Virginia Class

12

The unending hours were weighing heavily on all of the people from the Sea Breeze. Days had passed, clearly, since their capture and imprisonment in these herring-can quarters, but how many? Their captors had removed wristwatches, belts, and shoes, and in the artificial enclosure of a submarine there is no distinguishing night from day.

Periodically, they were fed — usually bowls of rice with dry beans and a little fish or other meat added, which they ate with their fingers because no implements were provided.

Periodically, plastic pitchers full of tepid water were brought in, and the empties taken away.

Periodically, they were allowed — one or two at a time — to leave the cramped compartment in the company of a pair of guards, and taken a short distance down the passageway outside to a bathroom with four toilet stalls, two metal sinks, and an open shower area. The stalls had no doors, and the lack of privacy was especially rough on Katie and Ginger, who complained that the guards and other sailors watched them relieve themselves with leering grins, commenting to one another in Arabic.

Periodically the two metal buckets left in their quarters for wastes or vomit were taken away and emptied.

The rest of the time, they were left alone.

And, God, how the place stank! Actually, the entire submarine stank, the air a foul miasma of sweat, fear, and unwashed bodies, the sharp ammoniac tang of urine, and the heavier odors of machine oil, diesel fuel, and wet laundry, but those odors were concentrated inside the locked compartment to a degree that made those brief trips to the head a welcome chance to draw a deep breath.

The rankness of that room grew worse day by day. Though they could wash faces and hands in the sinks, none had been allowed to use the showers, and the sweltering heat and humidity of the place had them sweating so much that the deck and bulkheads were slimy-wet to the touch. Most of them had been sick to their stomachs at one point or another in this voyage. When the submarine was running submerged, the motion transmitted through the deck was gentle, but they could always tell when the vessel had surfaced from the way the deck pitched and rolled with the action of the waves outside. The corkscrew motion — much worse at some times than others — was made infinitely worse by the oppressive heat and the stale, dieseltainted air; the third time someone vomited on the deck, their guards had provided the buckets. That meant they no longer had to clean up the mess with rags provided by their captors, but the smell was awful.

And lately, Zubrin, Davis, and Schiffer had all come down with savage bouts of diarrhea. Sometimes the guards came to escort them to the lavatory in time… and sometimes they didn't. Once, when he was a kid, DuPont had found a burlap bag in his father's barn and tried pulling it over his head. The bag was empty, but once had held manure. The indescribably foul smell in that bag, as DuPont remembered the experience, was no worse than right here in this tiny compartment.

Sometimes, when the submarine was running on the surface, a vent in the passageway outside washed the corridor with a stream of cool, fresh air that tasted like pure heaven compared to the stench of their prison. Of course, after walking that passageway at such a time, the air back in their room seemed that much worse by comparison.

All the prisoners had slumped into deep depression. There was no conversation any more, no talk at all save at long, rare intervals when someone asked to be taken to the bathroom. They sat or lay huddled on the steel deck; by agreement, the women had been given an upper bunk for their sole use, but every other square foot of space was taken up by cramped and unwashed, unshaven, unmoving bodies. The fear was palpable, a constant presence. They'd all heard the sounds hours ago when the submarine had attacked another vessel. They'd heard clearly the sharp twin hisses of torpedoes sliding into the ocean and, minutes, later, the heavy thuds and crashing noises marking the death of a ship. Since then, the sub had been running submerged, judging by the lack of wave action on the hull.

Who were they attacking? The Vietnamese? Was the Vietnamese navy looking for them, trying to hunt them down?

At times, DuPont found himself praying that the submarine would be found and sunk. It would, at least, end this nightmare of fear, claustrophobia, and stink.

Across the compartment, Schiffer groaned, placed a white hand across his belly, then rose unsteadily and picked his way past sprawled legs to the door. "Hey!" he shouted, thumping on the door. "Hey, out there! I gotta go!"

There was no answer, and Schiffer pounded on the door, harder.

"Jesus, Schiffer," Kingsfield said, making a face. "Just put a cork in your ass, for cryin' out loud."

"Leave him alone, man," Carle said. "When you gotta go…"

"Yeah, but he's makin' a fuckin' religion out of it."

"Watch your language, people," DuPont said. "We've got women in here."

