Virginia Class

5

"Captain, we are ready in all respects for sea."

"Very well," Garrett said, speaking into the headset mike he was wearing. "Transfer the ensign."

A deck party swiftly detached the American ensign from the jackstaff aft, then began securing the jackstaff itself. Virginia, like all recent American subs, had been designed with absolute silence in mind, which meant that permanent deck fittings — the capstans to which mooring lines were secured — all were located along the centerline where the water flow was already disturbed, while temporary fittings, like the flagpole or the secure points where deck handlers could clip their safety lines, could either be removed or hidden away in sealed recesses in the hull.

A moment later, a second American flag broke out from the masthead at Garrett's back, snapping in the freshening breeze off the Thames.

Garrett took another look around, checking the water alongside and aft of the Virginia. There wasn't much room to move in the tiny space. The bridge area of the sail was barely large enough for Garrett and the quartermaster chief — Harry Vance — wedged in side by side with the bare minimum of navigational and communications equipment. Two enlisted men stood in the lookout bins just behind them, to either side of the optical mast array, high-tech replacements for the venerable periscope that, with Virginia, had gone the way of the dinosaur.

A huge crowd had turned up on Pier One this morning to see Virginia off — mostly family and friends of her crew, with a fair number of dignitaries and politicians as well. A small Navy band had struck up "Anchors Aweigh" with an enthusiastic thump of brass and drums.

"Deck, single up lines, fore and aft," he said. The brow had already been swung ashore, and the brow lines and springs released and stowed. In a moment, the only ties still binding the Virginia to land were one mooring line forward and one aft, both attended by small line handling parties. They were highly visible on the black deck, in dungarees and bright orange life vests. One extra hand, a diver, stood ready in full scuba gear as well, fast-rescue insurance in case someone fell overboard. Virginia's narrow deck afforded very little room for maneuvering, and none whatsoever for missteps or accidents.

With that crowd ashore, it would not do to have someone trip over a line and end up in the drink.

"Deck lines singled up, fore and aft, aye," Chief Vance announced.

Garrett took a last look aft and to starboard, checking to see that the water was clear. A pair of harbor tugs stood ready in midriver, waiting. "Sound horn, backing down."

"Sound horn, backing down, aye, sir." Three sharp blasts sounded from the ship's horn mounted in the sail, a deafening triple honk.

"Cast off aft line," Garrett said. "Helm, come ten degrees left rudder."

"Aft line cast off, Captain," Vance told him.

"Helm, ten degrees left rudder, aye, sir" sounded in his headset.

"Maneuvering, slow astern."

"Maneuvering, slow astern, aye aye!"

With Virginia's pumpjet propulsor just barely turning over, and with the rudder swung left — the opposite direction for a right turn since the vessel was backing down — the submarine began slowly to move, her tail swinging out into the river away from the dock.

Garrett watched critically for a handful of heartbeats, then snapped the order, "Cast off forward line!"

"Cast off forward line, aye aye, sir!"

Bound to the land no more, Virginia moved slowly astern into the river, gently sliding past the San Juan moored opposite. The sailors on San Juan's deck came smartly to attention, rendering honors; Garrett faced them and responded with a hand salute.

By the time Virginia had cleared the dock, still moving astern, the tugs had moved in, passing lines over to the sub's deck parties. Garrett felt a soft, almost caressing bump as one of the tugs slipped in on Virginia's port side and began nudging the submarine into the main channel heading south. A small Coast Guard security boat fell into line ahead forward, with a second one bringing up the rear. Security was pretty tight today. There'd not yet been a successful terrorist attack on a U.S. ship getting under way from American waters. Emphasis on yet. The attack on the USS Cole while she was refueling at the port in Yemen had been a major victory for the terrorists who'd launched it— men now known to have been members of al Qaeda. That kind of publicity was bound to make the bastards want to try again… in a way intended to get even more attention.

Garrett leaned against the spartan instrument console beneath the Plexiglas spray canopy and let the tug drivers do their job, guiding the Virginia south past the point at Fort Trumbull and tiny Powder Island. Quarters were tight here within the lower reaches of the Thames, and no criticism of a sub skipper's skill was intended when the rules mandated the tugs' assistance in putting out to sea.

Twenty minutes later, the wind began picking up as the headlands to either side at the river's mouth fell away, and the Virginia entered Fishers Island Sound. East were Avery Point and the low and swampy bulge of Pine Island. West was the New London Lighthouse, marking the treacherous shoals of the Quinnipeag Rocks. As soon as they were clear of the Thames Channel, the tugs cast off and, with a mournful hoot of farewell, fell off to starboard.

