the first time he’d said those words in three years, and it felt really good.

Jabo stayed in the control room when Van came back, gave him the watch back for a couple of hours, and then took it back again for good. V-12 came up about 0500, also too excited to sleep.

“Good morning.”

“Good morning, glad you could make it.”

“Wouldn’t miss it. Ready to give up the conn?”

“In a few minutes, let’s go to battle stations first.”

“Aye,” said V-12. He wandered over to study the chart.

At 0525 the captain came to control, his eyes alive with excitement. “You find her yet?”

“Not yet sir.”

“I knew this plan was bullshit.”

“Wait until 0600,” said Jabo. “That’s the pattern.”

The captain looked at his watch. “You ready for battle stations?” Jabo waited for the few seconds to tick by until it was exactly 0530. Then he picked up the 1MC microphone and announced to the crew, “Battle Stations!”

“Chief of the watch, sound the general alarm.”

“Sound the general alarm, aye sir,” he responded, and then sounded the clanging alarm. Outside control he heard feet on the deck, running in every direction.

“Christ, the alarm sounds loud,” he said.

“Good,” said the captain. “In this case, we want her to hear us coming.”

The Damage Control Assistant, or DCA, showed up and started taking reports and checking off boxes on his dry erase board. Within minutes he announced, “Sir all stations have reported. We’re at battle stations and fully rigged.”

“That’s got to be a record,” said the captain. “I think some people were cheating and not actually sleeping.”

It was 0535.

Jabo fought the temptation to look at his watch. He regretted calling away battle stations so early, because in that state, there was none of the routine business to distract him from the slow passage of the next thirty minutes. No tags to approve, no drills to run, no maneuvers to order. Just the undetectable motion of their ship through the ocean, and the Boise somewhere in front of them. V-12 fidgeted by the chart. Jabo finally looked at his watch.

Five minutes had gone by.

In maneuvering, Lieutenant Bannick looked over his panels one last time, and then signed himself into the EOOW’s log.

“Lieutenant Bannick is the engineering office of the watch.”

Each of the three enlisted watchstanders acknowledged in turn.

“Welcome back to the engine room, sir,” said Brady, the reactor operator directly in front of him.

“It’s good to be back,” said Bannick, and he wasn’t lying.

Like all officers on the boat, with the exception of the supply officer, he’d been to nuclear power school, spent his first year at sea in the engine room, and had in large part been selected for the nuclear power program to begin with because of his engineering prowess. He was comfortable in the engine room, and more confident, less terrified of fucking up than he was on the conn. Not that he didn’t have massive responsibilities back there: a nuclear reactor, about twenty feet in front of him, was his responsibility. But as Officer of the Deck, he had responsibility for the entire ship, for the mission. During his first couple of years, back here, they used to consider Bannick good at his job, before he moved forward and the cracks in his abilities started to show. He would never be a great officer like Jabo, he knew. And Jabo certainly knew it, the first time he laid eyes on him. He didn’t crave that responsibility, and wasn’t good at it. He didn’t feel any humiliation at being moved back to the engine room. What he felt was profound relief. As he sat down behind the EOOW’s small desk, he thought even the chair felt more comfortable.

“So this is it for you, right sir?” said Brady. “Getting out?”

“Already got my separation orders.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Brand Management at Kraft Foods.”

All three watchstanders chuckled at that, which stung Bannick more than he thought it would. Kraft was a great company, he was proud to be going there.

“What are you going to do there? Sell cheese?”

“Kraft is an eighteen billion dollar company,” he said. “They do a hell of a lot more than cheese.”

“Like what?”

“They make Jell-O, Maxwell House Coffee, Ritz Crackers, A-1 Steak Sauce. All kinds of stuff. “

The watchstanders still seemed amused.

“And they don’t mind throwing money around,” said Bannick. “They’re paying me twice what I make in the Navy.”

That got their attention, and it was completely true. They were all under the impression that officers were obscenely overpaid.

“So, what exactly will you do?” asked Brady. “Design a better Ritz cracker?”

“No, being a brand manager takes years — it’s like being a captain of a ship. I’ll be working toward that.”

“Is this what you wanted to do?” asked Brady. There was genuine curiosity in his voice, all the teasing had gone. “When you decided you wanted to get out of the Navy, is this the kind of job you were looking for?”

Bannick thought it over for a minute. “Here was my main requirement. For the rest of my life, I want a job where if I fuck up, it doesn’t kill anybody.”

“Well that rules out crossing guard,” said Brady.

Five more minutes went by. Jabo began to worry.

The XO was in control now, avoiding eye contact, seething with resentment. He stood directly in front of the conn, his back to them, close enough that Jabo could smell his Old Spice. He had the stopwatch around his neck, ready to manage the details of the special procedure, although he radiated doubt about the plan that Jabo had foisted upon them. They were all on top of each other, crowded in control, the captain, the XO, V-12, and him. This is probably something that doesn’t happen in corporate America, thought Jabo, a bunch of executives get pissed at each other and then lock themselves together in a small room for a few hours. Or weeks.

He had convinced the captain to act on that daily pinging because it was all they had, but what if it wasn’t Boise?

The XO’s doubt was contagious. What if it was some far away ship, some weird active sonar from a fishing boat, some electronic glitch in their own computers? What if whatever was making the noise on the Boise had stopped? It gnawed at him that it didn’t match up with any active sonars, or in fact any sounds emitted by any submarines, friend or foe. Exactly what did he have to base his theory on, other than hope? The situation had called for bold action — that daily pinging might be the only thing they get. But it wouldn’t make it any easier to stomach if nothing happened.

Jabo knew what would happen then — he’d seen it before. The XO would tear him down, it’s what guys like him were good at. The story of the morning pinging would be a seed to build on, a narrative that Jabo was reckless, or stupid, or worse. If they never found the Boise, he would blame this moment, saying Jabo’s crazy theory had taken them off track, diverted them from the objective, screwed the mission. He’d probably even work on the legend from the Alabama, saying Jabo’s role had been overstated or worse. He’d tear Jabo down, was just looking for an opening to do it.

“Be careful with that thing,” said V-12. He was pointing at Jabo’s hands, where he’d been unconsciously rolling and unrolling his copy of the special procedure.

“What? Why?”

“We can’t make a copy of it.”

The XO’s shoulders tensed in front of them and the back of his neck turned red.

“Sir, it’s 0600,” said the Chief of the Watch. Jabo had asked him earlier to announce it, although that felt pointless now, everyone on the boat was staring at his watch, waiting to see if Jabo was right or wrong.

“Aye,” said Jabo. He looked expectantly toward sonar, waiting for them announce the pinging.

Another five minutes went by.

Jabo exhaled loudly. “Maybe it’s our depth.”

“How’s that?” snapped the captain.

“We always heard her at a much shallower depth,” said Jabo. “Maybe we’re in a sound channel down here, away from the signal.”

