Los Angeles Class

8

It had taken almost three hours to get the kid to say something other than a tight-voiced "Yes, sir!" or "No, sir!" Commander Gordon had met him during the long flight out from Washington, when it had turned out that his assigned seat on the 737 was next to his own. Gordon had seen the kid's nervousness and started talking to him gently to see if he could get him to relax a bit. It wasn't that Gordon was feeling in a paternal way; he just didn't care for the idea of a four-hour flight with a nervous wreck strapped into the seat next to his.

At last, though — somewhere over the Great Plains — Gordon had begun to get through. Seaman Doug O'Brien was newly out of Submarine School at Groton, Connecticut, and was on his way to his first assignment. He wasn't wearing dolphins on his dress white blouse, yet, the badge that marked him as a submariner. That would come later, after he passed a probationary period of learning all there was to learn about working in each department on his boat.

"So… what boat are you assigned to, son?" Gordon asked him, once a more meaningful dialogue than simple affirmatives and negatives had been established.

"Uh… my ship is the USS Pittsburgh, sir. SSN-720."

"Uh-uh, son. Full aback. A submarine is always a boat, never a ship. Didn't you pick that up in sub school?"

"Well, they kept talking about 'boats,' yeah… but a buddy of mine told me they were setting me up for a kind of joke, see?"

Gordon nodded. "Well, sounds to me like it was your friend who was setting you up for the joke. Submariners are pretty dogmatic about being aboard boats, not ships. Same thing with Navy aviators."

"Sir?"

"To the men stationed aboard an aircraft carrier, the carrier is a ship. But to the aviators, the men in the carrier's air wing, she's a 'boat.' " He grinned. "Don't try to figure out the logic of it. Sailors have been using language their own way to define their special world for a couple of thousand years at the very least."

"Okay… "He didn't sound too sure of himself.

"So, anyway, you're about to join the Pittsburgh?"

"Yes, sir! She's at a place called Mare Island. That's somewhere near San Francisco, but I don't exactly know where."

Gordon chuckled. It had to be, of course. He didn't tell the youngster that he was headed for the same new duty station… as O'Brien's captain.

"Well, I'm sure she's a good boat," he said. "I know her skipper."

"You do?" O'Brien's eyes grew large.

"He was my roommate at Annapolis, actually, and the best man at my wedding. Mike Chase. A good man."

"Gosh! I keep hearing how small the Navy really is, sir, how you keep bumping into the same people. I guess that's true, huh?"

"You have no idea!"

Gordon could tell that O'Brien wanted to ask where Gordon was going, but was afraid to speak up. To a young sea-man — nineteen, maybe eighteen years old — fresh out of boot camp and C-school, a ship captain was a godlike figure rarely glimpsed, and then with an awe approaching terror. The Olympian likes of commanders never socialized, never fraternized with enlisted mortals… none below the rank of E-5, at any rate. Gordon was afraid that if he admitted to who and what he was, the young man would swallow his heart.

Much of the rest of the flight they passed in silence, the boy watching the mountains slide by beneath the aircraft, while Gordon leaned his seat back and tried to nap. He thought about Becca again, and suppressed a stab of regret. How was he going to make this right with her?

He'd told her about the new assignment that evening, of course, the day he'd gotten his orders from Goldman. He'd taken her out to a favorite restaurant and sprung the news over a bowl of Maryland crab soup.

She hadn't seemed surprised. Her reaction was so lackluster, in fact, that at first he was certain her father had indeed told her all about it, and that she'd simply been waiting to hear it from him.

"The Navy wife's life," was all she'd said.

"You don't sound happy about it."

"Should I be? All my friends are here in Alexandria. Ellen and Margaret are settled in with their friends and school."

"It's summer, Becca. No school until September. If we're going to move, now's the time to do it, so we don't interrupt the kids' school year."

"And what if we don't want to follow you all the way across the country? Damn it, Frank, why can't you have a normal job that keeps you nine to five and doesn't send you off to the other end of the earth every six months?"

"You knew you were getting a sailor when you married me. You knew what it would be like." Damn it, she'd grown up in a Navy home, had hopscotched all over the world as her father had risen to the pinnacle of his career.

