The Passage

Prologue

Fifty miles off the coast of Siberia, the sea was a wind-scratched, ash-colored desert, heaving almost imperceptibly under a steely sky. Here and there, calm patches reflected the passing clouds like old mirrors. A faint cold wind off the Gydan Mountains moaned as if bereft, unheard by any ear.

Four hundred feet below the surface, a shadow slipped slowly through the dark.

The submarine milled northward at a pace no faster than a leisurely stroll, balanced on the knife edge of a thermocline. The huge machined-bronze propeller rotated its seven blades once every two seconds. Only the faintest blue filtered down to it through the cold and murky sea.

It was not the darkness that hid the three-hundred-foot-long, thirty-foot-diameter steel hull of USS Threadfin. It was silence. Pumps silent, plant silent, the hot radioactive water seeped through the vertical core of its reactor without throb or hum. Like a trespassing cat, she placed paw after paw, barely breathing, eyes wide and ears up, through the deep silence.

Standing behind the plane control stations, not looking at the diving officer, her captain murmured, “Woody, sure we’re not getting too heavy?”

“No, sir,” said the junior officer. “We’re trimmed out right. But damn it, I’d like to try it, one of these missions.”

“It’s not going to make much difference at this speed. We’re putting out more decibels from the screw than any kind of flow noise.”

“It’d work,” said the diving officer stubbornly. “I was talking to the sonar officer off one of the six-eighty-eights; they were playing around with it at Tongue of the Ocean. Regular two-part epoxy, got it from Servmart. They laid it in all the hull gaps, the safety tracks, retractable cleats, forward escape trunk. Then ground it smooth. Same-same with the flood ports, except one flush-closing valve—”

“But think how hard it’d be to get it out after the mission was over. And flow noise is a squared delta. Right now, there isn’t anything in the ocean quieter than we are — except maybe a jellyfish.”

The conversation was interrupted by a chief auxiliaryman. He reported that the problem with the rudder emergency-mode valve had been resolved. It had been clogged by a Kimwipe. The captain examined the frayed cloth absently. Under normal circumstances, he’d have exploded, asked who had inspected the last maintenance job. Now he just said, “Thanks. We’ll talk about it later, Chief.” He was still watching the diving-control station, staring through the dials. A grease-penciled placard above the panel read: DAYS OUT OF PEARL: 91. DAYS TO PEARL: 36.

Eighty feet aft of the control room, locked into the five-foot-diameter escape trunk he’d spent the last three days in, a thirty-year-old master diver from Eugene, Oregon, took a test breath off a Mark 16 closed-circuit underwater breathing apparatus. The 7 percent helium-oxygen mix tasted like stale ice. He was sweating under waffle-knit underwear and a dry suit. He blew out, trying to relax, and peeled a scrap of Saran Wrap — from the sandwiches they’d been living on since they went into saturation — off the number two diver’s leg.

Two decks down, a sonarman sucked his lip, hunting through the static of overamplified noise for the sound he’d heard, very faintly, fifteen minutes before. He didn’t want to report it too early. As soon as he spoke, the captain would want a bearing, range, classification. His fingers nudged the dial a millimeter left. Finally, he reached for the intercom.

In the control room, a speaker said, “Conn, Sonar: probable pinger bearing three-five-one. Contact is very faint.”

“Sonar, Conn aye,” said the officer of the deck.

“Ease us over there, Woody,” said the captain. “Remember, we’re hitting freshwater strata up here; we’re not far from the mouth of the river. Slow and easy. No transients, no knuckles, let’s oil our way in. Take her under the layer for the approach.”

“Aye, sir. Come left, steady course three-five-zero,” said the OOD. He wiped his hands on his trousers. “Dive, make your depth six hundred feet.”

“Make my depth six-zero-zero feet, Dive aye,” repeated the diving officer. He was a slight blond twenty-five-year-old from Bow, New Hampshire, and had left a pregnant wife behind in base housing. Submerged, Threadfin could copy broadcast, though it could not, on the current mission, transmit. Two weeks ago, a ten-word Red Cross message had told him he was the father of an eight-pound, seven-ounce girl. But there was no word in it about his wife, and he worried in well-worn grooves about her as he maintained the bubble between up one and down one.

In the sonar room, the technician stared at a screen of green light. A voice said in his headphones, “Hey, officer a’ the deck wants an estimated range?”