“Is there a channel?” said the XO. “Did you shoot an XBT?” An XBT was essentially a tiny torpedo with a thermometer on it, attached to the ship by thousands of feet of copper wire as thin as a human hair. It was shot out of the signal launcher and the temperature of the ocean at every depth was recorded as it fell to the bottom of the ocean.

Jabo’s face was turning red; he hadn’t even thought to look at the acoustic profile when he ordered that odd depth of 720 feet. He was about to confess when V-12 appeared at his side with a long scroll of paper.

“This is from six hours ago,” he said. “Van shot it. Almost completely flat. No sound channel.”

The captain looked at the paper while Jabo silently thanked V-12 with a relieved nod.

“Alright,” said the captain. “Let’s stay here for now.”

Five more minutes went by without a word in the control room.

In sonar, they all stared at their consoles, focused on the noise coming in their headsets. It was a whirring they were all familiar with, the sound of an empty ocean, a rushing noise like wind. They’d been trained to pick noises out of that sonic haystack, and they were all good at it: that’s why they were the battle stations team. While their brains were focused on their ears, their eyes were focused on their consoles, which had a digital clock in the lower corner: 0610, and the minutes continued to tick by.

Then, from the cold, unknowing noise of the ocean in front of them came a high, watery ping, each pulse lasting one second with a second between. It faded, then disappeared for a beat, but then it was back, as distinct and regular as a metronome.

Jabo heard the sonar supervisor key his microphone before he said a word.

“Sonar conn, we have an active submerged contact at three-four-zero relative, designate Sierra One.”

Thank God, Jabo said to himself. He looked at his watch: 0615. They had fifteen minutes to prosecute the target.

The supervisor was in control. “It’s faint!” he said. “May not be due to range, may be due to our depth. But we’ve got her. Recommend we come shallow.”

“No time,” said Jabo. “I’m going to do one TMA maneuver. That’s all we’ll get. I want to confirm range, then we’re doing the procedure.”

“Aye, aye sir,” said the supervisor, trotting back to sonar.

“Do it,” said Jabo to V-12. “Like we discussed.”

“Left ten degrees rudder!” said V-12. “Steady on course two-four-zero.”

The helm acknowledged the order and the ship swung left. On the console in front of them, bearings were starting to stack up, each ping from the Boise, one green dot for every ping that sonar heard. The fire control operator adjusted the solution he had in the system to keep the dots in a straight line. The straighter the line, especially after the maneuver tested their solution, the more accurate their estimate of the Boise’s course, speed, and range.

“What have you got?”

“Looks like she is on two-five-zero, five knots, about a thousand yards in front of us,” he said.

Jabo looked at his watch, they had ten minutes left. He waited one full minute, to verify that their solution still stacked up.

“Captain, we’ve got her. Inside a thousand yards. Recommend the special procedure.”

“Concur,” said the captain.

Jabo picked up the 27MC microphone, a link to sonar and the torpedo room. “Fire water slug from tube one!” he said.

Instantly, he felt the whoosh beneath his feet and his ears popped as the torpedomen ejected a tube full of water toward Boise. Had there been a torpedo in that tube, instead of just water, it would have sped toward the target on an intercept course determined by fire control.

“Ten seconds!” said the XO, stopwatch in hand.

“Fire water slug from tube two!”

Again, he felt the rumble in his feet and felt the pressure change in his ears. He’d been on the receiving end of these, in previous exercises, and he knew how loud the sound would be to the Boise, less than a half mile away.

“Ten seconds,” said the XO.

Jabo picked up the microphone for the UT, or underwater telephone, a transponder that broadcast voice directly into the water.

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

They waited, but there was no response. Jabo’s heart was pounding, he felt excitement that they’d located their target, but was deeply certain that her lack of response was bad news. He looked down at the captain who was continuing to watch her dots stack up in a straight line.

“Sir? The special procedure is complete.”

The captain continued staring at the dots. “No reaction at all,” he said with a sigh. “Stay on course until it stops.”

They stayed behind her for another ten minutes until the pinging stopped, at precisely 0630, and the reliable, straight stack of green dots abruptly stopped growing.

“Ok,” said the captain. “Let’s go active. One ping.”

It was an option Danny hadn’t had on the Alabama, where their active sonar had been crude and almost useless. The BQQ-5 sonar on the Louisville, designed to use against a very quiet foe, was both sophisticated and powerful.

On the captain’s order, the same sphere they used for listening emitted a burst of sound so powerful that it actually boiled some of the seawater in contact with it. The sound travelled to the Boise, bounced against its hull, and returned to them.

“Conn, sonar, Sierra One detected on active.”

Danny and the captain huddled around the CODC screen to see the display. The signal was a smear that vaguely correlated with the solution they’d been building.

“Again,” said the captain. Sonar complied, sending out another active pulse. Again, the return stacked up, but the precision was bad, not nearly as solid as the sound the Boise had emitted on her own.

“It’s fuzzy,” said Danny.

“The tiles,” said the captain. “I’ve operated against a coated boat before, and it looked just like this.” The captain was referring to the anechoic tiles that covered the Boise. (The Louisville, not an “improved” 688, was not covered by the tiles.) The soft, rubbery surface was specifically designed to absorb and degrade an active sonar signal.

“Again?” asked Danny.

“No,” said the captain. “That’s enough. It won’t get any better. Break contact. Let’s go to periscope depth and tell them we’ve found her.”

“Do it,” said Jabo, turning to V-12.

“Dive make your depth one-five-zero feet.”

“Make my depth one-five-zero, aye sir.”

At the shallow depth they cleared baffles, turning to starboard to make sure no one was behind them, in their acoustic blind spot. With that accomplished, they were ready to go all the way up.

V-12 puts his hands on the ring for the number two periscope, and turned it. The cylinder smoothly rose until he could flip down the handles and put his eye to the eyepiece. He turned around completely once before giving the order.

“Dive, make your depth seven-five feet.”

“Make my depth seven-five feet, aye sir.” The control room went silent as the ship started coming shallow. V-12 slowly spun with the scope, ensuring their path to the surface was clear with his own eyes.

“Scope is breaking….scope is clear,” he said, continuing to spin around deliberately, searching the seas.

“No close contacts,” he said. The control room began talking again, giving orders, receiving reports. V-12 kept his eye on the scope. Jabo leaned over to him and whispered in his ear as he spun.

“So you didn’t see her on the way up?”

“No,” V-12 whispered back. “And I was looking.”

“Raise the mast,” said the captain.

The Chief of the Watch flipped a toggle switch that raised one of their multi-function antennas. They started receiving traffic immediately, routine messages that had been waiting for them.

“Are we ready with our outgoing message?” asked the captain.

“We’ve got the draft prepared,” said V-12, his eye still on the scope. “Just need to fill in our course and speed for the Boise, her exact position, and her response to the special procedure.”

The leading petty officer for radio had appeared, clipboard in hand, with the draft message. Jabo looked over the shoulder of the fire control operator and wrote down their best estimate of the Boise’s speed, course, and range, in ballpoint pen on the palm of his hand. He then took the clipboard and transferred that information to the blanks on the message template.

“It’s ready, captain.”