"Fuck you," Kingsfield said. "They've heard fuckin' worse."

DuPont started to make a sharp response, then sagged back against the bulkhead, too exhausted, too wrung out to continue. It was astonishing how quickly the veneer of civilization — the polite language, manners, mutual respect, and simple caring for other people — could all vanish after just a few days of privation.

No one answered Schiffer's increasingly frantic pounding. At last, he turned away, yanked down his swim trunks and squatted over one of the buckets. Impossibly, or so it seemed to DuPont, the fetid stink of raw sewage grew worse. DuPont gagged against the odor, leaning back, squeezing shut his watering eyes, fighting down the nausea, the depression, the sheer terror. God, how much longer could they stand this torture?

Some time later, the door banged open and, as a sailor with an AK rifle stood guard from the passageway, a young sailor came in and removed the buckets, replacing them with clean ones. Instead of locking them in again, however, the armed guard stepped back and left the door open. A moment later, one of their captors strode in.

This was the one DuPont worried about the most. Kingsfield thought the guy might be Afghani. DuPont didn't know and didn't really care; what bothered him were the man's eyes, dark and probing and… arrogant was the word that came to mind. He wore no uniform but carried himself in front of the prisoners like a general, someone who would tolerate no disrespect, no rebellion. He stood inside the open doorway, fists on hips as he surveyed the captives. Then he pointed at the upper bunk where Ginger and Katie were seated and barked something in Arabic. Grinning through his scraggly beard, the guard stepped in, reaching up for Ginger's leg, his hand closing around her bare ankle. She screamed, pulling back from the edge of the bunk, kicking blindly…

"Just a goddamned fucking minute!" DuPont shouted, rising suddenly with a strength he'd had no idea he possessed. "Get your paws off of her!"

The guard, momentarily distracted, was holding his rifle casually with one hand, muzzle-down, and DuPont caught him by surprise. His wildly hurled fist connected with the side of the man's head and slammed him back into the bulkhead. DuPont whirled on the other man, stepping between him and the bunk. "I want to talk to whoever is in charge!" he shouted, his face inches from the Afghani's face. "You understand me? You speak English? I want to talk to the captain!"

The man spat something in Arabic. The guard was back, furious, his AK raised. DuPont didn't care. "I want someone who can talk to me in goddamn English!"

The guard swung his rifle, the butt connecting with DuPont's chest. Pain exploded through his body and he collapsed in a heap, gasping to draw breath.

The other men had roused however, and were moving forward, putting themselves between the women and DuPont. Kingsfield snarled something in Arabic, and both the guard and the Afghani blanched. As DuPont struggled to get back on his feet, the Afghani and Kingsfield snapped Arabic at each other, Kings-field defiant, the other shaking with rage.

Suddenly, the Afghani turned, pulled the AK assault rifle from the surprised guard's hands, and brought the muzzle up to Kingsfield's head. Kingsfield grappled with the man, trying to grab the weapon, but the rifle fired, the shot detonating like a bomb blast in the tiny room, and the side of the American's skull literally exploded in a spray of blood and brain and chunks of bone that splattered like hurled paint across half of the bulkhead at Kingsfield's back. The former Green Beret dropped, rag-doll limp.

In the stunned and ringing silence that followed, the guard, his eyes so wide they looked like they were starting from his face, took his weapon back and aimed it at them, sweeping it back and forth in tight, nervous arcs. The Afghani, his arm and sleeve covered with

Kingsfield's blood, screamed something unintelligible at them all before backing out of the room. The guard backed out after him, and the door slammed shut.

Carle knelt beside Kingsfield, but it was all too clear that the man was already dead.

My God, what have I done? DuPont thought. Now they're going to kill us all….

Virginia was under way once more, racing southwest at thirty knots on her way to her rendezvous with the Navy SEALs. Garrett slouched in his command seat, watching the view screen on the forward bulkhead with glum distraction. While ashore conferring with Captain Summers, he'd made a slight detour by the Navy exchange and tried calling Kazuko. He'd gotten her roommate, a woman who spoke only a few words of broken English, but who managed to convey the message that Kazuko was not home. "Kazuko go work," the woman had said over and over. "Kazuko go work." That meant she was working a flight. With a lot of patience and a lot of repetition, Garrett had finally learned that Kazuko had left that morning for a flight to Singapore. Ichi-ichi-ni-go bin—Flight 1125 if his rocky Japanese was working right.

