Los Angeles Class

15

"Three minutes, ladies!" Randall called out, bellowing to be heard above the clatter of the UH-lN's rotor. "Check your gear!"

There were only four of them, instead of the usual squad of seven. SOG operations frequently required customized fireteam and squad deployments. Besides Lieutenant (j.g.) Randall, there were TM Chief Donald McCluskey, GM1 Tom Nelson, and RM1 Rodney Fitch. All wore wet suits, masks, and fins, and lugged heavily laden satchels carrying the rest of their gear. The Huey Slick had been traveling south for the past fifty miles, searching for a featureless spot on a vast and wave-ruffled ocean.

Conditions were not especially good — low overcast, scattered showers, limited visibility, and winds gusting to forty knots.

Randall took his seat next to Fitch, seated on the edge of the cargo deck, feet on the helicopter's starboard-side skid, with the mingled wind and prop wash blasting around his ears like a hurricane. Somehow, the chopper pilot had to find a pencil-thin sliver out there in all that gray and whitecap-streaked water.

Still, they'd received pretty precise coordinates at Adak Naval Air Station before they'd lifted off, precise enough that the copilot had just given him the three-minute warning. He checked his watch; two minutes ten, now.

"I still want to know what genius thought I looked Russian!" Fitch yelled.

"Don't sweat it. If you get questioned, just tell 'em you're looking for your prayer rug!"

Fitch was black, though with skin tone light enough that he could pass for an inhabitant of one of the central Asian republics. And he did speak fluent Russian.

"Besides," Randall added, "you volunteered, remember?"

"Must have been temporary insanity, Lieutenant. You and me both know it never pays to volunteer!"

"Should be coming up on the drop point pretty quick…. "

"There!" Fitch yelled. "Just off to starboard! Y'see it?"

Randall leaned out a little against his safety harness. Fitch had damned good eyes; it took a moment or two for Randall to spot the telltale feather of a periscope wake against the whitecaps and spindrift. As they watched, the dark gray rectangle of a submarine's conning tower broke the surface, then rose, as plumes of white spray burst around it.

The Huey dropped toward the deck, until its landing skids were skimming just twenty feet off the water.

"Okay!" the Huey's pilot called back to them. "You're good to go!"

"Thank you, Lieutenant!"

"Any time! Good luck!"

"Okay!" Randall yelled to the other SEALs. "Gear… then go!"

From either side of the helicopter, large bundles of the team's equipment were heaved out into the wet air, to plummet into the waves below. An instant later, all four SEALs leaped out as well, two to either side of the aircraft, in a maneuver known as helocasting.

Randall dropped with his arms folded across his chest, his legs crossed, and his head tilted far forward, as he'd practiced innumerable times. He hit the ocean hard, and was instantly engulfed by the bitterly cold water. Kicking hard, he broke the surface, blowing and gasping. The water was frigid on the exposed parts of his face; the waves were a lot rougher than they'd appeared from the air, carrying him up, up, and up, then swiftly down again as the wave rolled past. He'd maintained his bearings, however, and was able to strike out in a vigorous crawl, swimming for the submarine intermittently visible through the surging waves.

A wave broke over him, salty green and freezing. Then he broke through to the surface again, and the submarine's hull was almost within reach. A line fell across his outstretched arm; he grabbed hold and let himself be pulled the rest of the way in.

Clambering up the side of a submarine in heavy surf wasn't easy, but training and sheer strength let him haul himself aboard at last, to lie gasping on the steel deck. Someone stooped over him in a bright orange life jacket, connecting a safety line. "Request… permission to come aboard… sir…."he gasped out.

"Granted," the voice replied. "Though I'm not a fuckin' sir…. "

Ten minutes later, all four SEALs were aboard and safely in the enlisted mess, cups of hot coffee in their hands, warm blankets flung over their shoulders.

"I very much hope this is an American submarine," Randall said after taking a hard swig of coffee. "I didn't see a flag coming down, and it would be embarrassing if you were Russians."

"Prisvetstvie," a bearded man said, grinning. "Dobri dyehn'! "

"Da," another said. " Vi ryehzyehrverahvahli nomyehr?"

"Yes, I have a reservation," Randall replied. "Very funny. But the guy who dragged me aboard topside gave it away when he welcomed me aboard."

"That would be me," a sailor said, raising a finger, "but I speak perfect English."

"I'm Commander Gordon," a lean, angular-looking man said, stepping forward, "and don't let Douglas or these other hooligans tell you otherwise. Welcome aboard the Pittsburgh, gentlemen."

"Good to be aboard, Captain," Randall said. "Thanks for the lift."

