Winter’s bite was blowing into the Bay. Troy Simms and the other men on top of the sail were muffled in Arctic cold weather gear, fur-lined parkas, and thick gloves which made it hard to adjust the focus on the powerful binoculars each man held in his hands, or hung on a thick leather strap on his padded chest.
The commander of the USS Sam Houston was mightily relieved to be going back to sea. More than that he was a little surprised; having anticipated a long interregnum ashore while the Navy’s Special Investigation Branch crawled all over him, his crew and the boat.
Rear Admiral Bernard Clarey, Commander Submarine Force, United States Pacific Fleet — COMSUBPAC — had come aboard the USS Sam Houston about an hour after the USS Theodore Roosevelt had cast off on her patrol twenty-four hours ago.
‘Permission to address the crew, Skipper?’ He had asked Troy Simms, exuding a winning and confident bonhomie.
‘Permission granted, sir!’
‘My name is Bernard Clarey and I am COMSUBPAC,” the older man had declared jovially over the boat’s internal PA system. “You’ve all been through the wringer in the last few days. I won’t apologise for that. SIB has its job to do, you have your jobs to do, and I have mine to do. That’s the way it is.’
The fifty-one year old veteran of a submarine war that had raged twenty years ago in the Eastern Pacific had viewed the men around him in the control room with a proudly paternal eye as he spoke into the microphone clasped in his right hand. Radiating youthful vitality and energy, every man in the compartment understood that their Admiral would have given his eye teeth to be sailing with them on their forthcoming patrol.
COMSUBPAC’s voice and cheerful outward demeanour had betrayed no hint of the fact that he had spent most of the last week in an aircraft traversing the Pacific and the continental United States, or locked in high-level briefings and interrogations in the Pentagon getting by snatching twenty or forty minute naps when he could. The crews of the USS Theodore Roosevelt and of the USS Sam Houston had indeed been ‘through the wringer in recent days’, as would every other crew in the Polaris Fleet; twelve hours ago the seven boats at sea — excluding the Theodore Roosevelt which had already been ‘cleared’ — had been ordered to surface, report their ‘status’ and to acknowledge new ‘operational directives’.
Of course, excepting their commanding officer none of the other members of the crew of the USS Sam Houston had known that the entire SSBM fleet was in turmoil, or that Bernard Clarey was tip toeing across the eye of a storm that had rocked the Navy Department to its knees in the last forty-eight hours.
‘It is my honour to be onboard this boat to wish you all Godspeed and good hunting on your forthcoming deterrent patrol. I have complete confidence in the officers and men of the USS Sam Houston and I know that nobody on this boat will let down the Navy!’
Afterwards, COMSUBPAC had toured the submarine, shaking hands and patting backs, exchanging quips and unfailingly supportive observations as to the combat readiness of the vessel and the morale of her crew.
On the pressure casing aft of the sail at the head of the gangway he had taken Troy Simms hand, shaken it and held it as he looked the USS Sam Houston’s commanding officer in the eye.
‘The strength of our system, Troy,’ he said very softly, ‘is that when the shit hits the fan people like me know that they can always count on men like you. When people like us stop trusting each other we know we are in trouble. I hope and pray that whatever appearances to the contrary, that we in America are a long way from that day.’
COMSUBPAC had temporarily moved his flag to Alameda, where he planned to remain at least until after Jackson Braithwaite’s memorial service. The murdered commander of Submarine Squadron Fifteen was to be interred with full military honours at the Arlington National Cemetery in a week’s time.
Troy Simms stared down at the black water roiling down the flanks of the submarine. The boat’s single multi-bladed propeller was hardly turning because the outrushing tide was sweeping the Ethan Allen class ballistic missile submarine’s seven thousand ton deadweight out to sea like a slow moving giant cork.
The silhouette of the USS Sam Houston’s escort, the USS John Paul Jones lengthened as the long lean hunter passed into deeper, open waters beyond the Golden Gate and her captain let her — metaphorically — stretch her legs. There were no other vessels on the gloomy horizon beyond the destroyer, no other traffic visible beyond the bridge. Far astern a ferry came around the dim bulk of Alcatraz Island, battling the tide on the way across to Sausalito. It was too dark to make out the masts and superstructures of ships tied up alongside the distant harbour piers of San Francisco.
Troy Simms felt the old-fashioned nakedness of any submarine captain caught on the surface at dawn. On the surface his command was horribly vulnerable; beneath the waves she was the deadliest fighting machine ever invented by man. A part of him badly wanted to know how it was possible for him to have gone to sea three weeks ago with sealed orders no sane man would countenance and which, it seemed, no sane man had countenanced.
He had been ordered to sail to within a few hundred miles of the coast of New South Wales, Australia! Most of his Polaris A2 missiles had been programmed to hit Australian cities!
However, no matter how much he wanted to know how that could have been allowed to happen; he also understood that he had no right to know unless his superiors deemed it operationally necessary. He had accepted that because that was the way things were sometimes. His job in the Navy was to command the USS Sam Houston; not to second guess COMPUBPAC and the Chief of Naval Operations in Washington, and it never occurred to him for a minute that SIB would not get to the bottom of the affair.
“We will dive the boat as soon as we clear the Golden Gate!” He rasped, taking one last look at the USS John Paul Jones, the great looming bridge, and the grey sky where in the middle distance it blended into the iron grey ocean.
Chapter 31
United States Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach was in a mood to kick something, or somebody by the time his car dropped him off outside the Department of Justice Building. Most trips up to Capitol Hill seemed to have this effect on him lately. Notwithstanding that a story had been put out to the effect that the Commander-in-Chief was recuperating from a bad dose of influenza and advising that there was no cause for concern; people were beginning to ask, and they had every right to ask, very pushy questions about the President’s continuing absence and nobody at the White House was making the situation any less worrying.
Most Washington insiders suspected that, contrary to public reassurances, there was plenty of cause for concern about the President’s health and any morning now that concern was going to be splashed across the front page of the Washington Post and blaring from TV newscasts.
That morning the White House Chief of Staff, Kenny O’Donnell, had been forced to brief senior members of the Washington press corps; the briefing had not gone well and already there were ugly rumours doing the rounds and several exasperated junior Administration staffers had broken ranks.
Katzenbach had called O’Donnell and warned him that if the President was not back in circulation within the next ‘couple of days’ the Administration was ‘in real trouble’.