"Well, well," Benson said, nodding at the pier. "Someone else is interested in Parche's return."
A gray government vehicle had just driven up to the beginning of Pier Two, and a quartet of MIBs was clambering out, adjusting jackets, straightening ties, donning hats and sunglasses. While one took up a position at the shore side of the pier, the other three trotted down the pier's length, obviously hurrying to be in position by the time the Parche pulled in and put her mooring lines over. A handful of Navy personnel in dungarees were already waiting as the shore-side line-handling party. They watched with evident amusement as the suits hurried into position.
Parche, meantime, was backing down in the main waterway, rudder hard to port as she swung her tail out into the Napa River Channel, bringing her blunt prow in toward the other side of Pier Two, just opposite from Pittsburgh's berthing space. Sailors stood on her deck, lines ready. A tugboat stood out in the channel, having guided Parche in to the dock area, and standing ready should she need an assist, but it was clear that Captain Perrigrino was an old hand at these maneuvers, and could carry them out unassisted.
"C'mon," Scobey said. "Let's start hauling this garbage ashore." His grin and his manner demonstrated clearly that he was interested in other things than filling the pierside Dumpster just now. Though he was in charge of the working party, he reached down and picked up a couple of the big, plastic bags and started for the Pittsburgh's brow, trooping down the gangway with a metallic clatter as the rest of the work detail picked up bags and followed in his wake.
They were met at the pier end of the brow, however, by one of the suits. Benson wasn't sure, but he was pretty certain that it was one of the men who'd interviewed him the day before … the one with the fancy laptop computer. "You can't come down here," the man told Scobey.
"Why not?" Scobey replied. He hefted the garbage bags. "Working party. Besides, they're down here." He nodded at the line handlers.
"Don't give me crap, sailor," the suit said. "Get back aboard your ship and go below!"
"I'll need authorization from my commanding officer to abandon my work detail," Scobey said. "Here." Casually, he tossed one of the garbage bags at the man, who instinctively reached up and caught it. "If I can't come onto the pier, maybe you could take care of this?" He tossed the second bag, making the man drop the first.
"Yeah," Benson said, coming up behind Scobey and tossing both of his own bags. "Make yourself useful, why don'tcha?"
Scobey turned and squeezed past the line of sailors on Pittsburgh's brow, heading back for the ceremonial guard shack for the OOD. The rest of the men kept filing down the brow and tossing garbage at the suit, who by this time had dropped the one bag he was holding with a disgusted look and refused to catch any more. He planted himself at the pier end of the brow and stood there, arms crossed, as though daring any of Pittsburgh's sailors to come ashore.
Laughing, the ' Burgh sailors went back aboard and sat down on the aft deck, watching Parche's arrival.
"You men go below!" the suit called up at them, pointing.
"Hey, we're under orders!" Benson called back. "We can't just up and leave without orders to do so!"
"Ja!" Jablonski called. "Und ve are chust following orders! Verstehen?"
The suit glowered, but had no way to enforce his edict. The ' Burgh men kept their seats as the Parche gracefully nosed up to the pier, then walked her stern in. With only a single screw, the maneuver took some fancy boat-handling skills. She had thrusters for fine-tuned station-keeping and movement, but it was a mark of considerable pride and seamanship to edge up to the dock on screw alone. They could see her skipper, Commander Perrigrino, watching from the weather bridge and calling down orders to the control room through a headset phone.
With a final churn and backwash as the Parche killed her maneuvering way, the submarine drifted the last few feet toward the dock as line handlers in Parche's deck crew tossed mooring lines to their counterparts ashore, who caught them and began pulling the vessel home. Lines were made fast to bollards on the pier, while deck cleats were uncovered on the Parche's deck and shipboard lines secured. The entire evolution took only a few moments, and was performed with an effortless and casual ease born of long experience, training, and practice.
"Welcome home, Parche!" Boyce yelled through cupped hands.
"Damn it, that's a breach of security!" one of the suits ashore yelled. "Get me that man's name!"
"Uh-oh," Benson said. "You'd better get below."
"Yeah," Kellerman agreed. "We never knew you, never saw you before in our lives!"
"And we will disavow all knowledge of your actions," Jablonski added.
"Right." Boyce vanished down the hatch.
It was amusing, really. The intelligence officers, if that's what they were, obviously wanted to keep a lid on the fact that it was the Parche coming in to port … and yet it was likely that half of the military personnel on Mare Island, and a fair-sized percentage of the civilians over in Vallejo, not only knew her name but had known for some time already that she was coming in. The intelligence network that Navy wives alone commanded was as impressive as anything ever fielded by Naval Intelligence.
Scobey, meanwhile, had returned from below. "Don't let 'em rattle you, guys," he said. "Mr. Walberg says they can't tell us what to do on Captain Chase's boat!"
"Hey, yeah," Benson said. "That's right. The skipper is king on his own boat. They can't tell us what to do!"
"Not with Fightin' Mike Chase, anyway," Scobey said, laughing. "The Old Man'd have 'em all for breakfast, sunglasses and all!"
Together, the two submarines loomed above the pier, the dark, whale-shape forms of their hulls motionless beneath the upward stab of their sails. The Sturgeons had been the standard U.S. Navy attack sub from the late 1960s through the seventies. Three hundred two feet long, with a beam of 31 feet, they were fifty-eight feet shorter overall than their Los Angeles class successors, and two feet narrower, and had a submerged displacement of almost 2000 tons less. Though they carried only about twenty-five fewer men than an LA boat—107 as opposed to 132—Sturgeons were actually considered much more comfortable to serve aboard than their later, bigger replacements. More of a Los Angeles boat's interior space, compared to a Sturgeon's, was taken up by electronics and a bigger sonar suite, the BQQ-5 which replaced the older BQQ-2. The simple fact that you had to hot bunk in an LA boat, and that that was rarely necessary, if ever, aboard a Sturgeon, was proof enough of the available crew space on board.
A few moments after tying up at the dock, a brow was rigged between the Parche and the pier. Two of the suits went aboard almost as soon as the brow was secured, and could be seen engaged in some fast and furious conversation with several of Parche's officers.
"I wonder if they're going to have GG show-and-tell aboard the Parche, now?" Benson wondered.
"Sure. Before any of her people can go ashore and get laid by Russian spies," was Scobey's reply.
"I wonder if we should warn them?" Jablonski said.