"Fare-well to all these joys," Moonie sang happily from the seat beside Caswell, "We sail at break of day-hey! — hey! — hey!" Several of the other men at the mess table joined in to the ragged rendition of "Anchors
Aweigh," shouting the final chorus of heys! loud enough to ring off the bulkhead.
"Shaddup, you screwballs," O'Day said, still grinning.
"But COB, it's not fair!"
"Fair," Ohio's Chief of the Boat said, "was not mentioned in your enlistment contract. That I guar-an-tee!"
Caswell looked down at the remnants of dinner— ham steak, mashed potatoes and gravy, pineapple, and green beans. He didn't feel much like eating anymore.
"Damn, isn't there something I can do, COB?" he asked. "Donny was telling me I might get special leave or something."
"Sick leave if you're sick, son. Compassionate leave if someone in your family died. Other than your soon-to-be-dead bachelor status, I don't see anyone dead here, do you?"
"No… "
"Well, then, there you are! Anyway, you know what they say. If the Navy wanted you to have a wife, they'd've issued you one with your sea bag!"
"The man's right, Cas," Rodriguez told him. "You got everything you need right here! You've got us!"
"You gonna climb into his rack with the kid, Rodriguez?" Moonie asked. "It'll be a fuckin' tight fit!" The others laughed.
"What do you expect?" Doc Kettering said. "Roddy has a big cock, and Cas has a tight ass!"
"How would you know?"
"I'm a Navy corpsman," Kettering said serenely. "Corpsmen know these things."
"I'm gonna sell tickets!" TM3 Dobrowski said. "Or take pictures!"
"Nah, the MAA'd just fuckin' confiscate 'em, man,"
Moonie said. "They don't want none of that homo-porno shit on the boat!"
"Aw, shut up, guys!" Caswell said. He looked at O'Day, his eyes damn close to tears. "COB, you gotta help me. I don't think Nina's going to understand!"
"If Nina has what it takes to be a good Navy wife," O'Day replied, "she'll understand. Or she'll learn to understand. Or you'll talk to her and make her understand. But you gotta realize, son… the needs of the Navy come first. Always."
Caswell was still feeling stunned — and completely blindsided. There'd been some scuttlebutt over the past couple of days about their sailing orders being moved up, that Ohio might be sent out on her deployment early, but he'd dismissed it as wild rumors, or as deliberate attempts by his shipmates to yank his chain. When the official word had come down from the exec this morning, however — that all leave and liberty would be cancelled as of 2400 hours Friday, and that the Ohio would be putting to sea by 0700 hours Saturday morning — it had felt like the end of the world.
At 1100 hours Saturday morning he was supposed to be at Our Lady of the Sea Catholic Church saying "I do," not standing sonar watch as the Ohio entered the Pacific Ocean.
Nina Dumont was the only daughter of a guy who'd made his fortune in Redmond's computer empire, and whose wife considered herself to be the rising star of Washington state's social elite. Mama and Papa Dumont were less than thrilled to begin with that their daughter was marrying a sailor, of all things… and an enlisted man at that, rather than an officer. Unthinkable!
Once they'd accepted the idea, though, they hijacked the wedding plans. Correction, Alice Dumont had hijacked the wedding; George had remained in his upstairs office, writing checks. Half of Redmond was supposed to be there this Saturday, and at the reception that afternoon. The cake, the flowers, the reception hall, the dinner — everything had already been ordered and at least partly paid for. Those damned, fancy engraved invitations had gone out a month ago. Jesus!
Nina's folks had been adamantly opposed to her marrying a sailor. Part of that had been due to the stereotypical sailor's image — a girl in every port, drunken carousing at topless bars on liberty, and all the rest — but part, too, had been aimed at the fact that a Navy wife faced long stretches, months at a time, when her husband was at sea and she was left home alone. No daughter of mine is going to be put through that! George Dumont had declared during one fiery encounter.
He'd won them over at last, though… or maybe what had won them over was Nina's announcement that she would elope with him if she had to. In any case, they'd accepted him, and now he called them "Mom" and "Dad."
When they found out the wedding was off, he was dead meat. He wouldn't mind so much if it was just the elder Dumonts who cut him off. What was Nina going to say? Would she, could she, even understand?
Well, he had liberty tonight, and he was supposed to go over to the Dumonts' house for dinner with the three of them.
He would know the worst then.
Lieutenant Commander Gary Hawking pulled back gently — very gently — on the control yoke, bringing the Manta into level flight. He still considered it "flying," even though he was currently piloting the Navy's newest deep-diving submersible at a depth of over 2,700 feet.
Once a naval aviator, he thought, always a naval aviator.
Hawking had joined the Navy twelve years ago, and had two tours of flight duty under his belt. Upon completion of his last deployment, though, he'd had the offer to volunteer for something that sounded really interesting — research work on the XSSF-1 Manta. He'd volunteered, been accepted, and in short order was transferred to Pearl Harbor where the final tests on the Manta were being conducted.
His move to Hawaii, however, had been by way of Connecticut, and a training tour at the Navy's submarine school at New London.
Technically, now, he was both a Navy aviator and a submariner. He didn't have his dolphins yet, though. A submariner's coveted dolphins were awarded after six months in the boats, and after he'd passed his quals — his qualifying tests — covering every system on the submarine. Hawking's last six months had been spent shuttling between Pearl and the Naval Research and Development lab — NRaD — in San Diego. Technically a creature of both worlds now, of air and of deep water, he wasn't yet wholly comfortable with the latter, nor had he been completely accepted by the submarine community.
But that, he was convinced, would come, given time and patience. The Manta, this weird little SciFi hybrid, was going to prove her worth… and so was he.
The Manta, in fact, was more like a traditional aircraft than a submarine. The XSSF stood for "Experimental Submarine Fighter," and not, as some wags had it, for "X-Files Super-Science Fiction."
She looked like something out of a science fiction movie, though. Just over ten meters in length and two meters thick, the Manta looked like a squat and slightly flattened torpedo in prelaunch mode, its overall dimensions dictated by those of the Trident II D5 ICBM. With waterfoils folded, the Manta fit neatly if snugly into one of the launch tubes on board an Ohio-class boomer. Once ejected from the launch tube by a burst of compressed air, the Manta's aft section unfolded to create a downward-angled delta with a gaping forward intake.