Well, those were usually short layovers, a quick there-and-back. She'd be back in Tokyo in a few days. Maybe he could see her on the return leg of Virginia's deployment.

The trouble was, he didn't know how long that deployment was going to be. No one did, and no promises could be made. Virginia might be stalking mystery subs and poking around Chinese bases in the South China Sea for the next week… or for the next three months.

And in the meantime, Jorgensen was compiling a charming list of Virginia's shortcomings and problems, and that meant trouble of a less personal and far more direct nature. Virginia was a brand new boat two times over — newly built, and the very first of her kind. Though she'd been on a pretty thorough shakedown under Commander Fitch, everyone had expected that more problems would surface.

They had. During the run south from the Bering Strait, no fewer than ninety-three separate electrical faults had been noted and logged, and some of them were in some pretty damned inaccessible spaces, way back in the depths of Virginia's belly. The big galley freezer had quit working while they were under the ice; the galley crew had had to bring a small mountain of frozen stores on board at Yokosuka to replace the ones ruined by an unexpected thaw. A set of fluorescent light tubes in the passageway aft of the torpedo room had stopped working, and replacing the tubes had not fixed the problem. There was an electrical short in there somewhere, and the ETs hadn't been able to find it yet. More worrying than that, the port side broadband sonar was out. If the sonar boys couldn't fix it, Virginia would be half deaf.

"Captain?" Jorgensen was at his side.

"Yes, XO."

"Thought you should see this, sir." He handed Garrett a clipboard with a sheaf of engineering reports and an extract from the troubleshooting log. Garrett scanned the entries quickly, flipping through the pages.

It was not pretty. The ET and engineering crew had traced more than half of those electrical faults to a single component — a thumb-sized computer chip identified by a long string of alphanumerics, and referred to as the "3C" for short. The chip was, in effect, a kind of electronic valve that determined when power flow through one set of circuits was approaching the system's tolerance levels, and shunted the flow to a parallel system. The idea was to prevent power overloads that could burn out circuits, and the system was used in literally hundreds of places throughout the Virginia, from sonar systems to cruise missile power-up circuits to communications relays to crew-space lighting and air circulation throughout the boat.

In these reports, Lieutenant Mizell, Virginia's chief engineering officer, was pointing out that those chips were failing under voltage fluctuations well within their supposed tolerance limits.

"Shit, XO," Garrett said. "What are we dealing with here… lowest bidder?"

"Looks that way, sir. Eng is fit to be tied. He recommends yanking all of the 3Cs and replacing them with… well, he told me chewing gum and duct tape. And he says he would recommend using a Tomahawk on the production plant in California that made these things, but that the chips in the launch circuits would probably fail and the missile wouldn't fire."

Garrett gave Jorgensen a hard glance. "He thinks our weapons circuits are compromised?"

The exec shook his head. "Not completely. The buggers fail randomly and intermittently. He's saying…" Jorgensen reached over Garrett's arm and flipped through several pages, to a sheet giving the engineering officer's recommendation. "There. When we went in at Yokosuka, he pulled and tested a bunch of 3Cs, and says they're running about a 12 percent failure rate, but only when the voltage fluctuates above a certain tolerance. They work fine… "

"…until they're used. Shit, XO, that's flat out UA. Unacceptable. You're telling me we have a one-in-eight chance of pushing a button and nothing happening. Or worse, a fire."

Of all possible casualties, the single greatest dread on board a submarine was fire, the demon dreaded more than crush depth, asphyxiation, or enemy action. An overloaded chip could cause a circuit to overheat. Overheat it enough, and a circuit breaker would cut in — theoretically. If the circuit breaker failed for any reason, fire was the inevitable result.

"That's about it, Captain. Eng recommends testing all of the 3Cs in stores to identify the bad ones, then pulling all the ones already installed and replacing them. Just to make sure."

"How long?"

"Two weeks at least."

"Two weeks?"

Jorgensen shrugged. "They have to run regular engineering duties, too. This is essentially extra-duty grunt work."

"Just how expensive is this little gem?" Garrett asked.

