DuPont sat in the corner on a stinking mattress, one of a half-dozen spread out over the deck. There was no room to lie down. He was wedged in tightly between Kingsfield and Zubrin, Sea Breeze's engineer, and Carle's back was right in front of him. The compartment was tiny, a room the size of a large closet, really, and never meant to hold ten people.
Sea Breeze's entire complement was packed into the room; only the two Vietnamese were missing.
The boarding party had stormed onto the yacht, coming over the starboard gunwale, shouting first in a language DuPont didn't know, and then in English. "Everybody! Everybody on boat! Line up here!"
There'd been ten of the invaders altogether, and they stormed through the Sea Breeze, rounding up crew and passengers alike with rough efficiency, herding everyone into a tight and easily controlled huddle on the aft deck.
"DuPont!" the man who appeared to be in charge shouted, waving a pistol. He wasn't wearing a uniform… or, rather, his dress appeared to be ragged castoffs of several uniforms. He wore a turban and sported a greasy, black beard. "Who is DuPont?"
Kingsfield had put a cautioning hand on his arm, but DuPont pushed forward anyway. "I am." The fact that they knew his name was unsettling. This attack was no random pirate outrage. It possessed the surety of an operation with a considerable military intelligence apparatus behind it.
"You come with us!" the ragged leader had shouted, pointing the pistol in his face.
"Will you let the rest of my people go?" he asked. Somehow, somehow, he had to find a way to bargain with these thugs.
"You come with us!"
"Look!" he'd said. "I… I work for a very important company. If you keep all of us alive, my company will pay a very generous ransom!"
"You Americans," the man said, with a look of pure disgust souring his face. "You think money can buy anything."
In DuPont's experience, there were very few things that money couldn't buy. And these people, whoever they were, surely needed money to operate, and a lot of it.
"You are prisoners, now," the man said, "of al Qaeda and Maktum. If you do exactly what you are told, you may be allowed to live. If you are trouble, even little trouble, we throw you to the sharks!"
Al Qaeda! DuPont had reeled at that, stunned. The Islamic fundamentalist terror group that had catapulted the twenty-first century into bloody war. Like most Americans, though, he thought of al Qaeda as ragged desert militia types, hiding out in caves and mountain camps, hunted from nation to nation by U.S. special forces.
My God, he thought. Where did they come up with a fucking submarined
The two Vietnamese were knocked to the deck, pinned down with rifle butts, and their hands locked behind them with plastic ties. "Hey!" DuPont shouted. "You don't need to do that!"
In the next instant, a rifle butt slammed into his skull from behind, pitching him to the deck in a black haze of pain. "Be silent," he was told, "or die!"
For the next twenty minutes, the invaders kept them there, kneeling in a close-huddled circle or flat on the deck, while several of their number went through the Sea Breeze's quarters, gathering papers, passports, and documents. The rest of the prisoners had their wrists roughly bound behind their backs with plastic ties, and were kept under close guard. When anyone tried to protest, he got a rifle butt from behind — not hard enough to kill or render unconscious, but enough to knock him to the deck and keep him silent.
DuPont witnessed only one hopeful sign in the takeover. One of the uniformed sailors, grinning, had begun touching Ginger, stroking her hair and arm, then pulling her from the circle, groping at her bikini top while saying something obviously salacious to the sailor next to him. Ginger screamed, trying to pull away, and then the turbaned man was there, screaming at the sailor in a language that sounded Arabic. DuPont didn't know what was being said, but from the tone of voice and the man's expression, he was willing to bet that the sailor was being figuratively burnt to a crisp.
After that, they left both girls alone.
Oddly, the incident left DuPont feeling even more scared and helpless. Their futures, their safety, their lives all now were entirely in the hands of this turbaned maniac. DuPont, used to giving orders and having his orders obeyed instantly, had never even imagined such a terror-drenched helplessness as this.
