The Hawaii subs, the Pacific Fleet submarine force, should be well on its way by now, he thought.
“You detached my submarines without informing me, Admiral. I’d appreciate it if you’d keep me in the god damned loop. Sir.”
“Sorry, Patch, but don’t forget, technically those submarines are under the operational control of the battle group, and since I’m the force commander they report in to me.”
“No, Admiral, those ships were to out-chop to my command. I’m the USUBCOM force commander, and as of last night those ships are under my op-comm.” The jargon meant the ships left the battle group and got a new boss, Pacino, the evening he arrived on the carrier.
“Okay, Patch, fine. They’re your boats and under your command. Okay? It’s just that you had a hell of a night with the accident and the sedative, and the doc thought you might be down for a while, which you were, and we were steaming as before.”
“Where are my ships?”
“The Pasadena and Cheyenne have been running at flank all night. They’ll be in the western Oparea, in the Sea of Japan, by the time the blockade starts.”
“Mac, we may be in a hurry to play this ball game, but why would we agree to kick off with only two players on the god damned field? The whole point of a blockade is to be visible. That takes surface ships. No blockade is credible with subs alone. And the Japan Oparea is crawling with their Destiny-class ships. With our boats running in there at flank speed, they’ll be eaten alive.”
“Those are the orders.”
“Admiral, my subs need release to sink the Destiny subs in the Oparea. You’ve given that order, I assume, sir.” Pacino braced for the worst.
“Those aren’t the rules of engagement. Patch, and you know it. The blockade setup is that, first, Tokyo and the world is notified that as of nineteen hundred hours today, no merchant shipping is to cross the boundary of the Oparea, or as Warner’s calling it in public, the Exclusion Zone. Then, as of seven o’clock tonight local time, we sink anything crossing the boundary, going in or out. There’s nothing authorizing us to attack the military of Japan.”
“Let’s ask, Admiral. We’ve got to get that request on the wire now. If my boats are out there, they could be targeted by Destiny subs. And since you sent them in at maximum speed, they made a hell of a racket getting there. The whole Japanese Fleet knows exactly where they are. They won’t last after the first torpedo.”
“What do you want this to say?”
“That we want to be released to strike at any Destiny submarine the minute we detect it, and that Tokyo should be told to withdraw their submarines or we’ll attack.”
Donner scribbled on the Writepad, and Pacino read.
“Fine.”
“I’ll send it as a joint message from Pacforcecom and USUBCOM/Pacforce. How’s that?”
“Great.” Pacino was still angry but he tried to keep it from showing.
The phone buzzed by the side of the rack. Capt. David Kane lifted a mucous-encrusted eyelid, found the phone, pulled it out of its cradle and dragged it to his ear.
“Captain,” he croaked. He felt older than his forty-five years, the forty-fifth birthday hitting him much harder than he had anticipated. He had been having another nightmare about it, the room filled with black balloons labeled “over the hill” while he looked in a mirror and saw deep wrinkles, bald head, gray mustache, himself bent over a cane. He was glad that the phone had interrupted the dream. He glanced at his watch, the face reading 3:15, trying to remember if it was set for Hawaii time, local time, Greenwich Mean or Tokyo time. He managed to recall ordering the ship’s clocks set to Tokyo time so that when they got to the Japan Oparea their bodies would be adjusted to the light cycles outside.
There was nothing worse than coming to periscope depth in a dark submarine with your body thinking it was two in the morning only to find that when the scope cleared the sun was shining from high in the sky.
“Captain,” he said again, wondering if he’d dreamt the phone had buzzed.
“Yes sir, Captain, Officer of the Deck. It’s zero three fifteen, sir. I’m calling to request to come up to periscope depth.”
Kane had trained his junior officers, on night wakeup calls like this, to make him dig for information. If the officer of the deck did a data dump on him, he’d be back asleep by the end of the O.O.D’s report.
“Okay. Any contacts?”
“No contacts, sir.”
“Present status?”
“Depth one five zero feet, speed six knots, course west, sir.”
“Reason for PD?”
“Broadcast, Captain. Also we need to check the inertial nav against the GPS signal.”
“Last broadcast was when?”
The ship was required to come up to periscope depth at least once every eight hours to get radio messages from the Comstar satellite that orbited in a geostationary orbit over the Pacific. The satellite would transmit messages in a ten-second burst every fifteen minutes, whether anyone was there to hear them or not. Usually while they were up, the periscope antenna would pull down the signal from the navigation satellite, the global-positioning system.
“We were up at twenty-thirty last night, sir. It’s time.”
“Very well, Offsa’deck,” Kane said, slurring the title, “take her up to PD and get the broadcast and a nav fix. Then get us back down and speed back up to flank. We’re late.”
“Aye, sir, periscope depth, broadcast, nav fix, deep and flank.”
Kane recradled the phone and shut his eyes again, sleep washing comfortably up over him, the dreams coming slowly, but then he was in his backyard dressed in a clown suit at his daughter’s birthday party, his wife Becky handing him a beer, the kids squealing in delight.
The party melted into a beach where he and Becky were alone in the moonlight and she was reaching for him, a devilish look in her blue eyes. He could feel her long fingernails as she drew them across his flat stomach to his waistband, her playful laughter mixing in with the sounds of the waves on the sand. He felt her fingers plunge into his bathing suit and gently stroke him, then pull him out. She began to kiss him. His eyes rolled back in his head, Becky’s mouth working until sweat poured down from his temples and— BOOM BOOM BOOM.
“Radioman, sir, messages for you.”
“Goddamnit.” Kane sat up in the rumpled bed. The radioman came in with the metal clipboard with the official Writepad. Kane glanced at the messages, the ones classified with codeword Enlightened Curtain first in the queue. It looked like the blockade would proceed ahead of schedule. Kane initialed the messages, drawing his finger over the surface of the Writepad as if using it for a pencil, the computer drawing lines as his finger sketched his initials over the pad.
The radioman left and Kane sank back into the rack, feeling the deck take on a down angle as the officer of the deck drove the ship deep again and increased speed to get back on their planned track to the Japan Oparea.
He shut his eyes and felt sleep overtake him again, but this time lovely Becky was gone, the dreams dominated by the ocean, its depth and darkness, storms at sea, dark rain. He tossed and turned all the way to the next phone call from the control room.