Jorgensen chuckled. "Eighteen dollars."

"Jesus. A billion-dollar sub crippled by an eighteen-dollar gadget you can probably buy off the shelf at Radio Shack."

"Well, that is the COTS philosophy. Screw up more for less money."

"Right. Okay, pass on to Eng that he can get to work pulling those chips. Just keep me informed if he wants to shut down a critical system."

"Aye aye, sir."

This promised to be a long patrol indeed.

EM1 Kirkpatrick was furious. He backed Wallace up against the bulkhead, his livid face inches from Wallace's, and screamed, "Wallace, you are an A-1 fuckup, you know that?"

"Yes, sir."

"Don't goddamn call me sir! I work for a living!"

"Yes, s—" He stopped and tried again. "Yes, Petty Officer Kirkpatrick."

"You pull another stunt like you did this morning, Wall-eye, and I will have your balls for breakfast, you understand me?"

"Yes, uh, yes, I do."

"If we had a big school chalkboard installed on this boat, I would make you write one thousand times, 'I will not be a screw-up.' But we don't have a chalkboard, so you will scrub out the shitters instead. You will use your freakin' toothbrush if necessary, but you will get them to shine and you will scrub the urinals and the sinks and the shower head and then you will swab the deck until you can eat your goddamn cornflakes off of it! Now get to work!"

The aft head on board the Virginia was about the size of a typical restroom in a McDonald's, with less privacy and more stainless steel — two open stalls, two urinals on the bulkhead, and two sinks. Kirkpatrick spun on his heel and left, leaving Wallace to face his task.

"Jesus, Wall-eye," a voice called from one of the stalls. "What did you do to piss him off?"

"Uh… I forgot to log out on my fire and security watch last night."

"Oops. Bad move, son." The hiss of the toilet being flushed sounded from the stall, accompanied by the distinctive and unmistakable stink of raw sewage. A moment later, Chief Kurzweil emerged, tucking his shirt into his trousers. "At least the head is brand new. You won't have to scrub hard."

That was true enough. Most of the stainless steel in the small compartment already gleamed bright in the overhead lights, and normal shipboard routine kept the place fairly spotless.

The insides of the commodes, though, were not gleaming. The smell made him hesitate at the door to the first stall.

"Pretty bad, isn't it?" Kurzweil said. "If they're ever able to build a submarine that doesn't let the stench in from the holding tanks, I will sign on for life, and personally kiss the designer."

"Isn't there a way to seal the septic off from the commode?" Wallace asked. "You know, a double door or something?"

"Negative. You know how the thing works?"

Wallace shook his head no.

"Pretty simple, really. You got your two ball valves — a big eight-incher at the bottom that lets the water and shit out of the bowl, and a small one that closes off a one-inch pipe bringing in sea water. You do your business, then yank that big lever to open the first valve, so a positive-displacement pump can move the shit into the sanitary tank. Then you close that, and use the other level to refill the bowl. Sealing it off would be a lot more complicated, a lot noisier, and a lot harder to keep clean. I can tell you, though, it's a lot better than it was on the old boats."

"Yeah?" Wallace walked to the storage locker and began pulling out brush and disinfectant.

"Yup. In the old diesel boats, you had to every so often air-load the sanitary tank — pump it up to 700 psi— to vent the waste overboard. They vented the air back into the boat — had to, so they didn't show any bubbles — and that meant one hell of a stink! The charcoal filters were supposed to take care of that, but they never really did the job.

"And heaven help you if you opened the main ball valve on a crapper when they were blowing sanitary! You could get a face-full at 700 pounds per square inch!"

Wallace was on his knees, scrubbing at the first toilet. "I guess it made a mess, huh?"

"A mess? Yeah, you could say that. Thing was, there was a way you could get even with someone you didn't like. There was this one engineering chief — a real asshole. Everybody hated him. He had this habit of yanking the ball valve open while he was still sitting on the throne, y'know? So some parties unnamed one day took the 'secured' sign off the door to the head when a sanitary blow was in progress. This chief walks in, does his thing, opens the ball valve while he's still sitting down, and whoosh! They say it was like a ping-pong ball shot up out of the throat of fuckin' Old Faithful.