"Not a problem. You boys picked a pretty rough day for it."

"Not our idea, believe me, sir."

"I should introduce these gentlemen," Gordon said, gesturing at four of the men in the mess hall, including the two who'd spoken such perfect Russian. "Sergei Mikhailovich Putin and Anatol Grigorovich Kasparov, late of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. And George Smith and John Johnson, of the USA."

"Good to meet you, Lieutenant," Smith said. He was thin and cold, with an assassin's hooded eyes. "Medved'" he added, the Russian word for bear.

"Povushka" Randall replied, giving the Russian word for trap and completing the recognition code.

"Good to know who your friends are, huh?" Johnson said. He was shorter, with a neatly trimmed beard.

"Lieutenant (j.g.) Randall," he said. "My men — McCluskey, Fitch, Nelson."

Gordon's eyes narrowed. "Did you say Lieutenant Randall?"

"Yes, sir."

"Kenneth Randall?"

The SEAL hesitated before responding. "May I ask if we know one another, sir?"

"We'll talk later, son," Gordon said. "Douglas here will take you all forward to the torpedo room and see that you get settled in, get dry clothes, and get what you need to be squared away. You'll be bunking in there until we reach our destination, which should be in another three or four days. Make yourselves at home. There's not much room to stretch, but the chow's good, and the company is congenial. Enjoy your stay."

"Thank you, Captain."

He wondered though, how this man knew him. His presence here was supposed to be classified….

"Enter," Gordon called in response to the two sharp raps on the door. It opened, and Lieutenant (j.g.) Randall stepped in. He'd showered and donned clean, dry clothing, the blue one-piece jumpers worn by officers aboard the Pittsburgh, known as "poopie suits."

"You wanted to see me, Captain?"

"Yes, Lieutenant. Have a seat."

"Thank you, sir."

"I was wondering if you were the Lieutenant Randall who was the 2IC on a SEAL raid in Lebanon last month. The Bekaa Valley, looking for the American hostages."

Randall's eyes narrowed to hard slits. "Sir, I'm really not at liberty to talk about that."

Gordon sighed, then nodded. "I understand, Lieutenant. I'd just like to say — hypothetically, of course — that if you were the man on that operation, well, I'm damned glad you made it back."

Randall nodded slowly. "And… just hypothetically, of course, if I had been that man… how the hell would a submarine skipper know about that?"

"Hypothetically, he might have been holding down a desk at the Pentagon last month, before taking command of a sub. It's possible he worked at the Naval Special Operations Command Office, planning little excursions like the one into the Bekaa Valley.

"And as long as we're making this all up, we could, just hypothetically, assume that sub driver has been wondering if he was responsible for the deaths of two good men."

"I… see." Randall looked Gordon up and down. "You don't look like the typical REMF. Not what I always picture them like."

REMF was military slang for a rear echelon motherfucker, a peculiarly juicy term for hacks, yes-men, ticket-punching brass, politicians, malingerers, wanna-bes, and a whole zoo of hangers-on, part and parcel of the enormous logistical tail of every military deployment… necessary, some of them, even most of them, but personnel far from the whisper of bullets or the thin stink of gun smoke and fear.

"I was a REMF. But mostly I drive submarines for a living."

"You planned an op in the Bekaa? What was it called?"

"Operation Free Sanction."

"Huh. You know, there was a time or three when I really wanted to kill you, sir."

Gordon noticed that Randall had dropped the pretense. "I imagine that's so. But I wasn't responsible for abandoning you out there."

"I know, I know."

"Nor was the micromanaging my idea. They brought me down to their Agent Double-Oh-Seven bunker that night. Until then, I didn't even know they'd accepted the plan. I'd drawn it up, submitted it, and never heard about it again, until that night."

"But you were watching over our shoulders, huh?"

"Most of it. They… we lost track of you when you went back for First Squad. What I wanted to know was what went wrong?"

"You didn't know?"

"They didn't tell me. I was surprised at how many bad guys were on-site… and I know the objective turned out to be a dry hole. Waite wasn't there."

"No. He'd been there, and probably pretty recently. But they'd moved him out and moved half the damned Syrian Army in. We weren't fighting militia that night, Captain. It was Assad's best, his crack troops." He leaned forward, his hands clasping one another. "Sir, I think it was a trap."

"As in… they knew you were coming?"

"They knew we were coming. They moved the hostages out and the Syrian Guard in. And they held back until we'd committed ourselves. It was God's own luck we got out. Two of us didn't."

"But who? How?"

"I'd kind of like to know that myself, Captain."

"And why?"

"That seems pretty obvious, doesn't it? Uncle Sugar had a real setback, image-wise, when Eagle's Claw went sour at Desert One. Remember those photos of Iranian soldiers cheering above the wreckage of our crashed helos in the desert? Think of the propaganda mileage Assad and his backers in the Kremlin could get if they could parade a captured SEAL platoon through the streets of Damascus."

"I see what you mean."

"I'll tell you the truth, sir. I've got a bad feeling about this mission, too."

"Such as?"

"It has all the makings of a cluster fuck, Captain. Security so tight none of us can even talk to one another, but signs indicate that Soviet intelligence is stepping up the power a notch. A few days ago, two of us investigated some mystery tracks on a beach at Adak."

"Mystery tracks?"

"Probably a Soviet marine tractor, a kind of submarine with tank tracks… or maybe a true submarine that can crawl as well as swim. There've been reports of the things in

Alaska and Scandinavia for years. Anyway, it looks to hell like one went ashore at Adak… and just when we were there, waiting for our ride."

"Coincidence?"

"Maybe. SEALs don't get old believing in coincidence, though. Let me ask you this, Captain."

"Shoot."

"Did you get out of port clean?"

Gordon gave him a humorless smile, tight-lipped. "Negative. We picked up a tail."

"But you had someone to scrape it off?"

"Actually… no. Security concerns were such that we didn't have another boat to run interference for us. We shook him off with some fancy maneuvers off San Francisco."

"Hmm. Interesting."

"You've got that paranoid look to you."

"How do you know what I look like when I'm paranoid?"

Gordon shrugged. "Something about the eyes."

"I see too many coincidences running through here. It'd make anyone paranoid."

"Just because you're paranoid," Gordon quipped, "doesn't mean they're not all out to get you."

"You got that right. Did you have anything to do with the planning of this op?"

"No." Gordon's eyes widened. "Wait. Are you saying the ambush in the Bekaa Valley and this mission are connected somehow?"

"No. Not at all. I am saying that we have some very high-level leaks, possibly at the Agency, possibly in the Pentagon. Frankly, I smell a rat … a rat that looks to me like a mole."

"I take your point. The question is, what can we do about it?"

Randall leaned back in his chair, eyes closed. "Captain, I don't think there's a fucking thing we can do. I have my mission orders. You have yours. We follow the plan as best we can… and see what shakes out. Sir."

"Sure." Gordon nodded. "In other words, if we're walking into a trap, we stick our necks out and shout, 'Here we are!'"

"You have a depressing way with words, Captain."

"Thank you. I like to think it's one of my better features."

"Okay, so what makes you think you have radiation poisoning?" HMC Ronald Pyter was an old-Navy hospital corpsman; when he wore his dress blues, the gold hash marks, each one representing four years of service, seemed to go clear up his sleeve, from wrist to elbow. He ran Pittsburgh's tiny sick bay and dispensary like a benevolent and somewhat mellow tyrant, dispensing advice as often as pills.

O'Brien sat on the opposite side of the steel desk from Pyter. "Well, my hair is falling out in clumps…. "

"We already checked your dosimeter," Pyter said. "I showed it to you. You are not picking up anything close to a dangerous level of radioactivity."

"But my hair… "

"Doug," Pyter said, surprising O'Brien with his use of his first name, "do you trust me?"

"Yes, sir."

"I'm not a sir. Call me 'Doc' or 'Chief.' "

"Yes, s … Chief." He wasn't sure if he did or not at this point. But it was the right thing to say. "I trust you."

"Okay. Have you been nauseous?"

"First day or two, yes… Chief. But I've been okay since then."

"Right. And… you've been to Submarine School at New Groton, right?"

"Yeah! Of course!"

"Okay, just checking. So you know about radiation alarms, ORSE inspections, and all of that. Or maybe you just slept through those lectures. Do you really think a radiation leak serious enough to make one of the crew members sick could go undetected? Or that senior crew members would cover such a thing up if it happened?"

"No, Chief. I just thought… I don't know, that maybe there was just a patch of radioactivity on a tabletop, or something, you know? Like I touched it and got it on my food or something."

Chief Pyter sighed. "Radiation doesn't work that way. Oh, granted, somebody could have sprinkled plutonium dust in your rack or something like that, but can you tell me why anybody would do that?"

"No, Chief."

"You have to trust your shipmates, son. Even when they yank your strings to make you twitch." He paused, letting that sink in. "If there was a radiation emergency on this boat, it would contaminate forward compartment by compartment. And as soon as the alarms sounded, we would seal off the contaminated areas from the rest of the boat. Does that make sense?"

"Yes…. "

"Next we would surface and try venting the affected compartments to the open air. If it was serious enough — and at that point it probably would be — the captain would evacuate the boat.

"You do not have radiation symptoms, son. Do you hear me?"

"Yes, Chief." He was trying to reorder his thinking. For an entire week he'd been living in dread, convinced he was dying. For several days, he'd been kept too busy to come down to sick bay and see anyone. And for the past couple of days, as his hair grew so patchy that several officers and petty officers had commented on his unkempt appearance, he'd simply been too afraid and too ashamed to say anything.

Not that that made any sense. But it had taken a definite act of willpower to demand that he be allowed to come down to sick call and see Chief Pyter.

Only now was he beginning to let himself relax into the idea that he wasn't sick. And yet…

"Okay, Chief. If it's not radiation, what is it? I mean… Chief Allison told me the other day I looked like I had the mange. But that's a dog disease, isn't it? Do I have mange?"

"Uh… no. It's not mange."

"Then what is it?" He reached up and pulled another tuft of hair out. "What's wrong with me?"

"Mmm." Pyter looked at O'Brien for a moment. He had a bushy mustache and light blue eyes that twinkled merrily when he was amused… like now. Damn it, what was so funny?

"Doug, you look to me like a squared-away sailor, all your shit in one seabag, know what I mean?"

"Thank you, Chief." That was not praise he'd heard before, and he sat up a bit straighter now for it.

"Don't mention it. You're always well turned out… uniform clean and neat. Good personal hygiene…. "

"Well, they stressed that hard, both in boot camp and in Sub School. Locked up in a tin can with a hundred twenty other guys… you keep yourself clean or they just might hold a blanket party."

Blanket parties — a relic of the old Navy, but not condoned any longer in this more sensitive era — were part of the hazing folklore in boot camp, a kind of boogeyman story about how offending recruits might find themselves dragged off to the head inside a blanket and given a shower that included caustic soap and a bristle brush.

"You shower every day?"

"Of course, Chief!"

"It's not 'of course.' You'd be astonished how many sailors are oblivious to their own ripe aroma. Especially after being at sea for a spell. You shampoo your hair every day?"

"Sure, Chief. I mean, it's part of the routine, right?"

"Uh-huh."

"So… when did you notice your hair was starting to fall out?"

"I don't know. I guess, maybe, a week or so after I came aboard."

"Uh-huh. And… have you discussed radiation poisoning with anyone else aboard?"

"Well… "

"It's okay, son. This isn't a mast, and I won't report you."

"Okay, I talked about it with some of the guys when it first started getting bad, y'know? But they said I could get in trouble for spreading rumors. None of them thought that's what I had either. But they didn't sound real convinced, know what I mean?"

Pyter chuckled. "I know exactly what you mean." He looked thoughtful for a moment. "You have any college,

son?"

"No, Chief. My family couldn't afford it, and my grades weren't all that great to begin with."

"But you know how fraternities will haze pledges before they get to be part of the club?"

"Oh, sure. And they told me at Sub School I'd probably get the treatment."

"Uh-huh."

When Pyter didn't elaborate, O'Brien's eyes widened, and he felt a sudden rush of anger. "Wait a minute!.. "

"Are you starting to get the picture, son?"

"Are you saying the guys are doing this somehow? Just to play a practical joke on the new guy?"

Pyter leaned back, his twinkling gaze on the overhead for a moment. "Doug, submariners are an elite community. No, a fraternity, a true brotherhood of blood and steel. You're part of a tradition that goes back to guys waiting out Japanese depth-charge attacks in stinking, steel coffins… hell it goes back eighty-seven years to America's first true submarine, the Holland, back when nobody knew if it was coming up again once it went down. Or to the Confederate Hunley going up against the Yankee Housatonic, with sixteen men aboard who knew they probably wouldn't survive the explosion when they rammed their spar home… or even back to David Bushnell in 1778, turning the hand cranks on a little tar-sealed barrel called the Turtle as he tried to get close enough to the British man-of-war Eagle in New York Harbor that he could try to attach a bag of gunpowder to the enemy's keel. His wooden screw wouldn't bite through the Eagle's copper-plated bottom, unfortunately, and the attempt failed." He waved a hand. "Beside the point. Bushnell was the first recorded submariner. He started a brotherhood of men willing to undergo some serious danger, hardship, and privation in order to carry out their missions.

"Now, submariners are a choosy lot. They want to know the men serving with them are the very best. Over the years, they've evolved some pretty sneaky ways to initiate others into the brotherhood. Some of their tests are downright vicious."

"You're saying this… what's happening to me, is a test?"

"Sort of. They're putting you through the sort of stuff they had to go through when they were nubs. It becomes a tradition, a part of your life aboard the boats. Doesn't make it easier, doesn't even make it right. But it's going to happen. You can squawk and complain and probably never be fully accepted by the rest of the crew … or you can just go along with it, take your lumps, have a good laugh when it's over… and maybe plan how you're going to get the next newbie who sets foot on board the Pittsburgh.

"Because that will happen, you know. Individuals come and go aboard the boats, but the boats remain. There'll always be another poor new guy to dump the shit on."

"I guess it's not so bad then, huh?"

"It happened to me, a good twenty years ago. All of your buddies have been through it. As a kind of initiation into an elite? No, it's not so bad." He grinned. "Did you get your invitation yet?"

"My invitation?"

"King Neptune's party. Tonight."

"Oh! I didn't think that was an invitation. More like a command." He reached into the breast pocket of his dungaree shirt and pulled out a folded-up piece of paper, handing it to Pyter. "Douglas gave it to me yesterday."

Pyter glanced at it, smiled, and handed it back. "You know what this is all about?"

"Huh? Oh, sure. It's like crossing the equator for the first time, only this is the International Date Line. Order of the Mystic Eastern Dragon? Something like that."

" 'Something like that.' You scared?"

"Well, I'm not looking forward to it, if that's what you mean. Some of the old hands have been trying to scare those of us who haven't been through it before. I know it'll be unpleasant. Scared? No, not really."

"Doug, it's the same as your being accepted as a submariner. People have been crossing the equator and the date line for a good many centuries, now. And it's an old, old tradition to have the guys who've already been there, done that, to put the new guys through the wringer. To initiate them. It's embarrassing, sometimes painful… mostly fun if you're willing to let go and join in. And next time, it'll be you wielding the paddle.

"And by going through with it, you're symbolically joining in with sailors who've braved the high seas and storms and hardships and long separations from loved ones and all of that clear back to… hell, I don't know. I've heard some of the Shellback stuff goes clear back to the Romans."

"I never knew the Romans crossed the equator."

"Maybe they didn't. They weren't any great shakes as seamen. Not like the Phoenicians. Doesn't matter. They had ceremonies, rites of passage, all their own." He chuckled. "You know, if this stuff was easy, it wouldn't feel as good once you were in the club!"

"I guess not."

"This sort of hazing gets dropped on every nub from the moment they set foot on board their first submarine. It won't be forever, it's usually not dangerous, and at the end of it you're an accepted member of the community."

"So, what did they do to make my hair fall out?"

Pyter looked uncomfortable. "I've been trying not to say. I wouldn't want to ruin their joke."

"Chief, they've had me thinking I was going to die for two weeks now!"

"Well, let me put it this way. I have to live on this boat, too!"

"You're afraid they'll get even if they know you told me?"

"Not afraid, exactly, but it's not the sort of hassle any sane man looks forward to."

"Yeah, and you've been initiated. What'd they do to you,

Chief?"

"Oh, the usual Mickey Mouse shit. Sending me off looking for left-handed spanners and blue skyhooks. And they pulled the hair routine on me, too. I think it's routine now for just about anyone shipping out aboard a nuke or a boomer."

"So how'd they do it?"

He smiled. "A little bit of Nair, or some other woman's hair removal cream, slipped into your shampoo bottle. They start out with a little, and work it up until you're going about half-and-half Nair and shampoo. That way, you don't notice the change in the texture and the lather so much."

"I thought I was just dealing with hard water or something."

"Aboard a submarine? You've got to be kidding!"

"They just wanted to scare me?"

"And make you part of the pack. And remember. You did not hear it from me!"

"I understand, Chief. Thanks a lot."

"Anytime, son." He grinned. "You know, normally I go along with the charade. Tell the poor son of a bitch that I don't think it's rad poisoning… but maybe he should take these pills for a few days, just to make sure. Then I give him a pack of aspirin."

"God… "

"Looked to me like you'd been through enough already! Anyway, you want some advice, son?"

"Sure."

"You'll be accepted as one of the gang faster, and more completely, if you find a way to turn the tables on them."

"Huh? What do you mean? Like putting Nair in their shampoo?"

"No. I mean by going along with the gag, and maybe even by turning it back against them. Shows you're in on the spirit of the thing."

"I think I get it. Thanks, Chief." He thought hard for a moment. "Ah… hah!"

"Something?"

"Just an idea. Say, Doc, you wouldn't happen to have a straight razor here, would you?"