The captain took it, read it over carefully, and then handed it over the XO for review.

“I think we can all agree she didn’t respond, correct?” he said. His voice was uncharacteristically serious.

“Yes sir,” they all said in turn.

The captain initialed it and handed it back to the radioman. “Transmit,” he said. “They’ll be waiting for this.”

“Transmit, aye sir,” he said.

Jabo gave a quick look at the depth indicator to make sure they were staying on depth; this would not be a good time for the mast to dip below the surface and screw up the transmission. He tapped V-12 on the shoulder. “Take a break,” he said. “Let me take a look.”

“Sure.”

Jabo leaned over and put his eye to the scope, adjusted to the daylight in front of him. The sea was calm, but not glassy, about a sea state one. Pillowy clouds piled up on the horizon. He completed a complete rotation in slow, and then turned to what he knew was the bearing of the Boise, just a half mile in front of them, but below the surface. There was no sign of her, of course, just an endless plane of water.

“See anything?” said V-12.

“Lots of water,” said Danny.

He started turning, automatically completing the standard search of the horizon. A ninety degree arc in high power, 270 degrees in low power, repeat. It was relaxing in a way, the slow revolving, the luxury of staring a long distance ahead. Normally underway your eyes never had to focus on anything more than a few feet away.

As the adrenalin subsided it gave way briefly to pride, happiness with himself for finding the Boise. But that was quickly replaced by a feeling of doom as he wondered what it all meant to the Boise, and what it would mean to them.

“Take it back,” said Jabo, and V-12 quickly replaced him at the scope. He made eye contact with the captain. The XO diligently kept his back to them.

On the mike from radio: “Conn, radio, receiving traffic from Subpac.”

“Very well,” said the captain.

“We’ve got it,” said the voice of the radioman. “It’s off-line encrypted. Request the captain come to radio.”

Without a word, the captain headed in that direction.

Jabo stepped over to the chart, to take a look at their position. The red marks he had down for the Boise were still there. He looked at the numbers on his hand, and put down, in red, a track for the course and speed of the Boise. He took a long, clear ruler and extended the line all the way to the left edge of the chart.

“Is that where we’re going?” said the Nav ET who had appeared at his side.

“No,” said Jabo. “It’s her.”

He pulled another chart from a drawer beneath the table, verified the position, and extended the track, in a light red pencil line, continuing it westward until it hit land.

The red line went all the way to Hong Kong. One of the busiest ports in the world. Manila, in the Philippines, to the south, was also a possibility. Or Taiwan, to the north, if they were slightly off. But Danny was confident in the solution.

He took a pair of dividers, and marked off days, at five knots, across the red line he’d drawn on the first chart. He adjusted the span of the dividers for the scale of the second chart and did it again.

Three and a half days until landfall.

USS Boise

The Boise was suddenly awash in noise. The report of the Louisville’s two waterslugs bounced across her hull, at ten seconds apart. This was followed by the watery sound of Danny Jabo’s voice as he hailed them by name. Finally the two pulses of sonic energy from the Louisville’s active sonar slammed into her. All the while, the COB’s alarm clock bleated dumbly from the Chief’s quarters.

In the control room, the fire control computer continued to consume itself, as fire and heat combined to destroy it. The breaker to the machine opened, but not before the short circuits inside it caused a giant surge of electricity.

Electrical breakers upstream of the computer also sensed the over current, and efficiently began tripping open, to protect the ship’s overall electric system from whatever was wrong, to isolate whatever problem in front of them. A breaker just outside the control room, controlling power to an array of low voltage circuits, tripped open with a loud kachunk, and power to the computer was cut off. With no electricity, the fire quickly subsided, as it burned what it could inside the machine and quickly died out.

Electricity for a number of systems went through the same breaker, including power to the chief’s quarters. All the lights went off.

The red digital numbers on the COB’s alarm clock went dark.

USS Louisville

The captain stayed in radio for what seemed like a long time, and Jabo kept the ship at periscope depth, in case they needed to send a message again quickly. The off-line encryption process was cumbersome, and required the captain to check each character in a message against a book that only he possessed, to translate the message one character at a time. Undoubtedly he would double check his work since he would have no radioman to assist him. After about thirty minutes, the captain came back into control, his face grim, a message hardcopy in his hand.

“Get a relief,” he said to Jabo. “I need you and the XO in the wardroom.”

“Aye sir.”

“And tell your relief to get us back on station, following the Boise.”

“Aye sir.”

A few minutes later the three of them were in the wardroom.

“We have our orders,” said the captain. He looked down at the paper in his hands, seemingly searching for the words. “They want us to sink her.”

“Jesus,” said Jabo.

The XO nodded without saying anything.

“That’s what it says,” said the captain. “My God. I’m going to sink a US submarine.”

“When?” said the XO.

“As soon as we can,” said the captain. “I’m thinking another twenty-four hours, when we hear the mystery pinging again and we can confirm her position.”

“I looked at the chart,” said Jabo, numbly. “She’s heading right for Hong Kong. She’ll be there in three days. I’m sure there’s no alternative.”

“And we’re the lucky bastards who get to do it.”

For a minute they all contemplated the magnitude of what they were being asked to do, but then Jabo started thinking about the specifics they needed to complete the mission: he couldn’t help himself. “We’ll need to load warshots in the tubes,” he said.

“All four,” said the captain. “And plan on shooting two. God help us if we can’t hit her with two.”

“What do we tell the crew?” said Jabo. “They know it’s the Boise out there. And they’ll know we’re shooting real torpedoes.”

“We can tell them it’s part of the exercise,” said the XO, the first words he spoken. “Tell them the Boise has been replaced overnight by a drone.”

“No,” said the captain. “I’m telling the crew the truth. I’ve already decided.”

“Does it say that in our orders?” asked the XO.

“It doesn’t say not to,” said the captain. “And I’ll be damned if I ask these men to destroy a US submarine without even telling them what the hell they’re doing.”

“But their clearance level…” said the XO.

“XO, this is it for me. This is the thing my career has led to, the thing I’ll be remembered for in the submarine force, if I’m remembered for anything. And in addition to following orders, I have to be concerned about the judgment of history. About right and wrong.”

“Ok,” said the XO quietly. “When do you want to tell them?”

The captain thought it over for a minute. “Let’s have officer training after dinner, right here. I’ll tell the wardroom in person. After that I’ll get on the 1MC and tell the whole crew.”

The mood of the crew was festive, as everyone knew they had done the impossible: they’d tracked a Los Angeles class submarine. The cooks, in response, cooked steak and giant crab legs that extended past the edge of every man’s plate. For dessert, the supply officer had held back a few five gallon buckets of real ice cream for a special occasion, and he brought them all out, three in crew’s mess and one in the wardroom.

The mood in the wardroom, too, was festive, the officers’ spirits soaring with the success of the exercise and the quality of their food. The cooks had even laid out a white linen table cloth to enhance the atmosphere.

