“Why don’t you start with his boat?” said Cote. “Isn’t that a logical place to start? See if his shipmates are sick?”
The NIS agent looked up at that, and he and Connelly made eye contact.
“Master Chief, you’ve finally asked me a question I can’t answer.”
“Can’t or won’t?”
King stood. “Thank you for your time, master chief. You have our cards, please let us know if you remember anything additional. Or if you start to display any symptoms. Especially coughing.”
“Will do.”
Cote stayed in the conference room a few minutes after they left and ruminated. He tried to think of how many men he knew aboard Boise.
Seven floors below, a young woman timidly approached the welcome desk. She wore low-cut jeans and a loose top that exposed a sliver of her taut, tanned stomach. Like every young woman on the island, she felt constant pressure to stay fit, because swimsuit season ran year-round. But while her body was young and beautiful, her eyes were red from crying, and she looked exhausted. The receptionist, a kindly older woman with a natural sympathy that suited her work, looked up from her Sudoku book to greet her.
“Hi, um, I’m looking for a patient,” she said. “I mean, I want to see if he’s here?”
“Are you family, sweetheart?” asked the receptionist.
“Um, no, I’m his… girlfriend.”
“And you’re not sure he’s here?”
“No, I’m not…” she choked on the words a little bit, trying not to cry. “It’s just — his boat pulled out, and he promised he would send me a letter on that last mail call. I haven’t gotten anything yet… so I thought maybe he was sick and I should check here.”
Sympathy welled up in the receptionist — could anyone possibly be this innocent? The poor girl was so in love that she thought the only reason for a missed letter was a hospitalization. She considered carefully what to say next. She decided on the spot that she would not be the one to dump an ice cold bucket of reality all over this poor thing.
“How long ago did he pull out, dear?”
“Four days ago.”
“Well that’s not very long is it? Maybe you just need to give the mail a couple of days!”
The sad girl nodded, and pulled a strand of blonde hair from her face. “Maybe.”
The receptionist briefly considered asking for a name and actually checking to see if he was in the hospital, but decided against it. She knew what the result would be. The boy wasn’t sick: he was just an asshole.
“I’m really not supposed to tell you if he’s here or not, if you’re not family,” she said.
“Ok.”
“But why don’t you wait a couple of days, come back and check again, okay?”
The girl sighed, defeated, but grateful for the older woman’s kindness. “Okay,” she said, walking back to the front door and into the unending tropical sunshine that always seemed cruel to the heartbroken.
The receptionist sighed too and watched her leave. She remembered that feeling so well, despite the years. She’d lived on Oahu her whole life and she, too, had had her heart broken by a sailor on one of these ships, despite the warnings every islander had given her prior to giving herself away. Maybe she’d given the girl two more days to think that the boy was still in love with her, two days of false hope. She was okay with that.
The officers filed into the wardroom at 1900. Dinner had been cleared but the pleasant smell remained, underpinned by a fresh pot of coffee that had been brewed in anticipation of a long night, the hundreds of check lists that had to be complete before the ship could go to sea.
Danny took note of his new shipmates as they arrived. He didn’t know any of the officers other than the captain personally, although in the small world of nuclear submarines, he was sure he would know some of their friends, their former ships, their former shipmates. Learning everyone’s names would be his first priority, but the boats they’d served on would be next.
Of course for the majority of the officers that filed into the wardroom, there were no previous boats — they were junior officers on their first sea tour, just like he’d been on Alabama. Of the 129 men on the boat, 12 were officers, which included the XO, the CO, and three departments heads: Danny, the engineer, and the weapons officer. That meant that of the twelve officers that filed into the wardroom that evening, the leadership of the boat, seven had never served on a boat before Louisville, and were probably in their early twenties. It was a sobering thought.
One of them was V-12, and Danny couldn’t help notice the way the other JOs deferred to him, listened when he talked, and greeted him first when they entered. While a little goofy, Danny thought, he possessed that great intangible that the nuclear navy sought so hard to instill in its young men: leadership.
The captain and the XO arrived together, the Captain sitting at the head of the table and the XO literally at his right hand. The XO, as always, came in carrying a thick stack of documents, which was beginning to seem almost like security blanket.
“Alright, let’s get started,” said the captain. “We have our orders. As many of you know, we are pulling out at dawn tomorrow. After a day of training at the Kauai torpedo range, we will proceed to Papa Hotel, submerge, and then commence a high speed transit to the western Pacific, where we will attempt to locate and track a friendly submarine.”
V-12 spoke up. “Is she wearing a NAU?”
“No NAU,” said the captain. “She’s going to be quiet.” Often friendly subs were given a Noise Augmentation Unit, or NAU, in exercises like this, to simulate the noisier boats of their enemies. And because, in reality, it was nearly impossible to track a modern US submarine unassisted.
The XO spoke up. “Part of the exercise is to see if we can do it. See if we can track one of our own with no help.”
Danny noticed how the captain had carefully avoided lying to them so far. They were going to track and find a friendly submarine — that was true. The XO didn’t seem to have as much trouble. Maybe the deceit was something that he and the CO had discussed, maybe it was even necessary. But it was interesting.
Danny rolled out a small scale chart of the Pacific across the wardroom table. JOs at either end held it down. He’d carefully drawn two neat lines upon it. The first was a blue great circle route that represented their high speed transit to the last known location of Boise: where the SOSUS array had heard her.
On the western edge of the chart was the second line, in red, one that connected the dots from the launch of the BST buoys to the SOSUS hit. The line connecting those two points of data represented the best estimate they had of Boise’s course and speed.
“We should be on station in four days,” said Danny. “That’s an SOA of twenty knots.” Those were the first words he’d spoken to his new shipmates in his capacity as navigator. Every one of the junior officers was staring at his hand where it hit the chart. He traced the blue line of their route with his finger and their eyes followed it intently.
“Alright,” the captain sighed. “Let’s get this over with. Danny, show them your goddamn fingers.”