“Tell him five to ten miles.”

“That a good range?”

“What you want up there, want me to run out with a tape measure?”

“Sonar estimates ten to twenty thousand yards, sir.”

“Silence the boat.”

Four discreet tones sounded in berthing compartments and in the engine room, in the sonar room and the wardroom and the long low-overheaded space smelling of oil and canned air where the torpedomen lay beneath the weapons, staring upward. In the scullery, the cooks slipped off their shoes and moved quietly about, securing pots and soup kettles. The engineers eased circuit breakers out on air-conditioning units. In the fan rooms, the blades slowed in their cages, whirring down to a stop.

The captain lifted his head, sensing the cessation of air movement on the nape of his neck. He unzipped the collar of his coveralls and took another deep breath. “Drop her to three knots.”

“Maneuvering, Conn: Make two-zero turns.”

The chief of the watch muttered into his sound-powered phones, relaying the order aft.

Back in the escape trunk, the divers pulled Navy Special Warfare — issue fins and masks over dry suits already sodden with trapped sweat. They checked watches, buddy lines, weight belts, duration/depth computers, and pony bottles. They wore no snorkels, no inflatable life preservers. If they saw open sky on this dive, they’d die in agony, coughing their lungs up in scarlet foam.

The sonarman nudged his dial left, then right. He frowned. “Conn, Sonar: new DIMUS trace, Sierra four-seven, bearing two-five-eight.”

DIMUS was digital multibeam steering, the equipment that gradually sampled noises too faint to hear out of the random crackle of the sea. “Bearing drift, classification?” the OOD asked.

“Sierra four-seven classified warship. Making three hundred turns on, uh … two three-bladed screws. Drawing left slowly. We’re picking up an occasional fifty-kilohertz pinging, sounds like the fathometer.”

“Probably out of Kamenskoye. Put a tracker on him. Notify me if there’s any indication he’s sniffed us.”

“Sonar aye.”

A long period of silence. The sonarman watched the screen as the prickle of ship sound ebbed, till it merged back into the hiss and crackle of the never-silent sea. He listened at the same time to the pinger, now dead ahead, as every ten minutes it emitted its low, short-burst narrowband signal, nearly undetectable unless you knew exactly where to look.

“Estimated range to pod, one mile. Permission to take a sounding?”

The captain considered. He needed to know how far above the seafloor he was. But to do that, he’d have to put sound in the water. Contrary to the three cardinal principles of submarine stealth, which are: one: Be as quiet as possible. Two: If you must make sound, try to disguise it as something else. And three: If neither one nor two is possible, then go ahead and make the noise, but don’t repeat it, and move away as quickly as consistent with principle number one.

In this case, each submarine assigned to Operation Northern Bells had been equipped with, among other special gear, a fathometer that operated at the same frequency as the depth-finding gear installed in the Soviet trawler fleet. A hunting sub or destroyer would likely classify it as from one of the dozens of small fishermen that dotted these far-northern waters.

He nodded silently to the officer of the deck, who kept his eyes on the fathometer. The display came on, flickered, registered 0000, then, for a moment, 80 M, then 0000 again. Then it went off.

“All stop! Diving Officer, I need her about two tons heavy. Do it slow, no transients, no pump noise.”

The chief of the boat bent over the ballast-control panel. He pressed two circular symbols, which changed to red open circles; waited thirty seconds, his eye on a slowly rising column of light; then pressed again. “Two tons flooded.”

“Retract pit sword.” The OOD glanced at the captain, who was staring forward again, deep in thought.

He was seeing it all in his mind.

To his left, perhaps fifty miles to port, was the Soviet mainland, the barren, isolated Magadan Peninsula. To starboard, seventy miles away, was Kamchatka, a dangling, even more godforsaken appendage of Siberia that had no value the Russians or anyone else had ever been able to find. Save one: a harbor, Petropavlovsk-Kamchatskii, now home to the ballistic missile submarines of the Soviet Pacific Fleet and control center for the SS-12 ICBMs of the Rocket Forces based there. This narrow neck of sea was all that separated the two.

For the last eleven hundred miles, since threading La Perouse Strait, Threadfin had been in Soviet territorial waters. For the last six days, she’d run silent, sometimes at seven knots, sometimes at five, sometimes at two, and sometimes at a dead stop, drifting with the deep currents; and once at twenty knots, racing westward as Soviet sonars searched and probed the sea behind her.

