“Right,” she said, laughing, “as long as there are no sandbars in sight.”
“Well, if Wells were still USUBCOM commander I’d be relieved of Greeneville and driving a desk at the office of base security and car stickers.”
“Congratulations, honey. Why don’t you ditch the admiral and we’ll celebrate tonight, just us?”
“You know I’d love that, but I better not. I’ll be home early.”
“I’ll be waiting, Captain.”
Phillips pressed the END button and dropped the phone in the console, stared at the rain washing the windshield and thought about how it would feel to command the newest submarine in the fleet. And suddenly it hit him that he’d be leaving his officers and crew behind, which dampened his mood. Well, perhaps he could convince Pacino to allow him to take Roger Whatney with him. Roger was now Phillips-trained. The two of them were a team, and Phillips didn’t look forward to breaking in a new XO.
He turned his mind to the things that needed to be done to turn his present ship over to her new skipper, put the car in gear and pulled out, heading for the O-club. It had turned out to be a good day, after all.
CHAPTER 4
Comdr. Toshumi Tanaka gripped the carved wooden handrails mounted on the edge of the clearing situated on the ridge overlooking the submarine piers of the Yokosuka Maritime Self Defense Force Base some 200 meters below the rocky ledge. The clearing at this spot had been groomed as a garden and meditation site. Below Tanaka’s feet rounded stones were placed to form a cobbled area up to the handrails looking down the ledge. The spot was beautiful in the spring and summer, but in the fall the gloomy aura of it made it unpopular, which fitted Tanaka’s mood. He glared out at the vista. Today he could only view the world through a haze of anger and frustration.
He thought of better times. When he was a small boy he had lived in a house by the sea, a house filled with laughter and love. His father had been a stern but caring naval officer, his mother happy to take care of him and his younger sister Onu. The elder Tanaka, then a junior officer, had been at sea much of the time, but when he was there the family was joyful. Toshumi and Onu spent happy hours playing and reading with their mother, waiting for the times when their father would return. All this until his eighth year when his father Akagi was asked to go on a foreign assignment in the United States and the Tanaka family had left Japan for America.
Akagi Tanaka, a commander then, was sent to a small seacoast town in Maryland to teach navigation to the students at the U.S. Naval Academy.
And from then on his son Toshumi learned firsthand what it was to feel like a stranger, to be made fun of and feel humiliation. It had been a relief when he returned to Tokyo and his old friends, but four years after the family’s return the Maritime Self Defense Force called on Akagi Tanaka again, this time to attend the US Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island. By then Toshumi Tanaka was a young teenager, watching the beautiful, rich American girls stroll the beaches and streets of the town, and knowing only rejection. Finally he convinced his family to allow him to go back to Japan and his friends. It was a happy reunion — abruptly interrupted by the news that his mother Orou was dead from breast cancer. From then on Toshumi’s life was a charcoal sketch, done in shades of gray and black. The pain of losing his mother would always be with him and he felt his father responsible. If only his father hadn’t insisted on dragging the family to America, Toshumi reflected bitterly.
Two years later his father, now a captain with friends at the Maritime Self Defense Force Academy in Yokosuka, was able to secure an appointment for Toshumi, although Toshumi had begun to hate the navy, connecting it with his father, with the foreign assignments, with his mother’s death. But to say no to this opportunity was to be forever behind his peers, at the bottom of Japanese society.
When Toshumi Tanaka finished school he had chosen to go into submarines, finding the surface navy boring, and found a natural, unsuspected talent. Tactically he was far ahead of his contemporaries and drove a submarine like it was part of himself. For the first time in many years he felt happy doing something; when he was driving a sub he could almost forget his mother’s death, his anger at his father. He was promoted years ahead of his contemporaries from lieutenant to lieutenant commander. As one of the youngest lieutenant commanders in the force, he was made the first officer of the first Destiny-class submarine intended for Japanese use — until then they had been manufactured for export sale. This had been the Destiny II class, the first submarine in the class, named Eternal Spirit.
After two years in the building yards and three years at sea Toshumi was promoted to full commander and given command of his own new Destiny II ship, the Winged Serpent. That had been only a year ago, and now he was a senior officer and submarine commander at age thirty-five. His father, Akagi, was now an admiral, the chief of staff of the MSDF, and though some outsiders thought that Toshumi’s position was based on his father’s commanding the force, those who knew Toshumi Tanaka also knew of his extraordinary talents for commanding men and his ship.
Tanaka forced his thoughts back to the present, forced his eyes to see the naval base stretching out to the horizon on either side. Below the ridge, piers pointed out to the bay, fingers reaching seaward. There was a large gap between the closest piers, with a squat outbuilding located half on the concrete of the pier, half hanging out over the brackish water of the slip. Tied up to the bollards on the seawall was a submarine, one of the Destiny III-class ships, the computer-controlled unmanned vessels.
Abruptly he heard footsteps behind him, and a shadow of a man materialized beside him. Tanaka did not turn.
“I thought I might find you here. Captain,” a young voice said. Still Tanaka didn’t turn. His second-in-command, Lt. Comdr. Hiro Mazdai, was as different from himself as a first officer could be. Tanaka was the son of a navy officer, Mazdai was born to wealth, the son of a Panasonic chief financial officer and board member.
Tanaka was raised on military compounds, Mazdai had never left Tokyo until he went to sea. Tanaka had sweated through five grueling years at the Self Defense Force Maritime Academy, Mazdai had breezed through Tokyo University. Tanaka was a loner, Mazdai was married to a beautiful Tokyo girl eleven years his junior. Tanaka was just short of 170 centimeters tall, almost towering for a Japanese, but slight, almost frail. Mazdai was short, stretching to reach 155 centimeters, solid and wide.
“The crew is ready, sir,” Mazdai said. “We have completed the ready-for-sea checklist. All the weapons have passed their electronic checks.” Far out on the right, blue in the mist, their submarine, the Winged Serpent, lay tied up next to several other submarines of the Destiny II class. Down below, an odd-looking truck drove up. Several men in yellow suits jumped off the rear. All wore full helmets with clear faceplates and carried automatic rifles. A door in the pier building rose slowly, revealing bright interior lights shining down on the weapon-loading gear.
“We won’t be going to sea,” Tanaka said flatly to his second in command.
“Sir?”
Tanaka looked directly at Mazdai, disgust clear in his face. “That Three-class down there, that robot sub is doing our mission. Our weapons will be removed as soon as that… thing is done being loaded.”
“They took the mission away from us?”
The men in yellow suits surrounded the truck as it opened, splitting like a clamshell to reveal encased weapons painted yellow and magenta. Stencilled on the side of the capsules were large words, unreadable from that height, but Tanaka knew what they spelled: “DANGER — RADIATION HAZARD — PLUTONIUM.”