"Fantastic! I'd appreciate that."
"Anything else?"
"Any major discipline problems I should know about?" Chase shook his head. "They're all great kids. The best. Absolute professionals, every one of 'em. COB went back and had a quiet talk with the owner of that bar ashore, by the way. The fight last week? We're paying him for damages out of the boat's fund, and he's dropping his charges."
"That's good. I'd hate to leave that unresolved."
"Still a shame. That bar was an old submariner's haunt for a lot of years. Sounds like the SPs are going to have to put it off-limits, now that that gang has taken it over."
"Won't be the first time."
"Roger that."
"And the men involved?"
"I'm deferring to you. Your problem. But I recommend you take it easy on them. They weren't to blame."
"Understood. I'll have to review the Shore Patrol reports, of course, but I don't see any point in being the bad guy, here."
"Anything else?"
"Can't think of anything, Mike. I know you're giving me a good boat."
"The best, Frank. Absolutely." He extended a hand.
"Good luck."
"Thanks a lot. You have your new orders yet?"
"Oh, yeah. I'll be conning a desk for a while down in San Diego. After that, I expect they'll be talking to me about senior service college, and maybe a major shore command. But hell. After driving a boat like the 'Burgh … "
Gordon looked up at the bulkhead, then the overhead. His, now. "I know what you mean."
Lieutenant (j.g.) Kenneth Randall swam with long, easy strokes of his flippers. Even though it was only a little past noon, the water was murky enough to make visibility a bitch. He had an underwater lantern attached by a lanyard to his left wrist, but the silt in the water served only to make the beam dazzlingly opaque. He relied instead on his eyes, peering through the high-tech mask that covered his entire face. He could just make out the bottom a foot or two ahead.
The water was frigid, though he honestly didn't feel the cold that much. His wet suit insulated him well with a layer of water warmed by his own body between the rubber and foam layers of the suit. Even in July, the water temperature in this region never got much above forty-five degrees or so. Without protection, a swimmer would die of hypothermia in minutes.
He checked his wrist compass to make sure he was still following the correct bearing. In this kind of silty gloom, it was possible to swim aimlessly in circles and think you were going in a straight line, just like a man lost in an Arctic whiteout. Yeah. The reported sighting ought to be just ahead.
"Trout One, this is Trout Two. Do you copy, over?" Nelson's voice was a bit garbled over the earpiece buried in the depths of Randall's dive hood, but recognizable.
"Trout Two, this is One." The full-face mask let him speak into the small radio microphone by his lips. He just had to be careful not to put too much pressure into the mask by talking, and risk breaking the pressure seal from the inside. He held the corner of the mask tight against his face as he spoke. "Go ahead."
"I think I found the objective. Track's pointed straight at the beach."
"Copy, Two. I should be there in a few moments. Hold your position."
"Copy, One. Holding."
Navy divers had been experimenting with various types of underwater radios for decades, with varying amounts of success. The trouble was that water was almost impenetrable to radio, so even modern units like this still-experimental one were only good for pretty close range — distances out to a few tens of meters or so. There was the promise of a whole new family of underwater communications gear piggybacked onto blue-green laser beams, which treated the ocean like a pane of transparent window glass.
Randall had trouble believing that even that technomarvel would work well in conditions as crappy as these.
There it was. It had to be.
Careful not to touch the bottom — one careless flick of a flipper would stir vast clouds of silt into the water which would not settle out for hours — he moved closer, then hovered. Reaching for the underwater camera slung from his waist, he raised the plastic housing, aimed, and clicked the shutter. Film advance was automatic. He took three more shots, just to be safe.
The subject of his photographic study was two sets of linear marks on the seabed just below … a pair of long rows of marching indentations in the soft muck running side by side about ten feet apart. As Trout Two had suggested, they were aimed straight at the beach.
He could see the shadow of his dive buddy above the tracks to his right, in the direction of shore. Carefully, he turned and followed, reaching GM1 Tom Nelson's position a moment later.
"They look fresh," Nelson said, his voice breaking up a bit over the radio circuit.
"Hard to tell. This goo would look fresh no matter what."
"Yeah, but currents and stuff would erode the markings. These are razor-sharp."
"Okay, Tonto. You're the ace tracker, then. Let's do some tracking."
"Right you are, kemosabe, sir."
They turned toward the shore and began gently kicking along side by side. The water here was nearly thirty feet deep, but shoaling rapidly. Overhead, the murk gradually grew lighter, until a silvery, flashing swirl of daylight began penetrating the silt. Ahead, light and dark churned and chopped, and the two SEALs could feel the insistent tug of the surf.
"Okay," Randall said, moving upright and holding his position with gentle motions of his arms. "We go in hot… just in case."
"Copy."
They dropped their lanterns and unclipped their weapons, H&K submachine guns specially designed for work in salt water. They removed muzzle plugs and breech covers, then started swimming in.
Randall's head broke the water as his knees hit the bottom. Shoving his mask up high on his head, he took a careful look around before letting the next inrushing wave pick him up and body-surf him forward another ten feet.
The beach was sere and lifeless, as lifeless as the gray mountains shouldering behind the dunes into a gray and leaden sky. Aptly named Split Top, one of the handful of genuine mountains on Adak was just visible on the horizon through the rain-laden haze to the east.
There wasn't a lot to Adak. A tiny island, one of the larger of the Andreanof Islands in the middle of the Aleutian chain, the place occupied a point almost precisely midway between East and West—2,062 miles from Seattle and 2,070 miles from Tokyo, as a hand-painted directional sign set up on the base pointed out. There were no native trees, no native civilian population. All that Adak boasted was a naval station, the site of NSGAA, the Naval Security Group Activity Adak. About two thousand naval personnel were stationed there, along with approximately a thousand dependents.
Randall lay in the surf, studying the beach. It was all rock and gray, volcanic ash. There was a lot of ash cover on the island, for Great Sitkin Volcano was located just thirty-six miles to the northeast, while Kanaga was to the west, just across Adak Strait. The gray muck and silt on the seabed surrounding the ocean was the accumulation of thousands of years' worth of volcanic fallout.
But that muck had captured the underwater tracks that had first captured a hiker's attention. Two days before, a young sailor stationed at the air station had been hiking along the western shore of the island above Adak Strait, not far from Cape Yakak, when he'd come upon strange tracks along the beach. The incoming tide had destroyed those tracks within the next couple of hours, making it impossible to pinpoint exactly where they'd emerged from the sea… or where they'd returned. Since the special SOG-SEAL unit had just flown into Adak to await transfer to a nuclear sub and their next op, the captain commanding the Adak station had asked if Randall and his people would take a look.