To an untrained observer, it looked very much like all the other submarines that lined the piers around the base: black, mysterious, undeniably deadly. Someone with a passing knowledge of warships would be able to see quickly that she was an attack submarine, as opposed to a missile sub, or boomer, like Alabama where Danny had spent his first sea tour: the lack of a long, flat missile deck easily gave that away. Danny’s previous submarine had been designed to launch long-range nuclear missiles. His new boat was designed around the more traditional submarine mission of shooting torpedoes, both at other submarines and surface ships.
Someone with slightly more experience could discern that she was a 688, or Los Angeles-class submarine, the nation’s largest class of submarines, a workhorse of the Cold War that had proven very useful for the new missions the force had found itself handed since the fall of the Berlin Wall. A close look at the bow, and the barely visible outline of the hatches for twelve vertical-launch cruise missile tubes, marked her as one of the “second flight” 688 subs, with the cruise missile capability that was an enhancement from the original design. The Louisville had, in fact, conducted the first war patrol of any US submarine since World War II, in the first Gulf War in 1991. On January 19 of that year, she fired the first shot of that conflict, a Tomahawk cruise missile that struck the Al Muthanna chemical weapons factory. The fact that the boat still had planes sticking out from her sail meant that she was not the most recent version of the 688, the “688i,” as in “improved.”
But Danny, with his experience and his expertise, saw far beyond the silhouette of the Louisville. He saw that the deck was painted and clean. There were few obstructions on the deck, and the only thing that connected her to shore were the shore power cables, the brow that he would soon walk across, and the two lines forward and aft that held her to the pier. The two young petty officers on the quarterdeck were clean-shaven, fit, and were resisting the urging of the tropical breeze to relax. In fact Danny knew they’d spotted him and were waiting for him to either come aboard or keep moving. Not all the seagull shit had been removed from the black hull of the boat, because that would be impossible, but they had diligently kept up with the relentless birds as best they could. The pier alongside the boat was clean too, the trash barrels were not overflowing and a load of zinc bricks had been neatly stacked. The flying bridge was erected atop the sail, and not a speck of rust was visible anywhere. Danny knew two things as he took a deep breath, stepped onto the brow, and crossed a small sliver of the Pacific onto his new home. With the Louisville, he’d once again found himself aboard a good boat. And: it was going to sea very, very soon.
He saluted the Petty Office on the quarterdeck. His name tag read Warner.
“Lieutenant Danny Jabo requests permission to come aboard.”
“Come aboard, sir,” he said, saluting back. “You must be our new navigator.”
Danny lowered his hand and stepped forward. “That’s what my orders say. Is the captain aboard?”
“Yes sir, I believe he is. Would you like an escort to help you find him?”
Danny detected a slight smirk in that, wondered if it was the attack boat sailor’s scorn for the new officer whose previous tour had been aboard a missile submarine: Boomer fag.
“No I’ll find him myself,” said Danny. “Just tell me where the elevator is.”
Warner hesitated at that, then realized he was being screwed with. He nodded his head and smiled. “Good one, sir.”
“Glad you liked it…”
He dropped his seabag down the hatch, then climbed down after it.
It was the smell that brought it all back more than anything else: a combination of diesel exhaust, amine, a lot of hardworking men in close proximity, and the smell of somebody cooking a large amount of calorically dense food; Danny guessed sloppy joes or beef stew. Despite what his new fast boat shipmates might think, Danny could find his way around the boat just fine. In fact, it was considerably easier since the boat was smaller than Alabama along any dimension: length, width, or, the measure with which maritime people preferred to compare total size, displacement. His old boat, the Alabama, had displaced 18,000 tons, more than some World War II aircraft carriers. His new boat displaced less than half of that: 7,000 tons. Despite the vast difference in size, however, the crew wasn’t all that much smaller: 154 men on the Alabama, 129 on Louisville. He was squeezing by a large number of those men as he made his way aft, and they mutually sized each other up as they rubbed by. They were in all shapes, sizes, and colors, and Danny liked them already, because they were his shipmates now. At the end of the passageway near the engine room watertight door, he found the man he was looking for.
He glared at a stack of orange kapok life preservers that Danny knew automatically had not been stowed to his satisfaction. He still had the same combative expression, the same gleaming bald head, and the muscular arms that he denied being vain about. This was his new commanding officer and his old friend: Commander Joe Michaels.
On Danny’s final patrol aboard the Alabama, they’d been on a high-speed run to Taiwan when their navigator went crazy and decided to sink the ship. Danny had been the communicator, Michaels the XO. It had ended with four dead bodies, including the navigator, and a collision that had nearly killed them all. In the aftermath, the Navy’s institutional wisdom had ended the career of their Captain. But they promoted Danny and Michaels, and made them heroes. When Danny first learned that he would be serving with him again on Louisville, he knew that it would be a tour filled with exhausting hard work, unreasonable demands, and profane insults. He wouldn’t have been happier if he’d been awarded another Navy Cross.
“Captain?”
Michaels turned. “Oh Christ… not you again? I told them to send you back to another boomer where you’d be more comfortable. Told them you liked those big toilet seats.”
“Danny Jabo, reporting for duty sir.” He dropped his seabag to the deck and saluted, and smiled despite himself.
“What are you so happy about?”
“Glad to be back on a boat.”
“Yeah bullshit. I’ll call Angi and tell her you said that.”
“She’s still in Indiana for now…”
“Then I’ll wait ‘til she gets to a place with telephones.” He extended his hand and Danny shook it. “I hope you’ve got your affairs in order, Jabo, because we’re going to sea in a hurry.”
“You know sir, that’s exactly what you said when I reported to the Alabama.”
“Don’t mean it ain’t true,” he said. “Follow me.”
They walked forward to his stateroom, and in what was too quick to be called an introduction, the CO shouted the name, or more often the nickname, of every man as they passed. Some were named, obviously, for how they looked: Bear, Red, and Stump. Some he called with the time-honored name for their positions on the boat: the corpsman was Doc, the supply officer was Chop, and the radioman was Sparks. Other nicknames were more mysterious, like Easy Money, Heavy Weather, and a Lieutenant jg he called “V-12.”