"Maneuvering, bridge," Garrett said into the intercom mike. "Make revolutions for twelve knots. Change course to one-seven-zero."

"Bridge, maneuvering" was the reply. "Make revolutions for twelve knots, aye. Change course to one-seven-zero, aye." He felt the surge of power as Virginia's screw bit harder at the ocean, thrusting her forward. The two security boats fell into step to port and starboard, trailing slightly astern.

Two lookouts stood in raised niches above and behind Garrett's place on the weather bridge, scanning the opposite horizons with binoculars. The man to starboard suddenly called out, "Surface target! Starboard quarter, possible collision course, range six hundred yards!"

Garrett turned, raising his binoculars and scanning the water in the indicated direction. Virginia was still just barely clear of the mouth of the Thames. The shore to the west was close, less than nine hundred yards distant, a low and rolling panorama of hills covered by the neatly clustered buildings of southwestern New London. A number of boats — mostly small recreational craft — motorboats and sailboats — were visible. The lookout's use of the word target wasn't meant literally, of course, but he'd spotted something that could be trouble.

And it was. Through his binoculars, Garrett could see the long, low lines of a bright red Cigarette boat, moving fast off Virginia's forward quarter, bow planing above the white slash of its wake. Its driver was in a hell of a hurry, and from the angle on the bow, it looked as if he was trying to cut across the Virginia's path.

"Radar, this is the Captain," he barked. "We've got a visual on a high-speed contact six hundred yards to starboard! Wake up down there and give me a bearing and speed!"

"Sir… aye aye, sir!" The voice sounded shaken. "Comm, Captain. Raise our security escort. Point them at the Cigarette boat cutting across our bow!

And put a flash out to New London. Tell them we have a civilian craft trying an intercept." He watched the other craft a moment longer. "Maneuvering, bridge. Come left ten degrees. Make revolutions for twenty-five knots!"

"Bridge, maneuvering. Come left ten degrees, aye. Make revolutions for two-five knots, aye!"

A 7,500-ton submarine does not stop on the proverbial dime. That racing boat driver was a civilian and probably wasn't used to handling craft heavier than the one he was in now. Garrett wasn't sure what the guy's game was, but it could easily end in disaster.

A high-speed racing boat probably wouldn't more than dent Virginia's hull if they collided, but there would be a bad PR fallout indeed if a civilian boat hit the sub and a civilian was killed. Every attack sub skipper in the Navy had nightmares about that; a few years ago, the Greeneville, a Los Angeles-class boat, had pulled an emergency surface drill and come up directly under a Japanese fishing boat loaded with students just off the Hawaiian coast. Nine civilians had died, and the Greeneville's captain had lost his command.

And there was another possibility to consider. Palestinian terrorists had used such boats for years in suicide bombing attempts against Israeli naval vessels, and there was the small boat packed with explosives that had put a hole in the hull of the USS Cole.

It didn't seem likely that al Qaeda would have a suicide boat waiting for a U.S. attack sub less than a mile off the coast of Connecticut… but then, before it happened, no one would have believed bin Laden's terrorists capable of taking out the World Trade Center and a chunk of the Pentagon with three hijacked airliners. The Navy in general, and ship captains in particular, took such possibilities very seriously indeed.

Garrett wasn't going to let that speedboat anywhere near his vessel if he could help it.

"Bridge, Radar," a voice called over the intercom headset. "Target designated Romeo One, bearing two-zero-five, range five-five-zero. Estimate speed at fifty knots. Probable intercept course. Time to impact… approximately two minutes."

"This is the Captain. Sound general quarters."

"Now general quarters, general quarters" blared from every 1MC speaker on the boat. "All hands, man your battle stations." As the vessel's crew came to a state of full alert, Garrett grappled with the variables of speed, range, and direction. He could extend the time to collision by turning away from the oncoming speedboat and increasing speed. Or he could order an emergency dive.

The trouble was, Virginia was still moving through dangerously restricted waters. Dead ahead was the shoal water of the New London Ledge, marked by another lighthouse. To the right of that lay the shoals of Black Ledge and Vixen Ledge, marked by warning buoys, while to the right were Long Rock, Shoal and Middle Rocks, and the Sarah Ledge. There was damned little room in here for maneuver.

"Diving Officer!" he snapped. "This is the Captain. Give me DBK!"

"Captain, Dive Officer. Depth beneath keel… thirty-eight feet."

Shallow. Very shallow. Virginia had a draft of thirty-four feet, meaning the actual depth here was seventy-two feet. From keel to the top of her sail she measured just under fifty-five feet, which gave her almost no leeway at all if she submerged totally. The slightest miscalculation in trim or angle of descent could slam the Virginia into the bottom. The charts listed the bottom hereabouts as mud; probably nothing would be damaged but pride… probably. Garrett wasn't willing to risk it, however.

