“Shut the door,” said Michaels as they entered his stateroom.
Danny did, and sat down.
“You meet the XO yet?”
“Not yet,” said Danny. “Where’s he from?”
“Did his JO tour on the east coast: I forget which boat. Was engineer on the Bremerton out here, was on the ORSE board before he came here.”
“Heavy nuke,” said Danny, carefully stripping all judgment from his voice.
“Heavy nuke,” said Michaels, nodding. “He’s been here about six months longer than me. Got along famously with the previous Captain.”
“Another heavy nuke?”
“I don’t know what you’re implying Jabo!” He playfully pounded the small fold-out desk. “Are you saying I can’t get along with these engineering types? Think they’re smarter than me?! Anyway, yes, he was a heavy nuke too, did a tour at Naval Reactors, blah blah blah. So I need to beat that shit out of him, teach him how to be a warrior.”
“Like me?” said Jabo.
“Warrior? You don’t get to call yourself this early in your second tour.” But Jabo could see approval in his eyes. “Anyway, that brings us to our mysterious mission…”
“Which is?”
“We’re going to Subpac in about an hour,” he said. “Get our orders. They’ll tell us all the details. Certainly I don’t know much yet, other than the fact that I’ve been told to go to sea in two days. But I’ve heard some weird shit.”
“Weird?”
Michaels rubbed his hand across his smooth bald scalp and sighed, then fixed Danny in his gaze.
“It sounds like we’ve got a submarine missing.”
“Missing? Sunk?”
Michaels shrugged. “Hell if I know. But we’re going to look for a friendly sub, and in about an hour we’ll all know more.”
Danny took a deep breath, suddenly feeling a sense of responsibility that he hadn’t felt in the past twenty-four months. He and his captain looked at each other for a moment, aware of the irony, or the fate, that had brought them together to look for a missing boat after what they’d been through together on their last patrol on Alabama.
“We’ve got an hour,” said Michaels. “Why don’t you go on the pier and call Angi? It might be a while before you get another chance.”
Danny looked at the boat as his phone dialed Angi, watching a Mark 48 torpedo being slowly lowered into the boat. The dark, forest-green color of the weapon struck him, not for the first time, as oddly beautiful. Angi answered.
“You see the XO yet?”
“He’s my CO now,” said Danny. “That’s going to be hard for me to get used to, too.”
“How is he?”
“The same. Called me a motherfucker about five times. The crew loves him of course.”
“Of course.”
She paused, awaiting the bad news. Danny could hear the baby fussing in her arms.
“You’ll need to handle the movers by yourself…” Danny was limited in what he could say on the phone by security rules.
“I know,” she answered. “Jenny called me.” Jenny was the Captain’s wife. Angi’s tone was flat, not angry. But she did sound tired in anticipation of what was in front of her: packing up everything they owned, then a drive cross country, then a six hour flight to Hawaii where, if everything went according to plan, all their stuff would show up and she would get to establish a new home, their third in two years. All with a baby in her arms. Moments like this reminded Danny that while he had knowingly volunteered for both the navy and submarine duty… his beautiful wife hadn’t signed up for this shit.
“You going to be ok?”
“We’ll be fine,” she said. “Call us when you can.”
They walked across the sub base together, the captain, the XO, and Danny. To the captain, everything they passed in Hawaii prompted a story, a tale of a bar that no longer existed, a stand- off between a drunk petty officer and shore patrol, and reminders of the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor that Michael’s recounted as if he’d been there himself to repel the attackers. The XO was quiet, shuffling a stack of files from one hand to another, occasionally peeking inside to verify he hadn’t forgotten some document.
“Didn’t you serve on a boat out here, XO?” Danny asked, when the captain was between tall tales.
He nodded, pausing in his search through a folder. “Bremerton. I was Engineer.” He stopped there, but seemed to sense that the CO and Danny were both waiting for him to contribute a sea story. “We did a refueling overhaul,” he said.
They turned toward one of those beautiful old art deco buildings that dotted Pearl Harbor, gleaming white in the tropical sun. The building, like the sub base, pre-dated Admiral Rickover and his nuclear navy, so it also pre-dated his Spartan ideal of plain, unadorned buildings in which form strictly followed function. And the function was, always, to slavishly labor toward the old man’s ideal of engineering perfection. The architecture of this part of the sub base was old, grand, and comfortable with the most traditional role of any navy: defending an empire.
“I thought we were going to Subpac?” said Danny, not recognizing their route. He had been to the headquarters building before and knew the way.
“No,” said the captain. “That’s not what I said. We’re not meeting at Subpac, we’re meeting Subpac.”
Danny tried not to look startled. They weren’t going to Subpac the building. They were meeting the two star admiral himself: the commander of every submarine in the Pacific.
“You ever meet him?” Michaels asked the XO. “You were out here the last few years. What’s he like?”
“Never really met him,” said the XO. “Saw him at a change of command once.”
They both waited for more, but the XO seemed to have difficulty taking the reins of a conversation. They marched up the coral steps of a two-story building at the edge of a courtyard.
Inside the foyer their eyes adjusted to the dim light as a yeoman checked their IDs. The walls were lined with black and white photos of the base during World War II. One showed a tender surrounded by dozens of tiny diesel subs, probably more in one frame than made up the entire modern Pacific fleet. They made so many of them, Danny knew, because they were vital to the navy’s Pacific mission, the only thing holding back the relentless Japanese advance. And because large numbers of them tended to disappear.
“Right this way, gentleman,” said the yeoman, and he led them down a narrow hallway that was lined with faded battle flags, many of them adorned with tiny rising suns for every Japanese ship they’d sunk. They stepped through a doorway at the end of the hallway.
“Gentlemen.” Admiral Wells stood in his dress whites to greet them with a grim smile. He was extremely trim, his shoulder boards with their two stars extending slightly past his narrow shoulders. It was easy to picture him running Hawaii’s famed Ironman race, which he had completed three times. He shook each of their hands in descending order of rank, finishing with Danny.
At the admiral’s side was a lieutenant with the gold braid on his shoulder that marked him as the admiral’s aide. On the other was a commander from the Naval Investigative Service whom Danny took just a moment to recognize. They stared at each other a moment.