But Danny couldn’t enjoy the food, he knew what they were going to do in the morning. The XO, too, seemed to share his somber mood, although few seemed to notice because he was always so dour. But Danny was surprised by the captain. While not exactly light-hearted, he did seem to be in a good mood. He seemed happy but not ebullient, jovial in a reflective kind of way. He always liked telling sea stories, but his stories that night were less bawdy than normal, more reminiscences of a long, successful career. To Danny, it felt vaguely like a retirement ceremony.

“You guys ever hear of Captain Wreford-Brown?” he asked when the conversation paused. “I met him once.”

Everyone nodded their heads.

“No? Never heard of him? Shame on you, submariners. He should be a hero of yours. How about the HMS Conqueror?”

Again, no one knew the reference.

“Okay, I’ve got an easy one. How about the General Belgrano? Just you JO’s — everybody know it?”

Every junior officer nodded his head.

“Go ahead, tell us Bannick.”

He laughed nervously and wiped his mouth with a napkin. “Sir, I believe the General Belgrano was an Argentinian warship sunk by a British submarine during the Falklands War.”

“Very good Bannick. And you know the significance of that to us?”

“It’s the only ship ever sunk by a nuclear submarine at war.”

“Absolutely correct,” said the Captain. “And she was sunk by the HMS Conqueror, commanded by Chris Wreford-Brown.”

“You met him, sir?”

“I did,” said the captain. “He spoke at the Pentagon when I was there on my shore tour. He’s retired now — manages a zoo in Devon, England.”

There was laughter around the table, and the captain joined in. “Hey, that’s part of our charter here — create good citizens that can contribute to society when they get off these boats. That’s something to keep in mind, apply what you’ve learned here on the outside.”

The captain cleared his throat. The wardroom grew quiet waiting to hear what was next.

“A lot of us submariners know the name of the Conqueror, and the ship she sunk,” he said. “But what a lot of people don’t realize is that the General Belgrano began her life as a United State Ship: the USS Phoenix. She was a Brooklyn-class light cruiser, commissioned in 1938. She was stationed in Pearl Harbor, was present during the Japanese attack on December 7, 1941. After that, she was in combat almost continuously, supporting General MacArthur and his island hopping campaign, as we took back the Pacific, one tiny scrap of land at a time. Bataan, Corregidor, Leyte Gulf: she was there for all of them, dodging torpedoes and kamikazes. Nine battle stars in all. By any measure, she was a tested combat vessel, and served our country well.”

Danny wondered where the captain was going with his story. Like many Naval officers, the captain was a history buff, and Danny wondered if he was lost in this story, or delaying the revelation about the Boise.

“We decommissioned her, along with hundreds of other good ships, at the end of the war. In 1951 we gave her to our friend Juan Peron in Argentina, and he named her Diecisiete de Octubre, the date of “Peoples’ Loyalty Day,” a holiday he created to honor himself. When a coup threw his ass out of office in 1955, they changed her name to General Belgrano, to honor one of their founding fathers.”

He paused for a moment, and looked over the room. “So most of us had heard of the General Belgrano, right?” They all nodded their heads. “But no one knew that was a US ship, right?”

They all nodded again. “That’s because she wasn’t a US ship anymore. When men and officers like all of us, from the cities and towns of the United States, left her and stopped caring for her, she stopped being a United States Ship.”

He ran his hand across his smooth scalp. “Gentleman, I guess all of us in the military at one point hope that we’re going to make history. Or at least participate in history. Tomorrow morning, we’re going to do that, although not in a way any of us thought we ever would. Tomorrow morning at 0600, we’re going to sink the USS Boise.”

A murmur went through the room. Jabo made eye contact with V-12, who didn’t seem surprised. The captain continued.

“The Boise left port shortly before we did. Soon after, she dropped out of contact, but, as we have seen, she has continued her journey, presumably on autopilot. The exercise we just participated in was designed to prove that no one is onboard, that she is a ghost ship, with no one alive. And she is continuing to steam westward, toward both friendly and not-so-friendly nations in Asia, and we have to stop her. Just like some of our comrades in arms might have to someday shoot down a passenger plane that is heading toward a populated target, out of control, we have to stop the Boise.”

“What’s wrong with her, captain?” It was Perez.

“We don’t know for sure. Or at least we didn’t when they briefed us in Pearl. Could have been a massive atmospheric problem, a radiation casualty, who knows. But the powers that be have decided that she has to be stopped, and we’re the ones to do it. I’ll be telling the crew as soon as I’m done here.”

The faces around the table were stunned and quiet. “We expect to go to battle stations tomorrow, just like we did this morning, and this time, instead of shooting waterslugs, we’ll shoot Mark 48 torpedoes.”

Jabo knew what they were going to do, and even so hearing the words, and seeing their effect on the wardroom gave him pause. Especially since he would be the OOD — he would be the one with his finger on the trigger.

But not really, he thought. Shooting a torpedo was not like firing a missile from a fighter jet, or throwing a hand grenade — it was a group effort. A complete team effort, with every man on the boat doing his part. Sonar would acquire the target, Jabo would give the order, a team of men in the torpedo room would align the valves that actually shot the weapon. If necessary, a fire control tech in the control room would steer the weapon toward the target. A dozen men, easily, would be able to rightfully tell their grandkids that they sunk the Boise. And that, thought Jabo, was why the captain was right for telling them all. They did have a right to know.

The wardroom had fallen quiet. Jabo wanted to break the silence and keep them focused on the task at hand. “What’s our attack plan, captain?” said Jabo.

The captain looked up, a little startled.

“You tell me,” he said. “You’re our battle stations OOD.”

Jabo thought hard for a minute. “I don’t think a standard two shot salvo is the way to go. That pattern is designed to account for evasion tactics, and to make it harder to detect us, the shooter. We don’t have to worry about either one of those.”

“So you want to go with a single shot? Be economical with the people’s million dollar torpedoes?”

“No sir. I think we should fire two shots, but closer together than the normal spread. Maybe offset just twenty degrees. Hopefully we’ll have thirty minutes or so to acquire her and get her solution entered with a high degree of accuracy.”

“What about active?” asked the XO. “Will we use that again?”

“If we have to,” said the captain. “But as we saw today, we can’t rely on it.”

“What about range?” said Burkhardt. “We were close when we found her this morning, right? Inside a thousand yards? Do we want to be firing warshots at that range?

“And how many do we want to load?” said Perez. “Should we put warshots in all four tubes? Just in case we need to shoot again?”

Soon the wardroom was engaged in a lively, productive debate about how to best acquire, prosecute, and sink a submerged target.

James had to drill the hole out slightly to get the gear he’d created onto the smooth axle. He wanted it tight, had purposely undersized the hole, wanting the plastic to grip the steel so that it wouldn’t slip around. But he was worried about cracking the new gear if he pressed to hard. He rubbed a little soap from his mold on the axle to lubricate it, and slowly pushed the wheel down to the small scratch that he’d made on the steel rod, marking its correct placement.

