“Chief?” said Jamie as he slowly stood. “What are you doing here?”
Lindsey jumped in before an answer could come. “Your father’s been here every weekend since we arrived, doing everything from machining a new pedal for Martin’s bike to playing games with the kids so I could take a shower,” said Lindsey. “He’s been really helpful.”
Mike just held out his right hand. It was meant to be a welcoming gesture, yet the sheer size of the hand hinted at malice or injury. The backs of the hands were scrubbed red, but creosote, rust, and grease still seemed to ooze from the pores. The missing tip of the pinkie was more evidence that these hands were tools first.
“Hello, James,” said Mike. He stared at Jamie, daring his son to say what he really thought.
“He’s made a real difference here,” said Lindsey, still trying to smooth over the moment.
“I wish I could take credit for the sign, but I have been able to help with the house. With all the Directorate cyber-attacks, the fridge won’t talk to the phone, and the toilet doesn’t know whether to flush or clean itself without instructions from its Beijing masters. I can’t fix the digital stuff, but I can at least clean up and rig some workarounds,” said Mike.
Jamie released his two kids and shook the hand, suddenly without the confident grip he had expected to use.
“Okay, kids, go show your friends the sandbox Grandpa built,” said Lindsey.
For the next hour, Lindsey stayed close to Jamie. She had always been good at this sort of thing, the chitchat, the empty How are yous, and all he could think about was his father walking the perimeter of his yard, keeping an eye on his kids, nursing a can of Coke.
Soon, the party began to break up, the guests having put in their appearances but knowing they weren’t supposed to linger.
When Lindsey went inside to clean up, there was no longer a way for Jamie to avoid talking to his father. The two men took their drinks and stood on the back patio, their silhouettes indistinguishable from each other. They looked down at the Fort Mason Green, toward the piers that had once hosted jazz concerts and winetastings. A pair of pockmarked littoral combat ships and four Mark VI patrol boats nuzzled the piers. Their tiny silhouettes made the absence of the larger warships that should have been there all the more obvious.
“Helluva nice house, Captain,” said Mike. “Can’t say I’ve ever had any admirals for neighbors. Must go with the promotion.”
“What’s going on here?” said Jamie, ignoring his father’s attempt at small talk.
“I figured Lindsey could use the help,” said Mike.
“You did? You don’t even know her, or the kids. You didn’t even come to our wedding,” said Jamie.
“War changes things for all of us,” said Mike.
“I’ll say.” Jamie looked at the walnut-size knuckles he knew were as hard as stones. “I don’t think I ever saw you drink a soda in my entire life.”
Each man took a sip of his drink and waited for the other to speak. The silence was occasionally broken by the laughing and howling of kids.
“The Navy Cross is a helluva thing, James,” said Mike, changing tack.
“It’s because I got the Coronado out,” said Jamie. “Riley died right in front of me at Pearl.”
“Still don’t know how you did it with an LCS,” said Mike. He growled out each letter with disdain. “Better ships didn’t.”
“Easy, Chief, Coronado is still my ship,” said Jamie. “At least, what’s left of it.”
“Well, she made you captain; you’re always gonna owe her that,” said Mike. “Any idea what they’re going to do with her?”
“Maybe make a museum or memorial out of it, when the war’s over,” said Jamie. “Or maybe turn it into dog tags. All that metal we need has to come from somewhere… We could patch up the hits we took at Pearl, but the missile hit we took in the Guam relief op wrecked the whole engine room for good.”
“You don’t belong here with her. You belong at sea.”
“Of all the people to say that,” muttered Jamie.
“So now we’re starting again?” said Mike. “Okay, I deserved that. I wasn’t as good at the home stuff as I was at the job.”
“You could have been,” said Jamie. “If you’d just tried half as hard at your more important job of taking care of your kids. Both of them.”
“Goddamn it, don’t you lay that blame on me,” said Mike. “Even if I’d been home, I couldn’t have saved her.”
“It’s Mackenzie. Say her name,” growled Jamie.
The two stared at each other in silence as Martin and Claire played tag in the yard beyond them.
“So, how is it really for the fleet?” said Mike, trying again to steer the discussion to easier ground.
“There’s a word for doing the same thing over and over and thinking it will have different results,” said Jamie. “I’m sure you heard, they sunk the Ford and the Vinson. The exact minute we crossed their Eastern Pacific Stability Zone line, just like they had warned. Both the carriers and even the subs. We still pushed on after that, and things got worse.”
“What the hell is going on? Too much power in those ships for ’em to be just torn apart like that.”
“Air Force’s toy planes are all hacked and can’t get off the ground while the Directorate owns the heavens — satellites, space stations, everything. They can see every move we make and target at will. We knew they’d eventually be able to do that to the surface ships, but now even the subs can’t hide. And if they can’t hide —”
“They go from sharks to chum,” said Mike.
“Only the boomers were left untargeted,” said Jamie, referring to the ballistic missile submarines that made up the strategic nuclear force.
“They wouldn’t hit them, not unless they wanted us to cut their population by half,” said Mike. “We should have done that when the Chinese first showed up at Pearl. After what the airstrikes did to the Twenty-Fifth ID base in Hawaii and all those Marines on Oahu? Fucking butchers. They were asking for us to nuke them. We still should.”
“I really hope it doesn’t come to that,” said Jamie.
“It will, mark my words,” said Mike. “I’m telling you, we should have nuked ’em the minute things started to go south. At least the chairman of Joint Chiefs had the honor to step down when the so-called commander in chief pussied out.”
“That’s just the spin he put on it after he got fired,” said Jamie. “By the time the national command authority figured out what was happening, it had already happened. After that, strategic calculus changed; going nuclear would just be revenge to the point of suicide. Hell, given how deep the Chinese penetrated our comms net, no one could even have known if the nuke orders would go through. We might just have been giving them a pretext to strike us first.”
“We should still just do it, and do it now. Just nuke Beijing, Shanghai, and make sure you get Hainan too,” said Mike. “No diplomacy, no more of that ‘reimagining-our-world’ bullshit from those eunuchs on TV. We should make their cities glow.”
“What about Moscow?” said Jamie. “Should we nuke that too? How about Paris, Rome, and Berlin, for not stepping up to join a fight an ocean away from them that was already over? And Tokyo, for kindly helping us clean up our bases and then asking us to leave? If we went with your plan, the whole world would be glowing, including here.” He nodded over to where the kids were still chasing each other.