The submarine, meanwhile, had maneuvered slowly closer to the Sea Breeze, until its conning tower loomed high above the yacht's deck. Once Sea Breeze was secured to the submarine's port side, sailors began cutting their bonds and manhandling the captives across one at a time, hauling them up the curved hull onto the submarine's aft deck, then forcing them down the hatch just aft of the sail. For DuPont, that descent through a narrow hatch, down a spindly vertical ladder into darkness, had been a kind of descent into the underworld. The submarine's belly was dark and hot and noisy, a tiny, closed-off Hell defined by pipes, wires, gauges, and dark-eyed men who watched him in hostile silence. Harsh, incandescent bulbs in wire cages cast pockets of illumination surrounded by impenetrable shadow. The humidity was so high that the bulkheads and pipes were sweating… and so was DuPont after only a few minutes below deck. The temperature, he guessed, was in the eighties, and was only slightly relieved by the breeze fitfully wafting from fist-sized ventilator shafts.
And the air stank. Unwashed bodies, sweat, urine, and the unfamiliar bite of the cooking spices used in Southwestern Asia mingled together to assault nose, throat, and eyes all at once.
He was led through what he guessed was the control room, where half a dozen uniformed men stood or sat at their stations. DuPont tried to observe and memorize everything. Was that a Chinese naval officer he'd seen? He thought so, though the light was uncertain and he'd been forced through into the next passageway with a sharp shove from behind.
Four of Sea Breeze's crew were already there, waiting in the tiny compartment when he was prodded in at gunpoint — Davis the radio man, Zubrin the engineer, a Filipino hand named Castro, and the Global ex-SEAL security guard and boatswain, Carle. The compartment, with its two sets of double bunks on the bulkhead opposite the door and a small desk between, was pretty close quarters for the five of them. With growing horror, DuPont watched as, one at a time, Schiffer, Kingsfield, Marshall, Katie, and Ginger were also pushed through the steel door.
The two Vietnamese passengers never appeared. DuPont wondered what had happened to them.
The prisoners sat on the bunks or on the deck; there was no room to move around. After about half an hour, the door opened again, and members of the submarine's crew began handing mattresses in from the passageway outside. They were thin — only a couple of inches thick, more like thick quilts than actual mat-tresses — and they stank to high heaven, but they offered something softer than the steel deck to sit on. Their appearance told DuPont that this tiny room was going to be their prison, possibly for some time to come.
Never had he felt this helpless, this terrified. Somehow, he'd managed to assume the professional demeanor he presented in board meetings and interviews with subordinates, but inside his stomach was knotting, his heart was pounding, and he felt like he was going to be sick.
After a long time, he became aware of a low-voiced muttering, a murmur, really, inside the compartment. It took him a few minutes of careful listening to decide what it was.
"George," he said, "shut up. Keep it to yourself."
"S-sorry, Mr. DuPont. Didn't know I was… uh, speaking out loud."
"I don't mind you praying, but do it to yourself."
"Yes, sir. Sorry, sir."
"All of you, listen to me. Global will know what's happened by now. You got through to them, didn't you, Davis?"
"I sent the message, and kept sending it, sir. Didn't get a response, but I'm sure they taped it."
"Okay. They'll figure it out, and they'll tell who needs to be told. Global is used to dealing with… these kinds of people." He'd almost said "terrorists," but he'd stopped himself. There was no need to dwell on the fact that their captors were al Qaeda. "The fact that we're still alive means these people will negotiate. And Global will do everything possible to get us back."
"What… what about the U.S. government?" Zubrin asked. "I mean… will the SEALs or Delta Force or somebody try a hostage rescue?"
"I don't know. Probably not, actually. Our best hope right now is that Corporate will pay a ransom, and then these people will let us go."
It was true. DuPont had read the studies and the reports. When hostages in this kind of situation were killed, it was almost always during an attempted rescue, often by so-called friendly fire.
But, then again… how often had hostages been in this kind of situation, held on board a submarine somehow co-opted by international terrorists? His guess was that it had never happened. They were flying blind, right now… and that included their captors.
But he didn't want to talk about the negative side of things. They needed to keep their spirits up.
"Will they let us go?" Ginger asked.
