"No…. "
"There you are, then. This boat is sound and solid. I don't know about your hair problems, but it's not a radiation leak… and you'd better belay that kind of talk if you don't want to get into trouble as a rumormonger. You have any idea what the Old Man'd do to someone who was spreading wild stories about radiation leaks on this submarine?"
O'Brien shook his head.
"Well, I just hate to think what he'd do. So… learn to trust your shipmates, okay?"
"Yeah, Big C. Okay."
"Right," Douglas said. "We'll tell you if you're dying or not!"
"That's real reassuring, Archie," Jablonski said, joining them. "What kind of stories are you telling the nub, anyway?"
"Ahh, first-time-out jitters. O'Brien here thinks he's losing his hair."
Benson sat down as well, eyeing him critically. "Well, he looks like he's got a bad case of the mange, but I don't know that he's losing all of it."
They continued discussing his condition… and the dangers of spreading unfounded rumors about radiation leaks on the boat… a federal offense, according to Jablonski.
O'Brien decided that he didn't want any food, and gave his tray to Douglas. "Let's just drop it, okay fellas?"
"Suits me," Scobey said. "Hey! Benson! You look like the proverbial cat that ate the proverbial canary. What gives?"
"Well, I know where we're headed."
Douglas shrugged. "Who doesn't? Siberia, right?"
"Yeah!" Benson said. "How'd you know?"
"I was in the control room this morning. All the charts at the chart station are places on the eastern Siberian coast. Magadan. Sakhalin. The coastline between the Amur and the Uda Rivers. I think we're going back to Oshkosh for another try."
"What'd you hear, Benson?" Scobey wanted to know.
"Chief Allison and I were with the packages during angles and dangles," Benson replied. "I think they were a little shook-up, you know? Anyway, one of 'em blurted out something he probably wasn't supposed to. He asked, 'Is it gonna be like this all the way to fucking Siberia?'"
The others chuckled.
"Well, we all knew we were probably headed east again anyway," Douglas pointed out. The word was that we were dropping our 'packages' off somewhere over there, and they don't look like they're intended for delivery to Beijing. It had to be either Oshkosh or Petro."
"Could've been Chukotskiy," Benson said, referring to the peninsula that marked the easternmost tip of Siberia, close up by Alaska.
"Doubt it," Douglas said, shaking his head. "Nothing much up there in the way of naval assets except Anadyr, and there's not much there but coastal-defense stuff. No, I'd bet on Magadan, or maybe the mouth of the Amur. There's a lot of shit going on there."
"Damned tight and shallow at the Amur," Boyce said, scowling. "Shallow water, lots of seabed sonar, and a lot of Red Banner Fleet ships and subs, in a lot of bases. Don't know if I like the sound of that."
"You guys sound like you've done this before," O'Brien said. The discussion had taken his mind off the fear. He found that his mind was wonderfully focused, sharp and clear, fastening on each word they said.
"Oh, we play this game all the time," Douglas said. "You have no idea."
"It's not the sort of thing to talk about," Scobey warned. "Know what I mean?"
"Sure. 'Silent Service.' But… you guys don't mean we might actually go inside Russian territorial waters?"
Scobey laughed. "Kid, one time, in the Baltic, we were so fucking close to the beach, the skipper let some of us take turns lookin' through the periscope, y'know? We could see girls sunbathing half-nekkid on the rocks west of Kaliningrad."
"C'mon, Big C! You're making that up!"
"Got pictures to prove it."
"What, periscope shots? From the scope camera?" Douglas laughed. "Now I know you're full of shit!"
"Can we see the pictures?" Benson asked. "Sure, but it'll cost ya."
"Cost us! How come?"
"What, for a peek at nekkid broads? Especially Russian nekkid broads? Five bucks."
"Shit. Playboy costs half that!"
"Playboy isn't Russian nekkid broads."
"Yeah," Douglas said. "They're American. Which means no mustaches and tits that don't sag to their knees."
O'Brien looked at Benson. He looked thoughtful, and perhaps a bit worried. "Benson? What's the matter?"
"Ah, nothing. Nothing, really. It's just, well, I keep wondering at the ethics of what we're doing."
"What do you mean, ethics?" Scobey asked. "We're protecting our country. Right boys?"
Douglas gave him a high five. "Fuckin'-A, Big C."
"Are we? Are we really? I mean, yeah, it's one thing to follow their submarines and make sure they're not trailing our boomers. If a war started, we'd have to nail their boomers and their hunter-killers real fast. I understand that.
"But what do we get by going all the way in to their coast, inside their territorial waters? I mean, well, how would we react if a Russian Victor III snuck up the Chesapeake and parked itself off Baltimore Harbor? That sort of thing would really piss us off, you know?"
"What makes you think they haven't?" Scobey said ominously.
"Well, if they have," Benson said, "then I'm pissed!" He spread his hands, his voice earnest. "They have no right to do that… any more than we have the right to play games in their waters!"
"Right?" Douglas asked. "Who said anything about 'right'? The Cold War is still a war, my man. Casualty lists aren't as high, but people do die, battles are fought, and casualties are taken!"
"It's almost a sure bet," Scobey said, "that the Russians had a hunter parked off San Francisco Bay, just waiting to pick up a boat coming out of Mare Island. If they did, then you can bet they're following us right this moment, nice and cozy in our baffles, just a few hundred yards off our screw."
O'Brien looked at Douglas. "Is that true?"
"It's possible. And if they're there, don't worry. The skipper'll lose 'em."
"But facts is facts, Benson," Scobey went on. "They do it. We do it. Nobody likes it, but it's part of the way the game is played."
"Damn it, it's not a game. Not if people get killed. Not if a mistake, by us or them, could bring somebody's finger down on the firing button and light off World War III!"
"You sound like you've thought a lot about this," Douglas said.
"Yeah. I have."
"Maybe you should think about going up on the roof."
"Yeah," Scobey said. "Service in the boats is for volunteers only. You don't like it, you can ship out."
"I didn't say I wanted that," Benson replied. "I just wonder sometimes if what we're doing is right."
"Sometimes," Scobey replied, "it's just possible that right has a lot less to do with this thing than survival does. Know what I mean?"
"I know. And what if the people playing this game, as you call it… the politicians, the generals, the Joint Chiefs, whoever else is sitting back there in Washington moving little plastic game pieces around on a big map of the world… what if they really do think it's a game and miscalculate? Our survival is still on the line.
"And, damn it… I trust you guys with my life. But do I trust those armchair strategists in Washington? The White House? The State Department? Some vodka-sodden jerk at a desk in the Kremlin? Some scared punk of a kid from some Soviet Socialist Republic none of us has ever heard of, sitting at the fire-control system for an RBU-6000 ASW rocket launcher aboard one of their sub hunters?
"Do you trust them with your lives? 'Cause that's what it comes down to. And I'm not sure I do trust 'em. Any of 'em."
Benson stood suddenly, picked up his tray, and returned it to the galley. Douglas and Scobey watched him go. "You think he's okay?" Douglas asked.