"Of course then, certain parties unnamed had to scrub out the head, and that was not pretty. But man, oh, man, was it worth it!" He chuckled. "Too bad you can't do that to old Jerkpatrick, huh?" Kurzweil turned and walked out of the head then, whistling, leaving a thoughtful Wallace to his task.

After an unknown time, they'd come and dragged Kingsfield's body out of the compartment. DuPont had expected some further repercussion, but none occurred… not unless you counted the fact that no one brought them food or water for a long time after that. DuPont had the uneasy feeling that someone on this submarine was thinking hard about his captives… thinking about whether or not it was worth it to keep them alive.

DuPont, once his head had cleared, pounded on the locked door to the room, shouting as loud as he could that he wanted, that he demanded to see the captain, and someone, anyone, who spoke English. He was ignored, and at last he gave in to the pleas of his fellow prisoners. "Look, Mr. DuPont," Schiffer told him. "Up until now, they haven't hurt us. They've just kept us locked in here, and they have to, y'know? They can't let us wander around loose on a submarine! I say we go with the program, keep a low profile, know what I mean? Jesus… now that they've killed one of us, they might decide to do the rest of us, too!"

At long last, a pair of guards showed up, pointed their rifles at DuPont, and ushered him out into the passageway. This time, they turned him right, not left, marching him in the opposite direction from the head. A moment later, he found himself in a crowded, narrow hole of an office, standing in front of a cold-eyed man who, he guessed, must be the captain of this submarine.

"You are DuPont?" the man demanded.

"Yes, sir." There was no need to antagonize the guy, especially if he spoke English.

"I am Commander ul Haq, the captain of this vessel. I am told you wished to speak with me."

DuPont drew a deep breath. "Yes, sir."

"I cannot tell you how long you will be held, or anything of that nature, Mr. DuPont. Essentially, this vessel is at war, and war is filled with uncertainties. I regret that you have been inconvenienced, but that is the way things are."

"I understand that. But I do wish to point out that you won't have many hostages left if you keep all of us inside that closet where you have us now. We can hardly breathe, and the heat is making us sick. Three of the men are down with diarrhea, and could be on the verge of major dehydration. And I don't know how long you'll be able to keep the lid on, either."

" 'Keep the lid on?' What do you mean?"

"It means that the people in that room can't be held responsible for their actions." DuPont was warming to the cadence of his argument now. He'd faced some tough customers over boardroom tables more than once in his career. Now his life, and the lives of those with him, depended on his ability to negotiate from a position of weakness. "If you put too many rats in too small a box, Captain, after a while they start eating one another… and attacking anyone who comes close. They go crazy. That's what's happening in that box right now. That's why one of my people is dead."

"Ah. Yes. What was the man's name?"

"Michael Kingsfield. He was one of my employees."

"He should not have attacked the guard."

"The guy — not the guard, the other guy — shot him in cold blood, Captain! Kingsfield stopped the guard from grabbing one of the women. Then the other guy started shouting, and then the other guy shot him."

"Ah. I had not heard that version of events," ul Haq said. "Normally, I would have no reason to believe you, of course… but I do know Noor Khalili. I gather, from Mr. Khalili's account, that your Kings-field admitted that he was in Afghanistan."

"I don't know. They were both speaking Arabic."

"Kingsfield, I was told, said something about… I believe the expression was 'killing Arabs in Afghanistan.' Noor Khalili is Afghani, Mr. DuPont. He lost family when your nation invaded his. He has… how do you say it? A sword to grind?"

"An 'ax.' An ax to grind. Okay. He doesn't like Americans. The point is, Captain, that Kingsfield was trying to protect one of the women. He got into an argument with this Khalili guy, and Khalili murdered him."

"And… what do you expect me to do about this?"

"Captain ul Haq, we are your prisoners, and that makes us your responsibility. You can decide to just kill us all and be done with it… but if you want to keep us alive for whatever reason, you're going to have to attend to certain conditions."

"What conditions?"

"That closet you have us in is too crowded. You need to put us into at least three rooms that same size."

"That closet, as it happens, is the largest private living compartment on this vessel. It was shared by four of the senior petty officers on board. They must now sleep with the regular enlisted men, to make room for you."