"Like the boss said," Kingsfield told her, "they've kept us alive for a reason. That's a very good sign."
"Right," DuPont added. "So… all of you, do what you're told. Don't give them a reason to regret keeping us alive."
Ginger was sitting on one of the bunks, looking terribly small and vulnerable in her bright blue bikini. "Mr. DuPont! I'm scared."
"Trust me, Ginger. It'll be okay. I promise."
He desperately hoped he would be able to make good on that promise.
"So, Seaman Wallace, how's it feel to be an experienced sailor, a real bluenose, now?"
Wallace was still so exhausted he could scarcely think straight. It had been a long, a very long, night.
He was sitting next to Virginia's senior sonar technician, ST1 Ken Queensly, facing the waterfall — a monitor screen with narrow, glowing green vertical strips representing the sounds of the ocean around the boat.
Today was his first sonar watch, the beginning of his familiarization with the arcane rituals of that shipboard department, another step in his quest to sign off on every department on board.
But after enduring the Neptune party until 0300 hours… then hitting the deck at 0630 to shave, shower, and grab some breakfast in order to be on watch by 0800… well, he didn't feel all there yet. He hoped the missing part of himself was still in his rack, getting some much-needed sleep.
"I said," Queensly repeated, "how's it feel to be a bluenose?"
"Uh… what? Sorry. Okay, I guess." He shook his head, groggy. "I'm not really awake yet."
Queensly laughed. "That I can believe. Hey, Grisly! Fetch this man some java."
ST2 Griswold rose from his console seat. "Comin' right up, Queenie. Anything for you?"
"I'm fine, Gris. Thanks." He clapped Wallace on the shoulder. "So, they kept you up late, huh?"
Wallace could only nod.
"It was a hell of party," Chief Evans said. Evans was the boat's senior sonar chief, the man in charge of the department and Wallace's new boss. Off watch, he was enjoying a chief's prerogative and lollygagging — hanging around the sonar shack to gossip. ST2 Dyer was the other watch stander, currently huddled over his console with his ears engulfed by a massive set of sonar headphones. "They turned those poor pollywogs every way but loose!" He reached out and dragged a blunt forefinger down the side of Wallace's nose. "You still have some paint there, youngster."
Wallace rubbed at the spot.
"You got it," Queensly said. "So what all did they do to you?" Queensly had not been in attendance last night. He'd been here, running the sonar watch. Wallace wondered how he could look so fresh after… what? Twelve straight hours, now.
"I'm pretty hazy on it all, right now," Wallace admitted. "It was kind of confusing."
"Well, I see you got the royal haircut from the royal barber."
Wallace grinned ruefully and ran his hand over his clean-shaven scalp. Part of the pollywogs' sentence had been to have their heads — and select other parts of their anatomy — completely shaved. His skin was still pretty raw in places. "Yeah. The worst part, I think, was when they made us go fishing for ice cubes." They'd made the pollywogs kneel around a large steel tub — just like bobbing for apples — only the apples were ice cubes, and they were hidden inside a foot-deep mess of something indescribable and very unpleasant. "What was that stuff, anyway?"
Evans laughed. "Hey, like old King Borealis told you, you've gotta eat shit to be accepted by the rest of us!"
Wallace grimaced at the mental image. The tub, he was pretty sure, had been full of stuff like cooking oil, grease, and maybe a few pounds of chocolate or cocoa powder to give it its lumpy semisolid consistency, and not what Evans was suggesting. Still…
At least his head had been shaved by that time, or else he'd still be pulling the stuff out of his hair.
"Joe," Griswold said, reentering the sonar shack. "Get it while it's hot."
Wallace accepted a mug full of steaming black coffee. "Why do you call it joe?" he asked, hoping to change the subject.
"Ah, therein lies a tale," Chief Evans said, leaning far back in his swivel chair. "In this man's Navy, there are five grades of coffee. They are, from best to worst, coffee, joe, java, jamoke, and battery acid. Only officers rate coffee, of course. On a submarine, the enlisted men can usually expect joe… unless it's toward the end of a deployment, of course. Then the coffee's almost gone, and the galley hands are cutting it with God knows what."