With the gear in place, he slowly reassembled the machine. He’d filed every individual tooth down until it looked perfect, but there was no way he would be able to tell how the thing worked until it was all assembled, until the gears meshed and turned with purpose. He’d gained an appreciation for the precision of the copier as he’d worked on it. And while he understood it well, there were a number of mysteries inside it, gears that appeared to have no purpose, limit switches that had no discernible function. But he knew that the engineers at Xerox wouldn’t waste any space, or parts, in the machine. It was fascinating to him, the philosophical differences evident in machinery. The machines he’d worked on in the military had been designed for reliability and ruggedness. Elegance was never an issue. And to hell with cost, too, especially on a submarine: the thing needed to work when flooded and shot. And if for some reason it broke, it had to be fixed by men at sea or Marines in the field. The Xerox machine had clearly been designed at every stage with cost in mind. Every wire was cut as short as possible, with no slack. When one gear could serve two purposes, it did. When metal could be replaced by plastic, it was. When they got back in port he would find somebody who could explain to him everything about the copier that he couldn’t figure out on his own.

Soon everything but the access panel was back in place. He went to control to get the danger tag cleared from the machine so he could turn it on and test it.

He was surprised to see the engineer on the conn.

“Hello, eng. What are you doing up here?”

He looked irked. “Captain called all the other officers into the wardroom.”

James understood; the engineer felt slighted. They were talking about something tactical and the captain felt he could be briefed later. “Well here’s our chance at some forward compartment glory,” he said, reaching for the tag out log.

The engineer raised an eyebrow, his spirits lifting. “You fixed it?”

“I’ll let you know in a minute,” he said. “Request permission to clear tags.”

The engineer took the sheet from him and signed it. “Clear tags. That’s awesome, James.”

“We’ll see, sir,” he said, already striding away.

Back in front of the copier, he took the red tag off the power switch and paused. He pushed it and nothing happened.

He remembered the small internal breaker, pushed it up, and pushed the power button again. The machine hummed to life.

He closed his eyes and listened as it clicked, and waited for the control panel to say READY. Everything sounded okay, but he knew his little gear wasn’t turning yet.

The READY light turned green. James looked around the office for something to copy. He found a sheet of paper turned over on the table, a flyer for the Hickam Half Marathon that had taken place a week before. He put it face down on the glass of the copier, closed the lid, and pressed the COPY button.

He heard a jarring click that almost bothered him, but the machine hummed and chuckled to life. He saw the warm incandescence of the copier’s light moving below the cover. Then, a pause, and a perfectly formed copy came out the other end.

James took it out and admired it.

The 1MC speaker next to his head clicked to life. “This is your captain,” it said. “I’m going to tell you men what we’re doing tomorrow morning.”

Jabo and V-12 rolled out of their racks together; Jabo let the young man in the lower rack exit first. They had both decided to take showers, interestingly, even though it certainly wasn’t required and they could have used the extra sleep. They were doing something important, thought Jabo, and maybe it would be better if they didn’t stink.

They toured the boat together. Every man was alert and ready. In the torpedo room, they were loading warshots into the tubes; they stopped and watched. Both because it was of critical importance for what they were about to do, and because it was a strangely beautiful operation to watch.

The Mark 48 torpedoes were nineteen feet long, taking up almost all the room available in the torpedo room. They weighed 3,500 pounds each, 650 pounds of which were the high explosives in the warhead. They could be steered via miles of thin copper wire that connected the weapon to the ship, and each weapon contained both active and passive sonar of its own. Danny had once been at a security seminar while on shore duty, and someone had asked the admiral on the podium if we would ever have drone submarines, the way the Air Force had embraced drone aircraft. He responded that the Navy had had drone submarines for a century: they were called torpedoes.

The torpedoemen moved the weapons up and down in their racks almost silently as they eased them toward the tube. At the breech door, they verified again that everything was lined up, and then the weapon was smoothly, almost silently inserted inside, the twenty-one inch diameter of the weapon filling the tube exactly. It occurred to Danny that there was a kind of close precision that was distinctive to loading weapons, whether it was a Trident missile being lowered into its tube, a Mark 48 torpedo being loaded, or a shotgun shell being pushed into his Remington 870 at home.

Timmons, the leading torpedoman, shut the breech door when the weapon was fully inside, and wrote on its status board in grease pencil: WARSHOT LOADED. All the tubes said the same thing now.

“You think we’ll shoot all four?” asked Timmons.

“If we do, it means I’ve screwed something up,” said Jabo. “If all goes according to plan, we’ll only need one, but we’ll shoot two just to be sure.”

“Normal approach?”

Jabo nodded. “As deliberate as possible. We’ll get a gnat’s ass solution, take time to validate it, and shoot two weapons.”

“We’re ready down here.” He pointed at the tube in front of them. “Tube One is your snapshot tube.” Snapshot was a quick reaction shot, usually a defensive move, the submarine equivalent of shooting from the hip. Tube One was their bullet in the chamber.

“We’re not expecting evasion, obviously. Or counterfire. But good to know.”

“You ever shoot a warshot?” asked V-12, to both of them.

“Never,” said Jabo.

“I did, once,” said Timmons. “At the range.” He patted the side of one of the dark green Mark 48 torpedoes that was still on the rails, patting it like you would a horse in the stable. “But nothing like this. Obviously.”

Jabo had always liked the torpedo room, and torpedomen. They vied with the A-gangers for the title for the most “real” of submariners. In their ongoing rivalry, they often said that “A-gangers pump shit, we do shit.” It was damp down there, in the lowest part of the ship, and loaded to the gills with deadly weaponry. It seemed a vestige of an earlier age, when submarines were the most feared, and hated, weapons in the fleet. When submarines were invented there were old fashioned officers who, in their dress whites and gold braid, thought that submarines were ungentlemanly, attacking their victims from the unseen depths: a dirty business. Danny could see how a visit to the torpedo room might confirm that belief.

“Were you ever on a Trident?” Jabo asked Timmons. “You seem familiar.”

“Yeah, I was.” said Timmons. “I was on the Florida — gold crew.”

“That’s it,” said Jabo. “That’s where I did my observed watch to get my dolphins. Captain Sullivan.”

Timmons laughed. “I actually think I remember that. Did you fire a water slug?”

“That’s one of the things Captain Sullivan made me do. I was lost. Your LPO was whispering in my ear the whole time, telling me exactly what to do.”

“Spence. Yeah, you got lucky there, he took mercy on you.”

“For sure. I stand here before you today only because of the collective mercy of about a hundred petty officers who have kept me off the shoals. What’s Spence doing now?”

“Retired, I heard. Made chief and got out.”

“Good for him,” said Jabo.

“He was famous for an incident on the Baton Rouge. They had a hot run in the north Pacific, had to flood the tube and everything. We still train on it.”

“Well,” said Jabo. “Keep focused this morning. Because you’re about to be a lot more famous than that.”

They reached control at the same time as the captain. He grabbed Danny’s elbow as they were about to step inside.

“You okay with this?” He looked Danny right in the eye.

“Sir?”

“You’re about to sink an American submarine. Filled with the bodies of men like you and me. I want to make sure your head is on straight.”