"And maybe I want something better for me! Better for my babies!"

"You're a Navy wife, Becca…."

"You don't have to remind me!.. "

Gordon lay back in the 737's seat and thought about the miles slipping away beneath him, taking him farther and farther away from Becca. He wanted to support her, but sometimes she was just so damned illogical about things….

He could read the weather signs well enough to know that his marriage was in serious trouble right now. Becca's depression… he wasn't sure he could handle that and his career, not now, not when things were just starting to break his way at long, long last.

He loved her, loved her as much as it was possible for one to love another. And he hurt for her, and hurt because there didn't seem to be anything he could do to help.

In fact, everything he did just seemed to make things worse.

The plane touched down at San Francisco International Airport. As an incoming ship captain, he rated a car and driver — a young third class who met him in the terminal with a hand-lettered sign reading "CDR GORDON." A few moments later, he saw O'Brien, his young traveling companion, waiting at the baggage-claim belt.

"You want a ride out to the base, son?"

The youngster's jaw dropped. "Huh? I mean… sure!" The alternative was a long wait and a ride in a Navy bus. "Are you going out to Mare Island, too?"

"Sure am. Grab your bags and meet me over there by the door."

His driver retrieved Gordon's bag, and minutes later, bags slung into the trunk, they were in a gray Navy sedan winding out of San Francisco International and heading north up the Bay on the James Lick Freeway.

Picking up 80 in downtown San Francisco, they crossed the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, paid their toll, and then continued following 80 north.

Traffic was light, and twenty minutes later they were approaching the Carquinez Bridge, which spanned the mouth of the Sacramento River where it joined the Napa River from the north and spilled into San Pablo Bay, which comprised the northern reaches of San Francisco Bay.

Gordon had done some reading up on Mare Island ahead of time. As their car crossed the toll bridge into Vallejo, he pointed out the Mare Island Naval Shipyard to O'Brien, ahead and to their left.

"The island got its name back in 1830," he told the youngster. "A mare belonging to the leader of a Mexican mapping expedition was swept away by the current of the Sacramento River at the Carquinez Straits… right below this bridge. Somehow, it managed to make it to shore on the southern tip of the island. They called it Isla de la Yegua after that … Mare Island.

"The U.S. Navy arrived on the scene when David Farragut came in and took command in 1854. Today the base covers something like 2600 acres… a lot more at low tide. It's home to the shipyard, a naval station, the Combat Systems Technical School Command, the Engineering Duty Officer School, and something like twenty-three, twenty-four other commands. Several submarines are usually home-ported here … especially the ones assigned to sneaky-Pete ops in the western Pacific."

"Sneaky-Pete?"

"Covert operations. The missions the U.S. government does not admit take place."

"I always wondered about that, sir. I mean, you hear things, read things, sometimes, about stuff happening, like secret missions into Russia and places like that. I never really believed any of them, of course."

Gordon smiled. The kid was pretty naive … and utterly unaware that he was sitting next to the man who'd conned a U.S. sub into the heart of the USSR's White Sea.

"Things like that do happen, son. More often than you'd believe. But we don't talk about them. Submariners are a pretty closed-mouth lot to begin with."

"Uh… sir? Are you a submariner?"

"Open your eyes, son." He nodded slightly toward the gold dolphins riding his uniform jacket, just above the rows of colored ribbons.

"Oh! Sorry, sir. I didn't notice. I guess I didn't want to look like I was prying."

"The fruit salad is there to be read, son. As is the badge. Helps you know who you're dealing with. It's not rude to know something about your shipmate."

"I understand, sir. Thank you, sir."

Gordon sighed. He didn't think the kid really understood, even yet.

They rode in silence through Vallejo, along the typical Navy-town avenue with its uniform shops and tattoo parlors, locker services for civvies and magazine shops ripe with skin mags and crotch novels.

They turned left and crossed the G-Street Bridge above the sullen brown stillness of the Napa River, crossing onto Mare Island and stopping at the main gate, where Gordon, O'Brien, and the driver all showed their IDs. Gordon told the driver to drop O'Brien off at the enlisted barracks first, before taking him on to the Bachelor Officers' Quarters, BOQ.