"Helm, Bridge. Come left twenty degrees."

"Bridge, Helm. Come left two-zero degrees, aye aye!"

"Maneuvering! Bridge! Increase revolutions to three-zero knots."

"Bridge, Maneuvering. Increase revs to make three-zero knots, aye aye!"

"Comm, signal our intentions to our escort." It wouldn't do for Virginia to avoid the oncoming civilian boat, only to run down a Coast Guard security craft in the process.

Virginia seemed to hunker down as her speed increased. The wash coming up and over her rounded bow and breaking up and across the slanted foot at the forward edge of her sail turned to a white cascade lashing at the cockpit. In seconds, Garrett was soaking wet, and the windshield was practically opaque with driving salt spray. Turning in the cockpit, he tried to spot the Cigarette boat, almost lost against the clutter of small boats and houses along the shore. There it was… almost bow-on now to starboard, high on a plane as it raced to catch up with the speeding submarine. The Coast Guard boats were both turning to intercept him.

Garrett continued to study the boat through his binoculars, trying somehow to read the mind of its pilot. An idiot rich kid out for a joyride in Daddy's expensive racing boat? That stretch of the Connecticut coast behind the New London skyline was definitely the high-rent district, home to plenty of rich doctors, lawyers, and New York City stockbrokers.

Or could it be a terrorist, an AQ fanatic trying to go out in a blaze of martyr's glory by taking out America's latest nuclear attack submarine with a speedboat full of explosives?

If it was a terrorist, Garrett thought, the guy wouldn't be alone. He would know his chances of catching the Virginia were slender, even within the maze of rocks and shoal waters south of New London. He might well be out there as a highly visible diversion, attracting attention with a bright red speedboat throwing a towering rooster tail of spray, while other suicide bombers moved into position in the south or east. Turning, he carefully swept the horizon ahead and to port. Fishers Island was four miles to the southeast, beyond the New London Ledge Light. That was the only piece of high ground that would afford much in the way of concealment for other attackers.

Garrett needed to make a navigational decision quickly. On his new heading, he would scrape past the New London Ledge and run smack aground on Fishers Island in another eight minutes or so. He could come back to starboard onto his original heading, taking the main channel south into Block Island Sound before turning southeast again and moving into the open vastness of the Atlantic. Or he could swing further to port, with the intention of threading the Virginia past the Dumplings and through narrow Lord's Passage between Wicopesset Island and East Point on the far tip of Fishers Island.

He would be in deep and open water faster with the first choice. Virginia needed maneuvering room, and fast. He took another look at the Cigarette boat, now almost directly to starboard. Yeah… to his eye, Virginia was definitely winning the race.

"Helm, Bridge. Come right three-zero degrees."

"Bridge, Helm. Come right three-zero degrees, aye aye!"

Back on a southerly heading, the New London Ledge Light now lay five hundred yards off the port bow. The Cigarette boat, now off Virginia's stern quarter, continued to make a valiant attempt to catch the fast-moving sub, but the two Coast Guard vessels were moving to block it. Swerving wildly, he avoided one of the Coasties, but the second expertly slid into his path.

By this time, the alert Garrett had flashed to the shore authorities had begun to produce results. A pair of Navy Sea Cobra helicopters was approaching low across the water from the airfield to the northeast, like small, deadly gray insects. Along the shoreline to the northeast, a small flotilla of Navy and Coast Guard patrol boats was scrambling. They'd be bearing down on the scene of the unfolding drama in another few minutes.

The Cigarette boat driver evidently saw that he wasn't going to get closer. At a distance range from the Virginia of just 150 yards, he turned broadside and cut his power. Through his binoculars, Garrett could see two people on board beside the pilot, a man and a woman, struggling to unfurl a large green and white banner along the craft's side.

The banner read Greenpeace.

Greenpeace! So they weren't terrorists and they weren't joyriders after all. Damn it all!

That organization, he knew, had a number of agendas worldwide, and they'd done a lot of good for conservation and for the raising of an ecological consciousness, both in the U.S. and abroad. Garrett approved, in general, of such goals. But Greenpeace was also dedicated to blocking the deployment of naval vessels with nuclear power plants, or that might be carrying nuclear weapons.

Garrett had encountered them before more than once. They'd tried a similar ploy a few years ago in San Francisco Bay as he'd captained the Pittsburgh from Mare's Island to the Golden Gate. They were nuisances, nothing more. He supported their right to protest, even if he thought some of their political goals were misguided.

