At last, though — somewhere over the Great Plains — Gordon had begun to get through. Seaman Doug O'Brien was newly out of Submarine School at Groton, Connecticut, and was on his way to his first assignment. He wasn't wearing dolphins on his dress white blouse, yet, the badge that marked him as a submariner. That would come later, after he passed a probationary period of learning all there was to learn about working in each department on his boat.
"So… what boat are you assigned to, son?" Gordon asked him, once a more meaningful dialogue than simple affirmatives and negatives had been established.
"Uh… my ship is the USS Pittsburgh, sir. SSN-720."
"Uh-uh, son. Full aback. A submarine is always a boat, never a ship. Didn't you pick that up in sub school?"
"Well, they kept talking about 'boats,' yeah… but a buddy of mine told me they were setting me up for a kind of joke, see?"
Gordon nodded. "Well, sounds to me like it was your friend who was setting you up for the joke. Submariners are pretty dogmatic about being aboard boats, not ships. Same thing with Navy aviators."
"Sir?"
"To the men stationed aboard an aircraft carrier, the carrier is a ship. But to the aviators, the men in the carrier's air wing, she's a 'boat.' " He grinned. "Don't try to figure out the logic of it. Sailors have been using language their own way to define their special world for a couple of thousand years at the very least."
"Okay… "He didn't sound too sure of himself.
"So, anyway, you're about to join the Pittsburgh?"
"Yes, sir! She's at a place called Mare Island. That's somewhere near San Francisco, but I don't exactly know where."
Gordon chuckled. It had to be, of course. He didn't tell the youngster that he was headed for the same new duty station… as O'Brien's captain.
"Well, I'm sure she's a good boat," he said. "I know her skipper."
"You do?" O'Brien's eyes grew large.
"He was my roommate at Annapolis, actually, and the best man at my wedding. Mike Chase. A good man."
"Gosh! I keep hearing how small the Navy really is, sir, how you keep bumping into the same people. I guess that's true, huh?"
"You have no idea!"
Gordon could tell that O'Brien wanted to ask where Gordon was going, but was afraid to speak up. To a young sea-man — nineteen, maybe eighteen years old — fresh out of boot camp and C-school, a ship captain was a godlike figure rarely glimpsed, and then with an awe approaching terror. The Olympian likes of commanders never socialized, never fraternized with enlisted mortals… none below the rank of E-5, at any rate. Gordon was afraid that if he admitted to who and what he was, the young man would swallow his heart.
Much of the rest of the flight they passed in silence, the boy watching the mountains slide by beneath the aircraft, while Gordon leaned his seat back and tried to nap. He thought about Becca again, and suppressed a stab of regret. How was he going to make this right with her?
He'd told her about the new assignment that evening, of course, the day he'd gotten his orders from Goldman. He'd taken her out to a favorite restaurant and sprung the news over a bowl of Maryland crab soup.
She hadn't seemed surprised. Her reaction was so lackluster, in fact, that at first he was certain her father had indeed told her all about it, and that she'd simply been waiting to hear it from him.
"The Navy wife's life," was all she'd said.
"You don't sound happy about it."
"Should I be? All my friends are here in Alexandria. Ellen and Margaret are settled in with their friends and school."
"It's summer, Becca. No school until September. If we're going to move, now's the time to do it, so we don't interrupt the kids' school year."
"And what if we don't want to follow you all the way across the country? Damn it, Frank, why can't you have a normal job that keeps you nine to five and doesn't send you off to the other end of the earth every six months?"
"You knew you were getting a sailor when you married me. You knew what it would be like." Damn it, she'd grown up in a Navy home, had hopscotched all over the world as her father had risen to the pinnacle of his career.
"And maybe I want something better for me! Better for my babies!"
"You're a Navy wife, Becca…."
"You don't have to remind me!.. "
Gordon lay back in the 737's seat and thought about the miles slipping away beneath him, taking him farther and farther away from Becca. He wanted to support her, but sometimes she was just so damned illogical about things….
He could read the weather signs well enough to know that his marriage was in serious trouble right now. Becca's depression… he wasn't sure he could handle that and his career, not now, not when things were just starting to break his way at long, long last.
He loved her, loved her as much as it was possible for one to love another. And he hurt for her, and hurt because there didn't seem to be anything he could do to help.
In fact, everything he did just seemed to make things worse.
The plane touched down at San Francisco International Airport. As an incoming ship captain, he rated a car and driver — a young third class who met him in the terminal with a hand-lettered sign reading "CDR GORDON." A few moments later, he saw O'Brien, his young traveling companion, waiting at the baggage-claim belt.
"You want a ride out to the base, son?"
The youngster's jaw dropped. "Huh? I mean… sure!" The alternative was a long wait and a ride in a Navy bus. "Are you going out to Mare Island, too?"
"Sure am. Grab your bags and meet me over there by the door."
His driver retrieved Gordon's bag, and minutes later, bags slung into the trunk, they were in a gray Navy sedan winding out of San Francisco International and heading north up the Bay on the James Lick Freeway.
Picking up 80 in downtown San Francisco, they crossed the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, paid their toll, and then continued following 80 north.
Traffic was light, and twenty minutes later they were approaching the Carquinez Bridge, which spanned the mouth of the Sacramento River where it joined the Napa River from the north and spilled into San Pablo Bay, which comprised the northern reaches of San Francisco Bay.
Gordon had done some reading up on Mare Island ahead of time. As their car crossed the toll bridge into Vallejo, he pointed out the Mare Island Naval Shipyard to O'Brien, ahead and to their left.
"The island got its name back in 1830," he told the youngster. "A mare belonging to the leader of a Mexican mapping expedition was swept away by the current of the Sacramento River at the Carquinez Straits… right below this bridge. Somehow, it managed to make it to shore on the southern tip of the island. They called it Isla de la Yegua after that … Mare Island.
"The U.S. Navy arrived on the scene when David Farragut came in and took command in 1854. Today the base covers something like 2600 acres… a lot more at low tide. It's home to the shipyard, a naval station, the Combat Systems Technical School Command, the Engineering Duty Officer School, and something like twenty-three, twenty-four other commands. Several submarines are usually home-ported here … especially the ones assigned to sneaky-Pete ops in the western Pacific."
"Sneaky-Pete?"
"Covert operations. The missions the U.S. government does not admit take place."
"I always wondered about that, sir. I mean, you hear things, read things, sometimes, about stuff happening, like secret missions into Russia and places like that. I never really believed any of them, of course."
Gordon smiled. The kid was pretty naive … and utterly unaware that he was sitting next to the man who'd conned a U.S. sub into the heart of the USSR's White Sea.