Silent Sea

EPILOGUE

The next year passed swiftly for Mike Brannon. He was promoted to full Commander and given the extra responsibility of Assistant to the Squadron Commander. Gloria found a pleasant house to rent on the Sound that was well within their budget, and they settled into the peacetime routine of a middle-seniority career officer on his way to Flag rank. They entertained junior officers once a month and were, in turn, entertained by their senior officers.

Sitting in his office in the Submarine Base in New London early one morning Brannon saw his door open, and Chief Yeoman Booth came in carrying a tray with two full cups of coffee in one hand and a letter in the other.

“Got a letter from Chief Flanagan,” he said, putting the coffee cups on the desk. “Thought you might like to hear what he’s up to, sir.”

“I would,” Brannon said, reaching for a coffee cup.

“He retired a year ago when I was on leave,” Booth said. “Went out to the Philippines. He’s got a regular business letterhead with half a dozen companies listed. Everything from construction to salvage work to ships’ supplies. He says he’s making money at all of them.”

“He’s a good man,” Brannon said. “Whatever he turns his hand to, he would be able to do.”

“He married a girl from Tacloban,” Booth continued. “Said he inherited a ready-made family. She’s got twin boys about fourteen, fifteen months old.” He looked at Mike Brannon, his eyes crinkling in a smile.

“Tacloban,” Booth went on. “That’s where he went ashore to deliver the orders to the guerrilla guy and didn’t come back for a night and a day and when he came back he was passed-out drunk and Brosmer swore he smelled pussy on him.”

Brannon nodded, smiling.

“Well, he’s married, and he says he’s happy as hell. Great woman. Good kids. You heard about Captain Mealey?”

“Made Rear Admiral,” Brannon said. “Going to be our boss as head of Submarines, Atlantic. Hell of a good move.”

“Sablefish is due in at ten hundred hours, sir. You want to meet her at the pier?”

“Hell, yes,” Brannon said. “John Olsen’s her skipper.”

Lieutenant Commander John Olsen crossed the gangway to the pier and engulfed Mike Brannon in a bear hug. “Hah! Three full stripes. Congratulations, Mike.”

“First things first,” Brannon said. “How about dinner at my house at about eighteen hundred? I’m going to be tied up here, but I’ll send a car to pick you up.”

“Can the car pick me up at the station, the railroad station, at seventeen hundred? My fiancée’s coming in on the seventeen hundred train from New York.”

Brannon’s eyebrows rose. “You engaged? The great woman hater? She’s welcome. I have to see this wonder woman who managed to trap you.

“Now, what can I do for you before I shove off to a lot of meetings? You’re part of our Squadron now and I sort of wear the number two hat in the Squadron.”

“I’ll give you an easy one,” Olsen said. “I need a first-rate Chief of the Boat. Mine looked all right during the pre-commissioning, but he fell apart when we started operating out of Key West.”

Brannon chewed his lower lip reflectively. “I’ve got Steve Petreshock in Eelfish as my Chief of the Boat and you can’t have him. I know, Fred Nelson. He made Chief a couple of months ago and he’s in excess. You know how good a man he is. That suit you?”

“Perfect,” Olsen said. “If he wants to come aboard.”

“He’ll jump at the chance,” Brannon said. “He knows he’s in excess, and Chief of the Boat billets don’t come along very often. I’ve got to run. The driver will meet you at the train station at seventeen hundred hours. See you at the house.”

John Olsen walked into the Brannon’s living room with a buxom, black-haired smiling woman at his side.

“These are the Brannons, dear,” he said to the woman. “Mike and Gloria. Folks, meet my fiancée, Mrs. Joan Hinman.” He watched as Brannon’s face twisted.

“You mean?” Brannon asked softly.

“What John means, Captain Brannon, Mrs. Brannon, is that I am the widow of Captain Arthur Hinman. And I am going to be Mrs. John Olsen if this Swede doesn’t chicken out on me.” She looked at the Brannons, her dark blue eyes under heavy black eyebrows level and serene.

“I’m delighted!” Gloria Brannon cried. She rushed forward and swept Joan Hinman into her embrace. She released her, and Mike Brannon came forward and shyly kissed Joan’s cheek.

“How did all this happen, if I may ask?” Mike Brannon said as the four sat on the shaded porch at the back of the house.

“I was stationed in Key West with Sablefish,” Olsen began. Joan waved her hand at him.

“I went to Key West for a change,” she said. “Some friends told me it was quaint and kind of funny there. I went to church one Sunday morning. A Lutheran church. Sort of an odd little place, only about twenty-five people in the congregation. The church had a little social hour after the service, coffee and doughnuts and put some money in the bowl to pay for it.

“I noticed this tall, skinny fellow dressed in a pair of old slacks and a sport shirt, and he put a dollar in the bowl and only had coffee, so I got interested. Fellow might be a big spender. Some nice lady, wife of a retired Colonel I think, came up and said wasn’t it just fine that since we were the only two visitors that day that we’d already met.”