Now she approached her goal, and he rubbed his chin and stared blankly at the readouts. This was sticking your crank under the guillotine, he thought. The Soviets had shot down a civilian jetliner that strayed over this area. They’d not let a submarine escape once it was detected.

But the reward … that made the risk worthwhile. Or at least those who’d sent them thought so.

“Sir?” said the diving officer, and the captain nodded, once.

“Pass the word to the divers: It’s up to them now.”

Inside the escape trunk, sealed in with a closed hatch below and another above, the master diver heard the order without change of expression. He sucked the empty space where a tooth had exploded years before, when he came up too fast from five hundred feet. The helium atmosphere distorted speech, so he said nothing to his partner. Just held up a finger, tapped his watch, then pointed at the four-inch-thick screw-sealed hatch above them. He reached up to spin a valve wheel open, bent, and cracked another. The smell of the sea hit his nose, cold, dank, as water began gushing in.

His hands moved with the familiarity of long practice, checking the oxygen bypass valve, the straps and nonmagnetic buckles, the lighted oxygen/CO₂ readouts clamped to his mask. As the rising water chilled his thighs, he sealed tempered glass over his face, twisted the bottle valve handwheel to full ON, and took a deep breath. He set the outer ring on his TAG/Heuer to twenty minutes past the hour.

Ten minutes later, the hatch lifted from the flush curvature of the submarine’s hull. The lead diver pulled himself through, into darkness. He fumbled at his belt.

The light showed the black torpedo shape of Threadfin’s hull stretching back into darkness. He pulled himself along it, keeping his breathing slow. The indicator inside his mask stayed green. He felt the number two diver behind him, heard a clank and scrape as he fended off. They fell together, linked by the buddy line, toward the bottom.

As they dropped, he fumbled at his waist. The box came on, red light — emitting diodes flickering as he swung it left, then right.

His knees hit bottom, sinking into cold ooze. He angled up again and finned westward, following the device held out at arm’s length like a compass. A faint green radiance in the enormous night marked the number two diver following him, off to his left and slightly above.

Behind them, hunched in front of the sonar stacks, the sonarman was tuning slowly across the band between 2 and 3 kilohertz. Occasional transients spiked the display. There was no periodicity, though, and when he tuned closer, he saw only random dancing light, heard nothing but the steady hiss and crackle of the empty sea.

The lead diver swam steadily through the dark, sixty beats a minute, following the green LEDs like an aviator on instruments. Gas rasped in his ears and parched his throat. Eight hundred feet, he thought. That means, if you don’t find Big Mama sub again, there is no way you don’t die.

A section of the panel previously dark suddenly came to life. A blue LED flickered, strengthened, became steady; then another. When the third flickered on, he immediately stopped swimming, sank toward the bottom, brought his fins under him, and swam back the way he had come.

Twenty feet back, he collided with a thin nylon cord. He seized it, waving the number two in with the phosphorescent wand. The other diver’s hand fumbled over his, found the cord, too, and followed it down — into the silt.

A muffled clank told him the other diver was unsheathing the trenching tool. He had one, too, but the way they’d planned this, one man dug and the other stayed alert. He didn’t know what for, though. He couldn’t think of anything that might happen that they could do anything about.

When he pointed the light down again, the beam went about two inches and stopped. Murk, and lots of it. He heard the scrape and hiss and clank as the other diver dug. That was the miserable part of the job, on your belly in the muck, scraping and clawing your way down into what seemed like the most remote part of the most remote sea in the world, in the utter cold of however many thousand lost aeons had laid down this ancient silt.

Down to the cable.

The line pulled at his wrist. He flinched, then angled down, eeling himself into the black quicksand that was the roiled, undulating bottom of the Sea of Okhotsk.

The man in chinos and button-down short-sleeved shirt wandered nervously down the corridor aft of the wardroom. This was the first time he’d ever been to sea. He didn’t like it. Being aboard a sub was a lot like being in jail. He’d been in jail once, in London, when an overzealous bobby had found him replacing the cover of a phone switch box outside the Chinese embassy. (The next day, a polite sort from M15 had come round and persuaded the Metropolitan Police to let him go, friendly relations and all that, thank you, disappear now, no fuss please, there’s a good chap.) He grinned faintly, remembering.

Only this jail was 278 feet long and very training-conscious. The crew had made him qualify on everything from emergency airbreathing masks to submersible pumps, not to mention the goddamn toilets.

He clenched his fists suddenly, checking his watch for the hundredth time since the divers had locked out. Christ, he thought. Let’s get the fucking pod aboard and get out of here.

The pod was a tap, just like the one he’d put on the embassy phones years ago. Two months back, Threadfin had attached it to the undersea telecommunications cable linking the Kamchatka Peninsula to Moscow. This cable carried all the traffic between the command, administrative, and technical authorities in Moscow and the Pacific Coast submarine and missile bases. The Sovs knew that NSA monitored all their radio communications. So they used land lines for the stuff they didn’t want intercepted. They buried them deep, put armed guards on them, one every mile, and bingo: They were secure from tapping.

So secure, in fact, that most of what went over the cable wasn’t even coded.

The kicker, though, was that for 120 miles, the cable ran underwater.

The civilian grinned, then stopped, looking at the thick curved ribs of the overhead. He shivered, feeling suddenly cold, and looked anxiously, for the hundred and first time, at his watch.

The number two diver grunted as his spade hit something hard. He reversed the trenching tool and probed. The buddy line fouled the handle and he had to stop to untangle it, by feel in the dark, his hands numb now, freezing cold. Goddamn it …. Goddamn this silt …. He dropped the tool and dug with his hands, furiously, like a crazed beaver. Then reached for the Ping-Pong paddle jammed under his weight belt.

The pod emerged from the silt under their lights, the muck melting in slow-mo as the divers fanned it away. It was three feet long, black, and shaped like one of those oval pieces of foam that are supposed to keep your keys from sinking if they fall overboard. Down its center ran a groove about eight inches wide.

In this groove, free to lift out of it without hindrance or binding if it was hoisted from the surface, ran the cable. It was black, too, new-looking and smooth. There were no barnacles or coral. Not this deep, this cold.

The number two diver knelt. Like an acolyte performing a sacred rite, he hesitated, then worked his gloves under the cable.

The lead diver was ready with his tool. Levering the handle under the cable, he pried its deadweight out of the groove. The pod remained, still half-buried. The ooze had crept back a little, almost like a live thing, though it was the essence of lifelessness — of death, black and cold, every trace of sun energy sucked out, till the empty atoms were useless to even the humblest life.

Suddenly, he lifted his head. He snapped his light off, and the other diver, startled, did, too. For a long minute, they stared into the mighty dark.

Did I imagine it? thought the number one diver. I didn’t hear anything. But I thought I felt something. Something … watching us?

Finally, he decided he was getting spooked. There was nothing else down here. His light clicked back into life, fainter now as the cold leached chemical activity from the batteries. Got to hurry, he thought, and anxiety made his hands clumsy as he inserted the butt of the tool into a slot, turned it, and caught the puck-shaped module as it came free. The number two slapped a new one into place. The lead diver replaced the sealing cap, turned it twice, and bore down till it clicked.

Done. The spades clanked and scraped as they dug silt back over the pod. Gloved hands passed over it, smoothing the cold, furrowed bottom. The lead diver caught the number two’s eyes. He nodded and jerked his thumb over his shoulder.

“Maneuvering reports divers locked back aboard, sir,” said the chief of the watch, letting go of the switch on the muted intercom. “Pumping the trunk down now.”

The captain straightened instantly from his too-careless slouch against the ballast-control panel. He crossed the control room with four long strides, slid down the port ladder, turned in a two-foot landing at the bottom, went down another ladder, turned, and headed forward. Crewmen flattened themselves against the sides of the passageway as he slid by, turning, too, so their chests brushed lightly as they passed. Grabbing a handhold above a massive door, he levered through and ducked under a hoist arm just as a torpedoman swung back a heavy machined-brass inner door. A little seawater ran out, dark with suspended silt. At the far end of the empty torpedo tube, circles of reflected light cupped a black object. The torpedoman reached for a battered pool bridge someone had racked on glue-on plastic brackets above the tube face. Its worn handle read: SONNY D’S, IMPERIAL BEACH. He slid it into the tube, then followed it, crawling in till only his feet stuck out into the torpedo room.

When he wriggled back out, pulling out the pool bridge, the module came with it. The civilian pushed past the captain, saying, “Excuse me, gentlemen.” He wiped the black disc with a bandanna from his back pocket and laid it on the head of a torpedo. An electric screwdriver whirred, and the cover came off with a pop.

They stared down at an empty reel and a small, complex tape drive and recording head mechanism. Under it was a second reel. The second reel was full of two-inch-wide magnetic data-storage tape.

“It’s good?” said the captain.

“It’s all here.” The civilian closed his eyes. “It worked. The son of a bitch worked.”

The captain grabbed a pair of phones hanging near the tube. He clicked the circuit selector. “Woody? Skipper here. Let’s get the fuck out of Dodge.”

Back in the control room, the chief watched a gauge column drop as pumps drove water from the fore and aft trim tanks, replacing it with air. The bubble of the fore-and-aft clinometer tumbled slowly forward as the bow lifted. The helmsman eased his aircraftstyle wheel back into his lap, and the lee helm rang up ahead two-thirds. Two hundred feet aft, one of the enginemen released a locking gear; with a faint hiss and sigh, the shining shaft began to rotate. The prop eased into motion again, slowly, slowly.

Threadfin began to move. Her rudder swung ponderously on its pintles, and she curved left, continuing her swing till the blunt bullet of her bow pointed south by southwest, back toward international waters, over a thousand miles away.

Within her hull, the word ran from mouth to mouth: The mission was over; they were headed home. In the sonar room, two enlisted men were talking about the surfing on Oahu when one caught sight of the screen.

“Conn, Sonar: new DIMUS trace, Sierra four-eight bearing two-seven-zero. Sierra four-eight classified warship, making two hundred turns on two fours.”

The OOD frowned. Two screws with four blades each meant a Soviet destroyer. He called the torpedo room. When the commanding officer got to the control room, Sonar was reporting another contact, this time from dead ahead.

The captain stood by the periscope stand, rubbing his chin as he did relative-motion solutions in his head. “Left fifteen degrees rudder,” he said.

“Captain has the conn.”

“Steady one-zero-zero. Slow to fifteen turns. Rig ship for ultraquiet.”

“Conn, Sonar: gain Sierra five-zero, bearing zero-nine-five. Sierra five-zero is a warship.”

“Shee-it,” whispered the captain.

“Conn, Sonar: Sierra four-eight and four-nine are active on eight kilohertz.”

“They’re warships all right.”

“I knew that,” said the captain. “What I want to know is, why are they pinging?” He crossed to the intercom, but before he touched it, it spoke. “Conn, Sonar: suppressed cavitation in the baffles.”

The captain’s nostrils widened and his face went tense. Suppressed cavitation meant another submarine. “Bearing?” he asked quietly.

“Can’t get an exact bearing, sir. Too much background noise. Somewhere on the port quarter.”

He took a deep breath. “Okay, man battle stations. Make tubes one through four fully ready with the exception of opening the outer doors.”

For twenty minutes, they twisted and turned in a narrowing circle. Sonar reported more active sonars, then helicopter flybys and sonobuoy drops. Sweating, the skipper ordered turn after turn, changed depth and speed, tried to keep his bow to whichever pursuer seemed closest. The beat of the screws, the pings hemmed them in closer and closer. At one point, something hissed along the side of the hull, making the deck sway beneath their feet. “Submarine screw noise, close aboard,” reported Sonar. “Opening now, bearing one-one-five.”

The diving officer muttered, “The son of a bitch almost hit us.”

“They’ve got us boxed, sir.”

The captain looked around. It was the boat’s exec, a stocky lieutenant commander from Gibson, Louisiana. “It’s a box,” he said again. “They’re trying to force us to surface.”

The skipper thought this over. “Get the spook up here,” he said.

“I’m here.”

The civilian’s head appeared at the top of the ladder. The captain beckoned him to where he stood by the scope.

“They’re trying to force us to surface,” he said.

The man in chinos went white. He shook his head slowly. “I can’t believe I’m hearing this.”

“It’s not a decision I’d want to make. But the op order’s clear about who’s in command.”

“I didn’t mean to say you couldn’t. But this program’s too important to compromise.”

“It’s compromised already. They obviously know we’re here.”

“They don’t know what we’re doing. What we did.”

“It’s that important?”

“It’s that important. Yeah.”

