"If enough of us get up on our hind legs and fight back, Admiral, we'll make them back down. We don't have to tolerate this kind of treatment. And I will not see my men treated this way. They're professionals, every goddamned one of them, and they should be treated as such!"
"I hear you, Mike. And I'll see what I can do. But no promises. I'll see you Friday, and we can talk more then. Good-bye."
The line went dead, and Chase hung up the phone.
Government agents grilling the crew on security questions. If it wasn't so grimly serious, it would be hilarious.
He hoped they would all be laughing by the time the change of command ceremony took place… and the Pittsburgh was made ready for sea once more.
10
After a day and a half of stress and, at times, idiot terror, the Gestapogruppe, as the men aboard had begun calling the intelligence unit — the GG for short — had vanished ashore, taking their voluminously stuffed folders and notebooks with them. Quiet conversations among the crewmen interviewed had established no obvious pattern to their questions, save the injunction not to talk about their interviews with other members of the crew.
The guess was that the three MIBs, as Big-C Scobey persisted in calling them, were definitely from some branch of U.S. Intelligence community, quite possibly from the CIA, and that they were on nothing more significant — or amusing — than a fishing expedition.
"Sure, the way I figure it," Big C had said at noon chow, "is that the 'Burgh is about to go out on another intel op like the last one, and they want to know they can trust us."
"Yeah," Douglas added, "or scare us all enough that we'll keep quiet about whatever it is!"
"Intimidation," Master Chief Warren said. "Sheer intimidation. I think the whole thing was a setup from the start. Get us all scared, or at least damned wide-awake. Then, when we come back from the next mission, all they have to do is step in and say, 'sign here.' Ten thousand dollar fine and ten years in Portsmouth Naval Prison for even breathing a word about what we've seen."
"Yeah?" O'Brien had said. "So… where are we going that's gonna be so all-fired secret?"
"Well, our last op was if-I-tell-ya-I-gotta-shoot-ya secret," Scobey said reflectively. "Hate to think what could be worse than that!"
"Uh-huh. And where'd you guys go last time, anyway?" O'Brien persisted.
"If we told you, nub," Scobey said, grinning, "then we'd have to shoot you…. "
Three hours later, Benson, Kellerman, O'Brien, Boyce, and Scobey were topside, working on garbage detail. At sea, garbage was carried topside and put over the side aft in special, weighted containers. If the boat was running sub-merged — her usual venue — the weighted containers were released from inside through a miniature and highly specialized version of a torpedo tube.
When in port, however, garbage was hauled topside and lugged ashore, where it was deposited in large, mobile Dumpsters brought to the pier and then hauled away again by garbage trucks. One hundred twenty men living together in closet-space proximity produced a lot of garbage, which had to be processed every day. If it went over the side while the boat was in port, it would — besides generating the active hostility of watch groups like Greenpeace — very swiftly beach the submarine on an artificial island of her own making.
The working party had been bringing plastic bags filled with garbage topside for the past ten minutes, handing it up the ladder of the forward escape trunk and bucket-brigading it aft to a growing pile astern. The next step would be to start hauling it down the boat's brow and tossing it into the Dumpster, waiting on the pier.
"How does it feel to be in the working classes again, Boyce?" Scobey asked with a laugh. As head of the working party, he was out of the line of actual labor, leaning against the aft corner of the sail with folded arms.
"Fuck you, Big C," was the equally cheerful reply. EM3 John Boyce was back aboard again, the obvious target now of the crew's barbed comments about goldbricking and the layabout life of ease. Diagnosed with concussion and possible skull injuries after the fight in the biker bar, Boyce had spent several days in a civilian hospital ashore, before being transferred to the Mare Island Naval Dispensary and his eventual release back to full duty.
"I wish," Scobey replied. "Not all of us have Benson's luck with women!"
"Yeah, I've been hearing about that," Dave Kellerman said, hauling another bag up through the gaping mouth of the escape trunk hatch and passing it on to Benson. "How about it, Benson? I hear you've managed to swing liberty tonight… again!"
"You should talk, Squee. You should talk!"
"Loni and I are engaged," Kellerman said. "But I hear you've been striking up a whirlwind romance ashore!"
"The waitress at the Tup 'n' Baa," Scobey said with a knowing wink. "I hear she was real grateful to Benson here after he stepped in to save the lady's honor that evening!"
"How grateful?" Boyce called up from the bottom of the escape trunk.
"Well, he came back aboard last night smelling of perfume and pussy. I'd say she was pretty damned grateful!"
"Lay off, guys," Benson said. He tossed the bagged garbage onto the pile on the deck. "Carol's a nice girl."
"Oh, a nice girl is it?" Scobey said. "I don't think I'm interested, then!"
Benson was about to respond when movement caught his eye to the south, past the pier close aboard on Pittsburgh's port side.
"Hey! Guys!" he called. "Look there."
A submarine was coming into port.
She was a Sturgeon class, dark slate gray in color, her sail well forward on her long hull. She'd come around the southern point of the island out of San Pablo Bay, and was sliding gently up the channel now between Mare Island and Vallejo.
She wasn't wearing her hull number yet; American submarines did not carry the magnetic numerals mounted on either side of their sails above the dive planes unless they were in port or engaged in what was jokingly known as a photo op. Still, each boat had its own telltale characteristics, signs of wear or hull scratches, fingerprints enough that other crews familiar with her could usually tell which one she was.
"Parche," Scobey said. "She must just be coming back after the op."
Boyce and O'Brien had come up the ladder and on to the after deck to see. "What op?" O'Brien wanted to know.
"Our last op," Kellerman said. "We were working… someplace with the Parche."
"Yeah," Boyce said. "We went in and made noise, got the whole bad guy fleet coming after us. And the ol' Parche over there just snuck into where she was supposed to go as quiet and as sneaky as you please."
"You see the broom?" Scobey added.
"Sure do."
Since World War II, a broom secured to the forward periscope housing or the weather bridge atop a submarine's sail during the return to port had meant the boat had successfully carried out her mission… effecting a "clean sweep" of enemy targets. Submarines still raised the emblem today, even though their missions no longer included the torpedoing of enemy targets.
The heads and shoulders of two men were visible in the weather cockpit, atop the forward edge of the Parche's sail, just ahead of the periscopes and the broom, raised bristle-end high. One of them saw the working party watching from Pittsburgh's stern, and waved. As working party supervisor, Scobey came to attention and saluted, holding until one of the tiny figures atop Parche's sail returned it.