"Okay… but why 'joe'?"
"Because the guy who outlawed rum on U.S. Navy ships was named Josephus Daniels. He was secretary of the navy in 1914 when he signed General Order 99 which prohibits… let's see, 'the use or introduction for drinking purposes of alcoholic liquors on board any naval vessel, or within any navy yard or station.' Congress had been pushing for using coffee as a substitute for twenty years before that. So they called coffee 'joe' in his honor."
"You're full of shit, Chief," said Dyer, removing his headset and turning to join the conversation. "It was a fuckin' racist slur from an old song, 'Old Black Joe.' " James Dyer was African American.
"The hell it was. Who's telling this story, you or me?"
"You are, Chief. I'm just telling you—"
"It was from Joe Daniels, man. Everybody knows that." He took a swig from his own mug. "Hey, here's a bit of trivia for you guys. Did you know the U.S. Navy uses more coffee per man than any other naval or military organization in the world? Fifty years ago, the Bureau of Supplies and Accounts figured the Navy used over twenty-five tons of coffee per day."
"Man, you are just chock full of fascinating data," Queensly said. "How much do we use today?"
"How the hell should I know?" Evans said. "I don't work in supply."
"So what's with the names java and jamoke?" Gris-wold asked.
"Probably just, whatcha call 'em, euphemisms," Evans said. "You know, they sound good together." He snapped his fingers, chanting, 'joe,' 'java,' 'jamoke'…"
"I think you mean 'euphonious,' Chief," Queensly said. "And you forgot 'murk' and 'shot-in-the-arm' and 'caffeine fix' and 'battery acid.' "
Wallace dared a sip of his coffee, then grimaced. He usually took it with creamer and sugar, and the black potion was way too bitter by itself.
"How is it?" Griswold asked.
"At least I know how it got the name 'battery acid,' " Wallace replied. "Yagh. Is this still part of the initiation?"
Evans laughed. "No, youngster. You are now a full-fledged and genu-wine blue-nosed gold dragon, with all rights and privileges thereunto, including, I might add, the right to bitch about the coffee. I think that pot's been on the hot plate since the forenoon watch yesterday."
"So… yesterday," Wallace said. "Was that Sunday? Or Saturday?"
Griswold chuckled. "Still wondering what day it is?"
"Well, I know we crossed the international date line last night…"
"Right," Evans said. "Actually, we're not up to the 180-degree meridian, yet, but the line takes a jog through the Bering Strait to avoid cutting off a piece of Siberia. When we crossed the line, we lost a day. It was Sunday. Now it's Monday."
"What was it last night, when Neptune was asking me questions?"
"Trick question, youngster," Evans said, chuckling.
"It was about 2400 hours, give or take. Midnight. And when it's midnight on the international date line, it's high noon in Greenwich, England."
"So? What's the point?"
"When it's noon in Greenwich is the only time when it's the same date everywhere on Earth. It was— and still is — Monday."
"But I thought you said we'd lost a day. I remember Sunday… yesterday. And you say today is Monday… "
"Don't worry about it, son," Queensly said. "It catches up with you, see? They'll probably adjust the shipboard calendars later in the cruise, when it's convenient."
"Maybe they'll get rid of Thursday," Griswold said, looking up at the fluorescent-lit overhead. "I never did get the hang of Thursdays…."
Wallace shook his head. "I still don't get it."
"Not important that you do, Seaman Wallace. It is important, though, that you get checked out on this board."
"Okay." He was feeling a bit more awake, now, but the mysteries of the sonar board were still daunting. "But I still don't know what I'm supposed to be doing."
"Listen and learn, Seaman Wallace. Listen and learn. And… have a listen to this."
Reaching out, he tapped a point on a touch-screen display. Instantly, the sonar shack was filled with a roar, a rushing, white-noise rumble that reminded Wallace of an oncoming train.
"What do you hear?"
