Po-Boy Taylor, the maintenance person for the sonar team, grumbled, “That’s all I hear from you: gripe, gripe, gripe.” “And all we hear from you is ‘mumble, mumble, mumble’!” “All right, you two, stop the crap and let’s get this last UUV loaded into the firing cradle. We left MacPherson alone with our two seamen too long. Makes me nervous,” Petty Officer Keyland declared.
“Well, I can always run back and keep Jenkins company. That way you’d have two qualified operators on the job. Could send the two seamen, Calvins and Gentron, down here—”
“Just shut up for a while, Pope,” Keyland pleaded. “Hard work for a few hours isn’t going to kill you.”
“But this isn’t even my job,” Bernardo said, tilting his Navy ball cap up off his forehead and running his hand through his long black hair. “I’m a sonar technician, not a torpedoman.” Taylor came around the corner. “Whoa!” he shouted, pretending to shiver. “I can’t believe you’re running your hand through that greasy shit you put on your hair.”
Bernardo put his hands on his hips. “I put nothing on my hair.”
Taylor laughed. “Then, maybe you should,” he said, picking up something from his toolbox and disappearing around the corner.
Bernardo turned back to the leading petty officer. “Listen, Petty Officer Keyland, as I said before our high school dropout interrupted, I’m a sonar technician, not a torpedoman.”
“Ain’t no such animal anymore in this man’s Navy!” Taylor shouted from the other side of the consoles. “And who you calling a high school dropout?”
“Cut it out, Po-Boy,” Keyland said in a loud voice to Taylor. “And you, Pope,” he continued, poking Bernardo in the chest once. “This may not be in your job description, but it isn’t as if we have extra hands we can send down here to do this.”
“The second UUV is hooked up and ready when you are,” Taylor said in a loud voice.
“So, Pope, get your butt down there at the firing cradle and make sure it loads properly.”
“Okay, I’m going, Petty Officer Keyland, but you keep your hands away from the button that opens the well deck. Remember what happened to that cat named Smith.”
Keyland did remember what happened to Smith… or whoever the sailor had really been. He glanced at the walkway that ran around the upper level separating where he stood and the lowest level, where the firing cradle held eight UUVs ready for launch. Beneath the firing cradle was a well deck that opened directly into the ocean.
Smith had tried to kill Senior Chief Agazzi on the walkway. The sailor would have succeeded if Master Chief Boatswain Mate Jacobs hadn’t decided to be his nosy self. He had knocked the faux Smith down onto the third level of the UUV compartment, where the man had rolled into the ocean through the open well deck. The sharks that now filled the shadows beneath this eighty-one-plus acres of man-made island had made short work of Smith, according to rumors.
Keyland turned around to the operating console that allowed manual firing of the UUVs. Senior Chief Agazzi had never spoken about the specifics of what happened down here, but if it had not been for him and Jacobs, Sea Base would have been resting on the bottom of the dark Pacific months ago. This Smith character had rigged C-4 on several UUVs. The UUVs were nothing more than sophisticated torpedoes capable of being computer-driven from the ASW control center by MacPherson or Gentron. Each UUV weighed over a ton with a five-hundred-pound high-explosive warhead. If Smith had not been stopped, the chain of explosions would have ripped the bottom out of the USNS Bellatrix. The large eighty-one-acre canopy held aloft by the Fast Sealift Ships would have started to collapse as Bellatrix sank. It would have been like a row of dominoes falling as Sea Base followed. Keyland shivered. He doubted anyone would have survived.
Bernardo’s boondockers clanged on the metal mesh steps of the ladder as he climbed down from the first level toward the second, drawing Keyland’s attention back to the console.
He watched as Bernardo, halfway down, grabbed the metal railing and slid the rest of the way down the short ladder to the second level. The second level was a metal mesh platform that encircled the third and final level, where the firing cradle rested.
Keyland looked at the firing cradle, then down at the computer control. “Ready, Taylor?” he shouted.
“I’m out of the way. It’s in the harness. All you gotta do is hit the button.”
“You got the emergency stop button.”
“I got the dead man’s button. It’s connected to the overhead tram and I’m holding it in my hand. As long as I keep it pressed, it’ll keep moving.”
Keyland pressed the icon. The noise of the hydraulics increased in intensity. He looked at the overhead rails. Within the exposed opening along the center, hidden partially by the shadows of the metal surrounding it, chains moved. The chains clanged against the sides of the metal railings adding decibels to the noise of the hydraulics.
“Jesus Christ!” Bernardo shouted, turning around and glaring at Keyland. The second class reached up and pulled his Navy ears down.
Kiang pulled the door to his stateroom closed. In his hand, he held several photographs from the North Korean incident over a month ago. This Petty Officer Taleb and he had spent that afternoon on the enclosed platform high up in the antenna masts over the tower, and Taleb had been bumping into his consistently since then. The man continued to pester him for copies of the photographs Kiang had taken that day.
He had tried to avoid doing this, but maybe if he gave the young sailor some of the photographs, the man would go back to his work and leave Kiang along. The last thing he needed was someone trailing him around Sea Base, especially some friendless sailor looking for an older mentor. The face of his handler, the colonel, interrupted his thoughts.
Whenever Kiang thought about a normal life, his captivity in China under the machinations of the colonel brought him back to the reality of how the rest of his life was going to be. He had received a letter from his parents in yesterday’s mail run. Along with the letter, written in English, were two photographs of his mom and dad visiting relatives in central China.
The difference was this letter held a message. The three pages had the second and last page interchanged. This was the second letter in a row with the same mistake. The first time, he’d attributed it to the censor forgetting to put them back in right order. For it to happen a second time meant it was deliberate. It could be the colonel sending Kiang a warning, but the colonel was not subtle about his warnings. Kiang’s ribs on his right side had healed slightly askew. That was the colonel’s idea of a subtle warning.
No, his father had done this. His father was a meticulous person. He ran their small shop in San Antonio with the precision of a major corporation. Nothing was left to chance. There was no way his father would have sent a letter with the three pages out of order.
He set the letter aside to play with later. His father was sending him a message with these two letters. So far, he had been unable to figure it out.
Kiang turned and shook the door. He glanced both ways down the passageway of the USNS Regulus. Seeing no one, he reached up and slid the thin wire into the crevice of the door. Less than a quarter-inch long, the wire would jump back flush with the door facing if someone opened it.
Satisfied, Kiang started down the passageway, passing other staterooms. He had seen one of the open-berthing areas on board the Regulus, and realized how lucky he was to have a private stateroom. The open-berthing areas had been constructed from part of the hangar bays on the Fast Sealift Ships. Each held fifty people of the same sex. A long row of two-high bunks lined each row of ten, each bunk with a mattress that seemed six inches thick to Kiang. The last row was only five double-bunks deep. A small lounge with a couple of couches and chairs surrounding a table and a television filled in the vacant space. The head was a hundred feet away in the aft forecastle of the ships. This meant the sailors, contractors, and merchant marines assigned to the accommodations there had to walk through about fifty feet of the huge hangar bay, then another fifty feet along a passageway, to shower, shave, and do their morning ablutions. Only the colonel could have kept him on board the Regulus if he had been assigned to one of the berthing areas.