“We hadn’t, but Joan took care of that,” Olsen said. “She said she hadn’t had any breakfast and would I pop for orange juice and flapjacks? I did, and that led to lunch and to dinner and let me tell you, she’s a good eater. Expensive date.”

“One thing led to another,” Joan continued. “He told me he was a captain of a ship and he took me to see it. I told him about Captain Hinman and he got a funny sort of a look.

“Then he told me about the Mako and the Eelfish.” Her normally smiling face was solemn.

“I knew how Art had died. Quickly, the Admiral said when he wrote, and you said the same thing, sir. But I didn’t know about the rest of the crew, the Psalm.” She reached out and took Olsen’s hand.

“John told me. It was hard for him to do that. We both cried. It sort of brought us closer together, and since then he’s taught me a lot about how you people in submarines feel about each other, how close you are to each other.

“I left the Navy after the Mako went down. They give you that option, you know. I didn’t have to work if I didn’t want to. There was the pension and the insurance. So I helped in charitable things and kept myself busy, and then one day a friend told me about Key West and I went there and I went to church and there was John. The hard part was a long way back, almost three years at that time.”

“She made me take her out every night,” Olsen grumbled. “Can you imagine me trying to learn to dance?”

“After about three months of suffering through him being a perfect gentleman at all times I gave him a choice,” Joan said. “I told him that if he had any dirty, sneaky, nasty thoughts about men and women and he didn’t try to carry them out he could get out of my life.” She threw her head back and rocked with laughter.

“Oh, did he have dirty thoughts!”

“She’s giving up a lot to marry me,” Olsen said. “She loses her pension. Shows you what a great catch I am.”

“I’m a woman who looks to the future,” Joan said. “If you don’t make Admiral I’ll divorce you and sue you for heaps of alimony.”

“One other thing, Mike,” Olsen said. “The wedding is next week. Will you be my best man?” He laughed as he saw the pained expression on Brannon’s face.

After dinner the group moved to the porch with coffee. Olsen settled in his chair. “You ever hear from any of our old bunch on the Eelfish?”

“Not many of the enlisted men who were Reserves write,” Brannon said. “That’s understandable. They’ve got a living to make on the outside. Paul Blake writes every couple of months or so. He and his wife, that nice Australian girl he married in Perth, they live on a farm in Kansas. He’s in partnership with his father. They’ve got about fifteen thousand acres of wheat. His last letter mentioned that his wife’s parents came over from Perth and spent a month with them.

“Chief Flanagan is in Manila. He’s apparently into a lot of different businesses and making them all go. He went there after he retired, after we got back, and he married a girl in Tacloban who had twin boys about fifteen months old.” He saw Olsen doing the mental arithmetic and the two men smiled. “Let’s see, Arbuckle and Lee are both in ‘Frisco. Perry is an architect and doing well. Lee is working for the state as a prosecutor. Perry said Lee’s wife is there and that it’s a good marriage. Perry is still single.

“Jerry Gold, remember him? He’s a dentist with an office in downtown Chicago. He wrote me not long ago and said any submariner coming through Chicago should stop and get free coffee served by a beautiful nurse, and a free dental checkup goes with the coffee. He hasn’t changed.

“Chief Morris, Chief Booth, they’re still with me. So are most of the Regulars who brought the Eelfish back. The last I heard of Doc Wharton he was going to veterinarian’s school somewhere in the Midwest. Charlie Two Blankets decided to make the Navy a career, and he’s in intelligence work in Washington.” He turned to Joan Hinman.

“You’ll like it here. Good duty station. Lots of really nice wives here.”

“I’m sure I will,” Joan said. “I think it’s time all of you were able to live normal lives again. I can’t see another war, not with that atomic bomb, terrible as it is, and that other bomb they talk about, the hydrogen bomb. As long as we have those weapons and every nation knows we would never use them to conquer anyone, as long as we have those weapons I think we’ll have peace.”

Gloria Brannon rose. “Let me show you my garden before it gets too dark.” The two women went out the screen door.

“Hell of a nice woman, John,” Brannon said. “I never met her, you know. Art wrote me about her. I always wondered what kind of a woman she was. Apparently she has a mind of her own.”

“Damned good mind, too,” Olsen said. “After she left the Navy she started taking courses at Georgetown, economics, anthropology. She kids a lot, she’s a hellion in bed, but she’s got a serious side that appeals to my Swedish upbringing.”

“When the women come back I want to talk to her some more about why she thinks we won’t have another war,” Brannon said.

“She’ll give you a good argument,” Olsen said. “She hates the idea of an atomic weapon and the damage it did to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the people it killed and injured. But she’s firmly convinced that as long as we have that weapon and have control of it there won’t be another war.”

“I believe that, too,” Mike Brannon said. “I believe it and I say ‘Thank God’ every night when I go to bed.”

Halfway across the world in a laboratory deep in a remote area of the Soviet Union, Russian and German physicists labored at the task of putting together an atomic bomb. They would explode that bomb in less than three years.