Wallace wasn't sure how to answer the question. "Uh… I don't know. A roaring noise. Is that a surface ship?"
"No. If it were a surface ship — or another submarine — you'd hear a kind of a throb to the sound… like this." He touched the controls again. The rushing roar vanished, replaced by a muffled thud-thud-thud. "From our sound library," Queensly said. "That was a Japanese maru, what they call their freighters. No… what do you hear when I do this?" Instantly, the compartment filled once more with a featureless roar… kind of like a waterfall, Wallace decided.
He listened a moment longer. "I don't know," he said. "It just sounds like… I don't know. Water rushing past."
"Bingo," Queensly said. "Give that blue-nosed dragon a see-gar!"
"Huh?"
" Virginia's current speed, Seaman Wallace, is… " He tapped at the controls again, then read what appeared in one corner of a console monitor. "Thirty-three point seven knots. And that, my friend, is flying. Virginia has sonar sensors all up and down her hull, and in the big dome up on the bow, of course. You are exactly right. You're hearing water rushing past those sensors at a good forty miles per hour. And brother, that makes such an unholy racket you can't hear a damned thing else."
"We're lucky to hear anything at all above eighteen knots," Evans put in. "Twelve is better."
"A lot better," Dyer said.
"And if the skipper really wants us to do some careful listening, he'll slow the boat to a crawl, or just hover in one place. When we're hunting a bad guy, it's a matter of moving a bit, stopping and listening, moving a bit more. Takes a lot of patience."
"My dad used to take me hunting in the woods, back in Pennsylvania," Wallace said. "You do a lot of just sitting and listening."
"Good analogy," Griswold said. "You don't want to make any noise and spook the deer. And you have to stop to really study the woods around you."
"We are hunters," Dyer pointed out. "Remember, Wallace. There's just two kinds of vessels — SSNs…"
"And targets. I know." He'd heard the old submariner's saying endlessly in sub school. "So, if we can't hear anything at this speed, how do I learn?"
"Simulations, Seaman Wallace," Queensly said. "Simulations… and the magic of computers." He tapped out a new command, replacing the waterfall noise with… a kind of a deep, hollow emptiness. "You did this in sub school, right?"
"Sure. Listening lessons, we called them."
"Right. You took some tests like this all the way back in boot camp, too. They had to find out who had good ears. The really talented ones, they send to sonar school. Like yours truly. Here. Try it with these." He handed Wallace a set of headphones.
With the phones on, Wallace still heard nothing but a kind of watery silence. Or… was that a kind of a deep, plaintive groaning in the distance? He tried to hear, tried to separate it from the background emptiness.
"Hear anything?" Queensly's voice sounded muffled and far off.
"I'm… not sure." His own voice sounded preternaturally loud, and curiously dead.
"Okay, I want you to do something for me. When I tell you… you're going to take in a deep breath for a count of four. Then you're going to hold it for a count of four. Then you'll let it out for a count of four. Then you'll hold it for a count of four. Then you'll repeat. We'll do that five or six times. Okay?"
"Uh… okay. Why?"
"It's an exercise I'm going to do with you quite a bit for the next few days. Just humor me, okay? Ready? I want you to take a few deep breaths first. Relax… relax. Just let everything go. Now, close your eyes. Stay relaxed. Let yourself just kind of sink down into the sound, okay? Now, breathe in… two… three… four. And hold… two… three… four. Breathe out… two… three… four. Hold… two… three… four. Breathe in… two… three… four… "
Wallace breathed as Queensly guided him through the exercise. The sonar tech's voice was monotonous, almost hypnotic, and Wallace felt as though he were sinking into that silent emptiness in the headset. Somehow, the silence was growing larger… and… louder? No, that wasn't it. But he was beginning to separate something like a sound from the background nothingness. A groan… followed by a popping, scratchy squeak, like a rusty hinge, unimaginably faint and far off.
"I hear it!" he said.
"That, Seaman Wallace, is what we call a biological. A whale, in fact, about a thousand miles off. Now here's another…"
And the listening lessons began in earnest.