"I guess they don't come much greener than that," the driver said, shaking his head as he removed Gordon's luggage from the trunk.

"We all have to start somewhere," Gordon replied. "And it's usually at the bottom. Thanks for the ride."

"My pleasure, sir."

He followed the driver into the BOQ, where he signed in at the front desk. We all have to start somewhere, he thought. Where the hell do I start with my marriage?

"Now fire in the reactor room, fire in the reactor room!" Klaxons blared, red lights flashed, lending an air of surreal urgency to a scene already verging on nightmarish. "All hands, man your damage-control stations! That is, man your fire and damage-control stations!"

Panic flooded through Doug O'Brien's mind. A reactor fire! And he didn't know what his duty station was, or where he was supposed to be.

"Now flooding in the reactor compartment, flooding in the reactor compartment. Damage-control watch, report to flooding stations…?

O'Brien sat bolt upright in his rack… and smashed his forehead into the bottom of the rack above his, hard. "God damn it," he exclaimed, dropping back to his thin mattress, hands cupped over his forehead. "Shit, shit, shit!" Thrashing, he rolled through the curtain separating him from the rest of the boat, landing on bare feet on the cold linoleum tile deck of the crew's quarters.

Odd. The emergency Klaxon was no longer sounding. He heard only the gentle hum of the Pittsburgh's ventilator system, the normal-sounding scuffs, bumps, and scrapes of other men going about their duties elsewhere on the boat.

He was standing in the passageway beside his rack, in Pittsburgh's crew spaces. There was no reactor emergency, no flooding.

He was going to live. Live!

Had the emergency, then, been just a dream?

"Jesus!.. "

"Hey, keep it down out there!" a groggy voice called from one of the curtained-off racks.

He groaned and looked at his watch. Almost time for reveille. No time in any case to get back in his rack for another ten or fifteen minutes' sleep. He might as well get up and get moving.

Lifting the bottom of his rack, he opened up his personal locker and from the recess within pulled his shower thongs, soap case, and shampoo bottle, then skinned out of his T-shirt and boxers and removed his watch. Taking a towel, he flip-flopped aft to the shower head, where he stepped into a stall and began wetting down.

The nightmare, he recognized now, was one he'd been having a lot lately, ever since his first few weeks at Sub School in Groton, where the students were subjected to a steady run of alarms and drills, designed to get them to react, and react correctly, the instant something bad started to go down.

By the time he'd finished his shower and dried himself, the morning watch was rousting from their racks. "Now reveille, reveille, reveille," a voice was calling from a speaker overhead. "All hands on deck…."

And then, " The uniform of the day is dungarees. The smoking lamp is lit in all authorized compartments…?

And O'Brien's second day of life aboard a Navy sub began.

He'd reported aboard yesterday, after spending Sunday night at a receiving barracks ashore.

Born in Rockville, Illinois, out on the flat and corn-shrouded prairie northwest of Chicago, Doug O'Brien had started out about as far from the sea and a sailor's life as was possible. His father worked in a John Deere dealership and never talked about his three years as an Army draftee in the late sixties. Certainly, there'd been no pressure on him at home to join the all-volunteer Navy, much less a volunteer elite within the Navy like the Silent Service.

But he'd wanted to be a submariner ever since he'd seen The Enemy Below as a kid. Sure, the submariners in that movie had been Germans, the bad guys … but somehow

Kurt Jurgens had made life aboard a German U-boat seem glamorous and exciting. O'Brien had been a small kid, and bright — two strikes against him when he went to school and began losing fights with bullies who beat him up for his lunch money or simply because they could.

Somehow, the image of the German sailors singing through the shattering thunder of a depth-charge attack had raised images of a camaraderie that the lonely O'Brien had never dreamed of before.

For you, my friend, and you, my friend, and all of us together…

The beatings his father had given him to punish him for losing the fights with the bullies had made things impossibly worse at home, especially after his mother had left and his father had started getting drunk every night. He'd run away from home on the morning of his eighteenth birthday and signed up with a Navy recruiter in Chicago that same afternoon.