Such antics were especially risky now, in the ongoing aftermath of the Cole and of the paranoia of 9-11. The United States was at war, whether her citizens were always aware of that or not. Garrett would have been justified in opening fire on that speedboat. Those Sea Cobras buzzing overhead most certainly would have fired if the Cigarette boat hadn't cut power.

What price freedom?

An old, old question, one American military personnel had pondered since Lexington and Concord. Virginia's primary ongoing mission was to safeguard American lives, property, and rights ashore and at sea. By extension, that included the rights of those Greenpeace advocates to protest the policies of the U.S. government.

But when those protests risked damage to an American naval vessel, worse, when they risked lives, civilian or military…

He could see the security boat grappling with the speedboat now, and armed Coast Guardsmen in black Kevlar vests clambering into the wallowing craft's well deck. Her crew would be in for some rough handling, he thought — complete with handcuffs and arrest. He hoped they thought it was all worth it, a fair exchange for making their dramatic statement. They were damned lucky not to have been blown out of the water.

"Conn, this is the Captain. Secure from general quarters." He would have to file a report on the incident later, justifying his decisions and orders. In the meantime, he needed to see to a harsher duty. "Who's got the radar watch?"

"Uh… Seaman Wallace has the radar watch, sir."

What the hell was a seaman doing on the radar watch at a critical moment like the Virginia's passage out of New London's crowded waters? "Tell Wallace that he is relieved from duty and that he is on report. Who is his department head?"

"Sir, that would be Chief Kurzweil."

"Tell him I want to see him in my office at…" He checked his wristwatch. "Ten hundred."

"Aye aye, sir."

Garrett remained on the weather bridge for a time longer, watching the rolling hills of Connecticut fall away astern. An hour later, Virginia was cutting through the heavier seas beyond the shelter of Block Island Sound. Fishers Island now lay well astern, sixteen miles, to be exact, and was little more than a shadow against the horizon. Seven miles to the northeast, off the port quarter, lay Block Island, marked by the 200-foot prominence of Beacon Hill. Eight miles to the southwest lay Montauk Point, easternmost tip of Long Island, and the much gentler swell of Prospect Hill beyond.

Ahead lay only open ocean, and the freedom of the depths—Virginia's proper domain.

"Diving Officer, this is the Captain. Depth below keel."

"Captain, DO. Depth below keel is now sixty-eight feet."

Deep enough — barely. "Very well. Prepare to take us down."

"Prepare to submerge, aye aye, sir."

"Lookouts below."

The two lookouts scrambled down out of their perches and vanished through the sail's hatch. Garrett took a last look around, savoring the taste of the cool, salt-laden air, the warmth of the sun still low in the east. Then he followed the lookouts down the ladder, securing the weather bridge deck grating and hatch above him.

He knew it would be a while before any of them felt sun or sea breeze again.

"Jesus, Wall-eye, you are in a world of shit!"

TM2 Ron Titelman's pleasant jibe did nothing to improve Wallace's spirits. Since he'd been relieved from duty a couple of hours ago, he'd holed up in the one place on board where he could be out of the way— in his rack. Unfortunately, Titelman had found him, yanked back the privacy curtain, and was leaning on the side of the bunk now, grinning with evil pleasure.

"Give me a break, Ron," Wallace said. "I don't even know what I did!"

"Well, you'll find out when you pay a little visit to the captain, that's for sure. Man, he's gonna ream you a new one with a live Mark 48. Warshot loaded!"

"Whadja find there, Titsy?" EM1 Jack Kirkpatrick said, coming up the narrow passageway beside Titelman. "Well! If it ain't the perpetrator hisself! Trying to hide from your shipmates, there?"

Wallace groaned and covered his eyes.

"I told you about making the department look bad, twerp!" Kirkpatrick growled. "Right now, your ass is grass!"

"What is this, a goddamn convention?" TM3 Rodriguez joined the conclave in an already crowded passageway. "Hey, Wall-eye! Out that rack! I'm off-duty until the first dogwatch and I want some rack time!"

Rodriguez was the man with whom Wallace had to hot-bunk, sharing the same rack space in staggered shifts of duty.

Clumsily, Wallace rolled out of the narrow confines of the bunk, landing on the deck and bumping against both Kirkpatrick and Titelman.

"Watch the fuckin' feet, newbie!" Kirkpatrick barked. "Why don't you make yourself useful and go outside and scrape down the hull?"

"Yeah. And requisition a gallon of polka-dot paint from ship's stores while you're at it," Titelman added. Wallace hurriedly pulled on his boondockers and moved off down the passageway forward, as the others exploded into raucous laughter at his back.

