The Lieutenant flicked a switch.
"This is the Captain. We're terminating this drill. Resume previous stations. Pilots take us to periscope depth."
The XO approached, a query in his eyes. The Captain handed him the new EAM.
"Unbelievable," he muttered.
"Damned straight, Steve."
The Obama was rising steadily. "Periscope depth," Oscar confirmed.
"Very well. Deploy the mast."
"Mast deployed, Sir."
The XO moved to join the Captain who was studying the computer screen that gave a panoramic view of the boat's surrounds. The Captain grunted and turned to the COB. "Surface the boat."
"Surface the boat… aye, Captain."
"Lookouts to the bridge with a grappling hook. Prepare to take guests on board. Two civvies."
The officers had their own wardroom for meals and although it was fairly cramped it could accommodate about nine or ten guests. It was as good a place as any to discuss operational problems and the running of the Virginia.
Pirman put a question to Grant.
"You were involved on Archer, weren't you, sir?"
"Yes." Reflectively. "It was as tense a time as the Cuban missile crisis, in which some of my commanders at the time had been involved in. I was a young lieutenant back then and it was as you know a NATO exercise. Top Secret, but the secrecy surrounding it caused a problem for the Russians. They were convinced we were planning a preemptive first strike, nuclear of course, and they placed their entire fleet on a war footing."
"Tense times," Pirman remarked.
"Aye," the captain agreed. "The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 changed things somewhat, but world politics being what it was, new threats emerged and we didn't see some of them coming.
"911," a chief observed. He was a quiet individual in charge of the reactor at the back of the Boat and one who rarely ventured forward except for meals. His name was Meyer and he usually had his head stuck in a book, normally some technical thing that other men avoided like the plague. The boat had its own library aboard including a good stock of submarine thrillers and classics like Das Boot, The Hunt for Red October, Typhoon, Crush Depth and a range of others. There were plenty of magazines too, including copies of Proceedings and the Navy Times.
Another day. Another drill.
The captain ordered Moses to assume command and initiate an angles and dangles drill.
Moses could feel the pressure of command as he issued orders to the crew. The captain was watching his every move.
"Down angle," Moses ordered the pilots. "Twenty degrees down. Petty officers check for leaks."
Moses leaned forward to maintain his balance looking a bit like an astronaut in an airless vacuum. In every area of the submarine, chiefs watched over the men under their control like hawks waiting to pounce on their prey.
Their biggest enemy was the ocean itself. Strangely enough, it was also their biggest friend, producing enough air to allow the crew to breathe.
It used to be that submarines were built from the inside out, but these days they were built from the outside in. The Obama was ready for whatever action it had to pursue.
It moved through the ocean water, a powerful predator waiting to pounce.
CHAPTER 5
Submarine duty consisted of drill after drill, with all hands preparing for every eventuality. Fire drills, flood drills, propulsion loss drills, drills for weapons release, crash dive drills, scram drills, the list was endless and exhaustive.
In civvy life he had been known as Paddy the Plumber, but within the navy they simply called him Paddy. A laconic Irishman, he was the only man aboard who had also worked in submarines for the British Royal Navy. He knew his stuff, and had spent time aboard the new British Astute class on HMS Ambush. Like the American Virginia class it was a fast attack nuclear sub. He knew every wrench and valve aboard, and was entrusted with any flooding problems that materialised aboard. His rank was that of a lieutenant, and he was also the only Irishman aboard.
Russell himself had had a lot of dealings with the Royal Navy, attending the Perisher submarine school when he had gone for his command posting. The sea trials had thrown up a lot of challenges, and he had encountered difficulties with the British way of doing things. They had different regulations with regard to fishing trawlers encountered at sea, and in many ways he had understood their concerns. It wasn't unknown for submarines to snag the lines of a fishing trawler, and it could lead to tragic outcomes.
The trials had also involved different scenarios and war games. Deep and shallow water operations, reconnaissance of land based features like lighthouses, often with a destroyer or anti-submarine corvette bearing down, and often with helicopters using sonar buoys to track them down. He had passed the course, but he had found elements of it very tricky. It gave him a newfound respect for the men and women of Britain's submarine arm.
Paddy was one of the busiest men aboard the Obama during the angles and dangles drill, going from one spot to another on the ship with his trusty spanner and tightening valves that showed the mere hint of a leak. He carried a tool belt around his waist that contained various size spanners, wrenches, and pliers.
Russell had ordered Pirman to keep a close eye on Paddy.
A question had hung in Pirman's eyes.
Russell smiled and remarked. "For command," he explained. "He might make a good COB some day."
CHAPTER 6
The last thing newly-promoted Chief Warrant Officer Jenny Hobbs expected to be doing aboard a US nuclear submarine was conducting a homicide investigation. She'd thought she'd left all that behind her when she resigned from the homicide division of the San Francisco Police Department, and put herself forward for officer training school in the US navy, a role she'd dreamt of since childhood when her grandfather and her father had filled her head with dashing tales of far flung lands and tales of derring-do.
She had been excited upon learning that the latest Virginia class subs were taking on women, something previous submarine classes hadn't permitted. She realised she was breaking new ground in applying for this arm of the service, but she liked challenging situations and opportunities to push herself.
She'd already examined and discounted the personal effects of Mahon. There were no clues there. The personal effects included nothing more than service uniforms, spare clothing, and a small chess set. Limited space on submarines meant crew couldn't be overburdened with many trappings, and Mahon was no exception to that rule. Working closely with the corpsman who was responsible for all medical matters aboard the Obama, and by interviewing those crew members who'd last seen Mahon, she had arrived at a good approximation of time of death. At sea, they didn't have the modern labs that would have been available on terra firma, and they obviously had to improvise. The time of death was obviously important because it meant she could start tracking the crew as to where they were at the time. She knew she could eliminate about half of the crew already, because they had been manning their watch at the time. It still left a lot of suspects, but she had ways of whittling down the list even further.
She had already ruled out the captain as a suspect because he'd been manning control at the time. Pirman hadn't been cleared because he'd gone walkabout at the time of the killing but she saw nothing unusual there. As the XO he had authority to wander all over the submarine should he so wish. It bothered her that she hadn't yet cleared the more senior men on the Obama, and that even the Chief of the Boat was suspect. Jonah Moses had been cleared, but two other sub-lieutenants were still suspect, and she was interviewing both later.