“But I want your backing, XO. I—”
“I have never in my career placed my captain in an awkward position with a junior officer and I don’t intend to now.” His eyes narrowed until the black pupils glistened with anger. “I’ve initialed that message. You may deliver it to him now and express yourself if you want to take the chance, but I’ll back my captain a hundred percent. His reaction will be the same as mine. We’ll remain silent until our mission is accomplished. The source of that message is secondary until our orders have been executed.”
The communications officer’s head inclined briefly m acknowledgment. “Thank you, sir,” he murmured softly. There was no purpose in challenging the authority of naval command. He turned slowly and stepped into the passageway. Makin heard Wally whisper to himself, “Thanks a lot,” as he moved away.
The XO rubbed his tired eyes slowly, pressing against his eyelids until multicolored stars glistened against the blackness. The United States was at war, not a show of force, not a localized action, but a terrifying confrontation with the Soviet Union. There were no boundaries. Civilians were as susceptible as the military. Every man aboard Pasadena had someone back home he was thinking of during every waking moment. Makin knew that each time he thought about Pat and the children in their new house looking down on Honolulu, he had to remember all the other families, too. But that was easy enough to say. It was next to impossible to do. The image of the three of them, Pat and the kids, kept pushing to the forefront, forcing all the others backward to merge in an incomprehensible blur.
That house was the first the Makins ever lived in that had a personality of its own. The others had been what a junior officer could get on a junior officer’s pay in a military community. Those had been shelters — neutral, bland, unenticing to anyone with a sense of taste. And Pat had taste that she was willing to keep in check until their time came.
It came when her husband received orders to Pasadena. She had gone out to Pearl herself to look for housing while he stayed back in New London to attend pre-XO school and mind the children. An old friend told her about a perfect house that had been purchased by her husband’s company when one of their executives was transferred back to the mainland. Places like that usually remained within the corporation in a tight housing economy like Honolulu, but it was a case of a friend of a friend who looked the other way.
Surprisingly, Pat had found a house they could afford with a view of the city and the water, and it was distinctive enough to have a personality of its own. The end result was a new personality for the Makins, a sense of pride and place that united them as a family.
It was the beginning of their transition. Dick had gone from a junior officer with ambition to the next stage, XO on an attack boat, which would make or break his career. And at the same time, the Makin family had established a sense of self. It had been a great year.
Dick smiled to himself when he realized his eyes were squeezed tightly shut. He wanted so much to retain that precious picture of Pat and the kids in front of that house that looked down on Honolulu and out to sea. But he shouldn’t — he couldn’t.
There were a hundred thirty other men aboard Pasadena who one way or another were projecting similar mental images. There were parents back on the U.S. mainland, brothers and sisters, and a number of the crew had wives and kids back there, too. He had no more idea than any other man whether they were already under attack. All-out war meant every place was a target, not just the military. For all he knew, for all any man aboard Pasadena knew, America could already be dead.
You always understood that such a situation was possible. But there was no real way to comprehend such horror until it was upon you. Beneath the surface of the Pacific, a few short words from a burst transmission were the only indication that their loved ones might have experienced a horrible death. The unknown was more ominous than any of them could have imagined. Their helplessness became magnified by their isolation. It had been only a matter of days since the initial war message, yet hours seemed days and the days seemed weeks. Only the two attacks they’d made interrupted the mental agony of not knowing. Ignorance was anything but bliss. Yet there was no desire for revenge, since they had no idea what type of vengeance they might exact.
Tim Sanford’s large body eased through the door to the executive officer’s stateroom before Makin had a chance to respond to the quick knock. “Sorry to interrupt, XO, but we’ve got to do something, sir.” The chief torpedoman tossed his rumpled Pasadena baseball cap on the cluttered desk and pulled the single chair back to sit down, all in one motion. He was as comfortable with officers as he was in chiefs’ quarters.
Makin’s face brightened into a wide smile. Something about the unruly red hair hanging over Sanford’s forehead and the freckles covering his broad Irish face was a source of amusement at a time like this. The man was obviously concerned, yet his good nature was still reflected in his eyes. Wally would go off in a blue funk and think dark thoughts for a long time. Sanford was exactly the opposite. He’d get whatever was chewing on him off his chest and then it would be all over chiefs’ quarters and back to the men in less than an hour. “Well, Chief, let’s try to fix whatever’s got you down. Talk to me.”
“Tommy Lott again, sir. He’s losing it fast. And you — or the captain, I meant to say — put him off. Captain Newell even said he wanted the tapes — and you just can’t do that. No one can. They belong to SUBPAC. You can’t do something like that with Tommy. He’s chief of the boat. Every man aboard looks up to him more than any of us. Now he’s about as blue as I’ve ever seen him, sir, and it’s spreading just like an infection. Every man’s talking about him, and those sonarmen aren’t helping—”
“Time out, Chief, time out.” Those goddamn tapes! “Are we going to spend the rest of this patrol worrying over those tapes he’s got of those Soviet masking devices?”
“Yes, sir. That’s it. Only Tommy says there’s no masking device any human being can put together that would sound like that. He’s playing it for anyone who’ll listen. He stops it, runs it backward, then forward … backward and forward. Says it’s like listening to ghosts.” Sanford’s freckles appeared to lose their definition as he continued. “Says each submarine has a personality of its own, and no computer could build a specific personality like Alaska or Nevada. And he points it out when he plays those tapes. Hell, I can’t tell. No one else can either, except some of the sonarmen say they do. It’s eerie, XO, Tommy says it’s like being in bed with a woman in a dark room — you could tell who she was after a while just by what she did without seeing or hearing her. Do you know what I mean?”
Makin nodded. He knew. The ultimate comparison. That came to every man within days after they got under way. The memories increased rather than disappeared as the days on patrol grew longer. Each time you got in your bunk, the imagination would take over, no matter you were by yourself, no matter you were dead tired. You remembered that woman — just like Tommy Lott was absolutely certain he could sense a submarine’s personality.
“What else, Chief?” He could see Sanford wasn’t finished.
“Mr. Makin, the Navy’s my life. It’s the only one I know.” He paused, pushing red hair away from his forehead. It fell back, as it always did, when he leaned forward. “I understand why Navy regs are the way they are … and I respect that.” He bit his lower lip. “Tommy’s the best friend I ever had, and he’s the finest chief of the boat in the Navy. But it’s almost as if he’s gone out of his head. He’s saying things about the captain that could get him in trouble, sir.” The words spilled out as if an invisible switch had been snapped on. “He’ll hate himself later. He can’t mean what he’s saying — and he respects Captain Newell as much as any of us — but—” Sanford stopped, searching for the proper words.