Being a Ph.D. and a senior contractor helped, though he wasn’t sure how. Most of the contractors on board “racked” in the open berthing area with the junior sailors. “Rack” was the nautical term for a bed, and “to rack” was the verb for sleeping on them. He could understand after seeing their construction why the word for a torture device of centuries ago applied to those beds in the open-berthing compartments.
He had a stateroom. Staterooms were the territory of the officers on warships. But staterooms on Fast Sealift Ships, such as the one he had on Regulus, put staterooms on warships to shame. He had overheard Navy officers talking about their accommodations. The staterooms on board Fast Sealift Ships made the Navy officers think of rooms on cruise liners. Twin beds, recliner rockers, lamps, private bathrooms with showers, and televisions. All that was missing was a bar, and Kiang wouldn’t be surprised if alcohol was available somewhere on these merchant marine ships.
Kiang walked onto the main deck, pushing the watertight door shut behind him and pushing down the bar to secure it. He glanced up at the bottom of the Sea Base metal canopy that stretched over the top of Regulus, held aloft by huge masts that reached nearly four stories above him. The trapped fumes of the eight ships assaulted his nostrils, the dense sulfur burning his nostrils slightly as he breathed. Dusk brought the late afternoon ocean breeze through the underpart of Sea Base, cleaning out the trapped fumes, and enticing people to come out. The bow of the Regulus was usually free of the fumes because of where the ship was located: front port side of Sea Base with no other ship in front of it.
Shouting came from over the side of the ship. He walked to the edge to see what the noise was about. The side of the ship that in other days was used to drive military vehicles on and off Regulus was open with its ramp extended outward. Fishing contest. The big thing on Sea Base was the fishing competition. At sea level, the fumes never penetrated, but being at sea level was something he never intended to do.
He shivered slightly. The only fish beneath Sea Base were sharks. Big sharks, small sharks… he wasn’t a marine biologist, but he had seen enough shark movies on the National Geographic Channel to know they were sharks. But you didn’t need to see them to recognize them, for they were something people talked about constantly. When Sea Base was first set up nearly four months ago, the Captain had allowed swim call, but within days the first of the sharks had arrived. Then more. Within a month, the whole of the shaded area beneath Sea Base canopy crawled with sharks. When Kiang first saw the spectacle, his first impression was that there were so many of them, you could walk between ships on their backs.
When Sea Base left the western Pacific and moved slowly into the Sea of Japan, the sharks accompanied it, never leaving the shadows beneath the floating island.
The fishing teams below were wrestling a shark to the side of the ramp. He turned away. The routine was to kill the shark, weigh it, take the statistics for the games, and then toss it back into the ocean, where fellow sharks fought over the carcass. It was a cruel sport, he thought. And each time they threw the shark back to be devoured by the others, it drew more sharks to Sea Base.
The door to the staircase leading up to Sea Base had been roped open. He started climbing. Four stories later, he pulled himself up through the opening onto the main deck. The stifling heat from the open area below was blown away by the soft Pacific breeze arcing up from the south. There was still the summer heat, even if the calendar said it was October, but at least there was nothing deflecting the breeze as the clustered ships below did.
He saw the C-130, and spotted Taleb carrying the front end of some poor soul’s seabag away from it. Taleb had told him that the two of them had met when Kiang returned from San Antonio. He didn’t recall the meeting, but seeing the man meeting this C-130 helped confirm that maybe Taleb did speak to him when he disembarked from the C-130. Kiang had a lot on his mind.
The interchanged pages meant something. It was a signal. A message from his father. But what was his father trying to tell him?
Taleb waved, but kept on with the task of helping the new arrival. Kiang ignored the gesture and continued toward the tower.
THREE
“Captain in Combat!” the booming voice of the Chief Operations Specialist for Sea Base Combat Information Center announced.
Garcia found the rolling announcement of his presence wherever he went on board Sea Base different from the jobs he had had for most of his career in the Navy. The thing that shocked him was how much he enjoyed it. He raised his hand in acknowledgment as he turned and shut the hatch behind him. Walking across the hard rubber covering in the blue-lighted compartment, he felt the eyes of the Combat Information Center watch team on him. It had been like this since the fight with the North Koreans. His eyes were still adjusting to the blue fluorescent lighting that kept Combat in a perpetual nighttime environment when he reached the vicinity of his chair.
Combat Information Center: This was where Skippers, throughout the era of the modern Navy, had fought their ships and their battle groups. This was the nerve center of Sea Base. And he was the four-striper Captain who could with a snap of his fingers bring the whole experiment to its full war-fighting potential, or with the same snap, shut it down. Military equivalents in other services had little appreciation for the full range of powers a Navy Captain at sea held.
A petty officer appeared out of the shadows with a fresh cup of coffee. Garcia thanked the man and took the cup. He had been drinking coffee since reveille at zero six hundred. He could do without another cup, but since the fight in the Sea of Japan, his sailors had treated him as if he was… what? Their father? He smiled. He enjoyed the treatment.
Combat was on the second level of the tower construction raised on top of the Sea Base canopy. The tower was four levels high. Unlike the top level, the second level was window-less. Ships at sea had levels instead of stories. Ashore, the tower would have been a building and each level referred to as a story. But four stories became four levels once Sea Base left dry land.
Air traffic controllers and the Air Boss occupied the top level — called the Air Tower — with its slanted windows wall-to-wall around the four sides of Sea Base. Each window slanted outward to increase visibility in heavy rain and each window had its own set of wipers.
The scientists and contractors who designed and built Sea Base occupied the bottom level. The Office of Naval Research filled the offices and cubicles inside the bottom level, which, like Combat, had no windows. But unlike Combat, every office, niche, and cubicle within the ONR spaces had bright fluorescent lights to help them see as they analyzed every bit of data connected with Project Sea Base. They were the only ones that referred to the man-made island as Project Sea Base.
The third level was his. It was both the in-port and at-sea cabin for the Skipper, and it was the largest he had ever seen. It was more a suite than a stateroom.