“We’ve got our orders,” said Danny. “And I’m the man to carry them out.”

“No qualms?”

Danny shook his head, a little mystified. “No sir. I’m sure this has been looked over by every admiral in the navy. And that’s good enough for me. Isn’t it for you?”

The captain looked him over for a long second. “I guess I’ve just known more admirals than you have.”

Everyone took their positions in control in an exact repeat of the day before. The only difference was that everyone, from the captain down to the newest cook in the crew’s mess, knew what they were about to do. But if anyone was gripped by doubt, they would have the benefit of that inertia, the reassurance of repetition. It was something they knew well on Tridents, Danny recalled, where every man knew at an abstract level that someday he might be called on to launch the nuclear missiles that could end the world. To defeat the normal human trepidation about that, they drilled constantly on the launch sequence, both to become proficient, and to make it seem routine.

“Are we ready?” asked the captain, already on the conn.

“Ready, captain.”

“Torpedoes loaded?”

“Loaded sir. V-12 and I watched them do the last one.”

“Very well,” said the captain. “When the time comes, shoot tubes one and two.”

“Shoot tubes one and two, aye, sir.”

Danny took a look at Van’s paperwork, then went over to focus on the chart.

The bright red line indicating Boise’s track was right in front of them. They were trailing behind her, waiting for their 0600 signal, the pinging that had guided them in. Danny checked his watch: 0530. He also looked at their depth: 280 feet. A more normal depth that would hopefully prevent that would prevent anything like yesterday where the Boise’s sound had drifted away from them, perhaps because of Danny’s brilliant idea to stay deep. Now they just needed to wait for the pinging.

V-12 appeared at his side with an XBT print out. “Completely flat,” he said.

“Good,” said Jabo. “We should be able to hear her.”

“At 0600?” said V-12, checking his watch.

“Let’s hope so,” said Danny. Since his apparent victory yesterday, the whole crew had adopted as gospel that the Boise would helpfully broadcast a loud noise every day starting at 0600. Danny wasn’t so sure. “I’d feel a lot more confident about that if I knew exactly what that sound was.”

“Who cares?” said V-12. “As long as she keeps doing it.”

“Right,” said Danny.

He stepped over to Van on the conn.

“Ready?”

Van exhaled. “I think so…”

“The proper answer to that question is, ‘I’m ready to be relieved.’”

“Oh, shit… sorry Nav…”

“I’m just screwing with you,” said Danny, putting his hand on his elbow. “Relax. But I am here to relieve you. You’ve got about ten minutes to grab something to eat before battle stations if you want.”

“Ok… cool,” he said. “Ship is on course two-seven-zero, 280 feet, and five knots.”

“Very well,” said Danny. “I relieve you.”

“I stand relieved.”

“This is Lieutenant Jabo,” he said. “I have the deck and the conn.”

The control room watchstanders acknowledged in turn. Danny caught the captain’s eye briefly. They nodded at each other.

“You going to call away Battle Stations?” he said.

“I’m going to wait,” said Danny. “Give the off going section ten minutes to eat and use the head.”

“Good thinking,” said the captain.

In truth, Danny remembered how slowly the time had gone the day before, and he didn’t feel like staring at his watch, watching the seconds tick by for a full thirty minutes before anything happened.

At 0550 Danny gave the order. The COW picked up his microphone and announced “Battle Stations!”

There was less running around than normal, fewer heavy footsteps on the deck plates, because everyone was in position already. Within minutes, the COW announced that all stations had reported, and that they were ready. Danny thought that’s how it must be during war. Battle stations wasn’t an event, it was a state of mind, everybody ready to fight all the time.

“Very well,” said Danny. He picked up the 27MC microphone that connected him to sonar and the torpedo room. “Flood tubes one and two.”

The captain looked at his watch as the torpedo room acknowledged the order. “It’s 0600.”

“Aye sir,” said Danny. He was hoping that the pinging would start again immediately.

The inside of the Boise was almost completely dark now, including the Chiefs’ Quarters. One by one, the lighting busses had tripped off as a result of the small fires and the resultant circuit breaker trips. Most of the light that remained came from the indicator lights on the systems that remained working, lights that were yellow, green, and red.

Those colored lights barely penetrated the dark, or the thick haze of smoke that now permeated the ship. The air was unbreathable, filled with fumes and vapor from the fires and the slow destruction of the ship. None of the ship’s atmospheric control equipment was working, and most of the fans had tripped off, so the smoke was pooling in thick clouds in the darkness.

But the ship’s propulsion machinery continued on, designed to be the most secure, the most survivable, the last thing to die on the boat. The screw continued to turn and the ship moved forward, but these were like the shallow breaths of a man in a coma, signs of life that weren’t really alive, the core reflexes of a man whose soul had long since departed.

At 0615, Danny looked at his watch, and avoided eye contact with the captain. His eyes scanned the bearing repeater, checking their depth, course and speed. Boise had taken a few minutes to show up before, he reminded himself, as he fought off his anxiety that they’d lost her.

He wondered about her, out in front of them, what might have gone wrong. How long could a ship steam on without a crew? Maybe she’d gone off course, or taken a dive. Maybe she’d driven herself to the bottom of the ocean before they could shoot her.

It bothered him that the notion disappointed him.

“It’s 0625,” said the captain.

Jabo shook his head. On cue, the sonar supervisor came into control.

“No sign of her?”

“No sir. Recommend we go active.”

Danny looked at the captain, who nodded. “Three pings,” he said.

Sonar sent three pulses into the water in front of them, each about five seconds apart. The returns came back scattered across their display, two of them vaguely aligning with their solution, one completely off.

“Wonderful,” said Jabo.

“How confident are you in this solution?” said the captain.

“About fifty percent. But I’m one hundred percent sure that this is all we’ve got.”

The captain shook his head. “Well shit.”

They watched the clock tick by until 0630 passed without a sign. Silence descended on the control room.

At 0640, V-12 broke the silence. “I still think that solution is solid,” he said.

“That’s incredibly comforting,” said Jabo. “I do too. But I can’t shoot a million dollar torpedo where I hope she is. We need to hear something.”

“But we won’t hear her,” said V-12. “We’re going five knots, she’s going five knots. Same class of submarine. We’re making the same amount of noise. We’re probably making more, what with… everybody alive on here. Without that 0600 pinging we’ll never hear her.”

V-12 was trying to help, but he was getting on Jabo’s nerves. Suddenly, unexpectedly, he remembered that afternoon of rabbit hunting in a snow-frosted field in Tennessee. He remembered shutting out his nephew’s jabbering as he focused on his shot. He remembered the advice he gave the kid, how sometimes you needed to stop moving in order to flush out the rabbits.

“All Stop!” He had an idea, but there was no time to explain it. That’s why he had the conn, he thought, to make decisions like this.

The helm paused momentarily, but his hand reached toward the Engine Order telegraph automatically. He rang it up.

“Maneuvering answers all stop,” he said.