Dressing in his dungarees, he made his way to the enlisted mess, only getting turned around and lost once. Unlike a supercarrier, even an L.A.-class submarine was essentially a sewer pipe with three decks, and it was pretty hard to lose your way.

The Crew's Mess was the largest single open space on board the boat, big enough for six tables with their attached seats, plus a counter leading into the galley forward, and an array of drink dispensers — various offerings of soda and the ever-present drink beloved of submariners for decades, the fruit drink known solely as "bug juice."

He took a metal tray from the stack and filed through the chow line, receiving hefty servings of scrambled eggs, bacon, fried potatoes, and sausage, with a glass of orange bug juice in the place of the time-honored tradition of Navy coffee. He'd never acquired a taste for the stuff, even though he'd wanted to like it in order to fit in with the other sailors almost from his first breakfast in boot camp at Great Lakes.

Much of the day before, his first day aboard, was still a fuzzy blur made dim by strangeness, haste, and exhaustion. He'd been through an orientation program right here at this same mess table, where he'd learned that he would have to rotate through each department aboard the Pittsburgh to earn his "quals," beginning with the torpedo room. He would not win his coveted dolphins until all of his department supervisors had trained him, tested him, and signed him off.

Seconds after he sat down and started shoveling into the eggs, some of his new companions joined him. Boatswain's Mate First Class Charles Scobey — though everyone called him "Big C" — sat down on his left, while Torpedoman's Mate Second Class Roger Benson sat down on his right. Electronics Technician Second Class James T. Jablonski, his left arm in a light blue hospital sling, set his tray down one-handed and sat down on the other side of the mess table.

"So, get lost yet, nub?" Jablonski asked cheerily. "Nub," O'Brien had learned the day before, stood for "Non-Useful Body," a "newbie," a sailor fresh out of school and serving aboard a boat for the first time. It was an appellation he would not be able to escape until he'd signed off on his quals and won his dolphins.

"Not really."

"Well, nub," Scobey said, "don't sweat it. You'll be scrambling to get your bearings for a few days, but you'll catch on. If the Old Man or the Exec don't have you for breakfast first." The others laughed.

"You can forget most of what they taught you in Sub School," Benson said. "Living on a submarine isn't like living anywhere else in the world, 'cept maybe on board a ship out in space somewhere."

"Well, that's not exactly 'in the world,' is it?" Scobey put in.

"Shit, Big C, you know what I mean. Anyway, like I was sayin', you need to get used to a whole new lifestyle. Port 'n' starboard watches that go on and on for weeks, sometimes. Hot bunking."

"A 688 Flight II boat like the Pittsburgh doesn't have enough racks for all of her enlisted people," Scobey told him. "So you'll be sharing your rack with someone else, with a schedule drawn up so that one of you is sleeping when the other's working."

"You've got a hell of a lot to learn," Benson told him. "All the tricks of the trade, as it were."

"Take the bug juice," Jablonski said with the air of a sage discussing arcane philosophies. He gestured grandly at the glass of orange liquid sitting on the table in front of O'Brien. "Now a true submariner knows that the redjuice is the good stuff. The orange stuff, though… pah! Don't drink it. Ever! It'll rot your insides!"

"I saw an experiment done once," Scobey said, nodding. "Y'take a piece of iron — a flat metal fitting or plate. You tie it to a string and let it hang inside a glass of orange bug juice. Three days later, you haul it out and have a look. The iron plate's riddled full of holes, worse'n Swiss cheese! Imagine what it's doin' to your guts!"

"Works with the red bug juice, too," Jablonski said.

"I've seen that done with Coke," Benson put in. When the others scowled at him for taking their psych-out campaign off-topic, he added, "but it works really, really well with bug juice."

"Actually, the orange shit is great as an all-purpose solvent and scouring agent," Jablonski put in. "Real high acid content, y'know? Scours tiles and fittings better'n soap powder. Just don't ever use it on any 'J' or 'Y' type fittings."

"Wha… what are those?" O'Brien asked.

"Damn it, kid, don't you know anything?" Scobey exploded.

"What are they teaching you kids at Groton these days?" Benson asked, shaking his head.

"J and Y fittings are the ones with rubber seals," Scobey said, with the patient air of one telling the absolute truth to an absolute idiot, "and they lead to the outside of the boat. Things like seawater-intake valves and positive-pressure flushing flanges."

"Waste-dump outlets," Jablonski said, nodding. "Pressure-balance influx lines."

"Right," Scobey said. "If you use acid on them — and that orange shit does have a real high acid content, believe me! — it'll eat through the rubber, rupture the seals, and some chilly day when we're at a thousand feet they'll fail. You ever seen what happens when water comes in through a ruptured seal, with a pressure behind it of five hundred pounds per square inch? It ain't pretty!"

"I scraped one poor nub off the bulkhead once," Jablonski said, shaking his head sadly. "Used a three-inch paint scraper and a sponge to get as much of him into the body bag as I could. Only found about this much, though." He held his hands out, shaping a shape the size of a basketball. "Five, maybe six pounds' worth. We decided to use a plastic trash bag from the galley instead of a regular body bag, 'cause there just wasn't enough left to make it cost-effective! You know, those regular body bags cost hundreds of dollars each."

"I remember that," Scobey said, almost mournfully. "There were bits of bone and teeth that were driven across the compartment and actually embedded in the steel bulkhead. Needed a dentist's drill and pick to dig them all out….

O'Brien's brows slammed together at that. "Hey!" he said around a mouthful of egg. "If that'd really happened, the Pittsburgh would've gone down and never come up again! You guys are pulling my leg!"

"How do you know it didn't?" Scobey said, leaning close by O'Brien's ear, dropping his voice to a melodramatic growl. "How do you know the 'Burgh isn't a ghost ship… and that you were doomed to walk her decks with the rest of us the moment you set foot aboard her haunted decks!.. "

O'Brien blinked, swallowed, then shook his head. "Geeze! You guys!"

He'd heard dark tales in Sub School about the hazing that went on with newbies aboard submarines. These seemed like pretty decent guys, though, and so far their hazing had been merely of the tall-tale variety.

ST3 David Kellerman brought his tray to the table.

"Squee!" Benson exclaimed. "How the hell are you?"

"'Squee?' " O'Brien asked, confused. Some submariner terminology was absolutely baffling.

"Don't ask," Boatswain's Mate First Class Archie Douglas said, joining the table.

"Oh, you can ask," Scobey said. "But if we told you, then Squee here would have to kill you. And we need you topside today on a working party."

"I thought I was supposed to start my quals in the torpedo room today."

Benson laughed. "You are, sort of. But the first thing you have to do is learn how to bring the torpedoes aboard. And before that, you have to take them off the boat. Can't have all that high-explosive shit just floating here beside Pier Two, waiting for some idiot to trip and fall and set the whole shebang off, and maybe take half of Vallejo with it."

"And getting torpedoes on and off the boat is a major evolution," Jablonski said, "because they haven't yet figured out a way to make a nineteen-foot-long Mark 48 torpedo go around corners in a submarine's companionways."

"Well, how do they do it?" O'Brien asked. "I know there's a forward torpedo-loading hatch, but I've never seen it actually done."

"What are they teaching you kids in school these days?" Douglas said, shaking his head sadly. "Don't worry," Scobey said darkly. "You'll see. You'll see!"

Commander Gordon stood at attention, his right hand rigidly held with fingertips touching the right side of his uniform cap's bill. Commander Mike Chase stood to his right in an identical pose as they faced the flagpole above the dock-side where a colors party was running up the flag. The last notes of the "Star-Spangled Banner" floated from a loudspeaker on the side of a nearby building. The two men dropped their salutes, and watched as the colors party formed up and marched away in parade-ground step.

"Still brings a lump to the throat, eh?" Chase said quietly.

"Always," Gordon replied.

Chase looked at the other man. Once they had been best friends, Annapolis roommates, about as close as two men could be.

A lot had happened in the twenty years since. For a time, Gordon had thought Chase'd been trying to sabotage his career. That had not been the case, but the distance between them had never closed up.

It was damned hard to find trust for a man once the old trust between them had seemed betrayed.