"I appreciate that. There's no room on a submarine, I know that. But the fact remains, you have ten… no, nine, now. Nine people crowded into a room barely big enough for four. We do not have adequate ventilation, and the temperature in there must be over a hundred degrees."

Ul Haq smiled. "You exaggerate. It can scarcely be the temperature of boiling water."

"Oh. I was using Fahrenheit. Celsius would be… I don't know. Thirty? Anyway, it's so hot we're all close to collapse in there. And three of us need medical attention. I don't know, drugs… salt. I don't know what would help. But they're sick and need a doctor."

"We have no doctor on board." He looked thoughtful. "I cannot promise anything, but I will see what can be done. Anything else?"

"Yes. Privacy."

"Privacy?" Ul Haq's eyebrows crept high up his forehead. "On a submarine?"

"We have two women in there. They have no clothing and they can't even go to the bathroom without guards watching everything they do. I thought your Holy Quran taught you better than that! Is this how the Quran teaches you to treat helpless women? Is this what the Quran expects of an honorable warrior?"

Ul Haq's eyes flashed dark with anger. "You will not speak of the scriptures in that way. I will not be lectured on the tenets of the Quran by an infidel…."

"Why not? Do you believe what it says about the treatment of your fellow man—or woman?" DuPont was skating on very thin ice now. He'd never read the Quran himself — there'd never been a reason to — but he'd discussed it with an Islamic roommate in college, once, and he'd had a class in comparative religion that same semester. He remembered arguing that Islam encouraged the mistreatment of women. Ali, his roommate, had insisted that the Prophet had been a radical and compassionate reformer where the rights of women were concerned. He desperately hoped the Quran backed that bit of information dredged from a late-night college bull session thirty years ago because, right now, he was shooting from the hip. "I mean no disrespect, sir," he continued. "I simply ask… do you live by the Quran? Or is the Quran just… words?"

"I am a servant of Allah," ul Haq began.

"Then you know what your own religion says about hospitality to strangers. And protecting women. And… isn't there something in your religion about Christians and Jews both being 'People of the Book?' We are not 'infidels,' as you put it. In Allah's name, I'm asking you, I'm begging you for help! We are being treated like animals, and if this goes on we will die! And then you will not have hostages for ransom or whatever else you want out of us!"

He stopped for breath. Ul Haq sat behind his narrow desk, regarding him in silence for a long and aching minute. DuPont forced himself to remain still, and outwardly calm. Had he pushed too hard, said too much?

"Do you believe in God?" ul Haq said at last. "Are you Christian?"

"Yes, I am." Well, technically. He'd not been to church since he was a kid, and the Sunday school lessons had never taken, as he liked to say. He wondered if he needed a quick brush-up lesson from Schiffer. "And those with you?"

"They're Christian, yes." He hoped none of the papers and passports these pirates had grabbed listed anyone's religion as Jewish. He didn't even know if any of them were Jews, but somehow he doubted that this Muslim's tolerance for other faiths extended to them.

Ul Haq nodded. "You are correct, Mr. DuPont. We do recognize the People of the Book, not as followers of Islam, but as… fellow travelers. However, there is very little I can do about the conditions you find yourself in. This is a submarine, a steel tube seventy-three meters long and less than seven meters high, with sixty men on board crowded into a space that would be cramped for half that many. We do not have private lavatory facilities for women—"

"Well, maybe you should have thought about that before you brought us all on board!"

"Would you prefer that I had left the women behind with the two Vietnamese we found on your boat?"

DuPont felt a cold chill on his spine at that. It was the first time anyone had hinted at the fate of Phuong and Nguyen. "No…"

"They would be dead now if we had done so. Mr. DuPont, I do regret your discomfort, but there is very little I can do. However, since you did ask in Allah's name, I will do what I can. I promise this, by Allah who is all-merciful. Is that sufficient answer to your… conditions?"

"I guess it will have to do."

"Very well. Good day, Mr. DuPont." Ul Haq nodded to the guard who'd been standing just outside the open door for the entire interview, and DuPont was led back to the room to rejoin the other captives. He knew something had just changed, that ul Haq had made some sort of key decision about the nine of them, but he wasn't certain what.

He hoped he hadn't just convinced the submarine's captain that his prisoners were more trouble than they were worth.