“It was a life raft,” he said. “Drifting right toward us. The goddamn thing just appeared in the ocean. One of those big, orange, covered ones, a completely enclosed inflatable. At first I thought maybe we’d gotten lucky and sunk the bastard, even though we hadn’t heard an explosion, and they abandoned ship. We were just starting to debate what we should do about it, whether we should take them prisoner or leave them adrift, when it got close enough for me to see it was empty. I stared for a minute longer than I should have, trying to figure out what it meant. Then the drones saw it.”
“Shit.”
“The Typhon boat had positioned themselves with the current and launched the raft so it would drift right toward us.”
“Why didn’t they shoot you with a torpedo again? You were sitting ducks.”
He shrugged. “Maybe they wanted to conserve their torpedoes. I think they didn’t want to give away their position again; we would have shot right back. Who knows? Maybe they just wanted to see if the lifeboat attack would work.”
“And it did?”
He nodded. “The raft kept drifting nearer, and by the time the drones spotted it, it was right next to us. We couldn’t dive, the engine room was still flooded. The down angle alone would have fucked us, about eleven tons of seawater rolling forward. Propulsion was screwed up because of the flooding, with the emergency propulsion motor we could barely make three knots against the current. The first bombs landed on the raft, blowing it to hell. But everything on that raft was made to float — the drones just kept hitting it, shredding it. Finally, one of them hit the scope.”
“While you were on it?”
He nodded. “That’s how I got this,” he said, tapping his eye patch. Pete winced at the click of his mangled fingertip on the leather. “Blew the optics right though the scope, shot the glass into my eye.”
“Jesus.”
“A second bomb fell a few feet underwater, hit the conning tower and exploded, breached the bridge trunk. Started a fire in external hydraulics. That’s about five hundred pounds of pressure, caught fire immediately. We lowered everything, submerged, even though that made the flooding start again in the engine room. Took local control in shaft alley, guys standing waist deep in water, controlling the planes with wrenches while the control room burned. Killed half my crew,” he said.
“My god,” said Pete. He’d never heard any of this.
Ase shrugged again. Pete realized he’d told the story many times, both in the brightly lit halls of power where he had to explain the disaster to his admirals, and in the dimly lit bars of Groton and Norfolk, where submariners told their real stories.
“We managed to get the fire out. Limped back to Pearl, at periscope depth the whole way. Saved the boat, somehow. Not that it mattered. It was too much to repair. As soon as they finished their investigation, they dragged her out to sea and scuttled her.”
Pete took it all in. It was the most Commander Ase had ever spoken to him.
“You know why I’m telling you all this?” he asked.
“So I know to lower the scope during a drone attack?”
“Yeah, I do recommend that. Highly. But in general — fuck the drones. The drones are like the weather, or…” he said with that weird smile curling onto his broken face, “the current. It’s something out there you all have to be concerned about, something you should use to your advantage, just like the Typhon boat did. But that’s not the reason I told you that story. That’s not what you need to know.”
“What do I need to know?”
“There’s an enemy submarine out there. And somebody onboard really knows what they’re doing.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Commander Carlson carefully dried and scanned every page of the documents they’d plucked from the sea. Almost all of it was readable, although that didn’t mean it was understandable. Much of it she’d read while holding the damp sheets in front of a hand dryer in the crew’s head.
It was medical research, she could tell that much. Something about the flu, which made sense given the history of the island. She knew about the flu, they all did, they’d been getting increasingly serious messages about hygiene and hand washing, and they’d all been required to get flu vaccines during their last port call, vaccines that clearly no one expected to be effective. That was confirmed in the captured documents — the scientists wrote about the futility of the present vaccines, and the virulence of the new strain. There were frightening classified briefs from the Alliance about the spread of the disease, the death rates, the unrest in the cities where it was doing the most harm.
She concluded that the crate of paper she’d grabbed represented some of their earlier work. Some of it contained dates. The earliest date was three years before, the most recent about a year earlier. But she could tell, even without any medical training, that they were getting close to a cure. There was an excitement in the more recent documents, a certainty that an answer was at hand.
She wrote a brief, one-page memo that summarized their findings, the dates that the paperwork spanned, the paragraphs and charts that seemed the most important to her untrained eyes. She consolidated these into about a five-page message, with the relevant scans attached, and sent it to squadron headquarters. It was as large a message as she dared send; she didn’t want to stay at PD any longer than necessary in the zone so close to the island where she chose to linger. They came to PD and sent the message to their satellite in a sixty-second, encrypted burst. They submerged the instant they received confirmation that the message had been received by the satellite.
Then she went to the wardroom, shared a microwave pizza with Banach, and waited for two hours, the amount of time she thought it might take for her bureaucracy to partially digest the information.
At sunset, they rose again, and a message was waiting for her. The OOD held the scope while she went to radio, reading it one line at a time as it came out of the printer.
Jennifer Carlson was a woman who had seen much during the war. But what she read on the message made her jaw drop. She walked back down to the wardroom, where Banach was enjoying a post-pizza cigarette.
“Sorry,” he said, starting to snuff it out on his plate. He knew his commander didn’t like smoking, and he did it only when she wasn’t around.
She waved her hand dismissively. “I have word from our illustrious leaders.”
“Did they congratulate us on shooting down the plane? Or chastise us for deviating from doctrine?”
“They express their congratulations,” she said, reading the message. “And they confirm that it was a high-value kill.”
“Oh?”
“The Alliance is sending out another rescue mission to the island, this time by submarine.”
“Smart.”
“The boat they are sending is the Polaris,” she said. “She’s on her way.”
Banach raised an eyebrow at this. “They know exactly which boat is coming? They know the name? How could they know that?”
“Because,” said Carlson, holding the message in front of her. “We have a man onboard.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX