Virginia Class

9

"You shouldn't tease poor George so much," Matthew DuPont said, sitting down on the deck next to the two women. "He's a prig… but he's a well-meaning prig."

"It's a shame, really," Katie said, letting Ginger go and sitting up. She shaded her eyes as she watched Schiffer walk aft, turn, and descend below deck into the yacht's salon. "He's a nice guy… good-looking, smart. Why can't he loosen up?"

"He's a Bible-thumper," Ginger said with a dismissive toss of her blond mane. "Bible-thumpers don't want anyone to have fun."

"I don't think it's that simple," DuPont said.

"He never quotes scripture at us, or anything like that," Katie said. Lying back, she stretched happily on her towel. "Oh, God. This is the best. I wish this job would never end! Why can't George just, you know, go with it? Enjoy life?"

"He's a good man, Katie. Worked his way up to assistant vice president from the very bottom of the corporate ladder." DuPont shrugged. "My impression is he was raised by pretty strict parents. My guess is he's afraid of what might happen if he did let go. Had a friend like that in college, a few centuries ago…."

Ginger laughed and reached out, stroking his thigh. "Mr. DuPont! You're not that old!"

"Thank you, Ginger. I just sometimes feel—"

"Hey!" Katie called, pointing out to sea. "What's that?"

DuPont turned, looking off the starboard beam. Something like a vertical pipe was emerging from the water less than a hundred yards away, dragging a white curl of spray in its wake. The white water exploded then, the wake becoming much higher and longer as the upper reaches of a massive black rectangle shouldered itself above the calm surface of the sea.

It took DuPont a moment to identify the apparition as a submarine.

"You girls better put some clothes on," he said, standing. "We may be about to have some company."

"Yes, Mr. DuPont."

Walking aft, he joined the two Vietnamese, both of whom were standing by the starboard mainstays, staring at the newcomer. "Is it one of yours?" he asked, hopeful.

"Mr. DuPont," Nguyen said. "The Socialist Republic of Vietnam has no submarines."

"I have some naval experience," Phuong added.

"That is what your navy people would call a 'Kilo-class' submarine. It is almost certainly Chinese. Our intelligence service warned us that they may have one in these waters."

"And that means trouble," DuPont said. "George! George!"

Schiffer stuck his head up out of the hatchway below. "Yessir?"

"Quick! Tell Davis to get on the horn to Oahu Corporate. Tell 'em there's a Chinese Kilo submarine surfacing next to us. Give our position exactly. Tell him to keep broadcasting until I tell him to stop."

Schiffer raised high enough out of the hatchway to see the submarine, his eyes wide. "Yes, sir!" he snapped, then vanished back down the hatch.

Davis was the yacht's radio operator, and the custodian of her state-of-the-art satellite communications and navigational equipment. If the Sea Breeze was about to become the focus of an international incident, Global Oil needed to know the particulars, and fast.

The submarine was on the surface now, running parallel to the Sea Breeze and less than the length of a football field away. The solid-black rectangle, clearly, was the conning tower, a windowless two-story building considerably longer than it was tall. The deck was only just visible above the water; he guessed the submarine was three times the length of the Sea Breeze, which made it something like two hundred to two hundred fifty feet long.

Men were spilling onto the deck now from a hatch in front of the conning tower, and he could see men in the tiny bridge atop the front of the conning tower itself. DuPont walked aft to the tiller, where Kingsfield was standing at the Sea Breeze's wheel, and picked up a pair of binoculars hanging from the binnacle.

"Whaddaya think, Mr. DuPont?" Kingsfield said. "Should I have the boys break out small arms, just in case?"

DuPont raised the binoculars and scanned the submarine's deck and sail. The men on the forward deck, he saw, wore bright orange life jackets… and several were carrying weapons. He recognized the wickedly curving magazines of AK-type assault rifles.

He considered the question. Michael Kingsfield and two of the other crew members had been drawn from Global's security division. Kingsfield himself was a former Army Green Beret. Davis was a former Marine, and Carle had been a Navy SEAL. A fourth hand, Greg Marshall was a former New York City cop, serving now as one of Sea Breeze's general hands. On a quasi-diplomatic business cruise like this one, it was good to have some competent security people along, just in case. The South China Sea was infamous for its modern-day gangs of pirates.

But pirates don't use submarines, and they were rarely this well armed. "I don't think so, Michael," he said. "But it won't hurt to be on your toes."

"Right, sir." He began speaking quickly into the needle mike of the headset he wore.

"Ahoy the sailboat!" The voice boomed across the water from a handheld loudhailer. DuPont was surprised it was English… until he remembered the American ensign flying from the taffrail. "Lower your sails and prepare to be boarded!"

A loudhailer was stored in a locker aft. He pulled it out, turned it on, and raised it to his mouth. "We are…" A squeal of feedback howled across the water. He adjusted the volume, and tried again. "We are a United States vessel in international waters!" he called back. "You have no right to detain us!"

For answer, a chain of waterspouts geysered across the surface of the sea directly beneath Sea Breeze's bowsprit, followed a second later by the crack-crack-crack of full-auto gunfire. Ginger, balancing one-handed against the mainmast as she stepped into her bikini bottom, squealed and fell to the deck. At first DuPont thought she'd been shot… but then he saw her scrambling for cover behind the forward deckhouse, unhurt but badly frightened.

"Lower your sails and prepare to be boarded!"

"Shit!" Kingsfield said at DuPont's back. "I don't think we have a choice, not against that firepower!"

Sea Breeze's fiberglass and aluminum hull would provide about as much protection against machine gun fire as tissue paper. DuPont nodded. "Strike the sails, Michael. I'll try to stall them." He hoped Davis was talking to Oahu by now. It was… what? Six hours' difference… so 4:30 on a Monday afternoon here would be 10:30 at night in Honolulu, but yesterday, Sunday, because of the date line. No matter. The people at Corporate in Oahu were supposed to maintain a 24-7 watch in the comm office. Somebody would be there to hear and pass the news.

Another burst of gunfire cracked across the water, and this time a line of five neat holes punched their way through the mainsail ten feet above the deck.

"Hold your fire, damn it!" DuPont called through the loudhailer. "We're bringing down the sail!"

Sea Breeze's entire crew — all save Davis — was on deck now. Kingsfield put the wheel over, bringing the yacht around to the right, toward the submarine and into the wind. As the jib fluttered and cracked fitfully in the breeze, the mainsail slid down the mast and was swiftly secured to the main boom. Spanker and jib were secured in short order, leaving the Sea Breeze rocking uncomfortably on the gentle swell.

A number of the armed men on the submarine were scrambling down into a pair of rubber rafts that had been dropped over the side. Kingsfield secured the wheel, then approached DuPont. "We could take 'em as they come across in the rafts, sir."

"And then what?" DuPont asked. "They machine-gun us from the submarine? I don't think the four of you would do much good treading water."

Kingsfield shrugged, unable to find a better answer.

DuPont turned to Nguyen. "What's likely to happen?" he asked. "Are we going to be interned?"

Nguyen's face was bland. "You Americans always assume people… what is it you say? Play by the rules. Out here … well, you will find it difficult to place a call to your consulate."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"It means the Chinese will do with us what they want. They claim these waters, as do we. Unfortunately, they have the upper hand at the moment. They could use you — and us — as examples of what happens to… I believe your word is 'trespassers.' "

DuPont took another look at the approaching rafts, getting a good look this time at the men on board.

"Shit!"

"What is it, sir?" Kingsfield asked.

"Those don't look like Chinese to me." Most of the men appeared to be in some kind of uniform, though he didn't recognize the nationality. Some, though, wore civilian clothing, with either turbans or scarves pulled tightly over their heads and tied at the back.

Kingsfield took the binoculars. "Huh. You're right. They look Middle Eastern to me. Or maybe… hell. Iranian? Afghan?"

"Afghanistan doesn't have a fucking navy."

"I know. But some of them have that look, y'know? I was in Afghanistan, sir, right after nine-eleven. Task Force Dagger."

"I know." If they weren't Chinese… what the hell were they? And what did they want with a private American yacht? He thought again about the high incidence of piracy in these waters… but that tended to be focused on fishermen and coastal traders.

And again, pirates did not have submarines.

"Mr. DuPont?" Schiffer was at his side. "Davis is sending the message. He'll keep transmitting as long as he can."

"Good."

"There's something else, though."

"What's that?"

"He picked up a message a few minutes ago. In Vietnamese and then in English. It was kind of fragmented, but…"

"But what?"

"The Viet base at Amboyna Cay, sir. It's gone."

"Gone? What do you mean, gone?"

"It stopped transmitting a couple of hours ago. Sounds like there was an explosion. A big one."

"Well… accidents happen…." But as he stared at the sharklike black silhouette of the foreign submarine off the starboard side, he had a feeling that very little accident was involved.

"I asked you a question, pollywog! What day is it?"

Wallace tried to clear his mind. He was on his hands and knees, stark naked, and shivering from the ice-water dousing he'd been getting each time he failed to answer a question to the satisfaction of the beings in front of him. Only his nose was painted bright blue, but he suspected the rest of his body was fast approaching the same hue.

"The pollywog defies us!" King Neptune roared. It was, in fact, Senior Chief Bollinger, but the COB was damned near unrecognizable — bare-chested, painted green from head to foot, and sporting a bushy white beard that would have done Saint Nick himself proud. He pointed at Wallace with his trident. "Methinks he needs another whack with the royal paddle!"

The Royal Baby stepped forward, wielding a smoothly sanded and varnished paddle. EM1 Hutchinson was the biggest man on board the Virginia, with a massive, jiggling paunch that spilled alarmingly over the waistband of the oversized diaper he wore.

"No! Wait!" Wallace cried. "It's… it's Sunday! No, Monday!"

"Well?" King Borealis Rex demanded from the throne at Neptune's side. "Which is it, pollywog? Sunday? Or Monday?" Chief Vance, rail-slender with a pinched face, looked terrifying with his skin painted bright blue and plastic icicles dangling from his white wig and beard.

Queen Amphitrite laughed. "I don't think the pollywog has the faintest idea, your Majesty!" TM1 Burn-ham looked quite fetching as Neptune's queen, in scarlet briefs and lipstick to match, fishnet stockings, and a bikini bra stuffed with tissue paper; long blond curls, a seashell necklace, strands of seaweed, and a crown made out of tinfoil completed his garb.

"What kind of seaman doesn't know what day it is?" Chief Kurzweil, in his role as Davy Jones, Secretary to His Majesty, hitched up his swim trunks. "/ say we dunk him!"

Wallace shook his head, trying to clear it. It was confusing enough since he wasn't entirely sure which side of the international date line they were on right now. He knew that if it was Sunday east of the line, it was Monday to the west. Which was it?

To make matters worse, the bulkhead clock in the crew's mess had been covered, and he didn't have his watch. He knew it was pretty close to midnight, but was it before? Or after? Were they using local time, which would be around midnight? Or GMT— Zulu — which would be twelve hours earlier… or was it later? God, he had to think!

His thinking by this point was thoroughly muddled. Hours ago, he'd been rousted out of a warm bunk less than fifteen minutes after he'd crawled in, summoned by the bears, also known as the "Royal Masters-at-Arms to Their Imperial Majesties," and to appear before them and answer specific charges of crimes against King Neptunus Rex and King Borealis Rex. Those crimes, an official and impressive-looking warrant declared, included but were not limited to slovenliness, still having manure stuck between his toes, having a non-regulation face, excessive liberty, not knowing larboard from starboard, impersonating a seaman, and being a general disgrace and scum-sodden poor excuse for a landlubber trespassing within His Imperial Majesty's domain.

In the following hours, he'd been stripped, painted, repeatedly doused with ice water, forced to crawl on his hands and knees down a gauntlet while shipmates to either side stung his buttocks with paddles, been humiliated with shouted questions impossible to answer… and been generally and bewilderingly tormented until he was so dazed he wouldn't have known what day it was if he'd been back in Monroeville with a calendar in his hand and his watch on his wrist.

"I'll give you one last chance, pollywog!" Neptune roared. "What fucking day is it?"

Somehow, through the haze, inspiration struck. "It's… it's whatever day you decree it to be, Your Majesty! Since you are all-powerful, you can make it be any day you wish!"

Neptune roared with laughter. "Ha! I like this one! We'll kill him last! Next!"

Helping hands pulled Wallace aside, as the hazing spotlight fell on QM3 Tom Simmons, another of the shivering, huddled mass of pollywogs waiting to complete this bizarre ritual.

The Virginia's mess hall, the largest compartment on board, had been decorated for the occasion, with fishnets and seaweed hanging from the bulkheads and overhead like curtains, with blue-green filters over the lights, and with an impressive triple throne for Neptune, Borealis, and Amphitrite. Various members of the crew — those who'd gone through this ritual earlier in their naval careers — had taken the parts of various characters: Jack Frost, the Royal Barber, the Royal Bears, a Royal Scribe, Neptune's Officer of the Day, the Devil, and assorted court jesters. Wallace hadn't counted, but there were at least twenty men in various degrees of costuming and paint making up the joint Royal Courts of Neptune and Borealis.

Besides this bizarre assembly, the mess deck was packed with both officers and enlisted crew watching the mayhem or actively taking part. Wallace caught sight of the captain, leaning against a bulkhead with folded arms, laughing. The skipper had played a small part in the drama, formally welcoming Neptune and his entourage as they emerged from the eight-man lockout trunk just aft of the control room. He'd told Neptune that there were several men aboard who'd never crossed the line before, nor ventured into the cold wastes of the Arctic, and asked that he be gentle with them. Bollinger had pretended to consider this request, then said, "I am sorry, Captain, but I must be severe with them. You have no idea what craven weaklings and scum-sucking landsmen have been invading my domain of late… used car salesmen, television evangelists, even lawyers! I will have a tidy ocean!"

Captain Garrett had bowed before the king and formally surrendered command of the Virginia to him, then spent the rest of the time by the bulkhead, watching. He wondered if a ship's captain had to go through this if he'd not done so before. It didn't seem right, somehow.

Odd. RM1 Padgett had just stepped into the mess room from forward, spotted Garrett, and made his way through the crowd to Garrett's side. Wallace saw the radioman whisper something in Garrett's ear. Garrett frowned, then nodded. At that point, Wallace was distracted by a sudden raucous burst of laughter. Simmons had gotten an answer wrong to some trick question or other, and been doused with ice water. When he glanced back again at where Garrett had been, he saw that the captain was gone.

The submarine had not been entirely abandoned to the forces of chaos, of course. Watch standers remained at their stations. When he felt the deck tip gently a few minutes later, the fore end of the mess hall rising higher than the aft, he knew that something unusual was going on. What was the message Padgett had delivered?

And what was important enough to interrupt the Imperial Court of Neptunus Rex?

Garrett stepped into the radio shack. "Anything yet?"

"It's just coming through, sir." Padgett said, tapping on a keyboard. "Coming out of the printer now."

The printer in the back corner began buzzing. Virginia might be a paperless vessel, but there were still times when hard copy was preferred. Garrett picked up the sheet from the paper feed and read it.

Padgett's whispered message in the crew's mess had been to the effect that the Virginia had received an ELF alert — someone had "rung the bell." A submarine cruising at three hundred feet could not receive ordinary radio messages, which were effectively blocked by just a few feet of water. Extremely Low Frequency signals could penetrate deep water, however, and be picked up by a special long wire antenna trailing in the submarine's wake. The radio waves were so long, however — about four thousand kilometers—that information transfer was painfully slow, on the order of.03 bit per second. ELF messages were limited, then, to signals known as "bell-ringers," which meant, simply, "come to the surface to receive orders."

And those orders were what Garrett held in his hand, now that the Virginia had come to periscope depth and lifted her satellite communications receiver above the waves. In his experience, such breaks in the routine were either training-related, or they were trouble. He read the message quickly.

Yup. Trouble. And lots of it.

There was more, most of it dealing with command authorities and communications protocol. The orders were signed James J. Taylor, Vice Admiral, JCS, and the time stamp showed the orders cut and issued less than two hours ago. Fast work. Who the hell was this DuPont character, and why was he so important? From the sound of things, the Pentagon, possibly the White House itself, had passed this one down the chain of command by way of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. DuPont's disappearance had overturned a real hornet's nest, and now Virginia was on her way straight into the heart of the swarm.

The Spratly Islands? Garrett knew they'd been the short fuse on a powder keg in Southeast Asia for decades. Claimed by China, Vietnam, and a handful of other nations, they were a war waiting to happen… especially if someone happened to strike oil in the region. The presence of Global Oil people on a pleasure boat with representatives of the Hanoi government suggested that Vietnam was raising the stakes, possibly bringing in Global to actively prospect. Or maybe they'd already made an oil or gas strike, and Global had been invited in to exploit it.

Either way, the People's Republic of China couldn't be happy about oil company representatives wandering around on behalf of the Vietnamese government. If the PLAN — the PRC's navy — was responsible for the man's disappearance, the chances for a diplomatic resolution were good, but Washington was going to want a powerful force in the area — like a carrier battle group and a few attack subs — to keep the Chinese honest. Given the recent history between the two powers, things could get hot.

And if China wasn't the culprit, there were a dozen different popular insurrections, civil conflicts, boundary disputes, religious wars, and out-and-out piracy going on in the region — in Indonesia, in Malaysia, in the Philippines, and elsewhere — to keep things damned interesting. DuPont might be the target of nothing more than a freelance bid for ransom or political leverage.

Or it could be something far more sinister, and deadly.

One thing was certain. Garrett wasn't going to get to see Kazuko. Once again, his personal life would be on hold until a crisis was resolved.

Well, that was the Navy way. He still might be able to call her, once the ship-to-shore phones were on-line.

He walked back to the control room, where a skeleton watch manned the con stations. The exec rose from the center seat. "Captain on deck."

He exchanged places with the XO. "Thanks, Number One."

"What's the word?"

Without comment, Garrett passed Jorgensen the printout. The XO read it, his eyebrows rising. Finally, he pursed his lips and gave a low whistle. "The Chinese?"

"Possibly. You'll note Washington doesn't know who the enemy is just yet. That's what they want us to find out."

"So I see. Looks like we have our work cut out for us."

"That we do."

"Are you going to cancel the crossing ceremony, sir?"

Garrett considered the question, his eyes on the control room bulkhead clock. "No. Let them go. The ritual is important. And we're going to be asking a lot of those men in the next few weeks."

"Yes, sir."

"Mr. DeKalb, plot the most direct course for Yokosuka, Japan."

"Aye aye, Captain." A pause. "Sir, recommend coming right fifteen degrees to put us on the desired course."

"Very well. Helm! Come right one-five degrees!"

"Come right one-five degrees, aye, sir!"

"Maneuvering, this is the Conn. Make revolutions for thirty knots."

"Conn, Maneuvering. Make revolutions for thirty knots, aye."

Garrett felt the surge of power as Virginia sped southwest through the depths.