“I think I understand what you’re saying,” said the captain. “But do you understand what I’m saying? Let’s make real sure. Tell me what you think I’m saying.”

“You’re asking me if it’s all right for you to surface, to give up.”

“No. I’m saying I may have to shoot my way out of this one.” The civilian licked his lips; his eyes darted around the control room.

“Captain, here’s an opening,” said the OOD.

The captain swung instantly back to the plot. The exec put his finger silently between the green and the blue traces.

“Seems to be a gap developing between four-eight and four-nine. Back to the northeast.”

“We’re not going to get out of this jam going northeast, Paulie.”

“No, but an end run — if we can shake them—”

“You’re right; it’s worth a try. Let’s go for it. Shit a decoy. Soon as you hear it trigger, kick her up to flank and we’ll try to drive between them.”

The Permit class were the fastest U.S. submarines ever to go to sea. As the reactor coolant pumps went to full power, Threadfin began accelerating with incredible smoothness, smoother than a train on welded rails, but so rapidly that the planesman felt himself pressed back into his seat. The glowing numerals of the rpm indicators flickered upward. A faint vibration grew over their heads, a fluttering roar like wind tearing by at great speed. It was the sound of 15,000 horsepower converting itself second by second into velocity.

As they passed twenty knots, Sonar reported losing all contacts due to self-noise. The acceleration continued. The captain leaned on the plotting table, looking down at the moving spot of light and the penciled tracks that hemmed it in. The paper was blistered. He wondered why, then saw another drop of sweat hit it.

“Answering ahead flank, sir, thirty-five knots.”

“Very well. We’ll run for fifteen minutes at high speed, then cut the go juice and slew right, coast out to listen.”

Seconds ticked by. The diving officer and the exec and the plotting team members stood around the table, watching the lighted rosette creep across the paper. After five minutes, the captain said, “You know, a few more minutes here and we just might make it out of this catfight with our shorts intact.”

“We’re making a hell of a racket.”

“I know that. The question is, now they know we’re not going to surface, if they’re willing to—”

The sonarman’s voice crackled through the room. “Water impact! Multiple water impacts, three-sixty degrees, all around us!”

Every man in the compartment strained his ears, listening for the whine that meant an incoming torpedo. But complete silence succeeded the warning.

“Hard left rudder!” shouted the captain suddenly. “Now!”

But the helmsman never had time to acknowledge the command.

The first salvo of RBU-25 rocket-thrown depth charges fell in a four-hundred-yard diameter circle imperfectly centered on Threadfin. Sinking through the sea, set to explode on impact, the closest one passed her madly milling screw fifty yards astern. The second salvo fell two hundred yards ahead of the first.

The first hit landed on the sonar dome. The molten jet of its shaped charge penetrated the inch-thick fiberglass. The seawater inside changed instantly to steam and exploded. The ruptured dome caught the high-speed laminar flow along the hull and peeled outward like a tulip blown apart by a jet of compressed air. The curved shards clattered and banged along the length of the speeding submarine.

The second hit detonated on the port stern plane, blowing half of it off the boat and bending the rest downward. A fifteen-foot chunk of steel spun aft into the prop, which was still driving at full speed.

The crew heard both explosions as muffled thuds, less than a third of a second apart. Then they felt themselves grow light as the boat nosed over, still at thirty-five knots, and headed for the bottom, two hundred feet down.

The third shaped charge punched through the pressure hull just aft of the sail. The two divers, still locked helplessly inside the escape trunk, heard it as a deafening slam, followed by the roar of pressurized water blasting into the engine room.

The men forward of the engine room transverse bulkhead heard it, too. They knew what it meant when the overhead lights went out and failure alarms flashed from every indicator. In the two or three seconds before they plowed into the bottom, some of them wondered what the Soviets would do with their bodies. Others wondered what would become of their souls. The comm officer, in the radio/crypto room, spent the last seconds of his life pulling the red toggles that would detonate the destruction charges.

The captain and the OOD, crouched in the hammering, slanting din, stared at each other in the weird red glow of emergency lighting. The younger man said, “Did we screw up, sir?”

“I don’t think so.”

“What I want to know is, how the fuck did they know? We were quiet! How did they know we were here?”

“I don’t know, Woody,” said the captain. Turning to the rest of the men in the control room, he said the only thing he could think of to say. “Thanks for everything, guys. You all did a super job.”