"So," Chase continued, as they turned and started walking toward the dockside. Seabirds shrieked overhead, circling, and bent white wings above the water. "When do you want to start going over the manifests?"

"Whenever convenient," Gordon replied. "Today, if you like."

"Not today," Chase said, smiling ruefully. "We're about to have an infestation of suits."

"Suits?" Gordon raised an eyebrow.

"Folks from Washington. Read Langley. I understand they want to debrief us on our last op."

"I see. What was the last op?"

"Can't tell you. Sorry."

"That classified?"

"That classified. And compartmentalized. And sanitized. And the key thrown away afterward."

"Hell of a way to run a Navy."

"My sense is that the Powers That Be are a bit nervous after the Walker incident." The Walkers had been an entire family of Navy spies—

John Walker, who'd started selling secrets when he'd been a Navy officer in 1967, his defense contractor brother, his Navy lieutenant son, and his best friend, also a naval officer. They'd been discovered only in 1985, after they'd already done incalculable damage. The word was that the new Soviet subs coming off the ways right now, ultrafast and ultra-silent, were the product, in part, of the Walkers' espionage efforts.

"And I'm going to put to sea with a whole crew who knows more about where the boat's been recently than I do!"

"They may decide to fill you in," Chase said quietly. "With all the haste… with the suits swarming everywhere …"

"What?"

"I don't know. I just have the feeling the 'Burgh is going to go right back into the lion's den again."

"And the next mission might have something to do with the last one?"

"Maybe."

"What makes you say that?"

"Nothing specific. Just a feeling, is all."

"Well, I don't want to come on board and spook the men," Gordon said. "Give me a call when we can get together and go over the books."

"Will do." Chase hesitated.

"What's the matter?" Gordon asked.

"Nothing really. Just a wonderment. I have to hold a captain's mast sometime this week. Five guys got into a fight in town the other night. Got pretty badly banged up."

"Sounds like they already got their punishment."

"That's true. But you know I can't let it slide."

"Of course not. What's the problem?"

"The problem is they had a raw deal handed to them on a platter. From what COB tells me, a biker gang decided to pick on them. They fought back. Predictable outcome."

"Ouch."

"The bartender wanted to press charges for damages. He knew he wasn't going to get it out of the bikers!"

"Yeah. I follow."

"COB got the men sprung, but the civilian establishment is still going to want to see justice done."

"So what have you done to the poor bastards so far?"

"Docked 'em liberty over the holiday. Though I did let the ones who wanted come topside to watch the fireworks over the Bay Saturday. But if they come up before me on mast, I'll have to dock 'em pay and give 'em extra duty. Seems a hell of a way to treat these boys, after what they've been through already."

And what they're likely to go through next. That shared but unspoken thought hung between them for a moment.

"Suggestion?" Gordon said.

"Shoot."

"Lose the forms."

"Eh?"

"Lose the forms. Since you're outgoing, they won't have any way to get hold of you, and I can play dumb. I'll refer them up the ladder all the way to Washington if I have to. If they want to sue the government, let 'em. By the time things straighten out, we'll be long gone to sea."

Chase nodded. "And from what I hear, you'll be home-porting down at San Diego after this. It'll be years before Pittsburgh sees Vallejo again."

"Sound workable?"

"Absolutely. I was hoping you'd think of that."

Gordon laughed. "I'd rather take care of our people than some parasite ashore."

"Amen. Well, I'd better go aboard and get squared away for our guests."

"I wish you luck."

"Thanks. We'll need it."

Chase walked down the pier, then stepped out onto the brow connecting the Pittsburgh with the dock. A small guard hut of strictly ceremonial utility had been erected on the 'Burghs deck aft of her sail, along with a confusion of safety lines and temporary stanchions. A Navy sentry came to attention as Chase saluted the ensign aft, then saluted the OD.

A ship's bell dinged twice. "Pittsburgh, arriving," a voice said over a loudspeaker, the ancient declaration that the ship's captain had just come aboard.

But not for much longer, he thought. The knowledge that he would soon be departing Pittsburgh for the last time hurt like the anticipated loss of a loved one.