Jabo picked up the 27MC microphone, to explain to the captain and sonar at the same time. “Sonar conn, coming to all stop, let’s see if we can pick her up on broadband as we slow down.”

“Conn sonar aye!”

The ship slowed as the screw stopped — and it grew quieter. Danny noticed the ship’s depth and course starting to creep. The ship was like an airplane; it required forward motion, water flowing over its rudder and planes, to maintain control. As they slowed to a stop they would lose control of their motion. But he hoped this wouldn’t take long as their ship became almost completely silent.

“Four knots,” said V-12. Another two minutes went by. “Three knots.”

“Flood Aux four,” said the Diving Officer. “Officer of the Deck, we are losing depth control.”

“Very well,” said Danny.

At 0650, Danny heard the 27MC crackle. “Conn, Sonar, submerged contact at three-five-zero relative, designate Sierra One. We’re hearing steam ring.”

“She’s close!” said the captain.

“Snapshot, Tube One!” said Danny, as the fire control operator punched in the bearing.

A “snapshot” was a procedure designed to launch a torpedo very quickly, with a bare amount of information. It was generally designed as a defensive move; a shot at an enemy submarine that suddenly appears out of the acoustic haze. Danny had hoped to take a carefully aimed sniper’s shot, but instead it was a shot from the hip, into a dark room. But unlike a sniper, Danny’s bullet had ears and a brain.

The battle stations torpedo team executed the snapshot procedure quickly, without question, and with competence honed over hundreds of hours of practice. Within fifteen seconds they had thrown the switch that forced compressed air into tube one, and ejected the torpedo into the sea.

The Mark 48 torpedo came to life once it left the ship. Its fuel, a monopropellant that contained its own oxidizer, ignited immediately and turned its motor. The torpedo was swift: it was designed to exceed the fastest speed of the fastest Soviet submarine. It also began transmitting active sonar from its nose immediately, and sending that data back to the ship via the thin copper wire that connected her.

The sound she transmitted bounced off the hull of the Boise and returned. Like a shark sniffing blood, the torpedo turned and accelerated toward her target.

“Torpedo is away!” came the word into control.

“Very well,” said Danny.

“It’s homing!” said the fire control operator. Through its wire, the torpedo was now sending them telemetry data.

Danny looked at the fire control screen. She was 800 yards almost directly in front of them.

The torpedo counted down its distance to the Boise and broadcasted the range back to them. They watched the numbers on the screen countdown… and then disappear.

A dull thump sounded in front of them.

The torpedo was designed not to kill directly with its explosion. Ideally, it wasn’t even supposed to contact the target vessel. Against a surface ship, it was designed to explode well beneath the target. A steam bubble would then raise up against the hull, lifting it, and break the ship’s back.

It worked slightly differently against the Boise, which was not vulnerable to being lifted up in the air like a surface ship. The fuse of the torpedo sensed when it was close to the Boise and detonated the Mark-48’s 650 pounds of high explosive, plus the large amount of fuel that remained inside the weapon. A huge, superheated steam bubble was created instantly, its walls moving outward in all directions faster than the speed of sound. When the bubble reached the hull of the Boise it attached itself to the side of the ship. The steam bubble collapsed in the water, then expanded again, oscillating. It was a massive, twisting, murderous amount of force.

In sonar, the supervisor tore the headphones off his head. What was a dull thump to the rest of the crew was a blast of noise to him. After hours of straining to hear the slightest trace of Boise, it was like a flashbulb going off in a darkened room. He put the earphones back on as soon as the blast noise waned.

Immediately after the boom came the groaning, wrenching sound of the Boise’s hull being torn apart. It was a sound he’d never heard before, but it was instantly recognizable. He could see in his mind the keel bending and the steel bulkheads giving way and admitting the sea. It reminded him of the sad cries the whales made.

Next came a loud, high-pitched hissing.

“What’s that?” said one of his men.

“Air banks,” he answered. The sound grew louder, as the tanks tore apart releasing thousands upon thousands of pounds of compressed air into the ocean, the emergency air banks that were supposed to save the Boise but never would. Soon he heard a similar hiss, but oscillating, falling away. He realized it was small gas cylinders sinking, punctured or with their valves torn off, spinning as they fell, the escaping gas spinning them like pinwheels.

Next came loud, staccato popping. It was a sound that they recognized from improperly conducted trash disposal: the sound of glass bottles popping as they passed through their own collapse depth. It’s why they kept a metal rod in the TDU room, to smash glass bottles before ejecting them. But there was no one left on the Boise to worry about it. Bottles of salad dressing and mayonnaise, every glass jar on the ship, fell to the bottom, until it could stand the pressure no more and imploded in an instant with a sound like a gunshot that travelled for hundreds of miles. As the hissing subsided, those random pops grew in frequency, like a string of fire crackers. As it reached its crescendo, the supervisor pictured a school of bottles floating downward together, tumbling, until they were obliterated by sea pressure a mile below the surface.

The pops slowed and disappeared.

The ocean was silent again.

Honolulu

Master Chief Cote was cleaning out his desk; after more than three decades it was his last day in the Navy. He’d declined to have a retirement ceremony, even though he was certainly entitled. He always found them a little embarrassing, and uncomfortably reminiscent of funerals.

It was a day at some level he thought would never come; he couldn’t picture himself out of uniform. He saw those other retirees puttering around, they tended to hover around the military towns they were comfortable with, to be close to VA medical facilities and people who understood their sea stories. They were easy to spot, the men with white hair kept short, and “casual’ clothes that were pressed a little too well, khaki shorts with razor creases and golf shirts tucked in tautly, RVs that were cleaned as if ready for inspection.

His office had accumulated a lot of crap during his shore tour, and he had to sort it into three piles: His personal possessions which would follow him home. Items that were classified because of medical privacy, patient records and the like. And items that were classified because of military secrecy, anything with the record of a specific ship’s movement or details about its mission. He’d briefed his replacement about all the navy material he was leaving behind, and the personal stack was small; he could fit it all in a box on his way out.

He reached a bookshelf near his door which was piled high with medial reference books and paper. It was the last major shit heap in his office, and was one he’d been avoiding cleaning up because it was so daunting. Laying on top of it was an unmarked manila envelope. He picked it up and looked inside.

The first thing he pulled out was a military ID card for Petty Officer William Dunham.

Cote took the envelope to his desk and dumped it out.

He had, he could soon see, the personal effects of Will Dunham, the items that were with him when he arrived at Tripler. Somehow they had ended up in his office. He knew he’d never seen them before, he had too much of an interest in Dunham, had thought about him too often, to forget that he had this trove of information about the young man. Someone, probably on that first day, had probably heard that Cote was involved in the case and had dropped off the envelope in his office. Maybe they’d meant to remind him later and forgot, who knows.

