“Loren Snyder.” He grabbed her hand and pumped it.
Fifteen minutes later Jugs met Ada and shook her hand. She sent Ada aft to meet the rest of the crew, who were running engine room drills.
When they were alone, Jugs said, “Lorrie, we gotta get outta here.”
“As soon as the engine room drills are complete.”
“No, Loren. Now.”
“Are you getting worried?”
“You are goddamn right I am. What if those SEALs come before we submerge and shoot holes in the outer casing? Or shoot out the photonics masts? Or throw a chain around the screw?”
“Well…”
“For God’s sake, Lorrie. We can’t do Texas any good if they disable us right here at the pier.”
Loren Snyder ran his hand through his short hair. He had been so worried about his ability to handle this ship, perhaps losing her at sea and killing these volunteers, that he had not sufficiently considered the risks of sitting here at the pier. At the pier, Texas was only a harmless steel sculpture. At sea submerged, she was a powerful warship.
“You’re right, Jugs,” he acknowledged. “Let’s get two guys topside to dump the gangway and cast off lines, you take the conn from the bridge. I’ll do the control room, and we’ll get the hell out of Dodge.”
That was the way it worked. Julie Aranado gave the orders from the tiny bridge, and using her rudder and screw in reverse, Texas backed out of the slip in which she was moored and began forward motion toward the mouth of Galveston Harbor. Julie had her at five knots when she saw the speedboats with machine guns on the forward deck come through the harbor entrance at high speed and turn toward the submarine.
“The SEALs are here,” she shouted into her voice-activated microphone on her headset. “Give me more turns.”
She felt the screw of the sub biting. Behind her a rooster tail was forming. The screw was partially out of the water and was much less efficient than it would be when fully submerged.
As the three speedboats rounded the far pier, a ragged fusillade rang out. Julie didn’t hear it, but she saw the faint traces of smoke and flashes from the rifles on the shore. The sheriff must have stationed sharpshooters on the piers, she thought.
One of the boats lost way. The other two turned hard to fall in formation with the sub. Julie asked for more turns on the screw.
“We’re going to have to submerge the hull,” she told Loren in the control room.
“For God’s sake, stay in the channel,” he replied.
She looked for the buoys. Fortunately this harbor was dredged regularly for cruise ships and freighters. The wind was playing with her hair as she scanned with the binoculars.
Jugs heard the snapping of bullets passing close by. A glance aft. The machine guns on the speedboats were flashing. And the hull was settling under the surface and the submarine was accelerating. Still, the bullets from the machine guns could damage the small conning tower and the photonics masts, all that remained of the submarine above water. Without those masts, Texas was blind at periscope depth. The photonics masts had replaced periscopes. They contained low-light, natural-light, and infrared cameras, and their video was displayed on monitors in the control room.
She timed the turn to the outbound channel and got it right. The boat answered the rudder nicely and the bow swung, and now they were going southeast into the rollers toward the ocean.
Another glance aft. One of the speedboats was dropping back, but one was staying with Texas, now doing at least twenty knots.
The speedboat might have managed to come alongside in calm waters, but now that they were out of the harbor the vessels hit the swells of the sea. Except for a slight pitching motion, Texas was unaffected, but the speedboat began to buck, rising and falling with every down thrust raising a cloud of spray.
“Give me all you’ve got,” Julie said to Loren on the sound-powered phone.
Incredibly, the bow wave that the tower was making became larger. She could hear and see the curl of water against the tower and feel the drops of spray. She held out her tongue and collected a few drops. They tasted salty. Riding the bridge as the sub ran on the surface was a sublime sensatory experience, just as she remembered it from her submarining days, a sensual experience that would stay with her all the days of her life.
“Twenty-two knots,” Loren reported.
Julie was watching the buoys. She wanted the safety of the deepest part of the channel. She was in it now, and she needed every foot. The coastal Gulf of Mexico was a shallow sea, unsuitable for submarine operations, the seabed dropping slowly away from the land.
Finally the swells were too much for the last speedboat. A few more bursts, the spang of bullets smacking the steel conning tower, then the boat slowed. The submarine ran on into the empty ocean, past a coaster that may have been the SEALs’ mother ship, into the afternoon.
Finally, an hour later, with two hundred feet of water beneath the keel, Julie Aranado said into her sound-powered mike, “Dive, dive, dive.” She unplugged the headset and dropped through the hatch, then pulled the hatch down behind her. Perched on the ladder, she spun the crank to dog it down. Then she went down the ladder and lowered herself through the opening in the pressure hull. She dogged that hatch behind her too, sealing the hull.
At the helm, Ada Fuentes didn’t use the planes to help drive Texas under because the water was so shallow. The attack submarine sank slowly as her ballast tanks filled. When the conning tower disappeared under the surface in a boil of white water, the surface of the sea became a slick as the water continued to roil. While gulls soared above the place where Texas submerged looking for small marine life lifted by the swirling water, Texas ran southeastward, toward deeper water. She was in her element now, a powerful warship hidden under the surface, in the great wide sea.
On Thursday morning, the first day of September, the power came back on in the Baltimore area. One power company, Potomac Electric Power, had figured out that the master computer that controlled the northeast grid had been sabotaged with bad code, so it began manually restoring power in portions of their service area. Still, restoring power to their entire service area would take a while, and restoring service to the entire northeastern United States would take days.
One of the suburban residents, Lincoln B. Greenwood, a senior executive service employee of the Department of Health and Human Services, had not gone to work that day because without power nothing could be done at the office. He was delighted when his television came back on and lights illuminated in his house. He could hear the toilet tanks filling as water once again surged through the pipes. He grabbed his car keys and opened his garage door, which rose majestically.
Greenwood was worried about the uncertainties the future held and had concluded that he and his wife didn’t have sufficient food in the house that would not spoil without refrigeration. And his daughter, with the four-month-old, undoubtedly needed baby food, formula, and diapers. He called her on his cell phone, and she affirmed his shopping list. She and her husband also needed more staples, she said.
The lot at the mall in Clarksville was packed with cars when Greenwood arrived, which surprised him. All of these stores closed when the power went out because their registers and computer systems were nonfunctional. Greenwood glanced at his watch; the power had only come back on twenty minutes ago. All of these people must have been here waiting, probably for hours, hoping and praying the power would be restored.
The queue to get into the supermarket, which also had a large pharmacy department, was four deep and extended around the corner of the store into the two-acre mall lot. Lincoln Greenwood got in line, resigned himself to a long wait, and began fretting that the store shelves would be empty when he got inside. The checkout lines would fill every aisle, blocking shoppers’ access to the shelves. What a nightmare!