That first phrase Titelman had used raised unpleasant memories. Wallace remembered the first march of his newly formed boot company back at Great Lakes, a small age ago. They'd walked across from Mainside, where they'd been in a holding company, through the tunnel to the recruit training center. In time-honored tradition, other, much more experienced recruits — all of six weeks, perhaps? — had leaned out of windows to taunt the scared newbies. "You guys are in a w-o-o-o-o-orld of shit!"

As they marched through the tunnel that connected the two halves of the base beneath Sheridan Road, they'd been ordered to sing "Anchors Aweigh" at the top of their lungs.

A bizarre, bizarre experience, and one that for a long time had seemed a world away.

Now, though, he was as scared and as anxious about the future as he'd been then, as though he hadn't changed, hadn't grown at all.

He'd known privacy was an issue on board an attack sub, but he'd not expected it to be like this. How was he going to even survive these next months at sea?

If he was lucky, maybe the captain would kill him.

"Jesus Christ, Chief! What were you thinking?" Garrett glared across the tiny desk at Chief Kurzweil, a look that others more than once had told him would peel paint from the bulkhead at fifty paces. "Have you forgotten how hard it is to read a radarscope in waters that cluttered?"

"No, sir. I guess… I guess I wasn't thinking, sir."

"I think you guess right."

"But Wallace is fresh out of ET school. He's about due for his crow. He's had training reading a scope!"

"Sure, training. But the real thing is never like training. Never. I don't care how good the simulators are."

"Yes, sir. But it's SOP to run all the newbies through every department. It's part of the training regimen."

"Of course it is. But you don't give a problem like that to someone with no experience! Why the hell weren't you backing him up?"

"I was, Captain. I was right behind him."

"Ah. Then why didn't you pick up that speedboat?"

"I… well, the picture was pretty cluttered, sir."

Yes, it would have been. Even with Virginia's advanced sensor systems and computers, the submarine's radar would have been backscattering like hell — from the sea, from the shore and all of the buildings on shore, from radar reflectors on buoys, from dozens of small craft ranging in size from small sailboats to fifty-foot yachts and houseboats. The radar picture had been a tangle of green splotches and smears. He knew, because he'd already played the recording automatically made of the boat's radar pictures, to see for himself what Wallace had been seeing.

"So cluttered that an ET chief with seventeen years in couldn't read it? If that was the case, what the hell was the point of sticking a seaman with maybe six months of service under his belt in that chair?"

"Romeo One started off just as another pleasure boat, sir. There was nothing to pick him out of the regular traffic. He was just idling along the shore. When he swung bow-on to us, he didn't speed up right away. It could've just been a turn, y'know?"

"I know. But the fact remains that the billion-dollar technology on this boat failed us this morning, and that failure was due to human error. Radar is supposed to be better than Mark One eyeballs, Chief. You guys should have been on the 1MC the instant that bastard put his foot on the gas."

Kurzweil sighed. "I fucked up. Sir."

"Yes, you most certainly did. And unfortunately, Wallace is going to have to pay for it. It's not his fault, you know."

"Yessir. It was my responsibility."

"It's not his fault, but I can't let him off the hook because he did screw up. He had the chair. And he didn't spot that Cigarette boat or the fact that it was on a collision course with us for a good thirty seconds. I know. I've seen the tapes."

"Yessir."

"What's more, the automatic alarms were off. Why?" Virginia's computerized sensor suite could be set to sound an alarm if a radar contact was on a collision course with the sub, or if the contact closed to within a certain range.

"That was my fault, sir. With all the traffic inside the Thames, and with the tugboats and security craft and everything, the damned alarm was going off every five seconds."

"Shit, Chief! When's the most likely time for a terrorist to try to hit us? When we're out at sea, a thousand miles from land and five hundred feet down?"

"No, sir. It would be when we were in a crowded harbor or channel. When there was a lot of other surface traffic around. When we couldn't submerge or maneuver."

"Right." Garrett closed his eyes for a moment. "Chief, I'm going to be a goddamn bastard about this. I'm logging it. There will be a disciplinary letter in your personnel record."

"Yes, sir."

He saw the pain in Kurzweil's face, but he had no choice, really. There would almost certainly be an investigation of the incident, and Garrett was determined that the sacrificial lamb, if there was to be one, would not be a seaman just out of boot camp with barely enough experience to tie his shoes. Kurzweil, the experienced man, should have had a more experienced man on the radar this morning — or he should have been there himself.

"Get the hell out of my sight, Chief." Kurzweil got.

There were times, Garrett thought, when he hated this job.