His name tag was in there, with the crest of the USS Boise to the right of the word DUNHAM. Two standard issue black navy ballpoint pens, the type that hadn’t changed in Cote’s entire career. Another unchanging artifact of a naval career: one of the small green notebooks designed to fit in a back pocket, to record everything that needed to be done: his first chief had called his a “paper brain.” Dunham’s was filled with neat script, observations from his watch, notes from training, several phone numbers in back with Honolulu area codes. The heaviest object in the envelope was a “leatherman” in its leather sheath, a foldable tool that every mechanic carried on his belt, containing a knife, screwdriver, and, handiest of all, needle nose pliers. Cote would have to submit it all to a heartless bureaucracy where it would, at some point and after a thorough and pointless examination and inventory, end up in the mailbox of a grieving parent, just in time to reopen the wounds of their loss.

Cote was almost ready to put it away when he found a small envelope at the bottom, addressed and stamped. It was addressed to a girl.

The envelope was unsealed. He opened it and pulled out a single piece of stationery.

Cote stopped reading there, suddenly feeling guilty for violating the dead sailor’s privacy. He hesitated for a minute. He sealed up the large manila envelope of Dunham’s things and put it on his stack, things to be dealt with by his successor. But he sealed the love letter and stuck it in his shirt pocket.

A few hours later, Cote left Tripler for the last time. The Hawaiian sunshine was blinding, and he paused for a few moments of the steps. No one was waiting for him, thank God, no one was there with a bundle of Mylar balloons to mark his retirement.

He looked both ways, and jogged across the street to a blue mailbox. He took the letter from his pocket, and in his last act in uniform, he dropped Dunham’s love letter in the mail.

USS Louisville

Danny was on the bridge when land came in sight, the tiny speck that was Oahu. Soon, he knew, as they got closer, it would grow and take shape, Diamond Head looming on the right. He’d read once that by some definitions the Hawaiian Islands were the most remote islands on earth, and it certainly always looked that way by sea.

It had been a flurry of activity since they sunk the Boise. They reported the success of their approach and kill, and within hours they’d received orders to return back home. The mood of the crew had been good, if not ebullient, every man there aware that while successful, they’d sunk a submarine of the United States, a billion dollars and over a hundred men. They’d learned that the official report would state that the boat was lost at sea, and that the Louisville had been part of a search and rescue team — the unnamed “US submarine” in the official media reports. Like the XO’s stories, it was just close enough to the truth to be a convincing lie. Everything else was left very vague — the Navy didn’t want any ambitious foreign power to try to locate and raise the Boise, as the US had in fact done with the sunken Soviet boat the K-129 during the Cold War. Captain Michaels had done what captains have always done to keep men from thinking too much, running drills and making them clean, keeping every hand busy so as to not grow too contemplative.

Certainly there would be rumors. And since their entire crew knew the truth, and even though they were sworn to secrecy, some of those rumors would be the exact truth. No matter. The Navy had lost two nuclear submarines before in its history, the Thresher in 1963 and the Scorpion in 1968. The rumors, legends, official reports, and scholarly studies still competed with each other to describe exactly what happened: was it a malfunctioning torpedo or a Cold War intrigue? A bad weld, a frozen valve, or a curse? The Boise would become like the Thresher and the Scorpion before her, like all submarines, really, even those still steaming: a mystery.

They were on the surface, V-12 paired with Jabo once again. They were running man overboard drills, executing graceful Williamson turns to the left and the right, coming right back up their track while the wake was still visible. They weren’t even sounding the alarm or involving the rest of the crew, just making the maneuver, using the theoretical challenge of doing a U-Turn and coming back to the same spot in the ocean as a time-honored way to master the motion of the ship on the surface.

“How was that one?” said V-12, looking for praise.

“It was alright,” said Danny.

“Just alright?”

“Well you’ve done about twenty of them. It should be perfect.”

“You know if you fall in the water you’ll want me up here.”

“If you’re up here I’ll probably jump in the water.”

The lookout behind them acknowledged a report from control. “Captain to the bridge,” he said. Danny and V-12 both stood a little straighter as the captain’s feet rang on the ladder steps.

“How are we this morning?” said the captain. “Both of you learning how to drive my ship?”

“Yes sir,” they both said.

“Turns a little tighter than the Alabama, doesn’t it?” he said to Danny.

“Yes sir,” he said. “I like my chances as a man overboard on this boat a lot better.”

He nodded. “And we don’t have that big flat missile deck to stand on, so that’s a good thing. Probably a lot more likely to have a man overboard here.”

Danny looked at his watch. “Sir, I recommend we start heading toward Pearl.”

The captain looked at his watch too. “Make it happen,” he said.

V-12 began giving orders and getting the ship on track to bring them home. “Here,” said the captain, handing Danny his cell phone. “Give Angi a call. Looks like we’re close enough.”

“You sure?” said Danny.

“Yeah, go ahead. I’m sure she’s dying to talk to you.”

Danny took the phone and dialed Angi’s phone from memory. She answered on the second ring.

“Hello?”

“It’s me.”

She paused for a minute, exhaled nervously. “Wow! I thought you might call.”

“God it’s good to hear your voice,” he said. He forgot that the captain and V-12 were both standing there, just disappeared into hearing the voice of the woman he loved.

“Yours too!” she said. “Danny, there’s a submarine in the news — the Boise.”

“Yeah.”

“It’s missing! It’s front page news here, the families on television are crying every night — it’s awful. Do we know anybody on the Boise?”

“I’m not sure,” said Danny.

“They’re saying it’s lost! Do you know any more about it?”

“Well.”

“Oh,” she said. “I get it. You can’t talk about it.”

In his state room, the XO was sorting through the flood of incoming message traffic, sorting out what had to be acted on right away, all the while looking for the messages he was expecting.

Danny had showed him up — and good. He’d been doing this long enough to know that. But he was second-in-command so whatever success Danny had brought them would be reflected on him as well. And he took some consolation in the fact that Danny would carry this around with him: he was the man who sunk a US submarine. He’d done his job masterfully, and completed his mission, but that fact remained. Danny had killed a boat. In the small world of the submarine force, that would be a cloud looming over him. It was more than superstition, although that would be a factor. But even completely rational men would recognize that Jabo wasn’t a guy you wanted to be around if you wanted a nice quiet career. And the submarine force was small. He and Jabo would cross paths again someday, and the XO would be able to get to him somehow, either by direct attacks or by laying obstacles in his path. Torpedoes or mines.

In the meantime, the XO would do what he could to seize the high ground. In a burst of inspiration he’d dashed off a message to Xerox, explaining to them how’d they’d fixed their machine at sea, an example of can-do spirit that reflected on the best tradition of the sea services. He fantasized that those Xerox executives might seize this, the story of how vital their machines were and how clever these submariners were. The XO’s fantasy even went further, he imagined a time after he got out of the navy when he might go to work for Xerox, the story of the repair at sea propelling him to lofty heights in the company.

A few hours later, outside of Pearl, a tug appeared at their side, and with it an orange, waterproof bag of US Mail. This included a certified letter from Xerox, which the XO was handed in the control room. He eagerly tore it open.

It was a single sheet of paper, signed by a VP of Customer Service. It explained that in allowing a non-certified technician to repair the copier, the Louisville had voided its warranty.